4 ms·

That's fine until your Internet connection is down for 4 days and she's due an assignment that needs to be emailed or printed. The device is a lemon then. At

That's fine until your Internet connection is down for 4 days and she's due an assignment that needs to be emailed or printed. The device is a lemon then. At least with a normal Mac/PC you can plug a printer in it.

plg 13y ago
Eventually (soon I hope) internet connectivity will be truly like electricity. I wonder how many arguments there were 100 yrs ago about how device X or activity Y were useless because "what happens when the electricity goes down"? Anyway it's a relevant argument today because as you say, we don't want the new "my dog ate my homework" to be "our internet went down and so I couldn't access my work on the cloud"
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Eventually (soon I hope) internet connectivity will be truly like electricity. I live in Silicon Valley, and based on my internet options (one sole unreliable option: Comcast), I have to say that we're far from the day that connectivity is like electricity.
- thirdsight 13y ago
  This is not going to happen. Internet connectivity is a race to the bottom. Think of all the effort that has been put into delivering a fairly unreliable service over existing copper rather than implementing FTTP. Oh and then charging as much as possible for it.
deadhead 13y ago
Write the assignment using docs offline mode. Print it out or email it from school. Or from a friends house. Or from the countless places that have free internet these days.
- thirdsight 13y ago
  a) Offline mode is unreliable. I know because I trialled it on a borrowed C720 last week. It's barely usable. Not only that you can't easily shift a document onto an SD for example in offline mode. Try it, then poke it in a PC and see what happens. b) school doesn't have a public WiFi network and all the ethernet ports are MAC address locked to the workstations plugged in for security reasons. This is the correct way to do it. c) We have ADSL here in the UK as the primary connection. When it goes bang, usually several exchanges are out. This happens surprisingly frequently. Friends will be down too, as will other free internet options. Your only option is to drive or get a bus 5+ miles away which just sucks. Sorry but your solutions are bad as is the product.
  - VLM 13y ago
    The problem with bringing up local issues for a global product is all the people who live in local areas without those issues. I'd be extremely hard pressed to lose wifi connectivity. I've been carrying around a republic wireless phone which offloads calls over voip for a couple years (got in on the beta) and I have excellent connectivity at home, work, library, kids school, every coffee shop I've ever entered, one fast food joint and two family dining restaurants within 2 miles of home, and believe it or not, our local grocery store. Oh and auntie's house, and about 20 of my kids friends houses all of which seem to have wifi either DSL, fiber, cablemodem, or who knows what (satellite?). My kids pediatricians office has a guest wifi, it helps the waiting room time a little. I'd have to think for a second, other than in my car while driving, where I don't have wifi. The movie theater (probably just as well). The local fast food sub sandwich store. The Home Depot store. The local walgreens drug store. Um... that's all I can think of? There must be more. City hall, where I spend 5 minutes annually paying my property tax, OMG thats the end of the world having no wifi there. If I was really hard pressed, I'd buy one of those wifi hotspot gadgets on a pay as you go and use that. They're cheap. When it gets to the level of the ridiculous, like whatsoever shall I do after the solar flare wipes out all internet and the zombie apocalypse begins and I really want to see that kitten video on youtube, well, I'll have better things to do than watch youtube videos, so I'm STILL not worried.
    - DanBC 13y ago

plg 13y ago

Eventually (soon I hope) internet connectivity will be truly like electricity. I wonder how many arguments there were 100 yrs ago about how device X or activity Y were useless because "what happens when the electricity goes down"? Anyway it's a relevant argument today because as you say, we don't want the new "my dog ate my homework" to be "our internet went down and so I couldn't access my work on the cloud"

auctiontheory 13y ago
Eventually (soon I hope) internet connectivity will be truly like electricity. I live in Silicon Valley, and based on my internet options (one sole unreliable option: Comcast), I have to say that we're far from the day that connectivity is like electricity.
thirdsight 13y ago
This is not going to happen. Internet connectivity is a race to the bottom. Think of all the effort that has been put into delivering a fairly unreliable service over existing copper rather than implementing FTTP. Oh and then charging as much as possible for it.

deadhead 13y ago

Write the assignment using docs offline mode. Print it out or email it from school. Or from a friends house. Or from the countless places that have free internet these days.

thirdsight 13y ago
a) Offline mode is unreliable. I know because I trialled it on a borrowed C720 last week. It's barely usable. Not only that you can't easily shift a document onto an SD for example in offline mode. Try it, then poke it in a PC and see what happens. b) school doesn't have a public WiFi network and all the ethernet ports are MAC address locked to the workstations plugged in for security reasons. This is the correct way to do it. c) We have ADSL here in the UK as the primary connection. When it goes bang, usually several exchanges are out. This happens surprisingly frequently. Friends will be down too, as will other free internet options. Your only option is to drive or get a bus 5+ miles away which just sucks. Sorry but your solutions are bad as is the product.
- VLM 13y ago
  The problem with bringing up local issues for a global product is all the people who live in local areas without those issues. I'd be extremely hard pressed to lose wifi connectivity. I've been carrying around a republic wireless phone which offloads calls over voip for a couple years (got in on the beta) and I have excellent connectivity at home, work, library, kids school, every coffee shop I've ever entered, one fast food joint and two family dining restaurants within 2 miles of home, and believe it or not, our local grocery store. Oh and auntie's house, and about 20 of my kids friends houses all of which seem to have wifi either DSL, fiber, cablemodem, or who knows what (satellite?). My kids pediatricians office has a guest wifi, it helps the waiting room time a little. I'd have to think for a second, other than in my car while driving, where I don't have wifi. The movie theater (probably just as well). The local fast food sub sandwich store. The Home Depot store. The local walgreens drug store. Um... that's all I can think of? There must be more. City hall, where I spend 5 minutes annually paying my property tax, OMG thats the end of the world having no wifi there. If I was really hard pressed, I'd buy one of those wifi hotspot gadgets on a pay as you go and use that. They're cheap. When it gets to the level of the ridiculous, like whatsoever shall I do after the solar flare wipes out all internet and the zombie apocalypse begins and I really want to see that kitten video on youtube, well, I'll have better things to do than watch youtube videos, so I'm STILL not worried.
  - DanBC 13y ago