[...] Can't anybody build anything that will last more than a few weeks? Am I that old to believe long tern stability is a good thing?
Good thing Mozilla does just that, eh? They pick one of about every seven major-version Firefox release to make an ESR (extended support release) version, and they have been doing this since 2012. The ESR release is supported for one full year, plus another couple months or so (specifically, the time it takes to release the next major version of Firefox after that on which the last point release of the ESR version is based--they add critical fixes from major versions to ESR versions during the year of support but avoid major feature or UI changes).
This is intended for organizations that deploy Firefox and need some stability (e.g., to test something before deployment and ensure support longer than 6-8 weeks), but you can use it at home, too, if you want.
GE has. It's called Wink and it's got the most stunning range of interoperability on the market. ZB HA, ZB LL, Z-Wave, Lutron's protocol. Insteon's working on theirs.
Everything I've seen says that Wink still requires the Philips Hue hub (just like SmartThings still requires it)--see, for example, http://www.wink.com/help/products/philips-hue-lighting-starter-kit/. It certainly should be possible, however, and since GE's own Link bulbs clearly support ZB LL, this was surprising to me.
Philips Hue. I'm not kidding. The ZigBee Light Link protocol that it uses is an open standard. The API that the Bridge uses to communicate via HTTP is also open, published by Philips. A few third parties have even made LightLink-compatible bulbs. They did not reverse-engineer anything. This summary is a little misleading in several ways: first, any third-party devices already joined will stay that way (unless you reset your bridge to defaults with the new firmware on it); second, there actually are problems with some bulbs that were exposed with the new firmware; and third, it's not that they aren't allowing third-party devices but rather that they just want them to be "Friends of Hue" certified first--though in fairness, even though that program has been around for a couple years I don't think anyone besides Philips has created products for it.
Someone could create an open-source ZigBee LightLink "bridge" compatible with Hue that lets you join whatever bulbs you want. It's just that nobody's done this, possibly because Philips' own product has historically been so good. I suspect some third party may create a compatible "bridge" soon, maybe SmartThings since their hub already has a ZigBee-capable radio, if they ever decide its' a good idea, but who knows. You'd probably also lose the Web-based functionality the Philips bridge enables, like scene syncing across devices, control when you're away from your home network (without needing to VPN in), and the ability to also use the website to control your lights.
Now if only OS X would was allowed to work on my 3 year old system which is more than powerful enough for it based on hacked installs, and if only all the software wasn't updated so it won't work on the last OS. Thanks Apple!
Meanwhile I can install Windows 10 on a 10 year old system and play a 16 year old game just fine. Boo Microsoft for being horrible people that don't give away your amazing product for free and don't have a penguin or a fruit as a logo.
What three-year-old Mac doesn't support the latest version of OS X? OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" officially supports Macs dating as far back as 2007 (or 2008 or 2009, depending on the system), and I believe El Capitan will support the same.
OK, fine, I meant to say "usable" instead of "useful." That is clearly what the last sentence of TFS is suggesting v2 should be usable for, as if it's just a new API that v1 users need to migrate to.
And exactly what folder would that be in Windows? I'm guessing they download to some sort of temporary folder, then install to places largely in %windir%, particularly %windir%/system32 (and the WoW64 equivalent). But good luck with that--and even if that's right and doesn't break regular usage, updates are going to install elevated anyway and can do whatever they want, including turning off a read only flag.
But this begs the question: what kind of anal retentive asshole would not want to receive Windows security updates? Why is this even an issue? If I upgrade to Windows 10, I want every security update the second it comes out. Sooner, if possible.
Security updates, sure. But Microsoft has traditionally divided Windows Updates into two categories: required and optional. The former is primarily security updates, while the second may include minor bug fixes (traditionally ones that were targeted for presumably better testing inside a later service pack but made available sooner for those affected) or updates to optional components, like new versions (non-security updates) of the.NET Framework, new drivers, and whatnot. I'll take the first but would rather have the opportunity to test the second myself and roll back if needed.
Umm...whoever wrote the headline and summary (and that's certainly what they implied), because that's what I was responding to rather than expressing a personal viewpoint that Facebook owes me benevolence?
Facebook's API description says about v2: "In v2.0, the friends API endpoint returns the list of a person's friends who are also using your app. In v1.0, the response included all of a person's friends." This doesn't sound like it will be a useful replacement for their XMPP chat interface unless everybody is using the same third-party app, or maybe I'm missing something.
Unless Title Guy edited the title in the past ten minutes, I don't see how "Mozilla Temporarily Disables Flash" is "misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version".
Slashdot edited the headline--thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.:) The old one was something like "Mozilla disables all versions of Flash in Firefox."
Wait, or maybe they didn't edit the headline, IDK (though I think they did)--but the story still implies the same (perhaps that's what I remember), that they're disabling "all versions," which is no longer true in any case.
Unless Title Guy edited the title in the past ten minutes, I don't see how "Mozilla Temporarily Disables Flash" is "misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version".
Slashdot edited the headline--thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.:) The old one was something like "Mozilla disables all versions of Flash in Firefox."
Mozilla did block the then-latest version of Flash Player, 18.0.0.203, last night. Adobe released version 18.0.0.209 early today, which fixes this vulnerability and which Mozilla is not blocking. They didn't really block "all versions," they just blocked versions less than or equal to known vulnerable versions, which at that time happened to also include the then-latest version. Let's stop using misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version of the plugin.
As is usual, the headline and summary are sensationalized at the expense of truth: Amazon isn't doing this for all Kindle books. They're doing it only for self-published Kindle books (i.e., not ones from actual publishing houses, which comprise the majority of books most people actually read), and even then it's not for books that are actually purchased: it's for books read as part of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited programs, which basically allow you to rent/check out participating books for "free" if you are in one of those programs (the former requires an Kindle reader or tablet from Amazon plus a Prime subscription, and the latter requires a monthly fee). Books people actually buy are unaffected, as are the vast majority of books in general even if they're rented. This is still an interesting model, but it's not as extreme as I thought from the Slashdot posting. I guess it would kind of be like Pandora negotiating a significantly lower royalty on songs that are skipped within the first few seconds.
How, exactly, does a "no country redirect" (i.e., "ncr") help in this situation? That's just intended for you to be taken to the "regular" (US English) Google.com homepage in case it's incorrectly detecting your location or you otherwise don't want to be redirected to a country-specific site. I'm pretty sure there's nothing else special about it.
It's not just grandmas. I work for a high-end web dev company in Seattle, and almost a third of my coworkers still have @aol.com addresses. I do too because dial-up is the only option where I live. Plus, it's nice to have had the same email address for nearly twenty years.
You (and they) know you can keep your aol.com e-mail address if you cancel your paid dial-up service, right? I understand you apparently have other reasons to keep it, but...
Responsible software should have a released branch that has only bug fixes, and then other versions for new features. Otherwise, how the fark can one use your software for certified products? How can someone do a risk analysis on something as a platform, when it might change daily? Feature changes should not be casually thrown in. Yes, mozilla stupidly did this - but most software does not, and should not. [...].
Maybe "did," but they don't anymore and haven't since 2012, which is shortly after they switched to the stupid Chrome-esque release model. They have an "ESR" (extended support release) branch intended for the enterprise but usable by anyone who only wants important fixes without big changes for a relatively long period of time--though in the world of Web browsers right now, I guess that only means a year.
I'm not sure why this is news. Sticking any device on the PCIe bus is going to allow for a lot more speed than using the SATA bus...
Did you read the summary? It's reporting that new PCIe SSDs are not faster than "old" SATA SSDs as measured by real-world app- and game-loading times (not benchmarks, in which of course PCIe outperforms, as they do mention). By "not faster," I mean "equal," which is what the headline means (somewhat odd usage of the phrase "as fast as" when you already expect the first thing to be faster, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from).
Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
Your history is a bit off. Gecko was Mozilla's focus since Mozilla itself was created to continue Netscape's work on the next version of their browser after failing on their goal of improving the (horrible) Netscape 4.x layout engine, which was their original goal for version 5 (although I think they might have been experimenting with both possibilities at the same time before giving up the former). Firefox (originally Phoenix then Firebird) was created with the goal of taking that same layout engine, Gecko, but wrapping only a simple browser around it rather than the entire Mozilla/Netscape Communicator-style suite. Netscape never had many Netscape/AOL features in the Mozilla suite itself; those (e.g., AIM integration, branding, and a different default theme--Modern instead of Classic, etc.) were mostly confined to the Netscape-branded releases that AOL/Netscape released using the Mozilla suite as a base (starting with Netscape 6--skipping the scrapped version 5 attempt, though version 6 was horribly delayed and based on a somewhat unstable pre-1.0 release of the Mozilla suite). In any case, Gecko has not only been there since before Firefox, but it's one of few things that Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (which effectively lives on as Seamonkey) share, albeit a very large and important thing since it's used for so much (not just HTML rendering but also creating the UI itself via XUL and a theme).
Thunderbird was created with a pretty similar goal: take the same layout engine but include only the e-mail features from the suite.
And, for the record, if you can't figure out the USPS website you're an idiot. All these idiosyncrasies have been around for as long as I can remember on their site, and yet we ship out stuff all the time with the system.
So how, exactly, do you use their website to print first-class postage, then? (I don't; I use PayPal and don't even bother with their site anymore. That's not an excuse for them, however.)
The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.
OK, display it to the user like that--but they still need to keep track somehow of the actual number. How do you propose that they do that? We are left with the same problem.
Masters of only one (Let Kindle Slide). Online Shopping. I simply do not understand all of these devices that Amazon is trying to pimp. Phones? Tablets? I love shopping at Amazon but their brain dead hardware makes zero sense.
I actually like the Fire TV--it supports everything I need (I like Apple, but I'm not invested in iTunes movie purchases and rentals, and Amazon Prime is quite nice for both movies and TV), and it can side-load Android apps, which isn't always useful but is at least a little fun. The Fire TV Stick, recently released and much cheaper, might also be nice, but I haven't used it. I actually returned my Roku for this. As you possibly hint, the Kindle is also a nice device, though I mean the e-ink variety rather than the tablets (which may also be nice, but I have never used them but suspect I would much prefer my own tablet with the Kindle app, which I currently use if I want an LCD).
As for the Echo, if it can be used as a high-quality speaker, I can see it being useful for that, though it would be nice to have a physical connection rather than Bluetooth. Its intended main function sounds neat, but I'm not sure it will be that useful (and I'm not sure how I feel about having an always-on mic, even if it presumably doesn't transmit anything to Amazon unless it thinks you've beckoned it).
Slashdot Mirror
[...] Can't anybody build anything that will last more than a few weeks? Am I that old to believe long tern stability is a good thing?
Good thing Mozilla does just that, eh? They pick one of about every seven major-version Firefox release to make an ESR (extended support release) version, and they have been doing this since 2012. The ESR release is supported for one full year, plus another couple months or so (specifically, the time it takes to release the next major version of Firefox after that on which the last point release of the ESR version is based--they add critical fixes from major versions to ESR versions during the year of support but avoid major feature or UI changes).
This is intended for organizations that deploy Firefox and need some stability (e.g., to test something before deployment and ensure support longer than 6-8 weeks), but you can use it at home, too, if you want.
A large portion of the submitter's words were stolen verbatim from the second link without any attribution.
Nobody's done this? Heh...
GE has. It's called Wink and it's got the most stunning range of interoperability on the market. ZB HA, ZB LL, Z-Wave, Lutron's protocol.
Insteon's working on theirs.
Everything I've seen says that Wink still requires the Philips Hue hub (just like SmartThings still requires it)--see, for example, http://www.wink.com/help/products/philips-hue-lighting-starter-kit/. It certainly should be possible, however, and since GE's own Link bulbs clearly support ZB LL, this was surprising to me.
Philips Hue. I'm not kidding. The ZigBee Light Link protocol that it uses is an open standard. The API that the Bridge uses to communicate via HTTP is also open, published by Philips. A few third parties have even made LightLink-compatible bulbs. They did not reverse-engineer anything. This summary is a little misleading in several ways: first, any third-party devices already joined will stay that way (unless you reset your bridge to defaults with the new firmware on it); second, there actually are problems with some bulbs that were exposed with the new firmware; and third, it's not that they aren't allowing third-party devices but rather that they just want them to be "Friends of Hue" certified first--though in fairness, even though that program has been around for a couple years I don't think anyone besides Philips has created products for it.
Someone could create an open-source ZigBee LightLink "bridge" compatible with Hue that lets you join whatever bulbs you want. It's just that nobody's done this, possibly because Philips' own product has historically been so good. I suspect some third party may create a compatible "bridge" soon, maybe SmartThings since their hub already has a ZigBee-capable radio, if they ever decide its' a good idea, but who knows. You'd probably also lose the Web-based functionality the Philips bridge enables, like scene syncing across devices, control when you're away from your home network (without needing to VPN in), and the ability to also use the website to control your lights.
Now if only OS X would was allowed to work on my 3 year old system which is more than powerful enough for it based on hacked installs, and if only all the software wasn't updated so it won't work on the last OS. Thanks Apple!
Meanwhile I can install Windows 10 on a 10 year old system and play a 16 year old game just fine. Boo Microsoft for being horrible people that don't give away your amazing product for free and don't have a penguin or a fruit as a logo.
What three-year-old Mac doesn't support the latest version of OS X? OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" officially supports Macs dating as far back as 2007 (or 2008 or 2009, depending on the system), and I believe El Capitan will support the same.
OK, fine, I meant to say "usable" instead of "useful." That is clearly what the last sentence of TFS is suggesting v2 should be usable for, as if it's just a new API that v1 users need to migrate to.
Make the entire folder read-only. Done.
And exactly what folder would that be in Windows? I'm guessing they download to some sort of temporary folder, then install to places largely in %windir%, particularly %windir%/system32 (and the WoW64 equivalent). But good luck with that--and even if that's right and doesn't break regular usage, updates are going to install elevated anyway and can do whatever they want, including turning off a read only flag.
But this begs the question: what kind of anal retentive asshole would not want to receive Windows security updates? Why is this even an issue? If I upgrade to Windows 10, I want every security update the second it comes out. Sooner, if possible.
Security updates, sure. But Microsoft has traditionally divided Windows Updates into two categories: required and optional. The former is primarily security updates, while the second may include minor bug fixes (traditionally ones that were targeted for presumably better testing inside a later service pack but made available sooner for those affected) or updates to optional components, like new versions (non-security updates) of the .NET Framework, new drivers, and whatnot. I'll take the first but would rather have the opportunity to test the second myself and roll back if needed.
Who says they intend it to be useful replacement?
Umm...whoever wrote the headline and summary (and that's certainly what they implied), because that's what I was responding to rather than expressing a personal viewpoint that Facebook owes me benevolence?
Facebook's API description says about v2: "In v2.0, the friends API endpoint returns the list of a person's friends who are also using your app. In v1.0, the response included all of a person's friends." This doesn't sound like it will be a useful replacement for their XMPP chat interface unless everybody is using the same third-party app, or maybe I'm missing something.
Unless Title Guy edited the title in the past ten minutes, I don't see how "Mozilla Temporarily Disables Flash" is "misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version".
Slashdot edited the headline--thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :) The old one was something like "Mozilla disables all versions of Flash in Firefox."
Wait, or maybe they didn't edit the headline, IDK (though I think they did)--but the story still implies the same (perhaps that's what I remember), that they're disabling "all versions," which is no longer true in any case.
Unless Title Guy edited the title in the past ten minutes, I don't see how "Mozilla Temporarily Disables Flash" is "misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version".
Slashdot edited the headline--thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :) The old one was something like "Mozilla disables all versions of Flash in Firefox."
Mozilla did block the then-latest version of Flash Player, 18.0.0.203, last night. Adobe released version 18.0.0.209 early today, which fixes this vulnerability and which Mozilla is not blocking. They didn't really block "all versions," they just blocked versions less than or equal to known vulnerable versions, which at that time happened to also include the then-latest version. Let's stop using misleading phrasing that will make people think they blocked any past, current, or hypothetical future version of the plugin.
As is usual, the headline and summary are sensationalized at the expense of truth: Amazon isn't doing this for all Kindle books. They're doing it only for self-published Kindle books (i.e., not ones from actual publishing houses, which comprise the majority of books most people actually read), and even then it's not for books that are actually purchased: it's for books read as part of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited programs, which basically allow you to rent/check out participating books for "free" if you are in one of those programs (the former requires an Kindle reader or tablet from Amazon plus a Prime subscription, and the latter requires a monthly fee). Books people actually buy are unaffected, as are the vast majority of books in general even if they're rented. This is still an interesting model, but it's not as extreme as I thought from the Slashdot posting. I guess it would kind of be like Pandora negotiating a significantly lower royalty on songs that are skipped within the first few seconds.
Just go to http://google.com/ncr to bypass it.
How, exactly, does a "no country redirect" (i.e., "ncr") help in this situation? That's just intended for you to be taken to the "regular" (US English) Google.com homepage in case it's incorrectly detecting your location or you otherwise don't want to be redirected to a country-specific site. I'm pretty sure there's nothing else special about it.
It's not just grandmas. I work for a high-end web dev company in Seattle, and almost a third of my coworkers still have @aol.com addresses. I do too because dial-up is the only option where I live. Plus, it's nice to have had the same email address for nearly twenty years.
You (and they) know you can keep your aol.com e-mail address if you cancel your paid dial-up service, right? I understand you apparently have other reasons to keep it, but...
I think you meant Digital Restrictions Management. ... At least there's still the iceweasel fork that doesn't come with this [...].
Or, you know, an actual build of Firefox from Mozilla that also doesn't come with it, as the article pointed out...
Responsible software should have a released branch that has only bug fixes, and then other versions for new features. Otherwise, how the fark can one use your software for certified products? How can someone do a risk analysis on something as a platform, when it might change daily? Feature changes should not be casually thrown in. Yes, mozilla stupidly did this - but most software does not, and should not. [...].
Maybe "did," but they don't anymore and haven't since 2012, which is shortly after they switched to the stupid Chrome-esque release model. They have an "ESR" (extended support release) branch intended for the enterprise but usable by anyone who only wants important fixes without big changes for a relatively long period of time--though in the world of Web browsers right now, I guess that only means a year.
I'm not sure why this is news. Sticking any device on the PCIe bus is going to allow for a lot more speed than using the SATA bus...
Did you read the summary? It's reporting that new PCIe SSDs are not faster than "old" SATA SSDs as measured by real-world app- and game-loading times (not benchmarks, in which of course PCIe outperforms, as they do mention). By "not faster," I mean "equal," which is what the headline means (somewhat odd usage of the phrase "as fast as" when you already expect the first thing to be faster, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from).
illiterate application essay's
The irony.
It's a Finder preference. Press command comma. The first checkbox is "Show all filename extensions".
How does that affect ls again? ;)
Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
Your history is a bit off. Gecko was Mozilla's focus since Mozilla itself was created to continue Netscape's work on the next version of their browser after failing on their goal of improving the (horrible) Netscape 4.x layout engine, which was their original goal for version 5 (although I think they might have been experimenting with both possibilities at the same time before giving up the former). Firefox (originally Phoenix then Firebird) was created with the goal of taking that same layout engine, Gecko, but wrapping only a simple browser around it rather than the entire Mozilla/Netscape Communicator-style suite. Netscape never had many Netscape/AOL features in the Mozilla suite itself; those (e.g., AIM integration, branding, and a different default theme--Modern instead of Classic, etc.) were mostly confined to the Netscape-branded releases that AOL/Netscape released using the Mozilla suite as a base (starting with Netscape 6--skipping the scrapped version 5 attempt, though version 6 was horribly delayed and based on a somewhat unstable pre-1.0 release of the Mozilla suite). In any case, Gecko has not only been there since before Firefox, but it's one of few things that Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (which effectively lives on as Seamonkey) share, albeit a very large and important thing since it's used for so much (not just HTML rendering but also creating the UI itself via XUL and a theme).
Thunderbird was created with a pretty similar goal: take the same layout engine but include only the e-mail features from the suite.
And, for the record, if you can't figure out the USPS website you're an idiot. All these idiosyncrasies have been around for as long as I can remember on their site, and yet we ship out stuff all the time with the system.
So how, exactly, do you use their website to print first-class postage, then? (I don't; I use PayPal and don't even bother with their site anymore. That's not an excuse for them, however.)
Java is still in a first major version.
Latest release is 1.8.0_xxx
Sort of. They've kept the internal version numbering like 1.8.x, but the public name since 1.5 has been "Java 5" and counting.
who cares really?
The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.
OK, display it to the user like that--but they still need to keep track somehow of the actual number. How do you propose that they do that? We are left with the same problem.
Masters of only one (Let Kindle Slide). Online Shopping. I simply do not understand all of these devices that Amazon is trying to pimp. Phones? Tablets? I love shopping at Amazon but their brain dead hardware makes zero sense.
I actually like the Fire TV--it supports everything I need (I like Apple, but I'm not invested in iTunes movie purchases and rentals, and Amazon Prime is quite nice for both movies and TV), and it can side-load Android apps, which isn't always useful but is at least a little fun. The Fire TV Stick, recently released and much cheaper, might also be nice, but I haven't used it. I actually returned my Roku for this. As you possibly hint, the Kindle is also a nice device, though I mean the e-ink variety rather than the tablets (which may also be nice, but I have never used them but suspect I would much prefer my own tablet with the Kindle app, which I currently use if I want an LCD).
As for the Echo, if it can be used as a high-quality speaker, I can see it being useful for that, though it would be nice to have a physical connection rather than Bluetooth. Its intended main function sounds neat, but I'm not sure it will be that useful (and I'm not sure how I feel about having an always-on mic, even if it presumably doesn't transmit anything to Amazon unless it thinks you've beckoned it).