Posts by big_D 6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
The employee does it once, to create an additional install package for the standard image. That cost then needs to be divvied up between all the machines sold with Firefox pre-installed.
There is a cost to creating that package, but it isn't going to work out at 16 quid a machine, unless they are planning on selling only half a dozen machines in total.
As long as they are not charging for Firefox itself, I don't see that Mozilla has much of a comeback. Dell are charging for the service of installing the software.
That is how the open source model is supposed to work, the software is free, but "consultants" are free to charge for additional services around the product, such as installation support, training, general support etc.
If someone is mug enough to fork out 16 quid, fair dinkum to Dell.
That said, putting Firefox as an additional component in the image would probably cost Dell a few cents at most, over the volume of machines they would potentially deliver with Firefox installed.
I agree, with one caveat, I find, although I have a tablet and a smartphone, that I still put a lot of tasks off until I can sit in front of a proper screen.
A smartphone and tablet are great for doing simple tasks on the move, that have to be done immediately, but for more intense work, I'll wait until I get to a real PC with a decent sized screen and proper input devices.
With projected displays and better input methods on mobile devices, this might change over time, but if I need to type more than a line or two of text, if it can wait, it waits until I can sit at a proper keyboard, for example.
We have one user here, he goes through his iPhones very quickly. He had 4 3GS', followed by a 4, which was swapped out 3 times in a year, then a 4s, which was swapped out twice, his 2nd 5 died, but the 5s was just about to be launched...
Biggest problems are Blutetooth packing in or the batteries dying within a couple of months.
Although the iOS for Autos sounds a bit of a sore thumb for the car makers. It only works with iPhone 5, 5s and 5c... No older iPhones and no smartphones from other manufacturers, from what I've heard.
That said, we have someone here still waiting for BMW to release a cradle for his iPhone 5s, he has had a 5 and a 5s, but still uses either a Galaxy SII or an iPhone 4 in the car...
Not wanting to appear a Microsoft appologist, they have extended the deadline from 2010 and users and companies have had over half a decades warning that they need to look for an alternative to XP. It isn't as if this date appeared out of nowhere at short notice (unlike Snow Leopard being put to sleep without even informing users).
"I strenuously object?" Is that how it works? Hm? "Objection." "Overruled." "Oh, no, no, no. No, I STRENUOUSLY object." "Oh. Well, if you strenuously object then I should take some time to reconsider."
Hmm, that is the second time that quote has come to mind in 2 days, reading articles and comments on this site...
Try Ctrl+Shift+V in MS Office.
As to the most obvious and most common? Not for me. I find it useful when bringing text from outside sources into Office documents, but when moving things around within a document, I want them to retain their formatting - if I move 10 chapters of a book around, I don't want to spend the next hour or so reapplying all the sub heading, code snippets etc. styles!
What really narks me is that adding "on a mobile device" to any existing invention seems to make it unique enough to repatent.
What does it matter, if the device is mobile or not? If I connect a peripheral to a desktop PC, a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone and it can communicate with said host, what makes it connecting to a tablet unique over a laptop or a desktop?
So many of the patents I see coming up are not only obvious, but were common practice when I started programming in the early 80s, only we had mainframes and micros at the time. One I read was for a menu list on a mobile device. How is that unique or obvious, how is having that same menu list taken from a 15" monitor and displaying it on a 4" display making "displaying a menu list" unique?!?!?!
people are leaving WhatsApp in droves, at least in Germany.
Threema has jumped from nowhere (around 10,000 downloads) to overtake Modern Combat 4 with over 500,000 downloads this morning.
I've spoken to several people and about half of them are looking at jumping, a third aren't worried, WhatsApp is easy and the rest don't use WhatsApp or Facebook, so don't give a hoot.
I sent my German step daughter an SMS this morning "Welcome to Facebook, resistence is futile", her answer was that she had already deleted WhatsApp and was looking for something else...
Yep, I played it in Southsea as well. Always a fun day out, coming from Fareham.
I had a copy on my Amiga, which ISTR wasn't too bad. But I never managed to get very far.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsKlgCCfEoo
Time Pilot was my specialty, from college, I could make 10p last over an hour! I could clock it on a regular basis, although the plastic ball on top of the joystick was missing, so you usually ended up with bloody fingers after a long game, until the skin hardened into callouses.
No need for dongles, there are plenty of authentication apps for smartphones, or SMS or a phonecall with a spoken code...
There are lots of methods that don't include them having to have a dongle. They are all inconvinient, but the question is, does the inconvinience outweigh the loss your control over the account?
This is the 9 "tiles" that appear when you open a new tab.
When you install a fresh copy of Firefox on a new machine, it has no history of the sites you've visited, so they fill those tiles with sponsored links instead. Once you start visiting real sites, those sponsored sites will start disappearing.
At that point AdBlock + isn't installed and it wouldn't help anyway, because these aren't "ads" in that sense of the word.
Apple III - main computer on Matt Helm TV series. I so wanted one...
Apple IIc - didn't Roy Scheider use one on a beach in the film 2010?
Lisa - I wanted one, I kept the Practical Computing year review magazine with it in for several years. There were lots of great PCs in that issue. It was a wonderful read, even after they were all superceded. To be honest, I prefer those simpler days to the computing to what we have now in many ways.
Newton - hand writing recognition worked well, as long as your name was Jerry Pournelle
You have a right to information about yourself, held by those bodies. You do not have a right, under law, to personally identifiable information from others.
If you make a call and the person identifies themselves, that is fine, ditto if they give you a business card. However their employer cannot give you their names, generally. They have to obtain written permission from those persons in order to release their names in your FOI request. They have to obtain permission, before they can put them as a contact on their website, for example!
And all of those custom LOB applications? Do you even have all of the source code? Do you have ARM compatible compilers that will take the code?
The OS and some standard packets are all well and good and simple applications, like file, print and web serving can probably be moved across relatively easily. But those bought in LOB solutions? What about the custom written LOB solutions? How much are they going to cost to get somebody in to recompile them and work out any issues and bugs that come along? Are all the third party libraries available in ARM versions?
I'm not saying it isn't possible, or that for standard needs it can't be done relatively easily, but you need to do a lot of investigative work and testing to get custom code transferred. The question is whether it is cost effective to do so? Or maybe wait until the next generation of the LOB tools needs to be written / bought in and go ARM then.
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