This may sound crazy, but it’s become clear to me that you simply cannot be a decent blogger without a fast (DSL or cable) connection. At this house in Berkeley I am stuck with dialup, and it is driving me crazy. Obviously, if I moved here I could go back to DSL, but for now it is sorely testing my patience. For starters, it takes several minutes just to load many typical blogs. Also, this is a much-neglected Windows 98 machine which I am rebuilding, and in the process of installing Windows 2000 I had to download SP4 (130 megabytes) and the connection failed again and again — hours into the damned downloads. Utterly maddening. I suppose if you have nothing but time (and a phone line to waste), dialup is OK, but I am going nuts.
For all the improvements in technology, bandwidth still has a long way to go.
DIALUP SUCKS BAD.
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4 responses to “DIALUP SUCKS BAD.”
Imagine if you lived in a technologically advanced country that offered real bandwidth at affordable rates?
“Ever since moving here to teach English two years ago, Renck has had a high-speed Internet connection of 8 megabits per second — only about average for a South Korean apartment, but nearly eight times the typical broadband speed in US households. He watches TV shows over this connection, creates multimedia projects for his class, and regularly updates a Weblog.
None of what he does is revolutionary it just happens far faster than it would in America. And that’s a little revolutionary all by itself.
“I didn’t realise how much the Web had to offer until I got to Korea,” said Renck, a programmer by training. “I couldn’t appreciate it until I got here and saw what true high-speed access does to change your perception of how fast information truly moves.”…”
http://www.mcarthurweb.com/archive/1091114324.html
Not glad to hear that you’re still on dialup. I started out on dialup and had too many problems of the kind you described, not only excruciatingly slow but also constantly cutting me off or failing to connect. I was on cable for a number of years and now I’m on DSL. Much better!
I wonder what kind of bandwidth the North Koreans get.
My old mobo just fried, so I took the opportunity to do a fairly major upgrade of my old PC: new 3Ghz P4 CPU, mobo, 1gb of RAM, new SATA hard drive, and (annoyingly required) a new power supply with an SATA power cable to plug in the hard drive. The net is now disgustingly faster, even with my relatively cheap $29 DSL. (If you bug SBC at the end of old contracts, you can keep your DSL at the introductory contract rate pretty much forever…) Lesson learned: it ain’t just the net – the ‘puter matters too 🙂
I tried to work on my brother’s PC using dialup a couple of weeks ago. After spending a hour in only two of a couple dozen Win Update iterations that needed to be done for Win 2K, I gave up, threw his PC in the back of the car, tossed in a network card, and finished the job here in less than an hour.
I agree: dialup blowz…