This is a little old, but I was out of town, so here is the “news flash.” Last week, Mozilla released a much anticipated Firefox 1.5. Here is an exerpt of the new features (taken from the Release Notes):

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
• Improvements to popup blocking.
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
• Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.

Get your copy at www.getfirefox.com.

When I got back to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, I clicked through the various RSS feeds I subscribe to via SharpReader.  I found one to be very interesting; Ed Brill posted “mail client hatred stats.”  For those of you who don’t know, Ed Brill is an IBMer working with Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales.  Anyway, in this post, Ed googled for the strings “I hate Notes” and “I hate Outlook” and compared the number of hits between the two.  The outcome was that “I hate Outlook” returned almost 7 times more results than “I hate Notes.”  Well, this is obviously not a fair comparison.  The obvious reason being Notes and Outlook can mean more than just the software package.  The second being that more people use Outlook than Notes (my own estimate).  I wasn’t able to find a credible source with the estimated number of installations. 

No offense to Ed or any other of my IBM friends, but I hate Notes!    Lotus Notes, that is.  Maybe it’s because Outlook is what I’m used to, but when I worked at IBM, I hated every minute of working with Notes.  The interface is just very odd to me.  If you don’t use the local replica, then if for some reason the server isn’t responding, your client will completely lock up.  And, when it locks up, you can’t just kill Notes.exe, you have to find some application to kill all of the child processes…  My fix was to just create the local replica…but then I wonder….Why isn’t that the default?  Why should I have to go figure out how to do all of these things?  For me, Outlook is very intuitive…sure there are some things that are difficult to find…but try using Notes for the first time.  It’s a huge shock.  Really, arguing this is pointless…Notes fans will continue to use Notes, and Outlook fans will continue to use Outlook.  It’s really a preference thing…and I obviously prefer Microsoft Outlook.

My dad is coming to visit for Thanksgiving…as a matter of fact, his plane lands in about 25 minutes.  I just now discovered a really cool web application…FlightView.  Continental Airlines uses it.  Basically, it will show you the location of the plane in pretty much real-time.  Continental’s site even shows the estimated arrival time, etc…all updated to the minute: Check Flight Status and Gate Information.  FlightView’s website shows everything from current elevation to ground speed to estimated time to arrival.  Check it out at flightview.com. 

Well, once again, I want to thank Catherine Helzerman. Ha! She had made a post called The Complete Concise History of GNU/Linux from digg. I thought I knew most of the story. Basically, Linux was founded by Linus Torvalds. He wanted to make improvements on an older operating system called Minix, but the author declined. Well, who was the original author? None other than Andrew Tanenbaum. He wrote the book for my Modern Operating Systems class that I took in college. Great book by the way….I just had no idea that Minix was his original creation. Very cool.

Catherine Helzerman found an article on Digg, which said: “Read about a bug on gmail that granted access to your gmail account, the geniuses at google have been defeated once more.”

Apparently someone found out an interesting way to get through the Gmail security and log-in as anyone without the use of passwords. He has posted the steps to take on elhacker.net with screenshots. He does inform us that Gmail has corrected the problem, but it was surprising to see!

View: Digg: Someone may have got into your gmail account and you even knew it

This just in on Neowin:

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc, announced today that it has been advised by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that its common stock – ticker symbol SGI – will no longer be traded on the NYSE beginning with the opening of business on Monday, November 7, 2005.

Link: Neowin.net – SGI delisted on NYSE

I’m not sure if this is something that was fixed in 10.4.3, but Safari (Apple’s built-in web browser) now passes the Acid2 test. What is Acid2, you may ask? Well, to quote from the website, Acid2 is “a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.” I do know that Safari did not pass this test in the original 10.4 Tiger release.

Test your browser

If you see a smiley face with the words “Hello World!” above it, then the browser passes the test. I don’t think Internet Explorer passes, and I know that Firefox 1.0.7 doesn’t pass either.

Think Secret just announced that Mac OS X 10.4.3 was released, and I am currently updating my laptop now. Apple’s support site says it includes fixes for:
- AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network and file services
- AirPort and Bluetooth wireless access
- Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, and RAW camera support
- disc recording when creating and burning media
- .Mac sync services
- Spotlight indexing and searching
- Dashboard widgets: Dictionary, Flight Tracker, Stickies, and Unit Converter
- Address Book, AppleScript, Automator, Dictionary, Font Book, iCal, iSync, Mail, and Safari applications
- Disk Utility, Keychain Access, Migration Assistant, and Software Update
- compatibility with third party applications and devices
- previous standalone security updates

Source: Think Secret – Briefly: Apple releases Mac OS X 10.4.3
More Info: Apple – Support – Downloads – Mac OS X Update 10.4.3

AppleInsider reported that “Shares of Apple Computer plummeted nearly $6 in after hours trading on Tuesday, losing over 11% of their value despite the company reporting the best quarterly results in its history.”

At the time of posting this entry, the stock was down 5.40 (10.47%) to $46.19 per share. I’m not sure what will happen to it come tomorrow morning.

Source: AppleInsider: Apple stock tanks over 11% in after-hours trading
Quote: AAPL

This evening, I was making my nightly rounds of the various blogs that I read and I came across something very interesting. Dave Hitz, the Founder and Executive Vice President of NetApp has a blog. In his most recent post, “People Die,” Dave learned about some real world business situations dealing with storage:

I learned that if an airline can’t access manifests and passenger lists, then their planes aren’t allowed to take off. After 4 hours, if they still can’t access their data, then every plane in their fleet is required to land at the nearest airport!

I learned that if a drug company can’t produce the right drug testing data, even 10 or 20 years after the drug is approved, then the FDA can shut down production of that drug in every factory that the company has.

View: Network Appliance, Inc. – DaveBlog