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Internet Friendly Cruise Lines?
ttyp0 asks: "The team of upper management at my company, including myself want to take a week long cruise vacation together. Unfortunately, being away from the office and unable access the Internet is terrifying in the case of an emergency. Are there any cruise lines that provide internet access in the cabins (ethernet jack)? If you've been on a cruise recently, who do you recommend?" Those boats are big enough, you figure at least one of the larger cruise lines have thrown a modest satellite and a small Internet cafe on one by now.
http://cybercaptive.com/cruise.shtml
Try that.
Actually no, they have no idea.
I can tell you the most you will get is a web browser with that is only allowed on port 80 and 443, through a proxy. Basically its used to browse the web and nothing else. We tried to get them to open up more ports (to allows Citrix for example) and not a chance!. Too much of a security risk.
Is it just me, but I am getting tired of everything I need to do being a security risk, and how can accessing my office computer via the Java Citrix client be a security risk. I think its more that they have non-technical people onboard who don't know or care about the issues
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
- INMARSAT is not cheap, but could be available. Better grease up--when I say it's not cheap, I mean it's not cheap.
- If you can't be incommunicado during your vacation, perhaps a cruise isn't the best choice of vacation?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I decided to go to Alaska/Vancouver this past summer and enjoyed it. The lack of net access was a plus, but I did want to at least have access on board. The good thing, the cruise line, Royal Carribean, does have net access.
The downside of their net access be listed:
- slow access, similar to a 56k modem.
- has to use their equipment setup, could not use my laptop.
- had to use their intergrated desktop envirnoment which is designed to charge the used by the minute, using your cabin card.
- i could only use an older version of IE at the time which did not have java support.
The way I got around this was to use VNC viewer to connect to my office machine, and use what software I needed to on that side such as my email and instant messengaging clients.
Another thing to note is that some ports of call do have net access. I can recall 3 cities on my trip with their own net access. There could have been more, but I wasn't looking for them. They were usually in near plain site, because of the tourists.
If this is not up to your liking, then I would say bring your own satellite hardware. But if you're on vacation, then keep it that way. Enjoy the vacation and pretend you don't have access. That's pretty much what I did.
$1000 for Phone
$250 for Data connector
$1.50 per min of 9600 baud
(the phone looks like a slow serial modem to your computer)
I've used a Psion Revo, null-modem cable and Iridium phone to telnet into servers while on vacation - works well for me, and the whole package weighs about 4 pounds.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
AOL Internet Cafés
Aboard the Sun, Dawn, Sea, Ocean, Royal, Regal, Grand and Golden Princess you can keep in touch while you're at sea. Extended hours are available allowing you to send and receive email, browse the Internet and utilize the Center's computers for word processing. Programs available include Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.), Corel Suite (WordPerfect, Corel Draw, etc.), Lotus Suite (Lotus 1, 2, 3) and AOL. Printing and photocopying services are also available. We encourage you to contact your ship's Computer Officer to discuss your specific needs and the charges that apply for these services.
I have been on 4 princess cruises, and they are a very nice way to travel.
The cruises have a public lounge where you get Internet access (there may be a fee, I forget) and you can also get it in your cabin for $$$$.
And it's true you can get net access in port...even in places like St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, there are places that let you fax/email/Internet right by the dock.
- adam
Check out http://www.geekcruises.com.
It's neat.
It could be that they are following a standard security procedure of never allow an untrusted or unknown user more than absolute minimum necessary access. You may be the grand poobah of networking and programming where you work, but on a cruise ship, they don't know you and should not make the assumption that you know what you are doing.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
2 years ago I went on the Disney cruise line (it was a freebie, from my moms company)
No net access, and a sat connection to a land phone was 13$+ a minute, my dad made one call, and it came to 65.something$
There phones did have data jacks, so I guess if you absolutely wanted just to check your e-mail, you could though.
I came across an O'Reilly article today that discusses this. It's titled "Wireless at Sea: A Report from the MacMania Alaska Cruise".
An excerpt:
--Bruce
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Some of the Norwegian cruise line boats have Internet access. We did the New Years 2K cruise on their new Norwegian Sky boat. You could dial-out from the rooms (sloooow) or they had an Internet cafe type setup. The cafe wasn't bad and it was more than enough to check web mail and things.
No net access in cabins, but they had an Internet 'Lounge' that had about 24 machines running Internet Exporer kiosk-style (no menubar, buttons for BACK, RELOAD, etc., only).
Speed was quite good, at least comparable to the 1.5Mb/sec DSL I have at home. The browser did have Java enabled. I was able to successfully use SSH and VNC (both Java applets from my web server) to get into my FreeBSD box back at home. Didn't try much else except HTTP(S). Of course, once I got VNC open and KDE running in that, I could do anything that way.
Cost was 0.75 per minute, with discounts to something around $0.55 and $0.40 per minute for prepurchasing 100 and 250 minutes, respectively. I only tried it a couple of times, mostly out of curiosity, so I just used the per-minute plan.
There was a two-hour window the second night of the cruise when access was free so you could try it out. Access was only available the first full day through the last full day of the cruise (i.e. not on the first night or last morning)
I just got back from my honeymoon. I was on Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas. There is in-room 56k modem access. I did not look into the fees. They also have a "business" center that has computers that can be used at 50c/min that are connected to the outside world.
Telephone calls to shore are a killer: 8$/min!
In jamaica, and grand cayman there were internet cafes.
I was on my honeymoon, so I did not so much as even think about touching a keyboard.
Hope this helps!