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Technological Changes
Some techno news... As you know Diskery has been undergoing a major technological upgrade over the past long while and now the effects are starting to be seen. Reality is upon us, folks and it is getting very difficult to continue compatibility with legacy (a.k.a. "old") technologies while using the new.SUPPORT FOR IE ENDING IN JUNE: Internet Explorer is no longer made by Microsoft, there is some new version for Win10. At Diskery we have not moved onto Win10 yet, but IE has so many exceptions to standard web programming that extra time is spent in ensuring those using it can see Diskery the way others do. As of June 1, 2016, we will no longer be testing to see if Diskery renders properly on the screens of IE users. If you are using IE we ask you change to a new browser. Diskery is thoroughly tested for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Both are free applications. The last versions of IE (9-11) will continue to work correctly -- for now -- but we no longer will test for them. SUPPORT FOR DIAL UP ENDING: It's sad but true. I remember starting in computers when dial up at 300bps to a private computer (no internet) over a telephone was the norm. Today high speed wireless at megabytes per second is the minimum. Dial up is still used as backup entry by providers to internet users when the main lines fail. It is also used in private computer-to-computer communications as well as in remote areas where high speed fiber-optics have not yet been installed - but for the vast majority of users it is obsolete - dial up modems are not even installed into computers anymore (although the connections on the circuit boards still exist). Part of Diskery's mandate is to be accessible to as many people as possible but support for slow systems is becoming problematic. If you need to use dial up to access Diskery, you are already finding it takes a long time to download the picture content; this will be getting worse as we will no longer be testing for download time. Images will now be downsized, not with transmission time in mind, but for efficient storage on the server as well as for wireless users (such as Smart Phones) where the amount of data transferred is more of an issue than the speed it is sent. If you cannot switch over to high speed connections - the text on Diskery as well as the Java, PHP and database programming will still run for you but the pictures will increasingly delay the time it takes for the site to execute on your computer - the fix: set your Browser's preferences to NOT display picture content. This takes effect June 1, 2016. |
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