I started off on C64s and Apple ][s in middle school, which upgraded to Mac LCs around 8th grade. Started off in BASIC, fiddled with stuff like Hypercard under the Mac.
That summer as I was going into high school my parents got me a Tandy PC1000. Family friends helped me with upgrades, software, etc. I eventually got my hands on a full copy of QuickBASIC, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C. I wrote my own database app, even wrote my own mouse drivers in assembler, linked them in through C and QB, started expanding my own library of that sort of code.
My first 'paid' gig was for a friend of my father who owned a TV repair business. I wrote a program that monitored a modem to pick up caller ID info and store it in a database; searchable, printed reports, etc. Networked it to pass the caller ID info to PCs in other buildings on his property. My 'payment' was in hardware, software, and 100 packs of 3.5" floppies, which I was more than happy with at the time.
I went to college for CS, but learned more in my job at a research institute on campus than I did in the classes. I actually had a couple professors who, after the first semester with them, just came to me later with "You know this already, don't you? Here's the test schedule, just show up for the exams if you want." I dropped out after a couple years and managed to get a decent job before the first major dot bomb bust.
I did some coding for a year or two after that, but mostly moved up the food chain. Most of my coding these days consists of shell scripts, awk, some PHP, but little 'new development.' Today I effectively operate as a liaison between support teams and development teams since I have the skillset to give a better technical analysis of an issue as well as the coding background to debug issues as well as know what is and is not possible on the dev side.
I'm guessing Onion News Empire is one of them, just started watching the pilot a few minutes ago. A few recognizable actors (not just a bunch of unknowns), funny so far.
Basically it's a big "fuck you" to the incumbent ISPs and a wake-up call to the public as to how badly we're being screwed by those ISPs. Data caps, incredible markups for marginal speed increases, etc. Google is proving those are all bullshit and still profitable.
I did something like this (though more sysadmin stuff than anything), but I worked for a former co-worker who started his own full-time contracting business, mainly web design work. I got paid by the hour for odds and ends, but I was there to relieve his workload and add some fine-point expertise. If something came up support-wise it was on his shoulders to find someone to handle it if I wasn't available. It worked out pretty well for both of us. If I was doing more coding work then it would have been even better as that is where his skills were so he could fully support it himself.
Exactly. Hand someone a Mini-14 and an AR-15 and ask which is more dangerous, and I bet you most anti-gun idiots will pick the AR-15, despite the fact that they are basically the same guns with different furniture.
I'm sure this was a troll, but I'll reply anyway. In general, cops are covered by federal law allowing concealed carry when off duty. There is no need for any active duty cop (and most reserve types) to have a CCW license.
Actually, Linksys *used to* produce some decent gear a couple years before the acquisition. In the last 2-4 years prior their quality went completely to crap. I've always wondered what the hell Cisco was thinking basically damaging their reputation by continuing to manufacture the same garbage Linksys had been producing the last couple years.
This is one reason why I got a Nook Color. I mainly wanted an eReader, but people had rooted the NC, provided instructions on how to fully 'open up' its copy of Android to essentially use it as a full tablet, and it perfectly suffices in that role for my uses.
I've known people who have done similar getting the really cheap no-name Android-based eReaders to use as an entry-level or small tablet and have worked just great.
I was one of those who did CS in the mid 90's and dropped out after two years, in my case due to money. I was stuck working on-campus, and even the highest paying job on campus under their work hour restrictions wasn't enough.
I moved back home, got an entry level job, and advanced very quickly. By the time my friends finished their degrees I was making a good salary while they spent years working help desks for minimum wage.
To some extent, I got lucky. I found the right employer at the right time, before the first big 'bubble burst' in the IT world.
Years later after an acquisition and facing eventual layoffs, I spent at least a year looking for a job. I had two places where former co-workers were at that could provide great references and increase my odds. One was an energy company who absolutely would not even look at a resume that didn't have a degree on it. Even their cable monkeys had to have a BS at minimum. Another was a financial institution who at least granted me an interview as a courtesy to my former co-worker but had absolutely no intentions of hiring anyone without a degree.
I tried a major hosting company. It sounded like I was set for the job, though I didn't like much of what I saw--the general staffing there looked like a freshman dorm on laundry day. That didn't go--apparently they didn't want any more senior staffers, just more college kids for minimum wage.
I finally ended up with a software vendor we used who knew my work well, and advanced from there.
I've had people trying to get me to sign up for jobs at newer government data centers that opened up in the area recently. No go there--no job anywhere near my salary level without a degree.
Big Corporate America has too many unqualified screeners in HR.
Small Corporate America is far too concerned about having to pay an employee too much, and are willing to sacrifice what they get for it. Eventually this will come to a head, just like outsourcing to India. When you have to pay ten kids $8 an hour to do what one qualified person making $35 an hour could do you either learn that lesson and thrive, or stick to your ways and die.
- A cordless drill kept charged in the server room can definitely speed up SHTF moments. Keep a good set of miscellaneous screwdriver bits and drill bits with it. - Vice grips. It never fails that you find a screw, bolt or nut that are too stripped. Get a regular pair and a needle-nose pair. I even have a miniature one that is great for tight spaces. - For when the above fail, an E-Z-Out bit set or reverse drill set for when you finish breaking the head off the screw/bolt. - If you deal with serial at all (yes, it still exists in many modern datacenters), you may want to get a BlackBox sniffer setup, a good BOB (break out box), etc. - You want at minimum a basic RJ-45 UTP tester, preferably a large multi-type cable tester. A big expensive unit like a Fluke Netmeter may be great to have, but it will take a long time to pay off when there are other ways to troubleshoot issues like that. - If you ever work with 66 or 110 blocks with any regularity, get yourself a good spring-loaded punch, usually a Paladin. If you don't get one with a pick, get a basic set of picks as well to keep with it. - Small prybars. The first time you go to change batteries in a UPS and find out the old ones have swollen badly you'll be glad you had them. A pair of very large flat head screwdrivers can substitute, but be prepared to break them.
Not counting ridiculously expensive stuff like Fluke Netmeters, Sunset xDSL kit, and other specialized gear, my basic sysadmin-oriented toolbag is probably around $1500 USD. Unfortunately in my current environment we have no tools around so I have to bring in all my personal gear for it. Very annoying.
The first time you find yourself needing one it will pay for itself in the labor saved. No matter how anal someone might be with labeling cables, you will always find a need for something like this.
Yep, I own all of his books. Honestly I didn't care for the road show as much just because it completely misses the depth of teaching he always did on Good Eats. There were already way too many shows of that type on the air anyway.
I do agree that he made the US version of Iron Chef good rather than just tolerable.
BTW, that 155 better be Celsius. It seems high, but any other 155 (K, F, or R) would be horrid.
Then your ratios are WAY off and / or you are leaving it in the brine WAY too long.
And 155F lets it coast to 165F when rested, the FDA approved safe temperature for the white meat. I know from experience that below that the fucker is RAW.
I've learned two big things over the years, both from Alton Brown, the geek god of cooking:
- A brine beats injections. I used to inject, now I brine. I don't use his brine recipe though. Mine has the usual salt and sugar, but I also use broth, some apple juice, a cayenne-based pepper sauce (Frank's, Louisiana, etc.), butter and herbs (mostly sage of course). I warm it enough to dissolve everything and get the flavors mingling, chill it, and brine the turkey fully submerged, breast-down overnight. I'm about to go get my started right after I finish this post! I also reserve some of this brine to pool up inside the cavity of the turkey when I first throw it in the oven.
- Use a real thermometer. If you use his method (the hot start then foil shield) you'll pull it when the breast reaches 155 and after resting your white and dark meat temperatures should be dead-on.
I understand where you're coming from, but be careful exactly what you imply.
That is the entire point Dawkins is arguing against. Call a spade a spade. Sooner or later societal convention has to stand aside for the greater good.
Back when I was in high school and using Win 3.1.1 on top of DOS 5, I came across a new copy of OS/2 Warp at a local computer shop, heavily discounted. I used it through my first year of college, where I got more and more into using Unix-related software under OS/2, thanks to the great porting work done by the community. I was regularly using vi, Apache, Perl, etc all directly under OS/2.
In school I used everything from DEC Unix (DEC OSF/1 on Alphas) to HP-UX on HPPA RISC boxes to, eventually, Linux, mostly in my on-campus job working at a research institute. That drove me to switch to Linux personally.
After dropping out of college due to money, I made my way quickly up the food chain at my first 'real' job. We had a mix of HP-UX and SCO in house, and no proper networking (10b2 all using "example" IPs out of the manuals--which were not private-space IPs). I modernized us and slowly introduced Linux into the mix. At the same time our primary software vendor (who I later went on to work for) started adopting Linux as well. We eventually displaced all of our HP-UX boxes and infiltrated the SCO install base with more and more Linux systems. Later on, when I went to work for that vendor, we got almost all of the installed SCO base replaced with Linux as well.
Long story short, using FOSS under OS/2 opened the door for me, while using it at work sealed the deal.
Completely pointless. Providing a picture provides more data. If the celebrity they show is someone that looks young and healthy you're obviously more likely to think they would still be alive; likewise if they look like Mel Gibson after yet another bender, or a pic of Lindsey Lohan during one of her heavily coked-out phases you'd probably figure they were dead by now.
Being from China, this has marginally more credibility than if it came out of North Korea.
I'd certainly love to see quantum entanglement become a usable means of communication, but all of the better minds than my own I've read say that due to uncertainty principles this would be impossible.
(Background: I've dealt with the custom software business in a different industry; I have no restaurant experience outside of watching every single episode of stuff like Kitchen Nightmares--US and UK. My industry does operate in a manner similar to how restaurants would seem to function.)
The biggest mistake I see out of smaller businesses is that they believe that massive amounts of redundancy. Will people die if your computers go down? Yes, spend the money. Is your business actually at risk of failing due to two days of your computers being down? Yes, the expense is justified.
So what is this software used for in a restaurant? Taking orders and distributing them to the appropriate kitchen stations. Maintaining inventory. Helping manage re-ordering. Maybe it extends to timekeeping for employees. Less likely to HR and accounting beyond that.
If you fall into this category, then you just go to paper if the computers fail. Keep a supply of paper ticket books around. Make sure you always keep a copy of daily reports of sales and inventory (either a hardcopy or a PDF or otherwise exported copy on disk on another system). If you have to go to paper then once you are back online you simply bring your inventories back up to date. If you have to place an order while your system is down, go off your last inventory report and your sales since then to do a replenishment order.
Not having technical staff on hand shouldn't matter. If it fails, they go manual then they call you or whoever their normal chain of support would be. You reconcile things as needed once the system is back online.
The world will not end if you have to rely on paper and calculators for a day or two.
Now if you really have the money to spend and really feel that your business is in serious danger by losing your computers for a day then go ahead with the expense.
Many posters above covered the basics at this point. The high end solution would be full redundancy of hardware and software. Dual servers with dual everything, live replication, etc. This is by far the most expensive route, but of course the most reliable and lowest down-time.
My choice?
We're talking about a restaurant. I can't possibly see this having a serious horsepower requirement. I would indeed have a basic server, but I would run the database (and server portion of your POS system, if it has one) inside a VM, probably a free or one of the less expensive versions of VMWare. I would regularly shut it down and copy the VM to either a second (inexpensive) server or, better yet, to a manager's desktop PC that has enough RAM to run the VM. Regular database dumps would be copied as well.
If it fails, you bring up the VM copy, load the last DB and you should be good to go.
Not having technical staff on hand shouldn't be an issue. You're a restaurant owner, and if the business is doing well at all you are probably working 80+ hour weeks and on call at a moment's notice any other time that the business is open. If you really can't, then get yourself a regular computer consultant that knows what knows your recovery plans and is on-call as needed. It may cost you a couple hundred a month to have one basically on retainer, but that's vastly less expensive than hiring dedicated technical staff.
Don't forget things like firewalling your servers if at all possible, and keeping at least one spare of your client PCs ready to swap in (particularly your receipt and ticket printers!).
My only real issue with eBooks, period, is cost. Why the fuck does the ebook cost more than a paperback copy?!?!? Why does it usually cost as much as the damned hardcover?!?!
eBooks were supposed to bring about a revolution. More people published, high profits for everyone involved, all while still costing radically less for the consumer. Instead it's become a pure money grab.
This sounds perfectly good to me. If someone has voluntarily chosen to become an infectious disease vector I'd consider it a positive if my doctor barred them from their practice.
Retail store decided to move the main front counter of the store. It wasn't permanently fixed to the flooring, but was hard-wired in with electrical and serial connections (serial terminals and printers). The decided it would be okay to just put eight people to work and lift the whole thing at once to drag it over about a foot. With the serial terminals and printers on it. Plugged in. Turned on.
After a couple inches they got a nice *POP POP POP* and puff of smoke off each piece of gear. Not just on the counter, but every piece of gear in the entire store, including the server. We had to send someone in a truck 400 miles with an entire store worth of new gear.
Once I got the server back in my hands, I saw pretty good evidence of what happened. When I opened it up, half of the multi-port serial card was burned out. Most of the ICs were literally vaporized, some to the point of leaving burn marks in the bottom of the case as well.
The best we can guess was that hot and perhaps ground on the incoming electrical Romex into the counter were shorted together, frying the gear on the counter, and sending the surge back through the serial connection (done over CAT5) to the server, and managed to get back out of the serial card to all the other gear in the store before the connections vaporized. The CAT5, however, seemed to have fared well with no obvious damage.
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I started off on C64s and Apple ][s in middle school, which upgraded to Mac LCs around 8th grade. Started off in BASIC, fiddled with stuff like Hypercard under the Mac.
That summer as I was going into high school my parents got me a Tandy PC1000. Family friends helped me with upgrades, software, etc. I eventually got my hands on a full copy of QuickBASIC, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C. I wrote my own database app, even wrote my own mouse drivers in assembler, linked them in through C and QB, started expanding my own library of that sort of code.
My first 'paid' gig was for a friend of my father who owned a TV repair business. I wrote a program that monitored a modem to pick up caller ID info and store it in a database; searchable, printed reports, etc. Networked it to pass the caller ID info to PCs in other buildings on his property. My 'payment' was in hardware, software, and 100 packs of 3.5" floppies, which I was more than happy with at the time.
I went to college for CS, but learned more in my job at a research institute on campus than I did in the classes. I actually had a couple professors who, after the first semester with them, just came to me later with "You know this already, don't you? Here's the test schedule, just show up for the exams if you want." I dropped out after a couple years and managed to get a decent job before the first major dot bomb bust.
I did some coding for a year or two after that, but mostly moved up the food chain. Most of my coding these days consists of shell scripts, awk, some PHP, but little 'new development.' Today I effectively operate as a liaison between support teams and development teams since I have the skillset to give a better technical analysis of an issue as well as the coding background to debug issues as well as know what is and is not possible on the dev side.
I'm guessing Onion News Empire is one of them, just started watching the pilot a few minutes ago. A few recognizable actors (not just a bunch of unknowns), funny so far.
Hopefully others work out this well too.
Basically it's a big "fuck you" to the incumbent ISPs and a wake-up call to the public as to how badly we're being screwed by those ISPs. Data caps, incredible markups for marginal speed increases, etc. Google is proving those are all bullshit and still profitable.
In other news, it was proposed to put a new tax on airline tickets in order to help sustain the horse & buggy industry.
I did something like this (though more sysadmin stuff than anything), but I worked for a former co-worker who started his own full-time contracting business, mainly web design work. I got paid by the hour for odds and ends, but I was there to relieve his workload and add some fine-point expertise. If something came up support-wise it was on his shoulders to find someone to handle it if I wasn't available. It worked out pretty well for both of us. If I was doing more coding work then it would have been even better as that is where his skills were so he could fully support it himself.
Exactly. Hand someone a Mini-14 and an AR-15 and ask which is more dangerous, and I bet you most anti-gun idiots will pick the AR-15, despite the fact that they are basically the same guns with different furniture.
I'm sure this was a troll, but I'll reply anyway. In general, cops are covered by federal law allowing concealed carry when off duty. There is no need for any active duty cop (and most reserve types) to have a CCW license.
Wish list:
A real keyboard.
Actually, Linksys *used to* produce some decent gear a couple years before the acquisition. In the last 2-4 years prior their quality went completely to crap. I've always wondered what the hell Cisco was thinking basically damaging their reputation by continuing to manufacture the same garbage Linksys had been producing the last couple years.
This is one reason why I got a Nook Color. I mainly wanted an eReader, but people had rooted the NC, provided instructions on how to fully 'open up' its copy of Android to essentially use it as a full tablet, and it perfectly suffices in that role for my uses.
I've known people who have done similar getting the really cheap no-name Android-based eReaders to use as an entry-level or small tablet and have worked just great.
I was one of those who did CS in the mid 90's and dropped out after two years, in my case due to money. I was stuck working on-campus, and even the highest paying job on campus under their work hour restrictions wasn't enough.
I moved back home, got an entry level job, and advanced very quickly. By the time my friends finished their degrees I was making a good salary while they spent years working help desks for minimum wage.
To some extent, I got lucky. I found the right employer at the right time, before the first big 'bubble burst' in the IT world.
Years later after an acquisition and facing eventual layoffs, I spent at least a year looking for a job. I had two places where former co-workers were at that could provide great references and increase my odds. One was an energy company who absolutely would not even look at a resume that didn't have a degree on it. Even their cable monkeys had to have a BS at minimum. Another was a financial institution who at least granted me an interview as a courtesy to my former co-worker but had absolutely no intentions of hiring anyone without a degree.
I tried a major hosting company. It sounded like I was set for the job, though I didn't like much of what I saw--the general staffing there looked like a freshman dorm on laundry day. That didn't go--apparently they didn't want any more senior staffers, just more college kids for minimum wage.
I finally ended up with a software vendor we used who knew my work well, and advanced from there.
I've had people trying to get me to sign up for jobs at newer government data centers that opened up in the area recently. No go there--no job anywhere near my salary level without a degree.
Big Corporate America has too many unqualified screeners in HR.
Small Corporate America is far too concerned about having to pay an employee too much, and are willing to sacrifice what they get for it. Eventually this will come to a head, just like outsourcing to India. When you have to pay ten kids $8 an hour to do what one qualified person making $35 an hour could do you either learn that lesson and thrive, or stick to your ways and die.
Trying not to duplicate stuff above..
- A cordless drill kept charged in the server room can definitely speed up SHTF moments. Keep a good set of miscellaneous screwdriver bits and drill bits with it.
- Vice grips. It never fails that you find a screw, bolt or nut that are too stripped. Get a regular pair and a needle-nose pair. I even have a miniature one that is great for tight spaces.
- For when the above fail, an E-Z-Out bit set or reverse drill set for when you finish breaking the head off the screw/bolt.
- If you deal with serial at all (yes, it still exists in many modern datacenters), you may want to get a BlackBox sniffer setup, a good BOB (break out box), etc.
- You want at minimum a basic RJ-45 UTP tester, preferably a large multi-type cable tester. A big expensive unit like a Fluke Netmeter may be great to have, but it will take a long time to pay off when there are other ways to troubleshoot issues like that.
- If you ever work with 66 or 110 blocks with any regularity, get yourself a good spring-loaded punch, usually a Paladin. If you don't get one with a pick, get a basic set of picks as well to keep with it.
- Small prybars. The first time you go to change batteries in a UPS and find out the old ones have swollen badly you'll be glad you had them. A pair of very large flat head screwdrivers can substitute, but be prepared to break them.
Not counting ridiculously expensive stuff like Fluke Netmeters, Sunset xDSL kit, and other specialized gear, my basic sysadmin-oriented toolbag is probably around $1500 USD. Unfortunately in my current environment we have no tools around so I have to bring in all my personal gear for it. Very annoying.
They cost a little (if you look around you can find a decent one under $75), but I'd highly recommend a Greenlee like this kit:
http://www.amazon.com/Greenlee-701K-G-Professional-Probe-Tracing/dp/B0042VII7A/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1354174642&sr=8-4&keywords=tone+generator
The first time you find yourself needing one it will pay for itself in the labor saved. No matter how anal someone might be with labeling cables, you will always find a need for something like this.
Yep, I own all of his books. Honestly I didn't care for the road show as much just because it completely misses the depth of teaching he always did on Good Eats. There were already way too many shows of that type on the air anyway.
I do agree that he made the US version of Iron Chef good rather than just tolerable.
It makes good meat taste like ham.
BTW, that 155 better be Celsius. It seems high, but any other 155 (K, F, or R) would be horrid.
Then your ratios are WAY off and / or you are leaving it in the brine WAY too long.
And 155F lets it coast to 165F when rested, the FDA approved safe temperature for the white meat. I know from experience that below that the fucker is RAW.
I've learned two big things over the years, both from Alton Brown, the geek god of cooking:
- A brine beats injections. I used to inject, now I brine. I don't use his brine recipe though. Mine has the usual salt and sugar, but I also use broth, some apple juice, a cayenne-based pepper sauce (Frank's, Louisiana, etc.), butter and herbs (mostly sage of course). I warm it enough to dissolve everything and get the flavors mingling, chill it, and brine the turkey fully submerged, breast-down overnight. I'm about to go get my started right after I finish this post! I also reserve some of this brine to pool up inside the cavity of the turkey when I first throw it in the oven.
- Use a real thermometer. If you use his method (the hot start then foil shield) you'll pull it when the breast reaches 155 and after resting your white and dark meat temperatures should be dead-on.
I understand where you're coming from, but be careful exactly what you imply.
That is the entire point Dawkins is arguing against. Call a spade a spade. Sooner or later societal convention has to stand aside for the greater good.
Back when I was in high school and using Win 3.1.1 on top of DOS 5, I came across a new copy of OS/2 Warp at a local computer shop, heavily discounted. I used it through my first year of college, where I got more and more into using Unix-related software under OS/2, thanks to the great porting work done by the community. I was regularly using vi, Apache, Perl, etc all directly under OS/2.
In school I used everything from DEC Unix (DEC OSF/1 on Alphas) to HP-UX on HPPA RISC boxes to, eventually, Linux, mostly in my on-campus job working at a research institute. That drove me to switch to Linux personally.
After dropping out of college due to money, I made my way quickly up the food chain at my first 'real' job. We had a mix of HP-UX and SCO in house, and no proper networking (10b2 all using "example" IPs out of the manuals--which were not private-space IPs). I modernized us and slowly introduced Linux into the mix. At the same time our primary software vendor (who I later went on to work for) started adopting Linux as well. We eventually displaced all of our HP-UX boxes and infiltrated the SCO install base with more and more Linux systems. Later on, when I went to work for that vendor, we got almost all of the installed SCO base replaced with Linux as well.
Long story short, using FOSS under OS/2 opened the door for me, while using it at work sealed the deal.
Completely pointless. Providing a picture provides more data. If the celebrity they show is someone that looks young and healthy you're obviously more likely to think they would still be alive; likewise if they look like Mel Gibson after yet another bender, or a pic of Lindsey Lohan during one of her heavily coked-out phases you'd probably figure they were dead by now.
Being from China, this has marginally more credibility than if it came out of North Korea.
I'd certainly love to see quantum entanglement become a usable means of communication, but all of the better minds than my own I've read say that due to uncertainty principles this would be impossible.
(Background: I've dealt with the custom software business in a different industry; I have no restaurant experience outside of watching every single episode of stuff like Kitchen Nightmares--US and UK. My industry does operate in a manner similar to how restaurants would seem to function.)
The biggest mistake I see out of smaller businesses is that they believe that massive amounts of redundancy. Will people die if your computers go down? Yes, spend the money. Is your business actually at risk of failing due to two days of your computers being down? Yes, the expense is justified.
So what is this software used for in a restaurant? Taking orders and distributing them to the appropriate kitchen stations. Maintaining inventory. Helping manage re-ordering. Maybe it extends to timekeeping for employees. Less likely to HR and accounting beyond that.
If you fall into this category, then you just go to paper if the computers fail. Keep a supply of paper ticket books around. Make sure you always keep a copy of daily reports of sales and inventory (either a hardcopy or a PDF or otherwise exported copy on disk on another system). If you have to go to paper then once you are back online you simply bring your inventories back up to date. If you have to place an order while your system is down, go off your last inventory report and your sales since then to do a replenishment order.
Not having technical staff on hand shouldn't matter. If it fails, they go manual then they call you or whoever their normal chain of support would be. You reconcile things as needed once the system is back online.
The world will not end if you have to rely on paper and calculators for a day or two.
Now if you really have the money to spend and really feel that your business is in serious danger by losing your computers for a day then go ahead with the expense.
Many posters above covered the basics at this point. The high end solution would be full redundancy of hardware and software. Dual servers with dual everything, live replication, etc. This is by far the most expensive route, but of course the most reliable and lowest down-time.
My choice?
We're talking about a restaurant. I can't possibly see this having a serious horsepower requirement. I would indeed have a basic server, but I would run the database (and server portion of your POS system, if it has one) inside a VM, probably a free or one of the less expensive versions of VMWare. I would regularly shut it down and copy the VM to either a second (inexpensive) server or, better yet, to a manager's desktop PC that has enough RAM to run the VM. Regular database dumps would be copied as well.
If it fails, you bring up the VM copy, load the last DB and you should be good to go.
Not having technical staff on hand shouldn't be an issue. You're a restaurant owner, and if the business is doing well at all you are probably working 80+ hour weeks and on call at a moment's notice any other time that the business is open. If you really can't, then get yourself a regular computer consultant that knows what knows your recovery plans and is on-call as needed. It may cost you a couple hundred a month to have one basically on retainer, but that's vastly less expensive than hiring dedicated technical staff.
Don't forget things like firewalling your servers if at all possible, and keeping at least one spare of your client PCs ready to swap in (particularly your receipt and ticket printers!).
My only real issue with eBooks, period, is cost. Why the fuck does the ebook cost more than a paperback copy?!?!? Why does it usually cost as much as the damned hardcover?!?!
eBooks were supposed to bring about a revolution. More people published, high profits for everyone involved, all while still costing radically less for the consumer. Instead it's become a pure money grab.
Was Scrat's acorn in there too? Did the poor little guy ever get his treasure?
This sounds perfectly good to me. If someone has voluntarily chosen to become an infectious disease vector I'd consider it a positive if my doctor barred them from their practice.
Retail store decided to move the main front counter of the store. It wasn't permanently fixed to the flooring, but was hard-wired in with electrical and serial connections (serial terminals and printers). The decided it would be okay to just put eight people to work and lift the whole thing at once to drag it over about a foot. With the serial terminals and printers on it. Plugged in. Turned on.
After a couple inches they got a nice *POP POP POP* and puff of smoke off each piece of gear. Not just on the counter, but every piece of gear in the entire store, including the server. We had to send someone in a truck 400 miles with an entire store worth of new gear.
Once I got the server back in my hands, I saw pretty good evidence of what happened. When I opened it up, half of the multi-port serial card was burned out. Most of the ICs were literally vaporized, some to the point of leaving burn marks in the bottom of the case as well.
The best we can guess was that hot and perhaps ground on the incoming electrical Romex into the counter were shorted together, frying the gear on the counter, and sending the surge back through the serial connection (done over CAT5) to the server, and managed to get back out of the serial card to all the other gear in the store before the connections vaporized. The CAT5, however, seemed to have fared well with no obvious damage.