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Comment Re:Is that legal in the UK? (Score 1) 306

From a legal standpoint, I don't think its that simple.

Who accepted the ToS? Was it even accepted at all? You can't really do that by just moving files around unless you were relying implicitly on say a site-license, which given Dell is not using these machines internally can't be applicable.

With all the bloatware that sometimes gets included on PCs you can't get around the need for some sort of license agreement which Dell clearly doesn't have in place. What most seem to be taking issue with is the "hijacking" of the Mozilla brand, if Dell forked Firefox, removing any Mozilla branding and included that version instead there really won't be much argument here. From what I'm seeing this is a trademark dispute, TFA points out the revelent parts of Mozilla's licence agreement with respect to this.

Comment Re: No (Score 1) 627

Quite true, however it can prevent non-tech people (read managers, HR) from identifying the weak members of a group (or at least how weak they are) by allowing them to at least turn out code that (hopefully) works. The code could be ugly and prone to issues but for most non-techies once it works they are good with that.

Assuming the person hiring is unable to tell the difference means you will most likely get a 50-50 split of strong vs weak programmers hired (humor me). Now ask which one will cost more and see what happens to that split.

Comment Re:I've never heard of it either (Score 1) 136

A single 140 character SM costs 10 cents here (Caribbean) on the low end, can get up to 40 cents without getting into roaming charges (6:1 exchange rate to US). Its also much more reliable than SMS by an extremely long margin (if a whatsapp has not gone through the sender knows it, if a SMS has not gone through not only does the sender not know when the message comes through it has the sender's timestamp which makes it look as if it had even to the receiver). I got some new years SMSes 2 days after.

A pretty much unlimited length whatsapp is free, plus you can send media (Pictures, audio, video) which works much, much better than MMS. Even if you pay the couple US bucks a year for whatsapp (I think its $2, don't quote me on that though), depending on how much you use text messaging you will at least break even in 1-2 months. My RC group uses it to send announcements for events, after a few broadcasts we would easily have paid for whatsapp subscriptions for the entire group.

I'll gladly concede Whatsapp is not perfect and has its annoying points (e.g. the device must have a SIM / phone number attached so most tablets are left out) but its still much, MUCH better than SMS ever will be.

Comment Re:black listing all androids in 5..4..3..2..1 (Score 1) 77

Just taking a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_devices I am seeing that the oldest phone supporting the current IOS version is the 4s.

From what little I know of the apple ecosystem if such a bug was found on a iPhone 3 the effective response would be the same (you are on your own, we don't support that any more).

I agree Apple is better at this but not for any reason other than they have a much smaller list of devices to deal with.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 435

All I can see from the article and comments is that as no standard exists for this type of interaction (the whole labels instead of folders thing) google chose to implement it their own way.

From the article the actual mail standards IMAP or "(shudder POP)", shouldn't be used as "you get a severely compromised experience". Instead google should reverse it's decision to drop active directory support for free users. This seems to be mainly driven by the fact that the mail standards can't handle your contacts or calendars and that they are not "instant" (saw something about PUSH notifications from the server that you got new mail), only folks I know that "need" to get e-mails that fast are businesses (if my family needs my attention that fast I get a call not an e-mail).

This also gets to the paid vs free users, author writes "Google had licensed EAS in 2009 because its enterprise customers demanded it." followed by "Outlook on Windows and on the Mac still has to connect to Gmail via IMAP, and there's no way (short of buying a third-party add-on or paying $50 a year for a Google Apps for Business account) to get all of your Gmail/Google Apps data into Outlook.". Maybe I'm overlooking something but this seems like simple business sense to me, why pay another company to cover your entire user base for a feature that a particular segment of your user base wants? If recieving your e-mail 5 minutes later will cost you that much then spending less than $5 a month sounds like a cheap sacrifice.

I don't particularly care for the current state of affairs, but I find it hard to blame google in this case. They should have gotten their modifications to IMAP standardized, Am I going to hold that against them? Not really, a standard takes allot of time to get finalized and at the end of the day they are a business that needs to keep running in the mean time. Also I find it odd that one one hand the author is bashing google about open standards yet pushing active directory's sync. I'll end with this question, instead of creating active directory sync why didn't microsoft extend IMAP and build a better standard that we could all use?

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