Home & Small Office Computer Guide

Have you ever wondered just what a map of the Internet would look like?

Well unfortunately you’re going to have to keep on wondering because the Net is now so big and so complex that no one can draw a map of it. No one can draw you an accurate representation of all the paths that each packet of information that makes up this page took to travel from our serer to your computer.

The best that anyone can do is to provide a ‘model’ of the Net and there happen to be two that are going the rounds at the moment. And it should come as no surprise that those two models take opposing views of what the Net is like.

One model suggests that the infrastructure that allows the Net to operate is contracting while the other suggests that the Net is more widely and finely spread than many people realise.

Obviously, without a map it’s hard to tell but the authors of the second model seem to think that the way they see the Net is the way the original designers intended it to look when they began working on the concept back in the 1960’s.

Earlier this week I had a big rant about Firefox and mentioned that I thought I might return to Internet Explorer. Well I haven’t done that just yet but I noticed today that I was spending a whole lot more time using than I was using Firefox.

And now maybe I might try something else instead of returning totally to IE. I’ve just read over on Home Office Voice that Opera is now free.

I tried Opera a year or so ago and found that I quite liked it but I couldn’t handle the advertising. You see if you wanted the free version you had to put up with advertising and if you wanted to be free of that you had to shell out $39.00. That’s not a big amount I know but … well … like most people I’m always drawn to anything that’s free.

Anyway Opera is now free and you can find it right here

Thanks for the pointer Martin.

Everybody wants a faster Internet connection but at the moment DSL or even 56kb is just a pipe dream for many. However things may be getting close to changing and that fast internet connection that you’ve always dreamed of may be no further away than your nearest wall socket.

Several years ag0 a company in the UK experimented with connecting subscribers to the Internet via the power lines but problems arose and the experiments were shelved. Then last year Aurora, the electricity supplier in Tasmania tried again and found that it was Internet connections via the power lines were quite possible and the download speed was described by one person as ‘blisteringly fast.”

Since then all has been quiet up until just recently when Google got involved. It has now entered into a joint venture with another company to fund the roll out of BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) across the USA.

So it could be soon grasshopper … soon.

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft but just lately I have been slowly moving towards appreciating Microsoft more and more.
This strange transition started not long after I downloaded and installed Firefox as my browser of choice. I have to say that at first I loved Firefox - it has some fantastic features that make life very easy for someone who makes his living from working on the Internet. And those features were missing from IE.

However, it also had one or two quirky little problems that I was learning to live with. For example, if you went to a site to stream a movie Firefox could not do it. The best you could hope for was to download the movie to your own machine and watch it from there.

But that was ok until just recently when I, and others, began to notice that Firefox was becoming even more buggy with each update. For example, when you are looking at this page in IE it will look very different to what you would see in Firefox. In Firefox the text would be bigger and the link colors would be darker.

If I try to make the text bigger for IE viewers then it becomes so big in Firefox that it can display in very bizarre ways that I won’t bore you with here.

And then came this morning. I went to a blog to download a podcast and found that the blog owner had provided several links so that I could either stream the podcast direct from his site or download it - as I wanted to do. So in Firefox I clicked on the download link … and found that it began streaming. And when I clicked on the streaming link … you guessed it. It began to download.

Ok, maybe the blog owner got the links wrong so I checked it in IE and in IE the download link downloaded and the streaming link streamed.

That may not seem like such a big problem but when you have a tool that you use for business then you want that tool to work the way it is supposed to do. It’s a productivity thing - time is money etc. etc.

Internet Explorer may not have all the bells and whistles that Firefox has but at least it works the way it’s supposed to work so maybe it’s time to go back to the tried and tested tools. Just because they carry the Microsoft brand doesn’t mean they don’t work.