A feature list isn't everything. If two products do the same thing, but one does it better... which one are you going to choose?
(And on the subject of security holes, recall that not all holes are created equal. From what I can tell, Opera has a mail slot, Firefox has a doggie door, and IE has a giant sliding glass door that it doesn't bother to close.)
Well, the page at Macromedia certainly suggests that it's 64-bit OSes in general -- it doesn't name Linux or MacOS specifically, so I woud assume that 64-bit versions of XP Pro or Win2003 can only run the 32-bit versions.
On the other hand, many people commenting here seem to be treating it as a Linux issue. Maybe it's because 64-bit Windows ships with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of IE, and Firefox and Opera only seem to be providing 32-bit binaries so far. The only situation in which you're likely to end up with an OS that *only* has a 64-bit browser is a Linux system with pre-installed 64-bit versions of Firefox and/or Konqueror.
At least some of those upgrades aren't counted. Automatic upgrades through the Firefox update mechanism aren't included, and I recall reading that the count also ignores downloads with a Firefox user-agent (though I'm not 100% sure of the second part).
If you don't have any Firefox specific material on your site, prefetch is extremely unlikely to have anything to do with it. Firefox uses prefetching only under very specific circumstances -- you have to add a rel="next" or rel="prefetch" to the <a href="..."> or <link href="..."> tags.
Now it could be that someone is linking to your site using such a tag, and IIRC Google sometimes adds the attribute to the first (and only the first) search result, but those are still limited circumstances. Unless the extra hits all seem to be coming from Google, and when you repeat the search query you turn up as #1, that's probably not it.
It's not all that hard to buy an AMD64 machine with Windows XP, and modern Pentium 4 chips are 64-bit capable. The percentage of new Windows PCs with 64-bit processors is only going to increase.
It's not just about Linux and alternative OS/architecture combinations, it's about running on leading-edge (or perhaps bleeding-edge) hardware, regardless of OS.
At least, I don't recall seeing that a 64-bit version of Flash was available for Windows. Certainly TFA only refers to "64-bit operating systems." But if there is one, I'm sure you can point it out to me.
Uh, no, I haven't experienced those problems. But then I've mainly used it on Windows and Linux, so I can't really speak for the stability of the Mac version.
As for feature bloat, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. They haven't added any features to the 1.0 series, just fixed bugs, so bloat is impossible by definition. The 1.5 series is still in beta, and so that's likely to be buggier than the stable version, but back to the feature bloat question...most of what's new isn't in the form of new features so much as improvements on existing features.
How many extensions are you using? You might want to try disabling or removing some and seeing if that improves performance.
My medium-traffic mainstream site shows Firefox climbing from 7.5% Firefox a year ago to 16.5% today. My low-traffic techie site has only been up a few months, but has Firefox at 42% and Opera at 12%.
And those numbers can be depressed by people downloading once and installing across an entire computer lab.
Download numbers are download numbers. They're not pretending that download numbers are usage numbers -- accurate usage numbers are hard to get, and patterns vary widely from site to site -- it's just an easy number to track for PR purposes.
I'm sure it helps that it's guaranteed to always go up. That said, growth seems to be fairly constant -- each 25M milestone has taken roughly 2.5 to 3 months.
I suspect that the freeing of Opera has had more of an impact on Firefox than anything Microsoft is doing.
Hard to say. Just looking at stats for my own medium-traffic mainstreamish site, Opera has had a more-or-less constant share of traffic (1%, give or take a few tenths) for the past two years. Firefox has climbed from 7.5% to about 16% over the past year. (By contrast, I have a more techie-oriented site that's pulling 42% FF and 12% Opera, with only 28% IE)
On one hand, I haven't seen any sign of an increase in Opera usage since it went free. On the other hand, it's only been a month, so I wouldn't expect to see major changes just yet.
Hey, as a starting point or casual reference, it's not bad. Your chances of finding inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading content on Wikipedia are no worse than your chance of finding it on a general Internet search. If you're doing serious research, you should be following it up with other sources -- preferably primary sources as much as possible -- which ought to help you catch any misinformation you got from a bad Wikipedia article.
The real challenge is finding the volunteers to fix all the obscure articles. I recently stumbled across an article with a typo in its outline structure that had been there for about a year, and no one had noticed it in that entire time. It's kind of like getting someone to do serious UI design or end-user documentation for an open-source project. People work on what they find interesting, and if no contributors find a topic interesting, it's not going to get fixed.
There's something perversely appealing about the image of a stadium full of robots watching a game played by robots, refereed by robots. Particularly if one assumes that these are simply programmed robots and not artificial lifeforms, it reaches literarily absurd levels of meaninglessness.
Clearly, the solution for profitable business is to let someone else do all the research and development, then implement the results yourself without the burden of a huge money sink.
Actually, that's fairly typical of many industries. The leading edge is dragged down by the overhead of all the experimentation, and once they've worked out a system, the imitators have a much smoother ride. It's easier to stand on giants' shoulders than to build the stilts yourself.
Of course, some resources are rendered unusable by the way we use them. Sure, the atoms in a fuel are still around after you burn it, but you're not going to be able to get much power out of a bunch of smoke. (Exceptions include nuclear power, where the atoms aren't all still around, and particularly breeder reactors, which produce waste that you can use for more fuel.)
Actually, evolution isn't necessary -- individual adaptation will be enough to prevent Mars-born humans from easily returning to Earth. Considering how much bone and muscle mass people lose on extended stays in free-fall, I imagine people growing up in 1/3 Earth gravity are going to develop differently than people growing up in full Earth gravity.
It's hard enough to move from a warm climate to a cold one -- and that's something you can usually adapt to within a year or two. Now imagine moving to a planet with 3 times the gravity your bone structure is built for.
(Of course, when you add the effects of evolution on top of that, there's probably potential for actual speciation...)
He mentioned the MP3 CD on his website in early August. This doesn't seem to have been a "here's an announcement" post as so much as a "how did I miss that?!?!" post. Some quotes:
I've been lobbying for an MP3 version of books for years -- Harper Audio hesitated for a long time because they were worried about people buying them and then complaining that they didn't play on their CD players
I hope the MP3 CDs work, and retailers stock and sell them -- as I said, I was the one vigorously lobbying for them, because if you're going to put something on your iPod, you might as well not have to rip it yourself. Ah well, we'll see how it works. It may be that people like to buy their iPod content from Itunes and Audible, and prefer audio CDs.
Next you add in the fact that most people are too lazy to even learn to spell correctly, far less learn how to type an e with an acute accent
Yep. Note that "smart quotes" didn't come into general use until Microsoft implemented them in the auto-complete features in Microsoft Word--the same ones that will do things like correct "cafe" to "café." Of course, they used non-standard characters to do it, leading to lots of Windows-only pages and programs like the Demoroniser, and they weren't quite smart enough, leading to millions of people worldwide using left-single-quotes instead of apostrophes for things like '90s or 'Twas--and not just in Word documents, either!
Still, it was the fact that it was, essentially, effortless, that led to people actually using them instead of the straight-up-and-down quotation marks and apostrophes that we have on the keyboard.
IMDB was one of the first websites I ever looked at, back when I took a 1-hour seminar on "Using the Internet" back in fall 1994. (For almost a year I used the terms "web" and "Mosaic" interchangably, until I got a PPP dialer for my computer and installed Netscape. Other than that, it was all Terminal and Lynx unless I wanted to go into a computer lab.)
The other sites were the instructor's home page (which, like most home pages back then, consisted mainly of a much of links) and, IIRC, some directory called Yahoo.
Thinking about it, it's kind of surprising that some of the pioneers of the web are actually still around, if in vastly different forms. Usually the pioneers go out of business while the second wave makes it big.
Slashdot Mirror
A feature list isn't everything. If two products do the same thing, but one does it better... which one are you going to choose?
(And on the subject of security holes, recall that not all holes are created equal. From what I can tell, Opera has a mail slot, Firefox has a doggie door, and IE has a giant sliding glass door that it doesn't bother to close.)
Well, the page at Macromedia certainly suggests that it's 64-bit OSes in general -- it doesn't name Linux or MacOS specifically, so I woud assume that 64-bit versions of XP Pro or Win2003 can only run the 32-bit versions.
On the other hand, many people commenting here seem to be treating it as a Linux issue. Maybe it's because 64-bit Windows ships with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of IE, and Firefox and Opera only seem to be providing 32-bit binaries so far. The only situation in which you're likely to end up with an OS that *only* has a 64-bit browser is a Linux system with pre-installed 64-bit versions of Firefox and/or Konqueror.
At least some of those upgrades aren't counted. Automatic upgrades through the Firefox update mechanism aren't included, and I recall reading that the count also ignores downloads with a Firefox user-agent (though I'm not 100% sure of the second part).
If you don't have any Firefox specific material on your site, prefetch is extremely unlikely to have anything to do with it. Firefox uses prefetching only under very specific circumstances -- you have to add a rel="next" or rel="prefetch" to the <a href="..."> or <link href="..."> tags.
Now it could be that someone is linking to your site using such a tag, and IIRC Google sometimes adds the attribute to the first (and only the first) search result, but those are still limited circumstances. Unless the extra hits all seem to be coming from Google, and when you repeat the search query you turn up as #1, that's probably not it.
It's not all that hard to buy an AMD64 machine with Windows XP, and modern Pentium 4 chips are 64-bit capable. The percentage of new Windows PCs with 64-bit processors is only going to increase.
It's not just about Linux and alternative OS/architecture combinations, it's about running on leading-edge (or perhaps bleeding-edge) hardware, regardless of OS.
At least, I don't recall seeing that a 64-bit version of Flash was available for Windows. Certainly TFA only refers to "64-bit operating systems." But if there is one, I'm sure you can point it out to me.
Uh, no, I haven't experienced those problems. But then I've mainly used it on Windows and Linux, so I can't really speak for the stability of the Mac version.
As for feature bloat, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. They haven't added any features to the 1.0 series, just fixed bugs, so bloat is impossible by definition. The 1.5 series is still in beta, and so that's likely to be buggier than the stable version, but back to the feature bloat question...most of what's new isn't in the form of new features so much as improvements on existing features.
How many extensions are you using? You might want to try disabling or removing some and seeing if that improves performance.
IIRC they don't count downloads with a Firefox user-agent. I'm not 100% sure of that, but I recall reading that somewhere.
If that's correct, that means it depends on whether you used Firefox or another browser to download the updated installer.
My medium-traffic mainstream site shows Firefox climbing from 7.5% Firefox a year ago to 16.5% today. My low-traffic techie site has only been up a few months, but has Firefox at 42% and Opera at 12%.
And those numbers can be depressed by people downloading once and installing across an entire computer lab.
Download numbers are download numbers. They're not pretending that download numbers are usage numbers -- accurate usage numbers are hard to get, and patterns vary widely from site to site -- it's just an easy number to track for PR purposes.
I'm sure it helps that it's guaranteed to always go up. That said, growth seems to be fairly constant -- each 25M milestone has taken roughly 2.5 to 3 months.
Hard to say. Just looking at stats for my own medium-traffic mainstreamish site, Opera has had a more-or-less constant share of traffic (1%, give or take a few tenths) for the past two years. Firefox has climbed from 7.5% to about 16% over the past year. (By contrast, I have a more techie-oriented site that's pulling 42% FF and 12% Opera, with only 28% IE)
On one hand, I haven't seen any sign of an increase in Opera usage since it went free. On the other hand, it's only been a month, so I wouldn't expect to see major changes just yet.
That reminds me of a saying about the internet itself:
The best thing about the web is that anyone can publish. The worst thing about the web is that anyone can publish.
Hey, as a starting point or casual reference, it's not bad. Your chances of finding inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading content on Wikipedia are no worse than your chance of finding it on a general Internet search. If you're doing serious research, you should be following it up with other sources -- preferably primary sources as much as possible -- which ought to help you catch any misinformation you got from a bad Wikipedia article.
The real challenge is finding the volunteers to fix all the obscure articles. I recently stumbled across an article with a typo in its outline structure that had been there for about a year, and no one had noticed it in that entire time. It's kind of like getting someone to do serious UI design or end-user documentation for an open-source project. People work on what they find interesting, and if no contributors find a topic interesting, it's not going to get fixed.
There's something perversely appealing about the image of a stadium full of robots watching a game played by robots, refereed by robots. Particularly if one assumes that these are simply programmed robots and not artificial lifeforms, it reaches literarily absurd levels of meaninglessness.
Clearly, the solution for profitable business is to let someone else do all the research and development, then implement the results yourself without the burden of a huge money sink.
Actually, that's fairly typical of many industries. The leading edge is dragged down by the overhead of all the experimentation, and once they've worked out a system, the imitators have a much smoother ride. It's easier to stand on giants' shoulders than to build the stilts yourself.
Of course, some resources are rendered unusable by the way we use them. Sure, the atoms in a fuel are still around after you burn it, but you're not going to be able to get much power out of a bunch of smoke. (Exceptions include nuclear power, where the atoms aren't all still around, and particularly breeder reactors, which produce waste that you can use for more fuel.)
Add in sufficient sheilding, and I think you've just described dozens of sci-fi novels from the 1940s and 1950s.
So, how old is the phrase "photo finish," anyway?
That's what the Internet is for.
Oh, wait, you said quality... Never mind.
Actually, evolution isn't necessary -- individual adaptation will be enough to prevent Mars-born humans from easily returning to Earth. Considering how much bone and muscle mass people lose on extended stays in free-fall, I imagine people growing up in 1/3 Earth gravity are going to develop differently than people growing up in full Earth gravity.
It's hard enough to move from a warm climate to a cold one -- and that's something you can usually adapt to within a year or two. Now imagine moving to a planet with 3 times the gravity your bone structure is built for.
(Of course, when you add the effects of evolution on top of that, there's probably potential for actual speciation...)
That always bothered me as well. He can't figure out the mouse, but he can use a 300-year-old keyboard design without resorting to hunt-and-peck?
Ah, I was going to post a link to last year's story. Looks like you've beat me to it, and added in an older one that I'd forgotten, as well!
Yes, yes, I know, a whole continent of people can't spell that metal's name.
I wish there was an option to mod that as -1, Elitist.
Like it or not, on this continent "aluminum" is the correct spelling.
He mentioned the MP3 CD on his website in early August. This doesn't seem to have been a "here's an announcement" post as so much as a "how did I miss that?!?!" post. Some quotes:
Yep. Note that "smart quotes" didn't come into general use until Microsoft implemented them in the auto-complete features in Microsoft Word--the same ones that will do things like correct "cafe" to "café." Of course, they used non-standard characters to do it, leading to lots of Windows-only pages and programs like the Demoroniser, and they weren't quite smart enough, leading to millions of people worldwide using left-single-quotes instead of apostrophes for things like '90s or 'Twas--and not just in Word documents, either!
Still, it was the fact that it was, essentially, effortless, that led to people actually using them instead of the straight-up-and-down quotation marks and apostrophes that we have on the keyboard.
IMDB was one of the first websites I ever looked at, back when I took a 1-hour seminar on "Using the Internet" back in fall 1994. (For almost a year I used the terms "web" and "Mosaic" interchangably, until I got a PPP dialer for my computer and installed Netscape. Other than that, it was all Terminal and Lynx unless I wanted to go into a computer lab.)
The other sites were the instructor's home page (which, like most home pages back then, consisted mainly of a much of links) and, IIRC, some directory called Yahoo.
Thinking about it, it's kind of surprising that some of the pioneers of the web are actually still around, if in vastly different forms. Usually the pioneers go out of business while the second wave makes it big.