Technology: June 2003 Archives
The good thing of buying a cellphone pack is that everything comes pre-configured. I have chosen the Movistar Activa pack with a Sony Ericsson T200 phone. One small box containing the phone, a power adaptor, a manual for the phone, the Movistar Activa SIM card and the accompanying manual. In the shop they placed the SIM card in the phone, activated it and selected the right rate. I could use it immediately, everything was configured. Everything? Well, no. I couldn't use WAP. Not that I really need WAP, but I prefer that everything works when I buy something. I intent to use WAP for only two tasks: check my bank balance if I want to purchase something expensive and to do some emergency browsing in case www.fimcap.org is having problems.
Both manuals I received are user-level manuals (how do I send a SMS message) and hardly contain any technical details. So I changed the language from Spanish to English (somehow technical terms are easier to understand in English) and started browsing through the settings. After trying out some options I found it: the phone was configured to use WAP over GPRS, while the prepaid Movistar Activa I use does not support GPRS by default. This is really stupid, they deliver a phone and a SIM card bundled with WAP settings that don't function in this configuration!!!! It would be more logical to configure the phone by default to use WAP over GSM, and let the few people who do contract for GPRS configure their phones later!!!
I love technology. I just love it. And I love computers, cellphones, PDA's, digital camera's and other geek toys. The only thing is... I don't have them!!! I used to have some fine toys, but they have been stolen some months ago.
My biggest proud and usefull gadget was my Palm III PDA, shown above. It contained my agenda, addresses of friends, family and clients, books to read at lost moments, games and passwords (encrypted of course!). Without realising it, I used my Palm daily, and was very happy with it. But... no Palm at the moment!
The other gadget I owned was a Samsung SGH-N400 cellphone. I specially liked the design of this phone (by Pininfarina). But is was easy to use and had all the functions I need (vibration, WAP, small size, ...). But... no cellphone at the moment!
I do have some computers, three in total. It is not the quality of them but the amount that make them geek toys. My desktop computer is the most advanced of the three, with a Cyrix P-133+ processor and 48Mb of memory. Yes, I know it is not that impressive. But after I reinstalled everything lately it runs faster that the mega computer I use at work. I did keep some room on the harddisk to install Linux to have even more pleasure. But... no Linux at the moment!
You might think that I must be a sad geek without any toys, but that is certainly not the case. I don't have any toys, because I am looking around to decide what toys I am going to buy. Alright, I could go into a shop and buy the latest and the greates phone, PDA and computer, but that is gonna cost me an awful lot of money. First of all I decided that I don't need a fancy cellphone. If I have time I will buy a prepaid number this weekend, and I will probably start using a second hand phone. For the moment that will be enough, since I don't phone a lot and neither plan to use any other functions. I will also keep on using my old computer. It is fast enough, and with a little bit of extra memory, a wireless connection to the ADSL router and Linux installed I sure will have lots of pleasure of it.
That leaves me without PDA. Palm recently released a new model, the Zire 71, which kicks ass! It has a built-in camera, so it gives me two toys for the price of one. The only problem is the price, which is around €300. I will have to think it over a few more times, but I am afraid that I am going to buy it...
Lately a lot of talk has been going on around Microsoft's web browser Internet Explorer (IE). This is my contribution.
First I want to go back in history. The first graphical browser NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was available in 1993 (I was one of its happy users). After a little bit of hesistation Microsoft jumped on the internet train with their Internet Explorer. Between that moment and the year 2000 Microsoft came with 6 versions of their IE browser. At that moment they had a huge monopoly in the browsermarket because of their monopoly in the OS market, and they sat back and relaxed. Now three years later (30% of the time since the creation of the World Wide Web!!!), we are still stuck with the same version, and it looks like we will have to deal with it for two more years, since Microsoft announced that they will only deliver their browsers together with Windows, and the next version of Windows (Longhorn) is scheduled for 2005.
I think thay are making a mistake. It is true that they have the monopoly, but more and more people are switching to other browsers. Furthermore, technology is advancing. More and more sites appear that make use of features that IE doesn't support, giving users a less than perfect browsing experience. At this moment the majority of the sites still uses code specially tweaked for IE, but little by little site designers start using standards complient code. And everybody knows that conforming to standards is not Microsofts strongest point. Their philosophy is 'what the monopolist uses is the standard'. That is why IE6 does not fully support CSS2, a standard created two(!) years before they created IE6.
But this is not why they are loosing users. After all, users don't care about these things, the web designers have to make sure their pages are coded well. But IE6 is also behind on the user interface side. Mozilla has nice features as a pop-up killer, an image manager to block unwanted images and a site navigation toolbar which lets me navigate through this site using the arrow keys on my browser.
Everybody is free to choose their browser, but I prefer a more modern browser than IE, which misses one third of the development of the Internet. At home I have installed Mozilla Firebird which has an install file of only 6 MB. Although is is still beta software, it runs perfectly on my old computer and gives me a lot more browsing pleasure than the browser installed by default.
With fancy e-mail I mean HTML mail. Most mail applications are able to send (and receive) messages in two formats: text only or HTML, and most applications use HTML by default, which is a BAD THING. People like to use HTML e-mail, because it looks nicer with all those colors, fonts, pictures,... and therefore most software companies like it. But for writing a simple 'Hello, how is life in Lleida?' message you don't need bold words nor blue titles. Plain text is probably better readable than that piece of art some people create.
There are of course always cases in which HTML mail is better, but usually that has to do with Viagra marketing, and those messages are deleted immediately. You might think that even if you don't use fancy effects, HTML mail could not harm anybody, could it? Wrong! There are a number of reasons why I (and many other people) consider HTML mail harmful:
