At Last!
The CBC has a nice post that includes a lot of snark about this: Microsoft is putting Internet Explorer out to pasture.
Nice lead – “A commonly held belief among heavy web users is that it’s only acceptable to use Internet Explorer for the purpose of downloading Firefox or Chrome.”
Apparently M$ will be introducing a totally new browser that is currently called ‘Project Sparta’ with Windows 10. We are cautioned that “Microsoft has yet to reveal the launch date for its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, but many online are already celebrating the end of Internet Explorer’s 20-year-long reign of ‘error.'”
14 comments
This will be at least the 4th time that IE was re-written from scratch. Why should we expect they get it right this time any more so than they did the previous three times? 🙂
(Counting… 1) Relabeled NCSA Mosaic. 2) Original Microsoft IE. 3) “New Engine” IE that came along with Vista/Win7/Win8 ).
With only 8% of the current ‘Net users, why would anyone care what they do, other than the corporate users who are required to use M$ software?
The monthly patch files for IE 11 are larger than a complete download of FF or Chrome.
I can tell you with all sincerity that web developers everywhere would rejoice loudly if IE dies and is never herd from again, in any form! I know I would.
It’s in my “It’s M$ – Believe it when it happens!” file.
I still have the source code for NCSA Mosaic 3. I found it when I was going through some old backup CD’s and storing the contents on LTO tapes since I’m sure most of my old CD’s are near (or past) EOL (though I used Kodak 24kt Gold long archive certified CD’s (actually manufactured by Mitsui) back then) and since I have no Internet… I have time. 🙂 I’ve been toying with the idea of modding the code & recompiling with modern x64 compiler. But I have more important uses of my time, like organising the past 2 decades+ of data & files into some semblance of order so I can find stuff. 😉 I’ve created an SQL db with a web (HTML/PHP) based entry/access system, which I plan to use on my biz site so I get to ‘kill 2 birds…’ 🙂 It’s annoying not to have regular Internet, but I’ve delayed it because I really do need to get all this done and this way, I have no choice. 😉 😀
I am loving having a kitchen again!! LOL Especially since I finally was able to buy some good pot’s n pans & other kitchen things. 🙂 Just made my first pasta in over 3 years! It was sooooo good! I had to stop myself from making seconds… even thirds! LOL
I bought these a couple weeks ago. Very good deal and they are excellent to use and clean. 🙂
StoneChef 6 Piece Marble Ceramic Pots Set (Red)
StoneChef 4 Piece Marble Ceramic Pan Set (Black)
(Though I got the red set. They seem to have been removed from the site. Maybe out of stock.) *shrug* 🙂
My monthly expenses have more than doubled… but it’s worth it. 🙂
I will be getting Internet soon. I can’t really put it off much longer. I needed the time, and money, for other things. 🙂
Oh! Check this out… It was bound to happen! LOL
Telstra runs out of IPv4 addresses
Style sheets will get a lot smaller and simpler without all of the conditional hacks to make things look good in IE. The CSS code for this site would be a third smaller without all of the corrections for M$takes.
Eating is a lot cheaper and better with your own kitchen there is no doubt about it. Of course you need to know how to cook, which is apparently a big mystery for many people. My parents both did it, although my Dad liked to do it more than my Mother. It is a basic survival tool that too many people ignore until they are forced to do it. It is amazing to find people who can’t even make hard boiled eggs properly, much less a basic tomato sauce or soup.
We have known for years about running out of IPv4 addresses, but people didn’t update. It’s like the Y2K ’emergency’ – what, the calendar went into stealth mode in 1990? The only reason I don’t have a permanent IP address for this site is that too many people haven’t made the changes to accommodate IPv6, and my host won’t assign IPv4 addresses to conserve them. My host is ready, it is the tight-fisted laggards who control the backbone that haven’t updated their equipment and software/firmware.
Good luck on your project. I don’t know what I’d complain about if I actually organized things in a rational manner. It would eliminate the frustration of looking for things that you know you have, if you could remember where you put it. 🙂
Unfortunately, it will be years before dev’s will can stop supporting IE even if M$ kill it. Most people still use W7/8 and even XP with just the default IE browser. Getting people to change or do the smart thing is an exercise in futility most of the time. *shrug*
I laughed about the IPv4 Telstra thing because it proves that here, as in the USA and UK and elsewhere, the Gov. understands nothing about the Internet, and they don’t understand even when it’s explained to them. They are still wanting to spend $billions on this stupid NSA style data retention/spying system which is so easily circumvented, especially with Telstra & Optus, who provide over 75% of the wholesale services to other ISPs, now using CGNAT because even though they have IPv6 ready, most people still use IPv4 and they have to be supported. It’s curious how the most ignorant and stupid people are the only ones who want to be politicians and get elected (with a few notable exceptions, though they generally have little real power to do anything smart or good with rare exceptions).
My little (well overdue) project is going well. The important CD’s were stored in a steel fire resistant strongbox that had room for about 460 CD/DVD’s in sleeves (not cases), with more recent backups on about 110 DVD’s in a zippered DVD folder. I put a couple of those moisture absorbing packs in them and replaced them annually, since humidity is a known killer of CD/DVD’s. I’ve copied about 240 so far, and all were good. 🙂 As well as copying to tape, I’m storing them an a 2TB Enterprise HDD (long life) which I will store in the strongbox with a tape. I have an LTO 4 drive which has a capacity of 800 GB native, 1.6TB max compressed. Since most of the data is textual, it’s compressing well. 🙂 Wish I could afford to upgrade to LTO 6 (2.5TB/6.25TB), although all my CD’s/DVD’s will fit easily on 1 LTO4 tape & 2TB HDD. As well as higher capacity, they are faster and have a much better compression algorithm. It’s on my wishlist when I start making some money. 😉 😀
I love cooking. Living with a Cordon Bleu chef years ago and owning a Restaurant, as well as Mom & Gran being great cooks helped a lot. 😀 I got some King Island AAA grade porterhouse steaks yesterday. They are hard to find and expensive (KI beef is mostly exported to Japan and Scandinavia), I needed an indulgence. It was well worth it! Will be some time until I can do that again, but that’s OK. 🙂 I had a little extra money as I made $200 doing tech support last week. I decided at the start of the year my time would no longer be free, with some exceptions at my discretion (a few people who have put themselves out helping me at no charge for eg.) My biggest kitchen related issue right now is a decent fridge/freezer. I only have a small fridge with a tiny freezer (like a medium sized bar fridge). Luckily, I have access to a finance program created by community service/church groups and my Bank, in conjunction with a good retailer that are offering certain white goods at significant discounts. I’m looking at this one with a 4 star energy efficiency rating (4 is the highest currently available for a fridge/freezer). The freezer is on the bottom, which I prefer.
Samsung SRL457MW 458L Bottom Mount Refrigerator
I can get up to $1,200 on a no interest/no fees loan (called NILS) with repayments up to 3 years. 🙂 I’m thinking about getting a new washing machine too. Depends on the monthly repayments, I need to keep them as low as possible for now.
OK! Now I need to go find a new GP doc’s surgery in my area. I’ve visited a couple, but they have no vacancies (have to get one that “bulk bill’s” so the visits are paid for by Medicare). Private ones cost a small fortune ($80-$100 for a 20min general consultation), as in the USA (of course). And people call Lawyers sharks! Hah! They are not the only “professional” predators!
Hope all is well with you my friend! Don’t let stress get to you. It almost got me last year, I should have moved out sooner… But like all compromises, it was good/bad. I should have got out before the “bad” became “REALLY bad”! LOL Live and learn.. You are smarter/wiser than I am, I hope! . 😉 😀
XP is stuck with version 8 of IE, so 8 and 11 will be the legacy versions. If devs stop worrying about catering to IE, and just pop up a notice that a visitor’s browser is out-of-date, and they should download Chrome or FF, rather than catering to the ever smaller numbers, it might actually die. Part of the M$ push for browser dominance was to encourage all of those ‘best viewed with IE’ notices on web sites.
Don’t believe all that garbage about ‘with age comes wisdom’. Getting older is not the learning experience it is cracked up to be. Mostly it is having the time to realize how bad many of the decisions you made earlier really were.
Doctors are being lured into group practices that tend to emphasize profits over patients. They charge you more and give you less than the individual private practices.
All of the data retention is just adding to the volume of crap you have to wade through to get the information you need. They don’t need more data, they need more analysts to figure out what data is necessary and target it. This is more ‘silver bullet’ thinking. There is no magical computer program that will look at the data and select the important stuff. You need people who can figure out what ‘important stuff’ looks like.
No one can do a really good job without good tools, and that loan program sounds like a good deal for working class people. When I bought my latest air conditioner I paid a good deal more for it than many others in the same range. It cost me a lot less than the cheapest model after two months of operation because of the difference in my utility bill. I was more comfortable for $50/month less than the unit I replaced. It paid for itself in one season. Most lower income people can’t look beyond the initial price of the appliance, so they can’t afford efficiency.
It sounds like your back-up project is really moving along. I worry about people who dump everything in a cloud back-up system. Not only is it a security risk, you have to trust the integrity of the system hardware that makes up the cloud system. Not a risk I’m willing to take.
I worry about people who dump everything in a cloud back-up system. Not only is it a security risk, you have to trust the integrity of the system hardware that makes up the cloud system.
Not really. Those of us doing “real” cloud applications are using massive multiple redundancy. Our data is replicated across three Postgres servers spread across three AWS availability zones, as well as being backed up nightly to an S3 bucket. The AWS load balancers are at least two instances of which if one goes down, the other takes over, and behind those load balancers we have at least two instances, of which if one goes down, the other takes over. Because everything is transactional, if a server goes down in the middle of the transaction the transaction gets rolled back and the other server in the HA pair ends up re-executing the transaction. If something happens and takes out the puppet server (the one non-redundant item in the mix), I can deploy a new constellation before the old one decays in roughly 15 minutes by playing the cloudformation json at the AWS API again with a new name, and Nagios will have alerted me long before any of the infrastructure decayed to the point where data loss is possible.
I estimate I’m using a rack’s worth of equipment, all told, spread across three different data centers, all of which would cost us around $250K if we were buying the equipment outright rather than leasing time on it plus requiring an expensive IT specialist at around $150K/year to manage it rather than Amazon’s people managing it. There will come a time when the economics say that we deploy using our own equipment rather than Amazon’s equipment, but that time is going to be a while coming.
You have the internal infrastructure to monitor the cloud, while most people who use them for back-up just dump and ignore until they need the back-up. My only dealings with a cloud is backing up the iPad, which has nothing important on it. My ISP has free space on their cloud system to store data, but I ignore it.
Clouds have uses, but you have to be engaged with them, and set up to recover quickly. Most people and businesses simply don’t have the interest or knowledge to do that.
I suppose it all depends on what you mean by “the cloud”, in the end. For example, I use Evernote. It stores its notes “in the cloud” so I can sync them between my home computer, my iPad, and my iPhone. I also have Wunderlist. Which operates similarly, but with todo and shopping lists. However, a) I don’t store any business critical information on them, b) I don’t care if they go away (there’s one file on the Evernote that is reasonably important, but it’s backed up on my local server), and c) I don’t count on those services remaining available in the future. There’s a *reason* why I back up my iPhone and iPad to my iMac rather than to my iCloud, and that’s because I trust 3rd party service providers about as far as I can throw their HQ buildings — i.e., not at all.
But when I as an IT specialist talk about “the cloud”, I’m talking about Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) — i.e., the bones of what’s needed to provide massively parallel and redundant internet services to people. I’m talking about Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other providers of that ilk. I’m talking about being able to deploy massively redundant infrastructure without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for racks full of gear spread across multiple data centers. About the only thing that can take down my infrastructure is an asteroid wiping out northern Virginia, where Amazon’s main data centers are located. And I’m about to take some steps to even be able to deal with that…
They way you use the Cloud is totally different from the way individuals use the various storage systems that get labelled as ‘clouds’. Using it to deploy multiple redundant virtual systems makes sense, and you monitor it and know what is going on to prevent disasters.
The individual and small business use it their sole back-up resource with no understanding of possible failure, or the need to encrypt sensitive information. They just upload and assume that someone else is taking care of their data and it will be available if they need it. I want to know it is safe and I can recover in less than a day, no matter what happens.
BTW, there are hosts out there that automatically update WordPress. My host doesn’t but I only modify one file when I install an update and it is quick after the back-up.
Aside: my spam filter has taken to grabbing your comments lately. No idea why.
Spam filters. Eh. Either they’re grabbing too much, or not grabbing enough. It seems to me that what we need is *real* anti-spam. As in, a subscription service where you subscribe to it and if someone spams you, men in black show up at their house and “disappear” them to the Spammer Gulag. We could outsource this to the same “black sites” that we disappeared all those Muslims into. I’d pay good money for that service. I suspect Yahoo and Google and Microsoft would pay even more, if that service existed.
“Your ISP is being used by spammers to spam my customer. I want their complete information — bank account used to pay you, home address, their works.”
“Not happening! My customer information is confidential!”
“I don’t think you understand, sir. You have a choice of either handing over that information, or two hours from now a cruise missile is dropping down the chimney of your data center. Your choice. Problem is solved either way as far as I’m concerned.”
“Err… you can’t do that! I’m a personal friend of Czar Vlad! It would be an act of war!”
“Here’s my card. You have 90 minutes to forward the information to the email address on the card. Otherwise…. boom.”
“No way! You’re bluffing!”
Man in black shrugs. “Easier to blow up one data center anyhow.” He smiles, turns, and walks away.
I would volunteer for the targeting team 🙂
All I need is a white list capability so it will leave the regulars alone, and to stop putting comments that are in my existing black list in the spam folder. I already know they are garbage, so the software should just delete them without bothering me.
I could switch to registration, but that would require making the login module available which attracts a different form of spam attack that annoys my host.
“I would volunteer for the targeting team”
How would you feel about a Parliament? I can probably get a laser disignator and a SPIKE-MR on the black market.! Though, money could be a problem. Have to find investors… shouldn’t be too difficult though! 😉 😀
I agree about most of the cloud services springing up like daisies. And agree with badtux. 🙂
I do use 2 cloud based services for general non-critical data, just for ease of access. Both have been around awhile and have an excellent record (I’ve not lost data or access in the 4+ years I’ve used them). I use Mediafire & Filefactory.
Of course, that will change when I get my iwStack IaaS cloud system up and running with Prometius.
iwStack
Work has slowed since I don’t have ready Internet access, but Prometius are progressing well. They now have 4 data sites in 3 countries, and more are planned. They are about to install a 2nd Hitachi HUS 150 Unified Storage system in the primary data center. They currently have 3 in 3 sites. All sites have a secondary NFS storage system for backups etc.
Well… I just had a 1 hr interruption. 😀 A friend from the Pharmacy I used the past 4 years, that I haven’t seen for 6 months was here. So, we caught up and made a lunch date for tomorrow. 😀 I’ll make some chicken burgers, just for a nice change. 😉
I think I have worked out a good SPAM solution after much trial and error. But of course, only time and lot of use will tell. *shrug* 😀
I had a full range of patholy tests done (I found my new doc and he wanted to start with a fresh baseline. I approve), so had to fast for 12 hours. I got a strong coffee and carrot cake from the lovely cafe across the road. But It’s almost 1 PM and they have worn off! I need to get some lunch. 😀
Yeah, it really is a matter of the capabilities of the people operating the particular “cloud” and the capabilities of the people using it. If the ‘cloud’ is really fault tolerant and and secure it is a good useful tool. but if all they are providing is on-line storage of data, that has been available for decades. with some very good sites among many other just using buzzwords.
It’s like back-up software. I can’t remember a decent back-up utility ever provided by M$. They still don’t provide a clean way of recovering from a disk failure with a back-up – it’s go back to scratch and start loading patches.
If you come up with something that allows a specific white list and a real black list that just disappears certain people without have to delete them manually from a SPAM folder in WP I would be interested.