Probability by Surprise Applets

Please note the following requirements.

Requirements

Most of these applets use JDK 1.1. event handlers among other things. You need Communicator version 4.5 or better, or Internet Explorer 4.01 or better.

Performance

The unix version of Netscape 4.5 has bugs.

• When you use fast update, or start any animation, the Stop button is not very responsive. This has to do with the way events are queued and no amount of programming can get around these system concerns.
• The underlying X-Windows library (Xlib) goes nuts sychronizing events and produces a number of errors. At least this happens on our SGI Irix 6.2 version.

The best performance is on a PC with an OS such as Windows NT that uses premptive-multitasking so that the thread execution is snappy. Both Netscape 4.5 and Internet Explorer do fine.

On Macs your mileage may wary. There are just too many problems with Java on the Mac. Your best bet is probably Microsoft Internet Explorer with the preferences set to Apple Runtime for Java. It works fine for me. I haven't tested Netscape 4.5 on the Macs. However, hope is on the horizon for Macs. I finally saw an announcement that MRJ 2.1 (Apple Runtime for Mac version 2.1) is due to be released this fall. By Apple's own admission, it fixes a huge number of bugs (their adjectives, not mine).

The list of Applets

• The Birthday Problem Applet. This Applet brings out some Xlib problems on Unix, at least on our SGI.
• The Collector Applet
• The Probability Tree Applet. This applet only works on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 on a PC. This is being worked on.
• The Match Applet
• The IID Sequence Applet