Posts Tagged ‘Internet in India’
Different Ways to Work Faster when Your Internet Connection is Slow
When it comes to the “information superhighway”, we’ve been in the fast lane for years.
But while we take our fast Internet speed for granted, there are many situations in which a slow connection is a problem. You might be using a computer in another part of the world, or trying to connect wirelessly while travelling. Your computer’s health can contribute to a slow connection too: spyware and viruses, add-on programs, and the amount of memory and hard disk space the computer has can all affect your connection speed.
With all of these potential scenarios, it’s good to know a few tricks to keep you productive when your connection is slow:
1. Compress your e-mail
Reducing your e-mail file sizes can help you send them more quickly. When sending large or multiple files, use a compression tool like WinZip. And if you’re sending an e-mail to multiple people, try creating a distribution list instead of listing each recipient separately – this is faster and more efficient. Finally, you can reduce your e-mail file size by ensuring your e-mail signature doesn’t contain any graphics, videos, stylised fonts or other content.
2. Work offline if you can
Working offline can help spare you the pain and frustration of a slow connection. And there are lots of tasks you can do without being online; for example, you can use an RSS reader to download articles for offline reading. For offline webmail, install an e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird to download your messages for offline reading and responding (it actually has a built-in RSS reader as well). Outlook users can work offline using Cached Exchange Mode, which stores a copy of your mailbox on your computer.
If there is a web page you frequently reference for information, you can save it to your computer rather than load it over and over again. Here’s how to save a web page in Internet Explorer:
- 1. Go to the Web page you want to save.
- 2. On the File menu, click Save As.
- 3. In the Save As type drop-down menu, select Web page, complete.
- 4. Click Save.
3. Block or disable unnecessary content
Web pages that contain heavy graphics or videos take longer to load, so turning them offcan speed your Internet browsing. Here’s how to disable these elements in Internet Explorer:
1. On the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. In the Internet Options dialogue box, click the Advanced tab.
3. In the Settings box, scroll down to the Multimedia section. Clear the following boxes:
- a. Play animations in Web pages
- b. Play sounds in Web pages
- c. Play videos in Web pages
You might also want to install an application that blocks annoying, bandwidth-consuming ads that make pages load more slowly.
4. Use tabbed browsing
Tabbed browsing doesn’t just reduce clutter on your desktop, it also helps you work more efficiently with a slow connection. When browsing through multiple pages, click your mouse scroll wheel or Control/Command click to open up each page in a new tab. This allows you to read one page while waiting for others to load, saving you time. You can also open a number of pages in multiple tabs, then disconnect and read offline.
While a slow connection can be annoying, you can help reduce frustration – and boost productivity – by knowing how to make your online activities more efficient. These tips should help you get more done, even when the Internet doesn’t move as fast as you do!
Internet turns 40 with birthday bash
Fri-Oct 30, 2009
Los Angeles / Agence France-Presse
Technology and media stars, pundits and entrepreneurs joined the Internet’s father to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child.
“It’s the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,” said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969.
Kleinrock led an anniversary event at the UCLA campus that blended reminiscence of the Internet’s past with debate about its future.
“There is going to be an ongoing controversy about where we have been and where we are going,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the popular news and blog website that bears her name.
“It is not just about the Internet; it is about our times. We are going to need desperately to tap into the better angels of our nature and make our lives not just about ourselves but about our communities and our world.”
Huffington was on hand to discuss the power the Internet gives to grass roots organizers on a panel with Kleinrock and Social Brain Foundation director Isaac Mao.
“The Internet is a democratizing element; everyone has an equivalent voice,” Kleinrock said. “There is no way back at this point. We can’t turn it off. The Internet Age is here.”
Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day four decades ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the Internet.
“The net is penetrating every aspect of our lives,” Kleinrock said to a room of about 200 people and an equal number watching online.
On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to “talk” to one at a research institute.
Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.
US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
ARPANET grew into what is known today as the Internet.
“It feels to me like the alumni meeting of the framers of the US Constitution,” Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow said as he addressed the gathering.
“There are a lot of people in this room who are honest to god uncles and aunts of the Internet. What you did is conceivably the most important technological event since the capture of fire.”
Barlow, whose nonprofit legal organization fights for online freedom, maintained that Internet access is on the verge of becoming an inalienable human right.
“The reality today is that the Internet is like a new life; it is organic,” said Regina Dugan, director of what became DARPA when “Defense” was added to the agency’s name.
“It is inherently beautiful. It challenges us all to think about ourselves, about others, about ethics, and about the future.”
To test the power of the Internet, DARPA will release 10 “very large balloons” in the continental US and then pay $40,000 to the first person or team to pinpoint their locations using online tools or networking.
The balloons will be afloat for two days and visible only during daylight hours. “Individuals can make information go viral,” Dugan said. “Then it was an Internet challenge, today it is a network challenge.”
The competition will be tracked on wildly popular microblogging service Twitter, according to DARPA.
Kleinrock, who is now 75, sees the Internet spreading into everything.
“The next step is to move it into the real world,” Kleinrock said. “The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me.”