One thing that I've learned working with theos is it takes a very long time for a company to die. They are doing a little better recently, 5 months ago if you called support you got either the president or the senior programmer. At that time our best guess was they had 4 people working for them. Now they problably have 6-8. Makes you feel really confident.
They managed to implement TCP/IP but for whatever reason we can't get more then 350 kb/s out of them on our 100 MB networks. The GUI was finally released about a year ago. It reminds me a lot of dos shell. The gui was part of a big new release Version 5 called corona. Basically they didn't fix anything that we needed and they added crap that isn't just annoying it's also broken. We aren't moving to the new version.
They have a fair number of legacy customers locked into their version of basic which isn't that bad as basic goes, so they have a relatively stable but small group to ride things out on.
When I first started using linux in mid 94ish hardware support was a serious issue. It seems like heaven compaired to finding compatible hardware for theos, and that is the major reason we're leaving. When a customer calls having seen some cool new toy and they want to use it 99% of the time we know there is no hope in hell it will work and that costs us money.
Oh the fact that they still charge around $3000 for a 5 user OS that linux beats the hell out of isn't helping them make friends either.
As for doing everything the hard way, they still do it. I've been learning to write printer drivers because thats the only way to get a laser printer working natively. Everything else you pass through windows.
The remaining users get together regularly but recently a split formed. About 50% are cutting and running the other 50% call us pansies for not sticking it out in hell.
So to answer you question yeah they're still around. Kinda
I work at a POS company. Our customers split about 50/50 terminal vs PC but on the PC they basically just get a terminal shell. The we refuse to support the PC stations so it doesn't affect us much, but we do see a lot of people switching back to terminals unless they do other work on the PC. On the back end server we use a piece of shit OS called theos, it's being replaced with Linux in a massive rewrite. Noone in their right mind would run something as important as a POS system on windows, it's just too vulnerable.
I write commercial software. Our software doesn't (yet) work on linux/mac/windows... I would love for someone to find an easy way to get my software to as many different OS's as possible. Seriously if anyone was to port our product to a mac, or windows they would have a thank you letter and a job offer on their way. The difference between us and some of the other software products out there is we don't want lock in on a single system. We get more revenue from customization and support then we get from new sales However most of the profit in the customizations and support comes from new sales. Eventually the customer settles in and become a steady low support stream and thats about it. The more systems we can run on the more chances we have at getting a customer. The only reason we don't run on every OS/hardware configuration possible is the fact that it's non-trivial to port to all of these. It has nothing to do with our desire to support one OS.
I've never been a nascar fan due to the lack of real technology on the cars. Yes they keep the racing tight and yes that gives us big spectacular crashes, but I'd much rather see them allowed to push the limit tech wise. F1 has far more interesting technology. Personally I think rally is the most exciting racing on TV.
Looking at that top 10 list leaves me very very scared about the state of the world.
Reading the other comments I'm seeing that this is being considered as a move to protect the patent. Thats probably true.
On a different point I see a few comments on how the maximum amount is $250,000 and that such a small amount it's not worth caring about. I don't know what companies you guys work for but my company could barely spare 1/10 of that given the recent market. I don't know of any company that turns around and goes "1/4 million is that all? Nope don't need to know what for let me just sign the cheque". I'm left wondering if this will be enough of an issue that small companies will look elsewhere for small filesystem. In my companies case it isn't an issue as we made the run for linux already. I assume that microsoft has to worry about driving away to many of the small customers.
The big guys may rule the world today, but they where nobodies 20 years ago and have to worry about those small fry that have the right combination of talent and luck.
You didn't mention if you'll be living in this cabin or just up there now and again. Around here cabins that aren't always occupied get broken into 2-3 times a year on average, so if thats possible down there get the laptop and take it home with you. As well the power drain is lower, the built in battery helps a lot when you're running on a flakey power grid similar to what you intend to build, and It's more useful overall then a PC. the only issue is cost, but it'll help cut down on your power requirements and probably make up the difference on solar panels.
If anything I'm surprised that this doesn't happen more often. The license savings on 800,000 machines should come to a number that you have to an idiot to not seriously look into.
Where as the license savings on the 20 machines at work comes to a small enough amount we don't decide it's worth porting the one program we require on windows so we don't think about it much. We also however don't upgrade very often, 10 95's 5 98's and a few others just for testing purposes.
Now having said this, we're moving our product to linux, partially for the higher margins we can get when we don't have to pay license fees on the servers we sell and partially because the old OS is expensive garbage that should have been retired 10 years ago. The massive number of free tools helps with the move, and the advertising push people like IBM have been doing really helps with the customers and the boss. I actually saw my first Linux/IBM commercial on TV today. Not there standard E-server commercials, but just on the merits of Linux.
The workplace is definitely changing and it's not at all like I guessed it would be 10 years ago when I started school.
As a coder turned project manager I fell that my current position is harder then my old coding job. The demands are higher the blame falls entirely on me and the worst part of all, I have to deal directly with the customers. As a coder I could work on things in small pieces and just meet the requirments, as the manager/designer I have to know how those pieces will go together and recognize the obstacles before hand. Really for the little extra pay I get for the new job I'd go back to being a coder if it wasn't for the lack of job security. I know I could outsource my coders, but that's mostly due to the design being complete enough that anyone can just sit back and code up exactly to spec. It's not hard to code when given "you need a box that takes in X out puts Y and here's how you convert X to Y". I would guess that you couldn't outsource a design of " We need something that does Z. I suppose my job could be outsourced but I already find dealing with the customers over the phone in the specification gathering stage quite difficult. I happen to know their markets quite well and that tends to be how I get through. If I didn't understand the market then I'd be screwed. So yeah someone that knows the market including all of the little local issues(taxes, strange holidays, legal issues...) could do my job from just about anywhere in the world, It's over the phone anyways. Someone that doesn't know of the little things couldn't do it.
When I looked into outsourcing our coding I decided not to. Reasons include - my programmers are already paid slightly below national average and the cost savings wouldn't be huge.
- My programmers are proven known pieces in the puzzle. I know which guy does what best and I can pretty accurately estimate delivery schedules based on that.
- I like working with my guys, they help out a lot when I do design or come up with ideas on things we may want to try.
- shipping jobs away from here doesn't help me or anyone else enough to be worth pissing the locals off.
- If I screw over my workers by shipping their jobs away, who will be their to back me when the owner decides someone else can do mine.
There is probably a fair number of reasons why Linus doesn't go out and do all the extra things. The key reasons are probably that it doesn't interest him, and he's not able to handle it all. Now that I've been moved up to management I'm finding the hard part isn't in getting the resources to do something. The hard part is keeping everything flowing on muliple projects and having everything ready to go and under control. If you take Linus' approach and allow everyone to manage themselves it saves a lot of inefficiency on his end. He just ok's the final product and works in his own little part of it. I unfortunately have to answer to someone so I need to be in control of most things. If someone at the very bottom screws up and it gets released it's my ass.
I've wanted to replace my Current receiver with a nice PC based solution for awhile now. I'm well aware that I'll have to build it myself and that isn't an issue.
My complaint is The PC based inputs are so expensive. My current receiver cost me $300 a couple of years ago. It has 3 video inputs and 5 audio inputs. All of them are RCA jacks if I remember correctly. It has a radio tuner, and the amplifiers and 5.1 surround decoding. Basically your typical lower-midrange receiver.
I can't find a single PC card with more then 3 audio inputs for less then $1200. I don't remember ever seeing a video card with more then one input.
Why aren't these pieces available? Radio cards can be had for $70 fairly easily but the other, more important parts I can't locate. I figured I'd go with external amplifiers to simplify things and that will work out just fine.
I figured for $1000 I should be able to build a PC based receiver that doesn't require fancy menu's or anything tivo like, just a simple LCD interface and a remote. It appears that I'm wrong.
We had been thinking about using kylix
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Kylix in Limbo
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Kylix had been in the running as the tool we'd use when we start a complete rewrite of our companies flagship product. cross platform is one of the major requirements set down by the boss and kylix seemed quite good. When testing/evaluating it had a few bugs and we also had the issue of the majority of our programmers are not C++ gods, but it was still quite high on the list. The high license cost was another issue that we had to consider. $25,000 in licences for a company that sells $1,000,000 a year is a lot. In case your wondering other platforms being concidered are Java- Jbuilder with DB to be determined. Something called majik the boss likes, I've yet to see anything on this so I can't comment. Oracle is saying we can do everything using forms. I don't believe them. Or my choice Java with a postgres DB. This is for a moderately complex POS system. The big issue is how close to losing money our company is at any given point. Profit was a whole $25,000 last year. In my mind big software costs are both pointless and out of our cababilities if they don't give us a huge return on investment. Yes the linux desktops aren't as slick and easy to use as win 2k would be, but the cost of work arounds are far below the cost of 15 win 2k licenses. The same thinking has to be applied to our new toolset.
How exactly does someone drop tape storage? We back up 15-20 gigs each night and move it off site the next day. The only way I can think of to do this is with tape. Dumping from one drive to another works great, and we do that as well, however both drives are still in the same physical location. moving the data over the net to another box just isn't feasible, the bill to move 500 gig of data a month would kill us. Removable harddrives are just too fragile to be considered reliable back ups, the abuse I put these tapes through would kill a HD in a day or two. Burning spindles of CD's or even DVD's just isn't cost effective.
Are their any other methods that I haven't thought of?
Well at the mom and pop 1 terminal for sales and reporting level I'd assume your correct. My company produces Point of Sale software and we rarely sell systems of that size. However when you get 3 or more terminals for sales or any kind of complex inventory you quickly realize that quick books just isn't upto the task, this is the market we've recently entered into.
You average 3 terminal system will cost you about $18,000 just in software costs from us and we're priced lower then much of our competition. A recent sale of a 75 terminal system come in at approx. $105,000
Unfortunately that $18,000 contains close to $5000 in OS costs for a very dated OS that is starting to hurt us. The 75 terminal system cost $16,000 in OS fees. So we're moving to linux over the next year or so with a complete rewrite of the codebase. We're not the only one in the industry moving to Linux either, some of our competition has already made the move and is doing well.
The plan is to have a large linux server offering up virtual desktops to PC's or actual dumb terminals. This would be a trivial task except for the requirement that the new software must have a GUI and not be text based. So now the question is just how much hardware is required to offer 100 unique qui connections over the network.
Anyways the point is that you can expect to see more linux in the small business sector in the near future. In the end money talks with most of these customers.
I'm seeing a few posts mentioning clean or environmentally friendly power. After production solar cells do give you that, however the last time I check the production of solar cells resulted in large amounts of toxic material. They probably end up being better then coal plants but not as clean as nuclear or my personal favorite solar heat plants. This isn't meaning to sound like a bash. I fully intend to use solar cells on my new home, I just wanted people to realize that nothings perfect.
As for the article, as others have pointed out, those efficiency rates are too good to be true. However I remember hearing that some key patents on solar cells are close to or have already expired. Perhaps some of those methods have allowed for some gain. I truely doubt that 100% is ever going to be possible, and I'd be happy with 35%.
I know google is good and all, but you can't really google for child porn can you? I know that you can get anything you want on the web no matter how wrong and vile, but I never assumed it would be so easy as google. I'm tempted to test but don't feel like going to jail over it.
I guess it would be hard as well to filter without actually inspecting each page though.
I used to subscribe to a few mail lists. But I've found online forums to be vastly supperior. I don't get spam, on busy forums I get responces almost immediately. The moderators do a great job sorting misplaced posts and dealing with trolls. And there is a nice archive of everything stored on the server. I don't care how much they clean up email I won't be switching back for these types of things.
Will I have 3 signatures since On this box I have a trackman that I prefer to use. Sitting right beside me I have a standard old mouse and at work I have an optical mouse. All three take time for me to get used to again each time I switch. I have to assume that it's because I'm using them slightly differently, due to the feedback. As well if I change something like the mouse acceleration because things seem to slow one day It takes awhile for me to come back into practice. How Do they deal with these changes?
Well I make software. It's purpose is to make my customers more efficient at what they do. In this case selling goods. I see my job as being no different then my fathers carpentry job. He builds physical things, bridges, buildings, houses, whatever. I build non physical things, basically automated cash registers, accounting, security checking, inventory management things. But I do make things. The fact that you can't hold them in your hand doesn't make them any less real.
I can see your point however. Most people I know work with things and don't care how they work and couldn't recreate them. I assume it's always been that way, but perhaps at some point in the past people did know a lot more about what they had.
In the 1960s, the split was closer to 60/40, with 80% of the population making 60% of the income, and the richest 20% of the population making 40%. [ref] Between 1960 and 2000, the income split has gone from 60/40 to 50/50.
Perhaps I'm wrong but haven't we seen this before a few hundred years ago. I'm thinking of the poor unwashed masses rising up and overthrowing the rich elite minority. The french revolution, the american war of independance, the russians also killed off their royalty if I remember correctly. These days the people are the business leaders, and not royalty but they still have the same outlook on life. I wouldn't be too surprised to see the same thing happen again. When you leave people with nothing and no hope they have very few real reasons to not die for a cause. Keep the masses happy and comfortable and they don't want to risk losing that.
I love it when places do this. I've always found it easiest to learn by watching someone else doing it, then copying, and then experimenting. I've learned basic cooking and baking, simple home repair and basic automotive repair this way all from tv. From there I usually realize I enjoy it, pick up a book or find a web site and get better at it. I'm currently in the middle of rebuilding a car using a manual a web forum and what I learned watching those hotrodding shows on TV saturday mornings. Now if only someone would release free videos of how to play with fiberglass and carbon fiber.
You know, I don't believe I'll have to start my own business to survive in this industry long term. My company has taken a beating in the most recent economy. But we've found that after cutting from 20 to 11 people we're stream lined and have cut the inefficiencies out. People have had a chance to try various roles and those that don't fit are removed.
The result of all this is, we're getting more done, with fewer people. Since we're moving towards an employee owned company (won't become legal for another year thanks to lots of paperwork) we're already all benefiting from this. 11 people making $3,000,000cdn in Sales each year makes for very very fat bonuses quartly. and living costs hear are very low compaired to a big city.
For an added karma bonus a big chunk of that overhead comes from a new version of the product. That instead of running on an OS costing $16,000 for 50 effectively dump terminal connections, it runs on linux. costs us nothing and gives us way more functionality. As the market gets tighter out there we have lots of room to drop our prices and continue making profit. My only fear at this point is one day a completely open source version of software will comeout that will cut our profits way back. But then we may go to an entirely support driver business model. Either way if We can keep this up for another 8-10 years I can retire at the ripe old age of 35-37. So kids remember stock options only make the market rich and salaries still don't make what you deserve in most cases, owning part of the business is where it's at. Just make sure your not in a company of idiots.
I've played soccer in the rain for years and never had problems with athletes foot. I doubt that the actors had any issues with the water since they could just go and dry off in a nice hotel room. It looks like the entire shot could be done in a sound stage pretty easily. I have heard them complain that they took a beating doing all the fights and wire work however.
The guys on the helms deep battle for TTT complained that they started getting sick after doing a couple months of night shoots in the simulated rain. That shot was too large to fit into a stage to make it pleasant to work on.
Well I maxed out at 124 k/s just before finishing. the torrent is at 3 MB/s total between 115 peers and 16 seeds. For everyone complaining about it's speed, you are aware that it takes time to spool up for new users? this is a result of the sharing requirement that stops leachers.
It's kinda sobbering watching that bit torrent link go through the roof. 30 peers at 600km/s when I connected 60 at 1.5mb/s a minute later and still climbing at the same rate.
Now anyone know how I can watch this without needing to kill my uptime?
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that I've learned working with theos is it takes a very long time for a company to die. They are doing a little better recently, 5 months ago if you called support you got either the president or the senior programmer. At that time our best guess was they had 4 people working for them. Now they problably have 6-8. Makes you feel really confident.
They managed to implement TCP/IP but for whatever reason we can't get more then 350 kb/s out of them on our 100 MB networks. The GUI was finally released about a year ago. It reminds me a lot of dos shell. The gui was part of a big new release Version 5 called corona. Basically they didn't fix anything that we needed and they added crap that isn't just annoying it's also broken. We aren't moving to the new version.
They have a fair number of legacy customers locked into their version of basic which isn't that bad as basic goes, so they have a relatively stable but small group to ride things out on.
When I first started using linux in mid 94ish hardware support was a serious issue. It seems like heaven compaired to finding compatible hardware for theos, and that is the major reason we're leaving. When a customer calls having seen some cool new toy and they want to use it 99% of the time we know there is no hope in hell it will work and that costs us money.
Oh the fact that they still charge around $3000 for a 5 user OS that linux beats the hell out of isn't helping them make friends either.
As for doing everything the hard way, they still do it. I've been learning to write printer drivers because thats the only way to get a laser printer working natively. Everything else you pass through windows.
The remaining users get together regularly but recently a split formed. About 50% are cutting and running the other 50% call us pansies for not sticking it out in hell.
So to answer you question yeah they're still around. Kinda
I work at a POS company. Our customers split about 50/50 terminal vs PC but on the PC they basically just get a terminal shell. The we refuse to support the PC stations so it doesn't affect us much, but we do see a lot of people switching back to terminals unless they do other work on the PC. On the back end server we use a piece of shit OS called theos, it's being replaced with Linux in a massive rewrite. Noone in their right mind would run something as important as a POS system on windows, it's just too vulnerable.
I write commercial software. Our software doesn't (yet) work on linux/mac/windows... I would love for someone to find an easy way to get my software to as many different OS's as possible. Seriously if anyone was to port our product to a mac, or windows they would have a thank you letter and a job offer on their way. The difference between us and some of the other software products out there is we don't want lock in on a single system. We get more revenue from customization and support then we get from new sales However most of the profit in the customizations and support comes from new sales. Eventually the customer settles in and become a steady low support stream and thats about it. The more systems we can run on the more chances we have at getting a customer. The only reason we don't run on every OS/hardware configuration possible is the fact that it's non-trivial to port to all of these. It has nothing to do with our desire to support one OS.
Someone takes the BSD is dying troll puts beagle2 in and gets modded interesting?
Why do I only get mod points on boring days
I've never been a nascar fan due to the lack of real technology on the cars. Yes they keep the racing tight and yes that gives us big spectacular crashes, but I'd much rather see them allowed to push the limit tech wise. F1 has far more interesting technology. Personally I think rally is the most exciting racing on TV.
Looking at that top 10 list leaves me very very scared about the state of the world.
Reading the other comments I'm seeing that this is being considered as a move to protect the patent. Thats probably true.
On a different point I see a few comments on how the maximum amount is $250,000 and that such a small amount it's not worth caring about. I don't know what companies you guys work for but my company could barely spare 1/10 of that given the recent market. I don't know of any company that turns around and goes "1/4 million is that all? Nope don't need to know what for let me just sign the cheque". I'm left wondering if this will be enough of an issue that small companies will look elsewhere for small filesystem. In my companies case it isn't an issue as we made the run for linux already. I assume that microsoft has to worry about driving away to many of the small customers.
The big guys may rule the world today, but they where nobodies 20 years ago and have to worry about those small fry that have the right combination of talent and luck.
You didn't mention if you'll be living in this cabin or just up there now and again. Around here cabins that aren't always occupied get broken into 2-3 times a year on average, so if thats possible down there get the laptop and take it home with you. As well the power drain is lower, the built in battery helps a lot when you're running on a flakey power grid similar to what you intend to build, and It's more useful overall then a PC. the only issue is cost, but it'll help cut down on your power requirements and probably make up the difference on solar panels.
If anything I'm surprised that this doesn't happen more often. The license savings on 800,000 machines should come to a number that you have to an idiot to not seriously look into.
/IBM commercial on TV today. Not there standard E-server commercials, but just on the merits of Linux.
Where as the license savings on the 20 machines at work comes to a small enough amount we don't decide it's worth porting the one program we require on windows so we don't think about it much. We also however don't upgrade very often, 10 95's 5 98's and a few others just for testing purposes.
Now having said this, we're moving our product to linux, partially for the higher margins we can get when we don't have to pay license fees on the servers we sell and partially because the old OS is expensive garbage that should have been retired 10 years ago. The massive number of free tools helps with the move, and the advertising push people like IBM have been doing really helps with the customers and the boss. I actually saw my first Linux
The workplace is definitely changing and it's not at all like I guessed it would be 10 years ago when I started school.
As a coder turned project manager I fell that my current position is harder then my old coding job. The demands are higher the blame falls entirely on me and the worst part of all, I have to deal directly with the customers. As a coder I could work on things in small pieces and just meet the requirments, as the manager/designer I have to know how those pieces will go together and recognize the obstacles before hand. Really for the little extra pay I get for the new job I'd go back to being a coder if it wasn't for the lack of job security.
I know I could outsource my coders, but that's mostly due to the design being complete enough that anyone can just sit back and code up exactly to spec. It's not hard to code when given "you need a box that takes in X out puts Y and here's how you convert X to Y". I would guess that you couldn't outsource a design of " We need something that does Z. I suppose my job could be outsourced but I already find dealing with the customers over the phone in the specification gathering stage quite difficult. I happen to know their markets quite well and that tends to be how I get through. If I didn't understand the market then I'd be screwed. So yeah someone that knows the market including all of the little local issues(taxes, strange holidays, legal issues...) could do my job from just about anywhere in the world, It's over the phone anyways. Someone that doesn't know of the little things couldn't do it.
When I looked into outsourcing our coding I decided not to.
Reasons include
- my programmers are already paid slightly below national average and the cost savings wouldn't be huge.
- My programmers are proven known pieces in the puzzle. I know which guy does what best and I can pretty accurately estimate delivery schedules based on that.
- I like working with my guys, they help out a lot when I do design or come up with ideas on things we may want to try.
- shipping jobs away from here doesn't help me or anyone else enough to be worth pissing the locals off.
- If I screw over my workers by shipping their jobs away, who will be their to back me when the owner decides someone else can do mine.
There is probably a fair number of reasons why Linus doesn't go out and do all the extra things. The key reasons are probably that it doesn't interest him, and he's not able to handle it all. Now that I've been moved up to management I'm finding the hard part isn't in getting the resources to do something. The hard part is keeping everything flowing on muliple projects and having everything ready to go and under control. If you take Linus' approach and allow everyone to manage themselves it saves a lot of inefficiency on his end. He just ok's the final product and works in his own little part of it. I unfortunately have to answer to someone so I need to be in control of most things. If someone at the very bottom screws up and it gets released it's my ass.
I've wanted to replace my Current receiver with a nice PC based solution for awhile now. I'm well aware that I'll have to build it myself and that isn't an issue.
My complaint is The PC based inputs are so expensive. My current receiver cost me $300 a couple of years ago. It has 3 video inputs and 5 audio inputs. All of them are RCA jacks if I remember correctly. It has a radio tuner, and the amplifiers and 5.1 surround decoding. Basically your typical lower-midrange receiver.
I can't find a single PC card with more then 3 audio inputs for less then $1200. I don't remember ever seeing a video card with more then one input.
Why aren't these pieces available? Radio cards can be had for $70 fairly easily but the other, more important parts I can't locate. I figured I'd go with external amplifiers to simplify things and that will work out just fine.
I figured for $1000 I should be able to build a PC based receiver that doesn't require fancy menu's or anything tivo like, just a simple LCD interface and a remote. It appears that I'm wrong.
Kylix had been in the running as the tool we'd use when we start a complete rewrite of our companies flagship product. cross platform is one of the major requirements set down by the boss and kylix seemed quite good. When testing/evaluating it had a few bugs and we also had the issue of the majority of our programmers are not C++ gods, but it was still quite high on the list. The high license cost was another issue that we had to consider. $25,000 in licences for a company that sells $1,000,000 a year is a lot. In case your wondering other platforms being concidered are Java- Jbuilder with DB to be determined. Something called majik the boss likes, I've yet to see anything on this so I can't comment. Oracle is saying we can do everything using forms. I don't believe them. Or my choice Java with a postgres DB. This is for a moderately complex POS system. The big issue is how close to losing money our company is at any given point. Profit was a whole $25,000 last year. In my mind big software costs are both pointless and out of our cababilities if they don't give us a huge return on investment. Yes the linux desktops aren't as slick and easy to use as win 2k would be, but the cost of work arounds are far below the cost of 15 win 2k licenses. The same thinking has to be applied to our new toolset.
How exactly does someone drop tape storage? We back up 15-20 gigs each night and move it off site the next day. The only way I can think of to do this is with tape. Dumping from one drive to another works great, and we do that as well, however both drives are still in the same physical location. moving the data over the net to another box just isn't feasible, the bill to move 500 gig of data a month would kill us. Removable harddrives are just too fragile to be considered reliable back ups, the abuse I put these tapes through would kill a HD in a day or two. Burning spindles of CD's or even DVD's just isn't cost effective.
Are their any other methods that I haven't thought of?
Well at the mom and pop 1 terminal for sales and reporting level I'd assume your correct. My company produces Point of Sale software and we rarely sell systems of that size. However when you get 3 or more terminals for sales or any kind of complex inventory you quickly realize that quick books just isn't upto the task, this is the market we've recently entered into.
You average 3 terminal system will cost you about $18,000 just in software costs from us and we're priced lower then much of our competition. A recent sale of a 75 terminal system come in at approx. $105,000
Unfortunately that $18,000 contains close to $5000 in OS costs for a very dated OS that is starting to hurt us. The 75 terminal system cost $16,000 in OS fees. So we're moving to linux over the next year or so with a complete rewrite of the codebase. We're not the only one in the industry moving to Linux either, some of our competition has already made the move and is doing well.
The plan is to have a large linux server offering up virtual desktops to PC's or actual dumb terminals. This would be a trivial task except for the requirement that the new software must have a GUI and not be text based. So now the question is just how much hardware is required to offer 100 unique qui connections over the network.
Anyways the point is that you can expect to see more linux in the small business sector in the near future. In the end money talks with most of these customers.
I'm seeing a few posts mentioning clean or environmentally friendly power. After production solar cells do give you that, however the last time I check the production of solar cells resulted in large amounts of toxic material. They probably end up being better then coal plants but not as clean as nuclear or my personal favorite solar heat plants. This isn't meaning to sound like a bash. I fully intend to use solar cells on my new home, I just wanted people to realize that nothings perfect.
As for the article, as others have pointed out, those efficiency rates are too good to be true. However I remember hearing that some key patents on solar cells are close to or have already expired. Perhaps some of those methods have allowed for some gain. I truely doubt that 100% is ever going to be possible, and I'd be happy with 35%.
I know google is good and all, but you can't really google for child porn can you? I know that you can get anything you want on the web no matter how wrong and vile, but I never assumed it would be so easy as google. I'm tempted to test but don't feel like going to jail over it.
I guess it would be hard as well to filter without actually inspecting each page though.
I used to subscribe to a few mail lists. But I've found online forums to be vastly supperior. I don't get spam, on busy forums I get responces almost immediately. The moderators do a great job sorting misplaced posts and dealing with trolls. And there is a nice archive of everything stored on the server. I don't care how much they clean up email I won't be switching back for these types of things.
Will I have 3 signatures since On this box I have a trackman that I prefer to use. Sitting right beside me I have a standard old mouse and at work I have an optical mouse. All three take time for me to get used to again each time I switch. I have to assume that it's because I'm using them slightly differently, due to the feedback. As well if I change something like the mouse acceleration because things seem to slow one day It takes awhile for me to come back into practice. How Do they deal with these changes?
Well I make software. It's purpose is to make my customers more efficient at what they do. In this case selling goods. I see my job as being no different then my fathers carpentry job. He builds physical things, bridges, buildings, houses, whatever. I build non physical things, basically automated cash registers, accounting, security checking, inventory management things. But I do make things. The fact that you can't hold them in your hand doesn't make them any less real.
I can see your point however. Most people I know work with things and don't care how they work and couldn't recreate them. I assume it's always been that way, but perhaps at some point in the past people did know a lot more about what they had.
Perhaps I'm wrong but haven't we seen this before a few hundred years ago. I'm thinking of the poor unwashed masses rising up and overthrowing the rich elite minority. The french revolution, the american war of independance, the russians also killed off their royalty if I remember correctly. These days the people are the business leaders, and not royalty but they still have the same outlook on life. I wouldn't be too surprised to see the same thing happen again. When you leave people with nothing and no hope they have very few real reasons to not die for a cause. Keep the masses happy and comfortable and they don't want to risk losing that.
I love it when places do this. I've always found it easiest to learn by watching someone else doing it, then copying, and then experimenting. I've learned basic cooking and baking, simple home repair and basic automotive repair this way all from tv. From there I usually realize I enjoy it, pick up a book or find a web site and get better at it. I'm currently in the middle of rebuilding a car using a manual a web forum and what I learned watching those hotrodding shows on TV saturday mornings. Now if only someone would release free videos of how to play with fiberglass and carbon fiber.
You know, I don't believe I'll have to start my own business to survive in this industry long term. My company has taken a beating in the most recent economy. But we've found that after cutting from 20 to 11 people we're stream lined and have cut the inefficiencies out. People have had a chance to try various roles and those that don't fit are removed.
The result of all this is, we're getting more done, with fewer people. Since we're moving towards an employee owned company (won't become legal for another year thanks to lots of paperwork) we're already all benefiting from this. 11 people making $3,000,000cdn in Sales each year makes for very very fat bonuses quartly. and living costs hear are very low compaired to a big city.
For an added karma bonus a big chunk of that overhead comes from a new version of the product. That instead of running on an OS costing $16,000 for 50 effectively dump terminal connections, it runs on linux. costs us nothing and gives us way more functionality. As the market gets tighter out there we have lots of room to drop our prices and continue making profit.
My only fear at this point is one day a completely open source version of software will comeout that will cut our profits way back. But then we may go to an entirely support driver business model. Either way if We can keep this up for another 8-10 years I can retire at the ripe old age of 35-37. So kids remember stock options only make the market rich and salaries still don't make what you deserve in most cases, owning part of the business is where it's at. Just make sure your not in a company of idiots.
"No - keep the mold away! Save us, Gold Bond!"
You seriously need to get some help.
I've played soccer in the rain for years and never had problems with athletes foot. I doubt that the actors had any issues with the water since they could just go and dry off in a nice hotel room. It looks like the entire shot could be done in a sound stage pretty easily. I have heard them complain that they took a beating doing all the fights and wire work however.
The guys on the helms deep battle for TTT complained that they started getting sick after doing a couple months of night shoots in the simulated rain. That shot was too large to fit into a stage to make it pleasant to work on.
Well I maxed out at 124 k/s just before finishing. the torrent is at 3 MB/s total between 115 peers and 16 seeds. For everyone complaining about it's speed, you are aware that it takes time to spool up for new users? this is a result of the sharing requirement that stops leachers.
I love this protocol
It's kinda sobbering watching that bit torrent link go through the roof. 30 peers at 600km/s when I connected 60 at 1.5mb/s a minute later and still climbing at the same rate.
Now anyone know how I can watch this without needing to kill my uptime?