I am using Bing webmaster tools to check the traffic to my website and I have noticed that I had Adobe Flash disabled and the lovely charts and graphs rendered by the web page still display. Google Analytics also works without flash. Annoyingly, Google Adsense does not work without flash when displaying graphs to the screen. hopefully they will fix this and allow me to see my data without having to switch the flash plugin back on. Youtube works perfectly without using flash, you just use HTML5 as that is supported by Firefox and it negates the need for the Adobe flash plugin, that is just a conduit for viruses and malware even on a Linux system. Not having the Adobe flash plugin enabled will prevent websites from playing those hidden flash files that play loud music and annoy the heck out of you.
There will still be some websites that will cling to flash support, but if you are running Linux, then you might not be running flash for much longer. The HTML5 feature at least allows you to watch Youtube videos without having to install the plugin and open a security hole in your system. I hope that in the future, there will be a common video codec for Linux and Windows browsers that will allow users of both platforms to enjoy online video streaming without any hassles and not have to install a proprietary codec. That will be better for security. The Webm codec is supported by Firefox, Chrome and the new Internet Explorer, so that is the main hope for future video streaming.
Anything is good as long as it is an open and free video codec. The image to the left shows the output of the cal 9 1752 command. This shows missing days in September 1752. Quite an oddity. This is due to the British Empire. http://www.genealogytoday.com/columns/everyday/030902.html.
-21:53:14-- gordon@deusexmachina [~/Downloads/gcc-4.7.0/mintbuild]$ cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
The cal command is very useful for displaying a calendar for reference. For some reason it only goes up to the year 9999. I guess by then we will have a different calendar. If we use the Star Trek stardate system, then it might be easier. The stardate today is -311360.42. Convert dates with the Javascript Stardate converter here: http://www.stevepugh.net/fleet/stardate.html.