Technology needs

This is an internet only section of MTH 123. As such, you will need to have access to a computer to view the course materials that are only online. At the minimum you will need:

. (of course!) This obvious, but you need one, and you need to have unrestricted access to one. If you like to read online, instead of the book because of the added features, you will be online quite a bit. This means you need to connected in a place where you can hog the phone line,

There may be a CD-ROM with this course that replaces the book’s website. If this is the case, your computer would need a CD-ROM player.

Documents that I write can be printed out in PDF format (like this one) or straight from the browser. You may need a PDF viewer (http://www.adobe.com for a free one) to print.

In order to run a web browser. AOL, att.net, mindspring etc are all internet providers or ISP’s. The speed of your internet connection may be an issue. Not for material that I generate, but maybe for material that is on the book’s website.

ISP’s cost money for the most part and are usually around $20 per month for dialup. Cable modems and DSL are even more. However, there are free alternatives where you trade privacy for the cost. (Don’t worry, if you are on AOL they already sell all the data about you anyways). Netzero, Yahoo, lycos and others offer free 56k connections.

A web browser (as you probably know) is used to browse the web (duh). Popular ones are Netscape, Internet Explorer and the AOL browser. There are several more for the more ambitious. The requirements on the browser are

• it needs accepts cookies. (This is for logging on.)

• It needs to have images. (most all do, but text only ones do exist –and have value)

• It needs to have javascript enabled. This is for the books website which does some nifty stuff with javascript. Javascript has various forms and if you can, you should upgrade your browser to a fairly recent version as some exploits are known for older ones through javascript.

Most of you probably have one. If you don’t there are literally 100’s of free email accounts that you can access through the web. Hotmail.com started this off, but yahoo.com, netcenter.com, mail.com are also some of the web sites that see this as a sure fire way to get you coming back to their site. The email account you use will be known to the other students in the section. If this bothers you, then find an email that is used just for this class.

I prefer to get plain old email. No HTML please. Attachments if necessary.

Patience. It isn’t really a technological need, but with technology comes unexpected glitches. Patience helps. So does asking the right people!. This may be me (your prof) or the tech support at your ISP.