Author Topic: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.  (Read 39692 times)

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Offline sportsfan882

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #200: January 22, 2010, 02:01:42 AM »
firefox 3.6 looks good.

why does it say the "personas" feature is new though? i have been using that for a while.

hmm. looks like the spell check "squiggly" line is slightly different on 3.6.

Offline PANatsFan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #201: January 22, 2010, 02:04:51 AM »
Ahh, it's PS3 and Wii, I misread and thought PS3 and 360.  It also works on the iPhone.  Leads me to believe it is just a straight streaming thing instead of the flash based player lala has.  That's why it works for PS3, Wii, and iPhone, all have a browser where the 360 does not.
The ability to re-download them from the locker is nice though. It's like a free backup. The owner of the site seems to have a very cool blog.

Offline The Chief

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #202: January 22, 2010, 09:22:34 AM »
is there a way to make it so that when i open a new tab in chrome, it goes to the new tab rather than keep me at the old page? firefox did it.

Shift+Ctrl+clicking a link will open a link in a new tab and immediately focus on it.  Tedious if you ask me, but that's the only way I could find to do it in 2 minutes on Google.  Google should really take a cue from Firefox and offer more end-user customizability.  Just having extensions is not enough.

Offline JMW IV

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #203: January 22, 2010, 11:50:57 AM »
*shrug*

I just click on the new tab and call it a day. don't see the big fuss here.

Offline The Chief

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #204: January 22, 2010, 11:56:21 AM »
*shrug*

don't see the big fuss here.

He wants a newly opened tab to take immediate focus by default, and Chrome has no mechanism for this.

Offline NatsAddict

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #205: January 22, 2010, 05:14:54 PM »
I apologize in advance if this has already been posted.

Quote
Tough Road Ahead for Adobe on Security
January 8, 2010, 9:59AM
by Dennis Fisher

Microsoft and its endless portfolio of products have been the favorite targets of attackers for more than a decade now. But if the events of the past year or so are any indication, it looks like that dubious distiniction now belongs to Adobe.

The last 12 months have been rough for Adobe, the maker of the ubiquitous Reader, Acrobat and Flash products. It started in February with a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in Reader that attackers were using to take control of vulnerable systems. And it went downhill from there, with Adobe in March warning that attackers were targeting an unpatched JBIG2 flaw in Reader and Acrobat, and having plenty of success with it.

In the first quarter of 2009, seemingly not a week went by without the disclosure of another serious flaw in Flash or Reader. More troubling is the fact that these reports often were accompanied by news that the flaws already were being actively exploited.

It was with all of this as a backdrop that Adobe security chief Brad Arkin said in May that the company had decided to undertake a major overhaul of its security response process, a move that resulted in Adobe switching to a regular quarterly security update schedule. The patch releases coincide with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday and have the same thinking behind them: giving users a predictable update schedule and more time to plan for patch deployment.

But the fact that Adobe needed to implement this program speaks to just how much of a target the company has become. But it also is an indication of how much pressure the Adobe security staff is under. Any way you look at it, Arkin has one of the more difficult jobs in security. Not only is he responsible for Adobe's security response process and all of the public-facing communication about security, but he also oversees the company's internal software security program and privacy initiatives. In other words, he's in one of the positions that gets all of the blame and none of the credit.

Arkin is working with a small dedicated security staff, nothing like the security groups at Microsoft, Oracle or other major software vendors, and he's dealing with a user base in the hundreds of millions. But users don't care about any of this, nor should they. They're only concerned with whether Adobe's software is putting them at risk.

Part of this situation, like the one that Microsoft found itself in about 10 years ago, is a product of the ubiquity of Adobe's software. Reader and Acrobat are the de facto standards for working with PDFs, and Flash is virtually impossible to escape on the Web. That ubiquity, combined with the general shift toward application attacks, makes Adobe's products highly attractive targets for attackers.

"When you’re looking at it from the attacker’s perspective, the install base is – is a big attractive metric to look at. And with Adobe Reader and Flash Player, these are two applications that are installed on a lot more machines than Windows is, for instance. And so, that’s something that paints a bigger bull’s eye. And so, that’s something that’s not gonna change. You know, we’ve got this ubiquitous software, and the responsibility is on us in order to do the things that we can do in order to help protect our users," Arkin said in a recent podcast on Adobe's security processes.

Another piece of the puzzle is also related to Microsoft. Because Microsoft has spent so much time, money and effort improving the security and reliability of Windows, Internet Explorer and its other key products, attackers have had far less success going after these products in recent years. So they have turned their attention to third-party applications, browser plug-ins and Web applications. This translates to more attention, both from attackers and researchers, for Adobe, Apple and dozens of smaller ISVs.

So far, Adobe's response to this shift in the threat landscape has consisted of two main components: establishing the regular quarterly patch release schedule and, most recently, the announcement that it will be using a silent updater for Reader for the first time with next week's scheduled patch release. Adobe shipped the new updater in October and this month's patch release will be the first time it's used by beta testers for a full release.

These are both important steps, particularly the automatic updater. The widespread use of Microsoft's Windows Update has been perhaps the most underrated change in the security landscape in recent years. The fact that millions of Windows users, who might otherwise go months or years without installing a patch, now have their PCs updated regularly is a big win.

This isn't to say that Microsoft's process is for everyone. Microsoft has personnel, resources and leverage that almost no other organization can muster and that makes this process easier. Not easy, but easier. And Microsoft also has been able to convince a lot of researchers to disclose vulnerabilities to them directly and privately, a long and painful process that has paid clear dividends in the form of fewer emergency zero-day responses and less exposure for users.

But if Arkin and Adobe can get automatic updates to work in their enormous user base as well, then they're onto something. Keeping users safe should be a major priority, and keeping them safe from themselves is a big part of that. But Adobe also needs to pay attention to the internal part of this equation: writing more secure software. The company is working on this, as well, with its software security program. But those processes take time and the attackers aren't waiting around.

In the short term, this does not bode well for Adobe. The automatic updates will take some time to reach critical mass, the software security program will take some time to bear fruit and the attackers will continue to hammer Adobe's applications. But in the long term, as these efforts reach maturity, expect to see the volume and severity of the public vulnerabilities in Adobe's software begin to decline and the number of successful attacks drop, as well, as more users are running updated versions.

As Microsoft can attest, that doesn't mean the attackers will stop, but making their task more difficult has paid major dividends for Microsoft and could for Adobe as well.
Tough Road Ahead for Adobe on Security | threatpost

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #206: January 22, 2010, 05:16:04 PM »
Youtube now has some videos available in HTML5.  I hope it's a trend for online video.  Adobe Flash can't die soon enough.

Offline The Chief

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #207: January 22, 2010, 06:13:28 PM »
Flash has its place, but I'd have to agree that it's grossly overused in place of lighter and more elegant methods.

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #208: January 22, 2010, 06:16:42 PM »
Flash can have it's place in the fiery depths of hell.  It's just so poorly coded and such a resource hog that it shouldn't be used anywhere, ever, until Adobe gets its head out of its ass and fixes the damn code.

There is no reason a 6 month old MacBook Pro with a C2D @2.8GHz and 4GB of RAM should exhibit slowdown on any website.  (And yes, I know I'm walking right into remarks about "well, that just because it's a POS Mac")

Offline The Chief

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #209: January 22, 2010, 06:31:16 PM »
Flash can have it's place in the fiery depths of hell.  It's just so poorly coded and such a resource hog that it shouldn't be used anywhere, ever, until Adobe gets its head out of its ass and fixes the damn code.

I'm always wary of making assertions like this since I didn't write Flash myself, but I more or less agree.

Quote
There is no reason a 6 month old MacBook Pro with a C2D @2.8GHz and 4GB of RAM should exhibit slowdown on any website.  (And yes, I know I'm walking right into remarks about "well, that just because it's a POS Mac")

Nah, it's all the same hardware these days anyway.  Arguments about Mac vs PC performance-wise have been dead (to me at least) ever since.  Or maybe it's just that I grew past the benchmarking/obsessing over 2% difference in performance days of my youth :P

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #210: January 22, 2010, 06:38:58 PM »
What does facebook chat use when you pop it out?  I was using it to chat with a friend last night and my system slowed to a crawl.  Firefox's CPU usage showed something like 120%.

I would get done typing a short sentence and have to wait for 30-40 seconds as each letter slowly appeared.  I'm wondering if it's flash based or something else.  I didn't try it in another browser to see if it was just Firefox.

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #211: January 22, 2010, 06:43:34 PM »
Actually it looks like a Firefox issue so some of my recent irrational hatred for flash is lessened.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/528680#threadId560771

Offline The Chief

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #212: January 22, 2010, 06:44:15 PM »
Looks like CSS and JS to me, but who knows.

Running 3.6 right now and no issues.  I don't know how, but I manage to almost never encounter any of the problems that people always mention with Firefox.

Offline JMW IV

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #213: January 22, 2010, 07:00:20 PM »
gears doesnt work with 3.6

or at least the linux version.

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #214: January 22, 2010, 07:09:44 PM »
I thought gears was being discontinued anyway.

Offline JMW IV

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #215: January 22, 2010, 09:23:52 PM »
I thought gears was being discontinued anyway.

hadn't heard about that. but then again, i hadn't been following very closely.

either way, for the time being, no way for me to use Google Docs and such offline. good thing i keep a copy of OpenOffice installed for such occasions.

Offline PANatsFan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #216: January 22, 2010, 09:26:20 PM »
What does facebook chat use when you pop it out?  I was using it to chat with a friend last night and my system slowed to a crawl.  Firefox's CPU usage showed something like 120%.

I would get done typing a short sentence and have to wait for 30-40 seconds as each letter slowly appeared.  I'm wondering if it's flash based or something else.  I didn't try it in another browser to see if it was just Firefox.

I can safely call Facebook a resource hog without looking over my shoulder. It blows. Now Facebook lite won't let you read your inbox messages - gets a Facebook fail whale :bang:

Offline PANatsFan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #217: January 22, 2010, 09:27:27 PM »
Thanks, NA.

Adobe Air freaks me out. The Shockhound mp3 store downloader runs on Air...

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #218: January 22, 2010, 09:31:17 PM »
If you had ubuntu you could install it by doing:

Code: [Select]
sudo apt-get install gears
I'm not sure how you could get it to work in puppy.

Offline PatsNats28

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #219: January 22, 2010, 10:41:46 PM »
He wants a newly opened tab to take immediate focus by default, and Chrome has no mechanism for this.

yup, got it with apple-shift. thanks

anyone know a way to make the triple swipe work? works in firefox

Offline Nathan

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #220: January 25, 2010, 08:22:08 PM »
New tabs when clicking with the middle scroll wheel to open a page in a new tab appear directly to the right of the home tab instead of at the very far right of all tabs.  I don't like that.
After using it a while, I've decided that I prefer the new way of the tab opening to the right of the originating tab.  Keeps related tabs together.

Offline PatsNats28

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #221: January 25, 2010, 10:59:00 PM »
Google Reader extension

Offline PatsNats28

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #222: January 26, 2010, 09:00:22 PM »
i used to have google toolbar on my old windows laptop

Offline PatsNats28

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #223: January 26, 2010, 09:20:41 PM »
so how do i ignore stuff in my reader feed?

Offline PatsNats28

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Re: The "Software and Web" Geek thread.
« Reply #224: January 26, 2010, 10:03:59 PM »
so how do i ignore stuff in my reader feed?