I opened an account with Wingspan a few months ago. So far it seems pretty decent although their site could use some work (some of the text is too small to read on my Mac, and the balance is pretty slow to display).
The one issue I've had so far with them is that deposits by mail are on the slow side. It takes 7-10 business days, and the first one I sent them took 3 weeks to show up in my account. The second one showed up in a more reasonable time period though, so hopefully that was an abberation (they blamed it on slow holiday mail).
I do really like the idea of having my banking and investment accounts in the same place and to be able to pay bills from my investment account if I need to (rather than doing last minute shuffling of money). Their fee structure is very reasonable compared to most banks (no charge for receiving wire transfers, unlike some banks, refunding of ATM fees) and they have excellent interest for checking and their bill pay seems good. I still haven't closed my old accounts at BofA and ETrade yet, but in a few months I will assuming things continue to go smoothly with Wingspan.
One of the things I like best about an online only bank is that they're motivated to make it easy to do things without having to come down to the branch. I don't have time to go to the bank and some banks are not very good at allowing you to do some things remotely. My husband's bank, Fremont Bank, is really bad about that. Clearly online banks aren't for everyone, but I don't go to ATMs very often and I'm most interested in good bill pay/online administration of account and a nice interest rate, so for me it's a good fit.
Although this would be a move in the right direction towards more 3rd party candidate opportunities, it would not completely solve the vote wasting issue.
To me it seems the only way we can really break the two party system in the US is to change from a one candidate per person vote to a vote for everyone you'd like option. If instead of having to pick a single candidate, you could mark off whomever would be most acceptable to you, a lot of the problems with the current system could be solved. Negative campaigning would still have a place, but it'd be a lot less useful, since you'd still have to convince people to vote for you, not just not to vote for your major opponent. You wouldn't have to choose between voting for who you think is best and the lesser of the two evils likely to win (since right now a vote for a third party is more of a vote against the person you like most of the two major parties). There wouldn't need to be second guessing about the true interest in the individual candidates since every candidate would get whatever percentage of votes people who were ok with them would give. The person with the most number of votes would win, but the vote totals would definitely be a lot more meaningful.
The biggest problem with a system like this is that it'll never get implemented in this country as long as the two party system is in power, since they stand to lose their hold over American politics quickly in a system that doesn't give preference to established parties or scare people into voting for them.
Actually, they already seem to have added some Javascript preference panels to 1.8 prerelease, which probably means it's coming reasonably soon. No doubt it won't be added into the prereleases still it's reasonably stable- he would do best not to put it in too soon and break everything.
FYI, I've been doing 95% of my browsing in iCab since 1.8 came out. It does read most sites beautifully, and I've even ordered a few things in it (which is important since many sites shops don't work without Javascript). Banking and a little bit of shopping is done in Netscape or IE 4.5, but that's a very small bit of my daily browsing.
All the other features in iCab are so useful that the Javascript thing really is not much of a deterrent- you just use another browser for those occasional needs. The customizable buttons and contextual menus are great. Keychain support and autocomplete really make my day. LINK tag interpreted for a toolbar is really nice - sadly the two major browsers don't support this, so most sites don't take advantage. The ad filters and comprehensive user preferences make a big difference. The built in HTML checker should be at every web designer's hands. The printing improvements are a great paper saver.
Yep, it doesn't have everything yet, but it's pretty darn impressive already (especially for a browser which came out of the blue, in German, only 10 months ago). The rate at which it's been improving is great, and I am not at all concerned about Javascript support- it'll be in when it's ready, and thankfully not before. I'd rather have no Javascript support than buggy support, and the same goes for CSS (just look at the mess that Netscape 4 and IE 3 created to see why).
I have high hopes for Mozilla too, but we'll see if they pan out.
I hope that iCab and Opera (also very user control friendly) encourage a brand new age of browsers with more user control and features which are designed to improve things for the browser users more than the browser manufacturers. Browsers have been in the user control dark ages for way too long.
Unfortunately Mailsmith doesn't support IMAP yet. But I've found Mulberry great for my needs (Mac and Windows, Unix coming soon). It has a nice feature of letting you read the mail in plain text, formatted text, or raw text mode, so you can filter out the HTML if you like, or read it with the formatting, or see it with the source. It doesn't support all that Javascript crap anyways, just the formatting pieces of HTML which make sense to support, like bold and italics.
Personally I find HTML email to be stupid for the most part, but part of the problem is how heavily the HTML clients try to push you to use it, just like with proprietary tags in browsers. They know the more HTML crap you get in the mail, the more you'll feel you're missing something by not using their stupid client. Most people who send HTML mail don't even realize they're doing it. And a lot don't realize that not everyone sees it the way they do. The biggest annoyance for me is when I'm just reading my mail in mailx (I don't do it that often anymore, just when I'm in a hurry or not near my mail client- IMAP is nice enough to keep my mail still readable in the shell) and there's all that HTML crap sitting there in the message. Sadly, I get a lot of legit HTML mail from people commenting on my websites (and the people at work who don't know better) so I can't just delete it all.
Seems to me the best way to support HTML in mail is not to support the whole darn thing (after all, this is mail, not a browser) but to support an appropriate XML language which is a subset of it which is useful for mail, and possibly use some special tags which could be special for mail (for followups, quoting and stuff). Actually I remember seeing a proposal about this on the W3C site, but I can't recall the name or find it on their site now.
Seems like this problem could be a danger in any mail client which stores browser cookies, and probably would not require Javascript (wouldn't loading an ad image on a page get that cookie there as well?)
Definitely for Internet voting to be safe and private a lot of work has to be done, but I think it's definitely the way to go once they work out the details.
For those complaining about the danger of fraud, there's definitely reason for concern, but do you realize how little checking there is now? I don't know if it's the same way everywhere, but in all the years I've been voting I've never been asked to in any way verify my identify, with ID or whatever. So although Internet voting would allow for a grander scale of fraud, there's not a lot of fraud protection in the current method.
They didn't say anything about it not running well. They just said they didn't want to spend the time bringing it up to full functionality with the Windows version, and they didn't want to accept the annoyance that would come out of a release with features missing.
I think it's a poor decision (certainly this late in the game), but the only people who can change it is them.
Actually, that's not completely true- everything I've read indicates that testing on the Mac side is usually less time consuming, mostly due to there being a lot more standardization in hardware. Doubt it would be 90/10, but probably no worse than 70/30.
The sad part is that the Mac has recently been on a very good game release upswing. Almost all the major publishers have games recently released, being ported, or are seriously considering them for the Mac.
What is going on with Half-Life is seriously bad, not so much because one less game is on the Mac (I am not much for shooters myself, but I'm sure my brother would have enjoyed it), but because of the message it sends. From what it sounds like, the game was almost finished! Seems to me that if you're going to do a port like this, you figure out your plans before you starting putting so much programming time in, so you have realistic expectations of what you're going to accomplish. This far along they might as well have finished it, or tried to pass it off to someone else who might have done it.
Really it sounds to me like either something's going on behind the scenes, or the people responsible for this decision just can't take reasonable criticism. It's perfectly logical for people to be annoyed at the limitations of the port, but that doesn't mean that nobody's going to buy it. To throw all that hard work down the tubes because people aren't happy that they're being treated 2nd class is silly. If they wanted to avoid treating the Mac users like 2nd class citizens they failed, now they're treating them even worse.
I think this really just calls into question the judgement of the people who started the port in the first place. If you're going to do a port, figure out your plans (what's going in, what's slicable if time gets tight, what's not going to happen) when you're determining whether a port's a good idea in the first place. Getting people all excited and then letting them down is really a bad idea. If you're upfront about your plans, all the better. If people know when the port is released what's going to make it in, they're less likely to be pissed of than later once they assumed things were going to be included that weren't.
Another option that is simple like web TV, but is better in some ways, is the Dreamcast.
If you're going to go with a TV based device, there are certain issues present in WebTV which can make it problematic. The biggest ones are the lack of horizontal scrolling (which can really make a mess out of some pages), hard to read text on a tv screen (made worse by WebTV squishing stuff to fit), difficulty in reading small text on the screen, and you're required to use a specific ISP.
The Dreamcast's browser has some advantages here- the browser does allow for horizontal scrolling (as well as vertical of course), and has a special scroll method which doesn't require scroll bars (you move the cursor in the direction you want to go) which gives you more screen space (and may be easier to pick up for someone not computer savvy). It also has antialiasing for text, which makes it more readable on the screen. It also has a magnifier which lets you rollover any section of a page to see a magnified view. It doesn't require a specific ISP (although Sega is pushing AT&T as the preferred ISP).
There are certain features which WebTV supports which Dreamcast doesn't, and vice versa, but if the objective is a simple device just for Internet use, the Dreamcast may be worth looking at.
(and just to clarify, the Dreamcast browser is _not_ based on Windows CE)
Re:Have they fixed the date problem yet?
on
PalmOS 3.3 Released
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· Score: 1
I have the same problem. Every week or two, my Palm seems to get set a week back exactly (so it's not just a battery drain or something). So far it hasn't been enough of a problem for me to call 3Com about it, but I checked their site and there's no mention of the problem.
I hope this patch fixes it, but I doubt it since it's not mentioned in the release notes. I'm going to check in a few days after I wait and see what issues get reported by people installing the update.
I wish I'd gotten a Visor too, but I got my Palm V a little too early.
The Nokia 9110 doesn't seem to be on their US site. I looked on the Finland site and it does look smaller in the picture, but not much. I unfortunately couldn't read the description as I don't read Finnish. Do you know where an English description of the Nokia 9110 might be? Is it available in the US?
Actually, my husband has a Nokia 9000. It is great, but it's pretty big compared to a Palm or standard cell phone. Also, there aren't many apps for it and it doesn't have anywhere near as nice PDA functionality (categories are more important than you might think). The best thing would be a PalmOS based cell phone from Nokia, which looks like it could be a possibility. Unfortunately, Qualcomm's reputation for cellphones really isn't that strong (and I have a friend who works there who really doesn't have good things to say about the pdQ either). I'd love to have a great Palm/cell combo, but it sounds like the pdQ may not be it for me. My husband loves his 9000, but I don't think I could give up the PalmOS, and I know that Mac support for it is pretty much non-existent.
Actually- Unisys probably just has everything in jpg because they hired some crappy design firm that thinks that jpg is smaller than gif for everything, so they should use it for everything. This is a common misconception among poorly educated web designers. I sincerely doubt they were trying to avoid their own idiotic and unenforcable fee.
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I opened an account with Wingspan a few months ago. So far it seems pretty decent although their site could use some work (some of the text is too small to read on my Mac, and the balance is pretty slow to display).
The one issue I've had so far with them is that deposits by mail are on the slow side. It takes 7-10 business days, and the first one I sent them took 3 weeks to show up in my account. The second one showed up in a more reasonable time period though, so hopefully that was an abberation (they blamed it on slow holiday mail).
I do really like the idea of having my banking and investment accounts in the same place and to be able to pay bills from my investment account if I need to (rather than doing last minute shuffling of money). Their fee structure is very reasonable compared to most banks (no charge for receiving wire transfers, unlike some banks, refunding of ATM fees) and they have excellent interest for checking and their bill pay seems good. I still haven't closed my old accounts at BofA and ETrade yet, but in a few months I will assuming things continue to go smoothly with Wingspan.
One of the things I like best about an online only bank is that they're motivated to make it easy to do things without having to come down to the branch. I don't have time to go to the bank and some banks are not very good at allowing you to do some things remotely. My husband's bank, Fremont Bank, is really bad about that. Clearly online banks aren't for everyone, but I don't go to ATMs very often and I'm most interested in good bill pay/online administration of account and a nice interest rate, so for me it's a good fit.
Although this would be a move in the right direction towards more 3rd party candidate opportunities, it would not completely solve the vote wasting issue.
To me it seems the only way we can really break the two party system in the US is to change from a one candidate per person vote to a vote for everyone you'd like option. If instead of having to pick a single candidate, you could mark off whomever would be most acceptable to you, a lot of the problems with the current system could be solved. Negative campaigning would still have a place, but it'd be a lot less useful, since you'd still have to convince people to vote for you, not just not to vote for your major opponent. You wouldn't have to choose between voting for who you think is best and the lesser of the two evils likely to win (since right now a vote for a third party is more of a vote against the person you like most of the two major parties). There wouldn't need to be second guessing about the true interest in the individual candidates since every candidate would get whatever percentage of votes people who were ok with them would give. The person with the most number of votes would win, but the vote totals would definitely be a lot more meaningful.
The biggest problem with a system like this is that it'll never get implemented in this country as long as the two party system is in power, since they stand to lose their hold over American politics quickly in a system that doesn't give preference to established parties or scare people into voting for them.
Actually, they already seem to have added some Javascript preference panels to 1.8 prerelease, which probably means it's coming reasonably soon. No doubt it won't be added into the prereleases still it's reasonably stable- he would do best not to put it in too soon and break everything.
FYI, I've been doing 95% of my browsing in iCab since 1.8 came out. It does read most sites beautifully, and I've even ordered a few things in it (which is important since many sites shops don't work without Javascript). Banking and a little bit of shopping is done in Netscape or IE 4.5, but that's a very small bit of my daily browsing.
All the other features in iCab are so useful that the Javascript thing really is not much of a deterrent- you just use another browser for those occasional needs. The customizable buttons and contextual menus are great. Keychain support and autocomplete really make my day. LINK tag interpreted for a toolbar is really nice - sadly the two major browsers don't support this, so most sites don't take advantage. The ad filters and comprehensive user preferences make a big difference. The built in HTML checker should be at every web designer's hands. The printing improvements are a great paper saver.
Yep, it doesn't have everything yet, but it's pretty darn impressive already (especially for a browser which came out of the blue, in German, only 10 months ago). The rate at which it's been improving is great, and I am not at all concerned about Javascript support- it'll be in when it's ready, and thankfully not before. I'd rather have no Javascript support than buggy support, and the same goes for CSS (just look at the mess that Netscape 4 and IE 3 created to see why).
I have high hopes for Mozilla too, but we'll see if they pan out.
I hope that iCab and Opera (also very user control friendly) encourage a brand new age of browsers with more user control and features which are designed to improve things for the browser users more than the browser manufacturers. Browsers have been in the user control dark ages for way too long.
Unfortunately Mailsmith doesn't support IMAP yet. But I've found Mulberry great for my needs (Mac and Windows, Unix coming soon). It has a nice feature of letting you read the mail in plain text, formatted text, or raw text mode, so you can filter out the HTML if you like, or read it with the formatting, or see it with the source. It doesn't support all that Javascript crap anyways, just the formatting pieces of HTML which make sense to support, like bold and italics.
Personally I find HTML email to be stupid for the most part, but part of the problem is how heavily the HTML clients try to push you to use it, just like with proprietary tags in browsers. They know the more HTML crap you get in the mail, the more you'll feel you're missing something by not using their stupid client. Most people who send HTML mail don't even realize they're doing it. And a lot don't realize that not everyone sees it the way they do. The biggest annoyance for me is when I'm just reading my mail in mailx (I don't do it that often anymore, just when I'm in a hurry or not near my mail client- IMAP is nice enough to keep my mail still readable in the shell) and there's all that HTML crap sitting there in the message. Sadly, I get a lot of legit HTML mail from people commenting on my websites (and the people at work who don't know better) so I can't just delete it all.
Seems to me the best way to support HTML in mail is not to support the whole darn thing (after all, this is mail, not a browser) but to support an appropriate XML language which is a subset of it which is useful for mail, and possibly use some special tags which could be special for mail (for followups, quoting and stuff). Actually I remember seeing a proposal about this on the W3C site, but I can't recall the name or find it on their site now.
Seems like this problem could be a danger in any mail client which stores browser cookies, and probably would not require Javascript (wouldn't loading an ad image on a page get that cookie there as well?)
Definitely for Internet voting to be safe and private a lot of work has to be done, but I think it's definitely the way to go once they work out the details.
For those complaining about the danger of fraud, there's definitely reason for concern, but do you realize how little checking there is now? I don't know if it's the same way everywhere, but in all the years I've been voting I've never been asked to in any way verify my identify, with ID or whatever. So although Internet voting would allow for a grander scale of fraud, there's not a lot of fraud protection in the current method.
They didn't say anything about it not running well. They just said they didn't want to spend the time bringing it up to full functionality with the Windows version, and they didn't want to accept the annoyance that would come out of a release with features missing.
I think it's a poor decision (certainly this late in the game), but the only people who can change it is them.
Actually, that's not completely true- everything I've read indicates that testing on the Mac side is usually less time consuming, mostly due to there being a lot more standardization in hardware. Doubt it would be 90/10, but probably no worse than 70/30.
The sad part is that the Mac has recently been on a very good game release upswing. Almost all the major publishers have games recently released, being ported, or are seriously considering them for the Mac.
What is going on with Half-Life is seriously bad, not so much because one less game is on the Mac (I am not much for shooters myself, but I'm sure my brother would have enjoyed it), but because of the message it sends. From what it sounds like, the game was almost finished! Seems to me that if you're going to do a port like this, you figure out your plans before you starting putting so much programming time in, so you have realistic expectations of what you're going to accomplish. This far along they might as well have finished it, or tried to pass it off to someone else who might have done it.
Really it sounds to me like either something's going on behind the scenes, or the people responsible for this decision just can't take reasonable criticism. It's perfectly logical for people to be annoyed at the limitations of the port, but that doesn't mean that nobody's going to buy it. To throw all that hard work down the tubes because people aren't happy that they're being treated 2nd class is silly. If they wanted to avoid treating the Mac users like 2nd class citizens they failed, now they're treating them even worse.
I think this really just calls into question the judgement of the people who started the port in the first place. If you're going to do a port, figure out your plans (what's going in, what's slicable if time gets tight, what's not going to happen) when you're determining whether a port's a good idea in the first place. Getting people all excited and then letting them down is really a bad idea. If you're upfront about your plans, all the better. If people know when the port is released what's going to make it in, they're less likely to be pissed of than later once they assumed things were going to be included that weren't.
Another option that is simple like web TV, but is better in some ways, is the Dreamcast.
If you're going to go with a TV based device, there are certain issues present in WebTV which can make it problematic. The biggest ones are the lack of horizontal scrolling (which can really make a mess out of some pages), hard to read text on a tv screen (made worse by WebTV squishing stuff to fit), difficulty in reading small text on the screen, and you're required to use a specific ISP.
The Dreamcast's browser has some advantages here- the browser does allow for horizontal scrolling (as well as vertical of course), and has a special scroll method which doesn't require scroll bars (you move the cursor in the direction you want to go) which gives you more screen space (and may be easier to pick up for someone not computer savvy). It also has antialiasing for text, which makes it more readable on the screen. It also has a magnifier which lets you rollover any section of a page to see a magnified view. It doesn't require a specific ISP (although Sega is pushing AT&T as the preferred ISP).
There are certain features which WebTV supports which Dreamcast doesn't, and vice versa, but if the objective is a simple device just for Internet use, the Dreamcast may be worth looking at.
(and just to clarify, the Dreamcast browser is _not_ based on Windows CE)
I have the same problem. Every week or two, my Palm seems to get set a week back exactly (so it's not just a battery drain or something). So far it hasn't been enough of a problem for me to call 3Com about it, but I checked their site and there's no mention of the problem.
I hope this patch fixes it, but I doubt it since it's not mentioned in the release notes. I'm going to check in a few days after I wait and see what issues get reported by people installing the update.
I wish I'd gotten a Visor too, but I got my Palm V a little too early.
The Nokia 9110 doesn't seem to be on their US site. I looked on the Finland site and it does look smaller in the picture, but not much. I unfortunately couldn't read the description as I don't read Finnish. Do you know where an English description of the Nokia 9110 might be? Is it available in the US?
Actually, my husband has a Nokia 9000. It is great, but it's pretty big compared to a Palm or standard cell phone. Also, there aren't many apps for it and it doesn't have anywhere near as nice PDA functionality (categories are more important than you might think). The best thing would be a PalmOS based cell phone from Nokia, which looks like it could be a possibility. Unfortunately, Qualcomm's reputation for cellphones really isn't that strong (and I have a friend who works there who really doesn't have good things to say about the pdQ either). I'd love to have a great Palm/cell combo, but it sounds like the pdQ may not be it for me. My husband loves his 9000, but I don't think I could give up the PalmOS, and I know that Mac support for it is pretty much non-existent.
Actually- Unisys probably just has everything in jpg because they hired some crappy design firm that thinks that jpg is smaller than gif for everything, so they should use it for everything. This is a common misconception among poorly educated web designers. I sincerely doubt they were trying to avoid their own idiotic and unenforcable fee.