MSNTV, WebTV, Interactive Television, Set Top Appliance, LBB, Little Black Box, Inexpensive Internet Access, Computer Phobia, Virus Free WWW, Easy To Use 'Net, Table Art, Audioscope Art, Basic HTML, Why Computers Hate Us, Internet For: The Disabled, Elderly, Poor "Just when u think yer life is hard, along comes MSNTV to remind u: it could b WORSE! :)" ~~Rogi
WebTV Only: Copy & Paste Any Amount Of
Text In This Box To Enlarge It For The Vision Impaired. *THIS BOX WILL EXPAND*
I got a JOB from my MSNTV! Most of the articles posted here: Rogi Writes cost Net4TV Voice $25 each! I'd have done it for free, of course, because it was so much FUN! And Dudette KNOWS it! LOL...
But, when the dot coms crashed, she had to stop publishing, because investors were timid. sigh....
I have a puter; I FOUND IT IN A DUMPSTER! whoo hoo! it came with all the connections, speakers, a microphone, keyboard, games cdroms and some other stuff. I dragged it home in my cart. Dudette sent me a modem, but it was only 28k, and sooooo slow! I was on One Plan for awhile, but finally gave up on the puter, cuz MSNTV was so much faster, easier, less hostile, and familiar. Then, apparantly, a cat walked across the kbd or something, and some of the Windows95 files with which it came loaded got deleted or corrupted or something. So, it sits under my living room table, collecting dust.
Recently, I bought a gas powered scooter from eBay for less than two hundred dollars, including shipping. It's got a flat tire right now, but I can get a new one from eBay, as soon as I save enough money. The scooter means I can go out at night, drag home groceries in the trailer I fashoned for it, save bus fare, not wear out my legs, look for an offline job, and have a social life! I couldn't go ANYWHERE at night for ten years! I haven't been able to go anywhere since Wednesday this week, because the busses didn't run Thursday or Friday.
I couldn't buy a gas powered scooter in this town for under EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS! except a junky, little toy Pep Boys is selling for xmas!
And there are whole websites that teach me how to repair the scooter, my washingmachine (also trash), etc.
I REFUSE to sit up here in this slum, isolated, and act like a dang victim, just because it makes the smug feel comfortable!
One can only access a library computer for three hours per day, based on availability. If all computers are occupied, one must sign up to a waiting list.
One may not attach any hardware to a public library computer. This includes scanners and printers. Therefore, one is required to pay $0.15 per print out page of internet web sites.
A bus transfer in Albuquerque, NM costs $1.00 and is only good for two hours.
To use the library computers every week day for three hours, here's what I'd pay per month.
$40.00 bus fare
If I print out only ten pages per week, I'd pay an additional $6.00 for printing.
I could hand-copy everything, but that would use up my computer time, writing everything down.
If I require child care at, say $5.00 per hour, that would be an additional fifteen dollars per day.
In addition, there's the travel time, to and from the library. Only ONE library, the main branch, downtown, is directly in front of a bus stop. Most others are a three-block, minimum, walk from the nearest bus stop. Temperatures in Albuquerque range from over 100 degrees farenheit on summer days to well below freezing on winter nights. This makes the trip quite stressful for some of us who are disabled.
In addition to all this, factor in the fact that MOST poor people have JOBS. Many of us also have family members for which we care, such as children and elderly or disabled relatives.
Factor in the travel time to and from work, because the jobs are rarely in the low-income housing areas of town, and that eats up at least an hour or two per day. Many busses in Albuquerque only run every twenty, forty or sixty minutes.
So, in order for a working mother to access the "free" library computers five days a week her day would run a minimum of fourteen hours. And that doesn't include taking care of children, cleaning, cooking, running other errands, etc.
And it would cost her a minimum of forty dollars' bus fare per month.
She couldn't: cook, supervise her kids, sit in a bed to rest her aching feet, keep an eye on grandma, run a load of laundry, help with homework or lounge around in her underwear after a hard day's work on a public computer, either!
well, people market to the poor, all the time: rent-to-own furniture, predatory lending and "check cashing" and "credit counselling," death insurance, lotteries, discount stores, etc. There's more advertising for alcohol, tobacco and lottery tickets in low-income neighborhoods than elsewhere, too.
Exploiting the poor is an old tradition in capitalism.
There are cheap clothes, cheap cell phones and other electronics, cheap cars, generic foods and drugs, cheap shoes: made by Chinese prisoners and third-world sweatshops. Wal*mart, the world's largest retailer, is FOUNDED on these.
I just heard a "tutorial on tv buying" on NPR's Morning Edition today. According to them, only about 2% of the "big box" stores' sales is in HDTV and plasma tvs. So, 98% of television sales are not high-end products. Parenthetically, Wal*mart was advertising a small, color tv with built-in DVD player for less than $130 for today's after Thanksgiving early sale. I'm reasonably sure it wasn't manufactured in the USA, nor by union workers.
So, the price of the appliance doesn't seem to be a major issue.
MSNTV is an enhancement to computer use, too, as shown by the popularity of the MSN One Plan, which allows multiple MSNTV units to be used in conjunction with computer use in a single household.
MSNTV could be marketed that way. Electronics stores sell all kinds of things besides the hardware for computer use: software, add ons, etc. Having an MSNTV box near the hard drives would be extra sales, not less money.
People could buy them for their kids! They've got surf control and password protections, they allow for up to six users, etc. And Grandma could have an account, too, without having to learn software.
Nope, I really don't think it's the price of the appliance; X Box is selling just fine, thank you, and its guts are WebTV.
The fault is in the marketing, not in the hardware.
I go without some basics in order to be online with my MSNTV. If someone hadn't thrown out ten, brand-new pairs of sweat pants in the dumpster down the alley from my place, for instance, I wouldn't have any sweatpants to wear right now. I dumpster dive, to keep from needing to buy stuff.
I paid for my MSNTV by selling loot I dived from the dumpster.
My neighbors in the "War Zone" throw away small fortunes, renting movies, getting drunk, paying for cable and otherwise trying to entertain themselves, to relieve the monotonous depression of being trapped in poverty.
It's hard for me to get to libraries, concerts, lectures, etc. on the bus. It's hard for me to get to the local Flea Market, to sell my arts and crafts.
So, I do these things on the 'net.
People ask me, all the time, "if you're so poor, how come you're online?"
Because I need to research stuff, like medical care, repairs, legal info, consumer info, etc. Because I need to participate in life, not be held hostage by my poverty and forced into the solitary confinement of being a shut in in a slum.
How can I afford NOT to be online???
It's one of the main reasons I'm frustrated by MSNTV's indifference to its own product and subscribers.
If my neighbors all knew about MSNTV, maybe their kids would have options besides drug and alcohol abuse for amusement, teen pregnancy, violence and criminal behavior. Maybe some of them could make it to college!
People act like MSNTV is a toy. Well, for me, it's a lifeline.
This image graced our MSNTV home page for about a week. Top MSNTV User Questions I'm not kidding. That's a video capture someone with an MSNTV Plus unit took!
I'm trying to show samples of what I'm able to do with web site building, so maybe some sucker, uh, customer, will hire me.
I swiped this idea from somebody a loooong time ago. I can't remember who. HMS56 knows, but he won't tell me.
I gussied it up a bit and added some junk, but basically it's all a stolen idea.
But it's a good thing I did it, because the original phony status board seems to have bitten the dust. I can't find it anywhere!
WHat was broken was the javascript on the "done" button. It would only produce the first pop up in the sequence.
I finally found a script, after looking for a couple of hours, and fixing it my way for at LEAST another hour.
It was a pain in the garbanzos, believe me.
But the more I put out there, that people might actually post around the internet, the more likely someone will stumble across me and PAY ME for how not stupid I am! LOL
Rogi's Status Board. Computers, this won't look like anything to you; it's got graphics which are behind the MSNTV firewall, which I cannot copy into a format you can see. Sorry. But click the "done" button, anyway...
W32/Mimail-I began spreading yesterday on the Internet
Story by Paul Roberts
NOVEMBER 14, 2003 ( IDG NEWS SERVICE ) - A new e-mail worm is spreading on the Internet and posing as a message from PayPal Inc., the online payment company, in an effort to harvest credit card numbers and account passwords, leading antivirus companies warned today. W32/Mimail-I is a new version of the Mimail worm, which first appeared in August, and is believed to be the first e-mail worm specifically designed to steal personal financial and account information, an online crime known as phishing.
Mimail-I first appeared late yesterday in what antivirus experts believe was a massive e-mail "seeding," in which spam programs are used to distribute messages containing the virus attachment, according to Craig Schmugar, a virus research engineer at McAfee Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team, or AVERT, which is part of Network Associates Inc. Like earlier editions of Mimail, the I-variant can also spread by itself. The worm contains its own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) e-mail engine and harvests e-mail addresses from victims' computers, Schmugar said.
Unlike earlier versions of Mimail, the new variant contains a message that tells recipients that their PayPal account will soon expire and that they need to re-enter their credit card information through "our secure application," referring to the executable file attached to the e-mail message
PayPal is owned by Ebay.Inc
Full story is here:
here
I wrote this to a yahoo group, primarily computer users, about three years ago:
I was assuming the Yahoo group would continue?
Webmasters use different forms of codes when they build sites. Computers can, theoretically at least, download software and/or upgrade browser functions
to cope with these (e.g.: ever been to a site that requests you download RealAudio or Flash?).
Webtv has no capacity to upload/download on the users' side. We can only do whatever MicroSoft gives us to do. New software is distributed by means of "upgrades," periodically. These have, in recent history, been extrememly problematic: releasing features some of us don't need (mp3, InstantMessenger) and have also unleashed frustrating bugs.
One of the worst bugs has been a "cookie dump." It prohibits cookied sites from recognizing our browsers...even sites for which we've signed up and have pass words. Another bug is a JavaScript bug which prevents us from "seeing" JS coding. But this second one is "curable" by reloading (our word for "refresh").
Our little set top boxes have small memories, compared to most modern computers. They can only store so many "gadgets." Fortunately, most of the burden is taken up by our network servers. Another benefit to this is that we never pick up viruses.
I recently hooked up a PC I found last year in the trash to the internet. I hate it. It's impersonal, stubborn, inigmatic, tempramental. I'm always afraid
I'll sneeze and delete some essential file. I'm afraid of sites online which might contaminnate it. It's a much more awkward medium for me. I have serious memory issues and, learning a new "language" at the age of 45, with Multiple Sclerosis, is very daunting, to say the least.
So I tend to correspond by WebTV rather than puter.
PLEASE accept my most humble apologies for the massive image you encountered on my web site, http://rriverstone.com!
This is one of the weird things about being on MSNTV. That image loads in less than 10 seconds for me. It's because I'm on a network, and have all the force and power of Billy Gates' toys to pass a melon through the eye of a needle.
Another problem with images and MSNTV: we can't view sources of pages, unless we go to another tool website to read the details or source codes.
I had no idea that image was as large as the Sears Tower. I should have looked it up at an online source viewer, at http://webscissors.com , etc.
But it's been...oh, two years, maybe since I messed with images much larger than my wiggle worms.
I also forget to add width and height dimensions into my HTML coding, which drives some computers crazy.
I'm having to relearn HTML. Gag. But I'll get it.
I went to Image Magick http://magick.net4tv.com/ and did the following: resized, reduced colors, dithered and otherwize beat to death that hidious monster.
I THINK I've reduced it to 1/4 its original size. It's still big, but you don't have to rent an extra apartment for it to live in anymore.
Does it load better now, or do you all still want me tarred and feathered?
MSNTV is the dangedest contraption ever plugged into a wall!
Bear with me. I've only recently ventured out to communicate with the puter world, and I still think like a webtv user.
* Live From Baghdad An Ordinary Iraqi Speaks Out: "The U.S. Has No Intention of Leaving Iraq" *
As the Baghdad headquarters of U.S. occupation forces comes under fire, we turn to a voice rarely heard in the U.S. media -- that of an ordinary Iraqi. We go to Baghdad to hear from retired engineer Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar.
* "I Find That A Travesty" - Joseph Wilson On Reports the White House May Invoke Executive Privilege In the Investigation of the Outting of His Wife As a CIA Operative *
Joseph Wilson, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, joins us in our firehouse studios to discuss the ongoing investigation as to who outted his wife as a CIA operative days after he blew the whistle on the White House's key case that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear program.
* Scientific McCarthyism: Is The Bush Administration Compiling a Hit List of AIDS Scientists? *
A list of over 150 scientists - which may have originated in the Department of Health - researching a wide range of topics related to health and sexuality, including HIV/AIDS, has been given to federal officials and is being used in attempts to discredit the researchers and challenge or revoke their federal grants.
* Headlines, November 5 *
- Pentagon Recruits Volunteers To Fill Draft Boards
- More U.S. Troops Needed in Iraq As Turkey Balks
- Mother of Deceased Soldier: Why Are We Still In Iraq?
- Supreme Court To Rule on Secret Court Proceedings
- UN Votes 179-3 to Condemn U.S. Embargo on Cuba
- Unemployment Rate For Young African Americans Up To 18%
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