Photoshop Elements ($85 from Adobe) is a pretty capable package if you want to work with general image editing. There's also a bundle that gives you basic video editing as well by including Premiere Elements ($128 from Adobe) available. I've worked on teams where the $650/seat licensing for Photoshop was a bit much to swallow and so Elements got us through.
The Elements line is geared towards the casual user base instead of the full blown Photoshop. You won't be designing award winning layouts, but it's great for croping and resizing photos etc for web and powerpoint docs. Take a look at their capabilities list to see if it's right for you: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/overv iew2.html
While I'm not loving the health care system at large, I'll save the debate for others who are more passionate about it.
I like my PPO, no referrals needed, wide coverage in my geographic area and traditional insurance (20/80) when I'm out of network etc.
As a self employed coder myself, I worked with my Insurance rep to get on a PPO plan with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of IL, It's not cheap - but it's cheaper than COBRA from my old employer. It's slightly better than catastrophic coverage and I opted for a high deductible which keeps it all in check and it covers my wife and two kids too. It ends up costing me about $4,500/year vs. COBRA which was running $10,200/year. My coverage isn't as good (no vision or dental and my deductible is higher) but rarely do I need $5,000+ of dental and vision work in a single year so it's still better to pay out of pocket on that.
My advice to you is to contact your insurance agent - you probably can talk to who ever setup your liability insurance to get the name of someone to use if you went with cut throat auto insurance. My local Nationwide rep has been very helpful.
Additionally, the $150/hr to plug in a monitor is a sure thing, they know it's easy and so it's the bread and butter. When they need to outsource for professional services of a DBA or something, their profit margin goes way down. It's really just a matter of business!
Retail stores do the exact same thing. Consider electronics. A new television usually is within a small window of room for pricing. One store will have it for $499, another for $510. It'll probably cost just as much in gas and distance traveled to go get the cheaper one anyway. Ultimately the store is making a VERY small profit on the TV, it's a tight market. BUT, when it comes to things like cables, installation, protection plans etc, the markup is VERY high. Most people expect the high pressure part of the purchase to be the TV, it's really not, when the salesman is in sell mode it's for the add-ons, because that's where they make their money. You want fries with that?
As an owner of a small web development business, I prefer to do the easy work for the same rate as my harder work. Yes it limits the client pool somewhat, but it also ensures I'm not in the business of posting content all day, I can write and debug applications at the same rate as posting a PDF for a company that doesn't have the time, energy, experience etc because it's just easier for them - it also requires less effort on my side.
Back to the initial Hard Drive request. Inevitably, when you go to install that Hard Drive, as the lone IT guru, your going to get a 100 questions, which may or may not be easy to answer... should you need to have the client sign a change of rate order for each question based on the difficulty to answer? No, flat rate it.
Incidently, when I used to manage a larger website with an colo facility contract with SAVVIS, we ran into issues with their services department charging a flat rate, regardless of what they were doing, installing patches, rebooting servers, upgrading F5 hardware, looking for corrupted database tables, defragging hard drives... didn't matter, flat rate. It sucks, but like before, get someone else to do it.
While I might get flamed for this one, in the home market at least, it's not Unix that people are buying, it's an experience. Unix is an important part in the scientific communities and for some hard core techies, but the people who buy the mac mini, iMac and iPod's aren't worried about the underlying technology.
Apple has created a brand experience that most marketing people try to copy harder than eCommerce sites copy Amazon and eBay. Everything about an Apple product lets you know your dealing with a company that puts the user experience first. That's Apples brand niche.
When I bought my first mac some 8 years ago... I was awe struck by the packaging - not of the computer - the card board box it came in was user friendly. It was perfectly clear what was in each box. It was intuitive which piece needed to come out next - the foam that was around the monitor was easy to hold on to and take out. Nothing about unpacking the computer was frustrating.
When Apple retail stores hit the scene, did anyone note that the UI on the electronic signature box matched that of Aqua? Did anyone notice that your receipt font matches the fonts on the box / os x / sales literature etc?
I bought a G4 tower a few years ago and the little details that go into engineering the case and hardware are what diferentiates Apple from any other manufacture I know. I lift a little handle on the side of my case and the whole thing flops open and I have access to clean the entire machine. Additionally, all of the edges of the stamped steel were de-burred so I didn't cut any of my knuckles open as I poked around inside the case. I understand most non-slashdot-reading users will not ever open their case, but much like a Mercedes-Benz, when you look under the hood or at any small corner of the car, you know no expense was spared to ensure whatever level you interface with the product it is solid, reliable and nice.
Even the iPod I bough 3 years ago came in a package that was clearly labeled. It was clear that designers had thought about the process of opening the package, puting the iPod on the left (since we're a left to right society here in the US) where we would look first when orienting ourselves to the two halves of the box.
I expect Jobs and the rest of the crew at Apple to continue making an experience that is every bit as robust and consistent with their products as my last few years of experience with the company has been.
I've had both internal and external drives fail. SCSI, ATA and EIDE (and a few MFM but that was my fault) and for my it has been the amount of use that the drives see.
For internal drives, I admin'd a list server for a while (Mailman) and it killed a drive every three years like clockwork, the thing would just stop spinning. While I have had some web servers and file servers go for three - six years without a problem.
On the external side, I lost a Lacie Big Disk triple interface within two months of buying it (it has two 160Gb disks that are striped to make it 320Gb) one of the two drives died, the other was okay - mfg replaced the unit and it's been solid (knock, knock) since.
File systems asside, your talking about a whole lot of hardware here! Is it really necessary to have all this data online at the same time, is it possible to store it in some other way (ie tapes) because it would probably be a whole lot cheaper!
Well, lets see... using 300Gb SCSI disks (assuming you can find raid 0 hardware to support enough disks) you can build out a 1Pb storage system with about 3,334 disks. That would set you back about $3.3Million, assuming you paid retail prices for the disks ~$1,000 / disk @ CDW today. Of course, if you orderded 3,000+ disks, I'm sure they would cut you a deal on the price.
Any hope of daisy chaining together a few dozen direct attached storage devices to a NAS server? Something like a Dell PowerVault 220 with 14 300Gb SCSI drives will set you back about $21K and give you 3.4Tb / 3U of space (RAID-5) so you would have some saftey net built in (albeit not much). Slap 10 of these on a Powervault 6000 series and you should have a ball park of 34Tb (while shy of what your looking for gets you in the right direction). Total cost around $250K - do it four times and spread the work out over four logical volumes and you should get in the neighborhood of 1Petabyte. You could then set up a redundant server structure and for $2Million you have a redundant mirrored architecture ready for one to fail and be brought up online quickly.
Why couldn't there be a small adult size? We have dwarfed people alive today functioning in society without issue. And since we're talking L.O.T.R. here, weren't the body doubles for the hobbits all Indonesian?
The question isn't really a question about user vs developer, it's a question about intellectual property. Additionally, it's a question about what the web is providing the individual. Is it a product that the user is paying for or is it a service?
In what I'll call "traditional" software you get something to put on your computer and interact with, modify and re-distribute as you see fit (including for money). Nowhere does it say that if you tweak a shared object library that you MUST re-distribute it, but rather, you must distribute the code if you sell your tweaked library to someone else. If it's for your own (or your own companies use) you can sit on the tweaks all you want, it's just not in the *spirit* of free software.
And here I thought I had seen it all, I had no idea about these Vertu phones, very slick... but hell at $8,300 it'd be cheaper to lug a brand new apple laptop around with vonage and the t-mobil hot spot unimited package for a few years.
It's not the idea that's bad, its the system. Laptops have come far enough to replace desktops for 99% of people, the cell phone is a long way off.
While my RAZR is a nice little device, the Java engine is slow. Until they can fix the power/heat/speed thing, it's going to be a while still, bluetooth keyboard or not.
You can get them at most retailers still while they sell down their stock. The website is all Nano.
I have a second generation iPod and have had very few issues with scratches. Of course I don't shove it in my pocket and there are some minor bumps and bruises, but as someone else pointed out already, if it's shiny when you buy it... it will get scratched over time, period. Get yourself some poly carbonate polish and clean the thing up yourself.
Perhaps the next apple will use a tougher material for the facing... but you know that will increase the cost, probably significantly. Plastic scratches, that's all there is to it.
Obviously not bug free... but neat idea none the less. I could see application for something like this in airports or shipping facilities, but not ready for prime time or people yet! Imagine when the actuator on the middle slide stops working... an expensive service tech has to come fix it, the parts are back ordered, so it's going to be another 3 weeks... arggggg....
Lomby, is right on. Teach them about project specification and requirements gathering, system design and architecture. Additionally I recommend any information you can provide about MVC design.
It's important to understand at a high level, how applications work. Since these people are in grad school and probably in a management track (or at least not looking for jobs as web application developers), they will need more familiarity with system design and what's possible with existing technology and development methods.
Learning the nuts and bolts of a language's syntax these people will not be writing code in the future and so a quick introduction to xHTML and CSS is about all they will likely ever use.
Based on the fact that you can still get updates for windows 95 on windowsupdates.microsoft.com, you assume that updates will be available for quite some time.
I wouldn't count on that... It's now a 10 year old OS, I would expect Microsoft to phase this out in the next year or two like they did NT.
I (unfortunately) just did a 10 day stint with my 3-week old son in the hospital. I can say that they at least have keyboard skins on their equipment. They also wear gloves which suprisingly does wonders to cut down on germ transfer.
Alternately, since your writing code for a living, you can always just put together some source (even if it isn't in production somewhere) just to show some of the processes and your coding style etc. When I have asked for samples in the past I wanted to see more what type of commenting, variable naming etc was used.
'cause we all know you can write the same thing a dozen different ways... some JavaScript examples.
// addition function function addNums (iA, iB){ var iR = iA + iB; return iR; }
or
// addition function function add_numbers (a, b) { return a+b; }
Syntactically different, but accomplish the same end result. I might have a preference and so would be looking for a developer who could pull it together the way my company does stuff, less training.
Incidently, if you do take this advice and write some code samples, do it in a few different languages so that you can pass the samples on to the future employer in their language of choice. It will also help keep you nimble while your out of work.
I work for a mid to large size non-profit and we looked into using Linux for our server farm only to find that Red Hat (at that time, 2002) wasn't even interested in working with a company looking to roll out less than 50 servers. We run Novell and Windows now as a result. I have one server that made it into production as an SMTP / Mailman box. Sad but true. In order to get support we were going to have to work through a third party vendor which wanted an arm and a leg over the Windows / Novell support company.
and deliver this "super" OS. I'm tired of reading about how great the future is, but every time we get close to it, it runs away. Its like a giant punch the monkey banner ad or something.
My LaCie 320Gb drive (2 seperate disks) died after 6 weeks. They did however replace it, only cost me shipping, however, I lost a good bit of video I had encoded. More of a frustration than a true loss since I still have it all on tape.
Slashdot Mirror
http://gulfspill.me/ has a nice embedable widget showing the ever increasing tally of oil spewing into the gulf.
I thought I would toss this in as well....
v iew2.html
Photoshop Elements ($85 from Adobe) is a pretty capable package if you want to work with general image editing. There's also a bundle that gives you basic video editing as well by including Premiere Elements ($128 from Adobe) available. I've worked on teams where the $650/seat licensing for Photoshop was a bit much to swallow and so Elements got us through.
The Elements line is geared towards the casual user base instead of the full blown Photoshop. You won't be designing award winning layouts, but it's great for croping and resizing photos etc for web and powerpoint docs. Take a look at their capabilities list to see if it's right for you: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/over
While I'm not loving the health care system at large, I'll save the debate for others who are more passionate about it.
I like my PPO, no referrals needed, wide coverage in my geographic area and traditional insurance (20/80) when I'm out of network etc.
As a self employed coder myself, I worked with my Insurance rep to get on a PPO plan with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of IL, It's not cheap - but it's cheaper than COBRA from my old employer. It's slightly better than catastrophic coverage and I opted for a high deductible which keeps it all in check and it covers my wife and two kids too. It ends up costing me about $4,500/year vs. COBRA which was running $10,200/year. My coverage isn't as good (no vision or dental and my deductible is higher) but rarely do I need $5,000+ of dental and vision work in a single year so it's still better to pay out of pocket on that.
My advice to you is to contact your insurance agent - you probably can talk to who ever setup your liability insurance to get the name of someone to use if you went with cut throat auto insurance. My local Nationwide rep has been very helpful.
Additionally, the $150/hr to plug in a monitor is a sure thing, they know it's easy and so it's the bread and butter. When they need to outsource for professional services of a DBA or something, their profit margin goes way down. It's really just a matter of business!
Retail stores do the exact same thing. Consider electronics. A new television usually is within a small window of room for pricing. One store will have it for $499, another for $510. It'll probably cost just as much in gas and distance traveled to go get the cheaper one anyway. Ultimately the store is making a VERY small profit on the TV, it's a tight market. BUT, when it comes to things like cables, installation, protection plans etc, the markup is VERY high. Most people expect the high pressure part of the purchase to be the TV, it's really not, when the salesman is in sell mode it's for the add-ons, because that's where they make their money. You want fries with that?
As an owner of a small web development business, I prefer to do the easy work for the same rate as my harder work. Yes it limits the client pool somewhat, but it also ensures I'm not in the business of posting content all day, I can write and debug applications at the same rate as posting a PDF for a company that doesn't have the time, energy, experience etc because it's just easier for them - it also requires less effort on my side.
Back to the initial Hard Drive request. Inevitably, when you go to install that Hard Drive, as the lone IT guru, your going to get a 100 questions, which may or may not be easy to answer... should you need to have the client sign a change of rate order for each question based on the difficulty to answer? No, flat rate it.
Incidently, when I used to manage a larger website with an colo facility contract with SAVVIS, we ran into issues with their services department charging a flat rate, regardless of what they were doing, installing patches, rebooting servers, upgrading F5 hardware, looking for corrupted database tables, defragging hard drives... didn't matter, flat rate. It sucks, but like before, get someone else to do it.
While I might get flamed for this one, in the home market at least, it's not Unix that people are buying, it's an experience. Unix is an important part in the scientific communities and for some hard core techies, but the people who buy the mac mini, iMac and iPod's aren't worried about the underlying technology.
Apple has created a brand experience that most marketing people try to copy harder than eCommerce sites copy Amazon and eBay. Everything about an Apple product lets you know your dealing with a company that puts the user experience first. That's Apples brand niche.
When I bought my first mac some 8 years ago... I was awe struck by the packaging - not of the computer - the card board box it came in was user friendly. It was perfectly clear what was in each box. It was intuitive which piece needed to come out next - the foam that was around the monitor was easy to hold on to and take out. Nothing about unpacking the computer was frustrating.
When Apple retail stores hit the scene, did anyone note that the UI on the electronic signature box matched that of Aqua? Did anyone notice that your receipt font matches the fonts on the box / os x / sales literature etc?
I bought a G4 tower a few years ago and the little details that go into engineering the case and hardware are what diferentiates Apple from any other manufacture I know. I lift a little handle on the side of my case and the whole thing flops open and I have access to clean the entire machine. Additionally, all of the edges of the stamped steel were de-burred so I didn't cut any of my knuckles open as I poked around inside the case. I understand most non-slashdot-reading users will not ever open their case, but much like a Mercedes-Benz, when you look under the hood or at any small corner of the car, you know no expense was spared to ensure whatever level you interface with the product it is solid, reliable and nice.
Even the iPod I bough 3 years ago came in a package that was clearly labeled. It was clear that designers had thought about the process of opening the package, puting the iPod on the left (since we're a left to right society here in the US) where we would look first when orienting ourselves to the two halves of the box.
I expect Jobs and the rest of the crew at Apple to continue making an experience that is every bit as robust and consistent with their products as my last few years of experience with the company has been.
Or Xerox as the case may be!
It's a tissue vs. Kleenex, Zerox vs. photo copy ... (the list goes on) debate on house hold words, they catch on and take a long time to go away.
I've had both internal and external drives fail. SCSI, ATA and EIDE (and a few MFM but that was my fault) and for my it has been the amount of use that the drives see.
For internal drives, I admin'd a list server for a while (Mailman) and it killed a drive every three years like clockwork, the thing would just stop spinning. While I have had some web servers and file servers go for three - six years without a problem.
On the external side, I lost a Lacie Big Disk triple interface within two months of buying it (it has two 160Gb disks that are striped to make it 320Gb) one of the two drives died, the other was okay - mfg replaced the unit and it's been solid (knock, knock) since.
File systems asside, your talking about a whole lot of hardware here! Is it really necessary to have all this data online at the same time, is it possible to store it in some other way (ie tapes) because it would probably be a whole lot cheaper!
Well, lets see... using 300Gb SCSI disks (assuming you can find raid 0 hardware to support enough disks) you can build out a 1Pb storage system with about 3,334 disks. That would set you back about $3.3Million, assuming you paid retail prices for the disks ~$1,000 / disk @ CDW today. Of course, if you orderded 3,000+ disks, I'm sure they would cut you a deal on the price.
Any hope of daisy chaining together a few dozen direct attached storage devices to a NAS server? Something like a Dell PowerVault 220 with 14 300Gb SCSI drives will set you back about $21K and give you 3.4Tb / 3U of space (RAID-5) so you would have some saftey net built in (albeit not much). Slap 10 of these on a Powervault 6000 series and you should have a ball park of 34Tb (while shy of what your looking for gets you in the right direction). Total cost around $250K - do it four times and spread the work out over four logical volumes and you should get in the neighborhood of 1Petabyte. You could then set up a redundant server structure and for $2Million you have a redundant mirrored architecture ready for one to fail and be brought up online quickly.
This should do wonders for the Catholic church in determining what a soul is, isn't and what's within the boundries of life.
Why couldn't there be a small adult size? We have dwarfed people alive today functioning in society without issue. And since we're talking L.O.T.R. here, weren't the body doubles for the hobbits all Indonesian?
The question isn't really a question about user vs developer, it's a question about intellectual property. Additionally, it's a question about what the web is providing the individual. Is it a product that the user is paying for or is it a service?
In what I'll call "traditional" software you get something to put on your computer and interact with, modify and re-distribute as you see fit (including for money). Nowhere does it say that if you tweak a shared object library that you MUST re-distribute it, but rather, you must distribute the code if you sell your tweaked library to someone else. If it's for your own (or your own companies use) you can sit on the tweaks all you want, it's just not in the *spirit* of free software.
And here I thought I had seen it all, I had no idea about these Vertu phones, very slick... but hell at $8,300 it'd be cheaper to lug a brand new apple laptop around with vonage and the t-mobil hot spot unimited package for a few years.
t ml?cmCat=search&itemId=prod15140127
Of course everyone should be so lucky to have a ruby bearing or two supporting their cell phone buttons. Sure makes my Motorola RAZR look cheap.
http://www.neimanmarcus.com/store/catalog/prod.jh
It's not the idea that's bad, its the system. Laptops have come far enough to replace desktops for 99% of people, the cell phone is a long way off.
While my RAZR is a nice little device, the Java engine is slow. Until they can fix the power/heat/speed thing, it's going to be a while still, bluetooth keyboard or not.
You can get them at most retailers still while they sell down their stock. The website is all Nano.
I have a second generation iPod and have had very few issues with scratches. Of course I don't shove it in my pocket and there are some minor bumps and bruises, but as someone else pointed out already, if it's shiny when you buy it... it will get scratched over time, period. Get yourself some poly carbonate polish and clean the thing up yourself.
Perhaps the next apple will use a tougher material for the facing... but you know that will increase the cost, probably significantly. Plastic scratches, that's all there is to it.
Obviously not bug free... but neat idea none the less. I could see application for something like this in airports or shipping facilities, but not ready for prime time or people yet! Imagine when the actuator on the middle slide stops working... an expensive service tech has to come fix it, the parts are back ordered, so it's going to be another 3 weeks... arggggg....
Lomby, is right on. Teach them about project specification and requirements gathering, system design and architecture. Additionally I recommend any information you can provide about MVC design.
It's important to understand at a high level, how applications work. Since these people are in grad school and probably in a management track (or at least not looking for jobs as web application developers), they will need more familiarity with system design and what's possible with existing technology and development methods.
Learning the nuts and bolts of a language's syntax these people will not be writing code in the future and so a quick introduction to xHTML and CSS is about all they will likely ever use.
I wouldn't count on that... It's now a 10 year old OS, I would expect Microsoft to phase this out in the next year or two like they did NT.
Using paint for plastic models would likely work best, most of them actually bond with the plastic forming a shell which really hangs on.
I think what he meant was that most 9.95 web hosts are on Linux/Apache installs, not IIS.
I (unfortunately) just did a 10 day stint with my 3-week old son in the hospital. I can say that they at least have keyboard skins on their equipment. They also wear gloves which suprisingly does wonders to cut down on germ transfer.
Alternately, since your writing code for a living, you can always just put together some source (even if it isn't in production somewhere) just to show some of the processes and your coding style etc. When I have asked for samples in the past I wanted to see more what type of commenting, variable naming etc was used.
'cause we all know you can write the same thing a dozen different ways... some JavaScript examples.
orSyntactically different, but accomplish the same end result. I might have a preference and so would be looking for a developer who could pull it together the way my company does stuff, less training.
Incidently, if you do take this advice and write some code samples, do it in a few different languages so that you can pass the samples on to the future employer in their language of choice. It will also help keep you nimble while your out of work.
I work for a mid to large size non-profit and we looked into using Linux for our server farm only to find that Red Hat (at that time, 2002) wasn't even interested in working with a company looking to roll out less than 50 servers. We run Novell and Windows now as a result. I have one server that made it into production as an SMTP / Mailman box. Sad but true. In order to get support we were going to have to work through a third party vendor which wanted an arm and a leg over the Windows / Novell support company.
and deliver this "super" OS. I'm tired of reading about how great the future is, but every time we get close to it, it runs away. Its like a giant punch the monkey banner ad or something.
My LaCie 320Gb drive (2 seperate disks) died after 6 weeks. They did however replace it, only cost me shipping, however, I lost a good bit of video I had encoded. More of a frustration than a true loss since I still have it all on tape.