I don't question that choice at all. Dlink makes good stuff and as long as you have a use for the speed then these products are a good choice for you. The point I had thought I had made clear in my first post is that many people are buying more than they need or will use, just because they think it's somehow going to make that 1.5Mbit DSL link faster. Rushing to a new non-standard technology from a company with a history of bad products and even worse customer support, and who abandons those customers when they change hardware designs, just doesn't make sense.
If Gigabit eithernet costs $30/card, I would find that a lot more than the current cost of 100Mbit cards (the last few I got were free after rebate, this week you can get 5 for $10 at CompUSA). If you're plugging into a 100Mbit device it makes sense to buy what you need. Likely by the time you really will upgrade you'll be upgrading to fiber or some other technology anyway, and a few $30 cards will have been a waste. Even if you do go to Gigabit in the future, it likely will cost less than the difference between a $30 NIC now and a $2 100 MBit NIC, so you might as well keep your options open without buyig into more than you use.
This certainly wouldn't be the case if a 100Mbit card were, say, $25 (and I remember when a 10 Mbit card was $200 and I was buying a couple of dozen at a time), but at current prices the premium for Gigabit ethernet in a PCI card is a factor. Beside, by the time you really are ready to use that Gigabyte card you might need it to be PCI Express rather than PCI (take it from someone with several old (and expensive) ISA NIC cards around). You just keep your options open by not buying more than you can use in the near future, and prices keep dropping so fast that by the time you do have a use for the faster technology you will be able to buy it and the total cost of it and the stuff you buy now will still be less than overbuying now.
The same holds true for 802.11b/802.11g/802.11?.
(and my post was really about something coming after g). If G were only a couple of dollars more than B your argument would hold. In truth it's many times more expensive than B (I just got another B PC card this week for $10 and recently got another B router for $10, you would be hard pressed to find either of these with G technology for less than 3 times the cost). At those cost differences, buy what you need. and, as I said, if you are not doing high speed local transfers and only using the wireless link for 1.5Mb or 3 Mb Internet access, then don't waste the money on a faster connection, and even if you think you have a faster connection the 54Mbit 802.11g is likely fast enough without buying into new technology.
One other put down that's worth mentioning is that this is from Belkin. I have a Belkin router that never worked right and is gathering dust. Sure, the firmware is flashable, but they never released a firmware upgrade; they changed the hardware and released a version 2 of the router. All of us with version 1 of the non-functional router are just screwed. Three guesses what I expect to happen to Belkin's new bleeding edge users as Belkin works out the bugs in their new technology.
Unfortunately, I know way too many people who paid a lot extra to get 802.11g than 802.11b - but only use it to surf the Internet. The truth is that even the 802.11b connection is faster than high speed brodband to the home, so there is no real gain in using 802.11g. I even saw (in a previous/. forum) someone who was plannig on opening a "Internet cafe" and was thinking he should go for 802.11g, not understanding that no user would exceed the 802.11b speed and not even realizing that the entire network would downgrade to 802.11b anyway if even one user was connected through 802.11b equipment.
Now, it seems, people are going to be rushing to these new "standards". Sure, if you're going to be transfering a lot of large files around your internal network, perhaps while you stream real time video to your "entertainment center", then you might justify the extra cost and being on the bleeding edge; but most users just think in terms of "I want the newer faster stuff" or simply "I want the good stuff" and they will end up paying a lot more now for the technology they never use than they would if they just waited until the standrds were worked out, the products came down in price, and the connection to the rest of the Internet caught up in speed to justify the choice.
It's even worse than what you say. Anyone who reports/forwards the spam they receive to another site would be stopped by this technique. So the first effect this would have would be to inflict a blow on those fighting spam.
# However, the Master is supposedly dead for certain, and I can't remember what became of The Rani... so we can't use them.
# Since The Doctor can time travel, and has a fascination with Earth, I recommend pitting him against....
So since the doctor can time travel and lame stories can be writen about the Doctor and Hitler, why in the world would you suggest that the Doctor can't fight the Master again, just because the Master is dead? All Time Lords don't have to travel in the same time stream, after all (even though for the most part the writers have kept things simple by having that happen, as well as the last forty years of Earth history too). But the Master before he reached his final regeneration could certainly have run into a "present day" Doctor during his own travels in time.
Great, now I get kicked of the mail server just for forwarding all of my spam to uce@ftc.gov. And to top it off, since my IsP started blocking port 25, I have to send this e-mail through their servers, rather than better run and more ineligent servers that I would use otherwise.
I learned ten years ago, when I was running a Netware shop, that to many people had Netware certification but no real clue when it came to real word issues not covered in their limited scope tests. I wouldn't actua;;y refuse to hire someone just because they had Netware certification, but I would much prefer someone with real experience.
On the other hand, MSCE certification was a good indicator for me. If someone had acutally paid to become a Microsoft puppet, and expected extra preks and pays and status for it, it was easy to decide that I would not hire them
his latest patent about a proximity card with incorporated PIN code protection was granted in June 2004
OK, RFID is an invention, I'll grant that. And I'll not get into the endless debate over the good and evil of it. But given the RFID is over 20 years old, what part of a proximity card with incorporated PIN code isn't so obvious and apparent to the average engineer that it should qualify for a patent? And isn't there plenty of prior art?
They got money from Sun/MS, yes. But that wasn't directly related to linux. I thought we were talking about SCOsource linux revenues.
It was directly related to Linux. Once again:
SCO collected $11,000 from this licensing program in the three months ended April 30, down from $8.3 million a year earlier. The program, which charges about $700 per Linux server, has collected $31,000 in the last six months.
Absolutely, Microsoft, long suspected to be the source of the Investement in SCO and finally confirmed that this was the case, did jump on the band wagon early and"license" supposed SCO IP. The amount of the payment was, as far as I know, never disclosed. This was pretty clearly another way for Microsoft to put cash into SCO's hands for their fight against Linux. But even though the motive is clear, it was part of the $8.3 they put on their books last year this quarter as income from claiming they owned Linux. And clearly there were others who paid up too, although hopefully few.
Your inability to search the news or look up the annual reports is not my problem. From a Dow Jones story on SCO today:
SCO collected $11,000 from this licensing program in the three months ended April 30, down from $8.3 million a year earlier. The program, which charges about $700 per Linux server, has collected $31,000 in the last six months.
"The highlights are that SCOX only collected $11k (yes, K) for that much-discussed license for EV1 and other Licensees. Cost of that $11k was well over $4M....."
Unfortunately, the truth is that they made only 11k this quarter from their Linux scam. However, they made $8.3 million this quarter last year from it, and a good bit more if you add up all of the quarters. So while the world is learning the truth about SCO, the SCO attack on Linux was profitable, and (more importantly) acomplished a lot of what the backers of the scam wanted to do.
Perhaps the point was that the "He" in question was not in the title, so what's your point? Rather, the "He" was in the apparent middle of a poorly constructed sentence. While there should have been a comma in front of it and it should not have been capatilized (unless there was a period before it and it was the start of a different sentence), the real problem is that this front page article talks about someone named Joy that many people have never heard of and makes no effort to say who in the world he is. Instead it only links to a registration required website. It was sloppy and lame in multiple ways.
Knoppix only has 4 terminals, so the key you would have had to use would have been alt-f5 Like I said, you can't count on the number of terminals being what you expect.
I did try alt-f5, and even ctrl-alt-f5, as well as every oter combination with a function key in it, but only your Alt-arrow key worked for me (Knoppix 3.4 5/17/2004 release). If you hadn't responded I still wouldn't know how to look at the start-up messages and then switch back. It just amazes me that such a basic function could be so cryptic or that so many slashdot readers could post suggestions that didn't help. And no one yet has been able to suggest where I should have been able to look to find out the answer to this simple question rather than asking slashdot and trying everything that everyone suggested. It does help explain why some people like me are still struggling with Linux even though we have over thirty years of industry experience and experience with many different operating systems.
Yes, but in all fairness, the x800 is substantially faster than the 9800
In all fairness, it's not, in may cases. It is (sometimes) if you're running 1600x1200 with AA turned way up, but at lower resolutions the difference isn't usually at all significant, the ATI 9800 and the NVidia can even beat it at 1200x1024 resolutions. The Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra even significantly beats the X800XT in some benchmarks and does it using 32 bit math while the X800XT is using only 24 bit math and older technology in other areas (Shader model 2 vs. Shader model 3, for example).
There's also the question of there being any real gain in having say 130 frams per second for a game as opposed to, say, 85 or 90. Particularly when you monitor isn't likely to be displaying those extra frames (or you eyes seeing them). It would seem to make a lot more sense to just compute and display to to 90 frames a second, and use any remaining CPU power to be sure other parts of the game are as responsive as posiable (and yes, the game does eat a lot of CPU to computer 130 frames a second, even though a lot of the graphics are done right on the video card).
But I'm not really wanting to argue the merits of one card against another, I was just pointing out how the gamers think nothing of dropping $500 here and another $500 in a couple of months when the next "hot" card is available. At this rate they almost certainly will have bought something at least as expensive to replace their new X800XT's before they even have Half Life 2 and Domm 3 in hand, and will be pitching those new cards when they need PCI Expresse video cards for the new motherboards that come out in the fall.
To me it would seem to not make a lot of sense to buy two or three different "high end" AGP cards this year when AGP is about to be replaced by PCI Express in the high end systems this year. But clearly the gamer community is still willing to shell out the cash for anything hot.
' How many people really spend $5,000 on a gaming machine? Mine cost less than $2,000, and I can play UT2k4 and others on it just fine."
I could see how it could happen. Just yesterday I saw on another forum a bunch of gamer geeks with more money than sense who wanted to rush to buy "on-sale"(but not even out yet) ATI X800XT Platimum Edition video cards for $450 to replace their $450 to $500 top end ATI 9800XT cards they bought a month or two ago! And with that mindset you just know that come September thay will have to have the next card that replaces their so-last-week X800XT. And they are buying these cards and saying they are buying them to play Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Buying and replacing high end video cards supposedly for games that might not even be out before the next wave of video cards comes out!
Just to follow-up for those who commented or others who later read this, here's the full story:
I'm using Knoppix. I had no idea which Linux would even matter. (Can you imagine the public outcry if old MS-DOS and PC-DOS and even DR-DOS used different keys for CRTL-ALT-DEL or had CTRL-ALT-DEL do different things?) Well, I retried all of the ALT-f7 and ALT-F-anything key combinations, relaesing and repressing the ALT and/or CTRL keys, all of the CTRL-ALT-key combinations, but nothing seemed to help until this post. Yes, ALT-RIGHT ARROW or ALT-LEFT ARROW work great, although the suggestion that I could use CRTL-ALT instead of ALT in the terminal screens was wrong, CTRL-ALT-Arrow does not work in the terminal screens (and, of course, ALT-Arrow doesn't work in the GUI).
It amazes me that something like this (and it's far from the only thing in Linux like this) could have been made so complicated that most of the Linux using/. geeks could't even give me a working answer.
Here's a dummy question for the Linux geeks that are reading this, and one that shows how clueless some of us Linux noobs are:
I start up Linux in a GUI. I know I can switch to a shell screen with ctrl-alt-f2 (or other f keys). I could also open a shell from the GUI, but in this case I want to switch with the ctrl-alt-f2 trick to see the original start-up dialog while the system was booting. OK, this works fine. But how in the world do I get back to the GUI??? I would have expected it to be anothet ctrl-alt-Fx key, but none get me there. I spent hours last night searching on Google with no luck.
What's the magic way to switch back to the GUI, and how does a Linux noob learn all of these little tricks that the Linix geeks just think everyone should know? Sure, I know about man, but without knowing what to look up (if it's even there at all), it really doesn't help.
I've played around with a number of different USB1.1 and USB 2.0 flash drives, and one thing that I was looking for when I read this article (yea, I read it) was the real size of the different devices. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have been covered.
You would think that if it's a 256meg drive then you would know the size, 256 megs, right? But marketing has struck again, I've found that 32 meg drivs I have actually seem to have about 30 megs of space on them, and vary by drive. A 64 meg device is also short several megs (as are some flash cards I have). I would have found it really handy if the reviewer had bothered to tell us how much space each of these devices really delivers.
created Scheme because they needed a clean and simple programming language with which to teach undergraduates
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. This seems to apply just as well to people and teachers as to real languages and teaching languages. There is simply no point in teaching a language that will never be really used. And certainly no point in creating yet another teaching language because no one is using any of the other ones that have been created. Even Pascal was useless until Borland extended it so much that it hardly resembles the original p-system versions. The basic concepts of programming stay the same; one might as well focus their effort on a language that will really be used like C or even Basic rather than so called teaching languages that represent one or two people's do it my way religious views on programming. Of couse, I would stay away from object oriented languages like C++ for a beginner. But there is simply no good reason to have anyone learn a useless language and then learn C rather than just learn a simple language like C directly.
Forgive the frankness of my choice of words, but Scheme, MzScheme, and MrEd, what crap! If someone is going to learn to program, then at least do it with a language that is actually used, not one that was "created" to hype a book. C or even Basic would be better choices. I would stay away from the visual versions of these and simply start on simple command line versions at first, but Visual Basic or even Visual C is another option if you want to tackel something that will let you get visually interesting results quickly.
Depending on your mother's background and interests, learing to use tools like spreadsheets might be interesting (particularly since these can also be programmed in a script language as well as just used as the basic tools thay are). And of course she should be introduced to a word processing program if all she has done in that area is e-mail so far.
Of course, she should be exposed to the rest of the Internet, particularly the web, if all she has done so far is e-mail. She might even want to set up a web page. Show her the interesting tools available, from on-line encyclopedias to using search engines to find old friends.
Lets not make too many jokes about shooting bullets at explosives. This is only the official goal. I'm sure Ashcroft and his gang have prefectly good reasons for wanting to go around shooting bullets randomly, and hoping to hit TNT. Americans must learn to give up our rights and safety and sanity in the fight against terrorism.
"Would you be willing to pay $600 for a console with all of the capabilities of a standard OEM PC?"
Don't be silly. A standard OEM PC will run Linux. You can bet that any computer or game console made by Microsoft will not be able to. And a OEM PC without a monitor costs less than $600.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't question that choice at all. Dlink makes good stuff and as long as you have a use for the speed then these products are a good choice for you. The point I had thought I had made clear in my first post is that many people are buying more than they need or will use, just because they think it's somehow going to make that 1.5Mbit DSL link faster. Rushing to a new non-standard technology from a company with a history of bad products and even worse customer support, and who abandons those customers when they change hardware designs, just doesn't make sense.
This certainly wouldn't be the case if a 100Mbit card were, say, $25 (and I remember when a 10 Mbit card was $200 and I was buying a couple of dozen at a time), but at current prices the premium for Gigabit ethernet in a PCI card is a factor. Beside, by the time you really are ready to use that Gigabyte card you might need it to be PCI Express rather than PCI (take it from someone with several old (and expensive) ISA NIC cards around). You just keep your options open by not buying more than you can use in the near future, and prices keep dropping so fast that by the time you do have a use for the faster technology you will be able to buy it and the total cost of it and the stuff you buy now will still be less than overbuying now.
The same holds true for 802.11b/802.11g/802.11?. (and my post was really about something coming after g). If G were only a couple of dollars more than B your argument would hold. In truth it's many times more expensive than B (I just got another B PC card this week for $10 and recently got another B router for $10, you would be hard pressed to find either of these with G technology for less than 3 times the cost). At those cost differences, buy what you need. and, as I said, if you are not doing high speed local transfers and only using the wireless link for 1.5Mb or 3 Mb Internet access, then don't waste the money on a faster connection, and even if you think you have a faster connection the 54Mbit 802.11g is likely fast enough without buying into new technology.
One other put down that's worth mentioning is that this is from Belkin. I have a Belkin router that never worked right and is gathering dust. Sure, the firmware is flashable, but they never released a firmware upgrade; they changed the hardware and released a version 2 of the router. All of us with version 1 of the non-functional router are just screwed. Three guesses what I expect to happen to Belkin's new bleeding edge users as Belkin works out the bugs in their new technology.
Now, it seems, people are going to be rushing to these new "standards". Sure, if you're going to be transfering a lot of large files around your internal network, perhaps while you stream real time video to your "entertainment center", then you might justify the extra cost and being on the bleeding edge; but most users just think in terms of "I want the newer faster stuff" or simply "I want the good stuff" and they will end up paying a lot more now for the technology they never use than they would if they just waited until the standrds were worked out, the products came down in price, and the connection to the rest of the Internet caught up in speed to justify the choice.
It's even worse than what you say. Anyone who reports/forwards the spam they receive to another site would be stopped by this technique. So the first effect this would have would be to inflict a blow on those fighting spam.
I for one welcome the New World Order and our European Article Numbering Code Overlords.
# Since The Doctor can time travel, and has a fascination with Earth, I recommend pitting him against ....
So since the doctor can time travel and lame stories can be writen about the Doctor and Hitler, why in the world would you suggest that the Doctor can't fight the Master again, just because the Master is dead? All Time Lords don't have to travel in the same time stream, after all (even though for the most part the writers have kept things simple by having that happen, as well as the last forty years of Earth history too). But the Master before he reached his final regeneration could certainly have run into a "present day" Doctor during his own travels in time.
Great, now I get kicked of the mail server just for forwarding all of my spam to uce@ftc.gov. And to top it off, since my IsP started blocking port 25, I have to send this e-mail through their servers, rather than better run and more ineligent servers that I would use otherwise.
328419 feet in meters
or
62 miles in meters
Google is your friend!
On the other hand, MSCE certification was a good indicator for me. If someone had acutally paid to become a Microsoft puppet, and expected extra preks and pays and status for it, it was easy to decide that I would not hire them
OK, RFID is an invention, I'll grant that. And I'll not get into the endless debate over the good and evil of it. But given the RFID is over 20 years old, what part of a proximity card with incorporated PIN code isn't so obvious and apparent to the average engineer that it should qualify for a patent? And isn't there plenty of prior art?
It was directly related to Linux. Once again:
SCO collected $11,000 from this licensing program in the three months ended April 30, down from $8.3 million a year earlier. The program, which charges about $700 per Linux server, has collected $31,000 in the last six months.
Absolutely, Microsoft, long suspected to be the source of the Investement in SCO and finally confirmed that this was the case, did jump on the band wagon early and"license" supposed SCO IP. The amount of the payment was, as far as I know, never disclosed. This was pretty clearly another way for Microsoft to put cash into SCO's hands for their fight against Linux. But even though the motive is clear, it was part of the $8.3 they put on their books last year this quarter as income from claiming they owned Linux. And clearly there were others who paid up too, although hopefully few.
Your inability to search the news or look up the annual reports is not my problem. From a Dow Jones story on SCO today:
SCO collected $11,000 from this licensing program in the three months ended April 30, down from $8.3 million a year earlier. The program, which charges about $700 per Linux server, has collected $31,000 in the last six months.
Unfortunately, the truth is that they made only 11k this quarter from their Linux scam. However, they made $8.3 million this quarter last year from it, and a good bit more if you add up all of the quarters. So while the world is learning the truth about SCO, the SCO attack on Linux was profitable, and (more importantly) acomplished a lot of what the backers of the scam wanted to do.
Perhaps the point was that the "He" in question was not in the title, so what's your point? Rather, the "He" was in the apparent middle of a poorly constructed sentence. While there should have been a comma in front of it and it should not have been capatilized (unless there was a period before it and it was the start of a different sentence), the real problem is that this front page article talks about someone named Joy that many people have never heard of and makes no effort to say who in the world he is. Instead it only links to a registration required website. It was sloppy and lame in multiple ways.
Now every time I lose a finger I'll have to re-buy my entire music collection.
I did try alt-f5, and even ctrl-alt-f5, as well as every oter combination with a function key in it, but only your Alt-arrow key worked for me (Knoppix 3.4 5/17/2004 release). If you hadn't responded I still wouldn't know how to look at the start-up messages and then switch back. It just amazes me that such a basic function could be so cryptic or that so many slashdot readers could post suggestions that didn't help. And no one yet has been able to suggest where I should have been able to look to find out the answer to this simple question rather than asking slashdot and trying everything that everyone suggested. It does help explain why some people like me are still struggling with Linux even though we have over thirty years of industry experience and experience with many different operating systems.
In all fairness, it's not, in may cases. It is (sometimes) if you're running 1600x1200 with AA turned way up, but at lower resolutions the difference isn't usually at all significant, the ATI 9800 and the NVidia can even beat it at 1200x1024 resolutions. The Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra even significantly beats the X800XT in some benchmarks and does it using 32 bit math while the X800XT is using only 24 bit math and older technology in other areas (Shader model 2 vs. Shader model 3, for example).
There's also the question of there being any real gain in having say 130 frams per second for a game as opposed to, say, 85 or 90. Particularly when you monitor isn't likely to be displaying those extra frames (or you eyes seeing them). It would seem to make a lot more sense to just compute and display to to 90 frames a second, and use any remaining CPU power to be sure other parts of the game are as responsive as posiable (and yes, the game does eat a lot of CPU to computer 130 frames a second, even though a lot of the graphics are done right on the video card).
But I'm not really wanting to argue the merits of one card against another, I was just pointing out how the gamers think nothing of dropping $500 here and another $500 in a couple of months when the next "hot" card is available. At this rate they almost certainly will have bought something at least as expensive to replace their new X800XT's before they even have Half Life 2 and Domm 3 in hand, and will be pitching those new cards when they need PCI Expresse video cards for the new motherboards that come out in the fall.
To me it would seem to not make a lot of sense to buy two or three different "high end" AGP cards this year when AGP is about to be replaced by PCI Express in the high end systems this year. But clearly the gamer community is still willing to shell out the cash for anything hot.
I could see how it could happen. Just yesterday I saw on another forum a bunch of gamer geeks with more money than sense who wanted to rush to buy "on-sale" (but not even out yet) ATI X800XT Platimum Edition video cards for $450 to replace their $450 to $500 top end ATI 9800XT cards they bought a month or two ago! And with that mindset you just know that come September thay will have to have the next card that replaces their so-last-week X800XT. And they are buying these cards and saying they are buying them to play Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Buying and replacing high end video cards supposedly for games that might not even be out before the next wave of video cards comes out!
Just to follow-up for those who commented or others who later read this, here's the full story:
I'm using Knoppix. I had no idea which Linux would even matter. (Can you imagine the public outcry if old MS-DOS and PC-DOS and even DR-DOS used different keys for CRTL-ALT-DEL or had CTRL-ALT-DEL do different things?) Well, I retried all of the ALT-f7 and ALT-F-anything key combinations, relaesing and repressing the ALT and/or CTRL keys, all of the CTRL-ALT-key combinations, but nothing seemed to help until this post. Yes, ALT-RIGHT ARROW or ALT-LEFT ARROW work great, although the suggestion that I could use CRTL-ALT instead of ALT in the terminal screens was wrong, CTRL-ALT-Arrow does not work in the terminal screens (and, of course, ALT-Arrow doesn't work in the GUI).
It amazes me that something like this (and it's far from the only thing in Linux like this) could have been made so complicated that most of the Linux using /. geeks could't even give me a working answer.
I start up Linux in a GUI. I know I can switch to a shell screen with ctrl-alt-f2 (or other f keys). I could also open a shell from the GUI, but in this case I want to switch with the ctrl-alt-f2 trick to see the original start-up dialog while the system was booting. OK, this works fine. But how in the world do I get back to the GUI??? I would have expected it to be anothet ctrl-alt-Fx key, but none get me there. I spent hours last night searching on Google with no luck.
What's the magic way to switch back to the GUI, and how does a Linux noob learn all of these little tricks that the Linix geeks just think everyone should know? Sure, I know about man, but without knowing what to look up (if it's even there at all), it really doesn't help.
You would think that if it's a 256meg drive then you would know the size, 256 megs, right? But marketing has struck again, I've found that 32 meg drivs I have actually seem to have about 30 megs of space on them, and vary by drive. A 64 meg device is also short several megs (as are some flash cards I have). I would have found it really handy if the reviewer had bothered to tell us how much space each of these devices really delivers.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. This seems to apply just as well to people and teachers as to real languages and teaching languages. There is simply no point in teaching a language that will never be really used. And certainly no point in creating yet another teaching language because no one is using any of the other ones that have been created. Even Pascal was useless until Borland extended it so much that it hardly resembles the original p-system versions. The basic concepts of programming stay the same; one might as well focus their effort on a language that will really be used like C or even Basic rather than so called teaching languages that represent one or two people's do it my way religious views on programming. Of couse, I would stay away from object oriented languages like C++ for a beginner. But there is simply no good reason to have anyone learn a useless language and then learn C rather than just learn a simple language like C directly.
Depending on your mother's background and interests, learing to use tools like spreadsheets might be interesting (particularly since these can also be programmed in a script language as well as just used as the basic tools thay are). And of course she should be introduced to a word processing program if all she has done in that area is e-mail so far.
Of course, she should be exposed to the rest of the Internet, particularly the web, if all she has done so far is e-mail. She might even want to set up a web page. Show her the interesting tools available, from on-line encyclopedias to using search engines to find old friends.
Lets not make too many jokes about shooting bullets at explosives. This is only the official goal . I'm sure Ashcroft and his gang have prefectly good reasons for wanting to go around shooting bullets randomly, and hoping to hit TNT. Americans must learn to give up our rights and safety and sanity in the fight against terrorism.
Don't be silly. A standard OEM PC will run Linux. You can bet that any computer or game console made by Microsoft will not be able to. And a OEM PC without a monitor costs less than $600.