The Mozilla plugin check tool can be used in any browser, and reports Flash on IE10 on Win8 is still "outdated": https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/ But the tool can be inaccurate for some browsers. At this time it does show Flash on Chrome as up-to-date. Chrome also bundles its own Flash. Firefox shows as OK too, after you update. If you try to update Flash in IE10 you get a notice that Flash is bundled, but it also says you can install it if you really want to.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS?
on
LibreOffice 4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Borland's early Turbo compilers were amazing (fit on two floppies, and fast). They used a DOS-based windowing system called Turbo Vision. Your app ended up looking like the Turbo IDE, with windows, drop down menus, checkboxes, etc., instead of the Windows 3.1 API. Indeed you could draw color graphics and animate math functions, etc., though that may have been in some kind of full screen mode.
Borland went over to the Windows API soon after all that. It all went to heck for Borland C++ when they dropped the Turbo name in the mid 1990s. Just too buggy to run (version 5). But Borland's Delphi Pascal stayed strong, and I use a text editor written in Delphi to this day. There were lots of user-contributed components, for instance, to make internet protocols work! Microsoft wasn't the only company that missed the boat on TCP/IP. Borland, like MS, put much of its effort into desktop database libraries instead.
Symantec, I wonder what goes on there. Hope the engineering is better than the fairly ridiculous adventure I had with customer service. I was reporting a bug in the "Verified" seals for my paying client: the web wizard generates the wrong seals because the product matrix has not kept up with the threeway conversion of Verisign, Symantec and Norton. On the fourth customer service rep I finally had someone who knew what he was talking about. Refreshingly, he was blunt and did not end by asking me if I had any other issues, but just signed off! He sent me the code I needed, but I'm not sure he reported the bug.
Let's hope that means the server security and SSL cert teams are no-nonsense engineers, not bereft souls in a chaotic marketing enterprise.
Chrome has it too, but hidden under Settings / Advanced / Privacy / Content Settings / Plugins / click-to-play Not sure what the default is these days.
Opera is a great browser, but sites with media content can be so complex, I just start with Firefox and the Browser View extension (very simple), and open the page in successive browsers until it works, with IE as a last resort.
The problem with click-to-play schemes is that sometimes there is a smaller Flash controller you don't see or notice. I've been running Firefox with Flashblock for years and this is a common problem, so I imagine it will be hitting click-to-play as bugs. People who use Noscript instead probably haven't noticed the issue, because once you whitelist a page in Noscript, it reloads and the Flash and everything else runs. But with click-to-play, you may need to reload the page whitelisted so all the triggers can fire in whatever js/flash system they have cooked up to keep count of the count-count. Remember when the Count just liked to count, and wasn't such a vampire?
Opera used to be the fastest non-IE browser to open up, so was handy for getting a quick weather report before heading out, but I think that has gone the way of Firefox as a 5MB download. With mobile not ruling the web, maybe we'll get some of that back.
Whatever turned Firefox into 20MB download I assume it should be able to do a good HTML5 emulation of Flash! http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.php (And Flash is monumentally bigger than its old versions too.)
To be clear on jQuery effects, I'm talking about Javascript with no browser plugins, just those big redundant ad js files that often rival the total byte size of the images on a page. Flash is at least compact. (I develop with js instead of Flash, but I try to keep it reasonable.)
JQuery can eat up cycles too. A common replacement for Flash animation is the jQuery "Cycle" plugin. Well, jQuery sets 13ms timeouts by default for effects. If I have two or three of those things running in ads on a page, my laptop's fan kicks on. The parameter, jQuery.fx.interval, is not that well known, and a developer on a decent system would not notice the CPU overuse. The 13ms resolution is not really needed for simple slideshows.
Photoshop 4.0.1, (c) 1996, I run it everyday. Only later features I miss are unlimited undo and editable text. Text always becomes raster. No plugins, but I do re-save files before they go out, using command line imagemagick scripts! That fixes the one big sneaky annoyance of PS 4.0.1: it saves PNG's with a weird color profile.
Does your stat for 747 include hostile attacks? The 747 seems to have a few outliers, like the shoot-down of KAL007 (269 lives) and Tenerife (583 lives, chaos at a small airport due to a bombing at a large airport), Air India 182 (329 lives, bomb), and Sept 11, 2011. Also, there is the massive JAL123 (520 lives, maintenance error). Airbus came along later, but did get hit by the U.S. attack on Iran Air 655 (290 lives).
Two things come to mind. In previous bad battery situation, the initial run of batteries were fine. Then when they went into production, perhaps with other subcontractors, they got the garbage.
Also, with the extensive testing of the planes, we've got to assume they run them under max power load, with every seat running laptops, playing movies on seatbacks, etc., right? And max use of air circulation, etc. And whatever else makes the batteries cycle to make up for generated power, however it works.
This plane uses a tremendous amount of electricity, see: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/01/boeing-787-electric-fire-grounding/ The li-ion batteries are from a company in Japan, but I wonder where they were manufactured. In the past, subcontractors outside Japan have done shoddy jobs making batteries, such as replacing mylar with paper. Once it's sealed up, how do you test it? Additionally, these batteries use cobolt oxide and are even more prone to overheating than tradition li-ion batteries. The batteries took a long time to certify.
A notorious SwissAir crash over the Atlantic was due to an overheated electrical bus. In a rush to get gambling devices onto seat backs, the airline had gone with a system that required a full computer for each display, which required more power than a more centralized system.
The trial was due to start in a few weeks, contrary to what you say in the second paragraph about no reason for the timing. Also, "US Attorney Chided Swartz On Day of Suicide" is the title of this post.
An indictment, esp. in the U.S. system, is necessarily one-sided, even if endorsed by a grand jury. I don't disagree with reading source material, I just wanted to point out the usefulness of journalism, or whatever that ZDNet article was. Probably I came off too harshly.
As I understand it, in civil code countries (not the U.S.), charges are brought only after some deliberation by a magistrate, after which a trial before a judge results in a likely conviction. In the U.S. the prosecutor leads the grand jury to an indictment (supposedly "could indict a ham sandwich"), and makes a maximal case. At trial it's more likely the charges get denied by the judge or petit jury, compared to a trial in a civil code country. But things have changed over time. U.S. prosecutors once used more discretion rather than trying to rack up convictions even if unjust. Or that's what I've read.
So reading an indictment is roughly equivalent to reading a blog arguing one side of the case.
Linksys did not precisely compete on price value. In the realm of stores like Office Dept, Linksys was top end. After Cisco, the packaging and casing got more extreme, comparative prices went up, all the while bargain basement brands went from unreliable to fine. Didn't help that Linksys alienated the tech-savvy segment of the mass market by killing the routers that could easily be converted to open source community firmware.
It looks like Busboys and Poets are having tech difficulties. We are looking for an alternative feed that we can pick up.
Sorry for the connectivity problems, we are currently working on the broadband issues. The full sound and video will be available on YouTube tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Docked in port is often more dangerous, to the ship at least. This storm came in on a wide hook so it would have been hard to pick a time to leave, assuming they were ready to go when the first warnings came.
The U.S. National Weather Service seems careful not to overstate. Then again, few people seem to even understand the difference between a Watch and a Warning. For this storm there is an oddball bureaucratic classification thing keeping the NWS's Hurricane Center from posting tropical warnings north of North Carolina. Kinda amusing... it's a PDF at the top of the Hurricane page... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ They are handing off to local offices and two more obscure divisions mid-storm: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ and http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/
Agree there's too much crying wolf but the actual numbers are pretty bad. Here is an analysis of why the predicted 11 foot tide at the Battery in lower Manhattan is bad news for the subway: http://kottke.org/12/10/hurricane-sandy-comin The alarms have been indiscriminate though, so there is a lot of noise in the signal. The recent eagerness to close the subway is particularly irksome. The "officials" would never close a large road system because in 24 hours it would be covered in seawater. The people making these decisions see things from the tinted windows of limousines. The first time the subway was closed for weather was only in 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Subway_flooding
Extreme combo of crying wolf and actual superlatives. The reliably sober NOAA is cited by Reuters, "It could be the largest storm to hit the United States." Its official NWS prediction is for a "major to historic" NYC flood. On the other hand, NYC has stranded million of subway riders 24 hrs. ahead of the predicted surge. Here on the edge of the storm in Virginia, the university that used to pride itself on never cancelling classes has indeed cancelled because parents can't work because the grade schools are closed because...
Rain. High near 51. Breezy, with a northwest wind 18 to 24 mph, with gusts as high as 36 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible.
Seamonkey is also convenient is you want to run another Mozilla browser alongside Firefox and not have to take any measures to keep the profiles separate. So it adds one to the number of browsers you can just install and run with no special setup and thereby split some of the advertiser & Facebook tracking that is so annoying.
Seamonkey and Thunderbird also keep the Mozilla team somewhat coherent in developing the common codebase, though increasingly build issues are wasting a lot of time for those two now unpaid projects. Mozilla has three projects it supports with paid developers: Firefox, the Firefox OS and Firefox Mobile. It dropped Thunderbird recently from that group and it's not clear how the TB team is going to handle rapid release vs. extended service release. Lots of tricky work for unpaid developers to keep up with an intricate codebase continually special cased for the three paid products, and to match Chrome innovations.
Seems to me Seamonkey developers are the ones most concerned with making current features work predictably for users.
Slashdot Mirror
The Mozilla plugin check tool can be used in any browser, and reports Flash on IE10 on Win8 is still "outdated": https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/
But the tool can be inaccurate for some browsers. At this time it does show Flash on Chrome as up-to-date. Chrome also bundles its own Flash. Firefox shows as OK too, after you update. If you try to update Flash in IE10 you get a notice that Flash is bundled, but it also says you can install it if you really want to.
And you do not need the JRE to run LibreOffice.
Borland's early Turbo compilers were amazing (fit on two floppies, and fast). They used a DOS-based windowing system called Turbo Vision. Your app ended up looking like the Turbo IDE, with windows, drop down menus, checkboxes, etc., instead of the Windows 3.1 API. Indeed you could draw color graphics and animate math functions, etc., though that may have been in some kind of full screen mode.
Borland went over to the Windows API soon after all that. It all went to heck for Borland C++ when they dropped the Turbo name in the mid 1990s. Just too buggy to run (version 5). But Borland's Delphi Pascal stayed strong, and I use a text editor written in Delphi to this day. There were lots of user-contributed components, for instance, to make internet protocols work! Microsoft wasn't the only company that missed the boat on TCP/IP. Borland, like MS, put much of its effort into desktop database libraries instead.
Symantec, I wonder what goes on there. Hope the engineering is better than the fairly ridiculous adventure I had with customer service. I was reporting a bug in the "Verified" seals for my paying client: the web wizard generates the wrong seals because the product matrix has not kept up with the threeway conversion of Verisign, Symantec and Norton. On the fourth customer service rep I finally had someone who knew what he was talking about. Refreshingly, he was blunt and did not end by asking me if I had any other issues, but just signed off! He sent me the code I needed, but I'm not sure he reported the bug.
Let's hope that means the server security and SSL cert teams are no-nonsense engineers, not bereft souls in a chaotic marketing enterprise.
mobile not ruling -> mobile now ruling
Chrome has it too, but hidden under Settings / Advanced / Privacy / Content Settings / Plugins / click-to-play
Not sure what the default is these days.
Opera is a great browser, but sites with media content can be so complex, I just start with Firefox and the Browser View extension (very simple), and open the page in successive browsers until it works, with IE as a last resort.
The problem with click-to-play schemes is that sometimes there is a smaller Flash controller you don't see or notice. I've been running Firefox with Flashblock for years and this is a common problem, so I imagine it will be hitting click-to-play as bugs. People who use Noscript instead probably haven't noticed the issue, because once you whitelist a page in Noscript, it reloads and the Flash and everything else runs. But with click-to-play, you may need to reload the page whitelisted so all the triggers can fire in whatever js/flash system they have cooked up to keep count of the count-count. Remember when the Count just liked to count, and wasn't such a vampire?
Opera used to be the fastest non-IE browser to open up, so was handy for getting a quick weather report before heading out, but I think that has gone the way of Firefox as a 5MB download. With mobile not ruling the web, maybe we'll get some of that back.
Whatever turned Firefox into 20MB download I assume it should be able to do a good HTML5 emulation of Flash! http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.php (And Flash is monumentally bigger than its old versions too.)
To be clear on jQuery effects, I'm talking about Javascript with no browser plugins, just those big redundant ad js files that often rival the total byte size of the images on a page. Flash is at least compact. (I develop with js instead of Flash, but I try to keep it reasonable.)
JQuery can eat up cycles too. A common replacement for Flash animation is the jQuery "Cycle" plugin. Well, jQuery sets 13ms timeouts by default for effects. If I have two or three of those things running in ads on a page, my laptop's fan kicks on. The parameter, jQuery.fx.interval, is not that well known, and a developer on a decent system would not notice the CPU overuse. The 13ms resolution is not really needed for simple slideshows.
Photoshop 4.0.1, (c) 1996, I run it everyday. Only later features I miss are unlimited undo and editable text. Text always becomes raster. No plugins, but I do re-save files before they go out, using command line imagemagick scripts! That fixes the one big sneaky annoyance of PS 4.0.1: it saves PNG's with a weird color profile.
Unfortunately it's much worse, surgeon with a fetish: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1959332/
*Soviet* shoot-down of KAL007, that is.
Does your stat for 747 include hostile attacks? The 747 seems to have a few outliers, like the shoot-down of KAL007 (269 lives) and Tenerife (583 lives, chaos at a small airport due to a bombing at a large airport), Air India 182 (329 lives, bomb), and Sept 11, 2011. Also, there is the massive JAL123 (520 lives, maintenance error). Airbus came along later, but did get hit by the U.S. attack on Iran Air 655 (290 lives).
Two things come to mind. In previous bad battery situation, the initial run of batteries were fine. Then when they went into production, perhaps with other subcontractors, they got the garbage.
Also, with the extensive testing of the planes, we've got to assume they run them under max power load, with every seat running laptops, playing movies on seatbacks, etc., right? And max use of air circulation, etc. And whatever else makes the batteries cycle to make up for generated power, however it works.
This plane uses a tremendous amount of electricity, see: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/01/boeing-787-electric-fire-grounding/
The li-ion batteries are from a company in Japan, but I wonder where they were manufactured. In the past, subcontractors outside Japan have done shoddy jobs making batteries, such as replacing mylar with paper. Once it's sealed up, how do you test it? Additionally, these batteries use cobolt oxide and are even more prone to overheating than tradition li-ion batteries. The batteries took a long time to certify.
A notorious SwissAir crash over the Atlantic was due to an overheated electrical bus. In a rush to get gambling devices onto seat backs, the airline had gone with a system that required a full computer for each display, which required more power than a more centralized system.
The trial was due to start in a few weeks, contrary to what you say in the second paragraph about no reason for the timing. Also, "US Attorney Chided Swartz On Day of Suicide" is the title of this post.
An indictment, esp. in the U.S. system, is necessarily one-sided, even if endorsed by a grand jury. I don't disagree with reading source material, I just wanted to point out the usefulness of journalism, or whatever that ZDNet article was. Probably I came off too harshly.
As I understand it, in civil code countries (not the U.S.), charges are brought only after some deliberation by a magistrate, after which a trial before a judge results in a likely conviction. In the U.S. the prosecutor leads the grand jury to an indictment (supposedly "could indict a ham sandwich"), and makes a maximal case. At trial it's more likely the charges get denied by the judge or petit jury, compared to a trial in a civil code country. But things have changed over time. U.S. prosecutors once used more discretion rather than trying to rack up convictions even if unjust. Or that's what I've read.
So reading an indictment is roughly equivalent to reading a blog arguing one side of the case.
Rather than read the indictment, or press releases from his side, I prefer actual journalism. Here's a well-written and informative article:
http://www.zdnet.com/hacker-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide-7000009725/
Linksys did not precisely compete on price value. In the realm of stores like Office Dept, Linksys was top end. After Cisco, the packaging and casing got more extreme, comparative prices went up, all the while bargain basement brands went from unreliable to fine. Didn't help that Linksys alienated the tech-savvy segment of the mass market by killing the routers that could easily be converted to open source community firmware.
And in fact:
http://nader.org/2012/11/03/to-view-third-party-debate-at-busboys-and-poets-nov-4/
The debate is supposed to have started at 7:30pm Eastern. The sites are not working.
Docked in port is often more dangerous, to the ship at least. This storm came in on a wide hook so it would have been hard to pick a time to leave, assuming they were ready to go when the first warnings came.
The U.S. National Weather Service seems careful not to overstate. Then again, few people seem to even understand the difference between a Watch and a Warning. For this storm there is an oddball bureaucratic classification thing keeping the NWS's Hurricane Center from posting tropical warnings north of North Carolina. Kinda amusing... it's a PDF at the top of the Hurricane page... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ They are handing off to local offices and two more obscure divisions mid-storm: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ and http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/
Agree there's too much crying wolf but the actual numbers are pretty bad. Here is an analysis of why the predicted 11 foot tide at the Battery in lower Manhattan is bad news for the subway: http://kottke.org/12/10/hurricane-sandy-comin The alarms have been indiscriminate though, so there is a lot of noise in the signal. The recent eagerness to close the subway is particularly irksome. The "officials" would never close a large road system because in 24 hours it would be covered in seawater. The people making these decisions see things from the tinted windows of limousines. The first time the subway was closed for weather was only in 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Subway_flooding
Extreme combo of crying wolf and actual superlatives. The reliably sober NOAA is cited by Reuters, "It could be the largest storm to hit the United States." Its official NWS prediction is for a "major to historic" NYC flood. On the other hand, NYC has stranded million of subway riders 24 hrs. ahead of the predicted surge. Here on the edge of the storm in Virginia, the university that used to pride itself on never cancelling classes has indeed cancelled because parents can't work because the grade schools are closed because...
Seamonkey is also convenient is you want to run another Mozilla browser alongside Firefox and not have to take any measures to keep the profiles separate. So it adds one to the number of browsers you can just install and run with no special setup and thereby split some of the advertiser & Facebook tracking that is so annoying.
Seamonkey and Thunderbird also keep the Mozilla team somewhat coherent in developing the common codebase, though increasingly build issues are wasting a lot of time for those two now unpaid projects. Mozilla has three projects it supports with paid developers: Firefox, the Firefox OS and Firefox Mobile. It dropped Thunderbird recently from that group and it's not clear how the TB team is going to handle rapid release vs. extended service release. Lots of tricky work for unpaid developers to keep up with an intricate codebase continually special cased for the three paid products, and to match Chrome innovations.
Seems to me Seamonkey developers are the ones most concerned with making current features work predictably for users.