This is a draft blog from Nov 19, 2005. Thought it was about time I dealt with some of the drafts.
I bought a laptop recently. I thought it would be cool to be able to continue with some of my hare-brained projects while gallivanting between Yorkshire and California. I went for a “desktop replacement” laptop, i.e. one that’s set up to be more powerful than portable. It means I can put on it all the toys I like to use: graphics software, software development tools, my music software and my favourite game. It’s at this point that I discover just HOW dependent we have become on the internet.
The worst offenders are the pieces of software where I’ll download the installer, go offline, then run the installer and it will say “cannot find the internet to download the product”.
I got hold of Blender, a great open-source 3d modelling program, installed it, and took it offline to play. But the help menu in fact fires up a browser to the internet. All very nice for keeping the documents up-to-date, but not much use to me, unplugged and out in the e-wilderness.
So in the spirit of engineer-luddites everywhere, I hereby start the broken ribbon campaign - remembering our Offline Users.
I guess the reason it’s a draft is that I really needed to make an icon to go with it. Ho hum.
3 comments so far...
I agree.
I have the same problem when I travel to the datatimewarp that is Big Floppy People in Schweden. I have to build up my laptop and carefully check I can do everything necessary without any net connection (both LAN and Internet).
At home, I’m heavily dependant on my server for holding my personal files, so I forget how much isn’t coming off the local machine.
Which reminds me… I really must build it up again for this summer.
Yeah. I preferred it when computer screens were black with green writing
I used to work on a Secret project, that had to be disconnected from the rest of the world - even to the point of being on a fibre optic LAN to help prevent bugging (or something like that). Try doing things like keeping Windows up-to-date when you aren’t allowed to connect the machine to the Internet. And that download a program only to find out it’s just the installer part you’ve downloaded - so annoying.
Very annoying.
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