11:31 – We’re still building and shipping science kits. This weekend, we should be able to finish labeling containers for the state virtual school order and get at least a good start on filling them. We told the customer we’d ship their first 40 kits before month end and the remaining 40 in the first week of September, but I hope to be able to get them all shipped by the end of the month.
I just activated Barbara’s new GSM phone. She’s playing with it now, setting ring tones, entering her phonebook, etc.
Just upgraded Firefox—again. I swear Mozilla is going to drive me nuts before they give up. For many recent versions, if you “Exit” FF, it would remember all open windows and tabs. When you opened FF again, it would show all the tabs, but load only the one active tab in each window, leaving the others without taking up memory until you actually clicked on it. Now, the first thing it would load as active, is the offline page you were previously looking at. Very valuable asset, because you never lost anything you might be working on, should the page get updated while you had FF closed.
The only downside to that is that occasionally, I had about 10 tabs open to create the daily weather report I record for the radio project. No problem—I just hit ‘reload all tabs’ twice, and I was current.
But suddenly, with this version, it automatically loads the current updated page from the Internet, instead of the offline one you might have been working on.
I really, really hate upgrades! We’re far enough along in the computer revolution that they should not be necessary anymore. Even Cinelerra has not had an upgrade since 2009. What gives at Mozilla?
FireFox is in a deathmatch race with Chrome. They are totally rewriting the backend of FireFox for javascript speed (google IonMonkey and SpiderMonkey) . Many of the game manufacturers are considering moving their games to browsers to kill their porting costs. See the following for more details about the environment if desired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread
My software business is considering abandoning our Windows front end and moving to a browser front end. We are trying to figure the usefulness of the browser based environment versus the dedicated userness of the Windows environment. The browser will never be as good as the dedicated Windows app but it is trying to be. Enough so for us to move and thus get the complete range of potential customers: Windows, Mac, IOS, Droid, etc.
This is what is killing Microsoft, the commodization of the operating system. Their business model is based on growing the number of computer users running Windows. That stopped a year ago and is rapidly decreasing as people move to IOS and droid variants.
MS also relied on user data lock-in with their office line, their email server, and SharePoint. In all of these, it’s time-consuming and painful to get your data out for use in another database or word processor or whatever you, the data’s owner, want to do with it. In a corporate environment, it’s cheaper to just pay the (ever-increasing) annual license fee.
There’s a good argument that GoogleDocs and similar (non-MS-controlled) cloud-based apps are a bigger threat to MS’s bottom line than are any number of non-Windows operating systems.
Google Docs, et.al. might work for a small business or individual. But don’t expect them to make much headway in publicly traded companies due to data security concerns. You can’t have business sensitive information stored on servers you don’t control, mission critical data dependent on the good will of other companies, etc. And for companies that deal with ITAR, HIPAA, or Sarbanes-Oxley data it’s out of the question, not to mention classified data.
For all their faults as apps, a well-configured system of servers and PCs running Windows, Office, and Exchange runs smoothly and efficiently.
Could something come along and unseat it? Sure. But MS has a lot of installed seats in corporate America.
I don’t know what it is about Queensland boys, but they seem to love blowing themselves up with home made bombs:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-18/teenager-suffers-horrific-injuries-in-homemade-bomb-explosion/4895108
Wow, looks like Google did a full reboot Friday afternoon (I was searching at the time and noticed it):
http://news.sky.com/story/1129847/google-outage-internet-traffic-plunges-40-percent