* Posts by Gary Trner

5 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2007

OpenOffice builds extensions for v2.3

Gary Trner

Word first? Not quite.

@ Terry Bernstein: "The reality, Microsoft haters notwithstanding, is that Word was the first generally available WYSIWYG word processor and there's an awfully big pool of users."

Word Perfect preceded a decent Word by a long shot, as did Amí Pro and a few others. Word, in the Windows 3 and Win95 eras was a joke compared to the top wysiwyg word processors.

That a restricted/crippled version was bundled with the OS gave rise to a familiarity with the product and bred a certain customer loyalty among those that didn't know how much better they could have had. Once a tipping point was reached for format lock-in, the other word processors were dead.

Boffins unveil sharpest ever stellar snaps

Gary Trner

Fine resolution

One light day apart, 25,000 light years away. If I've done the math right (not guaranteed), that's only about 0.0226 seconds of arc. Not bad resolution for sixty year old optics.

One photon sensitivity? Fantastic! That's the key to the whole thing. The rest is image processing.

AT&T turns screws on iPhone unlocker

Gary Trner

+7 Huh?

Um, the Central Standard Time zone is Z-6 hours, not Z+7.

Re iPhone: I can think of no legal right, beyond voiding the warranty, that Apple might have concerning modifications. AT&T has no dog in the fight, as they do not participate in the purchase.

@ Daniel Ballado-Torres

"<snip> (Oh, and they took an entire continent's name as their country's "name" but that is another gripe for another day)."

No, we took the name "The United States *of* America", not "America". We mostly refer to the country as "the U S" or the "U S of A", or "the States". We call our country "America" too, and we do refer to ourselves as Americans. Does that diminish you? Are you so ashamed of your own country's name? What self referential term would you prefer we use?

Jobs: one more thing... a browser war

Gary Trner

Web standards

Daniel Voyce wrote:

"How compliant is Safari? Are we talking Microsoft compliant or Firefox compliant?"

Definitely Firefox compliant. While Safari/Konqueror boast of passing the acid2 test, both they and Opera, another with acid2 credentials, have oddities that are head scratchers. They are still miles ahead of IE of any version.

Porting Safari to Windows is a Good Thing® for consumer choice and for developer testing.

cheers,

gary

Gary Trner

Good on Apple

As a web developer, I'm happy to see any modern browser show up on Windows. The more people introduced to browsers that are reasonably standards compliant, the more pressure is bought upon MSFT to bring their browser kicking and screaming into this millennium. Front end developers spend significant amount of time just making IE seem to work as well as Firefox, Opera and Konqueror/Safari.