Two ways - Google for a group already working on it in your area (not unlikely), or if you're not as lucky as that then start such a group. Plenty of information online as to how to participate in such a network and you can pretty easily buy off the shelf products to do so (no messy self assembly required). Might try looking at Locust World, Ultramesh, and Community Wireless.
Stop using commercial ISP's and switch to a public WiFi mesh infrastracture. We don't have to buy their shitty services. We're very capable of running our own network. Invest that money up front in buying the hardware needed to join your local mesh network and avoid paying ISP fees and playing by their stupid rules.
Of course then you have the problem that the bastards are trying to outlaw that too.. time to fight the man! I'm going to firebomb the fuckers if they try to mess with my Internet access. Show them the wrath of geeks.
Did you ever code JS for Mac IE? Ick! It's actually worse than coding JS on the Windows version. It's a product that is outdated and needs to die. Safari, Opera, and Firefox all run much better on Mac than IE does. Mac IE was pretty good at one time but since they abandoned it it's just been rotting.
Don't go into it with the expectation that more like Windows or Mac OS is better. Sometimes they may be and sometime they may not be. Study people ranging from no experience up through experts.
I hope both because I use the cheaper ATA at home and SATA in my servers. Guess I will be able to upgrade my servers (that only have rackmount space for two drives each) to 1TB per server now. Yippie! Before my supplier only offered up to 400GB SATA hdd's. Kick ass. I'll use it all too.
*shrugs* Does it matter? If people aren't using the product who is going to care if it is discontinued. Lame idea for a story.
Now, a story on why the products failed might be interesting. A real study in how programmers select tools and what kind of tools they really want. That'd be worthy of discussion.
Since they employ major Firefox developers that makes more sense to me. I can see no reason to buy Opera other than to merge it's development team into the FF development team and to have more of a portable device codebase.
It's easy in that there is nothing working to stop you from changing it. It's fairly simple to download a program that lets you do it without working through some complex hacking process, looking on websites in languages you don't speak, etc. Ignorance doesn't make something hard to do in the same way having to fight your way through a complex undocumented system is hard.
But changing the MAC address is easy. With what M$ is trying to shove down consumers throats your entire PC will be under the ever watchful eye of Big Bill. Supposedly impossible to bypass for the average joe and a full watch dog from hardware to software to media to network - in theory at least. Probably the last step needed to completely drive me away from Microsoft products but meanwhile the average non-geek will either not know or just bend over and take it.
I know I sure as hell will not enable this in my OS or browser. If that means not using certain programs, media, or websites then I just won't use them or more likely that I'll spoof false data to them.
Websites need to be able to hint at what fonts to use - and they can't really. This alone causes a great lot of text to be rendered, incorrectly, as images or Flash. This takes away the user's option to render this text in their choice of fonts. Support for downloadable fonts is the only way to improve on the situation. All that is really needed on top of the existing option of using a font tag and CSS is a meta tag to hint at where the browser can download the font if the computer doesn't already have it. The font can be cached temporarily and available, while cached, to any page with it's URL - just like any other web object. Pretty simple.
At Walmart you can find some IM/email specific machines for about $50 but I think these $100 laptops blow them away since they offer nicer keyboards, screens, and real wireless instead of some weird proprietary scheme. Maybe your highschool or college student might need something more powerful but up through junior high these would be perfect. It'd be pretty good for my parents too. They don't use their computer for much more than email and web and they always have spyware and viruses.
My laptop only gets about an hour but it's even less than that if you use the wifi. Pitiful. You have to lug around the power cord for it. I even had to get a car adapter so for the few minutes I use it in the car it won't go dead.
To bad it isn't kinetic like those flashlights you shake. Whenever you get peeved and shake the computer it'd recharge.
The problem is that there has been little innovation in laptops in the past decade.;)
Like - why does dropping a few drops of water in the keyboard still DESTROY your laptop? We let them sell this crap to us? Keyboard and mousing should be sealed off from the rest of the laptop and easily replaced. I'm waiting for them to figure out that they can make dockable keyboard and mouse that can be used normally while docked or can easily be popped loose to sit on your lap (or desk, or whatever) while you work.
And why can my laptop be used to fry an egg? There is no way you could sit with it on your lap for very long and if you could you couldn't really see the screen comfortably. Of course, to run Windows, I guess they can't cut back on the hardware specs to much. Linux runs just fine on my old 233Mhz laptop with 128MB of RAM but I hate to think how slow XP would be on that. Vista sounds even worse. Transparency and other useless visual stuff so we'll be lucky if we don't need a water cooled GPU in our laptops.
Why? We have $100 PDAs and phones that have built-in web browsers and are more powerful than the computers a lot of us were using just a few years ago. Also without the markup of going through usual channels to buy parts a hdd, lcd, etc can be bought much cheaper. I think that's why they're trying to sell these in lots of a million or more units because it lets them buy the parts much cheaper. You're $1500 Toughbook is great but it's seen a lot of markup before reaching the consumer.
These would be good little machines for running web-based apps especially. If it can run Firefox it can do everything most people will need. Most people already use web-based mail. Web-based IM, word processing, etc are going to be becoming popular soon I think. Making this machine good for the majority that aren't power users or gamers or at least aren't when mobile.
I'm especially interested in the 2.0 version they mention that they want to use an electronic ink display. Being able to read the screen in direct sunlight and with that extremely low energy use would be fantastic.
They're stupid because they never have a real PC's power and have a lot of downsides. They really need to create two lines of laptops.. ultra lights for casual use and power machines (with upgradable graphics, ram, etc) for users that need the power. I don't like being stuck somewhere in the middle where I have to lug a big heavy block that still can't quite do what I want. It'd be awesome if you could easily upgrade the graphics processor of your laptop. Of course with mini-itx (and nano-itx?) machines your PC is almost as small as your laptop a lot of the time but is still expandable. Slap a battery on there and you have a powerful, if slightly bulky, portable machine.
I was actually thinking of trying Nokia's little palm computer that runs Linux. I'll have to wait until I see one. I don't want to cramped of a keyboard or screen. The BlackBerry's seem a bit to small in those areas (last time I looked).
If they're as good as they sound then I'd buy one. I think laptops today are rather stupid. To slow to do anything demanding power and yet hot, noisy, and power hungry. I'd rather have something light, quiet, with a long battery life that does the basics I need - web, email, im, ssh, light word processing, and light image manipulation. I'll be surprised if the $100 laptop can't handle those and more.
I do that a lot. I don't follow pop culture so I usually don't know what the new songs are so that now and then when I hear one I like I'll have no idea how to buy it. Looking up the lyrics I remember is one such method.
I think Google should be making this easier. If they can scan and make books searchable I'd think they could do lyrics too. If they could do this with images it'd rock. For example, I like the painting in the resturant in the movie Spanglish and it seems familiar to me but I can't place who painted it so I can't order a copy of it. I could describe it well enough that an art student could probably tell me what it is. I want THAT from my search engine. Anyone here know the painting I'm talking about?
Becoming an authority in the subject is really the best method for gaining high placement. It's not that hard to get a #1 spot but you have to put some time and money into decent SEO and lots of content creation and community building. Create some solid content, drop the word in the right places that it's there, and set up the needed functionality to encourage users of that content to help build content themselves even if it's only in the form of discussion attached to each article you publish. Maybe sponsor a couple of related websites in exchange for a link back to your site. A good thing about SEO is that an 80x30 image or even a text link is fine for driving traffic to you. No need for full-page ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Might look to sites like Community Wireless. Good place to start.
Two ways - Google for a group already working on it in your area (not unlikely), or if you're not as lucky as that then start such a group. Plenty of information online as to how to participate in such a network and you can pretty easily buy off the shelf products to do so (no messy self assembly required). Might try looking at Locust World, Ultramesh, and Community Wireless.
Stop using commercial ISP's and switch to a public WiFi mesh infrastracture. We don't have to buy their shitty services. We're very capable of running our own network. Invest that money up front in buying the hardware needed to join your local mesh network and avoid paying ISP fees and playing by their stupid rules.
Of course then you have the problem that the bastards are trying to outlaw that too.. time to fight the man! I'm going to firebomb the fuckers if they try to mess with my Internet access. Show them the wrath of geeks.
Did you ever code JS for Mac IE? Ick! It's actually worse than coding JS on the Windows version. It's a product that is outdated and needs to die. Safari, Opera, and Firefox all run much better on Mac than IE does. Mac IE was pretty good at one time but since they abandoned it it's just been rotting.
Don't go into it with the expectation that more like Windows or Mac OS is better. Sometimes they may be and sometime they may not be. Study people ranging from no experience up through experts.
I buy a dozen or more drives a year and the price is always noticable in my experience. Hopefully that's changing as SATA becomes more standard.
I hope both because I use the cheaper ATA at home and SATA in my servers. Guess I will be able to upgrade my servers (that only have rackmount space for two drives each) to 1TB per server now. Yippie! Before my supplier only offered up to 400GB SATA hdd's. Kick ass. I'll use it all too.
*shrugs* Does it matter? If people aren't using the product who is going to care if it is discontinued. Lame idea for a story.
Now, a story on why the products failed might be interesting. A real study in how programmers select tools and what kind of tools they really want. That'd be worthy of discussion.
Since they employ major Firefox developers that makes more sense to me. I can see no reason to buy Opera other than to merge it's development team into the FF development team and to have more of a portable device codebase.
It's easy in that there is nothing working to stop you from changing it. It's fairly simple to download a program that lets you do it without working through some complex hacking process, looking on websites in languages you don't speak, etc. Ignorance doesn't make something hard to do in the same way having to fight your way through a complex undocumented system is hard.
But changing the MAC address is easy. With what M$ is trying to shove down consumers throats your entire PC will be under the ever watchful eye of Big Bill. Supposedly impossible to bypass for the average joe and a full watch dog from hardware to software to media to network - in theory at least. Probably the last step needed to completely drive me away from Microsoft products but meanwhile the average non-geek will either not know or just bend over and take it.
I know I sure as hell will not enable this in my OS or browser. If that means not using certain programs, media, or websites then I just won't use them or more likely that I'll spoof false data to them.
It's easy enough to get a small monitor. :)
Websites need to be able to hint at what fonts to use - and they can't really. This alone causes a great lot of text to be rendered, incorrectly, as images or Flash. This takes away the user's option to render this text in their choice of fonts. Support for downloadable fonts is the only way to improve on the situation. All that is really needed on top of the existing option of using a font tag and CSS is a meta tag to hint at where the browser can download the font if the computer doesn't already have it. The font can be cached temporarily and available, while cached, to any page with it's URL - just like any other web object. Pretty simple.
At Walmart you can find some IM/email specific machines for about $50 but I think these $100 laptops blow them away since they offer nicer keyboards, screens, and real wireless instead of some weird proprietary scheme. Maybe your highschool or college student might need something more powerful but up through junior high these would be perfect. It'd be pretty good for my parents too. They don't use their computer for much more than email and web and they always have spyware and viruses.
My laptop only gets about an hour but it's even less than that if you use the wifi. Pitiful. You have to lug around the power cord for it. I even had to get a car adapter so for the few minutes I use it in the car it won't go dead.
To bad it isn't kinetic like those flashlights you shake. Whenever you get peeved and shake the computer it'd recharge.
The problem is that there has been little innovation in laptops in the past decade. ;)
Like - why does dropping a few drops of water in the keyboard still DESTROY your laptop? We let them sell this crap to us? Keyboard and mousing should be sealed off from the rest of the laptop and easily replaced. I'm waiting for them to figure out that they can make dockable keyboard and mouse that can be used normally while docked or can easily be popped loose to sit on your lap (or desk, or whatever) while you work.
And why can my laptop be used to fry an egg? There is no way you could sit with it on your lap for very long and if you could you couldn't really see the screen comfortably. Of course, to run Windows, I guess they can't cut back on the hardware specs to much. Linux runs just fine on my old 233Mhz laptop with 128MB of RAM but I hate to think how slow XP would be on that. Vista sounds even worse. Transparency and other useless visual stuff so we'll be lucky if we don't need a water cooled GPU in our laptops.
Why? We have $100 PDAs and phones that have built-in web browsers and are more powerful than the computers a lot of us were using just a few years ago. Also without the markup of going through usual channels to buy parts a hdd, lcd, etc can be bought much cheaper. I think that's why they're trying to sell these in lots of a million or more units because it lets them buy the parts much cheaper. You're $1500 Toughbook is great but it's seen a lot of markup before reaching the consumer.
These would be good little machines for running web-based apps especially. If it can run Firefox it can do everything most people will need. Most people already use web-based mail. Web-based IM, word processing, etc are going to be becoming popular soon I think. Making this machine good for the majority that aren't power users or gamers or at least aren't when mobile.
I'm especially interested in the 2.0 version they mention that they want to use an electronic ink display. Being able to read the screen in direct sunlight and with that extremely low energy use would be fantastic.
They're stupid because they never have a real PC's power and have a lot of downsides. They really need to create two lines of laptops.. ultra lights for casual use and power machines (with upgradable graphics, ram, etc) for users that need the power. I don't like being stuck somewhere in the middle where I have to lug a big heavy block that still can't quite do what I want. It'd be awesome if you could easily upgrade the graphics processor of your laptop. Of course with mini-itx (and nano-itx?) machines your PC is almost as small as your laptop a lot of the time but is still expandable. Slap a battery on there and you have a powerful, if slightly bulky, portable machine.
I was actually thinking of trying Nokia's little palm computer that runs Linux. I'll have to wait until I see one. I don't want to cramped of a keyboard or screen. The BlackBerry's seem a bit to small in those areas (last time I looked).
If they're as good as they sound then I'd buy one. I think laptops today are rather stupid. To slow to do anything demanding power and yet hot, noisy, and power hungry. I'd rather have something light, quiet, with a long battery life that does the basics I need - web, email, im, ssh, light word processing, and light image manipulation. I'll be surprised if the $100 laptop can't handle those and more.
I do that a lot. I don't follow pop culture so I usually don't know what the new songs are so that now and then when I hear one I like I'll have no idea how to buy it. Looking up the lyrics I remember is one such method.
I think Google should be making this easier. If they can scan and make books searchable I'd think they could do lyrics too. If they could do this with images it'd rock. For example, I like the painting in the resturant in the movie Spanglish and it seems familiar to me but I can't place who painted it so I can't order a copy of it. I could describe it well enough that an art student could probably tell me what it is. I want THAT from my search engine. Anyone here know the painting I'm talking about?
Becoming an authority in the subject is really the best method for gaining high placement. It's not that hard to get a #1 spot but you have to put some time and money into decent SEO and lots of content creation and community building. Create some solid content, drop the word in the right places that it's there, and set up the needed functionality to encourage users of that content to help build content themselves even if it's only in the form of discussion attached to each article you publish. Maybe sponsor a couple of related websites in exchange for a link back to your site. A good thing about SEO is that an 80x30 image or even a text link is fine for driving traffic to you. No need for full-page ads.