Java is only used for the Base database utility and a number of new document wizards plus a few other minor bits. The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components, so Java has nothing to do with normal usage of the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool or drawing programs.
Ribbon use is subjective. Like many others, I hate it. It's clumsy and harder to find what you need.
All the major tablet and phone OSes work this way, even the recently-defunct ones like WebOS, so I'm not sure why this is a surprise. These are designed to be personal individual devices used by one person. You want another login, buy another device. (That part is by design to sell more things).
Yes and No. If the labels are claiming that they can dictate what goes for their music, then the other labels can to. And they can disagree with Apple and then sue.
And there are WAY more than thousands of other labels. I know tons of musicians who self-publish under their own labels. What the big 4 decides has no bearing on the way these artists see things.
I'm in complete agreement. But the fact that users can upload their own music (which may be ripped or downloaded illegally) to Apple just like they can to Google and Amazon, means Apple is no better. It's just that they are making a deal with the bug 4 labels to essentially pay protection money upfront.
Though Apple is in negotiations with the 4 big labels, there will still be thousands of labels that haven't given them permission for users to upload and stream their songs. So Apple's being just as legally iffy as Google and Amazon. The difference is that Apple is cutting deals with the labels most likely to sue them so they won't.
For the technologically confused, it's just a change in version numbering. That's all. 5.0 is essentially 4.1 (or maybe even 4.0.2). Nothing super-crazy going on. Sure, if someone *really* wanted, they can change the 5.0 to a 4.0.3 and feel all warm and fuzzy about 'stability'.
The only real issue is the possibility that some extensions weren't properly updated to understand this. Any that aren't can be remotely updated by addons.mozilla.org, though, and anyone with the Addons Compatibility Tester extension can enable disabled extensions and report any issues directly to Mozilla.
Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Released
on
Firefox 4 Released!
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· Score: 3
As always, we posted the portable version within a few hours over at PortableApps.com. As we did an extended test of version 4.0 portably following the whole 4.0 beta and RC process, it's turned out to be a nice, stable release. It's great for running from your flash drive, DropBox or just trying out a new firefox install without affecting your local one.
I suppose it does depend on your definition of a PC. Most people think Windows, because there is PC (Windows) and Mac. Outside of our geek community, *nix doesn't really exist (some netbooks notwithstanding) in terms of what most people think of. Even on phones, people have no idea that Android is Linux-based.
When outside of our sphere, the world is Windows. If you have your portable apps on a USB drive, you may use them at a local library, a net cafe, a hotel business center, at work or at school. All of those are generally going to be Windows (though a small number of primary and smaller number of secondary schools may be Mac only). Where most of our users wind up using their apps on Wine is on their home computer (or work PC in sysadmin roles or similar), which serves them well as they really only need to configure it, sync some bookmarks, install/update some apps, etc.
In terms of the 'platform being open', we're talking about our platform (menu, backup utility, application updater) as well as our format, installer and launcher/portablizer. All are open source (GPL) and available to all. And they aren't artificially tied to hardware (like Sandisk's now-defunct U3 platform).
It works just fine under Wine. We just recommend setting Wine to Windows 2000 in the version so Firefox doesn't try and do DirectX 9 hardware acceleration (as it does on XP) for most users. I know on my Ubuntu test VM, you wind up with a black window that doesn't redraw if it is set to XP, but it works just peachy set to Windows 2000.
Windows is generally a safe assumption as 94% of the market is using it (then 5% Mac and 1% *nix/BSD).
Well, the simple fact is that most people do use Windows. 94% at the moment (and 5% Mac and 1% *nix/bsd). So, realistically, it's a safe assumption to make. And, if you choose to run an alternate OS (I also run Ubuntu, for instance) you're familiar with this. The page where the app is available very clearly says that it is for Windows. It's not some kind of sneaky "gotcha".
Now, if you can hold back on the snarkiness for a minute, you'll find that you can also run it under Wine on *nix/BSD and may run under Darwine on Mac as well. We recommend setting the Windows version in Wine to Windows 2000 if your Linux drivers don't handle Wine's DirectX 9 stuff well (this works for me in VirtualBox for instance) so Firefox doesn't try and do hardware acceleration, leaving you with a window that won't redraw.
We actually test and make specific code changes to allow our products to run under Wine properly with our launchers, our portable installer and menu/platform.
This is a myth. H.264 is free for free streaming. But there is a licensing fee for every encoder and decoder regardless of whether the software is open or closed source, commercial of given away for free. Said licensing fee costs Google US$6.5 million a year. Mozilla would be forced to pay the same to add support to Firefox.
As Mozilla, Opera and now Google have committed to not shipping H.264 support, any website not factoring that into their decisions isn't being very smart. Firefox is over 1/2 of net users in some countries. Worldwide, Firefox is at 23%, Chrome is at 10% and Opera is a bit over 2%.
For what it's worth (though a little off-topic), the techniques and technologies we use at PortableApps.com are compatible with Wine and most of our apps will run without issue on all the major distros with a recent Wine version installed. We even do specific checks for Wine to work around a couple bugs (which have been reported) in our menu and utilities.
It's actually GPL3 code that can't be used in any apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad due to the anti-Tivoization clauses in GPL3 and the completely locked down nature of iOS and the app store.
Apps that use interpreted code are not permitted in the app store. This is the same reason that no full browsers other than Safari are allowed on iPhones (Opera Mini has to use a server to interpret Javascript to get around this). iDOS's original approval was a mistake. It won't be admitted to the app store under the current policy.
Is Indian also going to ban every phone that supports IMAP + SSL (which is basically all smart phones and many dumbphones with email support)? Or ban accessing webmail services that support HTTPS?
This is just the streaming part, which is currently free due to the temporary moratorium. You still have to pay the licensing fee for the software to encode it and the software to play it, even if said software is free and open source. So, this would still cost Mozilla $5,000,000 if they licensed it this year and rising next year.
This article was a bit light on the details (as it's just mentioning what's in the quick video preview on the site), but other sites have posted some rumors and analysis of some Samsung firmware leaks.
The display seems to be 800x480, which is decent on a 7" screen (133ppi, essentially the same as the iPad's 131ppi). There is a front and rear facing camera (confirmed in this video which mentions video calling), a 1.0 or 1.2GHz hummingbird processor (similar to the awesome 1GHz hummingbird in their Galaxy S phones which can really pump out the pixels), and some other goodies.
The iPhone 4 antenna design flaw results in a death *touch* which is activated simply by touching a specific place on the case. This is a far worse problem than using a specific grip to block antenna signals all around with a grip of your hand. Apple is basically trying to change the conversation to be about gripping phones in specific ways blocking some radio signals (which is an issue with every cell phone ever) and away from the design flaw which results in the iPhone 4's unique "death touch" problem.
Apple is about freedom. Freedom from porn. Freedom from criticism. Freedom from competition. Freedom from objective discussions. Freedom from the truth.
Apple little world is looking more like 1984 every day.
Several reasons that the portable installer stomps all over a zip file: 1. The portable installer is a smaller download 2. The portable installer doesn't require any external software to extract it 3. The portable installer automatically detects an existing instance of the PortableApps.com Platform, offers to install into it, and tells the menu that a new app is installed so it can display it. 4. The portable installer makes it easy to have options like whether to install additional languages without having to manually copy or delete files 5. The portable installer supports upgrades and can handle moving, removing and updating files between versions as apps often change internal files on major version releases 6. The portable installer can preserve any plugins or add-ons while handling point (5) 7. The portable installer can download apps from online in the cases where we don't yet have permission to repackage them (at PortableApps.com, we only do legal apps)
The do? But oh wait you lose all your settings. And settings from one version of the app would be used for another, which could disable most of your extensions.
So, ultimately, no... they don't.
At PortableApps.com, we released the portable package of Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 yesterday soon after 4.0 Beta 1 dropped. It's a great way to test the latest beta without impacting your current Firefox install since it runs self-contained from a single directory. You can even install it to your Desktop or Documents folder.
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Java is only used for the Base database utility and a number of new document wizards plus a few other minor bits. The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components, so Java has nothing to do with normal usage of the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool or drawing programs. Ribbon use is subjective. Like many others, I hate it. It's clumsy and harder to find what you need.
All the major tablet and phone OSes work this way, even the recently-defunct ones like WebOS, so I'm not sure why this is a surprise. These are designed to be personal individual devices used by one person. You want another login, buy another device. (That part is by design to sell more things).
Yes and No. If the labels are claiming that they can dictate what goes for their music, then the other labels can to. And they can disagree with Apple and then sue. And there are WAY more than thousands of other labels. I know tons of musicians who self-publish under their own labels. What the big 4 decides has no bearing on the way these artists see things.
I'm in complete agreement. But the fact that users can upload their own music (which may be ripped or downloaded illegally) to Apple just like they can to Google and Amazon, means Apple is no better. It's just that they are making a deal with the bug 4 labels to essentially pay protection money upfront.
Though Apple is in negotiations with the 4 big labels, there will still be thousands of labels that haven't given them permission for users to upload and stream their songs. So Apple's being just as legally iffy as Google and Amazon. The difference is that Apple is cutting deals with the labels most likely to sue them so they won't.
For the technologically confused, it's just a change in version numbering. That's all. 5.0 is essentially 4.1 (or maybe even 4.0.2). Nothing super-crazy going on. Sure, if someone *really* wanted, they can change the 5.0 to a 4.0.3 and feel all warm and fuzzy about 'stability'. The only real issue is the possibility that some extensions weren't properly updated to understand this. Any that aren't can be remotely updated by addons.mozilla.org, though, and anyone with the Addons Compatibility Tester extension can enable disabled extensions and report any issues directly to Mozilla.
As always, we posted the portable version within a few hours over at PortableApps.com. As we did an extended test of version 4.0 portably following the whole 4.0 beta and RC process, it's turned out to be a nice, stable release. It's great for running from your flash drive, DropBox or just trying out a new firefox install without affecting your local one.
Release Announcement | Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 homepage
I suppose it does depend on your definition of a PC. Most people think Windows, because there is PC (Windows) and Mac. Outside of our geek community, *nix doesn't really exist (some netbooks notwithstanding) in terms of what most people think of. Even on phones, people have no idea that Android is Linux-based.
When outside of our sphere, the world is Windows. If you have your portable apps on a USB drive, you may use them at a local library, a net cafe, a hotel business center, at work or at school. All of those are generally going to be Windows (though a small number of primary and smaller number of secondary schools may be Mac only). Where most of our users wind up using their apps on Wine is on their home computer (or work PC in sysadmin roles or similar), which serves them well as they really only need to configure it, sync some bookmarks, install/update some apps, etc.
In terms of the 'platform being open', we're talking about our platform (menu, backup utility, application updater) as well as our format, installer and launcher/portablizer. All are open source (GPL) and available to all. And they aren't artificially tied to hardware (like Sandisk's now-defunct U3 platform).
It works just fine under Wine. We just recommend setting Wine to Windows 2000 in the version so Firefox doesn't try and do DirectX 9 hardware acceleration (as it does on XP) for most users. I know on my Ubuntu test VM, you wind up with a black window that doesn't redraw if it is set to XP, but it works just peachy set to Windows 2000.
Windows is generally a safe assumption as 94% of the market is using it (then 5% Mac and 1% *nix/BSD).
Well, the simple fact is that most people do use Windows. 94% at the moment (and 5% Mac and 1% *nix/bsd). So, realistically, it's a safe assumption to make. And, if you choose to run an alternate OS (I also run Ubuntu, for instance) you're familiar with this. The page where the app is available very clearly says that it is for Windows. It's not some kind of sneaky "gotcha".
Now, if you can hold back on the snarkiness for a minute, you'll find that you can also run it under Wine on *nix/BSD and may run under Darwine on Mac as well. We recommend setting the Windows version in Wine to Windows 2000 if your Linux drivers don't handle Wine's DirectX 9 stuff well (this works for me in VirtualBox for instance) so Firefox doesn't try and do hardware acceleration, leaving you with a window that won't redraw.
We actually test and make specific code changes to allow our products to run under Wine properly with our launchers, our portable installer and menu/platform.
As always, we've packaged it for portable use (USB, cloud drive, etc) which also lets you try it out right on your desktop without installing it and impacting your local Firefox install at all.
http://portableapps.com/news/2011-01-14_-_firefox_portable_4.0_beta_9
And it really is noticeably faster than previous released.
This is a myth. H.264 is free for free streaming. But there is a licensing fee for every encoder and decoder regardless of whether the software is open or closed source, commercial of given away for free. Said licensing fee costs Google US$6.5 million a year. Mozilla would be forced to pay the same to add support to Firefox.
Nope. They officially came out against it and for WebM. WebM support has been in Opera since the 10.50 release.
As Mozilla, Opera and now Google have committed to not shipping H.264 support, any website not factoring that into their decisions isn't being very smart. Firefox is over 1/2 of net users in some countries. Worldwide, Firefox is at 23%, Chrome is at 10% and Opera is a bit over 2%.
For what it's worth (though a little off-topic), the techniques and technologies we use at PortableApps.com are compatible with Wine and most of our apps will run without issue on all the major distros with a recent Wine version installed. We even do specific checks for Wine to work around a couple bugs (which have been reported) in our menu and utilities.
It's actually GPL3 code that can't be used in any apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad due to the anti-Tivoization clauses in GPL3 and the completely locked down nature of iOS and the app store.
Apps that use interpreted code are not permitted in the app store. This is the same reason that no full browsers other than Safari are allowed on iPhones (Opera Mini has to use a server to interpret Javascript to get around this). iDOS's original approval was a mistake. It won't be admitted to the app store under the current policy.
Is Indian also going to ban every phone that supports IMAP + SSL (which is basically all smart phones and many dumbphones with email support)? Or ban accessing webmail services that support HTTPS?
This is just the streaming part, which is currently free due to the temporary moratorium. You still have to pay the licensing fee for the software to encode it and the software to play it, even if said software is free and open source. So, this would still cost Mozilla $5,000,000 if they licensed it this year and rising next year.
This article was a bit light on the details (as it's just mentioning what's in the quick video preview on the site), but other sites have posted some rumors and analysis of some Samsung firmware leaks.
The display seems to be 800x480, which is decent on a 7" screen (133ppi, essentially the same as the iPad's 131ppi). There is a front and rear facing camera (confirmed in this video which mentions video calling), a 1.0 or 1.2GHz hummingbird processor (similar to the awesome 1GHz hummingbird in their Galaxy S phones which can really pump out the pixels), and some other goodies.
http://samsung-firmware.webs.com/apps/blog/entries/show/4521384-exclusive-samsung-galaxy-tab-
The iPhone 4 antenna design flaw results in a death *touch* which is activated simply by touching a specific place on the case. This is a far worse problem than using a specific grip to block antenna signals all around with a grip of your hand. Apple is basically trying to change the conversation to be about gripping phones in specific ways blocking some radio signals (which is an issue with every cell phone ever) and away from the design flaw which results in the iPhone 4's unique "death touch" problem.
Apple is about freedom. Freedom from porn. Freedom from criticism. Freedom from competition. Freedom from objective discussions. Freedom from the truth.
Apple little world is looking more like 1984 every day.
Several reasons that the portable installer stomps all over a zip file:
1. The portable installer is a smaller download
2. The portable installer doesn't require any external software to extract it
3. The portable installer automatically detects an existing instance of the PortableApps.com Platform, offers to install into it, and tells the menu that a new app is installed so it can display it.
4. The portable installer makes it easy to have options like whether to install additional languages without having to manually copy or delete files
5. The portable installer supports upgrades and can handle moving, removing and updating files between versions as apps often change internal files on major version releases
6. The portable installer can preserve any plugins or add-ons while handling point (5)
7. The portable installer can download apps from online in the cases where we don't yet have permission to repackage them (at PortableApps.com, we only do legal apps)
The do? But oh wait you lose all your settings. And settings from one version of the app would be used for another, which could disable most of your extensions. So, ultimately, no... they don't.
At PortableApps.com, we released the portable package of Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 yesterday soon after 4.0 Beta 1 dropped. It's a great way to test the latest beta without impacting your current Firefox install since it runs self-contained from a single directory. You can even install it to your Desktop or Documents folder.
Try Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 out today with Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 1
Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 1 homepage