That was when the alternative was assembly language.
These days "high level" is when the language provides a built-in optimized function for extremely common tasks (like sorting), data types that don't change when you move to a different architecture (even if it's got a different number of bits or a different endianness) and don't overflow when you stick a somewhat larger number in them, automatic built-in bounds checking, automatic resizing for aggregate types (e.g., arrays), standard libraries for popular network protocols (e.g., HTTP), file types (e.g., ZIP), and other data interfaces (e.g., pulling information from an RDBMS), and a standard repository and mechanism for sharing additional code libraries (think: CPAN).
In other words, the VHLL (Very High-Level Language, i.e., something at least as high-level as Perl5) is the new HLL.
It's awfully tempting to create an alternate DNS root that only recognizes the two-letter country code TLDs plus.com,.net,.org,.edu,.gov, and.arpa. All those weird new ones ICANN keeps adding that nobody will ever care about? Forget them..info? Forget about it. Nobody uses it anyway..tel? Who needs it? Not me..xxx? Scratch it off the list..biz? Isn't that exactly what.com was for? Forget it. Forget them all.
Logically,.com and.org really cover the gTLD bases pretty well. It's arguable whether.net was even really necessary, but it's been around for a long time and is widely used by ISPs, so keep it. Similarly we need.edu and.gov for backward compatibility (they logically belong under.us, but that's hindsight talking), and.arpa for reverse IP lookups. But that's it. None of the other gTLDs serve any useful purpose whatsoever.
When new ones are added, it's NOT NEWS any more. They're irrelevant. Nobody cares. They've added at least a dozen worthless TLDs that will never be used since the last time any significant number of people cared about one.
Funny, I didn't see that in the URL. http://slashdot.internets.com/ Eh?
Huh. It says the page is "under construction".
Yeah, I know, foreigners *can* access it. Foreigners can also access Baidu, but that doesn't stop it from being Sinocentric. Their front page isn't even in English! Horrors!
Meh. If the idea of the US invading Canada is "touchy", somebody's missing a sense of humor.
I mean, come on, Canada? It's absurd. The only resource they really have a lot of that we might want to take is land, and it's not exactly tricky for a US citizen to buy land and get a resident card up there if you should happen to want to do so. Everything else they've got, we've got more, unless you count snow, which is prohibitively difficult to transport, or hockey, which nobody down here wants.
Come to think of it, I'd like to be in charge of coming up with slogans for National Pork Board advertisements. That would be such a cushy job. They virtually write themselves.
"Bacon: it tastes like bacon."
"Give me a ham sandwich."
"Mmmm.... pork sausage!"
I mean, come on, "the other white meat"? What were they thinking? Quite aside from being disingenuous, it also doesn't emphasize the product's strong points. That's bad advertising.
How come nobody's ever sued the everliving bejeebers out of the Pork Board for false advertising? White meat is poultry and fish, meat that's low in cholesterol and triglycerides and stuff. Pork isn't. Pork is red meat, like beef. It's tasty, but if you eat too much of it people will start calling you lardbutt. This point is not in dispute. (In fact, "lard" actually comes from pork, by definition. If you get it from beef it's called "tallow".)
The usual approach is to allow traffic on port 443 only to certain sites (either sites that ARE on the white list, or sites that are NOT on the black list, depending on whether you want sites that haven't been listed at all to be permitted or not).
The trouble is that unlike with http, where your filtering proxy can check the HTTP headers and thus filter by domain name, with https you have to operate at the IP layer, so the word "sites" means "IP addresses or ranges". (You still send port-80 traffic through the transparent proxy; traffic to most other ports is blocked, but you allow port 443 traffic if the destination is a "permitted" one.)
The reason this is a problem (well, more of a problem than usual) in this case is probably that Google is serving their SSL-encrypted search from some of the same IP address ranges that also serve some of their other SSL-encrypted services, including Apps for Education. Thus, the filter vendors can't distinguish. They either allow the encrypted search (which means they can't prevent kids from searching for the well-known naughty words that they are contractually bound to prevent kids from searching for) or else they block it and, in the process, block all Google SSL traffic, including Apps.
Google potentially *could* separate the SSL search service to a different set of IP address ranges, which would allow the filtering vendors to do what they want. I don't know how much of a hassle and expense it would be, though, and I also don't know how much benefit Google derives from filtered education users using their SSL-based services. (The question of censorship is basically moot here; the filtering vendors can't and won't back down on blocking SSL search. The question is whether providing them a way to still allow other SSL-based Google services is worth the hassle and expense.)
> It is in the "this is so outrageously disgusting > that it can't possibly be true" sense of the word.
It's Verizon we're talking about. Off the top of my head I can't think of any business practice so outlandishly disgusting that I would believe them too scrupulous to be capable of it.
> Without a computer you have to learn how to think.
I doubt if that's the bulk of the issue.
Remember, we're talking here about kids whose parents aren't very educated (which, though the article doesn't say this, correlates strongly with not placing a high value on education, not reading to the kids when they're young, not trying to teach the kids anything at home ever, not pushing the kids to do their homework, and so on and so forth).
In that kind of environment, the computer, just like the television, isn't used as an educational tool. It's used for entertainment, which makes it an active *distraction*. With the computer in the house, the kids are LESS likely to look at their homework.
You can't fix the educational divide with technology. It's a social problem.
Well, that's true in developed countries, anyway, where basic education is essentially free for the taking (for those willing to put in the time). I'm not certain whether the same would necessarily hold in all third-world cultures. If you had a group of people who *wanted* and *cared about* education but simply couldn't afford much, that would be a different dynamic.
Even in PHP, though, you're not going to code a stable sort by going to Knuth and picking out one of his algorithms. You're going to do basically a Schwartzian Transform, using the original position index as the last sort criterion, so you can take advantage of the built-in (unstable) sort. It'll perform better than a quicksort or heapsort or whatever that you code up from scratch.
I think "got it wrong" in the past tense is a little harsh, but I would say that a LOT of stuff in Knuth is wrong today, or at least terribly obsolete. It's not useless to be aware of, but you don't want to assume that everything is today still exactly the way Knuth described it in the digital stone age.
I mean, just for example, Knuth spends whole chapters talking about sorting algorithms. Almost all modern programmers don't have any use for that stuff, because re-implementing sort in your application code is pointless and counterproductive. The built-in sort provided by any modern language is optimized at a lower level and will handily beat the pants off anything you can do. Heck, even the Schwartzian Transform is built in to most modern languages these days.
Okay, sure, the guys who build low-level tools (compilers and system libraries and such) still need to know about sorting routines. What percentage of the programmer population is that? 0.1%? And even there, Knuth is somewhat obsolete, because (among other things) the stuff you're sorting is almost certainly stored in high-level cross-platform data structures, not some flat array of machine integers. I mean, it's still true that you probably don't want to code a bubble sort, but that's not exactly a profound revelation.
> Recent experiments have made me switch from a search > engine homepage, to the firefox search bar
I do virtually all of my searching with bookmark keywords. It's faster than messing around with the search drop-down list. You just use the location bar and prepend a couple of extra characters to your search terms and Bob is your uncle -- you go straight to the search results.
You can also do things other than search with it. For example, I have the keyword wp set up to take me straight to English-language Wikipedia articles, skipping the search entirely, when I type wp followed by a space and the article title in the location bar. Similarly, I have a keyword that takes me straight to the w3schools reference page for any given XHTML element.
>...But of course this means that people with ancient > versions of IE didn't have to see it also...
I always browse with page colors (all colors and backgrounds specified by the web page) disabled (in favor of my system colors, #FFE6BC foreground on #294D4A background). I've been doing that since it became an option sometime in the nineties. It's the only way to browse, as far as I'm concerned. The average webmaster has such terrible taste in colors, and then as if that weren't bad enough so many sites want to give you a blindingly bright background, usually white, I guess because they want to pretend the screen is paper or something. Ugh, talk about eye fatigue. No thanks.
The only time I turn on page colors is when I'm testing stylesheets for my own web content.
Do I even want to know what the background in question looked like? I bet I don't. In fact, here's me explicitly *not* even asking. Whatever it was, I'm glad I missed it.
I also don't happen to know what colors Slashdot is using these days. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
> I don't think it is our responsability to save "every" species... > but I think it's our responsibility to save species that we have > directly endangered through our own actions, whether those > actions are on purpose or a mistake.
As a Christian, I agree with that.
But I have a hard time seeing how an unbeliever could reconcile it with an evolutionist worldview. If you actually understand and buy into Darwinism, the logical conclusion would be that anything that goes extinct for any reason was "deselected" because it was unfit. If humans evolved from lower life forms, and some of those lower life forms go extinct as a result of humans, that would be the expected natural and desirable result of evolution at work, if you believe in that sort of thing.
To believe that we should protect a species from extinction at the hands of human actions, you'd have to believe that we are responsible for them. Responsible to whom, if you don't believe in a creator? You'd also have to believe that we're not better off without them, that every kind of organism that exists is here for some reason, some purpose. Whose purpose, if you don't believe in a creator? You'd have to believe that genetic information should be retained, even if it's apparently inferior to our own, because it won't simply be replaced by newer and better stuff.
Conservation of biological diversity doesn't fit with evolutionism. It's inconsistent. In fact, it's more or less the opposite philosophy.
What universe do you live in? Where I come from tuna is a byword for cheap protein that's more or less edible if you're not picky. Almost nobody will eat it without mayonaise. I don't think I've ever met anybody who actually *likes* it.
> Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" > is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
Actually, no. Most Japanese words contain two or three kanji. They're not "letters" in the Western sense either, though. Nor is there a one-to-one correspondence between kanji and morae. (Morae are the closest Japanese equivalent to syllables.) Some kanji readings are one mora long, others are two, and a few are longer, and of course any given kanji has several different readings, which usually don't even have the same number of morae. (onyomi tend to be shorter than kunyomi, and most kanji have both...) I guess morphemes or roots would be the best analogy for kanji in European languages, but that's *just* an analogy. They're not exactly the same thing. There isn't anything in western languages that's exactly equivalent to kanji.
I assume the engineers can sort that out, one way or another, even if they have to use active cooling to do it.
The bigger downside as far as I'm concerned would be that these babies would be a royal pain to work on, almost as bad as a laptop. Have you ever tried to work on a laptop when it develops a hardware problem? Have you ever tried to find a computer repair shop that will work on a laptop that has a hardware problem? Take the miniaturization too far and what you're going to end up with, essentially, is a disposable system: when any part of it breaks, you toss the whole thing in the wastebin and buy a new one.
Of course, if you're an extreme case modder and don't MIND spending eleventeen hours figuring out how to get each tiny little component wedged into a place where it only just barely fits with zero tolerance and inadequate connector head room and no space for your hands while you're working on it, because it's your hobby and you think it's fun, then hey, knock yourself out. Everybody's got to have a hobby. Some people collect bottle caps. But that doesn't mean it's ever going to make sense for mainstream use.
You know what? ATX is pretty good, really. I actually kind of like ATX.
> I found that Jobs is correct for people with normal vision,
By "normal vision", do you mean average (20/20)? Because, very few people have normal vision. Most people either have above-average or below-average vision. In fact, nearly half the population has *better* than average vision. Last time I was checked (which, admittedly, has been more than ten years), I had 40/20 vision, which is about twice as good as average. This is not abnormal, or even unusual.
Re:I'm not sure why anybody would listen to Gartne
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
> As for "training", home users' access to XP has been > (barring active effort on their part) largely cut off > for some time now
Huh? As best I can tell, more home users run Windows XP than all other versions of Windows combined. The ratio is dropping, but Windows XP still has majority market share at this point.
Perhaps you live in some alternate universe where people run out and buy a new computer every six months?
That's the operative issue, right there. An OS that can run the latest versions of all your applications is an OS that doesn't need to be upgraded. Because, fundamentally, running applications is pretty much the whole point of *having* an operating system.
Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
> it doesn't say whether those dates are in american or english format
Here's a hint: Microsoft is headquartered in Washington state.
With that said, the page in question is confusing, but the actual date you're looking for is the 2014 April 8 date in the third column (assuming you install the service packs, which is what the dates in the fourth column are about; the first two columns are essentially meaningless).
Slashdot Mirror
That was when the alternative was assembly language.
These days "high level" is when the language provides a built-in optimized function for extremely common tasks (like sorting), data types that don't change when you move to a different architecture (even if it's got a different number of bits or a different endianness) and don't overflow when you stick a somewhat larger number in them, automatic built-in bounds checking, automatic resizing for aggregate types (e.g., arrays), standard libraries for popular network protocols (e.g., HTTP), file types (e.g., ZIP), and other data interfaces (e.g., pulling information from an RDBMS), and a standard repository and mechanism for sharing additional code libraries (think: CPAN).
In other words, the VHLL (Very High-Level Language, i.e., something at least as high-level as Perl5) is the new HLL.
Another one? Really? WHY do we need another TLD?
.com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, and .arpa. All those weird new ones ICANN keeps adding that nobody will ever care about? Forget them. .info? Forget about it. Nobody uses it anyway. .tel? Who needs it? Not me. .xxx? Scratch it off the list. .biz? Isn't that exactly what .com was for? Forget it. Forget them all.
.com and .org really cover the gTLD bases pretty well. It's arguable whether .net was even really necessary, but it's been around for a long time and is widely used by ISPs, so keep it. Similarly we need .edu and .gov for backward compatibility (they logically belong under .us, but that's hindsight talking), and .arpa for reverse IP lookups. But that's it. None of the other gTLDs serve any useful purpose whatsoever.
It's awfully tempting to create an alternate DNS root that only recognizes the two-letter country code TLDs plus
Logically,
When new ones are added, it's NOT NEWS any more. They're irrelevant. Nobody cares. They've added at least a dozen worthless TLDs that will never be used since the last time any significant number of people cared about one.
Yeah, there was a joke about that in Last Action Hero.
"Hello? I've just shot a man in cold blood, and I wish to confess."
"Hey, quiet down out there!"
> INSIDE the Internets.com
Funny, I didn't see that in the URL.
http://slashdot.internets.com/
Eh?
Huh. It says the page is "under construction".
Yeah, I know, foreigners *can* access it. Foreigners can also access Baidu, but that doesn't stop it from being Sinocentric. Their front page isn't even in English! Horrors!
Meh. If the idea of the US invading Canada is "touchy", somebody's missing a sense of humor.
I mean, come on, Canada? It's absurd. The only resource they really have a lot of that we might want to take is land, and it's not exactly tricky for a US citizen to buy land and get a resident card up there if you should happen to want to do so. Everything else they've got, we've got more, unless you count snow, which is prohibitively difficult to transport, or hockey, which nobody down here wants.
Come to think of it, I'd like to be in charge of coming up with slogans for National Pork Board advertisements. That would be such a cushy job. They virtually write themselves.
"Bacon: it tastes like bacon."
"Give me a ham sandwich."
"Mmmm.... pork sausage!"
I mean, come on, "the other white meat"? What were they thinking? Quite aside from being disingenuous, it also doesn't emphasize the product's strong points. That's bad advertising.
How come nobody's ever sued the everliving bejeebers out of the Pork Board for false advertising? White meat is poultry and fish, meat that's low in cholesterol and triglycerides and stuff. Pork isn't. Pork is red meat, like beef. It's tasty, but if you eat too much of it people will start calling you lardbutt. This point is not in dispute. (In fact, "lard" actually comes from pork, by definition. If you get it from beef it's called "tallow".)
The usual approach is to allow traffic on port 443 only to certain sites (either sites that ARE on the white list, or sites that are NOT on the black list, depending on whether you want sites that haven't been listed at all to be permitted or not).
The trouble is that unlike with http, where your filtering proxy can check the HTTP headers and thus filter by domain name, with https you have to operate at the IP layer, so the word "sites" means "IP addresses or ranges". (You still send port-80 traffic through the transparent proxy; traffic to most other ports is blocked, but you allow port 443 traffic if the destination is a "permitted" one.)
The reason this is a problem (well, more of a problem than usual) in this case is probably that Google is serving their SSL-encrypted search from some of the same IP address ranges that also serve some of their other SSL-encrypted services, including Apps for Education. Thus, the filter vendors can't distinguish. They either allow the encrypted search (which means they can't prevent kids from searching for the well-known naughty words that they are contractually bound to prevent kids from searching for) or else they block it and, in the process, block all Google SSL traffic, including Apps.
Google potentially *could* separate the SSL search service to a different set of IP address ranges, which would allow the filtering vendors to do what they want. I don't know how much of a hassle and expense it would be, though, and I also don't know how much benefit Google derives from filtered education users using their SSL-based services. (The question of censorship is basically moot here; the filtering vendors can't and won't back down on blocking SSL search. The question is whether providing them a way to still allow other SSL-based Google services is worth the hassle and expense.)
> It is in the "this is so outrageously disgusting
> that it can't possibly be true" sense of the word.
It's Verizon we're talking about. Off the top of my head I can't think of any business practice so outlandishly disgusting that I would believe them too scrupulous to be capable of it.
> Without a computer you have to learn how to think.
I doubt if that's the bulk of the issue.
Remember, we're talking here about kids whose parents aren't very educated (which, though the article doesn't say this, correlates strongly with not placing a high value on education, not reading to the kids when they're young, not trying to teach the kids anything at home ever, not pushing the kids to do their homework, and so on and so forth).
In that kind of environment, the computer, just like the television, isn't used as an educational tool. It's used for entertainment, which makes it an active *distraction*. With the computer in the house, the kids are LESS likely to look at their homework.
You can't fix the educational divide with technology. It's a social problem.
Well, that's true in developed countries, anyway, where basic education is essentially free for the taking (for those willing to put in the time). I'm not certain whether the same would necessarily hold in all third-world cultures. If you had a group of people who *wanted* and *cared about* education but simply couldn't afford much, that would be a different dynamic.
> PHP does not have an stable sort.
PHP doesn't have a lot of things.
Even in PHP, though, you're not going to code a stable sort by going to Knuth and picking out one of his algorithms. You're going to do basically a Schwartzian Transform, using the original position index as the last sort criterion, so you can take advantage of the built-in (unstable) sort. It'll perform better than a quicksort or heapsort or whatever that you code up from scratch.
> I think under the water is the safest place during a hurricane.
North Dakota would also be a pretty safe place to ride out a hurricane.
HTH.HAND.
> you could just link those users to a video/chatbot that laughs at them
No, to one another. Exclusively.
I think "got it wrong" in the past tense is a little harsh, but I would say that a LOT of stuff in Knuth is wrong today, or at least terribly obsolete. It's not useless to be aware of, but you don't want to assume that everything is today still exactly the way Knuth described it in the digital stone age.
I mean, just for example, Knuth spends whole chapters talking about sorting algorithms. Almost all modern programmers don't have any use for that stuff, because re-implementing sort in your application code is pointless and counterproductive. The built-in sort provided by any modern language is optimized at a lower level and will handily beat the pants off anything you can do. Heck, even the Schwartzian Transform is built in to most modern languages these days.
Okay, sure, the guys who build low-level tools (compilers and system libraries and such) still need to know about sorting routines. What percentage of the programmer population is that? 0.1%? And even there, Knuth is somewhat obsolete, because (among other things) the stuff you're sorting is almost certainly stored in high-level cross-platform data structures, not some flat array of machine integers. I mean, it's still true that you probably don't want to code a bubble sort, but that's not exactly a profound revelation.
> I anticipate my Windows friends will have a much better experience.
I have a better experience without Flash installed. I believe this is true irrespective of OS.
> Recent experiments have made me switch from a search
> engine homepage, to the firefox search bar
I do virtually all of my searching with bookmark keywords. It's faster than messing around with the search drop-down list. You just use the location bar and prepend a couple of extra characters to your search terms and Bob is your uncle -- you go straight to the search results.
You can also do things other than search with it. For example, I have the keyword wp set up to take me straight to English-language Wikipedia articles, skipping the search entirely, when I type wp followed by a space and the article title in the location bar. Similarly, I have a keyword that takes me straight to the w3schools reference page for any given XHTML element.
> ...But of course this means that people with ancient
> versions of IE didn't have to see it also...
I always browse with page colors (all colors and backgrounds specified by the web page) disabled (in favor of my system colors, #FFE6BC foreground on #294D4A background). I've been doing that since it became an option sometime in the nineties. It's the only way to browse, as far as I'm concerned. The average webmaster has such terrible taste in colors, and then as if that weren't bad enough so many sites want to give you a blindingly bright background, usually white, I guess because they want to pretend the screen is paper or something. Ugh, talk about eye fatigue. No thanks.
The only time I turn on page colors is when I'm testing stylesheets for my own web content.
Do I even want to know what the background in question looked like? I bet I don't. In fact, here's me explicitly *not* even asking. Whatever it was, I'm glad I missed it.
I also don't happen to know what colors Slashdot is using these days. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
> I don't think it is our responsability to save "every" species...
> but I think it's our responsibility to save species that we have
> directly endangered through our own actions, whether those
> actions are on purpose or a mistake.
As a Christian, I agree with that.
But I have a hard time seeing how an unbeliever could reconcile it with an evolutionist worldview. If you actually understand and buy into Darwinism, the logical conclusion would be that anything that goes extinct for any reason was "deselected" because it was unfit. If humans evolved from lower life forms, and some of those lower life forms go extinct as a result of humans, that would be the expected natural and desirable result of evolution at work, if you believe in that sort of thing.
To believe that we should protect a species from extinction at the hands of human actions, you'd have to believe that we are responsible for them. Responsible to whom, if you don't believe in a creator? You'd also have to believe that we're not better off without them, that every kind of organism that exists is here for some reason, some purpose. Whose purpose, if you don't believe in a creator? You'd have to believe that genetic information should be retained, even if it's apparently inferior to our own, because it won't simply be replaced by newer and better stuff.
Conservation of biological diversity doesn't fit with evolutionism. It's inconsistent. In fact, it's more or less the opposite philosophy.
> bluefin tuna are legendarily tasty
What universe do you live in? Where I come from tuna is a byword for cheap protein that's more or less edible if you're not picky. Almost nobody will eat it without mayonaise. I don't think I've ever met anybody who actually *likes* it.
> Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling"
> is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
Actually, no. Most Japanese words contain two or three kanji. They're not "letters" in the Western sense either, though. Nor is there a one-to-one correspondence between kanji and morae. (Morae are the closest Japanese equivalent to syllables.) Some kanji readings are one mora long, others are two, and a few are longer, and of course any given kanji has several different readings, which usually don't even have the same number of morae. (onyomi tend to be shorter than kunyomi, and most kanji have both...) I guess morphemes or roots would be the best analogy for kanji in European languages, but that's *just* an analogy. They're not exactly the same thing. There isn't anything in western languages that's exactly equivalent to kanji.
> what's going to happen with all that heat
I assume the engineers can sort that out, one way or another, even if they have to use active cooling to do it.
The bigger downside as far as I'm concerned would be that these babies would be a royal pain to work on, almost as bad as a laptop. Have you ever tried to work on a laptop when it develops a hardware problem? Have you ever tried to find a computer repair shop that will work on a laptop that has a hardware problem? Take the miniaturization too far and what you're going to end up with, essentially, is a disposable system: when any part of it breaks, you toss the whole thing in the wastebin and buy a new one.
Of course, if you're an extreme case modder and don't MIND spending eleventeen hours figuring out how to get each tiny little component wedged into a place where it only just barely fits with zero tolerance and inadequate connector head room and no space for your hands while you're working on it, because it's your hobby and you think it's fun, then hey, knock yourself out. Everybody's got to have a hobby. Some people collect bottle caps. But that doesn't mean it's ever going to make sense for mainstream use.
You know what? ATX is pretty good, really. I actually kind of like ATX.
> I found that Jobs is correct for people with normal vision,
By "normal vision", do you mean average (20/20)? Because, very few people have normal vision. Most people either have above-average or below-average vision. In fact, nearly half the population has *better* than average vision. Last time I was checked (which, admittedly, has been more than ten years), I had 40/20 vision, which is about twice as good as average. This is not abnormal, or even unusual.
> As for "training", home users' access to XP has been
> (barring active effort on their part) largely cut off
> for some time now
Huh? As best I can tell, more home users run Windows XP than all other versions of Windows combined. The ratio is dropping, but Windows XP still has majority market share at this point.
Perhaps you live in some alternate universe where people run out and buy a new computer every six months?
> it's still supported by software vendors
That's the operative issue, right there. An OS that can run the latest versions of all your applications is an OS that doesn't need to be upgraded. Because, fundamentally, running applications is pretty much the whole point of *having* an operating system.
> it doesn't say whether those dates are in american or english format
Here's a hint: Microsoft is headquartered in Washington state.
With that said, the page in question is confusing, but the actual date you're looking for is the 2014 April 8 date in the third column (assuming you install the service packs, which is what the dates in the fourth column are about; the first two columns are essentially meaningless).