As far as I can tell the Internet Café is non-existent in the US now. I know
of none in the city I live in (Raleigh) and the last one I can recall seeing
when travelling was actually at the coast. The one at the coast was
promoting itself to those folks who didn't bring a laptop on holiday. What
you do see a lot of over here is WiFi access availability at coffee shops
(an unusual example is Panera Bread that apparently runs the largest private
free access WiFi network in the US). By casual observation I can say that
WiFi networks are very widely used by laptop owners. I was out the other day
at a café and the number of people using laptops while they eat/drank
outnumbered the non laptop using customers.
I can say that the publicly accessible computers in our county library
system are very heavily used by those who likely don't have broadband
internet access at home. A relative of mine is a former librarian and she
has many hilarious tales of policing those machines for publicly acceptable
usage.
In contrast to my US experience I was quite surprised to see straight up
internet cafes when I went home to England last year. Maybe I am jaded (or
possibly deluded) but it seemed so 1990's to me. Of course I am lucky enough
to be in position to afford a laptop. Given the buy in point for laptop
computers and their prevalence in the US environment the sight of ranks of
desktop computers with users happily tapping away made me giggle a bit.
I am not disputing the potential of the option to try and travel without a
laptop by using true internet cafes to burn DVD backups; but I personally
doubt it would work in the US as the required network of cafes just isn't
there. I will say that in my experience I want to spend the least amount of
time to do backups when traveling and the all in one nature of the Epson
option is a very good fit for me.
Dan S.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jez Cunningham
Subject: Re: [OM] Image Storage on the Road
Don't confuse internet cafes with places that sell coffee (or what they
purport to be coffee). They sell internet (and rent you a pc with a cd/dvd
burner)Jez
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> Hmmm. I guess that just shows that I've never been in an internet cafe
> (don't like Starbuck's coffee) and very, very rarely in a minilab.
> Maybe I should get out more... but not to Starbuck's. :-)
>
> Chuck Norcutt
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