I'm with you on that one. For me it's kidneys. Damned breakable organs!:-) I think (but IANADoc) that the stem-cells-from-other would suffer the same rejection problems, as the cell markers would be different, no? If there was some way to retro in the right codons to make whichever-protein-it-is-that-I-can't-make-right (Alport's syndrome, the protein has alpha-42 in the name iirc), and then grow a replacement (kidney, ear, eye) off of that, that would ROCK. Holy shit, would that rock. Perfectly functioning organ with no need for expensive immunosupressants? I'll buy that for a dollar!
PF has a fair number of nice features IPF doesn't have, such as variables and sets. Using them you should be able to make your new rules a lot cleaner. And, when you write something from scratch, odds are you'll do it better the second time by virtue of greater experience with the domain... PF is a Good Thing.
ICBW but this looks like primarily bugfixes
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
... lots and lots of bugfixes. Glancing through the changelog extract linked to from the story, nothing really *new* jumped out at me. Not that this is a bad thing, bugfixes and increased stability/driver support is always nice.:-) I noticed a lot of things having to do with the Xprt server and having to do with 3d accel (drm, OpenGL man pages, nv driver tuning, etc.).
Yes, by all means read the whole thread. I also stuck a link to it in my signature, which hasn't changed in something like a year previous. If any moderators (or god forbid the chimpanzees that have tied up the editors and taken over their consoles) see this post, consider that if you look at my record, I'm consistently giving back to the slashdot community by trying to post worthwhile comments and do my metamod every day. In other words, while most likely I'll get a -1 Troll or offtopic for this, I think this thread reflects legitimate concerns in the slashdot community.
A side note to anyone at Andover.net/OSDN/VA who happens to read this. Remind yourself that when Slashdot became corporate, the userbase became your customers, and indirectly your source of revenue through advertising. Piss us off too much, and watch your revenue stream trickle off...
Sure, it's called a lawyer with an email address. No, seriously, if you think you can cookie-cutter your way through a deal with something you got off the web, you are FUCKED. Game over, do not pass GO and most certainly do not collect $200. You just don't play a game without learning the rules! (Not if you want to win, anyway.) So get smart and hire a local lawyer who has a clue. Even if they aren't a techie, point them at the sites listed by other posters.
I've got sort of a business minor in addition to my normal electron herding (computer science and chemistry, weee!!). I can tell you the two most important things I learned were: hire a good lawyer and hire a good accountant. Becuase no matter how smart we are at tech stuff, that doesn't qualify us in those arenas and the potential penalties for error are grave.
but don't forget the hyphen!:-) I've never personally dealt with them but members of the local unix community always had nice things to say about them (I mean, if anyone devours "old" hardware it's us freenix fans [for a while they had dual ppro 200s for like $149!]). Anyway, they ship so don't worry if you don't happen to live in the land of Shiner Bock, Sun-baked Hippies, and Crazed Germans (aka central Texas).
Man, one meg cache ppro 200s. For under a hundred bucks. Holy shit, I feel old now!:-) I'm only 23, but I remember when those f*ckers would have cost more than a semester's tuition for me...
I had my ass sort of pulled out of the fire at one point by a utility I found via freshmeat. (It was something to securely allow users to change some of their account info via a browser, this helped at a startup where most of the dev team was win32 but our servers were unix). The developer was in Denmark, IIRC, and I sent him an email thanking him for the cool work he did, and telling him where I was. I included a link to the mapquest page for where the startup was located. He wrote me back saying that it was the coolest email he'd received in a while becuase he'd never expected that somebody half the world away would be enjoying his work.
If you have powered armor, that pretty much acts as a walking a priori waiver of whatever you want, no?;^) (Que old joke about where does an 800Lb. gorilla sit in the movie theater... [anywhere he wants])
absolutely revolutionize the tactical structure of the armies posessing them. For example, if every footsoldier has the survivability of a light APC and the punch of one as well due to the increased load bearing capacity, this obviously lends a serious edge to that army. The consequences go deeper than that, as well. Becuase of increased complexity, more staff will be needed for support, and increased soldier skill will be needed. This dovetails exactly with the shift from large standing armies composed of recruits (think WW2 america or the chinese army of today) to small, highly trained special operations units (which in combination with advanced air support, are devastation incarnate, as proved in Afghanistan today).
I don't think that the fab process would be "better". "More complex" would be closer. Keep in mind that additional complexity = more complicated fab process and increased failure rate while the components are being assembled, and both of those lead to increased cost.
I've seen other cases based on that shuttle motherboard, but damn if I can find links at the momeent. They were from a japanese company, and were about 75% taller (extra drive bay in both 3.5 and 5.25). They came in about five different really neat colors, but they were ~40,000 yen (about 300 american dollars, depending on the exchange rate).
Yeah, I used styrofoam and duct tape to mount an extra HD on a machine once. Worked pretty good (of course, it was an oooollllddd and veeerrry slooooow HD so I doubt it heated up much). If you need a 5.25" floppy, the guys over at compgeeks.com have them for $5.
find yourself a skilled artist (sculpter, painter, whatever) and say "make me a cool case, here's $BIG_NUM, do your best". E.g. you could have somebody paint on the existing case, or you could have a skilled metalworker make you some l33t burnished steel case replacement, or... Basically pick some style you'd like, find the corresponding artisian, and open your wallet. Alternatively, learn enough about $artform to DIY... as an example, see: http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/ for the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop...
speaking of drool-worthy case modifications: http://www.schrotthal.de/sgi/misc/tn/hotrod_onyx.j pg.html
Becuase, as other posters have mentioned, a BBA is going to set you back 150-200, the modem doesn't work with Unix, the cpu isn't a speed demon for desktop use, and if you try to start hacking the DC you'd need $$ for parts/tools/replacement DCs when you bork them experimenting.
Just as an example: www.used-pcs.com They're a shop in Austin, TX (actually a little suburb) that the people in the local freenix community have had nice things to say about.
Here's one solution that'd run a free unix great, and win9x pretty well:
DELL OPTIPLEX GXPRO #BWRZK $129
PPro 200 6.4G 64M, DESKTOP, 1.44FD, IDE CD-ROM, USB, NIC, Sound
Add on another $59 for a 15" moniter and you're set (if he's got broadband, add another $29 for a 56k modem if not). [Every now and again they even get dual cpu ppro machines in for about the same cost, for that extra geek factor...]
Or check the classified adverts in your local paper. You should be able to pick up a decent system (web surfing, email, text processing and the like) for <$300. If there are any state agencies or universities near where you live, try asking if they have a surplus department. You can find the craziest things that way (like a friend of mine that got a mint condition 20" xterminal for $10).
All this assumes that his old machine is completely dead. Is it just one part that failed?
If you can replace the dead parts for <=150 you're probably ahead of anything you could do with the dreamcast...
You could combine the satellite and relay approach by putting an intermediate relay sat in a stable place (lagrange point maybe? i'm not even close to being an astronomer, just a programmer than likes to look at the night sky), then running cable/LOS laser towers only as far as you need to paint the sat with your laser. I imagine the telescope to sat-relay stuff would all have to be laser-based, you wouldn't want stray radio waves kicking about... This would save you some effort and cost (putting sats in place is pretty much a solved problem I gather, assembling things by remote on a large scale where you can't talk to them directly... maybe launch teh sat first and use it to control the construction things...). Of course this would be hideously expensive. No, not hideously expensive, some-new-superlative-word expensive. But that's what governments are for, right?;-) "I million here, a million there; pretty soon you're talking about real money..." Another question is power. I guess you'd be on an observe-while-dark/store-power-from-cells-while-li t cycle. Or some sort of isotopic source...
I have a good friend (we run the site in my sig together) who was in much the same situation. He ran a series of bookstores, and he'd end up writing the inventory and accounting packages, that sort of thing. (He's in his late 40s and I'm in my early 20s, so age wise our friendship may seem a little odd, but once two men have fought qmail and slashcode together it's a bond hard to break;-) ) Anyway, his first tech job for a year or so was working as a coder-analyst for a book-centric dotcom. Worked out great for him, becuase not only could he provide significant value from the getgo with his domain knowledge, he could learn from the pure coders. Now he's working in an even more code-heavy position, so the transition is definitely possible. I think he's like 45 - 47 or so, and he's never had formal CS training, so the transition is definitely doable if you play from your strengths. Best of luck to your uncle! (If he does want to go straight coder, formal education in CS or sw.eng. is worth the investment, even if it's a couple-three part-time semesters at a community college.)
A takeover of SGI does seem pretty likely at this point. Here's some reasons why I suspect IBM would snap them up:
IBM has a much larger market cap and a fairly healthy balance sheet (this gives them the resources)
One of IBM's most profitable business sectors (or so a little birdy told me) outside of consulting is big iron and high performance computing, which is right up SGI's alley.
IBM has a large product base and customer base that center around Unix already
if IBM is serious about a Linux push, SGI is a source of skilled engineers who have also been working on Linux in the enterprise
it'd be one less competitor for all those cushy big-gov/big-edu contracts that IBM loves
Just idle speculation on my part. Sun is more of a pure-play Unix vendor, and thus might seem more appropriate as a takeover initiator, but I don't think their financial reserves are high enough to do it. Further, they're more of a "one-os, one-platform" company than IBM and would probably have a harder time assimilating the SGI folks/products.
Jeez, if SGI goes tits up, how many Unix (commercial) vendors will be left? Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters. I guess just Solaris and AIX. God save us all from AIX being the only Unix out there...;-)
I'm a programmer at a small (10ish person) shop
that uses QB. We use it for pretty much everything from time tracking to billing to yadayada. A number of gripes, from the end-user perspective:
Dude, what's with the interface? I mean, who made the decision to include a web browser in there?
If the system makes me log in (perfectly understandable), why can't it autoselect my name in places that require such (I'm thinking specifically of the employee timetracking (weekly timesheet) screen).
If it's a multi-user system, why does it bitch at me about "Can't do that, somebody else has the file open." I think that runs counter to the definition of "multi-user".
Data corruption: like the other replies have said, this sucks. We're not doing anything at all complicated, but once a week or so the accountant or office manager has to go around telling everyone to shutdown QB so they can try to rebuild the file, which only works maybe one time in three. I managed to cause a file corruption once by entering in one day's worth of time tracking (or at least, when I tried to close afterwards it said "Nyah nyah! The files b0rked!").
Performance: Dude, I have a decently fast machine at work (it can run the RTCW test pretty well). QB is slooooooooow, like it takes it ages to start up, and then another ice age to open up the default screen.
It bitches at me every time I open it that the company file is not on a mapped drive (our file is sitting on a samba server and I just don't have much inclination to map a drive to that for the one file). I can understand warning the user that the program might not be able to determine the free space, but for God's sake give me a "STFU" button on that so I can tell it "yeah I know, but it's ok, so hush now".
Having had a little experience in accounting (some classes in college), I can well imagine the complexity you face programming this beast, so you have my sympathy. Still, it needs some work...
I took a little Russian in college (or rather, I took 13 credit hours worth and remember little;^) ). "Medved" (prounounced a little more lik Myedvyed) is "bear", so "medvedka" is a diminutive form, i.e. a cute nickname* like "cute little bear". Check out this nifty online dictionary for things like this (type in "medved", hit "transliterate input", and away you go (if your machine and browser can handle cyrillic anyway).
*similarly "vod" is water, so "vodka" is "little water that we all know and love";^) [not to single out the Russians as heavy drinkers, iirc whiskey (the english mangling of the original gaelic anyway) meant "water of life"]
MS derives no income from ASP. They do, however, derive income from the sale of NT/2k/XP/whatever.
Anything that makes those platforms of more universal appeal makes them more money. Similarly, if they did charge for ASP, a sane business decision would be to make versions available for things besides MS operating systems.
True, they don't sell Office for anything but Windows and MacOS, but that's probably a cost/benefit decision (as in "X dollars for a linux Office team would only make sense if revenue Y is greater than X" (probably X + required profit margin)).
It isn't hard to predict what MS is going to do given a set of stimuli. However large they may be, whatever their corporate culture might be like internally, they're a business like any other (public traded) business (operating in a near or total monopoly).
... makes a lot of sense. For example, where I live (Houston, TX), there are many, many neighborhoods that simply can't get either of the land-line based broadband options (well, ISDN I guess, but that sucks) for reasons like "lazy or stupid cable tv company" or "neighborhood has dsl-incompatible switch, so sorry", things like that. These are subdivisions that are hardly way-out-rural locations, and many of them are reasonably high income. In other words, they're close enough in that not much in the way of wireless infrastructure could reach most of them and they're eagerly waiting to put dollars in somebody's hand. (Most of my friends in this situation either rely on ISDN or sat modems, neither of which anyone has said many complementary things about either in terms of expense, bandwidth, or latency.) I imagine this is not an uncommon situation (I've heard of many other cities that suffer from these conditions, in places ranging from SoCal to NoVa). These folks would make a great bread-and-butter revenue stream, top that off with an icing of high-ticket mobile users and you've got a great initial revenue stream.
OK, a lot of the other posts are fairly insightful about recommending a Mac. (Where I work, on graphics person swears by Macs, the other swears at them.)
If you go with a PC solution, I strongly recommend a Matrox video card. Top notch color quality and 2d image performance. Crisp text, etc etc. In this arena, Matrox beats the pants off of anything nVidia or ATI can field, from what I've seen.
Also, get a Trinitron moniter. You can find 17-19" trinitrons in the 250-350 range. Yeah, that's going to likely be the biggest chuck of the 1000, but it's worth it.
In addition to the keyboard (I suggest Keytronic) and mouse (can't go wrong with a M$ scrollimouse),
get her one of the "hobbyist" wacom tablets. They cost about 99, but I have two computer artists that think they're worth more than their weight in gold. (I know these work with macs too, so it's a dual purpose recommendation;) ).
Don't worry about SCSI unless she wants to do video editing.
For motherboard recommendations I usually trust Tom's Hardware. The plain fact of the matter is that most graphics tools will run just fine on say a p3-500 running on a 440bx board. So even the cheapest duron you can buy and a decent abit or asus kt133/kt133a chipset board will handle PhotoShop with one hand tied behind it's back.
Out pc-using graphicsgrrl is using a duron 850 machine and is just as happy as can be with it's performance (she was giggling at how fast some of the more cpu intensive filters were running).
So, here's a parts list and prices (USD), I'm taking all this from Essential Computer. They're a place I've had good dealings with three or four times now... Anyway, this is what I'd build if it were me.
kb/mouse/floppy: season to taste, probably about $30-40
Enlight 7237 case w/ 300w pwr: $59 (and another case fan for the back side: $5)
So that's a total of about $650, probably another $100 for shipping. I didn't include a moniter there, becuase the best way to buy a moniter is to go comparison shopping with your own eyes. Best Buy is currently selling a Sony 17" Trinitron moniter for 329. The moniter I use is pretty decent, it's a 19" Mag flat screen (trinitron clone). Looks like BB has an equivalent model for ~$220. So if that 1000 is only for the hardware, this system will just about fit that (tack on more if she wants scanner/printer/wacom).
I didn't include software costs in that, but I'd really suggest she go with windows 2000. Stable and it supports the widest range of graphics software and hardware (I love open source as much as the rest of you, but frankly if you're serious about graphics OSS just doesn't cut it yet). That's probably $120, and then there's another $x for the graphics software itself. If you go with adobe, you would do best to find a college student and bribe them to buy you the academic-priced sw (you'll save probably 500+ dollars). (oh, and you can save $$$ on MS Word, if all she needs is simple document editing like for resumes or whatever, AbiWord works about as well as word97) There are of course alternatives to the official channels for Adobe and Macromedia producs, but that I leave up to you. YMMV (Your Morals May Vary).
The other day I was reading salon and this jaguar ad started out like an innocent 160xmumble standard ad banner. Said something about "rip into jaguar" or something equally retarded. Then this paper-tearing effect starts and extends down and to the left, covering about 30% of the page i was reading. super, super annoying...
You know, really, I don't mind banner ads all that much, as long as they are reasonably circumspect and don't actively try to annoy me.
I've even been know to click on some of them if they looked interesting. However, I've pledged to myself that I will not click on the ads for or buy ANYTHING from companies that use hectic, spasm-inducing animated gifs, super-size flash ads, ads with sound, popunder ads, popup ads, or any other species from the menangerie of ads whose theory seems to be "Let's stick our thumb up the user's butt, and he'll be really pissed off now! Somehow, that'll make him wanna buy our cheap crap! Yeahyeahyeah! Hand me the crack pipe again, bob!".
matrox cards usually are nowhere near the fastest in terms of 3d performance, but their 2d performance is top notch. The image quality and text clarity on a matrox card is soooo much better than anything nVidia or ATI offers it's just not even funny. Plus, matrox cards have good LCD/DVI support. (Neither of these two features is suprising given that they aim for the professional/graphics design market.) Although, for $2000, you're options re: lcd moniters will be extremely limited if not nonexistant. Truthfully, I'd say go for a Trinitron tube or the like and run it at 80+Hz ( you won't see any distortion or flicker) becuase a 21" Trinitron is probably less than a 15-17" LCD (more screen space will be nice for page layout). Oh, and caution Gramps against moving said 21" Trinitron moniter, he'd probably herniate if he tried. (Hell, I almost would and I'm 30% of his age...);-)
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I'm with you on that one. For me it's kidneys. Damned breakable organs! :-) I think (but IANADoc) that the stem-cells-from-other would suffer the same rejection problems, as the cell markers would be different, no? If there was some way to retro in the right codons to make whichever-protein-it-is-that-I-can't-make-right (Alport's syndrome, the protein has alpha-42 in the name iirc), and then grow a replacement (kidney, ear, eye) off of that, that would ROCK. Holy shit, would that rock. Perfectly functioning organ with no need for expensive immunosupressants? I'll buy that for a dollar!
PF has a fair number of nice features IPF doesn't have, such as variables and sets. Using them you should be able to make your new rules a lot cleaner. And, when you write something from scratch, odds are you'll do it better the second time by virtue of greater experience with the domain... PF is a Good Thing.
... lots and lots of bugfixes. Glancing through the changelog extract linked to from the story, nothing really *new* jumped out at me. Not that this is a bad thing, bugfixes and increased stability/driver support is always nice. :-) I noticed a lot of things having to do with the Xprt server and having to do with 3d accel (drm, OpenGL man pages, nv driver tuning, etc.).
Yes, by all means read the whole thread. I also stuck a link to it in my signature, which hasn't changed in something like a year previous. If any moderators (or god forbid the chimpanzees that have tied up the editors and taken over their consoles) see this post, consider that if you look at my record, I'm consistently giving back to the slashdot community by trying to post worthwhile comments and do my metamod every day. In other words, while most likely I'll get a -1 Troll or offtopic for this, I think this thread reflects legitimate concerns in the slashdot community.
A side note to anyone at Andover.net/OSDN/VA who happens to read this. Remind yourself that when Slashdot became corporate, the userbase became your customers, and indirectly your source of revenue through advertising. Piss us off too much, and watch your revenue stream trickle off...
Sure, it's called a lawyer with an email address. No, seriously, if you think you can cookie-cutter your way through a deal with something you got off the web, you are FUCKED. Game over, do not pass GO and most certainly do not collect $200. You just don't play a game without learning the rules! (Not if you want to win, anyway.) So get smart and hire a local lawyer who has a clue. Even if they aren't a techie, point them at the sites listed by other posters.
I've got sort of a business minor in addition to my normal electron herding (computer science and chemistry, weee!!). I can tell you the two most important things I learned were: hire a good lawyer and hire a good accountant. Becuase no matter how smart we are at tech stuff, that doesn't qualify us in those arenas and the potential penalties for error are grave.
but don't forget the hyphen! :-) I've never personally dealt with them but members of the local unix community always had nice things to say about them (I mean, if anyone devours "old" hardware it's us freenix fans [for a while they had dual ppro 200s for like $149!]). Anyway, they ship so don't worry if you don't happen to live in the land of Shiner Bock, Sun-baked Hippies, and Crazed Germans (aka central Texas).
Man, one meg cache ppro 200s. For under a hundred bucks. Holy shit, I feel old now! :-) I'm only 23, but I remember when those f*ckers would have cost more than a semester's tuition for me...
I had my ass sort of pulled out of the fire at one point by a utility I found via freshmeat. (It was something to securely allow users to change some of their account info via a browser, this helped at a startup where most of the dev team was win32 but our servers were unix). The developer was in Denmark, IIRC, and I sent him an email thanking him for the cool work he did, and telling him where I was. I included a link to the mapquest page for where the startup was located. He wrote me back saying that it was the coolest email he'd received in a while becuase he'd never expected that somebody half the world away would be enjoying his work.
Armor sucked ass! Starship troopers was waaaay better.
If you have powered armor, that pretty much acts as a walking a priori waiver of whatever you want, no? ;^) (Que old joke about where does an 800Lb. gorilla sit in the movie theater... [anywhere he wants])
absolutely revolutionize the tactical structure of the armies posessing them. For example, if every footsoldier has the survivability of a light APC and the punch of one as well due to the increased load bearing capacity, this obviously lends a serious edge to that army. The consequences go deeper than that, as well. Becuase of increased complexity, more staff will be needed for support, and increased soldier skill will be needed. This dovetails exactly with the shift from large standing armies composed of recruits (think WW2 america or the chinese army of today) to small, highly trained special operations units (which in combination with advanced air support, are devastation incarnate, as proved in Afghanistan today).
I don't think that the fab process would be "better". "More complex" would be closer. Keep in mind that additional complexity = more complicated fab process and increased failure rate while the components are being assembled, and both of those lead to increased cost.
I've seen other cases based on that shuttle motherboard, but damn if I can find links at the momeent. They were from a japanese company, and were about 75% taller (extra drive bay in both 3.5 and 5.25). They came in about five different really neat colors, but they were ~40,000 yen (about 300 american dollars, depending on the exchange rate).
Yeah, I used styrofoam and duct tape to mount an extra HD on a machine once. Worked pretty good (of course, it was an oooollllddd and veeerrry slooooow HD so I doubt it heated up much). If you need a 5.25" floppy, the guys over at compgeeks.com have them for $5.
find yourself a skilled artist (sculpter, painter, whatever) and say "make me a cool case, here's $BIG_NUM, do your best". E.g. you could have somebody paint on the existing case, or you could have a skilled metalworker make you some l33t burnished steel case replacement, or... Basically pick some style you'd like, find the corresponding artisian, and open your wallet. Alternatively, learn enough about $artform to DIY... as an example, see: http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/ for the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop...
j pg.html
speaking of drool-worthy case modifications: http://www.schrotthal.de/sgi/misc/tn/hotrod_onyx.
Becuase, as other posters have mentioned, a BBA is going to set you back 150-200, the modem doesn't work with Unix, the cpu isn't a speed demon for desktop use, and if you try to start hacking the DC you'd need $$ for parts/tools/replacement DCs when you bork them experimenting.
Just as an example: www.used-pcs.com They're a shop in Austin, TX (actually a little suburb) that the people in the local freenix community have had nice things to say about.
Here's one solution that'd run a free unix great, and win9x pretty well: DELL OPTIPLEX GXPRO #BWRZK $129 PPro 200 6.4G 64M, DESKTOP, 1.44FD, IDE CD-ROM, USB, NIC, Sound Add on another $59 for a 15" moniter and you're set (if he's got broadband, add another $29 for a 56k modem if not). [Every now and again they even get dual cpu ppro machines in for about the same cost, for that extra geek factor...]
Or check the classified adverts in your local paper. You should be able to pick up a decent system (web surfing, email, text processing and the like) for <$300. If there are any state agencies or universities near where you live, try asking if they have a surplus department. You can find the craziest things that way (like a friend of mine that got a mint condition 20" xterminal for $10).
All this assumes that his old machine is completely dead. Is it just one part that failed? If you can replace the dead parts for <=150 you're probably ahead of anything you could do with the dreamcast...
You could combine the satellite and relay approach by putting an intermediate relay sat in a stable place (lagrange point maybe? i'm not even close to being an astronomer, just a programmer than likes to look at the night sky), then running cable/LOS laser towers only as far as you need to paint the sat with your laser. I imagine the telescope to sat-relay stuff would all have to be laser-based, you wouldn't want stray radio waves kicking about... This would save you some effort and cost (putting sats in place is pretty much a solved problem I gather, assembling things by remote on a large scale where you can't talk to them directly... maybe launch teh sat first and use it to control the construction things...). Of course this would be hideously expensive. No, not hideously expensive, some-new-superlative-word expensive. But that's what governments are for, right? ;-) "I million here, a million there; pretty soon you're talking about real money..." Another question is power. I guess you'd be on an observe-while-dark/store-power-from-cells-while-li t cycle. Or some sort of isotopic source...
I have a good friend (we run the site in my sig together) who was in much the same situation. He ran a series of bookstores, and he'd end up writing the inventory and accounting packages, that sort of thing. (He's in his late 40s and I'm in my early 20s, so age wise our friendship may seem a little odd, but once two men have fought qmail and slashcode together it's a bond hard to break ;-) ) Anyway, his first tech job for a year or so was working as a coder-analyst for a book-centric dotcom. Worked out great for him, becuase not only could he provide significant value from the getgo with his domain knowledge, he could learn from the pure coders. Now he's working in an even more code-heavy position, so the transition is definitely possible. I think he's like 45 - 47 or so, and he's never had formal CS training, so the transition is definitely doable if you play from your strengths. Best of luck to your uncle! (If he does want to go straight coder, formal education in CS or sw.eng. is worth the investment, even if it's a couple-three part-time semesters at a community college.)
Just idle speculation on my part. Sun is more of a pure-play Unix vendor, and thus might seem more appropriate as a takeover initiator, but I don't think their financial reserves are high enough to do it. Further, they're more of a "one-os, one-platform" company than IBM and would probably have a harder time assimilating the SGI folks/products.
Jeez, if SGI goes tits up, how many Unix (commercial) vendors will be left? Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters. I guess just Solaris and AIX. God save us all from AIX being the only Unix out there...;-)
I'm a programmer at a small (10ish person) shop that uses QB. We use it for pretty much everything from time tracking to billing to yadayada. A number of gripes, from the end-user perspective:
- Dude, what's with the interface? I mean, who made the decision to include a web browser in there?
- If the system makes me log in (perfectly understandable), why can't it autoselect my name in places that require such (I'm thinking specifically of the employee timetracking (weekly timesheet) screen).
- If it's a multi-user system, why does it bitch at me about "Can't do that, somebody else has the file open." I think that runs counter to the definition of "multi-user".
- Data corruption: like the other replies have said, this sucks. We're not doing anything at all complicated, but once a week or so the accountant or office manager has to go around telling everyone to shutdown QB so they can try to rebuild the file, which only works maybe one time in three. I managed to cause a file corruption once by entering in one day's worth of time tracking (or at least, when I tried to close afterwards it said "Nyah nyah! The files b0rked!").
- Performance: Dude, I have a decently fast machine at work (it can run the RTCW test pretty well). QB is slooooooooow, like it takes it ages to start up, and then another ice age to open up the default screen.
- It bitches at me every time I open it that the company file is not on a mapped drive (our file is sitting on a samba server and I just don't have much inclination to map a drive to that for the one file). I can understand warning the user that the program might not be able to determine the free space, but for God's sake give me a "STFU" button on that so I can tell it "yeah I know, but it's ok, so hush now".
Having had a little experience in accounting (some classes in college), I can well imagine the complexity you face programming this beast, so you have my sympathy. Still, it needs some work...I took a little Russian in college (or rather, I took 13 credit hours worth and remember little ;^) ). "Medved" (prounounced a little more lik Myedvyed) is "bear", so "medvedka" is a diminutive form, i.e. a cute nickname* like "cute little bear". Check out this nifty online dictionary for things like this (type in "medved", hit "transliterate input", and away you go (if your machine and browser can handle cyrillic anyway).
*similarly "vod" is water, so "vodka" is "little water that we all know and love" ;^) [not to single out the Russians as heavy drinkers, iirc whiskey (the english mangling of the original gaelic anyway) meant "water of life"]
MS derives no income from ASP. They do, however, derive income from the sale of NT/2k/XP/whatever. Anything that makes those platforms of more universal appeal makes them more money. Similarly, if they did charge for ASP, a sane business decision would be to make versions available for things besides MS operating systems. True, they don't sell Office for anything but Windows and MacOS, but that's probably a cost/benefit decision (as in "X dollars for a linux Office team would only make sense if revenue Y is greater than X" (probably X + required profit margin)).
It isn't hard to predict what MS is going to do given a set of stimuli. However large they may be, whatever their corporate culture might be like internally, they're a business like any other (public traded) business (operating in a near or total monopoly).
... makes a lot of sense. For example, where I live (Houston, TX), there are many, many neighborhoods that simply can't get either of the land-line based broadband options (well, ISDN I guess, but that sucks) for reasons like "lazy or stupid cable tv company" or "neighborhood has dsl-incompatible switch, so sorry", things like that. These are subdivisions that are hardly way-out-rural locations, and many of them are reasonably high income. In other words, they're close enough in that not much in the way of wireless infrastructure could reach most of them and they're eagerly waiting to put dollars in somebody's hand. (Most of my friends in this situation either rely on ISDN or sat modems, neither of which anyone has said many complementary things about either in terms of expense, bandwidth, or latency.) I imagine this is not an uncommon situation (I've heard of many other cities that suffer from these conditions, in places ranging from SoCal to NoVa). These folks would make a great bread-and-butter revenue stream, top that off with an icing of high-ticket mobile users and you've got a great initial revenue stream.
OK, a lot of the other posts are fairly insightful about recommending a Mac. (Where I work, on graphics person swears by Macs, the other swears at them.)
If you go with a PC solution, I strongly recommend a Matrox video card. Top notch color quality and 2d image performance. Crisp text, etc etc. In this arena, Matrox beats the pants off of anything nVidia or ATI can field, from what I've seen.
Also, get a Trinitron moniter. You can find 17-19" trinitrons in the 250-350 range. Yeah, that's going to likely be the biggest chuck of the 1000, but it's worth it.
In addition to the keyboard (I suggest Keytronic) and mouse (can't go wrong with a M$ scrollimouse), get her one of the "hobbyist" wacom tablets. They cost about 99, but I have two computer artists that think they're worth more than their weight in gold. (I know these work with macs too, so it's a dual purpose recommendation ;) ).
Don't worry about SCSI unless she wants to do video editing.
For motherboard recommendations I usually trust Tom's Hardware. The plain fact of the matter is that most graphics tools will run just fine on say a p3-500 running on a 440bx board. So even the cheapest duron you can buy and a decent abit or asus kt133/kt133a chipset board will handle PhotoShop with one hand tied behind it's back. Out pc-using graphicsgrrl is using a duron 850 machine and is just as happy as can be with it's performance (she was giggling at how fast some of the more cpu intensive filters were running).
So, here's a parts list and prices (USD), I'm taking all this from Essential Computer. They're a place I've had good dealings with three or four times now... Anyway, this is what I'd build if it were me.
- AMD duron 950 (retail box w/ HSF): $75
- Abit KT7A: $90
- Micron 512Mb pc133 dram: $69
- Matrox G550 (32mb ddr, db15 and dvi): $93
- SB pci128 sound card: $18
- Netgear 311 10/100 nic: $18 (and/or: 3com usr 2977 non-winmodem pci 56k $45)
- Seagate Barracuda ST340016A 40gb 7200rpm ata100 drive: $96
- Plextor 12/10/32 cdrw: $112
- kb/mouse/floppy: season to taste, probably about $30-40
- Enlight 7237 case w/ 300w pwr: $59 (and another case fan for the back side: $5)
So that's a total of about $650, probably another $100 for shipping. I didn't include a moniter there, becuase the best way to buy a moniter is to go comparison shopping with your own eyes. Best Buy is currently selling a Sony 17" Trinitron moniter for 329. The moniter I use is pretty decent, it's a 19" Mag flat screen (trinitron clone). Looks like BB has an equivalent model for ~$220. So if that 1000 is only for the hardware, this system will just about fit that (tack on more if she wants scanner/printer/wacom).I didn't include software costs in that, but I'd really suggest she go with windows 2000. Stable and it supports the widest range of graphics software and hardware (I love open source as much as the rest of you, but frankly if you're serious about graphics OSS just doesn't cut it yet). That's probably $120, and then there's another $x for the graphics software itself. If you go with adobe, you would do best to find a college student and bribe them to buy you the academic-priced sw (you'll save probably 500+ dollars). (oh, and you can save $$$ on MS Word, if all she needs is simple document editing like for resumes or whatever, AbiWord works about as well as word97) There are of course alternatives to the official channels for Adobe and Macromedia producs, but that I leave up to you. YMMV (Your Morals May Vary).
The other day I was reading salon and this jaguar ad started out like an innocent 160xmumble standard ad banner. Said something about "rip into jaguar" or something equally retarded. Then this paper-tearing effect starts and extends down and to the left, covering about 30% of the page i was reading. super, super annoying...
You know, really, I don't mind banner ads all that much, as long as they are reasonably circumspect and don't actively try to annoy me. I've even been know to click on some of them if they looked interesting. However, I've pledged to myself that I will not click on the ads for or buy ANYTHING from companies that use hectic, spasm-inducing animated gifs, super-size flash ads, ads with sound, popunder ads, popup ads, or any other species from the menangerie of ads whose theory seems to be "Let's stick our thumb up the user's butt, and he'll be really pissed off now! Somehow, that'll make him wanna buy our cheap crap! Yeahyeahyeah! Hand me the crack pipe again, bob!".
matrox cards usually are nowhere near the fastest in terms of 3d performance, but their 2d performance is top notch. The image quality and text clarity on a matrox card is soooo much better than anything nVidia or ATI offers it's just not even funny. Plus, matrox cards have good LCD/DVI support. (Neither of these two features is suprising given that they aim for the professional/graphics design market.) Although, for $2000, you're options re: lcd moniters will be extremely limited if not nonexistant. Truthfully, I'd say go for a Trinitron tube or the like and run it at 80+Hz ( you won't see any distortion or flicker) becuase a 21" Trinitron is probably less than a 15-17" LCD (more screen space will be nice for page layout). Oh, and caution Gramps against moving said 21" Trinitron moniter, he'd probably herniate if he tried. (Hell, I almost would and I'm 30% of his age...) ;-)