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ExtraBITS for 9 March 2015

In this week’s collection of links, Apple replaces AT&T in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Oracle’s Java now comes with a nasty surprise in the installer, and it turns out you can proof EPUBs with the iBooks Web Inspector.

Apple to Replace AT&T in the Dow Jones Industrial Average — After 18 March 2015, Apple will officially replace AT&T on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. While it’s a prestigious position for Apple, the Dow is an inferior stock index, since it includes only 30 companies and is a price-weighted average, thus giving higher-priced stocks more influence than their lower-priced counterparts, while ignoring relative industry size and market capitalization.

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Another Reason to Not Install Java — Installing Java on your Mac is ill-advised, since it can lead to security headaches when enabled in Web browsers. But now Oracle has made installing Java an even worse proposition by bundling the Ask Search Extension with the Java installer. The Ask extension, long included in the Java installer for Windows, is considered adware and should be avoided.

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Proof iBooks with the Web Inspector — Those who develop EPUBs are aware of how similar to a Web site an EPUB is, containing, as it does, XHTML and CSS files to present the ebook’s contents. Not many know, however, that Apple makes it possible to use OS X’s built-in Web Inspector to debug EPUBs. Derrick Schultz shows how developers can enable the Web Inspector in iBooks on the Mac so they can select text in an EPUB being proofed in iBooks and see the underlying XHTML and CSS underlying that text.

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