there are a few things i want to get off my chest this week... i spend my days (and sometimes nights) with people eager to learn more about new technologies. millions of folks around the world are right there with them.... pouring thru all sorts of consumer and trade magazines to educate themselves... maybe they'll even read their daily paper's technology column. the resulting mess of understanding can be frightening.... it's not unlike the american political process. so what i'd like to do today is run thru some overused, overhyped technologies and give you a little reality check....

If you are already connected to the internet, chances are your home PC has a modem.... they come in a variety of sizes, measured primarily by the speed they can send and receieve information. 14-4 is perhaps the current common speed, although it is quickly being replaced by 28.8... in theory this means a 28.8 modem can send or receiev information at 28 thousand 8-hundred bytes per second.

In reality, you'll almost never get a 28.8 connection.... that's because the phone lines in many parts of the country are of such low quality that establishing a reliable conection at high speeds is nearly impossible. One technology that hopes to bring you reliable high speed connections to the internet is the cable modem

Basically it'll work like your regular modem, except you'll hook it into your cable line instead of your phone line. Because cable is generally better than phone lines for carrying lots of information, a cable modem user will get (number) a super high speed line into their PC. Trouble is, all that speed is only one way.... cable modems can only send limited data *out* of your PC... So, you can download files very quickly, but sending files out would wind up being slower than with your current modem.

Even if they fix the one way problem.... cable modems face a more serious challenge.... the backers of this technology expect that you're going to buy one way high speed access to the internet from the cable company.... the same yahoos who can barely get a TV signal into your house. Oh, and those helpful people you call now when you have cable trouble? They're here to help you get online. The poor customer service from the cable companies would likely kill this deal if it weren't for the fact that something better will come along before the cable companies get their act together and sell this to you. Look for some cool new technologies from the phone companies later this year...

another of my least favorite technologies is the CD-ROM. perhaps the best word to describe this technology is slow... or painfully slow. you have one in your computer of course... its not even an option these days. my dad's new computer came with two, as if the people who built it knew one wasn't fast enough. And despite the fact that they come in different speeds, they numbers don't always mean what they say... double speed cd-roms are not always half as fast as a quad speed, and they are definately not four times slower than a 8 times cd-rom.

i hesitate to even mention to number of bugs in most CD-ROM's and the pathetic customer support many offer. think about the idea behind cd-roms... you can call the ROM's if you are truly hip... massive quantities of disks are made, pressed, packaged, marketed, and shipped, despite the fact that we have faster and cheaper ways of delivering that content... oh, and you can't record on most of them.... kind of like laser disks.

the one nice thing about cd-rom's is that because CD's can carry so much more data, its easier to load new software from a cd ... for example you can load windows 95 from a cd-rom... or you could try doing it from dozens of floppy disks... the frustration of that alone might be worth buying a cd-rom....

Lastly, what is perhaps the most persistent half- truth in the internet world.... the internet can survive an atomic blast. it keeps running even if one part goes down. data automatically routes around outages. its like a living organism that can grow a new leg if one is cut off. yeah, right.... in theory maybe, but in reality the internet relies on dozens of phone companies and other folks to tie all the internet lines together, any one of which can cause net surfers headaches....

there is a nameless long distance company in the washington DC area who frequently stops all net access for tens of thousands of people for hours and hours at a time and bottleneck transmissions for the rest of us trying to get past DC. in fact, this kind of thing happens daily around the internet.... the routing of information that should find its own way from point a to point b by any path available, often can't get past the front door. and that's not counting the mail that gets lost without a trace. it may seem trivial, but remember the anger america onine faced when their users got busy signals... outages across the net affects not only the people in that area, but also anyone trying to pass along that route. the limitless internet that's always there like a Ma Bell's dialtone doesn't exist right now...

i'll stop there... i'm sure to be flamed by some networking guru or cable industry mogel... and maybe its the media's fault for not telling precise stories about technology... now you know another side of the story...