LOL, that's a great way to put it. ;-)

It's pretty funny because calc.org has been essentially hijacked by the very guy who was supposed to revive it. The domain doesn't legally belong to him, it still belongs to Adam, and I don't think Adam approved of this move.

Is that what happened? I have no idea. It's really very sad to see this happen to calc.org.

Well:
* A whois says the domain still belongs to Adam.
* I remember Ben Trettel talking about his Super Soaker Central site on a calculator site (probably calc.org) at some point in the past, so he's not some unrelated hijacker. This is from memory, so unfortunately I don't have any more details.
* IIRC, Ben was indeed the guy in charge of calc.org. (Again, from memory, so no guarantees and no details.)

Thus what I have written is what I have figured. Maybe we should ask Ben Trettel and Adam for clarification? Any of you reading this?

Ben Trettel talks alot about SEO, so I'll assume he knows a bit about it. And if you know anything about SEO, you know duplicate content is the worse thing that can happen to a site. It would NOT be in his best interests to have one of his sites appear on two different domains.

From that (and that both he and Adam are very nice people and appear to be good friends) I'll believe him that it wasn't intentional.

I also believe him, still he should have known that turning off the VHOST would cause exactly this to happen. ;-)

True, but it's been dead for so long that it basically doesn't matter at this point

Adam might not have approved but would he really care?
A few years ago when calc.org was making vast improvements, gaining momentum and people where actually uploading programs didn't he get pissed off and deleted all the archives?

nah this was TI-Files, long before i joined the community (back in 98-99 I think), some guy called bryan from ticalc hacked ti files and he got fired from ticalc.org . Back in 2001-2002 calc.org was getting awesome and even had some programs not avaliable on ticalc.org (good ones and horrible ones), but in summer 2002 they moved to new server and it didnt turned out well and they lost everything but the program archives, afterward this is when they became crappier and crappier.

No I very much doubt Adam would agree with this.

Adam was very proud of calc.org when he ran it. it was his baby so to speak, and his site had a lot of features ticalc.org wouldn't touch at the time, such as program ratings, modular views, site hosting that at the time was top notch with CGI access and lots more space, and every tutorial he could get permission to add.

When he left, calc.org basically died, and it shouldn't have. It had three major site crashes. then when they finally got a host that didn't crash every five minutes, itmom ran spam relay's which basically further ruined calc.org reputation when it got joe-jobbed. finally they decided to redesign the site and sat on it for two years instead of attempting to do something to at least keep it's userbase.

It got to the point that itmom was dead, and when it finally went under, so did all the hosted sites. (mine, hiryu's and Patrick's. pretty much the only ones getting updates anyway) That was pretty much the end of it.

If I had to predict the future, Adam will either kill the domain altogether and some spam spyware Lister will take it like what happened to ti-files.org, or he'll just park it. I could see about buying the domain off of him and try to resurrect the thing, but I don't know if it can be done after this amount of damage, and it definitely wouldn't be the same since I'm not exactly a web designer. It'd probably be a CMS or a forum like bluecrimson.

This is amusing :)

Let me know if you have any ideas on how to use the domain name. It's obviously not doing any good as it is now, and I don't forsee any revitalization attempts succeeding on a domain name alone. So I'm taking suggestions.

Point it at ticalc.org? :-P

According to Ben, calc.org was a VHOST on sscentral.org, and he shut it down, so it now shows the main VHOST instead. (There's a link to his explanation further down the thread.)

That's pretty, but how does it have anything to do with calculators?

/me misses the old calc.org

Heh. :)

I've never been there before, what did it used to look like? And why would such a site have that URL?

Before the crash in 2002 it looked like this

http://web.archive.org/web/2001072114170 5/http://calc.org/
(dont forget to remove the space between both urls)
9 months or so after the crash it somewhat continued but the website had much less features and they only had the TI-83, 86 and 89 files avaliable for download. They also had HP calculator stuff

Wow, the archived main page looks pretty darn good. I especially like the search function (filters for program type, etc.). Maybe something for ticalc.org to implement?

Still, it is sad to see a once calculator-oriented domain hosting a super-soaker site...

Yeah....

LOL that was hilarious!
How did they get that URL? It looks to me to be just some other website or did the guys at calc.org really make it?

BTW Firefox 2.0 is awesome

The guy at calc.org, Ben Trettel, is also in charge of this site.

it is not the most hilarious thing in the world, actually sad, calc.org used to be about as good as ticalc.org

so this means the old one is gone forever? I never rly went there but any calc website must be good :)

It's very sad.

BTW FIREFOX SUCKS!!! IT'S WORTHLESS!!! JAVA DOESN'T WORK, GAMES WON'T LOAD, PLUGINS ARE HARD TO SET UP...WHO ON EARTH WOULD WANT IT??? MY HIGH SCHOOL HAD IT AND THEIR HOMEPAGE DIDN'T EVEN LOAD CORRECTLY!!!

well i guess they ddint followed W3C standard. At least firefox is better than IE imo, I prefer Opera tho

I hate FF too. And I love Opera. It's so smooth and configurable.

OPERA RULES!!!!

Konqueror rulez!

I gotta try that someday (if it's for windows)

Of course it's not, Window$ sucks. ;-p

More seriously, Konqueror 3 is only available for *nix systems, the only Window$ port uses Cygwin and X11. Konqueror 4 will probably be natively ported to Window$ though, they're currently working on the KDE 4 kdelibs.

ah ok I see x.x i was just wondering

perhapes but, MS has the market cornered. I have a tv-tuner, scanner, printer, radio-scanner, memory stick, and UPS strip, all of which have windows-only drivers

oh, and I forgot my wifi card -- Dell TrueMobile 1300 MiniPCI -- It only exists for Windows and that one has bugs (I actually looked for another driver, not just accepting the package that says win only)

Well, I think you probably aren't looking for GNU/Linux drivers well enough. If you're seriously interested in trying out GNU/Linux, then I can try to help. Please give the model numbers of all the hardware you need drivers for.

As for the WiFi card, you need to figure out the actual chipset of that card. Dell doesn't produce wireless chipsets, they buy them, solder them on a circuit board and then sell the result with their brand name. Most other WiFi card brands do the same. (In the case of Dell, it could even be that they bought the entire card from another manufacturer and just sticked their name on it, but that doesn't really matter, what matters is the chipset.)

According to the sites found by Google, the Dell TrueMobile 1300 MiniPCI has a Broadcom 4306 chipset. This is handled by the bcm43xx driver which has been included in Fedora since Fedora Core 5. But sometimes manufacturers use a completely different chipset without changing the model number, so I'd recommend verifying this, though the easiest way to verify is to simply install GNU/Linux and then run the "lspci" utility which should be installed by default in most distributions. (I always got it installed by default in Fedora, at least.)

I don't really know and I don't really care, my point was most manufacturers(sp?) assume the customer uses windows...I knew someone who used linux and he got a digital sorround sound (sp?) card and then he found out it was for windows only...

Since I have to have WinXP to access the college network from on campus, I'll stick with that anyway...besides, my Sandisk Cruzer U3 only works with win2000/xp...

thanks tho.

> Since I have to have WinXP to access the college network from on campus, I'll stick with that anyway...

Are you sure? While they won't support it officially, connecting with GNU/Linux will probably work. And I doubt IT will be getting mad at you for that, they're more likely to be happy to have one less machine on the network spreading viruses. ;-) But of course, I'm neither a lawyer not a decision maker at your college, I just give my informal opinion.

> besides, my Sandisk Cruzer U3 only works with win2000/xp...

Well, you can use it as a normal Flash drive. I don't see the point of the U3 feature anyway for GNU/Linux, if you need to insulate whatever program is running from the Flash stick (i.e. keep it from permanently writing stuff to your HDD), just run it as a different user.

I don't know about their policies but I know that when I connect to the wifi, I type in a url (usually google) and it loads a page "Welcome to VWwifi, please log in" and I put in the user/password and it then loads google. As far as that goes, I only know they said we needed windows XP and Office 2003 (I stuck with 2002 because it opens most of the things the teachers post) so that's what I'll stick with.

As far as U3, I like the program it came with where I can enter my password and it configures the computer just like mine at home. I can go into "my documents" and my stuff is there. I can go to "Favorites" and my favorites are there.

What I do like linux for (I have 'UBCD') is when I have computer trouble and I can repartition my drive and recover data without loosing anything.

<< I don't know about their policies but I know that when I connect to the wifi, I type in a url (usually google) and it loads a page "Welcome to VWwifi, please log in" and I put in the user/password and it then loads google. As far as that goes, I only know they said we needed windows XP and Office 2003 (I stuck with 2002 because it opens most of the things the teachers post) so that's what I'll stick with. >>

That's the "login hack" for open WiFi so they can have open (and thus more compatible) WiFi while still allowing only registered users to use it. (It's a pretty common setup.) This doesn't require any particular operating system on the client (i.e. your computer), in fact the very reason they do it is not to require OS and/or hardware support for stuff like WEP, WPA or 802.1X.

<< As far as U3, I like the program it came with where I can enter my password and it configures the computer just like mine at home. I can go into "my documents" and my stuff is there. I can go to "Favorites" and my favorites are there. >>

That's a nice feature. You can have something similar with a regular USB stick (or your U3 stick in regular mode, but realistically, you'll probably want to get a second one to try it out, so you don't trash the U3 stuff) together with a live CD such as Knoppix or the FedoraUnity LiveSpins. With the Kadischi tool, you can even spin a Fedora Live CD with your own choice of packages, for example, you can put TiLP2 on it.

Thanks, that's good to know. I must say I'm not that knowlegable about wifi...love to get a wifi print server for xmas...

I'll have to keep that in mind, I have used UBCD for data recovery and I know/knew someone with knoppix but for the moment, I'll stick with what I have. I've filled up not quite half of my 2gb U3 disk...

thanks, though

WTH?? FF is awesome! The plug ins are easy and you don't even need to download anything, it installs straight from the browser.... built in spell check... Faster than IE... safer than IE... I don't know much about Opera but I do know that FF 2 kix but.
maybe u had a different version. the new one came out like a week ago.

Opera is the most standards-compliant browser AFAIK, and I think it's pretty secure too. Personally, I like both Firefox and Opera, each has its own advantages.

i think opera has some website rendering issues, but not too bad, most of the time it's javascript related and they keep fixing it in each release. I don't like how firefox sometimes reset settings to default when it crashes too often

hmm yeah also Opera doesn't remember my ticalc.org login either, even if i set ticalc.org to store my username/pass to my computer, it still log me out when i close/reopen opera and go on ticalc.org

I've used numerous versions of Opera on ticalc.org, and had no problem like this. Maybe you have turned off cookies, or disabled cookies specifically for ticalc.org?

I should check out, but it only happens on ticalc.org, I don't have this problems on any forums I visit, nor any other website i vist that require logining

</emo>

You probably don't have the flash plugin installed properly. And java is a computer thing, not a browser thing.

Their system is so locked down we can't change anything...the accounts rank below the XP "limited" -- we can't even recover from system errors.

anyway, I got a flash drive that is "U3" and it came with firefox. I know that the stuff is loaded properly and...IT STILL DOESN'T WORK!!! I can't pull up that school's homepage. It says "content blocked" over all of the menu buttons...WORTHLESS!!! It won't load games or chat boxes either...USELESS!!!

I stand by my orig. view. IT'S WORTHLESS!!! IE may not be as secure but at least it works properly!!!

Well then something's screwed up with your computer or your Firefox installation, since I've used both IE and Firefox, and Firefox has always worked perfectly for me.

...even with the Java and Flash plugins, BTW. If your school's computers are so locked down you can't install the proper extensions for Firefox, blame your school, not Firefox.

Perhapes but how do you explain the mobile one preinstalled on the memory stick? EVEN THAT ONE HAD TROUBLE!

I'll stick with IE. Firefox usually adblocks the content I want and lets through the stuff I don't care about anyhow. It won't even let me log on to my college account management...or grades for that matter!

nope, I like IE just fine, the programs I use run fine and everything works.

I think Firefox has ad-blocking disabled by default, so that shouldn't be the problem. The problem is probably as people have said already: the page uses proprietary IE-only extensions. As Web developers grow up, they'll start to use standards more and proprietary extensions less (hopefully). This will be aided by having a better standards-compliant browser (one that even properly supports transparency in PNGs!) to test sites.

What's the URL to your school's account management Web site (assuming it is accessible on the Internet)? I'd like to see it for myself, so I can determine the exact cause and possibly a solution.

The login works fine but after that the problems begin. I havn't tried it since they upgraded their server though. It's virginia community college (US).

Have you tried downloading Firefox from the official site and installing it? Otherwise the one on the drive might be set up badly. I'm not saying you have to use Firefox if you don't want to, but don't go giving it a bad name for bad reasons.