We have a small division that does basic mail processing. We have gone from doing just small batches a day to now large batches. We process data to and from our pgsql database with Excel, I have processed some small scripts to do the transfer, as well as the formatting from various channel partners.
I then integrate with some software from Pitney Bowes to scrub the data, then re-export and process again into Excel and then into Word.
Overall the process is fairly quick and i have been able to train a very non-technical person to do the process in less than 20 minutes before it hits the printers and goes to the mail processing equipment. not to mention, no hassle dealing with things like postal bar-codes, and 4-8k pages of merged data pushed off to the printer. It chews through the merge in literally seconds and generates multiple multi-thousand page document without breaking a sweat on an older machine.
The license cost for me on that software from MS is about $250, thats a clear ROI on that software within days of use.
I have tried the process on OpenOffice, as well as Office on Mac. I found that the mac would take almost 30 minutes just to spool the document to the printer and took FOREVER to do the merge (Office Mac). OO worked ok, but it felt clumbsy and would sometimes do strange things if the documents where too big and printing wasn't as fast.
Overall, MS Office is worth buying and using. And I would laugh if one of my IT guys wanted to migrate us over to OOo or anything else when what we are using is working, and from a business standpoint the ROI is clear. Even as my business grows and I need to license more workstation, 1-2 hours a week of an employing futzing around with OO or some alternative isn't worth the savings of license fees. And people that say that Office 2003 is more difficult to use than OO have probably never used Office at more than a passing glance or as a glorified text editor.
Just keep in mind that in a sole proprietorship, that your personally liable for your business. Most small businesses can cruise along just fine, but if you are worth a lot (house, car, etc), I wouldn't risk it. Also, if you plan on posting things that are potentially litigious on your weblog, I would consider at least a LLC. I am not sure if there are messed up laws that could potentially tie you up in litigation from the actions of your users, who knows (a lawyer, definitely not me).
You can usually do that for under $250, and under $500 with a lawyers help. I seem to remember thats how the costs for us, our small logistics software house, to incorporate LLC in Nevada.
"Browser applications are also a miserable failure, because they're tacked onto a system designed to do something completely different. The browser window itself can't update, so you need to run in Flash, ActiveX, or Java, none of which are particularly good at full scale applications. Flash is too animation-centric for persistent data like that, Java never hit its stride (see the WordPerfect in Browser in Java debacle), and ActiveX is ActiveX. Comparing the elegance of remote Xwindows or straight SSH to browser applications shows just how far behind we are."
I have been playing quite a bit, and I haven't seen anything like this happen yet.
As a matter of fact I have been SHOCKED at how well the service (xbox live) has worked in light of having so many new people slamming the service. My bet is that there is a heat related issue with this guys console, but I don't see what the story is as he can just return it and get another unit if it's defective.
On that note, I don't own a regular xbox, and didn't really know what to expect with xbox live. My out of game experience was pretty amazing. I have been having a absolute blast racing online with others on PGR, I haven't even bothered opening the 3 other games I purchased.
I don't understand why so many people are giving this thing such bad press and negative commentary, as it's provided me with some of the most entertaining online gaming I have yet experienced. I can jump on and be racing other gamers in less than 3 minutes, and have had white-knuckles due to such close races, the service does a great job at pitching you against other like-skilled racers.
"When we've finished digesting all the recent announcements, I suspect we may well be porting our application from MySQL to either Oracle or PostgreSQL on Solaris, for sound commercial and support reasons."
I have been running PGSQL on Linux since the 6.0 series. I would consider myself a prime candidate (small company, we run all of our customer service and core telecommunications service products (IVR) on top of the PGSQL database. I just don't see enough value-add to buy Sun equipment to run their flavor of PGSQL. I am not trying to flame or troll, or turf, whatever.
I just historically haven't had any problems running pgsql and don't honestly believe that having a sun engineer on the phone helping me fix a problem or running on solaris will really provide me any more stability than running RHEL3 Linux on Dell equipment. I would love to see a non-bias assesement of why I would want to switch to Solaris.
In my opinion, if they want to go after the small business or small databsae market they need to demonstrate:
1. How they really can bail you out of a tough spot. 2. How can solaris really make my life easier when I am reasonably comfortable using Linux. 3. Why would Postgres run better on Solaris than Linux? (advanced debugging capabilities seems like something that the pgsql engineers would want, but not me).
I'll be getting one, but probably not for the same reasons some will.
1. I am an early adopter, call it a hobby.. Call it foolish. For me it's fun. 2. I have HD TV and am anxious to get full use of it. 3. I have friends that are buying it, and I am looking forward to online play with them. 4. I have a Media Center PC and look forward to using the MCE blade on the xbox to play my mp3's & recorded shows.
I wouldn't say I am 'chomping at the bit', but I am happy to get my new toy and feel for the $, it packs a decent entertainment value for me.
Ah, thanks for the insight, it makes a bit more sense now.
"I fact, I've known people who have gotten divorced because the man left the church. The man refused to do any of the temple unmarrage thingies. The wife was not allowed to have another temple marrage because she's still sealed to her divorced, inactive husband."
I just can't imagine what an emotional roller-coaster it must be for women who are honestly stuck in the middle of a situation where they honestly believe they are going to be damned because they can't get their husband to cancel his membership. I also wonder how many women get shafted at the alter or pre-marriage because they couldn't get their situation sorted and the husband-to-be wouldn't bother marriage someone that wasn't sanctified by their church.
Seems like a system that fosters a strange personal emotional abuse or anything but happiness to me.
"While most mainstream Mormons don't do that, they can still have multiple marrages. How? Well, then legal marrage ends at death; the religous marrage doesn't. It isn't uncommon to see older members outlive their wives and re-marry."
I am sorry, but this is completely wrong. I am not Mormon today, but my parents are and having had a parent that was killed in an accident while I was young, I learned how this process really worked.
After my mother remarried my now step-dad, they where married but not sealed. My mother couldn't get sealed to my step-dad because she was already sealed. As I understand the system you can't get re-sealed for "time-and-eternity" unless you temple-divorce. As I saw this was always a source of pain for my step-father who did believe in this religion.
I personally find the entire system to be untrue and don't believe in it, but there is nothing shameful or inherently wrong about how the church currently is running the temple marriage as I see it, and further more I know of fewer organizations that push harder for the family unit to remain in tact.
Yup, I remember the first time I realized there was other people that where as fanatical about communicating with others as I was. The world of BBS opened up my eyes to shareware and other tools that I had no idea existed as well.
Door games anyone?
The local Eau Claire, WI BBSUG was a bunch of old Hams. I made friends that I will remember for the rest of my life through that community.
The BBS community played a large role in to decide that computer programming and networking was definately where I wanted to be as I got older, and I can say with confidence that the BBS world changed who I am today to a large scale what I am doing and have been able to achieve.
I look back on those BBS years with the fondest memories of learning and exploration.
I have recently been chucking my old machines and built a very quiet Athlon (not silent as I hoped, but a water-cooled CPU would pretty much make it silent...) and a silent power supply.
I can crank up the fans if I want to play games, but typically I am not doing anything that requires so much cooling.
I also bought a mac-mini for work, I spend most of my time in email clients , web browsers and unix terminals.. so a mac seems to work fine for what I need to be doing. I love the fact I can go into my office and work on my computer and not so much as a hum is comming from my computer. My thinkpad makes more noise (and thats almost absolutely silent).
First, make a plan of what your trying to do.. then go browse apache Commons.
There have been many times I got through a project, or part way into it.. and realized I could of saved a TON of time by using a tool from that resource.
If your doing anything with XML, it's worth taking a look at JDom.
Make sure your using Eclipse, and if your doing web based projects.. I highly recomend http://myeclipseide.com. I have been a subscribe for a while, and have really enjoyed the enhancements that their modules bring for web development.
WoW has all but destroyed the player base of DAoC. Their endgame relies on a large number of people playing, and unfortunately it's spun into a rut thats going to take a miracle to fix. WoW and EQ2 have finally nailed the coffin shut on that game imho.
Mythic has had no real compeition in their niche until now. I hope they enjoyed their hayday while they had it.
And I find that both can have a place on a gamers shelf. One can't really be compared to the other, as they are both MASSIVELY different in scope and design.
WoW: Great game, fast paced, very simple to understand and navigate. My only grief with the game is that the character development can be quite cookie cutter. The talents are pretty liner, and there seems to be preferred path for PVP performance. WoW does at least have a plan for PVP. Though, it's not all implemented, it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.
EQ2: MASSIVE world. Your put right in the middle of an epic-sized story that makes me feel as if I am a key part of the shaping of the world. The character development is quite profound, almost to the degree of Marrowind type games (though, not quite so flexible). I love this and it makes me feel that I am in control of my character and I can make something unique and interesting as I like him. The world is beautiful and I find it a pleasure to walk around and explore. I find that the death penalty is a bit rougher than WoW, and solo play is getting harder and harder at 13-14+. EQ2 has a really neat web-based character report. You can see almost all aspects of your character from the web site.
Here is mine: http://eq2players.station.sony.com/en/pplay er.vm?c haracterId=111621109
All in all, I find them both a pleasure to play. I have spent the last few years playing another not-so-unpopular game with a very Realm-versus-Realm oriented aspect of endgame. I have found both of these games a huge upgrade over what I hvae been playing, and my wife might even play WoW with me which would be great. The barrier to entry to play previous MOG's where too great for her to feel like she was having fun.
I don't believe that casual or hardcore gamer types will be disappointed with either. Both of which would definitely give you the $50 retail value if only played for the 30 free days.
I will likely have accounts open on both of the games and try to divide my free time between them. I will let the game that has the best customer support, interesting game play and a company that cares about the long term playability of their game and not looking to make a short dollar today.
"Sure, it would cannibalize some of their Mac and Windows market, but I feel pretty confident that there is a significant number of people that are waiting for this offering. While we can argue all day about some of Adobe's policies and other doings, I tip my hat to them on this one."
How so? I would believe it would have the opposite effect. If they can get people onto linux to use Photoshop, that means that people can run other tools that they have on linux, where their competition is late comming to the game on the linux desktop. Sounds like they could get some tie-in across multiple products this way, not canabalize their windows market.
If they where giving away photoshop for free this might be the case, but I would bet this won't be the case.
"Combine this with their premature launch date and lack of real outreach to new MMOGers, and things look grim for SOE. If they don't wake up in a hurry, Blizzard's gonna eat their lunch."
I agree with everything you said.
What would you like to bet that Blizzard anounces their open beta for the day EQ2 is supposed to go live.
I am sure that they are going to do something to try and rain on Sony's launch-day parade.
I surely hope that EQ2 does do well. I would hate to see Blizzard left as the only player standing. After playing DAoC for 3 years, Mythic customers loose big because of the lack of real compitition in the RvR space 'niche' (if you can call it that), that DAoC occupies. I know that people will be leaving that game in droves to WoW, not one person I know is going to do anything more than just 'try' EQ2 , at best, along with WoW and pick the one that intrest them the most.
DAoC doesn't have many people that I know who really are into the crazy treadmill grind to only get either more treadmill with another release or raid content.
Trials of Atlantis really ruined DAoC for most people I game with, myself included. Hopefully Blizzard will learn from that mistake.
And really will aid in the retention of players. A lot of the interaction and interest that keeps me playing my games is the friends that I game with . Our guild has it's own similar services, but many people don't have the technical ability to do such a thing themselves.
I hope WoW will offer a competitive service.
I know that a lot of small businesses where started offering services such as this to the exact same market. I am sure they aren't happy to see Sony jump right into their space.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a small division that does basic mail processing. We have gone from doing just small batches a day to now large batches. We process data to and from our pgsql database with Excel, I have processed some small scripts to do the transfer, as well as the formatting from various channel partners.
I then integrate with some software from Pitney Bowes to scrub the data, then re-export and process again into Excel and then into Word.
Overall the process is fairly quick and i have been able to train a very non-technical person to do the process in less than 20 minutes before it hits the printers and goes to the mail processing equipment. not to mention, no hassle dealing with things like postal bar-codes, and 4-8k pages of merged data pushed off to the printer. It chews through the merge in literally seconds and generates multiple multi-thousand page document without breaking a sweat on an older machine.
The license cost for me on that software from MS is about $250, thats a clear ROI on that software within days of use.
I have tried the process on OpenOffice, as well as Office on Mac. I found that the mac would take almost 30 minutes just to spool the document to the printer and took FOREVER to do the merge (Office Mac). OO worked ok, but it felt clumbsy and would sometimes do strange things if the documents where too big and printing wasn't as fast.
Overall, MS Office is worth buying and using. And I would laugh if one of my IT guys wanted to migrate us over to OOo or anything else when what we are using is working, and from a business standpoint the ROI is clear. Even as my business grows and I need to license more workstation, 1-2 hours a week of an employing futzing around with OO or some alternative isn't worth the savings of license fees. And people that say that Office 2003 is more difficult to use than OO have probably never used Office at more than a passing glance or as a glorified text editor.
Just keep in mind that in a sole proprietorship, that your personally liable for your business. Most small businesses can cruise along just fine, but if you are worth a lot (house, car, etc), I wouldn't risk it. Also, if you plan on posting things that are potentially litigious on your weblog, I would consider at least a LLC. I am not sure if there are messed up laws that could potentially tie you up in litigation from the actions of your users, who knows (a lawyer, definitely not me).
You can usually do that for under $250, and under $500 with a lawyers help. I seem to remember thats how the costs for us, our small logistics software house, to incorporate LLC in Nevada.
Good luck with your venture!
"Browser applications are also a miserable failure, because they're tacked onto a system designed to do something completely different. The browser window itself can't update, so you need to run in Flash, ActiveX, or Java, none of which are particularly good at full scale applications. Flash is too animation-centric for persistent data like that, Java never hit its stride (see the WordPerfect in Browser in Java debacle), and ActiveX is ActiveX. Comparing the elegance of remote Xwindows or straight SSH to browser applications shows just how far behind we are."
Hense the entire push to AJAX.
Get with the times man.
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
"-- prefer reality unfiltered because I'm not a coward - Me 11/27/2005"
I have to laugh when people quote themselves in their own signature.
It's almost as nauseating as people on http://www.kuro5hin.org/ quoting each other.
I have been playing quite a bit, and I haven't seen anything like this happen yet.
As a matter of fact I have been SHOCKED at how well the service (xbox live) has worked in light of having so many new people slamming the service. My bet is that there is a heat related issue with this guys console, but I don't see what the story is as he can just return it and get another unit if it's defective.
On that note, I don't own a regular xbox, and didn't really know what to expect with xbox live. My out of game experience was pretty amazing. I have been having a absolute blast racing online with others on PGR, I haven't even bothered opening the 3 other games I purchased.
I don't understand why so many people are giving this thing such bad press and negative commentary, as it's provided me with some of the most entertaining online gaming I have yet experienced. I can jump on and be racing other gamers in less than 3 minutes, and have had white-knuckles due to such close races, the service does a great job at pitching you against other like-skilled racers.
"When we've finished digesting all the recent announcements, I suspect we may well be porting our application from MySQL to either Oracle or PostgreSQL on Solaris, for sound commercial and support reasons."
I have been running PGSQL on Linux since the 6.0 series. I would consider myself a prime candidate (small company, we run all of our customer service and core telecommunications service products (IVR) on top of the PGSQL database. I just don't see enough value-add to buy Sun equipment to run their flavor of PGSQL. I am not trying to flame or troll, or turf, whatever.
I just historically haven't had any problems running pgsql and don't honestly believe that having a sun engineer on the phone helping me fix a problem or running on solaris will really provide me any more stability than running RHEL3 Linux on Dell equipment. I would love to see a non-bias assesement of why I would want to switch to Solaris.
In my opinion, if they want to go after the small business or small databsae market they need to demonstrate:
1. How they really can bail you out of a tough spot.
2. How can solaris really make my life easier when I am reasonably comfortable using Linux.
3. Why would Postgres run better on Solaris than Linux? (advanced debugging capabilities seems like something that the pgsql engineers would want, but not me).
Yup, same model I am sure they are using with the GoogleCache proxy and WiFi secure tunneling software.
I'll be getting one, but probably not for the same reasons some will.
1. I am an early adopter, call it a hobby.. Call it foolish. For me it's fun.
2. I have HD TV and am anxious to get full use of it.
3. I have friends that are buying it, and I am looking forward to online play with them.
4. I have a Media Center PC and look forward to using the MCE blade on the xbox to play my mp3's & recorded shows.
I wouldn't say I am 'chomping at the bit', but I am happy to get my new toy and feel for the $, it packs a decent entertainment value for me.
yup, seems that it's down or simply not working yet. (who knows, maybe it got overloaded)
Ah, thanks for the insight, it makes a bit more sense now.
"I fact, I've known people who have gotten divorced because the man left the church. The man refused to do any of the temple unmarrage thingies. The wife was not allowed to have another temple marrage because she's still sealed to her divorced, inactive husband."
I just can't imagine what an emotional roller-coaster it must be for women who are honestly stuck in the middle of a situation where they honestly believe they are going to be damned because they can't get their husband to cancel his membership. I also wonder how many women get shafted at the alter or pre-marriage because they couldn't get their situation sorted and the husband-to-be wouldn't bother marriage someone that wasn't sanctified by their church.
Seems like a system that fosters a strange personal emotional abuse or anything but happiness to me.
"While most mainstream Mormons don't do that, they can still have multiple marrages. How? Well, then legal marrage ends at death; the religous marrage doesn't. It isn't uncommon to see older members outlive their wives and re-marry."
I am sorry, but this is completely wrong. I am not Mormon today, but my parents are and having had a parent that was killed in an accident while I was young, I learned how this process really worked.
After my mother remarried my now step-dad, they where married but not sealed. My mother couldn't get sealed to my step-dad because she was already sealed. As I understand the system you can't get re-sealed for "time-and-eternity" unless you temple-divorce. As I saw this was always a source of pain for my step-father who did believe in this religion.
I personally find the entire system to be untrue and don't believe in it, but there is nothing shameful or inherently wrong about how the church currently is running the temple marriage as I see it, and further more I know of fewer organizations that push harder for the family unit to remain in tact.
Yup, I remember the first time I realized there was other people that where as fanatical about communicating with others as I was. The world of BBS opened up my eyes to shareware and other tools that I had no idea existed as well.
Door games anyone?
The local Eau Claire, WI BBSUG was a bunch of old Hams. I made friends that I will remember for the rest of my life through that community.
The BBS community played a large role in to decide that computer programming and networking was definately where I wanted to be as I got older, and I can say with confidence that the BBS world changed who I am today to a large scale what I am doing and have been able to achieve.
I look back on those BBS years with the fondest memories of learning and exploration.
How is iLBC crappy?
From my experience with it, it only sounds crapy when it's being transcoded from a bad source. iLBC => iLBC sounds great.
On that same note you could say that g729 or ulaw is crappy, but it's all depending on how your creating the stream.
iLBC is a GREAT protocol, as can be heard on a skype->skype call (which uses iLBC).
Indeed, and well put.
I have recently been chucking my old machines and built a very quiet Athlon (not silent as I hoped, but a water-cooled CPU would pretty much make it silent...) and a silent power supply.
I can crank up the fans if I want to play games, but typically I am not doing anything that requires so much cooling.
I also bought a mac-mini for work, I spend most of my time in email clients , web browsers and unix terminals.. so a mac seems to work fine for what I need to be doing. I love the fact I can go into my office and work on my computer and not so much as a hum is comming from my computer. My thinkpad makes more noise (and thats almost absolutely silent).
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/index.html
Cheers
First, make a plan of what your trying to do.. then go browse apache Commons.
There have been many times I got through a project, or part way into it.. and realized I could of saved a TON of time by using a tool from that resource.
If your doing anything with XML, it's worth taking a look at JDom.
Make sure your using Eclipse, and if your doing web based projects.. I highly recomend http://myeclipseide.com. I have been a subscribe for a while, and have really enjoyed the enhancements that their modules bring for web development.
WoW has all but destroyed the player base of DAoC. Their endgame relies on a large number of people playing, and unfortunately it's spun into a rut thats going to take a miracle to fix. WoW and EQ2 have finally nailed the coffin shut on that game imho.
Mythic has had no real compeition in their niche until now. I hope they enjoyed their hayday while they had it.
Yup, JIRA is where it's at.
We have used bugzilla for a few years, and just made the transition to JIRA due to the ability to better track all parts of the development process.
I would even go so far to say that JIRA has been the best improvement to my development team in the 3 years I have been on it.
And I find that both can have a place on a gamers shelf. One can't really be compared to the other, as they are both MASSIVELY different in scope and design.
WoW: Great game, fast paced, very simple to understand and navigate. My only grief with the game is that the character development can be quite cookie cutter. The talents are pretty liner, and there seems to be preferred path for PVP performance. WoW does at least have a plan for PVP. Though, it's not all implemented, it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.
EQ2: MASSIVE world. Your put right in the middle of an epic-sized story that makes me feel as if I am a key part of the shaping of the world. The character development is quite profound, almost to the degree of Marrowind type games (though, not quite so flexible). I love this and it makes me feel that I am in control of my character and I can make something unique and interesting as I like him. The world is beautiful and I find it a pleasure to walk around and explore. I find that the death penalty is a bit rougher than WoW, and solo play is getting harder and harder at 13-14+. EQ2 has a really neat web-based character report. You can see almost all aspects of your character from the web site.
Here is mine:
http://eq2players.station.sony.com/en/ppla
All in all, I find them both a pleasure to play. I have spent the last few years playing another not-so-unpopular game with a very Realm-versus-Realm oriented aspect of endgame. I have found both of these games a huge upgrade over what I hvae been playing, and my wife might even play WoW with me which would be great. The barrier to entry to play previous MOG's where too great for her to feel like she was having fun.
I don't believe that casual or hardcore gamer types will be disappointed with either. Both of which would definitely give you the $50 retail value if only played for the 30 free days.
I will likely have accounts open on both of the games and try to divide my free time between them. I will let the game that has the best customer support, interesting game play and a company that cares about the long term playability of their game and not looking to make a short dollar today.
"Sure, it would cannibalize some of their Mac and Windows market, but I feel pretty confident that there is a significant number of people that are waiting for this offering. While we can argue all day about some of Adobe's policies and other doings, I tip my hat to them on this one."
How so? I would believe it would have the opposite effect. If they can get people onto linux to use Photoshop, that means that people can run other tools that they have on linux, where their competition is late comming to the game on the linux desktop. Sounds like they could get some tie-in across multiple products this way, not canabalize their windows market.
If they where giving away photoshop for free this might be the case, but I would bet this won't be the case.
I played it for a few hours and it just seemed like Diablo3, and was pretty boring in my opinion.
Others might find it fun, but I couldn't get into it.. no matter how hard I WANTED to.
"Combine this with their premature launch date and lack of real outreach to new MMOGers, and things look grim for SOE. If they don't wake up in a hurry, Blizzard's gonna eat their lunch."
I agree with everything you said.
What would you like to bet that Blizzard anounces their open beta for the day EQ2 is supposed to go live.
I am sure that they are going to do something to try and rain on Sony's launch-day parade.
I surely hope that EQ2 does do well. I would hate to see Blizzard left as the only player standing. After playing DAoC for 3 years, Mythic customers loose big because of the lack of real compitition in the RvR space 'niche' (if you can call it that), that DAoC occupies. I know that people will be leaving that game in droves to WoW, not one person I know is going to do anything more than just 'try' EQ2 , at best, along with WoW and pick the one that intrest them the most.
DAoC doesn't have many people that I know who really are into the crazy treadmill grind to only get either more treadmill with another release or raid content.
Trials of Atlantis really ruined DAoC for most people I game with, myself included. Hopefully Blizzard will learn from that mistake.
And really will aid in the retention of players. A lot of the interaction and interest that keeps me playing my games is the friends that I game with . Our guild has it's own similar services, but many people don't have the technical ability to do such a thing themselves.
I hope WoW will offer a competitive service.
I know that a lot of small businesses where started offering services such as this to the exact same market. I am sure they aren't happy to see Sony jump right into their space.