Moonarino

Woah. Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, the former "big three". Tons of early innovation there. I had no idea AltaVista was still around. As for Compuserve, you reminded me that AOL is only the second-oldest email service that's still kicking.

Please view this first part of my response as thoroughly light-hearted (and consider that I'm retirement age myself) but you do know about "phablets", cellphones as big as tablets used to be? My lady's phone has a 6.8" screen with 4k resolution. My chronic carpal-tunnel-like affliction won't allow me to even think about something that big and heavy. My current cell screen is 5.5", with hardware buttons instead of onscreen (so relatively bigger than 5.5" with onscreen buttons). I do also have a 9" tablet with a case that props. But I still much prefer big-screen TV for football and basketball. Sports bar. Indy OTS has a very nice one (Playmakers) just off the Casino. Logging in on my last 3 cruises (Royal and CCL) at peak times would often take minutes, even with always being careful to disconnect from WiFi every time after logging out. Still not optimum per se. This is one thing I hope gets better as part of Starlink (accompanying WiFi/router/switch upgrades etc).

Yeah, let's not go there lol . . . . . although we really should rail nonstop. Looks like BoA (for one) actually wants to go another round.

Yep, it means exactly that.

I once asked for a couple of weeks off -- because (a) one of my subordinates had previously gotten approved for it by somebody else, not me, and (b) because I had been seriously burning out for months and I desperately needed it -- and thought I might get fired just for asking. So I share that older gentleman's disgust. 😉 We also avoid cruising certain times of the year for the same reason you stated, which of course (I presume) will affect age range. For years I have had the "sense" that Celebrity cruisers were older on average, mostly because of X's approach to cruising, the way the cruise line presents itself.

Ooops . . . somebody's "stop" comment was deleted, just when I was gonna "like" it. Oh well . . . . . . . . whoever you are, I for one appreciate the effort.

But what good does it do if you can't prove it's a recent test? I could use a test result from when I had a fever a few days ago (from a sinus infection) and home-tested just to know if I was covid-positive or not (the test was negative) and I'm not sailing till November.

You can snap a photo of a test, taken exactly when (see my above) and from whom? (And was the test actually done correctly or not?) Under current instructions there is pretty much no way to confirm any of that by just snapping a photo of "a" test result. IOW, they might as well just give up on the whole deal.

I think the biggest part of the question is how do we prove the date . . . or the name for that matter. (Whose test result is it? 🙃 ) As for date, it's probably not widely known (or at least thought of) that one can set a cellphone date manually, thus the possibility of fooling pretty much everything and everybody.

If you were cruising in early September 2008 I can only imagine what kind of "tension" you were experiencing. (Or even not cruising.) That was the month when the finance giants started falling like dominoes (although it had all started unraveling a year earlier). Anyway, I saw that happening on TV news feeds in the Olympic Bar on Carnival Triumph, wishing I had good Internet so I could get online and read a whole lot more meat (and real facts) than TV news ever gives out. (I didn't have Internet on that cruise because it was my first, and was learning what I could do without or would sorely miss.) Emails -- this is one reason why I stated my first "skepticism" that a main-pipe upgrade might (again) ignore the chance to upgrade a ship's entire network infrastructure. Regardless of how fast the super-broadband uplink might be, when you have to wait 5 minutes just to get logged on to the ship's wifi, and then 5 minutes just for a first email check, you know something was missed. This has been the case with every advertised major upgrade of Internet "speed" I've experienced so far. It's like hitting a major traffic backup on the on-ramp of a superhighway with 70+ speed limit. Superhighway does nothing at all for us if we can't even get on the highway. But again I'm hopeful that they'll be smart enough that we end-users will actually be able to see the difference this time around, regardless of time of day, or port-day versus sea-day.

1994. 2400 baud dial-up was the state-of-the-art (for anybody anywhere on the public side of things) and the entire "Internet" was barely more than text. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released late that year. Before then I had found a "nice" little Dungeons-type game that was not much more than arrow keys (to navigate in a box) and the space bar. Google was just a pipe dream, if anything at all. We've come a loooooooong long way baby. This also relates to why I can be satisfied with a reliable 20Mb home Internet connection, but I also love seeing progress in communications (to a point), and am still utterly amazed that computers and comm systems can routinely handle billions of data bits per second. And about every 10 years it all gets multiplied by another thousand. @fstuff1, I can relate at least from the sense that I (mostly) just check email to see if anything urgent has come up with family, as we're all getting older and older. But 15-20 years ago, as "the" IT person in the 24/7 business I worked for, before any vacation I always had to repeat several times to several people, "I will NOT be reachable next week!" or whatever. But now (sad to say) you practically can't escape it.

Good for them. Lol -- something else to give them ulcers. I'm pretty sure that "nightmare" (for them) is already covered elsewhere though. And maybe they don't realize that all US private sector don't work for guvmint like theirs do.

I dumped my DTV satellite 3-4 years ago and I've never looked back. Was already paying for Prime's free shipping and was pleasantly surprise to find how much TV it also included. Then proceeded through several streaming services till I settled on YT TV (for now). Some people apparently don't realize how big space (even inner space) is. I'm presently wondering what the general mean circumference of the LEO region is. I'm sure it's a quite a bit smaller than 22k miles up, but still. Next question would be how much total volume, and then it follows, what percentage of volume all of that "junk" is taking up. Would calculate it myself but I'm just too lazy. (Actually I'm too stupid to even try.) Speaking of Denver, I first seriously learned about satellites at the old Lowry AFB. Lived on the edge of Denver and Aurora for most of a year.

Mike Ditka's late-in-life generosity helped me recover from a very bad debt problem. A lot of people didn't like him because they only believed the "bear" image (or whatever his haters wanted to say about him). Mark Twain, oh so long ago: "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed." Edit to add: Musk is smarter than all of us put together.

People would get dizzy just trying to keep up these days.

Go for it, no problem. I remember when 10Mb hard drives were a thing. Back in the days of floppy disks almost as big as a dinner plate. I might recommend avoiding topics like "petulant child" (too many of which actually run too much of our govs, not to mention AMZ and Google) or the zillions of ways our tax dollars are wasted. Opinions are like you-know-what.

Gawd. I get your point, obviously very relevant, but man what an eyesore 😉. Would seriously expect sights like this to be above the highest passenger access. Maybe this is, can't know for sure from the pic.

And I as a techie (even a much older one) should probably be raving too. But I very much agree with your entire post. There's an adage (or several) about making the cart bigger and then inventing new ways to overload it. That's exactly how the computer world has operated for as long as I've been involved in it.

It should be presumed that Starlink will replace the present uplink, and also that a ship's Starlink is just one wide-open uplink. Think water pipes (a network of them) with each segment growing in size until it hits the single big pipe. You pay for the size of the water pipe that's closest to you (this is a gross over-simplification but a traditional analogy), not necessarily the giant one that everybody onboard goes through. Methinks the pricing tiers would be similar to current, like whether your package allows video streaming or not, multiple simultaneous users, etc. In other words, relatively transparent to the change to Starlink. (Please note my stress on "relatively".)

Raw speed rating is a starting point (e.g. how does the box perform in the real world, etc). And as @markebmentioned on page one, if wireless access points aren't well-placed, etc, it may not even matter to some folks what size the uplink is. The chain breaks at its weakest link, so to speak. Long-time IT pro, I saw a few failures and sub-standards in my day.

That was the point of my comment (#10). There are several layers (including cabling) between us users and the big pipe to the sky. We must hope every aspect is considered/examined/upgraded as necessary for a solid final product.

In that case I won't have to worry about whether the app wakes my sleeping phone to notify 🙃 I do plan to try the messaging. It seems like a logical place for notifications, although CCL had it embedded in the dining section of the app -- if I remember correctly. On that note, I thoroughly understand the end of your comment. One thing missing on my last cruise was the daily "big screen" (outdoor) movie schedule. I have no idea where they posted that info from one day to the next, if anywhere. This was because no more daily flyer thingies and I had no idea where to look. Thanks to all for taking the time and trouble. I'm still wondering why the app has almost doubled in size since June of last year, 145mb to 274mb. Maybe it's all the room and light controls.

Asking because we often don't know the really good stuff till we get onboard and connected. One specific question, haven't seen anything mentioned on this: When waiting for seating in the MDR, is the app configured to notify us when our table is ready? I ask this because (surprise!) in May I discovered that Carnival's Hub app has this feature and it actually worked! The rest of my title question is a free-for-all -- especially any not-so-obvious (or doesn't-work-so-great) feature that might be worth mentioning. Edit to add another question: If the phone sleeps while we're waiting for some notification, will the app wake the phone and notify?

I do hope Starlink will "work with Royal Caribbean Group" to improve networking throughout the ships while they're offering that fat pipe, which is only half the battle. The other half is getting there, i.e., having enough good-quality/well-configured switches and access points onboard, all the layers we have to hop through to get to (and from) The Big Pipe. It's never about improving just one piece. IOW, cross your fingers that it will live up to the hype. Edit to add: Not a nay-sayer because I love good technology that works as advertised. Just sayin', it's always about the whole formula.

Definitely give it another day at least. From TA to cruiseline depends on multiple things going right, right on time. Either way, you do want to fix your browser probem . . . I always use Firefox (recent version) for Celebrity and other cruise lines with no problem at all. (Except for Princess' chat feature which has never even shown up on FF.) Offered just in case -- it gets harder and harder to do the simple things: Definitely try clearing Firefox "Cached Web Content" under Settings > Privacy & Security > about a page down under "Cookies and Site Data" click the "Clear Data" button. If you leave both boxes checked, it will delete ALL cookies and site data, which maybe you don't want to do. You can uncheck the first box to just clear cache. If that isn't enough, just under the "Clear Data" button is "Manage Data". Click that, then search for 'celebrity" and delete all cookies it displays.