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Desktop Replacements and the 11 Pound Pencil
Marco Ramius writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has an article up entitled 'Unwieldy Laptops or Portable Desktops?' in which the author lugs an Alienware Area-51m desktop replacement to a 32 hour LAN to assess what advantages and disadvantages desktop replacements have over desktops themselves." They also have a related article entitled The Case of the 11 Pound Pencil where an office adopts a desktop replacement solution to unsatisfactory ends. Both interesting looks at appropriate uses for hefty hardware.
Once you've written a couple of LAMP applications, it's easy enough just to copy the important functions out of a past one, spend an afternoon tinkering with it and have a new one up and running. The most important thing is to get procedures in place for doing something by hand first, before you even think about computerising it.
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But, I know we're exceptional. Some of the firms we have to deal with, employ people basically to copy and paste stuff from an e-mail or Word document into an Excel spreadsheet. They think they're doing something clever, even going so far as to describe their operations as sophisticated and computerised. Go figure
That's funny. You rag on people for doing copy and paste from e-mail or World into an Excel spreasheet, but you admit to copy and paste coding in the preceding paragraph. If your re-use involves modifying whatever is being re-used in any way, then your design sucks. If you find yourself doing any modifiction of code to allow its re-use, then your design sucks.