Mozilla 1.6 beats Internet Explorer in every way
Hi Mike,
I'm a little bit confused. I'm not sure which Explorer I should be using to browse the web. Should I use my Internet Explorer or my Ford Explorer? Which one is faster? I wish Microsoft would sue Ford and clear this matter up for me. Maybe if you forwarded this to Carly and she could give it to her pilot who drives a ... Why does she get to fly around in her tax free Gulfstream while I have to drive a taxed slow donkey Internet Explorer?
Keep on keeping on,
George
Windows and General Relativity
Not too long ago, The Inquirer posted a nice article about Windows XP showing an Overclocked P4 Erratic Edition as 10 mhz, due to 32 bit been limited to the number 4,294,967,296.
Yesterday, I was attempting to download a DVD ISO off my ISP that was around the 4.2 billion bits mark and received an interesting download window.
If you notice the size says 3.85gb, that is because they use bytes for the size.
-101% um, maybe its been transmitted faster than the Speed of Light and ive really already reveieved it before I started to download it.... A side effect of General Relativity?... or something....
Hope this amuses someone...
Regards,
Shaun Johns
Windows and General Relativity
Excel and the Numbers Game
Apparently, MS doesn't care much for figures, and I don't mean pretty lasses.
In case anyone needs to know, you shoudn't trust research to Excel either.
Here.
Title: Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel
Abstract: The open source spreadsheet package "Gnumeric" was such a good clone of Microsoft Excel that it even had errors in its statistical functions similar to those in Excel's statistical functions. When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2, has largely fixed its flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions. Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perform statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel.
The PDF is here.
Regards,
Wei Shun
Silly old Alexa and Stuff
Tech site readership slumps precipitously
[NB: Our Webmaster says our page views continue to climb, and the problem appears to be with Alexa, restricted as it is to some diehards rather than hip young folk unlike yours truly. Ed.]
Charlie,
It is a trend, my friend. You may not notice it, and I would very probably have missed it too, were it not for a curious "incident" which happened to me a few weeks ago and one which happened last Saturday.
First the one which occurred just before the Valentine weekend, which I was to spend with the family-in-law at the Belgian coast, not far from the high school (?) where I studied and obtained my Master's Degree. As I was in the neighbo(u)rhood, I offered the Informatics teacher to give a little speech/talk/presentation on databases and database programming, as this is something that is only mentioned in passing (or glossed over completely) during the programming classes.
I fondly remember from my own years there that those evenings were almost always most entertaining, as the "speech" itself was mostly discarded and replaced by a question/answer or "stories from the workfloor" type of session. Which more often than not finished the following morning in a nearby pub ;-)
My offer was turned down - for a very good reason, as it turned out: there would barely be an audience. In the 10 years since I graduated, the interest in the "informatics" courses has declined every year, with only a few students left (there used to be 40-50). I did not make much of it, and enjoyed my stay a the coast, but somehow the question "why?" kept nagging me - so I started asking around, only to hear about declining numbers of informatics students at almost every university or highschool (in Belgium, that is).
Now on to the incident of Saturday. While reading the jobs ads in the paper, I came across an invitation to attend a "work-breakfast" (from 9:00-12:00) which promised to pinpoint some forgotten, but very useful features of Oracle 9i and a presentation on the use of Oracle Advanced Queuing while processing data captured during the "Dodentocht" (100 km on foot). It was free, first-come-first-served and the paper was already a few days old - I gathered there was only a very slim chance of being allowed. Nevertheless, I subscribed through the website and received a confirmation email a few minutes later, complete with driving directions and a detailed roadmap. Maybe I got lucky?
Evidently not, as only 21 people turned up - out of 24 subscriptions. I really got curious as to why there were only so few people there, so I asked the presenter afterwards. What seemed to be a small, harmless question evolved into a discussion which lasted a few hours (well, the organising company had ordered way too many sandwiches, it would have been a shame to throw them in the bin ;-).
The gist of it: the general interest in "technology", and especially IT is declining. Fast. Throughout the population.
A lady working in the Intel building just across the road reported that the "open day" they organised last year only attracted half of the visitors of the year before.
Someone working in an IT outsourcing company confessed that as they could not find skilled people to strenghten their workforce, they started recruiting people "fresh-out-of-school" (as in the heydays of the IT bubble) with the promise to train them, only to receive next to no response to their job ads.
They all wondered - just like me, just like you - why?
And if you expected to find an answer here, you were wrong ;-)
Name supplied
Mozilla and Zillas in General
Hi Mike,
Mozilla 1.6 gets even better once you add the Tabbrowser Extensions ( here ) and PrefBar (here) to it. OTOH quite certainly someone will argue that I'm unfair to all those OTHER extensions out there... Just pick your poison from eg
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/
With best regards,
Martin Forisch
Hideeho Mike!
Well IE is 3 years old, in Internet/Computer time, that?s like T-Rex shipped it first. There are more things that speak against IE, like the complete lack of support for the latest Standards, namely CSS2.1 (like generated content), XHTML and on and on. Another thing that IE has never heard about is PNG graphics with alpha transparency. That results in a really shitty way of programming GOOD webpages, that are working in such obscure browsers as Opera and Mozilla (obscure from the AOL user point of view ;-) and as well will work in IE. BTW, you really really should try Opera, too.
Have a look at this.
Mit freundlichem Gruss / Yours Sincerely
Jürgen H
the Tab options was offered in Netscape 7.0 and later versions.
Mozilla Firebird (the one thats under a meg in size) is probably the best standalone web browser.
You didn't mention the pop up killer thats built into Mozilla (Pref's - Privacy -n- Security - Popup Windows).
I've used Mozilla for the last year (used Netscape 6.1 threw 7.2 then went to M 1.5).
I actually use Firebird as well (its not at a full 1.0 version as of yet, but its just a slim'd down version of the latest Mozilla build).
I've read your site and pointed people to your site for quite some time. Now if you would have gotten the guy that writes the BOFH article's to come along with you when you left the Reg...I'ld never have to go there.
Keep up the good work.
Michael F
Man buys Acer Ferrari AMD waves HP goodbye
Hello Mike
You may recall some months back my female canine and moan with regards to HP not wanting to sell me an AthlonXP-M based laptop computer with an SXGA screen here in Singapore. As I noted in that moan, all HP needed to do was build me the computer of my choice where it was available, the USA, and fed-ex it to me. But to protect my best interests with respect to support, HP refused. Well HP, it worked! I bought an Acer Ferrari 3000 AND IT ROCKS!!!!!
I would like to thank HP for preventing me from purchasing an HP product that would, according to HP, have broken down in no time and required HP support(which of course they couldn't provide here in Singapore for some reason). As such, I am the FIRST person in my company(which employs 350 engineers, read geeks and 1000 sales and support staff) to buy an Acer and our IS department is watching this with much interest. Acer came up with the full 3 year international warranty and the 2 hour in house express service, something HP didn't even offer. Ok, that's the politics, now the machine?
As I said above, the machine rocks. Built-in blue tooth, 802.11g, 1394 port, 4 USB ports, AthlonXP-M 2500, SXGA screen, built in Ethernet, built-in AC97 modem, 1G of ram and 1 PCMCIA slot which I use with my dual serial IO card so that I have some serial port connectivity. We just had a dealer meeting at which I used all the functions of the machine except the 1394 port and it all worked superbly. I have the unit partitioned up nicely as am running Gentoo Linux as well as XP pro in a dual boot configuration. The Linux is tweaked specifically for my Athlon XPM(that's what I like about Gentoo, you compile everything from source for the specific processor in your machine) with powernow running flawlessly under Linux(2.6-2-rc2-mm1 kernel). Only 2 gripes about the machine, it only has a 4200rpm HDD and comes with XP home. The HDD speed am going to be solving with a ram disk product that will allow me to write my windoze swap and all temp files to ram disk which will allow it to run like a rocket(not done yet). The XP home issue turned out to be bollix. I purchased XP pro and it installed fine with all the drivers perfectly(had some trouble getting bluetooth to work but an Acer technician and I managed to get it to go under XpPro...was a duff inf file with the blue tooth driver). Ok, that's the geeky stuff.
The politics are?.? if this unit does me right, we will buy more of them. So, the new HP once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. They had a guaranteed sale but instead gave Acer an inroad to one of their customers. Glad I hold no HP stock. Wonder if the HP board of directors are reading this? Wonder if they care? Maybe I'll buy some Acer stock.
Cheers,
John
WINDOZE and LINUX nightmare
Hi Mageeky,
Well after two weeks of brutal Hell... I have repaired WINDOZE after the disastrous W2K SP4 "critical security upgrade". I have every friggin Microsucks update installed and have not lost any data that I know of (yet). I can document that SP4 will hose some Symantec/Norton security files when installed. In my case SP4 also hosed IE5.x and other stuff. Microsuck's has a few laundry lists of damage done by SP4 with few solutions. The fact that these thieves get away with damaging peoples systems and NOT paying for the damage or going to jail is a REAL crime !!!! I figure Dollar bill and SuSE cost us over $6,000 in two weeks despite the fact we did NOTHING wrong other than install their automated "upgrades".
And after the SP4 disaster, I decided to try Linux as you know from my previous e-mail. Started with SuSE Office Desktop 8.1 >From my experience this distro is too old to recognize typical PC hardware of the past two years like PCI modems and intregal 3Com networks vs. physical Ethernet cards. So unless some one desires to learn manual coding of Linux as a hobby I'd pass on SuSE Office Desktop especially as SuSE USA refuses to provide ANY Tech Support even after you pay for it (twice literally). SuSE USA has some REAL Big operational problems that are going to land them in a courtroom IMNHO.
So out with Office Desktop and like a damned fool we try SuSE 9.0 Personal Linux. At least this distro recognizes and properly configs our 3Com network though it didn't like our Gigabit net... But still no luck with installing the most common internal modem on the face of the Earth a USR 5610B PCI modem. SuSE Tech Support, (sic) claims to ONLY provide support for an external serial dial-up modem. NO installation SUPPORT is provided for any internal modem or any external cable/DSL modems. So I guess that means SuSE provides NO SUPPORT at all as who in their right mind uses an external dial-up modem these days???
Based on conversations with several Linux journalists and people on Linux support websites, IBM is the only one providing quality Linux support, and that of course is to large enterprise and probably mostly for servers. Based on our experience Linux looks to be a very good O/S waiting for a competent graphical interface, which no Linux distro mfg. is supplying or supporting. It's really a crap shoot if any Linux desktop distro will properly install on a PC without major hassles and manual configuration. There are no easy manual configs. and little industry hardware support. As an example US Robotics offers a Red Hat Linux patch that does install the 5610B into Linux but USR provides ZERO tech support and ask people to send THEM installation scrips that work with Linux!
It's really sad that such a great O/S as Linux is simply NOT ready for Prime Time on the PC desktop because the distro mfgs. have NOT done a good job with the details of their graphical interface. These folks do not understand that most PC users want a simple, reliable, secure O/S. They do NOT desire to become Linux programmers or to make Linux a hobby. They use a PC as a TOOL. Linux has the means to make PC operation a much better and more secure experience, but not in it's current half-baked desktop distros.
Time for companies like SuSE, Red Hat, Debian and others to get off their duffs and do the job right. NOBODY needs or wants the hacked, cobbled, unsecure crap known as WINDOZE. There is literally a Golden Opportunity in the Linux community for a polished, professional Linux distro that delivers pain-free installation of all hardware and it sure doesn't need to be FREE as many people foolishly believe. We purchased the full RETAIL versions of SuSE Linux so that we WOULD have Tech Support for our first go at Linux. SuSE FAILED MISERABLY and we would discourage ANYONE from purchasing their software based on SuSE's TOTAL REFUSAL TO PROVIDE THE TECH SUPPORT PAID FOR in our RETAIL product purchases. SuSE can't be trusted as many other consumers have discovered the hard way, just as we did. Trust me when I tell ya We WON'T get fooled again by SuSE !!!
To illustrate how incompetent SuSE US Tech Support, (sic) is, they insisted we go online and registered our product before we could obtain Tech Support (sic). We asked them how we were suppose to do this without being able to install our dial-up modem - the actual reason for our tech call. They suggested we go find a WINDOZE based computer some where and log on and register... Don't EVER buy SuSE software or you'll regret it in our not so humble opinion! These people are clueless in our experience and have no interest in the cost to their customers from lack of Tech Support.
BUYER BEWARE applies to anyone considering desktop Linux - It's simply NOT ready for Prime time yet
Source:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14440
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