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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 9/14/2005 |
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Why is using the internet expensive
and why is it so slow? The
internet – or the world wide web as we know it – is slow and
getting slower. One of the reasons for this is that the number of people
accessing the internet daily keeps growing. Same equipment – more
people – thus slower operation. When the
real internet started – over 40 years ago, everything was plain text.
It was a black and white world.
Even when the WWW started in the early ‘90’s it used low
resolution graphics. Today, everything is high resolution full color
graphics, including movies and live video. The
original internet was a closed network, designed to let colleges and military
institutions exchange text messages and documents. The WWW
is a completely open world wide network, designed to let anybody send
anything across it or post anything on it – text, pictures, movies, or
music. There’s a lot of web pages on the internet today. When you go to
Google you see that they have over 8 billion pages listed, and that’s
certainly not all. This
means you need a pretty powerful computer with lots of processing power and
memory to handle and download these graphics. This means you have to use a
more expensive computer. And
because there’s so many pretty pictures on the internet, you need a quality
printer to print them out, and color print cartridges are expensive. And
because the internet is now all high resolution graphics, you have to have a
fast internet connection; dsl or cable or satellite,
which means you pay more to be connected to it. And
there’s also a training cost of using the internet, you have to learn
how to access it, and you have to keep learning how to do new things as they
happen. Any
computer accessing the internet needs to be protected against viruses,
spyware and adware programs with some kind of an internet security suite
which protects against all these things, so there’s another cost. And then
there’s the hidden costs of the internet, some of which can’t be
calculated. With all
the hidden scams on the internet, spyware programs, adware, Bogus product
sales, it’s almost impossible to calculate what the costs of these
programs are. How many
people have fallen prey to scams like the Nigerian letter? And to
businesses, what’s the cost of employees surfing the internet during
work hours. It used to be that Businesses watched out for employees playing
computer games during working hours; now internet surfing is the biggest time
waster. But
probably the biggest thing that’s slowing the internet down, and
wasting everyone’s money, are the spammers. A
spammer can send out a million spam emails for a very low cost. Spammers have
it made, they make lots of money, and if they get caught, the penalties are
pretty much a slap on the wrist. What does cost a lot of money is people who
receive those spams having to manually delete them
from their mailboxes. And every spam has to be checked for viruses, spyware,
and adware, and it has to be filtered to see if it really is spam or a
legitimate email. So I
sit at my computer - wasting my time, watching emails coming
in, each of which has to be scanned, and most of which end up in my trash
can. And
probably the biggest is frustration is – who do you complain to? Nobody
owns the internet. There’s no internet police. You just have to accept
it, as it is, and keep spending your time and money. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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