Browsing and Emailing Off-line

Newbie cruisers often ask about what type of internet access they will have onboard a cruise ship, how well it works, how to use it, and how much it will cost.

First, one must understand that, because they are moving most of the time and because they travel around the world, cruise ships have to use satellite-based communications systems. Satellite-based communications is a very technically challenging problem to solve and and the solution is therefore very costly. And the connection is either very, very slow, or so slow as to be useless.

Most modern cruise ships have satellite connections with upwards of several hundred Kilobits per second bandwidth. By comparison, a typical home residence with cable modem or Verizon FIOS now has an internet connection capable of 15-50 Megabit per second range. Again, that's Megabits not Kilobits. So your typical home internet connection (shared with a handful of family users) has about 100 times the bandwidth of a large ship that must share its connection amongst dozens or even hundreds of users simultaneously! And, this slow satellite-based internet connection costs the cruise line at least tens of thousands of dollars per month, and naturally, they need to pass on these costs to you!

Given such internet bandwidth constraints and its associated high costs aboard a cruise ship, the best way to optimize your internet usage and to minimize the cost is to work offline. Most browsers and email clients now support offline use. Working offline means to be able to do things such as read emails or web pages while not being connected to the internet.

The reason most people never learned how to work off-line is because most of us have unlimited Internet connectivity at work and/or home, so working off-line is not necessary. We are all accustomed to casually browsing the web, hitting CNN.COM for example, and spending 10-15 minutes reading each article. However, on a cruise ship, when internet bandwidth is scarce and its use is costly (at up to 75 cents/minute!), working offline is critical to minimizing your internet-related expenses.

Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer for example, has an offline mode. You simply connect to the internet, and visit the sites and pages you are interested in (but don't read them while connected). Then after hitting all your sites, disconnect. Since your browser was in offline mode, it basically stored the text and images of each page locally on your hard disk so you can now read them at your convenience--rather than rushing because you are connected and spending 50 cents a minute!

You do the same type of thing with email using any number of commercially available offline mail readers, e.g. Outlook Express. Even the most popular web-based email services such as Google's Gmail or Yahoo Mail now offer offline clients. Simply connect, fetch and send your email, and then disconnect. You can read or compose messages at your leisure. Later, you can reconnect and get/send emails again.

If the benefits are still not clear, here are two identical scenarios, but one offline and one online, for getting the same five hypothetical emails, reading them and then composing five replies:

Work online via web-based email

1. Connect to Internet
2. Start browser (30 seconds)
3. Hit your email web server (30 seconds)
4. Open email and read it (1 minute)
5. Compose a reply and send it (2 minutes)
6. Repeat 4 and 5 four more times (12 minutes)
7. Logoff

Total time and cost: 16 minutes and $8.00

Working offline using your own computer

1. Open email client
2. Connect to Internet
3. Send/receive emails (30 seconds)
4. Disconnect
5. Casually read all new emails and compose replies while relaxing by the pool, in your cabin or at the lounge!
6. Reconnect to Internet
7. Send/Receive all messages (30 seconds)

Total time and cost: 1 minute and $0.50

And a couple other thoughts:

1. On a cruise ship, avoid using the internet during peak usage times. The bandwidth bottleneck during peak times can make the internet connection virtually unusable to try to connect during dinner, in the early morning or late evening hours, or when the ship is in port.

2. Remember to turn off Windows and other automatic software updates. You don't want these services to initiate download activities in such a non-broadband situations.

As you can see, if you learn work in off-line mode, you can cut your internet usage and cost by by a huge amount without much inconvenience at all!

The Future of Social Networking

The current crop of social networking, microblogging, mobile communications and collaborative technologies is quickly creating a new paradigm for human interaction, socializing and communications. Sites like Facebook, for example, provide a new and powerful way to communicate and stay in touch with friends and family.

But I wonder what fundamental changes will occur in human interactions after another generation or two. Will people know how to interact in person anymore? Will all this lead to more physical isolation or even total disconnect of people, and thus reduce or eliminate the need for these very technologies? Can it all lead to a world of mostly electronic interactions between human beings?

Wouldn't it be ironic if the popularity of these new technologies led to substantial reductions in human interactions, and that itself eventually kills the very technologies that initiated the trend in the first place?

HP Printers

I've personally been buying and using HP printers for over twenty years now. I fondly remember our old HP LaserJet II, IIId and 4si printers from the 80's and 90's. They each probably printed several hundred thousand pages with hardly any servicing or maintenance before eventually quitting. In 1999, we purchased our HP LaserJet 5000GN and, nine years and probably a hundred thousand pages later, it's still going strong! We kill fewer trees these days because we print so much less than we used to. The 90's vision of the "paperless" office is really approaching reality!

I'm disappointed to report that my 2 1/2 year-old HP OfficeJet 7410 inkjet's scanner unit apparently just failed. When copying or scanning, the unit will routinely make a loud grinding noise, displays a "scanner failure" error message, and hangs. So now it can print but can't scan, fax or photocopy.

Since it's out of warranty, nobody locally wants to fix it, and it's not worth shipping it for service. As my home office unit, I doubt it's even scanned or printed 1,000 pages yet and it still smells and looks like new. At $468 delivered, that means it cost me about 46 cents per page to own and operate, and that doesn't include the cost of toner and paper! I realize I can't compare a multifunction inkjet-based printer to a workhorse LaserJet, but this multifunction unit wasn't that much cheaper than those LaserJets.

I've since replaced this defective HP OfficeJet 7410 with a new HP LaserJet CM1312mfp multifunction. We'll see how long this one lasts, but I'm certain it's not going to make it to 100,000 copies or 10 years like the old workhorses...