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Editorials |
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| Acceleration: Speed Enhancements have come of age |
| | Speed, as Mr. Einstein so informed us, is a most relative thing, one that has as much to do with the observer as the object in motion. For a few years I never even thought about optimizing web speed, as I was one of the privileged few to be Autobahning on a T1. Mainlining in real time I had no need to tweak my machine to rev up my surfing speed.
Then life happened and the falling Twin Towers set off a domino effect that ultimately left me driving a Jetta (you want to talk speed; I'd rather talk gas mileage) in the real world and chugging along on a 56k Zoom in the virtual world. Not so incidentally that's about 40k in modem overkill thanks to my town's exceptionally stodgy phone lines. Now it was my turn to tweak. I bought more ram, went text only, increased my cache, decreased my refresh frequency and still I was feeling as frustrated as Prufrock measuring my life in byte-sized coffee spoons. I grow old I grow old, waiting for my pages to download... Read entire story » |
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Dialup is for Lovers;
broadband is for Wimps |
| | At the risk of revealing myself to be a wimp, I have to admit that I am broadband-dependent. I do not say this without some small measure of shame. Not long ago most of us, especially those living in one-zip code towns, had no choice about what ISP we employed to get online. For people in my town, to be online or not was the only choice, but nowadays like with beers, motor vehicles, and Asian food, every American consumer is now bombarded with multiple choices. With choices, comes preferences and the preference we opt for in connecting to the World Wide Web tells a lot about who we are, just as surely as whether we drive a new BMW or an elderly Chevy, drink Heineken or Rolling Rock, order chow mien or sushi defines our personality and image. And the fact of the matter, at least in my neck of the woods, is that real men don't broadband. Read entire story » |
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