I was thinking the intel710 would be more from that era as I bought a brand new centrino 6 years ago with a gma950 and it was powerful enough to run Wow. But you are right. After 10 years school districts or businesses that still use them to support IE 6 end up seeing costs skyrocket! But the cost accountants do not see this. Only money saved by not upgraded etc. Thankfully many who do not see this are being arm twisted to upgrade to run Windows 7.
I favor the Asus EEE or Dell 9 netbooks with Ubuntu pre-installed instead. They are cheaper to support at $199 and you know they will run Linux and the version Dell includes has codecs and its own repository where drivers are tested. This means Johnny who created an imovie with the sole iMac in the classroom can view it with the quicktime codec on the netbook and the 50 year old teacher who is computer illiterate can use them and go. No tweaking or having the teacher go hunt down codecs on mediubuntu.
Of course teachers and staff could test older equipment for free donated to see if it runs Ubuntu and everything still works on them?
I worked in 3 school districts in the last 6 years. One was all Windows, the other two use Macs. Apple still has large influences as MS realizes schools never update and are cheap and cash budgeted. Corps are an easier sell in comparison.
But one thing working for Microsoft right now you do not see is they support their operating systems for 10 years! Apple used to do that but has stopped angering tax payers and many who do budgeting for the districts. The fact a 10 year old computer still runs on XP saves tax payer money and is a plus.
Can Linux run with a gui on a 10 year old PC? I never tried on anything that old and wonder if the old xfree86 drivers work in a modern XORG? Maybe someone more knowledgable can answer that?
To me a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. Students only need to know how to enter a formula using basic algebra and how to graph things, use margins in a word processor etc. LibraOffice does this fine. Ubuntu is nice too on netbook as they cheap and small and students can borrow them to type writting assignments.
So does Apple. Apple still has a HUGE lock today but with them getting greedy and not supporting a mac more than 3 years old that might change sadly.
Anchorage school district is finally retiring its 2004 emacs and just updated city wide last year and the year before to new imacs. They also use Ubuntu netbooks for creative writting classes and other uses as you can't fit 30 macs in one classroom as easily.
True they keep Windows or MacOSX on their laptops, but Anchorage School district and a few others buys dell 9 mini netbooks and uses a cart to store them and charge that can hold 30 at a time.
They love it because they are $199 with Ubuntu and when students are done they just put them back in. It is great as teachers may have a few computers in the classroom but rarely enough for everyone.
My posts get modded down as I am cynical for linux for users still at this point due to the lack of codecs that come with it and a stable abi where an update in my experience can kill a platform. However, Dell's branded distro of Ubuntu only uses its own repositories so nothing bad will happen in an update and the price comes with the codecs like h.264, mp3, and quicktime. All the teacher has to do is plug it in and they come with OpenOffice to boot!
A netbook might be better than older computers and cheaper because someone has to test each one to see if its compatible iwth all the hardware and if things still work on it etc. $199 for an Asus netbook or Dell with Ubuntu is perfect and something a school can look into.
In such a situation your value of gold will be worth less. Infact no one will give a damn as you wont be able to buy anything with it as there is no currency to back it with. Your shiny rocks wont be worth it to land sellers or your own soldiers as they can't use it to buy anything.
Deflation makes perfect sense right now and is an economic cure for our problems.
When you spend money you do not have in debt inflation spikes. With inflation basically you delay paying for instant gratification and have the hangover later. To fix the collapse deflation does the opposite.
Deflation you delay gratification and have long term wealth and buying power. That smells like investing to me and how people get rich. You see if you owe debt you pay it off today but long term it is required to be normal again which is where Europe, US, and soon to be China are right now. Deflation is sustainable while inflation is not.
The bright side too is deflation builds banks assets and encourages investment! Reason why is as people save the money does not just sit in a fault in a bank somewhere. Banks lend it out to job creators (real ones and not republican millionaires) like startups, businesses, etc. Also as people feel richer and rich as they see their savings grow the desire to consume increases which helps the economy grow. Peter Schiff talks about this and the reason he encourages people to buy gold for this reason. Guess what? Our money will stop being frozen in gold and will move back into the economy again as your money will grow and gold will lose its value in a deflationairy economy.
We need deflation and I think we should go that route as nothing else has worked.
This has been discussed before. At the current rate it would take you a month even with that butterfly labs platform for a single bitcoin according to another slashdotter. What are the electricity costs?
Newer GPUs are out since then so maybe you can mine 3 a month. Ok, will that pay for the rig and the electricity.
All you are trading is a series of 1s and 0s in a correct pattern. It is not worth anyone. But hey some other smuch might just pay
There are no such things at bitcoins. All a coin is, is a serious of 1010s in a particular order. So a computer randomly generating 1010s in a program called a mining app to find a correct pattern and whola it is real and physical like real money!
In essence they do not exist and are not tangible. The whole thing is a fraud. How can you steal it?
Maybe 10 times, and only if the tape is sitting in a air conditioned room, not being used.
Taking a DLT and doing random access stuff will destroy the tape in a matter of weeks.
Yeah no kidding. Earth's own magnetic field will erase a tape within a few years on its own let alone EM from the electrical wiring. A hard disk platter at least shields that.
And of course you can always manually create a new torrent file or movie by pricking in a couple of thousand punch cards.
For that you need to look into outsourcing to Zaire. Tell them the cards store certain secrets and codes for getting Wow Gold and he can help share it if they recruit others to help and willing to work fast enough with the fork lifts and readers to resemble and upload the bits back to the media server at home.
I disagree. Sure you can use tape but the new stuff with speciality raid flash card storage controllers and SANs are immensly popular! I so someone demo it at a network users group and he could store over a terabyte of data backed up within 23 seconds from 2 different restore servers. It was so sweet and fucking fast and easy. Tape is on the way out.
When it costs a few million an hour of lost productivity for a server shutdown it is not acceptable to backup a system from tape. The costs saved could pay for the system itself.
My guess is its a young 22 year old IT guy who thinks it is cool but has not used a VCR since he was 5 and never seen a tape drive before unlike us older folks. When you read specs like 110 megs a second it gives a false impression it is just as fast.
There are kids today who do not remember the pains of fast forwarding a song on tape for 9 fucking minutes to hear that one good song while the rest of the album is crap. That was so awesome about cds. It was not the sound quality but the fact I could skip tracks.
Have you considered punch cards? You can get a vintange IBM 370 for only a few hundred thousand and a warehouse to store all the punch cards for just several million. Put it in China and you can have a few servants ravage up with forklifts and storage boxes with the cards and scramble to put them in the reader and upload it back to your home media server.
I mean who cares about using a cheap $200 external usb drive like everyone else pretending we somehow live in the 21st century... pfft
Humans are complex and most of use are not psychopaths. So the only way he can live with himself for being a truly rotten person whose purpose is to crush dreams of innovators and start-ups with extortion!
So he lies to himself so he can get up every morning and he tells himself for the greater good and then goes on even boosts his ego about how generous he is! Incredible!
What he doesn't see or chooses not too is that businesses and innovators help the world as much if not more than Bill Gates Foundation, feed the homeless, or any other noble organization. They create jobs, pay taxes, give products to people, use other companies that do the same etc.
Extortion just takes away and creates artificial barriers. WIthout work and innovators trying to get rich we would all be very poor and live in 3rd world conditions. This is economics 101 folks
Not to sound assholish but I would only target a particular version of IE on purpose if I owned such an intranet company. I then could charge you over and over again after each browser update.
It sucks but intranet software companies are there to make money and it is unrealistic to have them support browsers that change every 6 weeks. Firefox blew it at 4.0.
Original point is IE 6 as an example was not a bad browser 10 years ago and when no one sets standards we have others fill in. Today Chrome css -webkit extensions are turning into the next IE 6. They are not compatible with Mozilla's nor Microsofts but Chrome is cool so its ok. 10 years from now we are going to be in another clusterfuck as it will take the same man hours removing old webkit css 3 extensions that will break as Google eventuals becomes complaint with the ever slow W3C.
We have not learned our lesson from that sadly, because we just hate one company and one browser today.
I watch Restaurant Impossible on the foodnetwork and the first mistake any struggling restaurant makes is not knowing costs, revenue, and profit per item. The second is poor food quality.
A POS system with a restaurant add-on will keep track of EVERYTHING. It does so automatically as long as you put the costs in your waitress will print the bill and all this information is updated automatically. Free software? Come on you have a business to run and need to know numbers.
Customers are paying you for a service. Not for you to play with FOSS and the better you know what you are doing right and where you are messing up and spending too much time the better your company performs. If you have extra time I would highly recommend a finance and accounting class 101. You will learn a ton and your accountant would appreciate it. You can have the most awesome food in the world yet go broke otherwise! It does happen as many restaurants spend half their time in catering and not know the costs lose money every month thinking they are getting rich from the revenues of it, yet not knowing the profits. If you do not know the difference between a revenue and a profit then another reason to use quickbooks to handle it though your cash registers and take a finance 101.
Whats your time worth to you? Customers are not paying you to play with software. THey are paying you to get a job done. You need to be a dick to yourself if you want to successful as customers only care about what you can do and nothing else. If Quickbooks works pay for it. Use a spreadsheet in LibreOffice if it is small and just need to keep track of a few assets and expenses.
Remember you are not being paid to be an idealist. You are paid to produce. If you want to spend extra time with a FOSS go for it. To me quickbooks is a great product for a small company as it means you work a ton of hours as it is right now. If you can come home at a reasonable hour then its worth it.
As others pointed you have no idea how the other solutions will work when you have a deadline to pay those bills. Quickbooks has support.
Shit man you had that ancient XP box for a long time. I do not think that is going to be a problem with Windows 7 as many will refuse to upgrade or simply their machines are powerful enough so why spend the money and upgrade?
Ballmer will hopefully be fired if this fails. Windows is the bread and butter of Microsoft a much lower price plus people not buying will have a catastrophic effect on revenue come next year.... or maybe higher as people will be buying Windows 7 for their new WIndows 8 machines:-)
I have used it and I am typing on an old laptop with WIndows 8 right now. Yeah, in firefox opened in the desktop it is very similiar to Windows 7, but it stops there FAST.
Here are my gripes 1. Instant search/start crippled: I put up with Vista because of instant search. It is so awesome to type anything and enter in 1/3 of a second and it even scans the contents of documents to do so. - Because it is now full screen I can not have a document opened and quickly hit the WIndows key to type something I am reading to see if I have a document on that particular topic. Accountants use this feature A TON. When you have a spreadsheet with 100 cost centers and want to know more detail the last thing you want is to have the full screen start hide that spreadsheet when you do a search for another one outlining why costs went up?
- It is less keyboard friendly and some items are not listed or needs mouse interaction to select slowing down my speed by HUGE margins! Example, restart and Windows Update. In Wndows 7 I just hit the Win key rest -> enter done! Windows 8 is shows no results and below are 3 rows applications, utilities, and settings (I think). So I hit Win key upd... oops now I need to use the mouse to select settings -> then select restart. Fail
2. Desktop is crippled. - Not really as desktop. Just a cute background and a app bar with 1 icon for IE and one for Windows explorer. You need to back to METRO to select a real app in that annoying non friendly search kind of way. The Desktop is just an app and not an environment. Control panel and everything is removed from there
3. Metro apps are full screen only. This is a problem as people typically cut and paste or do things like write an email about a website or something. Can't do that in Metro delegating this to the desktop. Whoops desktop is crippled.
Metro is not a bad idea. Just very poorly implemented as MS wants you to purchase Windows 9 to fix it. Sadly they never learned from Vista as users just kept using XP instead. If I were in charge I would put the task bar in Metro and put in the ability to have tabs and turn applets into Windows if the screen is big enough. I would have translucent effects of aero still in and make instant search not full screen and maybe include graphical thumbnails next to the names of the programs and files. Make it look cool yet still functional on the desktop.
That's only valid if it's a completely open standard. It needs to be completely open right from the beginning, otherwise it's meaningless... promises won't cut it. Is FaceTime an open standard as promised?
Exactly! Which was the point of not letting make the best man win approach as it leads to problems 11 years later with poor saps supporting their pages still to that old standard that really was not a standard.
IE 6 really was ahead of Netscape for many years. Mozilla had the same bugs netscape had and it took awhile before Firefox was ready and even firefox failed the acid tests too until about 2.0 if I recall right. That leaves 6 years for IE 6 that mucked up everything.
Today we can't implement all the html 5 features on www.html5test.com. Not because of supporting ancient versions of IE but because css 3 has 3 different versions that are incompatible with each other just like IE 6 was in its day. Some tags are identical, others take hexidecimal for color arguments, others take 0-255 srgb for the same ones. There is no standard in html 5 and css 3 besides a few basics. W3C needs to speed up or feature freeze its set and move the newer stuff for html 5 and css 3 and turn them into html 5.1 and css 3.1 standards and then 5.2 and css 3.2 and so on. Too many proposals from everyone and it is not just MS. Apple/Chrome from webkit is making alot of different implementations from everyone else.
Here is an example of a Chrome only website? Notice it is fully HTML 5 compliant but the implementation is not standardized yet so the css 3 all have similar functionalities so they get a checkmark at www.html5test.com, but in reality it might as well be IE 6 all over again. That html 5 and css 3 is not w3c standardized.
Webkite css 3 is different than Microsofts which is also different from Gecko's. Until the W3C starts leading and defining standards I do not think it is evil of MS this time around because there is no guidelines at all and no draft proposal. Just mailing lists of "wouldn't it be great if we had X!"
If I had my way I would make them do a final proposal and go into a recommendation quickly by freezing other things being discussed and make them html 5.1 and css 3.1. The sooner we have standards the sooner things will work together again.
Why not go with the best overall standard regardless of who introduced it and whether or not it was the first. Now this doesn't mean I'm for or against either standard, it just seems that the assumption is that it should be ignored because it wasn't first and because Microsoft introduced it.
We did that. The answer was IE 6. Remember those days?
It is hated now especially on Slashdot but at the time it had the best box model, best implementation of javascript, and of course specific css sheets with proprietary values were the best of the best 10 years ago. When the world and the W3C decided to do things differently we ended up with a world wide web that was optimized for just that one browser at that one version, where we got an error message saying Netscape isn't supported... even though we used Firefox?!
I saw an interview with Bill Joy where he mentioned he didn't have the luxuries of MIT with fiber connections that would allow him to use an emacs like editor. Vi was designed so he in his house he rented in Berkeley could use a phone line and 300 baud modem with a teletype edit files from the pdp-11 mincomputer in his basement room he was renting out?
Still I like the shortcuts and think its cool but vi became a visual editor to ed under extreme bandwidth limitations of the time frame. Still I am impressed it integrated with visual studio and I could run those things in a non unix environment I like to think ides can provide a lot more today. Textmate I heard of but I can not afford a mac and wonder if a win64 or linux version will come about?
Still a young 22 year old CS student should not need to learn these things today but I thought it was cool a decade ago.
The flash exploit I believe. My ex had terrible securith with her gaming Vista laptop. I was more ignorant back then too with security issues as I have not worked in a pc shop yet and seen the machines coming in and the steps people took. I thought AV software was a waste too as I do not visit bad sites on this machines etc. I was quite stupid.
Nowdays I am so paranoid I tend to avoid firefox because it has no sandboxing, use flash that updates automatically, use Chrome which does it for me and has double sandboxing, am very serious with a good AV package and also run Malware bytes.
My kids run ancient java still probably on the old desktop out of my control to run minecraft and I shudder. I thought it was safe back then too in 2009/10. GOD. Windows 7 thankfully is much more secure as well as the steps I now take.
But still mac users back then were getting hacked and the ones who had access to the guild vault were always hacked. hmmm.... sorry something is up with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking the intel710 would be more from that era as I bought a brand new centrino 6 years ago with a gma950 and it was powerful enough to run Wow. But you are right. After 10 years school districts or businesses that still use them to support IE 6 end up seeing costs skyrocket! But the cost accountants do not see this. Only money saved by not upgraded etc. Thankfully many who do not see this are being arm twisted to upgrade to run Windows 7.
I favor the Asus EEE or Dell 9 netbooks with Ubuntu pre-installed instead. They are cheaper to support at $199 and you know they will run Linux and the version Dell includes has codecs and its own repository where drivers are tested. This means Johnny who created an imovie with the sole iMac in the classroom can view it with the quicktime codec on the netbook and the 50 year old teacher who is computer illiterate can use them and go. No tweaking or having the teacher go hunt down codecs on mediubuntu.
Of course teachers and staff could test older equipment for free donated to see if it runs Ubuntu and everything still works on them?
I worked in 3 school districts in the last 6 years. One was all Windows, the other two use Macs. Apple still has large influences as MS realizes schools never update and are cheap and cash budgeted. Corps are an easier sell in comparison.
But one thing working for Microsoft right now you do not see is they support their operating systems for 10 years! Apple used to do that but has stopped angering tax payers and many who do budgeting for the districts. The fact a 10 year old computer still runs on XP saves tax payer money and is a plus.
Can Linux run with a gui on a 10 year old PC? I never tried on anything that old and wonder if the old xfree86 drivers work in a modern XORG? Maybe someone more knowledgable can answer that?
To me a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. Students only need to know how to enter a formula using basic algebra and how to graph things, use margins in a word processor etc. LibraOffice does this fine. Ubuntu is nice too on netbook as they cheap and small and students can borrow them to type writting assignments.
So does Apple. Apple still has a HUGE lock today but with them getting greedy and not supporting a mac more than 3 years old that might change sadly.
Anchorage school district is finally retiring its 2004 emacs and just updated city wide last year and the year before to new imacs. They also use Ubuntu netbooks for creative writting classes and other uses as you can't fit 30 macs in one classroom as easily.
True they keep Windows or MacOSX on their laptops, but Anchorage School district and a few others buys dell 9 mini netbooks and uses a cart to store them and charge that can hold 30 at a time.
They love it because they are $199 with Ubuntu and when students are done they just put them back in. It is great as teachers may have a few computers in the classroom but rarely enough for everyone.
My posts get modded down as I am cynical for linux for users still at this point due to the lack of codecs that come with it and a stable abi where an update in my experience can kill a platform. However, Dell's branded distro of Ubuntu only uses its own repositories so nothing bad will happen in an update and the price comes with the codecs like h.264, mp3, and quicktime. All the teacher has to do is plug it in and they come with OpenOffice to boot!
A netbook might be better than older computers and cheaper because someone has to test each one to see if its compatible iwth all the hardware and if things still work on it etc. $199 for an Asus netbook or Dell with Ubuntu is perfect and something a school can look into.
In such a situation your value of gold will be worth less. Infact no one will give a damn as you wont be able to buy anything with it as there is no currency to back it with. Your shiny rocks wont be worth it to land sellers or your own soldiers as they can't use it to buy anything.
Deflation makes perfect sense right now and is an economic cure for our problems.
When you spend money you do not have in debt inflation spikes. With inflation basically you delay paying for instant gratification and have the hangover later. To fix the collapse deflation does the opposite.
Deflation you delay gratification and have long term wealth and buying power. That smells like investing to me and how people get rich. You see if you owe debt you pay it off today but long term it is required to be normal again which is where Europe, US, and soon to be China are right now. Deflation is sustainable while inflation is not.
The bright side too is deflation builds banks assets and encourages investment! Reason why is as people save the money does not just sit in a fault in a bank somewhere. Banks lend it out to job creators (real ones and not republican millionaires) like startups, businesses, etc. Also as people feel richer and rich as they see their savings grow the desire to consume increases which helps the economy grow. Peter Schiff talks about this and the reason he encourages people to buy gold for this reason. Guess what? Our money will stop being frozen in gold and will move back into the economy again as your money will grow and gold will lose its value in a deflationairy economy.
We need deflation and I think we should go that route as nothing else has worked.
This has been discussed before. At the current rate it would take you a month even with that butterfly labs platform for a single bitcoin according to another slashdotter. What are the electricity costs?
Newer GPUs are out since then so maybe you can mine 3 a month. Ok, will that pay for the rig and the electricity.
All you are trading is a series of 1s and 0s in a correct pattern. It is not worth anyone. But hey some other smuch might just pay
There are no such things at bitcoins. All a coin is, is a serious of 1010s in a particular order. So a computer randomly generating 1010s in a program called a mining app to find a correct pattern and whola it is real and physical like real money!
In essence they do not exist and are not tangible. The whole thing is a fraud. How can you steal it?
80 times the longevity? No. Really no.
Maybe 10 times, and only if the tape is sitting in a air conditioned room, not being used.
Taking a DLT and doing random access stuff will destroy the tape in a matter of weeks.
Yeah no kidding. Earth's own magnetic field will erase a tape within a few years on its own let alone EM from the electrical wiring. A hard disk platter at least shields that.
And of course you can always manually create a new torrent file or movie by pricking in a couple of thousand punch cards.
For that you need to look into outsourcing to Zaire. Tell them the cards store certain secrets and codes for getting Wow Gold and he can help share it if they recruit others to help and willing to work fast enough with the fork lifts and readers to resemble and upload the bits back to the media server at home.
I disagree. Sure you can use tape but the new stuff with speciality raid flash card storage controllers and SANs are immensly popular! I so someone demo it at a network users group and he could store over a terabyte of data backed up within 23 seconds from 2 different restore servers. It was so sweet and fucking fast and easy. Tape is on the way out.
When it costs a few million an hour of lost productivity for a server shutdown it is not acceptable to backup a system from tape. The costs saved could pay for the system itself.
My guess is its a young 22 year old IT guy who thinks it is cool but has not used a VCR since he was 5 and never seen a tape drive before unlike us older folks. When you read specs like 110 megs a second it gives a false impression it is just as fast.
There are kids today who do not remember the pains of fast forwarding a song on tape for 9 fucking minutes to hear that one good song while the rest of the album is crap. That was so awesome about cds. It was not the sound quality but the fact I could skip tracks.
Anyway it is just ignorance I am sure.
Have you considered punch cards? You can get a vintange IBM 370 for only a few hundred thousand and a warehouse to store all the punch cards for just several million. Put it in China and you can have a few servants ravage up with forklifts and storage boxes with the cards and scramble to put them in the reader and upload it back to your home media server.
I mean who cares about using a cheap $200 external usb drive like everyone else pretending we somehow live in the 21st century ... pfft
Is that cognitive dissonance I smell?
Humans are complex and most of use are not psychopaths. So the only way he can live with himself for being a truly rotten person whose purpose is to crush dreams of innovators and start-ups with extortion!
So he lies to himself so he can get up every morning and he tells himself for the greater good and then goes on even boosts his ego about how generous he is! Incredible!
What he doesn't see or chooses not too is that businesses and innovators help the world as much if not more than Bill Gates Foundation, feed the homeless, or any other noble organization. They create jobs, pay taxes, give products to people, use other companies that do the same etc.
Extortion just takes away and creates artificial barriers. WIthout work and innovators trying to get rich we would all be very poor and live in 3rd world conditions. This is economics 101 folks
Not to sound assholish but I would only target a particular version of IE on purpose if I owned such an intranet company. I then could charge you over and over again after each browser update.
It sucks but intranet software companies are there to make money and it is unrealistic to have them support browsers that change every 6 weeks. Firefox blew it at 4.0.
Original point is IE 6 as an example was not a bad browser 10 years ago and when no one sets standards we have others fill in. Today Chrome css -webkit extensions are turning into the next IE 6. They are not compatible with Mozilla's nor Microsofts but Chrome is cool so its ok. 10 years from now we are going to be in another clusterfuck as it will take the same man hours removing old webkit css 3 extensions that will break as Google eventuals becomes complaint with the ever slow W3C.
We have not learned our lesson from that sadly, because we just hate one company and one browser today.
Disregard. I read the post in more detail and a restaurant has specific needs
Get quickbooks POS edition.
I watch Restaurant Impossible on the foodnetwork and the first mistake any struggling restaurant makes is not knowing costs, revenue, and profit per item. The second is poor food quality.
A POS system with a restaurant add-on will keep track of EVERYTHING. It does so automatically as long as you put the costs in your waitress will print the bill and all this information is updated automatically. Free software? Come on you have a business to run and need to know numbers.
Customers are paying you for a service. Not for you to play with FOSS and the better you know what you are doing right and where you are messing up and spending too much time the better your company performs. If you have extra time I would highly recommend a finance and accounting class 101. You will learn a ton and your accountant would appreciate it. You can have the most awesome food in the world yet go broke otherwise! It does happen as many restaurants spend half their time in catering and not know the costs lose money every month thinking they are getting rich from the revenues of it, yet not knowing the profits. If you do not know the difference between a revenue and a profit then another reason to use quickbooks to handle it though your cash registers and take a finance 101.
Whats your time worth to you? Customers are not paying you to play with software. THey are paying you to get a job done. You need to be a dick to yourself if you want to successful as customers only care about what you can do and nothing else. If Quickbooks works pay for it. Use a spreadsheet in LibreOffice if it is small and just need to keep track of a few assets and expenses.
Remember you are not being paid to be an idealist. You are paid to produce. If you want to spend extra time with a FOSS go for it. To me quickbooks is a great product for a small company as it means you work a ton of hours as it is right now. If you can come home at a reasonable hour then its worth it.
As others pointed you have no idea how the other solutions will work when you have a deadline to pay those bills. Quickbooks has support.
Shit man you had that ancient XP box for a long time. I do not think that is going to be a problem with Windows 7 as many will refuse to upgrade or simply their machines are powerful enough so why spend the money and upgrade?
Ballmer will hopefully be fired if this fails. Windows is the bread and butter of Microsoft a much lower price plus people not buying will have a catastrophic effect on revenue come next year. ... or maybe higher as people will be buying Windows 7 for their new WIndows 8 machines :-)
It is not like Win 7 at all!
I have used it and I am typing on an old laptop with WIndows 8 right now. Yeah, in firefox opened in the desktop it is very similiar to Windows 7, but it stops there FAST.
Here are my gripes
1. Instant search/start crippled: I put up with Vista because of instant search. It is so awesome to type anything and enter in 1/3 of a second and it even scans the contents of documents to do so.
- Because it is now full screen I can not have a document opened and quickly hit the WIndows key to type something I am reading to see if I have a document on that particular topic. Accountants use this feature A TON. When you have a spreadsheet with 100 cost centers and want to know more detail the last thing you want is to have the full screen start hide that spreadsheet when you do a search for another one outlining why costs went up?
- It is less keyboard friendly and some items are not listed or needs mouse interaction to select slowing down my speed by HUGE margins! Example, restart and Windows Update. In Wndows 7 I just hit the Win key rest -> enter done! Windows 8 is shows no results and below are 3 rows applications, utilities, and settings (I think). So I hit Win key upd ... oops now I need to use the mouse to select settings -> then select restart. Fail
2. Desktop is crippled.
- Not really as desktop. Just a cute background and a app bar with 1 icon for IE and one for Windows explorer. You need to back to METRO to select a real app in that annoying non friendly search kind of way. The Desktop is just an app and not an environment. Control panel and everything is removed from there
3. Metro apps are full screen only. This is a problem as people typically cut and paste or do things like write an email about a website or something. Can't do that in Metro delegating this to the desktop. Whoops desktop is crippled.
Metro is not a bad idea. Just very poorly implemented as MS wants you to purchase Windows 9 to fix it. Sadly they never learned from Vista as users just kept using XP instead. If I were in charge I would put the task bar in Metro and put in the ability to have tabs and turn applets into Windows if the screen is big enough. I would have translucent effects of aero still in and make instant search not full screen and maybe include graphical thumbnails next to the names of the programs and files. Make it look cool yet still functional on the desktop.
It just looks rushed and not thought up well.
That's only valid if it's a completely open standard. It needs to be completely open right from the beginning, otherwise it's meaningless ... promises won't cut it. Is FaceTime an open standard as promised?
Exactly! Which was the point of not letting make the best man win approach as it leads to problems 11 years later with poor saps supporting their pages still to that old standard that really was not a standard.
IE 6 really was ahead of Netscape for many years. Mozilla had the same bugs netscape had and it took awhile before Firefox was ready and even firefox failed the acid tests too until about 2.0 if I recall right. That leaves 6 years for IE 6 that mucked up everything.
Today we can't implement all the html 5 features on www.html5test.com. Not because of supporting ancient versions of IE but because css 3 has 3 different versions that are incompatible with each other just like IE 6 was in its day. Some tags are identical, others take hexidecimal for color arguments, others take 0-255 srgb for the same ones. There is no standard in html 5 and css 3 besides a few basics. W3C needs to speed up or feature freeze its set and move the newer stuff for html 5 and css 3 and turn them into html 5.1 and css 3.1 standards and then 5.2 and css 3.2 and so on. Too many proposals from everyone and it is not just MS. Apple/Chrome from webkit is making alot of different implementations from everyone else.
Here is an example of a Chrome only website? Notice it is fully HTML 5 compliant but the implementation is not standardized yet so the css 3 all have similar functionalities so they get a checkmark at www.html5test.com, but in reality it might as well be IE 6 all over again. That html 5 and css 3 is not w3c standardized.
Webkite css 3 is different than Microsofts which is also different from Gecko's. Until the W3C starts leading and defining standards I do not think it is evil of MS this time around because there is no guidelines at all and no draft proposal. Just mailing lists of "wouldn't it be great if we had X!"
If I had my way I would make them do a final proposal and go into a recommendation quickly by freezing other things being discussed and make them html 5.1 and css 3.1. The sooner we have standards the sooner things will work together again.
Why not go with the best overall standard regardless of who introduced it and whether or not it was the first. Now this doesn't mean I'm for or against either standard, it just seems that the assumption is that it should be ignored because it wasn't first and because Microsoft introduced it.
We did that. The answer was IE 6. Remember those days?
It is hated now especially on Slashdot but at the time it had the best box model, best implementation of javascript, and of course specific css sheets with proprietary values were the best of the best 10 years ago. When the world and the W3C decided to do things differently we ended up with a world wide web that was optimized for just that one browser at that one version, where we got an error message saying Netscape isn't supported ... even though we used Firefox?!
I saw an interview with Bill Joy where he mentioned he didn't have the luxuries of MIT with fiber connections that would allow him to use an emacs like editor. Vi was designed so he in his house he rented in Berkeley could use a phone line and 300 baud modem with a teletype edit files from the pdp-11 mincomputer in his basement room he was renting out?
Still I like the shortcuts and think its cool but vi became a visual editor to ed under extreme bandwidth limitations of the time frame. Still I am impressed it integrated with visual studio and I could run those things in a non unix environment I like to think ides can provide a lot more today. Textmate I heard of but I can not afford a mac and wonder if a win64 or linux version will come about?
Still a young 22 year old CS student should not need to learn these things today but I thought it was cool a decade ago.
The flash exploit I believe. My ex had terrible securith with her gaming Vista laptop. I was more ignorant back then too with security issues as I have not worked in a pc shop yet and seen the machines coming in and the steps people took. I thought AV software was a waste too as I do not visit bad sites on this machines etc. I was quite stupid.
Nowdays I am so paranoid I tend to avoid firefox because it has no sandboxing, use flash that updates automatically, use Chrome which does it for me and has double sandboxing, am very serious with a good AV package and also run Malware bytes.
My kids run ancient java still probably on the old desktop out of my control to run minecraft and I shudder. I thought it was safe back then too in 2009/10. GOD. Windows 7 thankfully is much more secure as well as the steps I now take.
But still mac users back then were getting hacked and the ones who had access to the guild vault were always hacked. hmmm .... sorry something is up with that.