Congrats on using GPG, PGP or some other protocol that secures your message. To secure your credentials and messages from people sharing a starbucks wifi connection, try POP3, IMAP and SMTP over SSL. It solves a different problem, and has no effect on the readability of your messages at the other end. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer
Yes, yes, MacBook Pro is a clumsy name, but get used to it. The iBook occupies an important position for Apple, and something has to fill it. That the new Intel laptop is the MacBook Pro implies that there will soon be a MacBook that is not pro.
Nice. Flame war. I'm staying out of it, except to say that you can skip the registration by downloading the disc images Microsoft provides, rather than using the standard install tool, which requires an internet connection to download the components. You also get to keep the tools should Microsoft pull the online portion of the install files at a future date.
Re:Buy Here, Pay Here places suck.
on
High-Tech RepoMan
·
· Score: 1
Yeah. I hate it when I find something interesting at one of these lots. The biggest problem I find is that the value of the vehicle is ±10% of the downpayment. I'll drive by, see a truck for $2499. When I pull in, I find a $2200 truck and the word "down" in tiny print below the price.
A laptop running either RealBasic, O'Basic or Visual Basic, hooked to a large TV. One person on the laptop, but the whole team working on the idea. Notebook and markers, laser pointer, pizza, and (if your team is disciplined enough) beer. The UI builds itself.
Oh, God, not you too! You started off sounding so bright. Over and over and over again, it must be explained that what's easy to use depends on what you were used to before. Explain to me what's so intuitive about "Control-V" to mean "copy the text I just highlighted and cut here" in a Windows environment, and I'll explain why the commands in vi and Emacs make sense. vi is a tool for programmers. Non-programmers have kwrite. vi can do thousands of things. YOU try binding every one of those thousands of things to a key sequence, and make sure *every* *function* is bound to an intuitive keystroke. At some point, you have to decide between "print" or "paste" for the P key. Which function gets the C key, "copy" or "cut"? Only people who've never sweated out a key-binding chart complain about key-bindings.
You're half right. Designing user interfaces is hard. It's easy to make a bad web interface, command-line interface, text based interface, and don't even get me started on voice-based interfaces. At this point, "fixing" (if you can call it that) vi is the same as breaking vi. My point was really that trivial tasks should be trivial for the end user, and vi isn't trivial for the first time user in the way the MS-DOS EDIT command is. I agree the x=cut v=paste c=copy isn't obvious, and I see your point. I get crossed up trying to use paste on the palm (shortcut-p) because I'm used to the desktop operating systems. Thing is, there's still a menu option. And the menus also show the shortcuts. The interface has layers.
Nerds don't have to lose in this. A good interface has layers. Well-organized menus allow users to find what they need, but advanced users can use shortcuts. Many people edit text just fine without knowing about the control modifiers (ctrl-bksp, ctrl-arrow, ctrl-del). Windows-key shortcuts are pretty cool. Linux has layers, but it needs the easiest. I don't know if we need to go as far as "hide extensions of known file types", but something is needed.
Welcome your users.
That *would* be nice, wouldn't it? A couple distros (Knoppix and ?) at least do a splash screen with links to info, with an option to turn it off. Sadly, some distro authors out there really don't care much, and it would be cumbersome to come up with a general-purpose one. But we should try something, here. We're standing by for you to head the sourceforge project!
That's a mighty good idea. Mighty good. I've thought about doing documentation and UI work. I'm going to look into what's involved, and of course, make sure I'm not re-inventing the wheel. How about releasing 411?
Linux could be easy. My mother, who had expressed pride in never having used a computer, recently discovered, quite by accident, just how much stuff was available on eBay. I had a surplus IBM 300GL sitting about, so I loaded it up with Mandriva 2005. There were the little problems: hiding toolbars accidently, moving the mouse while clicking (accidental drags), not recognizing interface modality. The vanilla hardware on the P3 based desktop installed easily for me, and after setting auto-login for her, setting up her email accounts and bookmarks, Gnome was easy for her. She found a few challenges, so I tried giving her a Macintosh. We went back to the Linux machine quickly.
That having been said, I've used linux before, I've used Windows. If you want to install something not included in the distro, you're in for some work. I tried installing FreeNX on Mandriva over a SSH terminal. I never did get it working. Apropos hadn't been set up by default, and install was failing on a file whose package I couldn't find.
So, here's what I want in Linux:
Be better than Windows. Where windows wants to tell you every five minutes that your wireless connection is down even though you're working on a wired connection and your laptop's wifi switch is off, be smarter. Tell the user once, if you must, then leave them alone.
Install all the docs by default. Never assume that your user doesn't need man pages.
Label each program with a name that describes what it does. Look at Windows accessories. Most of the program names are much less abstract. Backup, Address Book, Notepad, Command Prompt, Backup, Security Center, Disk Defragmenter, Disk Cleanup. So, what's easier, drakxconf or Control Panel? Let's also map some commands to likely alternatives. man is good, but what if help worked too? Maybe if help pointed to an overview of man, apropos, lynx and some docs?
Usabilty testing by non programmers. I like vi about as much as the average person. That is, not very. compared to the MS-DOS edit.exe, vi is pretty weak. Or rather, it's very strong, but it makes what should be a 100% intuitive task for anyone familiar with a computer into a series of random button-pushing and man-reading sessions.
Build a roadmap.So, this distro wants the config file here, and that distro wants it there. Super! Fine! But if you want to put this sort of thing all over, how about building a map? I'd love to be able to download a single installer, run it (in the gui!) let it figure out where everything is, what needs to be downloaded, what dependencies need satisfying. Fix it all, and exit. I hate installing software that didn't come with the distro currently. Windows does this well, Mac does this well, why is this so hard for Linux?
Welcome your users. Sure, you may never click through the overly-animated Welcome to Windows intro. Some people will. Just a quick tour of the nifty little features of your OS, some quick pointers to the help, the configuration, the browser, the email, and most people will be fine. Add a world-class tutorial. Back in the days of the classic Mac OS, there were tutorials that included clicking, double clicking, dragging, hovering, typing, text entry fields, dialog boxes (modal and non-modal) menus, powering off. The basics that most of us nerds don't remember learning have to be taught to some people! Linux should teach them, by default.
That's the thing. IBM tried to force the market to Microchannel, and instead of the x86 world following, IBM found themselves on a incompatible, and largely unsupported fork. Microsoft could find themselves in the same boat if they try steering Windows just to break the base.
In the hardware-side x86 world, at least for the last fifteen years or so, you could buy a complete system, and no single company could be guaranteed a cut. AMD might get money, Intel might get money, but nobody had it locked down. Over time, the x86 has become something of a standard hardware platform. With WINE, I'd love to see a Windows Standard Base created. A single software environment that would be very commonplace, widely supported, shipped on almost all hardware, but not tied to a single company. In a sense, push Microsoft in software where IBM went with hardware. Eventually, you'll see vendors start creating secure versions, embedded versions, silly hacks to the PSP, and the money could go anywhere. Microsoft's Windows division could use some more direct competition.
There are two pine trees on my house. From the storm, troll.
Most of the people from the affected area have lots of time. They evacuated. That's right, the majority evacuated. They don't have jobs to go back to. They don't have money to make a vacation of it. Even if they did, the wiser are saving their money in fear that their evacuation will become permanent. They're sitting in their hotel rooms watching CNN and speed dialing FEMA and their insurance company.
FEMA doesn't have the people to handle the call volume. The phone system is broken here, and most calls don't go through. Many of the calls that reach FEMA are disconnected. FEMA requires IE6. IE6 requires a fairly recent version of windows. That requires a somewhat late model x86-ish PC.
No Mac, no *nix.
Now, I evacuated to the home of a family member. She owns a nice little iMac. Pleasant machine. Well kept. OS X 10.2. There is no IE 6 for this.
When I finally got a friend to set up their XP machine for a VNC session, I found that the web forms were painfully simple. They set things up so that tabbing wasn't required for forms with a known length, f-key navigation selects page elements, caps are forced and a disabled text box shows context help for the active form element.
Slick, but not really needed. Most people on the internet know how to use a form.
I used the about:config route in Firefox, pasting in a user-agent string from IE6 on XP.
Once in, I found that the context sensitive help didn't work, and the form field labels were written with the assumption that the context help would be displayed.
Most of the population evacuated. FEMA claim forms are very important to people who left, are safe, but are running out of hotel money, spending money, gas money. So, you're in a strange city, and your Dell Celeron box is sitting under a foot of mud. Doesn't really matter, as it's two hundred miles away, behind police roadblocks and without power, phone or broadband. You can't reach FEMA on the phone - they keep hanging up on you because they're swamped. You're looking for a computer with an internet connection. Not just any computer. No macs, no 'NIX, no webtv, no cellphone browsers, no older PCs. Windows XP doesn't even assure you success. It has to have IE 6, which was a large download and was unavailable at the launch time of any Windows desktop operating system.
You're looking for a computer that has either been updated, or is fairly new and runs windows. Heck, I've never seen IE 6 in a library! Around here, they run IE 5 or Navigator!
I've got three boxes, but I don't have a windows license for them - they're running Mandrake.
Actually, I was thinking - what would be involved in putting IE on some sort of server and using a Java-based VNC or RDC client in a web page to serve the content to disenfranchised web users?
I'm in this boat. Heck I submitted a version of this story. I'm just happy to see that they posted some version. of it on slashdot.
Please realize that there are 1.3 million people in The Greater New Orleans area. In New Orleans proper, officials have estimated that roughly 80% of residents evacuated. In my home town of Slidell, it's estimated that 50% of our residents evacuated.
It's safe to say that for every one person that is stuck in a shelter, there are two or three people that got out and are tapping their own resources to stay out of shelters. These range from hard working folks to our very prolific "Cajun Spam Gang." All these people need help too. Even Ronnie and Flo. Most evacuated with an eye to returning in two days.
Can't they use the bloody phone? Sadly, the answer is probably no. The phone system here, and for a few hundred miles around here is fairly borked. I have to try my calls five and six times to get through. Some numbers work better from the cell, some from the landline. Many lines are down, and the remaining lines are at capacity. FEMA isn't staffed for the size of this disaster anyhow. After two dozen attempts yesterday, I got through twice, and each of those times, I was read a few privacy notices, informed that they were too busy, and then disconnected.
FEMA needs the internet right now.
But, here I am, at my sister's house, trying to register using her iMac. I've changed the user-agent in Firefox, which lets me in, but much of the help system doesn't work, and the form isn't written to work without the help. Some form fields are labelled with things like "PRIMARY?" because it's supposed to lean on context-sensitive help. I went to the local library, but this St. Mary Parish branch runs IE 5 on Windows.
I finally registered by calling a friend who still has an internet connection and an up-to-date XP box, and having him set up a VNC connection for me.
If they required a plug-in, or supported 5.x browsers, things wouldn't be so bad. Right now, they're saying that you need Windows ME, XP, 2000, and that's it.
If they needed to do something so advanced that they had to restrict browsers, things wouldn't be so bad. The site presents the user with a page full of forms with a next and previous button at the bottom. It's a simple "wizard" style interface, and could be designed sothat it could work in nearly any web browser, including html and wap phone browsers and lynx.
Visit a neighbor with a Windows machine... tsk tsk. That works, if you assume that you and your neighbor both evacuated to the same place, and your neighbor brought their moderately late-model laptop with them. Most people who left are in strange surroundings and don't know anyone in their town.
I second this. My M100 has a ton of information in it, a game or two, and Eudora. There's still lots of space left. I used to use the IR to check email through my old Nokia phone. I just synced it for the first time in a couple months. If you simply want to keep track of task and appointment data, what more could you want?
Of course, if the orignal poster just wants a geek solution, Tigerdirect.com has the Fossil PDA watch in stock if you want more geek. It's $80.
GPS won't work in most offices. I mean, if your offices are a tent city, sure, but otherwise, the roof will likely kill the signal enough that the accuracy will be useless, assuming you can get a signal at all.
GPS is good for figuring out where an access point is, but only on a building level, (is the AP in this building or that one?) not on a desk/office/cubicle level.
Also, see other posts for good points regarding the issue of indoor reflections of signal.
While I don't think MSIE is inherently evil, I think I could argue that a browser that allows web pages (a resource that should not be trusted) to cause memory leaks is itself flawed. Part of the browser's job is to not expose the user to risk or instability while interpreting documents of unknown maliciousness and quality.
The problem with this is that the students that are already struggling with a topic will find themselves singled out for homework beyond that of their classmates as "punishment."
However, if you can do this without that problem, you'll have the best possible solution.
Slashdot Mirror
And I've used my iBook and Firefox with Truckstop.net.
Congrats on using GPG, PGP or some other protocol that secures your message. To secure your credentials and messages from people sharing a starbucks wifi connection, try POP3, IMAP and SMTP over SSL. It solves a different problem, and has no effect on the readability of your messages at the other end.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer
Okay. I'll put it on a tor hidden server.
Yes.
Yes. Use encryption. Encryption in your email client, encryption in your browser. Tor does this, but so does https and ssl.
Yes, yes, MacBook Pro is a clumsy name, but get used to it. The iBook occupies an important position for Apple, and something has to fill it. That the new Intel laptop is the MacBook Pro implies that there will soon be a MacBook that is not pro.
Nice. Flame war. I'm staying out of it, except to say that you can skip the registration by downloading the disc images Microsoft provides, rather than using the standard install tool, which requires an internet connection to download the components. You also get to keep the tools should Microsoft pull the online portion of the install files at a future date.
/ install/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support
Yeah. I hate it when I find something interesting at one of these lots. The biggest problem I find is that the value of the vehicle is ±10% of the downpayment. I'll drive by, see a truck for $2499. When I pull in, I find a $2200 truck and the word "down" in tiny print below the price.
A laptop running either RealBasic, O'Basic or Visual Basic, hooked to a large TV. One person on the laptop, but the whole team working on the idea. Notebook and markers, laser pointer, pizza, and (if your team is disciplined enough) beer. The UI builds itself.
Usabilty testing by non programmers.
Oh, God, not you too! You started off sounding so bright. Over and over and over again, it must be explained that what's easy to use depends on what you were used to before. Explain to me what's so intuitive about "Control-V" to mean "copy the text I just highlighted and cut here" in a Windows environment, and I'll explain why the commands in vi and Emacs make sense. vi is a tool for programmers. Non-programmers have kwrite. vi can do thousands of things. YOU try binding every one of those thousands of things to a key sequence, and make sure *every* *function* is bound to an intuitive keystroke. At some point, you have to decide between "print" or "paste" for the P key. Which function gets the C key, "copy" or "cut"? Only people who've never sweated out a key-binding chart complain about key-bindings.
You're half right. Designing user interfaces is hard. It's easy to make a bad web interface, command-line interface, text based interface, and don't even get me started on voice-based interfaces. At this point, "fixing" (if you can call it that) vi is the same as breaking vi. My point was really that trivial tasks should be trivial for the end user, and vi isn't trivial for the first time user in the way the MS-DOS EDIT command is. I agree the x=cut v=paste c=copy isn't obvious, and I see your point. I get crossed up trying to use paste on the palm (shortcut-p) because I'm used to the desktop operating systems. Thing is, there's still a menu option. And the menus also show the shortcuts. The interface has layers.
Nerds don't have to lose in this. A good interface has layers. Well-organized menus allow users to find what they need, but advanced users can use shortcuts. Many people edit text just fine without knowing about the control modifiers (ctrl-bksp, ctrl-arrow, ctrl-del). Windows-key shortcuts are pretty cool. Linux has layers, but it needs the easiest. I don't know if we need to go as far as "hide extensions of known file types", but something is needed.
Welcome your users.
That *would* be nice, wouldn't it? A couple distros (Knoppix and ?) at least do a splash screen with links to info, with an option to turn it off. Sadly, some distro authors out there really don't care much, and it would be cumbersome to come up with a general-purpose one. But we should try something, here. We're standing by for you to head the sourceforge project!
That's a mighty good idea. Mighty good. I've thought about doing documentation and UI work. I'm going to look into what's involved, and of course, make sure I'm not re-inventing the wheel. How about releasing 411?
urpmi?
No, I've never heard of urpmi.
Needs a better name. Seems you'd have to know the name to find it, but it sounds very good.
Linux could be easy. My mother, who had expressed pride in never having used a computer, recently discovered, quite by accident, just how much stuff was available on eBay. I had a surplus IBM 300GL sitting about, so I loaded it up with Mandriva 2005. There were the little problems: hiding toolbars accidently, moving the mouse while clicking (accidental drags), not recognizing interface modality. The vanilla hardware on the P3 based desktop installed easily for me, and after setting auto-login for her, setting up her email accounts and bookmarks, Gnome was easy for her. She found a few challenges, so I tried giving her a Macintosh. We went back to the Linux machine quickly.
That having been said, I've used linux before, I've used Windows. If you want to install something not included in the distro, you're in for some work. I tried installing FreeNX on Mandriva over a SSH terminal. I never did get it working. Apropos hadn't been set up by default, and install was failing on a file whose package I couldn't find.
So, here's what I want in Linux:
Be better than Windows. Where windows wants to tell you every five minutes that your wireless connection is down even though you're working on a wired connection and your laptop's wifi switch is off, be smarter. Tell the user once, if you must, then leave them alone.
Install all the docs by default. Never assume that your user doesn't need man pages.
Label each program with a name that describes what it does. Look at Windows accessories. Most of the program names are much less abstract. Backup, Address Book, Notepad, Command Prompt, Backup, Security Center, Disk Defragmenter, Disk Cleanup. So, what's easier, drakxconf or Control Panel? Let's also map some commands to likely alternatives. man is good, but what if help worked too? Maybe if help pointed to an overview of man, apropos, lynx and some docs?
Usabilty testing by non programmers. I like vi about as much as the average person. That is, not very. compared to the MS-DOS edit.exe, vi is pretty weak. Or rather, it's very strong, but it makes what should be a 100% intuitive task for anyone familiar with a computer into a series of random button-pushing and man-reading sessions.
Build a roadmap.So, this distro wants the config file here, and that distro wants it there. Super! Fine! But if you want to put this sort of thing all over, how about building a map? I'd love to be able to download a single installer, run it (in the gui!) let it figure out where everything is, what needs to be downloaded, what dependencies need satisfying. Fix it all, and exit. I hate installing software that didn't come with the distro currently. Windows does this well, Mac does this well, why is this so hard for Linux?
Welcome your users. Sure, you may never click through the overly-animated Welcome to Windows intro. Some people will. Just a quick tour of the nifty little features of your OS, some quick pointers to the help, the configuration, the browser, the email, and most people will be fine. Add a world-class tutorial. Back in the days of the classic Mac OS, there were tutorials that included clicking, double clicking, dragging, hovering, typing, text entry fields, dialog boxes (modal and non-modal) menus, powering off. The basics that most of us nerds don't remember learning have to be taught to some people! Linux should teach them, by default.
That's the thing. IBM tried to force the market to Microchannel, and instead of the x86 world following, IBM found themselves on a incompatible, and largely unsupported fork. Microsoft could find themselves in the same boat if they try steering Windows just to break the base.
In the hardware-side x86 world, at least for the last fifteen years or so, you could buy a complete system, and no single company could be guaranteed a cut. AMD might get money, Intel might get money, but nobody had it locked down. Over time, the x86 has become something of a standard hardware platform. With WINE, I'd love to see a Windows Standard Base created. A single software environment that would be very commonplace, widely supported, shipped on almost all hardware, but not tied to a single company. In a sense, push Microsoft in software where IBM went with hardware. Eventually, you'll see vendors start creating secure versions, embedded versions, silly hacks to the PSP, and the money could go anywhere. Microsoft's Windows division could use some more direct competition.
Wouldn't that be great, or am I wrong?
There are two pine trees on my house. From the storm, troll.
Most of the people from the affected area have lots of time. They evacuated. That's right, the majority evacuated. They don't have jobs to go back to. They don't have money to make a vacation of it. Even if they did, the wiser are saving their money in fear that their evacuation will become permanent. They're sitting in their hotel rooms watching CNN and speed dialing FEMA and their insurance company.
FEMA doesn't have the people to handle the call volume. The phone system is broken here, and most calls don't go through. Many of the calls that reach FEMA are disconnected. FEMA requires IE6. IE6 requires a fairly recent version of windows. That requires a somewhat late model x86-ish PC.
No Mac, no *nix.
Now, I evacuated to the home of a family member. She owns a nice little iMac. Pleasant machine. Well kept. OS X 10.2. There is no IE 6 for this.
When I finally got a friend to set up their XP machine for a VNC session, I found that the web forms were painfully simple. They set things up so that tabbing wasn't required for forms with a known length, f-key navigation selects page elements, caps are forced and a disabled text box shows context help for the active form element.
Slick, but not really needed. Most people on the internet know how to use a form.
I used the about:config route in Firefox, pasting in a user-agent string from IE6 on XP.
Once in, I found that the context sensitive help didn't work, and the form field labels were written with the assumption that the context help would be displayed.
Please, don't waste bandwidth from their site right now, unless you're filing a claim.
Most of the population evacuated. FEMA claim forms are very important to people who left, are safe, but are running out of hotel money, spending money, gas money.
So, you're in a strange city, and your Dell Celeron box is sitting under a foot of mud. Doesn't really matter, as it's two hundred miles away, behind police roadblocks and without power, phone or broadband.
You can't reach FEMA on the phone - they keep hanging up on you because they're swamped.
You're looking for a computer with an internet connection. Not just any computer. No macs, no 'NIX, no webtv, no cellphone browsers, no older PCs. Windows XP doesn't even assure you success. It has to have IE 6, which was a large download and was unavailable at the launch time of any Windows desktop operating system.
You're looking for a computer that has either been updated, or is fairly new and runs windows. Heck, I've never seen IE 6 in a library! Around here, they run IE 5 or Navigator!
Meh.
Emulate a PC on the Mac so you can submit a form to FEMA?
I can use a cheap emulator and buy a copy of Windows (Win XP Home $200) or I can buy Virtual PC with Windows installed for $249.
For one website. While I'm not working and trying to pay for a hotel room for the second week and can't find a branch of my bank in a strange city.
I've got three boxes, but I don't have a windows license for them - they're running Mandrake.
Actually, I was thinking - what would be involved in putting IE on some sort of server and using a Java-based VNC or RDC client in a web page to serve the content to disenfranchised web users?
Whoa there.
I'm in this boat. Heck I submitted a version of this story. I'm just happy to see that they posted some version. of it on slashdot.
Please realize that there are 1.3 million people in The Greater New Orleans area. In New Orleans proper, officials have estimated that roughly 80% of residents evacuated. In my home town of Slidell, it's estimated that 50% of our residents evacuated.
It's safe to say that for every one person that is stuck in a shelter, there are two or three people that got out and are tapping their own resources to stay out of shelters. These range from hard working folks to our very prolific "Cajun Spam Gang." All these people need help too. Even Ronnie and Flo. Most evacuated with an eye to returning in two days.
Can't they use the bloody phone? Sadly, the answer is probably no. The phone system here, and for a few hundred miles around here is fairly borked. I have to try my calls five and six times to get through. Some numbers work better from the cell, some from the landline. Many lines are down, and the remaining lines are at capacity. FEMA isn't staffed for the size of this disaster anyhow. After two dozen attempts yesterday, I got through twice, and each of those times, I was read a few privacy notices, informed that they were too busy, and then disconnected.
FEMA needs the internet right now.
But, here I am, at my sister's house, trying to register using her iMac. I've changed the user-agent in Firefox, which lets me in, but much of the help system doesn't work, and the form isn't written to work without the help. Some form fields are labelled with things like "PRIMARY?" because it's supposed to lean on context-sensitive help. I went to the local library, but this St. Mary Parish branch runs IE 5 on Windows.
I finally registered by calling a friend who still has an internet connection and an up-to-date XP box, and having him set up a VNC connection for me.
If they required a plug-in, or supported 5.x browsers, things wouldn't be so bad. Right now, they're saying that you need Windows ME, XP, 2000, and that's it.
If they needed to do something so advanced that they had to restrict browsers, things wouldn't be so bad. The site presents the user with a page full of forms with a next and previous button at the bottom. It's a simple "wizard" style interface, and could be designed sothat it could work in nearly any web browser, including html and wap phone browsers and lynx.
Visit a neighbor with a Windows machine... tsk tsk. That works, if you assume that you and your neighbor both evacuated to the same place, and your neighbor brought their moderately late-model laptop with them. Most people who left are in strange surroundings and don't know anyone in their town.
I second this. My M100 has a ton of information in it, a game or two, and Eudora. There's still lots of space left. I used to use the IR to check email through my old Nokia phone. I just synced it for the first time in a couple months. If you simply want to keep track of task and appointment data, what more could you want?
Of course, if the orignal poster just wants a geek solution, Tigerdirect.com has the Fossil PDA watch in stock if you want more geek. It's $80.
GPS won't work in most offices. I mean, if your offices are a tent city, sure, but otherwise, the roof will likely kill the signal enough that the accuracy will be useless, assuming you can get a signal at all.
GPS is good for figuring out where an access point is, but only on a building level, (is the AP in this building or that one?) not on a desk/office/cubicle level.
Also, see other posts for good points regarding the issue of indoor reflections of signal.
While I don't think MSIE is inherently evil, I think I could argue that a browser that allows web pages (a resource that should not be trusted) to cause memory leaks is itself flawed. Part of the browser's job is to not expose the user to risk or instability while interpreting documents of unknown maliciousness and quality.
The problem with this is that the students that are already struggling with a topic will find themselves singled out for homework beyond that of their classmates as "punishment."
However, if you can do this without that problem, you'll have the best possible solution.