HN user
I'm looking forward to the day when you can buy a SIM card from a cell carrier which offers only data and text, no voice call support.
You can get these now. Get an LTE USB stick sim and add a $10 text package to it. You can add voice as well, but why bother.
Thanks for the tip on the Creator sets, I visited my local games store recently but did not see these. Just bought a couple sets on Amazon... now I have Lego again (in a few days)! :D
I think the Google location is Windsor, but I know they have an office in Montréal and probably Toronto as well.
Think everything is an icon rather than everything is a file.
I think it is trying to be a simple and elegant desktop system. It requires nearly zero configuration and has a consistent look and performs well.
I get the feeling it aims to be an open source implementation of what the original Mac was meant to be (pre-OSX)... boot-to-desktop with no terminal layer spawning first.
No, it has a built-in browser. Not sure what engine is behind it but it reminds me of the Konqueror days. There is no Firefox build that is reasonably current that I have seen yet (hopefully I'm wrong, please someone prove me wrong).
I have been interested in Haiku for awhile but could not get it to install. Last week I finally realized that I could run it in a VirtualBox instance so I started trying it out. I like it... very simple UI, very clean, and very fast.
It comes with many Unix-like shell utilities including scp and ssh. git is installed. There is a graphical text editor and something resembling a package manager that will allow you to fetch vim.
The web browser is a bit lacking/weird/not-sure-how-to-describe, but reading through the installation manual it appears that many Wifi chipsets are supported via BSD drivers.
Press shift when booting if you can't get anywhere, and definitely read the manual. There are few necessary concepts to learn...
Really reminds me of Mac OS 7-9, but much more stable and a better user interface. I'm considering using it for back-end web development (as most of my work is server-based). I'm not concerned about Flash anymore so that is a non-issue.
I've had mixed results with Voip and reading some of the comments here just turned me on to STUN and TURN.
See this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MWYw0fltr0 which explains the causes behind reliability problems.
I have thought about running my own server to manage my NATted voip calls and knowing ice/stun/turn will help has now led me to this: http://www.rtcquickstart.org/introduction
I'm thinking I might try to implement this. Voip on my mobile phone would be great, but I've had my hopes dashed before...
This is cool, I could consider booting up my old netbook again if I can just use flash. One problem I foresee though is that the keyboard layouts are some short list. I don't know which "Canadian" keyboard layout it is, there are at least 3 common variations. I hope they can fix that so we can select from the full list of keyboards.
I think the real issue here is PayPal. I just opened an OVH account not that long ago and was surprised they only accept PayPal in Canada and USA.
So I opened a business PayPal account even though I have no intention of becoming a "paypal merchant". To my surprise, PayPal holds the money 8-10 days. Excellent.
It took about 20 days to get the payment through, so at least they started the billing cycle from that point.
Having heard so many PayPal horror stories I would not be surprised if they got screwed over somehow.
This closely resembles my experience getting my business established with Québec. Eventually I sent an email to the helpdesk complaining about all of the issues and in return they sent me an address to an office downtown. That office is the helpdesk and processing center.
Since then I go to the office every time, chat with the people, ask questions, fill out my forms, and they process it immediately.
It took over one year to finally gain access to all the components of the online system. I still can't read their PDFs because they require an Adobe plugin for PDF "security".
At any rate, see if you have the ability to go in person. Helps with the language barrier and probably more effective.