Sure. There's no reason in the world Grandma couldn't use Mozilla on Linux for e-mail and web surfing. And that hardware would suit her very well.
And yes for Linux hobbyists too. And for families that want another computer for their kids.
Does anyone have any anecdotal evidence on the reliability of Microtel stuff? Hard drives are getting pretty good these days, so I wouldn't expect too much trouble.
I'd recommend that they go with a major namebrand, pay a couple hundred more, and get bundled technical support.
Keep in mind that "a couple hundred more" doubles the price of it! If your $200 Microtel box breaks, you can buy another one and still come out even!
The phone is a Nokia 8250. When I bought the first one, it was $200 minus a $40 mail in rebate for the phone and another $40 rebate for the calling plan.
When I ordered the new one, I paid $180 + S&H, no rebates. I mean, I can see either 1) paying full price for the phone and not affecting my contract, or 2) getting a steep discount on the phone and restarting my contract. But they forced me to buy a new phone at full price, restarting my contract. That seems very much unfair to me.
And no, I have never once called them to ask for a credit. Do you think I could still get one if I asked nicely? Would it be best to e-mail from their website or call 611?
August 2001: Signed a year contract, got a new phone, got some rebates, got lots of minutes
February 2002: Lost my phone in Ecuador (yeah, probably shouldn't have taken it... I had service, which surprised me, but didn't try it out before I lost it). Had my parents call AT&T to tell them it was missing and suspend my account.
March 2002: Got back from Ecuador, ordered a new phone from AT&T. And to get this new phone, they made me restart my year contract. And they didn't give me one freeking cent discount on the phone!
August 2002: Find out that when they restarted my contract, they didn't bother to extend the time for my promotions to next March. So my promotions are about to end, and since this is my only phone, it's a horrible deal without the free LD and boatloads of minutes. So I have to start my year contract yet again to keep getting the perks!
Now, I probably would have renewed anyway, but I was being tempted by VoiceStream's nationwide no-roaming, and I wanted to have the option to switch.
But how in tarnation can they justify reseting the contract like that to just replace a miserable lost phone???? Corporate greed I guess.
I've wanted to write and complain to AT&T but haven't gotten around to it yet. I probably will NOT renew my AT&T contract next August, unless they do something to make this up to me. That's just inexcusible, in my book.
A 15 year old fat-kid hiding away in his closet plinking out a Linux based Excel clone doesn't count as the "Linux equivalent of Excel".
No, but OpenOffice.org Calc does.
I still laugh my ass off when someone loads the Gnome games and uses them as an example of how Linux has come a long way with its games.
If you're comparing the games bundled with Windows to the ones bundled with GNOME, then GNOME kicks Windows' arse! Whatever the OS, you have to install additional games. Plenty of decent games are working on Linux now.
I would love to see Linux come into its own..but it's going to happen when truely professional software companies jump on the bandwagon
That WILL happen... when enough people decide to use Linux! Yeah it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but you CAN help move it along by using Linux where you can, today. When more people do that, the companies will know there is a market for it.
In reality, I have plenty of stuff working under Red Hat 8 -- HP 5200C USB scanner, SanDisc SDDR 31 USB CompactFlash reader, HP 8200something CDR... and I had to do very little tweaking, certainly no searching for drivers or reinstalling.
The key is to buy hardware that Linux supports. You'll need to buy a new PC someday, so keep that in mind when you do. Once you do that, you should have few problems.
Not Open Source, but there's always Borland Kylix, which now supports C++. Its debugger has all of the features you'd expect.
For Open Source, there's Data Display Debugger (DDD), though it hasn't been updated in a while and it's a front end to gdb. I don't know why you say gdb doesn't work, but admittedly it's cryptic without GUI front ends.
GAAAAA that sure came out wrong! Slashdot apparently dropped my inclusion of the HTML [table] tag in the text and subject. That's what I meant, NOT all HTML e-mail!
The big problem with this is spam still gets to the server.:(
Just thought of this now... but it seems like almost all spam these days contains a whole bunch of HTML tags. Maybe someone should write a server plugin to instantly reject all mail containing , instantly adding the sending IP to a iptables DROP rule.
There's little legitimate e-mail with tables, unless you count paypal, datek, and travelocity news and that kind of crap. But we could always add a list of "good" IPs.
I know there are server solutions, but all make me a bit queasy. I just want something that will detect funky activity on the fly and instantly deny all access to that IP.
Actually I think there's a reasonably possibility that Windows will eventually be open sourced, but ONLY IF it becomes apparent that Linux has a serious chance of taking over the desktop market (and I am personally 100% convinced that will happen; it's just a matter of how long it will take).
Once that happens, Microsoft will pretty much HAVE to Open Source Windows to have a chance. Everyone will realize the benefits of OSS and they won't want to lock themselves into a proprietary platform.
If/when Windows becomes OSS, I may or may not endorse using it. At that point I'll judge it vs. Linux technically.
I used their sas.r1 server, setting that as my proxy. After putting in my acc#, it always came back saying "the registration server is temporarily busy. Please try again later." I finally had to bring out my dad's Win95 laptop to get it registered. Simply ridiculous!
Crap, if there was another option besides sas, I wish my techies knew about it. I talked to plenty of them on the phone.
I also got a DHCP, but it didn't do me any good because it was restricted to talking only to the sas server.
I also have ATTBI. It was a pain in the arse to get set up with Linux, because its $#@%$#@ registration system assumes you use Internet Explorer. After the cable modem is registered, though, it works flawlessly.
I did pretty much exactly that on Mt. Cotopaxi in Ecuador, also very close to the equator, also about 16,000 feet. I guess it wasn't THAT cold though... probably in the 20s F, but it was windy as heck.
Yikes, that must be scary! I know that kind of thing happens occasionally, I've heard several other reports of things like that on the Lonely Planet boards and rec.travel.latin-america. However, 95%+ of people who visit the region never experience violent crime.
I have personally traveled in Guatemala quite a bit, and know many others who have. The worst that's happened to anyone I know is a bag snatched from a bus overhead rack when they weren't paying attention, and attempts at retreiving contents of backpacks by slitting them.
Scariest thing that's happened to ME was watching a restaurant employee beat the crap out of someone with (I think) a peice of wood (Restaurante El Zocalo in Monterrico).
Right. Latin America truly rocks. Great people, great sights, good food, inexpensive. And it's reasonably safe if you don't do anything stupid. Not to mention the fact that you just need to know Spanish to get around most of it.
I recommend Guatemala or Ecuador to start. They're really easy to travel in and have much to recommend them.
Unless you're lucky enough to have Red Hat or Mandrake or someone fund your travel to expos, or have an expo pay your way to come talk about the project. It happens.
Hey, I used WordStar right on through the mid-90s. It really was a great program.
I actually wish there were a WordStar for Linux/UNIX using curses. Yeah I'm familiar with joe/jstar, but it's just a text editor. I mean a real word processor that used WS keystrokes.
yeah but most book reviews go through the chapters and tell us what they cover, mentioning the quality and quantity of examples, clarity of writing, etc. This "review" didn't go through the chapters at all. I mostly agree with the guy that this wasn't much of a review.
Also, does anyone here know anything about performance issues? Visual Basic nowadays is fairly reasonable for certain aspects of enterprise solutions, but if this is anything like Mozilla I'm not sure I could recommend it as being a good platform for applications.
Depends on what your "application" is. For applications that involve data entry, interaction with a server, some data manipulation, and some types of games, Mozilla will do just fine.
If you're implementing a ray tracer, a program to calculate a billion digits of Pi, or a 3D first person shooter, Mozilla should NOT be used.
But the vast majority of business applications fall in the first set, and Mozilla makes a great platform for that.
I've read several chapters of this book and I'm trying my hand at Mozilla app development. I'm mainly interested in it for "better" web applications. HTML was never designed for that kind of thing, and I'm frankly tired of it being used for such. Mozilla+XUL can make applications that load like web pages but whose interface is more like traditional desktop applications. Rock on!
I really DO believe that Mozilla has a bright future in this regard. It provides some great tools. I about wet myself when I discovered the Javascript Debugger! As the article says, it will provide a totally free/Free way to deploy custom applications.
It's also a potent tool against IE's monopoly. If there's one thing that can cause people to switch from IE to Mozilla, it's applications that only work in Mozilla! I used to support the "Best Viewed with Any Browser" campaign (which is still appropriate for pure information) but I have since realized that because Mozilla is Free, open, and cross-platform, there is no need for anything else! I now encourage people to develop web-based applications in XUL.
I do have a few small gripes with it. Textboxes don't wrap like they do with HTML's "wrap=soft" attribute. That's bad. I asked in a newsgroup and was told that this functionality would be in Mozilla 1.2.
Also I was hoping to embed an HTML editor in my application, so that people could post HTML in their comments and have a fancy editor for them. To my dismay, it appears like the HTML Composer can ONLY be embedded in local chrome:// apps, not in those served by HTTP. Anyone know a way around this?
Overall though, Mozilla kicks arse! I think it has a very bright future!
Sucky as it is, scaring up "testimonials" from people who are involved in a company seems pretty common.
I once wrote a fairly awesome tool for finding expired domains, for a company I once worked for. The company president sent off an e-mail telling all employees of the company to write up a testimonial about how great this new product was, and how it gave so much more useful results than the "e-crap.com" that other search engines suggested. He mentioned in the e-mail "even Micah, if he's willing" -- which I took to mean he thought I'd be above writing a fake testimonial (which is true, I WOULD have a problem doing that).
Funny thing is, I actually had a true testimonial. I used the thing to find some very good domains for a project I was working on. So the company put up a "testimonial" page with about 6 completely BS testimonials and my true one.:-)
Ironically, my tool has been taken down for some reason which I'm still not sure of (I think they were ticking off the WHOIS people), and now it has degraded to one that suggests things like "e-crap.com".
Slashdot Mirror
My bank and investment site work just fine on Mozilla in Linux.
And if her bank isn't supported, well, Grandma probably doesn't need or even WANT online banking.
And frankly, anyone who designs a website that only works in IE should be [insert the most cruel torture immaginable here].
To whom? Grandma?
Sure. There's no reason in the world Grandma couldn't use Mozilla on Linux for e-mail and web surfing. And that hardware would suit her very well.
And yes for Linux hobbyists too. And for families that want another computer for their kids.
Does anyone have any anecdotal evidence on the reliability of Microtel stuff? Hard drives are getting pretty good these days, so I wouldn't expect too much trouble.
I'd recommend that they go with a major namebrand, pay a couple hundred more, and get bundled technical support.
Keep in mind that "a couple hundred more" doubles the price of it! If your $200 Microtel box breaks, you can buy another one and still come out even!
The PR says it compares to an 800MHz Celeron. Whether it DOES or not, I dunno.
It's not a super-powerful computer, of course, but for $199, it's certainly not a rip-off. I'd have no trouble recommending that to some people.
Thanks for the reply.
The phone is a Nokia 8250. When I bought the first one, it was $200 minus a $40 mail in rebate for the phone and another $40 rebate for the calling plan.
When I ordered the new one, I paid $180 + S&H, no rebates. I mean, I can see either 1) paying full price for the phone and not affecting my contract, or 2) getting a steep discount on the phone and restarting my contract. But they forced me to buy a new phone at full price, restarting my contract. That seems very much unfair to me.
And no, I have never once called them to ask for a credit. Do you think I could still get one if I asked nicely? Would it be best to e-mail from their website or call 611?
Thanks!
August 2001: Signed a year contract, got a new phone, got some rebates, got lots of minutes
February 2002: Lost my phone in Ecuador (yeah, probably shouldn't have taken it... I had service, which surprised me, but didn't try it out before I lost it). Had my parents call AT&T to tell them it was missing and suspend my account.
March 2002: Got back from Ecuador, ordered a new phone from AT&T. And to get this new phone, they made me restart my year contract. And they didn't give me one freeking cent discount on the phone!
August 2002: Find out that when they restarted my contract, they didn't bother to extend the time for my promotions to next March. So my promotions are about to end, and since this is my only phone, it's a horrible deal without the free LD and boatloads of minutes. So I have to start my year contract yet again to keep getting the perks!
Now, I probably would have renewed anyway, but I was being tempted by VoiceStream's nationwide no-roaming, and I wanted to have the option to switch.
But how in tarnation can they justify reseting the contract like that to just replace a miserable lost phone???? Corporate greed I guess.
I've wanted to write and complain to AT&T but haven't gotten around to it yet. I probably will NOT renew my AT&T contract next August, unless they do something to make this up to me. That's just inexcusible, in my book.
A 15 year old fat-kid hiding away in his closet plinking out a Linux based Excel clone doesn't count as the "Linux equivalent of Excel".
No, but OpenOffice.org Calc does.
I still laugh my ass off when someone loads the Gnome games and uses them as an example of how Linux has come a long way with its games.
If you're comparing the games bundled with Windows to the ones bundled with GNOME, then GNOME kicks Windows' arse! Whatever the OS, you have to install additional games. Plenty of decent games are working on Linux now.
I would love to see Linux come into its own..but it's going to happen when truely professional software companies jump on the bandwagon
That WILL happen... when enough people decide to use Linux! Yeah it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but you CAN help move it along by using Linux where you can, today. When more people do that, the companies will know there is a market for it.
sheesh, sorry you had so many problems. :/
In reality, I have plenty of stuff working under Red Hat 8 -- HP 5200C USB scanner, SanDisc SDDR 31 USB CompactFlash reader, HP 8200something CDR... and I had to do very little tweaking, certainly no searching for drivers or reinstalling.
The key is to buy hardware that Linux supports. You'll need to buy a new PC someday, so keep that in mind when you do. Once you do that, you should have few problems.
Not Open Source, but there's always Borland Kylix, which now supports C++. Its debugger has all of the features you'd expect.
For Open Source, there's Data Display Debugger (DDD), though it hasn't been updated in a while and it's a front end to gdb. I don't know why you say gdb doesn't work, but admittedly it's cryptic without GUI front ends.
GAAAAA that sure came out wrong! Slashdot apparently dropped my inclusion of the HTML [table] tag in the text and subject. That's what I meant, NOT all HTML e-mail!
The big problem with this is spam still gets to the server. :(
Just thought of this now... but it seems like almost all spam these days contains a whole bunch of HTML tags. Maybe someone should write a server plugin to instantly reject all mail containing , instantly adding the sending IP to a iptables DROP rule.
There's little legitimate e-mail with tables, unless you count paypal, datek, and travelocity news and that kind of crap. But we could always add a list of "good" IPs.
I know there are server solutions, but all make me a bit queasy. I just want something that will detect funky activity on the fly and instantly deny all access to that IP.
Actually I think there's a reasonably possibility that Windows will eventually be open sourced, but ONLY IF it becomes apparent that Linux has a serious chance of taking over the desktop market (and I am personally 100% convinced that will happen; it's just a matter of how long it will take).
Once that happens, Microsoft will pretty much HAVE to Open Source Windows to have a chance. Everyone will realize the benefits of OSS and they won't want to lock themselves into a proprietary platform.
If/when Windows becomes OSS, I may or may not endorse using it. At that point I'll judge it vs. Linux technically.
I used their sas.r1 server, setting that as my proxy. After putting in my acc#, it always came back saying "the registration server is temporarily busy. Please try again later." I finally had to bring out my dad's Win95 laptop to get it registered. Simply ridiculous!
Crap, if there was another option besides sas, I wish my techies knew about it. I talked to plenty of them on the phone.
I also got a DHCP, but it didn't do me any good because it was restricted to talking only to the sas server.
I also have ATTBI. It was a pain in the arse to get set up with Linux, because its $#@%$#@ registration system assumes you use Internet Explorer. After the cable modem is registered, though, it works flawlessly.
I did pretty much exactly that on Mt. Cotopaxi in Ecuador, also very close to the equator, also about 16,000 feet. I guess it wasn't THAT cold though... probably in the 20s F, but it was windy as heck.
Yikes, that must be scary! I know that kind of thing happens occasionally, I've heard several other reports of things like that on the Lonely Planet boards and rec.travel.latin-america. However, 95%+ of people who visit the region never experience violent crime.
I have personally traveled in Guatemala quite a bit, and know many others who have. The worst that's happened to anyone I know is a bag snatched from a bus overhead rack when they weren't paying attention, and attempts at retreiving contents of backpacks by slitting them.
Scariest thing that's happened to ME was watching a restaurant employee beat the crap out of someone with (I think) a peice of wood (Restaurante El Zocalo in Monterrico).
If you want to find out just EXACTLY how dangerous the world is, pick up a copy of The World's Most Dangerous Places.
:-)
Or Read it online. I *LOVE* that book.
Right. Latin America truly rocks. Great people, great sights, good food, inexpensive. And it's reasonably safe if you don't do anything stupid. Not to mention the fact that you just need to know Spanish to get around most of it.
I recommend Guatemala or Ecuador to start. They're really easy to travel in and have much to recommend them.
Unless you're lucky enough to have Red Hat or Mandrake or someone fund your travel to expos, or have an expo pay your way to come talk about the project. It happens.
Hey, I used WordStar right on through the mid-90s. It really was a great program.
I actually wish there were a WordStar for Linux/UNIX using curses. Yeah I'm familiar with joe/jstar, but it's just a text editor. I mean a real word processor that used WS keystrokes.
Wow. I'm not 100% sure if it will be suitable for my app or not (looks a little overkill), but it's definitely impressive! Thanks for the tip.
yeah but most book reviews go through the chapters and tell us what they cover, mentioning the quality and quantity of examples, clarity of writing, etc. This "review" didn't go through the chapters at all. I mostly agree with the guy that this wasn't much of a review.
I myself am working on a Bible program that will run, locally, under Mozilla.
Rock on. I'd be interested in this. Does it have a website? Is it based on the SWORD project or something?
Also, does anyone here know anything about performance issues? Visual Basic nowadays is fairly reasonable for certain aspects of enterprise solutions, but if this is anything like Mozilla I'm not sure I could recommend it as being a good platform for applications.
Depends on what your "application" is. For applications that involve data entry, interaction with a server, some data manipulation, and some types of games, Mozilla will do just fine.
If you're implementing a ray tracer, a program to calculate a billion digits of Pi, or a 3D first person shooter, Mozilla should NOT be used.
But the vast majority of business applications fall in the first set, and Mozilla makes a great platform for that.
I've read several chapters of this book and I'm trying my hand at Mozilla app development. I'm mainly interested in it for "better" web applications. HTML was never designed for that kind of thing, and I'm frankly tired of it being used for such. Mozilla+XUL can make applications that load like web pages but whose interface is more like traditional desktop applications. Rock on!
I really DO believe that Mozilla has a bright future in this regard. It provides some great tools. I about wet myself when I discovered the Javascript Debugger! As the article says, it will provide a totally free/Free way to deploy custom applications.
It's also a potent tool against IE's monopoly. If there's one thing that can cause people to switch from IE to Mozilla, it's applications that only work in Mozilla! I used to support the "Best Viewed with Any Browser" campaign (which is still appropriate for pure information) but I have since realized that because Mozilla is Free, open, and cross-platform, there is no need for anything else! I now encourage people to develop web-based applications in XUL.
I do have a few small gripes with it. Textboxes don't wrap like they do with HTML's "wrap=soft" attribute. That's bad. I asked in a newsgroup and was told that this functionality would be in Mozilla 1.2.
Also I was hoping to embed an HTML editor in my application, so that people could post HTML in their comments and have a fancy editor for them. To my dismay, it appears like the HTML Composer can ONLY be embedded in local chrome:// apps, not in those served by HTTP. Anyone know a way around this?
Overall though, Mozilla kicks arse! I think it has a very bright future!
Sucky as it is, scaring up "testimonials" from people who are involved in a company seems pretty common.
:-)
I once wrote a fairly awesome tool for finding expired domains, for a company I once worked for. The company president sent off an e-mail telling all employees of the company to write up a testimonial about how great this new product was, and how it gave so much more useful results than the "e-crap.com" that other search engines suggested. He mentioned in the e-mail "even Micah, if he's willing" -- which I took to mean he thought I'd be above writing a fake testimonial (which is true, I WOULD have a problem doing that).
Funny thing is, I actually had a true testimonial. I used the thing to find some very good domains for a project I was working on. So the company put up a "testimonial" page with about 6 completely BS testimonials and my true one.
Ironically, my tool has been taken down for some reason which I'm still not sure of (I think they were ticking off the WHOIS people), and now it has degraded to one that suggests things like "e-crap.com".