As luck would have it, I went through my organization's web logs just the other day for info on browsers. Here's a summary of what I found, for anyone who's interested.
12 months ago, IE accounted for a steady 94% of hits. Gecko-based browsers (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, Firefox) accounted for 3%. Netscape 4 had around 1.5% of the hits, Safari just under 1%, Opera about 0.5%, and Konqueror 0.1%.
Firefox started registering in my logs around July, when the Gecko share jumped to 4.3%, rising steadily to 5.7% in October. In December Gecko jumped up to 7%, and is currently around 8.2% (March-April). Firefox now represents about 80% of Gecko-based browsers. The number of non-Firefox Gecko hits (ie. Netscape 6+, etc) has remained more-or-less steady.
IE's decline matches Firefox's rise - by October, it was down to 92%. IE now rates around 87% of hits on our site.
Safari has increased to about 2.5%. Netscape 4 has (finally) declined to virtual insignificance. Sadly, Konqueror has also declined steadily, maybe 0.03% in a good month (looks like a lot of Konqueror users have switched to Firefox too).
These stats come from an Australian state government website that receives about 3 million hits per month. The site is not technology-oriented, and about half of the hits come from overseas, so I believe that this is a reasonably good sample of browser use.
You all know this: The devil is in the details. The programming impact would be larger than anticipated.
Why would there need to be any "programming changes" ? All of the DLS info is stored in config files on various operating systems; all you have to do is change the config for any affected timezones.
This sort of thing happened in 2000 in Australia - DLS was extended here to give more daylight hours for the Sydney Olympics. Great idea. Worked fine, no problems. All of the major OS vendors (Microsoft, Sun, IBM, all the Linux distros) simply issued updated timezone info in the form of patches, way ahead of time. Nothing bad happened. Nobody noticed. No big deal.
apt-get upgrade apache is rapid - it takes 15s on a fast system.
This is a bit pedantic, but...
On a Debian system, "apt-get upgrade apache" will upgrade every package on your system (If you can do that in 15 seconds, I'd like to see what kind of hardware and network connection you've got !!!).
Actually, "apt-get upgrade" is what gets run when you type that command. apt-get seems to ignore anything after the "upgrade" keyword, which IMHO ought to give a syntax error.
The command you really mean is "apt-get --reinstall install apache".
Here's my theory of what Google is planning. Its not related to the telephony thing, so sorry if its off-topic.
At the moment, Microsoft dominates consumer computing. Why ? Because the desktop is the computer, and Microsoft owns the desktop.
Remember the Sun catchphrase, "the network is the computer" ? Sun's plan was to replace fat desktops with thin clients connected to their servers, and thus rule the world. It didn't work for a number of reasons - Sun was not powerful enough, they couldn't convince enough people to see their vision, the network infrastructure wasn't there, their servers couldn't provide all the functionality of a PC.
Now look at Google. They probably have the best server infrastructure in the world. They are constantly providing new cool services on those servers. They currently provide enough diskspace to store all your email; perhaps soon they'll provide enough disk so you can store all your info on their servers. Now, if they can put in place the network infrastructure to provide fast access between the user and the servers, then the Sun dream starts to become a reality.
So, Google provides a complete thin desktop solution. You don't need your crash-prone virus-magnet fat client PC anymore. Google will store (and back up) all your data, provide all the software you need, and you can access it from anywhere in the world.
The network becomes the computer. Google owns the network. So, Google owns consumer computing.
Google wins. Microsoft loses.
Well, its just a theory. Let's wait and see if Google invests in thin-client technology.
Faster load times would be great. Word loads in about one second on my computer; there is no excuse for OO.o taking more than ten seconds.
MS Office loads as fast as it does because its dll's are loaded into memory at boot time. The trade-off is a slower boot (but people don't notice, because Windows takes a minute or so to boot anyway; an extra 10 seconds makes little difference). Also, you're loading a program into memory that you might not use (although RAM is relatively cheap these days, so again its not such a big deal).
Does anyone know if OOo has this load-dlls-at-boot option ? (I know Mozilla does).
Anyway, if you want a product that sings, dances, and makes coffee for you, then spend the $$$ and buy MS Office. If you want something that is Good Enough(TM) for your word processing requirements, then use OOo for free.
Or, to make an analogy, if you want a Rolls Royce, then expect to pay for it; if you don't need all the features of a Rolls, then a Ford/Chevy/Toyota/whatever should do. (The trouble is, Microsoft's Rolls Royce runs on proprietary roads.)
I do a fair bit of word processing, but nothing more complex than paragraph styles, tables, list indents, ToC's, etc., and OOo is fine for me.
Re:You sure about your example?
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
And Dollar will never melt down as long as Oil is traded only in Dollars.
I read somewhere that one of the reasons George Bush wanted to invade Iraq so urgently was because Saddam was about to start trading Iraq's oil in Euros, rather than dollars. If that had happened, it may have been the start of a long journey down a slippery slope for the dollar.
Re:Free Speech in Denmark??
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's nothing. You can be jailed anywhere in the world if the US president thinks you're a terrorist. Give me a Danish judge any day.
"The point is that empowered plants are more liekly to be successfully grown by an uneducated, amatuer farmer. If you could give the starving world a crop that would grow just by putting it in the ground, that would directly save lives."
I agree with your statement, assuming that the empowered plant is capable of re-producing (ie. the offspring of the parent seed is also fertile); or that the farmers in developing countries can afford to pay the licensing fees that are demanded by the owners of the GM technology to buy new seeds each season, without getting into mountains of (more) debt.
However, I don't think that either of these things are likely.
DeepDarkSky is spot-on with this one. Starvation is not caused by insufficient food production - starvation is caused by our inability/unwillingness to distribute the over-abundance of food in the developed world to people who are starving.
Introducing more GM food won't solve this. Why should it ? If there's surplus food in the world now, then why will more surplus food make a difference, as long as the people who control supply remain in charge ? The "lets promote the use of GM food to end starvation" arguement is pushed by those who will benefit from the $$$'s in patent licensing of GM products. They are amongst the most evil people in the world, IMHO. How much lower can you get, than to try to profit by taking advantage of other people's suffering ?
The fact that this switch from open to effectively closed voting software has occured in Australia might create an opportunity to get the issue out into the media.
Unlike most countries, voting is actually compulsory in Australia. If you don't vote in a federal or state election, and you don't have a good reason, you get fined. If you refuse to pay your fine, then you have to answer to a court. If you keep on refusing to accept some form of penalty, then eventually you get sent to jail.
If even a small number of people were to refuse to vote in an election, on the basis that they thought the election process was not transparent, and then subsequently wound up in jail, this would be bound to generate media interest. It would get the issue out in the open where the public could hear the issues involved and think about it. Who knows, maybe it could even attract international attention ?
I don't know why this was mod-ed funny - Asimov added the Zeroth Law (and revised the First) in his later Robot novels (as he merged the series into the Foundation saga).
The article states that the new anti-virus feature "checks for third-party anti-virus and firewall software and lets users know whether it is enabled or not".
That doesn't sound the same as a competitor to Symantec/McAffee/etc., they're just writing a monitor to warn the user if they've got AV running or not.
My work purchased some new IPAQ's a couple of months ago to develop wireless gis applications (projects that I will be involved in in the new year), and I get to look after one.
I use the one I have mainly for the calender and to-do lists. I like the way calendar appointments for the day are displayed on the main desktop (palmtop?) screen. I also use the alarm function occasionally to remind me of stuff. I've never used an electronic organiser before, and I was previously sceptical about them, but now that I've got one, its definitely improved my personal organisation at work. If/when I have to give it up, I'll probably buy myself a cheaper Palm model.
I also use it, like a lot of other people, for reading. Not so much e-books - man pages, Java API docs, articles pointed to on Slashdot:-), all sorts of stuff. Lots of things that I would never usually get around to reading, becuase I don't like sitting in front of a desktop PC any longer than I have to. But with the PDA, if I see something I think I might want to read, I can download it, and read it over a beer in front of the TV at night, or in bed, or whenever I've got a few minutes to kill. Its not as good as reading a real book, but its much better (and much more convenient) than reading off a desktop monitor, or even a laptop for that matter.
I also find it very handy for copying files from work to home, or vice-versa. A floppy can only hold 1.4Mb, I can squeeze 50Mb onto the IPAQ if I have to.
My main complaints about the PDA stem from the fact that it runs Microsoft's PocketPC OS. The calendar and stuff will only synchronise with Outlook 2002, which, being a Linux desktop user, I don't use (I'd love to get it to synchronise with something like Evolution or Korganizer). Also, I can't use the USB connection, since it requires MS's ActiveSync software (but I've got it connected just fine to Linux using PPP over the serial port, and 115Kb/s isn't too slow for most things - even copying a 30Mb file onto it at work to take home is ok, if I remember to start doing it an hour before I leave work).
Maybe one day when I get brave I'll blow away PPC and install Linux:-)
Get a small disk, and put your boot loader on that
on
Finding BIOS Upgrades?
·
· Score: 1
I have an old 486 at home that has the same 500Mb restriction.
I put 2 disks into it - a 330Mb (with Windows 95), and a 2Gb (with Red Hat 6.2). LILO is installed on the 330Mb master. The BIOS finds LILO, then LILO loads Windows or Linux. Works fine. It should work ok with a bigger slave disk too, as long as the/boot partition is in the first 1023 sectors, or whatever that limitation is.
Why? So Microsoft can profit at the expense of the education of our children? You absolute ****ing *i*si*ng i*i*tic bunch of *uc*ing a**eh*les! *an** *a*s*** of the *i*** *rd***! You ****p** **s** **e*s*s!!!
This is a quote from an old version of the Perl FAQ:
"If you're on Unix, you already have an IDE -- Unix itself.
This powerful IDE derives from its interoperability,
flexibility, and configurability. If you really want to
get a feel for Unix-qua-IDE, the best thing to do is to
find some high-powered programmer whose native language is
Unix. Find someone who has been at this for many years,
and just sit back and watch them at work. They have
created their own IDE, one that suits their own tastes and
aptitudes. Quietly observe them edit files, move them
around, compile them, debug them, test them, etc. The
entire development *is* integrated, like a top-of-the-line
German sports car: functional, powerful, and elegant. You
will be absolutely astonished at the speed and ease
exhibited by the native speaker of Unix in his home
territory. The art and skill of a virtuoso can only be
seen to be believed. That is the path to mastery -- all
these cobbled little IDEs are expensive toys designed to
sell a flashy demo using cheap tricks, and being optimized
for immediate but shallow understanding rather than
enduring use, are but a dim palimpsest of real tools.
In short, you just have to learn the toolbox. However, if
you're not on Unix, then your vendor probably didn't
bother to provide you with a proper toolbox on the so-
called complete system that you forked out your hard-earned cash on."
Slashdot Mirror
12 months ago, IE accounted for a steady 94% of hits. Gecko-based browsers (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, Firefox) accounted for 3%. Netscape 4 had around 1.5% of the hits, Safari just under 1%, Opera about 0.5%, and Konqueror 0.1%.
Firefox started registering in my logs around July, when the Gecko share jumped to 4.3%, rising steadily to 5.7% in October. In December Gecko jumped up to 7%, and is currently around 8.2% (March-April). Firefox now represents about 80% of Gecko-based browsers. The number of non-Firefox Gecko hits (ie. Netscape 6+, etc) has remained more-or-less steady.
IE's decline matches Firefox's rise - by October, it was down to 92%. IE now rates around 87% of hits on our site.
Safari has increased to about 2.5%. Netscape 4 has (finally) declined to virtual insignificance. Sadly, Konqueror has also declined steadily, maybe 0.03% in a good month (looks like a lot of Konqueror users have switched to Firefox too).
These stats come from an Australian state government website that receives about 3 million hits per month. The site is not technology-oriented, and about half of the hits come from overseas, so I believe that this is a reasonably good sample of browser use.
Why would there need to be any "programming changes" ? All of the DLS info is stored in config files on various operating systems; all you have to do is change the config for any affected timezones.
This sort of thing happened in 2000 in Australia - DLS was extended here to give more daylight hours for the Sydney Olympics. Great idea. Worked fine, no problems. All of the major OS vendors (Microsoft, Sun, IBM, all the Linux distros) simply issued updated timezone info in the form of patches, way ahead of time. Nothing bad happened. Nobody noticed. No big deal.
So, "trusted computing" becomes mandatory ?
This is a bit pedantic, but...
On a Debian system, "apt-get upgrade apache" will upgrade every package on your system (If you can do that in 15 seconds, I'd like to see what kind of hardware and network connection you've got !!!).
Actually, "apt-get upgrade" is what gets run when you type that command. apt-get seems to ignore anything after the "upgrade" keyword, which IMHO ought to give a syntax error.
The command you really mean is "apt-get --reinstall install apache".
Here's my theory of what Google is planning. Its not related to the telephony thing, so sorry if its off-topic.
At the moment, Microsoft dominates consumer computing. Why ? Because the desktop is the computer, and Microsoft owns the desktop.
Remember the Sun catchphrase, "the network is the computer" ? Sun's plan was to replace fat desktops with thin clients connected to their servers, and thus rule the world. It didn't work for a number of reasons - Sun was not powerful enough, they couldn't convince enough people to see their vision, the network infrastructure wasn't there, their servers couldn't provide all the functionality of a PC.
Now look at Google. They probably have the best server infrastructure in the world. They are constantly providing new cool services on those servers. They currently provide enough diskspace to store all your email; perhaps soon they'll provide enough disk so you can store all your info on their servers. Now, if they can put in place the network infrastructure to provide fast access between the user and the servers, then the Sun dream starts to become a reality.
So, Google provides a complete thin desktop solution. You don't need your crash-prone virus-magnet fat client PC anymore. Google will store (and back up) all your data, provide all the software you need, and you can access it from anywhere in the world.
The network becomes the computer. Google owns the network. So, Google owns consumer computing.
Google wins. Microsoft loses.
Well, its just a theory. Let's wait and see if Google invests in thin-client technology.
I reckon the blank dialog box was caused by spyware that got installed while he was running IE :-)
MS Office loads as fast as it does because its dll's are loaded into memory at boot time. The trade-off is a slower boot (but people don't notice, because Windows takes a minute or so to boot anyway; an extra 10 seconds makes little difference). Also, you're loading a program into memory that you might not use (although RAM is relatively cheap these days, so again its not such a big deal).
Does anyone know if OOo has this load-dlls-at-boot option ? (I know Mozilla does).
Anyway, if you want a product that sings, dances, and makes coffee for you, then spend the $$$ and buy MS Office. If you want something that is Good Enough(TM) for your word processing requirements, then use OOo for free.
Or, to make an analogy, if you want a Rolls Royce, then expect to pay for it; if you don't need all the features of a Rolls, then a Ford/Chevy/Toyota/whatever should do. (The trouble is, Microsoft's Rolls Royce runs on proprietary roads.)
I do a fair bit of word processing, but nothing more complex than paragraph styles, tables, list indents, ToC's, etc., and OOo is fine for me.
I read somewhere that one of the reasons George Bush wanted to invade Iraq so urgently was because Saddam was about to start trading Iraq's oil in Euros, rather than dollars. If that had happened, it may have been the start of a long journey down a slippery slope for the dollar.
That's nothing. You can be jailed anywhere in the world if the US president thinks you're a terrorist. Give me a Danish judge any day.
"The point is that empowered plants are more liekly to be successfully grown by an uneducated, amatuer farmer. If you could give the starving world a crop that would grow just by putting it in the ground, that would directly save lives."
I agree with your statement, assuming that the empowered plant is capable of re-producing (ie. the offspring of the parent seed is also fertile); or that the farmers in developing countries can afford to pay the licensing fees that are demanded by the owners of the GM technology to buy new seeds each season, without getting into mountains of (more) debt.
However, I don't think that either of these things are likely.
DeepDarkSky is spot-on with this one. Starvation is not caused by insufficient food production - starvation is caused by our inability/unwillingness to distribute the over-abundance of food in the developed world to people who are starving.
Introducing more GM food won't solve this. Why should it ? If there's surplus food in the world now, then why will more surplus food make a difference, as long as the people who control supply remain in charge ? The "lets promote the use of GM food to end starvation" arguement is pushed by those who will benefit from the $$$'s in patent licensing of GM products. They are amongst the most evil people in the world, IMHO. How much lower can you get, than to try to profit by taking advantage of other people's suffering ?
But in this case its not the government sending messages, its a politician sending crap trying to get re-elected. There is a difference.
The fact that this switch from open to effectively closed voting software has occured in Australia might create an opportunity to get the issue out into the media.
Unlike most countries, voting is actually compulsory in Australia. If you don't vote in a federal or state election, and you don't have a good reason, you get fined. If you refuse to pay your fine, then you have to answer to a court. If you keep on refusing to accept some form of penalty, then eventually you get sent to jail.
If even a small number of people were to refuse to vote in an election, on the basis that they thought the election process was not transparent, and then subsequently wound up in jail, this would be bound to generate media interest. It would get the issue out in the open where the public could hear the issues involved and think about it. Who knows, maybe it could even attract international attention ?
Nope, you got it backwards. Here's a cut-and-paste from a query I just did on xe.com's currency coverter:
:-).
1 AUD = 0.701681 USD
Yes, AUD $10 Million = US $7 Million (or US $7,016,810 to be a bit more precise
BTW, what clown mod'ed me redundant ? Mine was about the 6th comment on this article. Jeez.
For non-Australians in the audience, note that $1-AU ~= $0.70-US. So the cost estimates are around $10.5M - $14M US, or $265.50-$350 US per seat.
... send Bush to Mars, but don't bring him back. Saves money, and everyone's happy.
I don't know why this was mod-ed funny - Asimov added the Zeroth Law (and revised the First) in his later Robot novels (as he merged the series into the Foundation saga).
The article states that the new anti-virus feature "checks for third-party anti-virus and firewall software and lets users know whether it is enabled or not".
That doesn't sound the same as a competitor to Symantec/McAffee/etc., they're just writing a monitor to warn the user if they've got AV running or not.
Does anyone else read it that way ?
> Why? What's so ideal about the Library of Congress to hold an international collection of e-books?
This is a valid point. Why does the LoC rate as the "default" international library ? Why not, say, Library and Archives Canada ? Or the Australian National Library ? Or the National Library of Ireland ? Or the National Library of Jamaica ? Or
I'm not trying to sound anti-American, just offering a non-American perspective.
Reminds me of Pink Floyd's "runaway" ("flyaway" ?) pig
... figure out how to attach a Bayesian filter to his letterbox.
My work purchased some new IPAQ's a couple of months ago to develop wireless gis applications (projects that I will be involved in in the new year), and I get to look after one.
:-), all sorts of stuff. Lots of things that I would never usually get around to reading, becuase I don't like sitting in front of a desktop PC any longer than I have to. But with the PDA, if I see something I think I might want to read, I can download it, and read it over a beer in front of the TV at night, or in bed, or whenever I've got a few minutes to kill. Its not as good as reading a real book, but its much better (and much more convenient) than reading off a desktop monitor, or even a laptop for that matter.
:-)
I use the one I have mainly for the calender and to-do lists. I like the way calendar appointments for the day are displayed on the main desktop (palmtop?) screen. I also use the alarm function occasionally to remind me of stuff. I've never used an electronic organiser before, and I was previously sceptical about them, but now that I've got one, its definitely improved my personal organisation at work. If/when I have to give it up, I'll probably buy myself a cheaper Palm model.
I also use it, like a lot of other people, for reading. Not so much e-books - man pages, Java API docs, articles pointed to on Slashdot
I also find it very handy for copying files from work to home, or vice-versa. A floppy can only hold 1.4Mb, I can squeeze 50Mb onto the IPAQ if I have to.
My main complaints about the PDA stem from the fact that it runs Microsoft's PocketPC OS. The calendar and stuff will only synchronise with Outlook 2002, which, being a Linux desktop user, I don't use (I'd love to get it to synchronise with something like Evolution or Korganizer). Also, I can't use the USB connection, since it requires MS's ActiveSync software (but I've got it connected just fine to Linux using PPP over the serial port, and 115Kb/s isn't too slow for most things - even copying a 30Mb file onto it at work to take home is ok, if I remember to start doing it an hour before I leave work).
Maybe one day when I get brave I'll blow away PPC and install Linux
I have an old 486 at home that has the same 500Mb restriction.
/boot partition is in the first 1023 sectors, or whatever that limitation is.
I put 2 disks into it - a 330Mb (with Windows 95), and a 2Gb (with Red Hat 6.2). LILO is installed on the 330Mb master. The BIOS finds LILO, then LILO loads Windows or Linux. Works fine. It should work ok with a bigger slave disk too, as long as the
Couldn't have said it any better myself ...
"If you're on Unix, you already have an IDE -- Unix itself. This powerful IDE derives from its interoperability, flexibility, and configurability. If you really want to get a feel for Unix-qua-IDE, the best thing to do is to find some high-powered programmer whose native language is Unix. Find someone who has been at this for many years, and just sit back and watch them at work. They have created their own IDE, one that suits their own tastes and aptitudes. Quietly observe them edit files, move them around, compile them, debug them, test them, etc. The entire development *is* integrated, like a top-of-the-line German sports car: functional, powerful, and elegant. You will be absolutely astonished at the speed and ease exhibited by the native speaker of Unix in his home territory. The art and skill of a virtuoso can only be seen to be believed. That is the path to mastery -- all these cobbled little IDEs are expensive toys designed to sell a flashy demo using cheap tricks, and being optimized for immediate but shallow understanding rather than enduring use, are but a dim palimpsest of real tools. In short, you just have to learn the toolbox. However, if you're not on Unix, then your vendor probably didn't bother to provide you with a proper toolbox on the so- called complete system that you forked out your hard-earned cash on."