Re:Ladies and Gentlemen... (Been there, done that)
on
Got Tracks?
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· Score: 2
I believe it is time to build a Slashdot-mobile.
Been there, done that, and even gave it away for free. Needless to say, it didn't have anything nearly as cool as a built-in MP3 player, let alone tracks.
Re:Read the article, kids
on
Got Tracks?
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· Score: 3
apparently the changeover takes 30 minutes
Yes, but the changeover requires jacking your vehicle up, which with something as big as a Tahoe isn't something you should take lightly. Even taking snow chains off and on is a major hassle, especially in the kind of conditions these things are getting used for. Do you REALLY want to get all down and dirty just to take the tracks off? Of course not. These tracks are going to be filthy.
how do you steer a truck with these things without trashing your differential
I was amazed by that myself. They claim identical turning radius to the factory tires, which is pretty darned tight, and that would definitely stress out your joints. If you examine the photos, there doesn't appear to be any kind of gearing to let the tracks freewheel, so 4wd on grass would mean trashing the grass and your tranny.
The only drawback - 40mph max
on
Got Tracks?
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· Score: 2
The only drawback I can see is a 40mph max speed. I can't imagine how rough these things would be on the highway, which pretty well means there's not a lot of us who could pull this off, even if we had the cash. If they worked at highway speeds, I think there'd be an instant huge demand, just for the testosterone factor. I mean, I bet most of us would rather have a GMC Tahoe with these tracks than a Hummer - the Tahoe would be more comfortable, and the track's coolness factor would beat the Hummer.
Most of these people say that it would be cheaper to buy a new processor, but in actuallity...
Not only is it cheaper to do a water-cooled rig as you suggest, but in addition the water cooling rig can be reused for all of your CPU purchases. A friend of mine has been using the same rig since the original Pentium days. Whenever he gets a new CPU, he just has to change the CPU cooling block (pretty cheap) and presto, he's back in business. So it's great, because he always gets more speed out of every CPU he buys. That's more than I can say for my CPU fan purchases - seems like every time I upgrade, I shell out $40 for the top-of-the-line platinum-coated super-groovy Orb, but it goes out the door with the old CPU every time, and it's not reusable.
Plus, if you build a shell for the hard drive or other components, those are usually completely reusable. He's been using the same 3.5" water cool shell since he started, and the same video card chip cooler. These things have lasted beyond several upgrades. Pretty slick.
The problem is that, as a game company, the majority of our code is closed source. Would that put developers off? Do most free software developers aspire to create free software exclusively?
That implies that free software developers are either working for open-source companies (not likely, not many of them left that are profitable), doing non-computer jobs (again, not likely, if they know enough to program) or just plain unemployed. Somehow, none of those three make sense - I refuse to believe that everybody involved in the development of Linux works for companies like RedHat or Pizza Hut. Just my opinion, though.
Companies have the choice of protecting or relinquishing the intellectual property resulting from their research and development consistent with their particular customer and business needs.
We know what choice Microsoft has made. As much as we want to flame Microsoft for making buggy, expensive software, it's their business model, and it's obvious that Mundie is advocating something more than shared-source here. He's rubbing it in the face of the Linux industry when he says it: companies have the choice whether to hang on to their source or not, and the success of the company is often indicative of the choices they make.
Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, you just can't point to any other company and say they've had the same results. It's easy for Mundie to say that shared-source (rather than open source) has played some role in that growth, because there's no way any of us can refute it. But at the same time, he could just as well have been saying that the success of Microsoft is due to Gates having a bad haircut, and that every CEO/founder/President should have a bad haircut.
In their defense, though, Mundie is saying that it's a choice, and it's a choice Microsoft has made. It's not like they aren't aware of the choice: they're making it to satisfy their business needs, like stockholders, and I sincerely doubt the stockholders would jump for joy if Microsoft gave up the source code tomorrow.
If the builders claimed the fault in the machines was Y2K related then it sounds like you got stung by a bunch of cowboys.
No, it was indeed Y2K related. As I recall, they designed the Accts Receivable code to purge old data, and they didn't get the math quite right. In 2000, the 1999 A/R was deemed too old to keep around, and it got purged.
Every time Katz does a movie review somebody bitches about how this is offtopic. Of course it is. Is it going away? No. Shut the fuck up.
Oh, good point! Forgot about that. We're powerless. Thanks. I'll be sure to let those anti-Communist protesters in, so they can stop wasting their time too. No sense in bothering with voicing one's opinion. Appreciate that insight!
MS has a huge percentage of the hospitality industry. A lot of people don't realize that most hotels are franchised, owned by individuals (or companies). Hampton Inns, for example, aren't all owned by the same people. However, they have to choose whatever front office system is mandated by the franchise office, because they have to use the same back end reporting.
Whenever a desk clerk checks you in at a Hampton Inn, for example, they're using exactly the same system no matter which Hampton Inn it is. A lot of the franchises write their own front office systems, and MS dominates those systems:
Holiday Inn - mostly *nix
Choice Hotels (Comfort/Quality/Econo) - Windows NT
Hampton Inn - Win95/NT wkstations, *nix back end
Fairfield Inn - Win95/NT
Days Inn - Linux (woohoo!)
There's a catch with the Days Inn system, though. They really broke tradition when they picked Linux, but unfortunately, they picked a bad rollout time (just-prior-to-12/31/1999) and didn't do enough beta testing. The Y2k problem completely wiped out all hotel receivables. All your direct bill records were toast. The implementation was so bad, in fact, that the system's name of "PowerUp" turned into a nickname of "PowerDown".
The hoteliers rebelled, turning the franchise meeting into a yelling match. Nobody wanted the system, and everybody said Linux sucked. It wasn't that Linux actually sucked, of course, it was just that the program was so inherently bad.
The Windows systems, on the other hand, have been rolled out with mostly good reviews. They were deployed on killer hardware (almost everybody mandates Dell workstations) instead of cheap clones, and they got lavish training manuals and videos. It's been a case of throwing money at the problem vs. trying to cut corners, and the Linux camp came out looking rather rough.
Anyway, the next time you go to a hotel, peek your head over the front desk and take a look at what they're using to check you in. You might be surprised. (Then again, you could stay at Days Inn just to support Linux!)
Does anyone know what happened to those cooling systems that used a crystal that would absorb/emit heat as electricity was applied?
I think you're talking about Peltier coolers. They're definitely gaining market share - they're on the rack at my local CompUSA, even. They go for around $25-$50. They work as advertised, but they use a lot of electricity. They're no quieter than a regular CPU cooler, though, because they still require a fan.
But seriously: water-warfare sounds like a 'relatively' good idea (if you forget that warfare sucks etc etc) as it minimises 'colateral damage' (i.e. innocent people getting hurt).
You mean like the sinking of the Lusitania? In which 1,195 lives were lost? There are plenty of people-carrying vessels out there that are in danger at wartime.
Oooooh. Underwater warfare! We're so scared. What are you gonna' do, kill all our fish?
Read the article again. The underwater missiles have the potential of scooting along underwater until they get to the coast, and then popping up and blowing away coastal cities, thus rendering any Star-Wars-style missile defense systems useless. Now, think about how just about every country has ships in the ocean that are permitted to come right up to our shoreline, and you'll realize that they don't even have to be that accurate in order to wipe out cities like DC, NY, LA, Miami, etc. Yes, you should be scared.
Of course, most of this can already be done on a smaller/cheaper scale by smuggling nuclear weapons aboard container ships, but this allows for a more timely attack, I guess.
While OODBMS were an obvious choice to me for performance and ease of programming, my consultants told me that finding Oracle talent was so much easier than finding Versant talent (for example) that I would be wasting time and money using OODBMS. This is especially true of DBAs.
And that's precisely the same reason it took Linux so long to catch on in the enterprise, and why it still hasn't invaded small to medium businesses with only 1-2 network-savvy people. I'd love to switch to Linux fileservers instead of upgrading our NT boxes to 2k, but since we can't find anybody with the appropriate experience to manage them when I'm not around, we stick with the point-and-click OS's. Don't flame me for the decision, I'm just stating why we don't always switch to things we all know are best. (Reminds me of OS/2 for some reason.)
I'm probably a good example of their target demographic. I've got tastes that aren't matched by a lot of radio stations, and I'm a gadget-buyer. (I happen to dig 80's, Frank Sinatra, and blues music. Not together, of course.) Sure, I live in a big city with dozens of stations, but most of them suck, and I usually end up listening to Internet radio at home and MP3's in the car.
I would KILL to have access to this kind of radio everywhere. Traveling is such a pain, because you spend half your time trying to find a decent radio station. Sometimes your rental car has a CD player, sometimes it has a tape deck, and carrying more equipment like an MP3 player is a pain in the butt. And no, I don't want to unpack my laptop, plug it into the cigarette lighter, and listen to MP3's on the tinny speakers (or monkey with tape adapters.)
The solution would be XM radios in rental cars. I want to be able to log in on any radio and get my stations. The login process has to be simple - don't make me pound out my e-mail address using phone keypads. And don't make me log in every time, and don't penalize me if I don't log out - I know this makes things hard in the world of rental cars, but deal with it. They don't have this solution available yet, though.
The next thing they need to address is XM walkmans. If I can't carry it with me on my head like my Sony that has the radio built into the headphones, I'm not going to subscribe. I don't see that as possible with their current setup, and that's definitely a drawback.
So it seems their target demographic is restricted to people who don't rent cars, and don't use walkmans. (Walkmen?) There are other problems, but these two alone make it a bad deal for me and everybody I know. Why would I pay XM when I get digital music with my TV cable connection, and free digital radio on the internet?
Re:Can we please give them the benefit of the doub
on
Sony Violating GPL?
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· Score: 5
Looking at the new emulator, it was just posted 2 days ago (5/1/01). My guess is that they'll release the source real soon now, but it probably wasn't quite ready for prime time just yet.
How can the binary be ready before the source code? Is that some kind of temporal engineering there or something?
Perhaps a technology czar would create the expertise in the civil service to bring those services in house, where they can be maintained without the danger of future problems often associated with the extensive use of contracting.
Eh? You mean like the awesome efficiency of the Postal Service, which just announced they lost over $100 million last year? Or maybe you mean the IRS, known for customer service so poor that citizens had to go begging to Congress for a customer's bill of rights? Thanks, but I'll take the contractors any day.:-D
I filed my taxes online this year. I'm filing for student aid online this year - did you know you could do that? They do the whole process online, right down to your digital signature. I can renew my Texas driver's license online.
In fact, I can't think of a single interaction I've had with state or federal governments in the last year that I haven't been able to do entirely online. I'm not quite sure where that $225 million is going, but I don't like it. Instead of making more services accessible, they should give Senators and Representatives e-training classes to make them more aware of current issues and get them to check their friggin' e-mails. Start there, before throwing more money at the problem.
Computers are everywhere; if your office is set up reasonably well
Oh, I wish. We have a similar setup to what the original poster has: we have to generate huge reports for our clients, most of which aren't able to get high-speed internet access. (We scan comment cards for hotels, restaurants, etc.) They want consolidated reports with color graphs explaining their customer satisfaction trends. We make all of the reports available on the internet, but people just don't want to see them that way. They don't have the time to download 100 pages worth of reports with color graphs over a 33.6.
As far as I know, you cannot control page breaks via HTML inside a web browser.
You can kind of cheat with table row counts and style codes. In plain English, if the number of rows so far is greater than, say, 50, put in STYLE=page-break-before:always. v4 & above browsers honor it, if I remember right.
I've got a group in-house that does almost exactly what you're talking about. There's a lot of people on here spewing off about Crystal and PDF's, so let me give you more details on what worked for us.
We have a few large (2-5gb) databases that we have to report on. Most reports are generated on a periodic basis, but we've got a few that have to be done on-the-fly when the user requests them. The formatting has to be flawless, and we print out reports on color lasers as well as make them available for download.
The solution (picked long before I came on board) was Crystal Reports. Whether you like Windows-based development tools or not, you have to admit that it's easier to hire a Crystal person off the street than it is to hire & train for any other report writer.
To give you some idea, we have a dedicated Crystal person on staff, and several machines that churn out Crystal Reports full time. (We keep five Tektronix color lasers busy for most of the day.)
The same Crystal Report files are used whether the report is going online or being printed. In fact, we print to PDF format, and save the PDF's. Before you get one of our report packets in the mail (or FedEx or whatever), you can view the same report online in your web browser, and it prints out perfectly. Plus, there's no CPU/database load on our servers - each report is run once, and stored on hard drive.
For the reports that are done on-the-fly, we use the Crystal Reports viewers. There's several, a Netscape plugin, ActiveX plugin, and a Java plugin. You have to redirect your web users to the right page for your browser, of course. But for these on-the-fly reports, PDF isn't involved. They can print using the Crystal plugin, and page breaks and everything work fine.
I understand why a lot of people on here throw out solutions like XML, but my experience has been that spending more money on the famously well-used tool usually means spending a little less money on the hiring end later. When this becomes a big business (and aren't you planning for that?) you want to be able to hire quickly, and nothing's more widely used than Crystal Reports.
If you've got any questions about the setup, you can e-mail me.
With charging I think we will see much more real content on the internet and just not "hi, my name is John...bla bla bla" homepages.
Speaking as someone who happens to have a "hi, my name is Brent...bla bla bla" website, I can vouch for the fact that we'll be here forever. As long as I can get a hosting account for less than the cost of a good steak dinner (or even a bad steak dinner), I'll be showing my webcam until they pry it from my cold, offline fingers.
And your suggestion doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, either. For example, I can pay fifty cents to get a copy of my local Houston Chronicle paper, or I can get a free copy of the independent Houston Press. Guess which one has better quality? It's a flip - for restaurant reviews, hard-hitting political articles, and what's going on locally, you want the free one. For up-to-the-minute sports scores, good cooking recipes, and national entertainment news, I turn to the - well, I turn to the web, actually, but that's beside the point.
The bottom line is that charging subscribers more doesn't guarantee a higher quality. Take Slashdot - can you imagine a better source for this kind of thing? What good would it do to charge for it - most of the good stuff would disappear. I like reading the opinions of the AC's, and they sure wouldn't pay for the privilege of posting.
Let me know. I'll buy it off you. As a CTS sufferer, I'm always looking for alternatives, and the mouse thing wouldn't bother me so much. (Plus I use Windows for most of my type-intensive stuff, I'm sad to say.)
This is what you get when you let brilliant minds do whatever they feel like doing. Somehow, it feels more valuable than what a lot of my working friends are doing at dot-com flameouts.
There's a lot to be said for letting brilliant people do whatever they want, without giving them much money. It's this sort of spirit that used to drive dot-coms, back before incubators, before the stock boom took off and everything was about stock valuations. Suddenly, millions of dollars were flying around, and everybody was under pressure to turn it into profits.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it is time to build a Slashdot-mobile.
Been there, done that, and even gave it away for free. Needless to say, it didn't have anything nearly as cool as a built-in MP3 player, let alone tracks.
apparently the changeover takes 30 minutes
Yes, but the changeover requires jacking your vehicle up, which with something as big as a Tahoe isn't something you should take lightly. Even taking snow chains off and on is a major hassle, especially in the kind of conditions these things are getting used for. Do you REALLY want to get all down and dirty just to take the tracks off? Of course not. These tracks are going to be filthy.
how do you steer a truck with these things without trashing your differential
I was amazed by that myself. They claim identical turning radius to the factory tires, which is pretty darned tight, and that would definitely stress out your joints. If you examine the photos, there doesn't appear to be any kind of gearing to let the tracks freewheel, so 4wd on grass would mean trashing the grass and your tranny.
The only drawback I can see is a 40mph max speed. I can't imagine how rough these things would be on the highway, which pretty well means there's not a lot of us who could pull this off, even if we had the cash. If they worked at highway speeds, I think there'd be an instant huge demand, just for the testosterone factor. I mean, I bet most of us would rather have a GMC Tahoe with these tracks than a Hummer - the Tahoe would be more comfortable, and the track's coolness factor would beat the Hummer.
Most of these people say that it would be cheaper to buy a new processor, but in actuallity...
Not only is it cheaper to do a water-cooled rig as you suggest, but in addition the water cooling rig can be reused for all of your CPU purchases. A friend of mine has been using the same rig since the original Pentium days. Whenever he gets a new CPU, he just has to change the CPU cooling block (pretty cheap) and presto, he's back in business. So it's great, because he always gets more speed out of every CPU he buys. That's more than I can say for my CPU fan purchases - seems like every time I upgrade, I shell out $40 for the top-of-the-line platinum-coated super-groovy Orb, but it goes out the door with the old CPU every time, and it's not reusable.
Plus, if you build a shell for the hard drive or other components, those are usually completely reusable. He's been using the same 3.5" water cool shell since he started, and the same video card chip cooler. These things have lasted beyond several upgrades. Pretty slick.
The problem is that, as a game company, the majority of our code is closed source. Would that put developers off? Do most free software developers aspire to create free software exclusively?
That implies that free software developers are either working for open-source companies (not likely, not many of them left that are profitable), doing non-computer jobs (again, not likely, if they know enough to program) or just plain unemployed. Somehow, none of those three make sense - I refuse to believe that everybody involved in the development of Linux works for companies like RedHat or Pizza Hut. Just my opinion, though.
Companies have the choice of protecting or relinquishing the intellectual property resulting from their research and development consistent with their particular customer and business needs.
We know what choice Microsoft has made. As much as we want to flame Microsoft for making buggy, expensive software, it's their business model, and it's obvious that Mundie is advocating something more than shared-source here. He's rubbing it in the face of the Linux industry when he says it: companies have the choice whether to hang on to their source or not, and the success of the company is often indicative of the choices they make.
Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, you just can't point to any other company and say they've had the same results. It's easy for Mundie to say that shared-source (rather than open source) has played some role in that growth, because there's no way any of us can refute it. But at the same time, he could just as well have been saying that the success of Microsoft is due to Gates having a bad haircut, and that every CEO/founder/President should have a bad haircut.
In their defense, though, Mundie is saying that it's a choice, and it's a choice Microsoft has made. It's not like they aren't aware of the choice: they're making it to satisfy their business needs, like stockholders, and I sincerely doubt the stockholders would jump for joy if Microsoft gave up the source code tomorrow.
If the builders claimed the fault in the machines was Y2K related then it sounds like you got stung by a bunch of cowboys.
No, it was indeed Y2K related. As I recall, they designed the Accts Receivable code to purge old data, and they didn't get the math quite right. In 2000, the 1999 A/R was deemed too old to keep around, and it got purged.
Every time Katz does a movie review somebody bitches about how this is offtopic. Of course it is. Is it going away? No. Shut the fuck up.
Oh, good point! Forgot about that. We're powerless. Thanks. I'll be sure to let those anti-Communist protesters in, so they can stop wasting their time too. No sense in bothering with voicing one's opinion. Appreciate that insight!
MS has a huge percentage of the hospitality industry. A lot of people don't realize that most hotels are franchised, owned by individuals (or companies). Hampton Inns, for example, aren't all owned by the same people. However, they have to choose whatever front office system is mandated by the franchise office, because they have to use the same back end reporting.
Whenever a desk clerk checks you in at a Hampton Inn, for example, they're using exactly the same system no matter which Hampton Inn it is. A lot of the franchises write their own front office systems, and MS dominates those systems:
Holiday Inn - mostly *nix
Choice Hotels (Comfort/Quality/Econo) - Windows NT
Hampton Inn - Win95/NT wkstations, *nix back end
Fairfield Inn - Win95/NT
Days Inn - Linux (woohoo!)
There's a catch with the Days Inn system, though. They really broke tradition when they picked Linux, but unfortunately, they picked a bad rollout time (just-prior-to-12/31/1999) and didn't do enough beta testing. The Y2k problem completely wiped out all hotel receivables. All your direct bill records were toast. The implementation was so bad, in fact, that the system's name of "PowerUp" turned into a nickname of "PowerDown".
The hoteliers rebelled, turning the franchise meeting into a yelling match. Nobody wanted the system, and everybody said Linux sucked. It wasn't that Linux actually sucked, of course, it was just that the program was so inherently bad.
The Windows systems, on the other hand, have been rolled out with mostly good reviews. They were deployed on killer hardware (almost everybody mandates Dell workstations) instead of cheap clones, and they got lavish training manuals and videos. It's been a case of throwing money at the problem vs. trying to cut corners, and the Linux camp came out looking rather rough.
Anyway, the next time you go to a hotel, peek your head over the front desk and take a look at what they're using to check you in. You might be surprised. (Then again, you could stay at Days Inn just to support Linux!)
A criticism of a movie review from one who has a movie quote as a .sig
.sig, but you don't see Slashdot delivering a joke story of the day, now, do you?
There are plenty of people on here with amusing quotes in their
Does anyone know what happened to those cooling systems that used a crystal that would absorb/emit heat as electricity was applied?
I think you're talking about Peltier coolers. They're definitely gaining market share - they're on the rack at my local CompUSA, even. They go for around $25-$50. They work as advertised, but they use a lot of electricity. They're no quieter than a regular CPU cooler, though, because they still require a fan.
But seriously: water-warfare sounds like a 'relatively' good idea (if you forget that warfare sucks etc etc) as it minimises 'colateral damage' (i.e. innocent people getting hurt).
You mean like the sinking of the Lusitania? In which 1,195 lives were lost? There are plenty of people-carrying vessels out there that are in danger at wartime.
Oooooh. Underwater warfare! We're so scared. What are you gonna' do, kill all our fish?
Read the article again. The underwater missiles have the potential of scooting along underwater until they get to the coast, and then popping up and blowing away coastal cities, thus rendering any Star-Wars-style missile defense systems useless. Now, think about how just about every country has ships in the ocean that are permitted to come right up to our shoreline, and you'll realize that they don't even have to be that accurate in order to wipe out cities like DC, NY, LA, Miami, etc. Yes, you should be scared.
Of course, most of this can already be done on a smaller/cheaper scale by smuggling nuclear weapons aboard container ships, but this allows for a more timely attack, I guess.
While OODBMS were an obvious choice to me for performance and ease of programming, my consultants told me that finding Oracle talent was so much easier than finding Versant talent (for example) that I would be wasting time and money using OODBMS. This is especially true of DBAs.
And that's precisely the same reason it took Linux so long to catch on in the enterprise, and why it still hasn't invaded small to medium businesses with only 1-2 network-savvy people. I'd love to switch to Linux fileservers instead of upgrading our NT boxes to 2k, but since we can't find anybody with the appropriate experience to manage them when I'm not around, we stick with the point-and-click OS's. Don't flame me for the decision, I'm just stating why we don't always switch to things we all know are best. (Reminds me of OS/2 for some reason.)
I'm probably a good example of their target demographic. I've got tastes that aren't matched by a lot of radio stations, and I'm a gadget-buyer. (I happen to dig 80's, Frank Sinatra, and blues music. Not together, of course.) Sure, I live in a big city with dozens of stations, but most of them suck, and I usually end up listening to Internet radio at home and MP3's in the car.
I would KILL to have access to this kind of radio everywhere. Traveling is such a pain, because you spend half your time trying to find a decent radio station. Sometimes your rental car has a CD player, sometimes it has a tape deck, and carrying more equipment like an MP3 player is a pain in the butt. And no, I don't want to unpack my laptop, plug it into the cigarette lighter, and listen to MP3's on the tinny speakers (or monkey with tape adapters.)
The solution would be XM radios in rental cars. I want to be able to log in on any radio and get my stations. The login process has to be simple - don't make me pound out my e-mail address using phone keypads. And don't make me log in every time, and don't penalize me if I don't log out - I know this makes things hard in the world of rental cars, but deal with it. They don't have this solution available yet, though.
The next thing they need to address is XM walkmans. If I can't carry it with me on my head like my Sony that has the radio built into the headphones, I'm not going to subscribe. I don't see that as possible with their current setup, and that's definitely a drawback.
So it seems their target demographic is restricted to people who don't rent cars, and don't use walkmans. (Walkmen?) There are other problems, but these two alone make it a bad deal for me and everybody I know. Why would I pay XM when I get digital music with my TV cable connection, and free digital radio on the internet?
Looking at the new emulator, it was just posted 2 days ago (5/1/01). My guess is that they'll release the source real soon now, but it probably wasn't quite ready for prime time just yet.
How can the binary be ready before the source code? Is that some kind of temporal engineering there or something?
Perhaps a technology czar would create the expertise in the civil service to bring those services in house, where they can be maintained without the danger of future problems often associated with the extensive use of contracting.
:-D
Eh? You mean like the awesome efficiency of the Postal Service, which just announced they lost over $100 million last year? Or maybe you mean the IRS, known for customer service so poor that citizens had to go begging to Congress for a customer's bill of rights? Thanks, but I'll take the contractors any day.
Will this Czar wear a beeper in case a citizen had networking problems with the government database?
No, no, Al Gore's the guy on call for networking problems. He's Mr. Infrastructure.
I filed my taxes online this year. I'm filing for student aid online this year - did you know you could do that? They do the whole process online, right down to your digital signature. I can renew my Texas driver's license online.
In fact, I can't think of a single interaction I've had with state or federal governments in the last year that I haven't been able to do entirely online. I'm not quite sure where that $225 million is going, but I don't like it. Instead of making more services accessible, they should give Senators and Representatives e-training classes to make them more aware of current issues and get them to check their friggin' e-mails. Start there, before throwing more money at the problem.
Computers are everywhere; if your office is set up reasonably well
Oh, I wish. We have a similar setup to what the original poster has: we have to generate huge reports for our clients, most of which aren't able to get high-speed internet access. (We scan comment cards for hotels, restaurants, etc.) They want consolidated reports with color graphs explaining their customer satisfaction trends. We make all of the reports available on the internet, but people just don't want to see them that way. They don't have the time to download 100 pages worth of reports with color graphs over a 33.6.
As far as I know, you cannot control page breaks via HTML inside a web browser.
You can kind of cheat with table row counts and style codes. In plain English, if the number of rows so far is greater than, say, 50, put in STYLE=page-break-before:always. v4 & above browsers honor it, if I remember right.
I've got a group in-house that does almost exactly what you're talking about. There's a lot of people on here spewing off about Crystal and PDF's, so let me give you more details on what worked for us.
We have a few large (2-5gb) databases that we have to report on. Most reports are generated on a periodic basis, but we've got a few that have to be done on-the-fly when the user requests them. The formatting has to be flawless, and we print out reports on color lasers as well as make them available for download.
The solution (picked long before I came on board) was Crystal Reports. Whether you like Windows-based development tools or not, you have to admit that it's easier to hire a Crystal person off the street than it is to hire & train for any other report writer.
To give you some idea, we have a dedicated Crystal person on staff, and several machines that churn out Crystal Reports full time. (We keep five Tektronix color lasers busy for most of the day.)
The same Crystal Report files are used whether the report is going online or being printed. In fact, we print to PDF format, and save the PDF's. Before you get one of our report packets in the mail (or FedEx or whatever), you can view the same report online in your web browser, and it prints out perfectly. Plus, there's no CPU/database load on our servers - each report is run once, and stored on hard drive.
For the reports that are done on-the-fly, we use the Crystal Reports viewers. There's several, a Netscape plugin, ActiveX plugin, and a Java plugin. You have to redirect your web users to the right page for your browser, of course. But for these on-the-fly reports, PDF isn't involved. They can print using the Crystal plugin, and page breaks and everything work fine.
I understand why a lot of people on here throw out solutions like XML, but my experience has been that spending more money on the famously well-used tool usually means spending a little less money on the hiring end later. When this becomes a big business (and aren't you planning for that?) you want to be able to hire quickly, and nothing's more widely used than Crystal Reports.
If you've got any questions about the setup, you can e-mail me.
With charging I think we will see much more real content on the internet and just not "hi, my name is John...bla bla bla" homepages.
Speaking as someone who happens to have a "hi, my name is Brent...bla bla bla" website, I can vouch for the fact that we'll be here forever. As long as I can get a hosting account for less than the cost of a good steak dinner (or even a bad steak dinner), I'll be showing my webcam until they pry it from my cold, offline fingers.
And your suggestion doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, either. For example, I can pay fifty cents to get a copy of my local Houston Chronicle paper, or I can get a free copy of the independent Houston Press. Guess which one has better quality? It's a flip - for restaurant reviews, hard-hitting political articles, and what's going on locally, you want the free one. For up-to-the-minute sports scores, good cooking recipes, and national entertainment news, I turn to the - well, I turn to the web, actually, but that's beside the point.
The bottom line is that charging subscribers more doesn't guarantee a higher quality. Take Slashdot - can you imagine a better source for this kind of thing? What good would it do to charge for it - most of the good stuff would disappear. I like reading the opinions of the AC's, and they sure wouldn't pay for the privilege of posting.
Let me know. I'll buy it off you. As a CTS sufferer, I'm always looking for alternatives, and the mouse thing wouldn't bother me so much. (Plus I use Windows for most of my type-intensive stuff, I'm sad to say.)
This is what you get when you let brilliant minds do whatever they feel like doing. Somehow, it feels more valuable than what a lot of my working friends are doing at dot-com flameouts.
There's a lot to be said for letting brilliant people do whatever they want, without giving them much money. It's this sort of spirit that used to drive dot-coms, back before incubators, before the stock boom took off and everything was about stock valuations. Suddenly, millions of dollars were flying around, and everybody was under pressure to turn it into profits.