If a TIFF file will work, then why not some kind of 'print to fax' setup?
Basic idea is: Word: print->fax program fax program saves as TIFF file (perhaps choosing 'fine' resolution etc.)
Same idea with a different implementation would be to print to a 'postscript' printer, then use a postscript to tiff conversion program. This could be fairly well automated with a print queue on a *nix box accepting the postscript 'print' jobs, then simply archiving the resulting tiff files off someplace handy.
I think that typical open-source projects do target a higher-level of computer geekiness and sophisticated users, however there are many projects that attempt to make things simpler.
Meanwhile "mainstream" I think is moving up the technical ladder. As users get more skilled with computers and a bit more jaded towards the crap commercial software they buy, open source systems may be the next thing they try.
In combination, I think these trends would indicate some intersection at some point in the future, but probably not 2003 or even 2004.
No, this is _way_ more expensive than the PCJr was. $10billion? Sheesh... Lot of money. I wonder how they came to that figure? Why not 9 billion, or 11 billion?
At least the PCJr wasn't doomed to begin with -- the only way to make CPU time valuable is to limit the amount available. With Moores law and economies of scale (how long till we have an 8-way 5GHz CPU system? How much longer until we have the same with 10GHz?) I find it difficult to conceive of any way to beat it, other than absolute domination.
When I had roadrunner installed (a long time ago) I just put a junk hard drive in my PC with windows 95 (they didn't support Linux).
When the tech came I let them do whatever they were going to do. When they left I checked the relevant settings and the pulled the hard drive out, and put my primary drive back in.
Sounds like you want either a reflective LCD display or one of those fancy-schmancy computer google thingies. Looks like Xybernaut (among others) offer such things for sale. Just search for wearable computers.
Granted a bunch of people wearing opaque computer goggles, possibly with computer gloves navigating their own private 3-d world might make for an odd looking group to an uninitiated visitor. Make sure to keep a few regular CRTs and schedule visits carefully.
Is there some overwhelming reason that the server portion (i.e.: the communications) couldn't be reverse-engineered to make a samba-style "bug for bug" compatible "exchange server". Once the protocol was figured out then people could continue to use outlook. Backend might then be SQL server of choice + Sendmail/qmail/whatever + a webmail product (squirrel mail?) +... you get the point.
Ideally this mythical product would support both the proprietary exchange server protocol(s) and some open protocol that other clients could interoperate on. Then Exchange/Outlook could compete on features & function rather than being the only game in town.
From the article: "Stuff like "the Cathedral and the Bazaar." Now, I get it about being the bazaar. I'm a science fiction writer, I got no problem at all with bizarre stuff. But commercial software? Microsoft? As a cathedral? "
I thought that ESRs whole Cathedral vs. Bazaar thing was that Gnu and RMS represent the "Cathedral" (ie: carefully controlled who gets to contribute, everything falls along into RMSs grand vision, RMS as a fanatic Free-Software religion). And that Linux and "open source" represent the bazaar (ie: looser collaboration on things, some commercial interest is tolerated, it ain't pretty but it works kind of thing).
I have no strong feelings either way about whether 'free' software should or should not have a clickwrap style license agreement. I suppose that's up to the lawyers to sort out.
I do think that the validity of a clickwrap license is highly questionable because the user would under normal circumstances be unlikely to see it. Most people get PCs pre-configured at work or by a technician, and it's the technicians that are just clicking "OK" to the terms of the EULA, and I presume that the vast majority of technicians don't bother to read the EULA anyway.
Perhaps it could be argued from a legal perspective that the technician was acting on behalf of the real end-user/purchaser, but legalisms aside, it doesn't make much sense.
I've been using gvim for at least 5 years on windows (NT, 2k, XP) and never had _one_ crash.
If you don't like the *vi type editors, Xemacs or Gnu emacs work flawlessly on win32 as well. Xemacs is a lot easier to set up (e.g.: getting the Java development environment JDE working), but perhaps you want to use Gnu emacs for political reasons...
If you want something more windows-centric NOTEPAD.EXE has always been pretty reliable, if a bit slow on large files.
I have to review tech resumes all the time. Automatic filters: years of experience and college degree. I will look at people w/out a degree but with exerpience, but there are some massive hurdles there:
1: The process of getting a 4-year degree gives an employer some level of comfort, since it is likely that the candidate had substantial writing, communication, and intellectual experience. I don't give a rip if the degree is in philosophy or physics (or even CS).
2: A candidate w/out a college degree might be OK, but might not. The experience quoted is viewed with biased eyes -- "what kind of work would a company give someone without a college degree?".
If I were you I would immediately start working on getting a bachelors degree - BA, BS, whatever, in _anything_. Experience is great, but unless your're some kind of celebrity (e.g.: well-known linux programmer), or have _great_ networking, you're just going to miss out on a _lot_ of potential interviews, not to mention jobs. Pay differential once you change jobs will be substantial as well.
First, to everyone who thinks that having a switched network adds much of anything in the way of anti-sniffing security, you should probably look at tools like ettercap or dsniff _now_.
Since an encrypted channel between the printer and the workstation (most likely a windows client, possibly a *nix client) would have to be supported by both the printer and the client, you've got an ugly situation -- both the client and server need to support the encryption/authentication/etc. protocol.
This would be fine if you were just about to discard all of your printers and start fresh again, were able to find suitable products, and the products offered acceptable encryption. Given that this situation is rather unlikely, here's another approach:
Get a 'firewall' style box that supports vpns. Make sure that vpn 'clients' are available for all of your workstation platforms. Put all of the printers behind this vpn-device, on their own private network, including the server that 'shares' the printers.
When the user prints the print driver connects to the different network, through a vpn tunnel. The strength of the encryption on the vpn can be tuned independently of any other aspect of the system.
This leaves the rather obvious hole that someone could disconnect an ethernet cable from the printer, put in a small hub, and then sniff from there. Maybe you bolt the printers into a 'security box' that prevents access to the network connection, and do something similar to the wall jack. At some point you have to give up on paranoia and just monitor things.
If you can define a snort rule that would pick up some tell-tale of a yahoo IM message, you could then have an 'active response' that would send a tcp reset to each end of the connection spoofed to be from the remote end. This is also effective for blocking gnutella traffic.
Eventually people will give up trying to use yahoo's messenger and switch to something more subversive. when will an icmp-echo reply based IM service get started? That's what the world _really_ needs.
As a developer I've found that most management-types don't give a hoot about technical details, or much of anything else that a heads-down developer might care about.
What will get attention is an understanding of business need, an attention to detail in terms of reporting progress and delivering systems that work, and positive attitude.
As a manager I get very tired of hearing about the programmers, sysadmins, etc. complaining that such-and-such can't be done, or otherwise blocking progress. Much more often than not things that "can't be done" just require a re-statement of the problem and some creative application of simple ideas.
My recommendation would be to make a friend or at least the aquaintance of one of the project manager's bosses, and just talk. Don't attack the current project managers style -- that would make their boss look bad. Don't complain about the impossibility of whatever. Mention that you have an idea of how to accomplish some objective. Show that you have some clue as to what the managers are interested in. Show that you have some interest in the companies performance. Be prepared to give out some 'write ups' that show a very clear train of thought and that make a clear recommendation up front, with backup material and dialogue exploring alternatives explaining why the recommendation makes sense.
If that doesn't work, then get a job with a company that has a clue. They're out there.
1: GPL Everything. 2: Cease all development activity (--> R&D budget == 0) 3: Lay off all lawyers 4: Divvy up the $40 billion in cash thushly:
a: Pay off all debt and legal claims.
b: 30% of remainder to MS Investors
c: 30% to charity
d: 30% to FSF. Lets face it, they put the Gnu in Gnu/Linux!
e: 10% to executive level for being nice guys. 5: Any employees left could provide commercial support contracts for formerly Microsoft products. 6: A FSF-style "Microsoft Software Foundation" funded by corporate charity etc. should be founded to foster continued development on Microsoft products and technologies.
You could be subversive about the whole thing, e.g.: Get the new site developed in PHP on Linux. Then it makes sense to run it in production on the same platform.
You could play the security card, but it is really a double-edged sword as both Linux and Solaris get a _lot_ of security advisories. The fact that *most* of the time these are fairly minor, or that a distribution with umpteen thousand 3rd party packages such as redhat is bound to have problems and that might be OK is difficult for many to understand. Quite frankly solaris out of the box takes a 'rape me, please' stance on security, although it can be locked down pretty well. Same goes for windows though.
If you're forced to run Windows, it's not the end of the world. You can still run Apache, and you can get the Cygwin distribution to give you all of your nifty *nix commands. Not nearly as clean, nice, etc. as a 'real' unix, but a lot better than vanilla windows.
You might also look at any of the multitude of web server appliances, that just happen to run Linux. E.G.: the cobalt RAQ (currently marketed by SUN). Typically they are managed through a browser, and if your boss isn't too happy about a command-line driven system, perhaps he would be happier with a purpose-made appliance.
Ultimately, *what* you end up running matters a lot less than execution. A well executed Windows system will beat the pants off of a poorly executed *nix system, and vice-versa. Especially vice-versa.
I recently stayed at both Swissotel in Boston and Sutton Place in Toronto. Both offered a web-tv style internet service for about $10 per day.
Although I'm sure this is probably fine for some people, most slashdot-types would probably get irritated pretty fast with this kind of connection. So if you ask the hotel about what kind of internet access they have, and they say "yes we have high speed internet access in every room", they might mean this webtv crap. They might also mean there is a data port on the phone in the room. woo hoo.
If any hotel-types are reading this: Personally I'd much rather have 802.11 and/or an ethernet jack in the wall.
How about a second box? Hardware capable of saturating a 10MB ethernet connection should be really cheap, and even saturating a 100MB connection isn't hard.
Get two interfaces on each, one interface to an internal 'management' network, the other interface to the equipment you're testing. That way you can operate both boxes out of a single computer, possibly using SSH (or X or Telnet or whatever).
You might also try some other tools besides ftp -- some of the cracker tools can be tuned to blast out an amazing amount of traffic, and even ping can saturate a link if you make the packets big enough and have enough processes sending them.
My company uses Medical Manager as well. I'm not too familiar with the feature sets, but am with the operational issues.
It runs on a 'customized' C-Tree 'database'. C-Tree is probably fine as is, but their customizations don't appear to have improved performance -- quite the opposite.
We run a _really_ big shop, our database is about 13GB and growing, but running a purge of old data took well over a week (of exclusive 'no one else can access the system' type access). Their tech support is mostly clueless requiring global 777 file permissions, direct dial-in to the machine, and root access.
I suspect it would work fine for a smaller shop, but beware if you have a lot of offices to deal with. If they claim a particular machine is about double what you'd need to run their app, quadruple the performance of that machine and you'll be in good shape. Biggest problem is disk I/O -- we are seriously considering a 20GB RAM drive to improve performance -- it's that bad when it gets big.
Final note of warning about medical manager is HIPAA -- they don't do it, or at least it sounds like they are not going to upgrade the medical manager system to directly support the various HIPAA-approved transaction formats such as the '837'. Instead they offer themselves as a clearinghouse service and charge $0.50 give or take per claim to do all of the necessary HIPAA translation. In itself, this is a good way to extract more revenue from existing customers, but I would see it as a warning sign to new customers.
I used to run a small computer shop -- 30-100 PCs a month kind of place.
We used to do hand-builds, then eventually switched to getting 'mostly configured' systems we could then further customize for the customer.
_If_ you know exactly what you're doing, _and_ you have a number of good contacts with various suppliers, _and_ you get a good batch of parts with no incompatabilities -- in other words, best case scenario you will have:
A: A big pile of boxes to assemble. The days of jumpers and whatnot are mostly gone, but you still need to figure out how everything fits together, do it 10, 20, 30, whatever times in a row, and never break anything or have a DOA part. And even though there probably aren't a lot of jumpers, there are still finicky CMOS settings to set correctly and equivalently on all of the machines.
B: To then load everything. This is generally best done on one 'master' system with that disk image 'ghosted' onto the other hard drives. Sounds simple, but setting up that master image properly can take a while. Perhaps you'd have to do this with a Dell anyway. YMMV.
C: To deal with any integration problems -- hard drive fails? Call the hard drive vendor. Flaky problems? Oops, you couldn't afford a RAM tester or other diagnostic equipment, and so you play the swap-out game -- you pretty much need a complete computer on the side for this kind of troubleshooting. And a _lot_ of time on your hands.
And this is absolute best case. The crackpot idea of upgrading the mobo in place and re-using the hard drive, video, etc. is fine in principle, but in practice doesn't scale beyond the one-off home hobbyist sort of thing.
Worst case is that you buy parts for perhaps 20 systems, get about 14 built, RMA 3-4 hard drives, have some strange driver problems with the video cards, and get 2-3 variations of motherboard --- rev. 1, rev. 2, one yellow one green -- whatever, RAM seems to be flaky, but you're not sure if it's a CMOS setting or a bad MOBO or a bad RAM module, and if the latter, which one it might be. Start chewing through all of the permutations and eventually you figure it out and maybe get 18 of the original 20 built, the other two are constantly rotated with various users as their desktops crap out.
IMHO other than for home hobbyist use, getting a Dell/IBM/Compaq/Gateway/HP/insert favorite brand here/whatever computer beats the heck out of a roll-your-own system.
The discussion of failed formats (Betamax, DAT, that phillips digital tape thing that competed with minidisc, divx dvds) points out the obvious -- it's hard to get consumers to move to a new format. In fact you could say that the CD's success was really an abberation -- most formats fail.
I think this one will succeed, for a few reasons: 1: It's marginally open -- from the consumers point of view they can copy stuff around. 2: Most people can grasp the idea that they can 'fit' a certain amount on a disk, and it sounds likely that you _wouldn't_ need a PC to operate this thing as you most definitely do to feed MP3 players. 3: The record companies will now give you two options: A: The record on CD w/no extras, or B: the dataplay format with the album, a couple of other albums you might buy access to in the future (and can preview now), and VALUE ADDED CONTENT -- the dataplay format might offer the same music as the CD, but add in 20-30 minutes of video, or a game or fill-in-the-blank. So joe q consumer at musicland sees two formats, same price, one offers more content. 4: The record companies will likely start releasing the CD only 6-12 months after releasing on dataplay, if at all. 5: They're sure to have a bevvy of lawyers litigating against anyone they detect who is reverse engineering or otherwise cracking the dataplay protection. DMCA to the rescue!
And that sucks. Suppose I want to buy the led zeppelin album 'in through the out door', but the record companies only have two dataplay disks -- 1 has "dark side of the moon" as it's main album with led zeppelin II & III as extra 'buy in' albums on the same disk. The other has 'Led Zeppelin IV' as the main title, with 'houses of the holy' and 'in through the out door' as the 'buy in' albums. This means I have to buy the disk that contains that album for $16 + tax, then go to their website or call to 'unlock' the album I want for an extra $13. I can see why the record companies would be drooling at the prospect -- especially since all of the systems that have to be put in place to cover costs will probably justify them in ratcheting down artist royalties even further.
Or I could just listen to my old cds, copy them to my mp3 player (lets face it, most people have some kind of PC access -- certainly the people willing/able to plunk down $300 for a dataplay player)
1: Such info gathering would make it a lot easier for MS to know what people search for and possibly deploy their own 'Google' style search engine. -- A possible revenue stream if the whole.NET panacea doesn't work out financially.
2: Who's to say that once this 'blows over' as a privacy/security issue in the press, the process is re-incarnated as a more invasive version (e.g.: pass back LAN and local filesystem searches, flag users searching for 'warez', send passport account IDs with each transaction, etc.) Such a change could be effectively hidden in a 'security patch' with some vague legalese hidden 19 pages into the supplementary EULA to make it officially 'legal'.
I think you might just be SOL. Does RPG run on _any_ other platform besides OS/400? I know it was used by Digital way back, but I honestly can't say I've seen it on any other platform.
On the other hand, IBM may port it over one of these days. Until then you're probably stuck either: 1: Not running linux on your ISeries/AS400 2: Running linux LPAR'ed next to OS400 3: Getting real and just buying a seperate Linux box to run those Linux apps (which is, I know all too well, not always a viable choice for political or financial reasons)
Alternately you could re-develop everything using any of the variously popular programming languages available on the Unix/Linux platform: Perl, Python, C, C++, ObjectiveC, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, Prolog, Cobol, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ruby, Rebol, PHP,... Hmmm... Convert an entire library of RPG programs to a different platform and re-write in a new language, now wouldn't _that_ be a project?
Slashdot Mirror
If a TIFF file will work, then why not some kind of 'print to fax' setup?
Basic idea is:
Word: print->fax program
fax program saves as TIFF file (perhaps choosing 'fine' resolution etc.)
Same idea with a different implementation would be to print to a 'postscript' printer, then use a postscript to tiff conversion program. This could be fairly well automated with a print queue on a *nix box accepting the postscript 'print' jobs, then simply archiving the resulting tiff files off someplace handy.
I think that typical open-source projects do target a higher-level of computer geekiness and sophisticated users, however there are many projects that attempt to make things simpler.
Meanwhile "mainstream" I think is moving up the technical ladder. As users get more skilled with computers and a bit more jaded towards the crap commercial software they buy, open source systems may be the next thing they try.
In combination, I think these trends would indicate some intersection at some point in the future, but probably not 2003 or even 2004.
No, this is _way_ more expensive than the PCJr was. $10billion? Sheesh... Lot of money. I wonder how they came to that figure? Why not 9 billion, or 11 billion?
At least the PCJr wasn't doomed to begin with -- the only way to make CPU time valuable is to limit the amount available. With Moores law and economies of scale (how long till we have an 8-way 5GHz CPU system? How much longer until we have the same with 10GHz?) I find it difficult to conceive of any way to beat it, other than absolute domination.
When I had roadrunner installed (a long time ago) I just put a junk hard drive in my PC with windows 95 (they didn't support Linux).
When the tech came I let them do whatever they were going to do. When they left I checked the relevant settings and the pulled the hard drive out, and put my primary drive back in.
Sounds like you want either a reflective LCD display or one of those fancy-schmancy computer google thingies. Looks like Xybernaut (among others) offer such things for sale. Just search for wearable computers.
Granted a bunch of people wearing opaque computer goggles, possibly with computer gloves navigating their own private 3-d world might make for an odd looking group to an uninitiated visitor. Make sure to keep a few regular CRTs and schedule visits carefully.
Is there some overwhelming reason that the server portion (i.e.: the communications) couldn't be reverse-engineered to make a samba-style "bug for bug" compatible "exchange server". Once the protocol was figured out then people could continue to use outlook. Backend might then be SQL server of choice + Sendmail/qmail/whatever + a webmail product (squirrel mail?) + ... you get the point.
Ideally this mythical product would support both the proprietary exchange server protocol(s) and some open protocol that other clients could interoperate on. Then Exchange/Outlook could compete on features & function rather than being the only game in town.
Zope is an excellent web-based system, and there are many add-ons for extra features like calendars, discussion lists, etc.
Can run 'behind' apache, but it also includes it's own webserver.
From the article: "Stuff like "the Cathedral and the Bazaar." Now, I get it about being the bazaar. I'm a science fiction writer, I got no problem at all with bizarre stuff. But commercial software? Microsoft? As a cathedral? "
I thought that ESRs whole Cathedral vs. Bazaar thing was that Gnu and RMS represent the "Cathedral" (ie: carefully controlled who gets to contribute, everything falls along into RMSs grand vision, RMS as a fanatic Free-Software religion). And that Linux and "open source" represent the bazaar (ie: looser collaboration on things, some commercial interest is tolerated, it ain't pretty but it works kind of thing).
Maybe I got it all wrong though...
I have no strong feelings either way about whether 'free' software should or should not have a clickwrap style license agreement. I suppose that's up to the lawyers to sort out.
I do think that the validity of a clickwrap license is highly questionable because the user would under normal circumstances be unlikely to see it. Most people get PCs pre-configured at work or by a technician, and it's the technicians that are just clicking "OK" to the terms of the EULA, and I presume that the vast majority of technicians don't bother to read the EULA anyway.
Perhaps it could be argued from a legal perspective that the technician was acting on behalf of the real end-user/purchaser, but legalisms aside, it doesn't make much sense.
I've been using gvim for at least 5 years on windows (NT, 2k, XP) and never had _one_ crash.
If you don't like the *vi type editors, Xemacs or Gnu emacs work flawlessly on win32 as well. Xemacs is a lot easier to set up (e.g.: getting the Java development environment JDE working), but perhaps you want to use Gnu emacs for political reasons...
If you want something more windows-centric NOTEPAD.EXE has always been pretty reliable, if a bit slow on large files.
I have to review tech resumes all the time. Automatic filters: years of experience and college degree. I will look at people w/out a degree but with exerpience, but there are some massive hurdles there:
1: The process of getting a 4-year degree gives an employer some level of comfort, since it is likely that the candidate had substantial writing, communication, and intellectual experience. I don't give a rip if the degree is in philosophy or physics (or even CS).
2: A candidate w/out a college degree might be OK, but might not. The experience quoted is viewed with biased eyes -- "what kind of work would a company give someone without a college degree?".
If I were you I would immediately start working on getting a bachelors degree - BA, BS, whatever, in _anything_. Experience is great, but unless your're some kind of celebrity (e.g.: well-known linux programmer), or have _great_ networking, you're just going to miss out on a _lot_ of potential interviews, not to mention jobs. Pay differential once you change jobs will be substantial as well.
The OpenBSD site has some pretty cool t-shirts.
First, to everyone who thinks that having a switched network adds much of anything in the way of anti-sniffing security, you should probably look at tools like ettercap or dsniff _now_.
Since an encrypted channel between the printer and the workstation (most likely a windows client, possibly a *nix client) would have to be supported by both the printer and the client, you've got an ugly situation -- both the client and server need to support the encryption/authentication/etc. protocol.
This would be fine if you were just about to discard all of your printers and start fresh again, were able to find suitable products, and the products offered acceptable encryption. Given that this situation is rather unlikely, here's another approach:
Get a 'firewall' style box that supports vpns. Make sure that vpn 'clients' are available for all of your workstation platforms. Put all of the printers behind this vpn-device, on their own private network, including the server that 'shares' the printers.
When the user prints the print driver connects to the different network, through a vpn tunnel. The strength of the encryption on the vpn can be tuned independently of any other aspect of the system.
This leaves the rather obvious hole that someone could disconnect an ethernet cable from the printer, put in a small hub, and then sniff from there. Maybe you bolt the printers into a 'security box' that prevents access to the network connection, and do something similar to the wall jack. At some point you have to give up on paranoia and just monitor things.
If you can define a snort rule that would pick up some tell-tale of a yahoo IM message, you could then have an 'active response' that would send a tcp reset to each end of the connection spoofed to be from the remote end. This is also effective for blocking gnutella traffic.
Eventually people will give up trying to use yahoo's messenger and switch to something more subversive. when will an icmp-echo reply based IM service get started? That's what the world _really_ needs.
As a developer I've found that most management-types don't give a hoot about technical details, or much of anything else that a heads-down developer might care about.
What will get attention is an understanding of business need, an attention to detail in terms of reporting progress and delivering systems that work, and positive attitude.
As a manager I get very tired of hearing about the programmers, sysadmins, etc. complaining that such-and-such can't be done, or otherwise blocking progress. Much more often than not things that "can't be done" just require a re-statement of the problem and some creative application of simple ideas.
My recommendation would be to make a friend or at least the aquaintance of one of the project manager's bosses, and just talk. Don't attack the current project managers style -- that would make their boss look bad. Don't complain about the impossibility of whatever. Mention that you have an idea of how to accomplish some objective. Show that you have some clue as to what the managers are interested in. Show that you have some interest in the companies performance. Be prepared to give out some 'write ups' that show a very clear train of thought and that make a clear recommendation up front, with backup material and dialogue exploring alternatives explaining why the recommendation makes sense.
If that doesn't work, then get a job with a company that has a clue. They're out there.
The new MS Business plan:
1: GPL Everything.
2: Cease all development activity (--> R&D budget == 0)
3: Lay off all lawyers
4: Divvy up the $40 billion in cash thushly:
a: Pay off all debt and legal claims.
b: 30% of remainder to MS Investors
c: 30% to charity
d: 30% to FSF. Lets face it, they put the Gnu in Gnu/Linux!
e: 10% to executive level for being nice guys.
5: Any employees left could provide commercial support contracts for formerly Microsoft products.
6: A FSF-style "Microsoft Software Foundation" funded by corporate charity etc. should be founded to foster continued development on Microsoft products and technologies.
You could be subversive about the whole thing, e.g.: Get the new site developed in PHP on Linux. Then it makes sense to run it in production on the same platform.
You could play the security card, but it is really a double-edged sword as both Linux and Solaris get a _lot_ of security advisories. The fact that *most* of the time these are fairly minor, or that a distribution with umpteen thousand 3rd party packages such as redhat is bound to have problems and that might be OK is difficult for many to understand. Quite frankly solaris out of the box takes a 'rape me, please' stance on security, although it can be locked down pretty well. Same goes for windows though.
If you're forced to run Windows, it's not the end of the world. You can still run Apache, and you can get the Cygwin distribution to give you all of your nifty *nix commands. Not nearly as clean, nice, etc. as a 'real' unix, but a lot better than vanilla windows.
You might also look at any of the multitude of web server appliances, that just happen to run Linux. E.G.: the cobalt RAQ (currently marketed by SUN). Typically they are managed through a browser, and if your boss isn't too happy about a command-line driven system, perhaps he would be happier with a purpose-made appliance.
Ultimately, *what* you end up running matters a lot less than execution. A well executed Windows system will beat the pants off of a poorly executed *nix system, and vice-versa. Especially vice-versa.
I recently stayed at both Swissotel in Boston and Sutton Place in Toronto. Both offered a web-tv style internet service for about $10 per day.
Although I'm sure this is probably fine for some people, most slashdot-types would probably get irritated pretty fast with this kind of connection. So if you ask the hotel about what kind of internet access they have, and they say "yes we have high speed internet access in every room", they might mean this webtv crap. They might also mean there is a data port on the phone in the room. woo hoo.
If any hotel-types are reading this: Personally I'd much rather have 802.11 and/or an ethernet jack in the wall.
How about a second box? Hardware capable of saturating a 10MB ethernet connection should be really cheap, and even saturating a 100MB connection isn't hard.
Get two interfaces on each, one interface to an internal 'management' network, the other interface to the equipment you're testing. That way you can operate both boxes out of a single computer, possibly using SSH (or X or Telnet or whatever).
You might also try some other tools besides ftp -- some of the cracker tools can be tuned to blast out an amazing amount of traffic, and even ping can saturate a link if you make the packets big enough and have enough processes sending them.
I dunno. Just a thought.
My company uses Medical Manager as well. I'm not too familiar with the feature sets, but am with the operational issues.
It runs on a 'customized' C-Tree 'database'. C-Tree is probably fine as is, but their customizations don't appear to have improved performance -- quite the opposite.
We run a _really_ big shop, our database is about 13GB and growing, but running a purge of old data took well over a week (of exclusive 'no one else can access the system' type access). Their tech support is mostly clueless requiring global 777 file permissions, direct dial-in to the machine, and root access.
I suspect it would work fine for a smaller shop, but beware if you have a lot of offices to deal with. If they claim a particular machine is about double what you'd need to run their app, quadruple the performance of that machine and you'll be in good shape. Biggest problem is disk I/O -- we are seriously considering a 20GB RAM drive to improve performance -- it's that bad when it gets big.
Final note of warning about medical manager is HIPAA -- they don't do it, or at least it sounds like they are not going to upgrade the medical manager system to directly support the various HIPAA-approved transaction formats such as the '837'. Instead they offer themselves as a clearinghouse service and charge $0.50 give or take per claim to do all of the necessary HIPAA translation. In itself, this is a good way to extract more revenue from existing customers, but I would see it as a warning sign to new customers.
Good luck.
I used to run a small computer shop -- 30-100 PCs a month kind of place.
We used to do hand-builds, then eventually switched to getting 'mostly configured' systems we could then further customize for the customer.
_If_ you know exactly what you're doing, _and_ you have a number of good contacts with various suppliers, _and_ you get a good batch of parts with no incompatabilities -- in other words, best case scenario you will have:
A: A big pile of boxes to assemble. The days of jumpers and whatnot are mostly gone, but you still need to figure out how everything fits together, do it 10, 20, 30, whatever times in a row, and never break anything or have a DOA part. And even though there probably aren't a lot of jumpers, there are still finicky CMOS settings to set correctly and equivalently on all of the machines.
B: To then load everything. This is generally best done on one 'master' system with that disk image 'ghosted' onto the other hard drives. Sounds simple, but setting up that master image properly can take a while. Perhaps you'd have to do this with a Dell anyway. YMMV.
C: To deal with any integration problems -- hard drive fails? Call the hard drive vendor. Flaky problems? Oops, you couldn't afford a RAM tester or other diagnostic equipment, and so you play the swap-out game -- you pretty much need a complete computer on the side for this kind of troubleshooting. And a _lot_ of time on your hands.
And this is absolute best case. The crackpot idea of upgrading the mobo in place and re-using the hard drive, video, etc. is fine in principle, but in practice doesn't scale beyond the one-off home hobbyist sort of thing.
Worst case is that you buy parts for perhaps 20 systems, get about 14 built, RMA 3-4 hard drives, have some strange driver problems with the video cards, and get 2-3 variations of motherboard --- rev. 1, rev. 2, one yellow one green -- whatever, RAM seems to be flaky, but you're not sure if it's a CMOS setting or a bad MOBO or a bad RAM module, and if the latter, which one it might be. Start chewing through all of the permutations and eventually you figure it out and maybe get 18 of the original 20 built, the other two are constantly rotated with various users as their desktops crap out.
IMHO other than for home hobbyist use, getting a Dell/IBM/Compaq/Gateway/HP/insert favorite brand here/whatever computer beats the heck out of a roll-your-own system.
The discussion of failed formats (Betamax, DAT, that phillips digital tape thing that competed with minidisc, divx dvds) points out the obvious -- it's hard to get consumers to move to a new format. In fact you could say that the CD's success was really an abberation -- most formats fail.
I think this one will succeed, for a few reasons:
1: It's marginally open -- from the consumers point of view they can copy stuff around.
2: Most people can grasp the idea that they can 'fit' a certain amount on a disk, and it sounds likely that you _wouldn't_ need a PC to operate this thing as you most definitely do to feed MP3 players.
3: The record companies will now give you two options: A: The record on CD w/no extras, or B: the dataplay format with the album, a couple of other albums you might buy access to in the future (and can preview now), and VALUE ADDED CONTENT -- the dataplay format might offer the same music as the CD, but add in 20-30 minutes of video, or a game or fill-in-the-blank. So joe q consumer at musicland sees two formats, same price, one offers more content.
4: The record companies will likely start releasing the CD only 6-12 months after releasing on dataplay, if at all.
5: They're sure to have a bevvy of lawyers litigating against anyone they detect who is reverse engineering or otherwise cracking the dataplay protection. DMCA to the rescue!
And that sucks. Suppose I want to buy the led zeppelin album 'in through the out door', but the record companies only have two dataplay disks -- 1 has "dark side of the moon" as it's main album with led zeppelin II & III as extra 'buy in' albums on the same disk. The other has 'Led Zeppelin IV' as the main title, with 'houses of the holy' and 'in through the out door' as the 'buy in' albums. This means I have to buy the disk that contains that album for $16 + tax, then go to their website or call to 'unlock' the album I want for an extra $13. I can see why the record companies would be drooling at the prospect -- especially since all of the systems that have to be put in place to cover costs will probably justify them in ratcheting down artist royalties even further.
Or I could just listen to my old cds, copy them to my mp3 player (lets face it, most people have some kind of PC access -- certainly the people willing/able to plunk down $300 for a dataplay player)
1: Such info gathering would make it a lot easier for MS to know what people search for and possibly deploy their own 'Google' style search engine. -- A possible revenue stream if the whole .NET panacea doesn't work out financially.
2: Who's to say that once this 'blows over' as a privacy/security issue in the press, the process is re-incarnated as a more invasive version (e.g.: pass back LAN and local filesystem searches, flag users searching for 'warez', send passport account IDs with each transaction, etc.) Such a change could be effectively hidden in a 'security patch' with some vague legalese hidden 19 pages into the supplementary EULA to make it officially 'legal'.
Just my $.02
This smells like an april fools so bad I think one of those nozzles should hose this story down where the sun don't shine.
:)
I think you might just be SOL. Does RPG run on _any_ other platform besides OS/400? I know it was used by Digital way back, but I honestly can't say I've seen it on any other platform.
... Hmmm... Convert an entire library of RPG programs to a different platform and re-write in a new language, now wouldn't _that_ be a project?
On the other hand, IBM may port it over one of these days. Until then you're probably stuck either:
1: Not running linux on your ISeries/AS400
2: Running linux LPAR'ed next to OS400
3: Getting real and just buying a seperate Linux box to run those Linux apps (which is, I know all too well, not always a viable choice for political or financial reasons)
Alternately you could re-develop everything using any of the variously popular programming languages available on the Unix/Linux platform: Perl, Python, C, C++, ObjectiveC, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, Prolog, Cobol, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ruby, Rebol, PHP,