AUGUST 2004 MAXIMUMPC 4
Are your online activities ever
really free from prying eyes?could feasibly upgrade. Today 56K is
basically the end of the line. This means
that unless you get some sort of high-
speed access, your upgrading days are
over. Or are they?
Internet speed boosters like AOL’s
Speedboost promise to make your dial-
up experience faster than ever, but don’t
be fooled. The majority of speed boost-
ing technology is really just smarter
graphic and page handling. All this
means is that the sites you visit often are
preloaded and cached for faster delivery,
and/or that graphics are downloaded
in smaller sizes and lower resolutions.
While this may feel speedier, you’re tech-
nically only getting an optimized solu-
tion—not a faster connection.
For the AOL crowd not ready to take the
high-speed connection plunge, we sup-
pose an accelerator is better than nothing,
but you’re simply delaying the inevitable.
As more and more sites serving broad-
band visitors add more and more graph-
ics, the whole web will only get slower
for modem diehards in the slow lane, no
matter how many features these so-called
accelerators strip out.$%"5.+%$
IT’S POSSIBLE TO DIE FROM
SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR
COMPUTER FOR TOO LONG
File this under “strange but true,”
because a 31-year-old gamer fromwestern China literally perished in front
of his PC this year after a particularly
rousing 20-hour nonstop session of the
online multiplayer game Saga. Internet
café employees reported that the victim
usually played for 10 hours a day non-
stop. But it caught up with him. Doctors
speculate that the actual cause of death
was an embolism resulting from physi-
cal inactivity that moved into his heart.
While video game haters are quick to
blame the medium, we have this to say:
Doing anything for an abnormally long
period of time without sleep or proper
nutrition will probably do you in."%,)%6% )4
ËIT’S POSSIBLE TO DIE FROM
SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR
COMPUTER FOR TOO LONG
File this under “strange but true,”