For most users most of the time, they're just running a word processor, a web browser, and maybe an email application
Or transcoding streaming media into a format their video card takes. Or taking video content from their HD camera phone of the future and ripping it onto Blu-ray. Or retouching the red-eye grandmas old photos. Or maybe background processing their digital photo album looking for faces that match aunt marge so they can be classified. Or maybe....
Just because you can't think of uses for horsepower, doesn't mean grandma can't. We haven't even scratched the surface of what computers might be able to do for us if we give them enough juice.
In fact, I wager the classic "All most home users do is word-processing" is bunk. If anything, most home users dont even own a fancy pants word processor because the only thing they'd need it for are resumes. I would imagine these days, most home users are using their computers for all forms of media and expect any manipulation of said media to happen very, very fast.
If it weren't for giving the small states a handicap in presidential elections, a candidate would only spend time in cities like New York, LA or states like Florida. Basically anywhere with density. They'd completely ignore spending their resources in small states because it wouldn't affect their outcomes.
The electoral college sounds like a scam on the surface, but when you think hard about what would happen if we didn't have it, you might change your mind.
Some times you got to make the job have enough perks so you dont get tempted to go corrupt. If you cut a politicans pay, it just makes them more likely to take people up on bribes and kickbacks. If you pay a politican a lot, it won't be worth their while (as much) to rake in the dough with such nonsense.
The less money a politician makes, the easier they are to bribe. The more they make, the less they "need" to take the risks of going corrupt. The same holds true for cops, people who print money, and probably people who make drugs like morphine. Gotta pay them so they don't start creating their own private "benefits package".
Oh, and before you hang me. If you mean "compromise" as in "DLC style cave in to the republicans just enough to get 51% of the vote", then I agree with you. But I dont consider that compromise, I consider that being a coward. You can compromise and still not be a coward--that is what I disagree on.
The idea that "compromise" is somehow the ultimate solution to a problem is part of the reason things are so screwed up in this country.
And you think the last 8 years was full of fucking compromise? Do you think Bush and friends were willing to "compromise" on their little war thing? No, they are the poster child of your dream. They would fire people who wanted to compromise. Look how much they fucked up our country.
No. You are 100% wrong. The biggest problem is nobody is willing to comprise at all. We are too interested in fighting over distractions like gun-control or abortion rights. The republican party and to some degree the democrats have been all about non-compromise. Nixon won the election by polarizing us on useless social issues. Bush forced us into non-compromise with clever use of language ('either you are with us, or against us').
We need more compromise, not less. You sir, are very, very wrong.
Give me a Regan or Obama
You haven't read Obama's "Audacity of Hope" have you? He is all about compromise. His courage is comes not from his "courage of conviction" but his courage to tell it like it is and to verbalize both sides of an issue. Has Bush *ever* stated the valid points that are raised by those who disagree? Nope--after all that would be un-patriotic, Bush is always right, he has the courage of conviction!
Obama has the courage to actually go on camera and say "here is where I might be wrong... these other guys might be right instead". He even does so when it would piss off his own base.
I suggest you read his book. I have. That is why I voted for the guy. He would never agree with what you just wrote.
Then gas prices rose, and the world changed, and SUVs were seen as dinosaurs
I dont blame them for tapping into the SUV fad. I do think they were stupid to not see it for the fad it was and think long term. Only an idiot can seriously make a 5 or 10 year plan and not consider long-term fuel prices.
If your statement was true, then when the Seattle port wanted to barcode shipping containers, the Union would have been cool with it. If your statement were true, the unions would have been honest with their members about the long-term prospects of a company when the said company simply has no "wiggle room" to compete with a global market.
Your statement is better rephrased as: "Unions have an kind of interest in their members".
Some are smart and think long term. Some are stupid (UAW) and ignore both short and long term and thus shoot themselves in the foot.
Is it wise for a single human to decide for his or her self what is and what is not "actual information"? It is a good idea to create tools that allow us to isolate ourself from mainstream thought? Maybe those "links that sell me shit" might mean "they have ads, but really the content is something that makes me uncomfortable". Who knows?
If the most widely used search engine filters the results so it returns only what you want to hear, what kind of society will we have? Will it create one where we humans debate ideas to find their core truths? Or will such technology allow us as a society to hide from uncomfortable truths because our tools make it easy?
And instead of debating you fools, I instead will just "personalize" you and your views away. The world is flat, 9-11 was a plot by the Nike Shoe Factory to convince NYC firefighters to buy expensive running shoes and we never landed on the Moon, we landed on Mercury to have a round table meeting with the extra-dimensional life that gives the US it's weapons technology.
How do I know this? Everything I want to hear is always number one on Google! I boycott everything else (known as "Main Stream Media") by hiding it!
I disagree with you. Thanks to more personalization coming in "the future" I'll finally be able to shape my echo chamber in a way that filters you semantic search people out of my world view forever. But until that time comes, I'll be forced to challenge my values, thoughts and beliefs by debating you instead. So:
I'd love to hear how any kind of "Semantic Web" or "Semantic Search" deals with the natural tenancy of people to want to improve their rankings. Remember the days before Google and you used to be able to get on top of Lycos or Altavista by just stuffing the "Keyword" meta-tag full of garbage? How is any kind of "Semantic Web" different then a fancy, W3C sanctioned "keyword" meta-tag?
Course, thanks to this new-fangled "personalized search", once you do solve the problem I won't know about it because my Tivo, my e-Newspaper, my pocket cell-computer, my microwave-xbox-wiimote and my digital iToaster will know better then to tell me. So please, take time to reply thoughtfully; after all, in the near future I will finally be able to filter uncomfortable ideas likes yours away. Thankfully, in the future you will be able to screen your world in a way that doesn't require you to argue with me. You and I can both live a digital life where everybody agrees with us!
But what happens if you want to do full text search? Besides, your nice ACID InnoDB kinda backfires when half the tables are using MyISAM, doesn't it? And good thing MySQL lets you know when your nice happy transaction will not roll back properly because half the tables are MyISAM, right?
As I said, what fun is a database server that is consistent or predictable?
If your database is crashed and is no longer capable of accepting data, how is that different from losing data?
I mean this is mysql here, not a real relational database. Kind of like sloppy cowboy VB coders of yore, MySQL has the same kind of attitude. "If it works, who cares if it is right".
I mean, sure people site "Well, Slashdot, FaceBook, and BIGCO use it, so MySQL is okay". But have those people ever realized how easy it is to lock yourself into MySQL? MySQL is so full of non-standard behavior and gotchas that it can be very painful and difficult to migrate to a real database. So what to companies do? Layer on a huge pile of Memcached and crazy "archive databases" to scale when if they had started with a more standard, scalable database system maybe they could have allocated their developer time to something more productive.
Anyway, I rant. I just think MySQL is only used by large companies because either they don't understand how much extra developer hours are spent working around MySQLisms or they know MySQL sucks, but know that it is to costly to migrate to something better.
But that has nothing to do with your post or my original post does it? I'll conclude with the main problem--Like VB, MySQL grew a whole crop of developers who dont know any better. While I dont know if you can blame that on the database or a programming language, I chuckle when I see MySQLisms in code (like never using a "JOIN" because it mysql is "faster if you give it small SELECT statements).
MySQL has never been a stable database program. I've never had any other database system that just blows a database table at random. Nothing is more exciting then having a website go down because one of the tables got marked "corrupt" and you have to go "REPAIR TABLE". The damn thing might not even have a load on it and it will blow up!
First of all, what is MySQL doing that corrupts tables during normal operation and second of all? Seriously, a database shouldn't crash like that, ever.
Second of all, it might as well try to auto-repair the damn table. I mean, I've never had it loose data, only somehow decide the table was "corrupt" and then taken offline. And who cares if you do it automatically and it looses data, this is MySQL we are talking about here! They make no claim about data integrity and the user base doesn't even know what that means (must be a car or some "enterprise" feature used only by NASA and Fortune 50 companies)! I mean, 0000-00-00 is a valid date according to them!
But alas, this is MySQL we are talking about here. I mean, it isn't like you are putting any sensitive data on it right? I mean, surely only a fool would use it for anything besides storing data like "number of shoes in my closet" or "number of purses owned by the wife", right?
Good 'ol MySQL. I mean, what fun is a database server that is consistent or predictable?
Would be to just play around with all of them. Dunno if you will be the guy who is adding products and stuff, but if you aren't make sure to pay attention to the backend side of things. All of them handle things like inventory and "t-shirt sizes" or "widget colors" different and you want to make sure your client can manage that stuff on their own. For example, the main reason I choose viacart was that it would track the inventory separately for each product option... several of them (including X-Cart, I think) would track inventory based on the product. So if you had only 2 medium shirts and zero large shirts, the customer could order a large shirt anyway because the system would go "you have two shirts in stock" regardless of the size.
As I said, they all suck, honestly. Just in different ways:-) Play with them and try to set up a mini version of what you are doing to be doing on production to see if they meet your needs.
You never delete shit. Ever. Then you loose the records of it happening. Fraudsters delete shit. You always hide it. What if the customer or your merchant account comes back several months later and contests the order? How can you prove you canceled an order that is now deleted from the database?
What if they want to re-instate the order? Who knows what you might want to do with that information! If you delete it, you'll never get it back. If you hide it, you can always pull it up later.
Paypal or your merchant might have the order totals and stuff, but they won't have the exact line-item invoice sent to the customer--only the shopping cart application will. I've yet to find a cheap shopping cart application that sends the full shopping cart to the payment system. They usually send over the mimimum set of fields required to get an approval or decline and then they are done.
If the ZenCart developers think deleting an order is a good idea, it makes me question their understanding of the problem domain. What else are they doing that is sketchy?
Besides, there are other free shopping cart applications out there that work for folks like you or me who only want to sell a couple products. ViaCart is the one I finally settled on. Much easier to use too. It is free for a limited number of products.
Honestly though, all of them suck in various ways. You just need to pick the one that doesn't suck for the parts you use.
I find myself using conditional comments more and more these days. Wish I had done so long ago. Makes your codebase much cleaner and your life a bit more sane. The only drawback is you have to always remember to touch that pesky ie.css file when you make any kind of breaking change.
But only if you were the first guy to work on the website. The second you have to touch somebody elses 4 table deep, FONT laced goo, it is usually much cheaper to bite your lip and deal with it.... but even then it depends.
I think the moral is really, it all depends. Just dont have a heart attack if you find yourself using a table for layout every now and then.
What are you, some old-school bricks and mortar business designed by the dinosaurs. Us young kids with our new economy are leveraging paradigm shifting software such as QuickBooks that integrates SMTP based technology that enables us to seamlessly *email* our clients PDF invoices from within our software.
While your snail mail slow-voices arrive at your client in days, our internet-speed invoices use push technology to instantly bill our clients.
Have a nice life, gramps. PS: DrKoop is going IPO and I hear it will be huge!
Sorry if I hurt your feelings. I wasn't aware that Slashdot was for grandmothers chatting quietly about the latest developments in the knitting industry. Perhaps you could guide me to a place better suited to boisterous, passionate and foul-mouthed postings like mine would be better suited.
Again, sorry if I hurt your feelings or offended you. I hope my non-apology will help you carry on with your life in a somewhat dignified fashion. Cheers.
And say that unix (FreeBSD myself) is a good platform to *target* for contract web stuff. Windows, currently, isn't as cheap or easy for freelance web stuff as *unix. However, call me weird, but I prefer to do the actual writing of code under windows using a windows-based text editor (Eclipse, UltraEdit, or heaven forbid Dreamweaver depending). Depending on whatever, I'll either just use SMB to mount the disk or FTP most of my work. That doesn't mean you can slack though, you will will have to do minor edits via Nano or VI. And depending, I'll be doing version control either via TortiseSVN or through a shell (I wouldn't ever trust SVN over a network mounted filesystem).
Interestingly, I wonder what it would be like to do development work on something a bit more unixy like OSX. Dunno, bottom line is:
work in the OS on which you're comfortable.
And I'll add "But make sure you can work on any OS, cause you'll have to eventually". All OS's suck, just in different ways;-)
(and yes, again, nice diner party + wine + 12:40am + fun thread = messy writing, sorry)..
Never thought about how you'd bill for freelance writing. I guess that might be easier to estimate, am I right? I mean, they dont ask you to change the entire plot mid-stream do they?
Hmm... I majored in tech. communication (i.e. technical writing). Never thought how you'd bill for that kind of work:-)
At least in the case of Zencart you could see the source to verify the behavior and i'd bet with a little work prevent that from happening.
But could I bill a client to not only make that database-affecting patch, but bill them to play open source politics to get that fix pushed into the mainline ZenCart codebase?. And trust me, I can fully expect a *lot* of politics involved to get them to accept a patch which changes makes a change to the DB schema and affects how orders are removed.
So since my client won't pay for that, can I get them to pay for the continual application of a database-affecting patch every time ZenCart releases an update? Hmm... I doubt it, and quite honestly I really dont want to do it even if I get paid for it. What a pain in the ass!
So basically, your solution is a non-starter. I dont play open source politics unless it is worth my non-billable time. FreeBSD is worth my non-billable time and I've contributed many ports and patches to them, but ZenCart just doesn't make the cut I'm afraid. I'm certainly not inclined to play open source politics for quickbooks-like accounting packages, that is for sure. The last thing I want to do with my non-billable time is accounting!!
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody likes working on computers who are used in houses with chain smokers. Make sure to plug the "non-smoking owner" too.
Fixed.
But which is easier to use on the couch? A laptop or an iPhone?
Or transcoding streaming media into a format their video card takes. Or taking video content from their HD camera phone of the future and ripping it onto Blu-ray. Or retouching the red-eye grandmas old photos. Or maybe background processing their digital photo album looking for faces that match aunt marge so they can be classified. Or maybe....
Just because you can't think of uses for horsepower, doesn't mean grandma can't. We haven't even scratched the surface of what computers might be able to do for us if we give them enough juice.
In fact, I wager the classic "All most home users do is word-processing" is bunk. If anything, most home users dont even own a fancy pants word processor because the only thing they'd need it for are resumes. I would imagine these days, most home users are using their computers for all forms of media and expect any manipulation of said media to happen very, very fast.
If it weren't for giving the small states a handicap in presidential elections, a candidate would only spend time in cities like New York, LA or states like Florida. Basically anywhere with density. They'd completely ignore spending their resources in small states because it wouldn't affect their outcomes.
The electoral college sounds like a scam on the surface, but when you think hard about what would happen if we didn't have it, you might change your mind.
Some times you got to make the job have enough perks so you dont get tempted to go corrupt. If you cut a politicans pay, it just makes them more likely to take people up on bribes and kickbacks. If you pay a politican a lot, it won't be worth their while (as much) to rake in the dough with such nonsense.
The less money a politician makes, the easier they are to bribe. The more they make, the less they "need" to take the risks of going corrupt. The same holds true for cops, people who print money, and probably people who make drugs like morphine. Gotta pay them so they don't start creating their own private "benefits package".
Oh, and before you hang me. If you mean "compromise" as in "DLC style cave in to the republicans just enough to get 51% of the vote", then I agree with you. But I dont consider that compromise, I consider that being a coward. You can compromise and still not be a coward--that is what I disagree on.
And you think the last 8 years was full of fucking compromise? Do you think Bush and friends were willing to "compromise" on their little war thing? No, they are the poster child of your dream. They would fire people who wanted to compromise. Look how much they fucked up our country.
No. You are 100% wrong. The biggest problem is nobody is willing to comprise at all. We are too interested in fighting over distractions like gun-control or abortion rights. The republican party and to some degree the democrats have been all about non-compromise. Nixon won the election by polarizing us on useless social issues. Bush forced us into non-compromise with clever use of language ('either you are with us, or against us').
We need more compromise, not less. You sir, are very, very wrong.
You haven't read Obama's "Audacity of Hope" have you? He is all about compromise. His courage is comes not from his "courage of conviction" but his courage to tell it like it is and to verbalize both sides of an issue. Has Bush *ever* stated the valid points that are raised by those who disagree? Nope--after all that would be un-patriotic, Bush is always right, he has the courage of conviction!
Obama has the courage to actually go on camera and say "here is where I might be wrong... these other guys might be right instead". He even does so when it would piss off his own base.
I suggest you read his book. I have. That is why I voted for the guy. He would never agree with what you just wrote.
I dont blame them for tapping into the SUV fad. I do think they were stupid to not see it for the fad it was and think long term. Only an idiot can seriously make a 5 or 10 year plan and not consider long-term fuel prices.
If your statement was true, then when the Seattle port wanted to barcode shipping containers, the Union would have been cool with it. If your statement were true, the unions would have been honest with their members about the long-term prospects of a company when the said company simply has no "wiggle room" to compete with a global market.
Your statement is better rephrased as:
"Unions have an kind of interest in their members".
Some are smart and think long term. Some are stupid (UAW) and ignore both short and long term and thus shoot themselves in the foot.
The market share of IE6 users will shrink to a point were we can finally write these people off. IE6 is holding the web back big time.
Is it wise for a single human to decide for his or her self what is and what is not "actual information"? It is a good idea to create tools that allow us to isolate ourself from mainstream thought? Maybe those "links that sell me shit" might mean "they have ads, but really the content is something that makes me uncomfortable". Who knows?
If the most widely used search engine filters the results so it returns only what you want to hear, what kind of society will we have? Will it create one where we humans debate ideas to find their core truths? Or will such technology allow us as a society to hide from uncomfortable truths because our tools make it easy?
Which do you prefer to live in?
And instead of debating you fools, I instead will just "personalize" you and your views away. The world is flat, 9-11 was a plot by the Nike Shoe Factory to convince NYC firefighters to buy expensive running shoes and we never landed on the Moon, we landed on Mercury to have a round table meeting with the extra-dimensional life that gives the US it's weapons technology.
How do I know this? Everything I want to hear is always number one on Google! I boycott everything else (known as "Main Stream Media") by hiding it!
I disagree with you. Thanks to more personalization coming in "the future" I'll finally be able to shape my echo chamber in a way that filters you semantic search people out of my world view forever. But until that time comes, I'll be forced to challenge my values, thoughts and beliefs by debating you instead. So:
I'd love to hear how any kind of "Semantic Web" or "Semantic Search" deals with the natural tenancy of people to want to improve their rankings. Remember the days before Google and you used to be able to get on top of Lycos or Altavista by just stuffing the "Keyword" meta-tag full of garbage? How is any kind of "Semantic Web" different then a fancy, W3C sanctioned "keyword" meta-tag?
Course, thanks to this new-fangled "personalized search", once you do solve the problem I won't know about it because my Tivo, my e-Newspaper, my pocket cell-computer, my microwave-xbox-wiimote and my digital iToaster will know better then to tell me. So please, take time to reply thoughtfully; after all, in the near future I will finally be able to filter uncomfortable ideas likes yours away. Thankfully, in the future you will be able to screen your world in a way that doesn't require you to argue with me. You and I can both live a digital life where everybody agrees with us!
But what happens if you want to do full text search? Besides, your nice ACID InnoDB kinda backfires when half the tables are using MyISAM, doesn't it? And good thing MySQL lets you know when your nice happy transaction will not roll back properly because half the tables are MyISAM, right?
As I said, what fun is a database server that is consistent or predictable?
I mean this is mysql here, not a real relational database. Kind of like sloppy cowboy VB coders of yore, MySQL has the same kind of attitude. "If it works, who cares if it is right".
I mean, sure people site "Well, Slashdot, FaceBook, and BIGCO use it, so MySQL is okay". But have those people ever realized how easy it is to lock yourself into MySQL? MySQL is so full of non-standard behavior and gotchas that it can be very painful and difficult to migrate to a real database. So what to companies do? Layer on a huge pile of Memcached and crazy "archive databases" to scale when if they had started with a more standard, scalable database system maybe they could have allocated their developer time to something more productive.
Anyway, I rant. I just think MySQL is only used by large companies because either they don't understand how much extra developer hours are spent working around MySQLisms or they know MySQL sucks, but know that it is to costly to migrate to something better.
But that has nothing to do with your post or my original post does it? I'll conclude with the main problem--Like VB, MySQL grew a whole crop of developers who dont know any better. While I dont know if you can blame that on the database or a programming language, I chuckle when I see MySQLisms in code (like never using a "JOIN" because it mysql is "faster if you give it small SELECT statements).
MySQL has never been a stable database program. I've never had any other database system that just blows a database table at random. Nothing is more exciting then having a website go down because one of the tables got marked "corrupt" and you have to go "REPAIR TABLE". The damn thing might not even have a load on it and it will blow up!
First of all, what is MySQL doing that corrupts tables during normal operation and second of all? Seriously, a database shouldn't crash like that, ever.
Second of all, it might as well try to auto-repair the damn table. I mean, I've never had it loose data, only somehow decide the table was "corrupt" and then taken offline. And who cares if you do it automatically and it looses data, this is MySQL we are talking about here! They make no claim about data integrity and the user base doesn't even know what that means (must be a car or some "enterprise" feature used only by NASA and Fortune 50 companies)! I mean, 0000-00-00 is a valid date according to them!
But alas, this is MySQL we are talking about here. I mean, it isn't like you are putting any sensitive data on it right? I mean, surely only a fool would use it for anything besides storing data like "number of shoes in my closet" or "number of purses owned by the wife", right?
Good 'ol MySQL. I mean, what fun is a database server that is consistent or predictable?
Would be to just play around with all of them. Dunno if you will be the guy who is adding products and stuff, but if you aren't make sure to pay attention to the backend side of things. All of them handle things like inventory and "t-shirt sizes" or "widget colors" different and you want to make sure your client can manage that stuff on their own. For example, the main reason I choose viacart was that it would track the inventory separately for each product option... several of them (including X-Cart, I think) would track inventory based on the product. So if you had only 2 medium shirts and zero large shirts, the customer could order a large shirt anyway because the system would go "you have two shirts in stock" regardless of the size.
As I said, they all suck, honestly. Just in different ways :-) Play with them and try to set up a mini version of what you are doing to be doing on production to see if they meet your needs.
You never delete shit. Ever. Then you loose the records of it happening. Fraudsters delete shit. You always hide it. What if the customer or your merchant account comes back several months later and contests the order? How can you prove you canceled an order that is now deleted from the database?
What if they want to re-instate the order? Who knows what you might want to do with that information! If you delete it, you'll never get it back. If you hide it, you can always pull it up later.
Paypal or your merchant might have the order totals and stuff, but they won't have the exact line-item invoice sent to the customer--only the shopping cart application will. I've yet to find a cheap shopping cart application that sends the full shopping cart to the payment system. They usually send over the mimimum set of fields required to get an approval or decline and then they are done.
If the ZenCart developers think deleting an order is a good idea, it makes me question their understanding of the problem domain. What else are they doing that is sketchy?
Besides, there are other free shopping cart applications out there that work for folks like you or me who only want to sell a couple products. ViaCart is the one I finally settled on. Much easier to use too. It is free for a limited number of products.
Honestly though, all of them suck in various ways. You just need to pick the one that doesn't suck for the parts you use.
I find myself using conditional comments more and more these days. Wish I had done so long ago. Makes your codebase much cleaner and your life a bit more sane. The only drawback is you have to always remember to touch that pesky ie.css file when you make any kind of breaking change.
But only if you were the first guy to work on the website. The second you have to touch somebody elses 4 table deep, FONT laced goo, it is usually much cheaper to bite your lip and deal with it.... but even then it depends.
I think the moral is really, it all depends. Just dont have a heart attack if you find yourself using a table for layout every now and then.
What are you, some old-school bricks and mortar business designed by the dinosaurs. Us young kids with our new economy are leveraging paradigm shifting software such as QuickBooks that integrates SMTP based technology that enables us to seamlessly *email* our clients PDF invoices from within our software.
While your snail mail slow-voices arrive at your client in days, our internet-speed invoices use push technology to instantly bill our clients.
Have a nice life, gramps. PS: DrKoop is going IPO and I hear it will be huge!
Sorry if I hurt your feelings. I wasn't aware that Slashdot was for grandmothers chatting quietly about the latest developments in the knitting industry. Perhaps you could guide me to a place better suited to boisterous, passionate and foul-mouthed postings like mine would be better suited.
Again, sorry if I hurt your feelings or offended you. I hope my non-apology will help you carry on with your life in a somewhat dignified fashion. Cheers.
And say that unix (FreeBSD myself) is a good platform to *target* for contract web stuff. Windows, currently, isn't as cheap or easy for freelance web stuff as *unix. However, call me weird, but I prefer to do the actual writing of code under windows using a windows-based text editor (Eclipse, UltraEdit, or heaven forbid Dreamweaver depending). Depending on whatever, I'll either just use SMB to mount the disk or FTP most of my work. That doesn't mean you can slack though, you will will have to do minor edits via Nano or VI. And depending, I'll be doing version control either via TortiseSVN or through a shell (I wouldn't ever trust SVN over a network mounted filesystem).
Interestingly, I wonder what it would be like to do development work on something a bit more unixy like OSX. Dunno, bottom line is:
And I'll add "But make sure you can work on any OS, cause you'll have to eventually". All OS's suck, just in different ways ;-)
(and yes, again, nice diner party + wine + 12:40am + fun thread = messy writing, sorry)..
Never thought about how you'd bill for freelance writing. I guess that might be easier to estimate, am I right? I mean, they dont ask you to change the entire plot mid-stream do they?
Hmm... I majored in tech. communication (i.e. technical writing). Never thought how you'd bill for that kind of work :-)
At least in the case of Zencart you could see the source to verify the behavior and i'd bet with a little work prevent that from happening.
But could I bill a client to not only make that database-affecting patch, but bill them to play open source politics to get that fix pushed into the mainline ZenCart codebase?. And trust me, I can fully expect a *lot* of politics involved to get them to accept a patch which changes makes a change to the DB schema and affects how orders are removed.
So since my client won't pay for that, can I get them to pay for the continual application of a database-affecting patch every time ZenCart releases an update? Hmm... I doubt it, and quite honestly I really dont want to do it even if I get paid for it. What a pain in the ass!
So basically, your solution is a non-starter. I dont play open source politics unless it is worth my non-billable time. FreeBSD is worth my non-billable time and I've contributed many ports and patches to them, but ZenCart just doesn't make the cut I'm afraid. I'm certainly not inclined to play open source politics for quickbooks-like accounting packages, that is for sure. The last thing I want to do with my non-billable time is accounting!!