So all of Elon's companies get $5b in subsidies? The oil industry in the US get $37.5 billion in subsidies a year, including $21 billion for production and exploration. That's a far worse proposition for this country.
Want some insulation? Start a side business.
A friend and I both started separate businesses about 18 months ago. Him, because he wanted to. Me, because I had to. His business, really a side business, is beekeeping. Mine is IT consulting, but I have a very specific focus based on a specific thing here. We're both doing really well and last weekend we compared notes. We've both kind of knew this, but this is the conclusion we came to:
His day job isn't the most thrilling and has ups and downs through the year, but he loves his side business. Me, I have a stable new business, but I might consider getting full time employment somewhere just to make my commute easier, however I love the business so much I'd have to keep parts of the work as a side business. Most people in other parts of the world seem to work like this.
End result - side business is f*cking awesome and most people just seem too lazy to do it.
If you haven't heard of the Long Now Foundation, check it out - http://longnow.org/
I think the whole paradigm is pretty cool - civilization has been in existence for 10,000 years, so let's build stuff now that will last for another 10,000 years. Surely by then any civilization will wonder what the hell we were thinking. Anyway, one of their projects is the cryptically named "Long Server".
Now, assuming humans just disappeared tomorrow, it's completely possible that Hoover Dam could run for 50-100 years and thereby entire data centers could stay up and running. That's a blink of an eye in geologic terms though.
I've got a Moto X 2013 that I love. It might not be the phone for everyone, but it does exactly what I need in the way I want it done. It's standard Verizon firmware, nothing too fancy, and fairly stable - maybe one crash or reboot needed every other month. My contract will be up in less than 6 months and the timing seems like it might be right to wait it out for one of the Project Ara phones - the modular Google phones.
Part of that is because there will likely be a Nexus reference spec phone that I can just use on a pay-as-you-go plan. I think I'm ditching the whole contract thing - I think I'd be much happier with an MVNO.
First off, backups are the solution to this - don't let important things be stored locally. (Not that it matters, the new hires always like to reinvent the wheel.)
However, a bunch of things need to be solved from an HR perspective. You need to make a checklist for HR on how to handle IT things. Things like, "Get the PIN code to their iPhone" or "Make sure social media accounts have documented passwords" that'll make your life easier.) Basically you have 6 different situations:
Senior/Upper Management - resigns - be nice. If some knowledge might be needed later, HR should have a policy to hire that person on a consulting/1099 basis if needed. Even if they're disgruntled, it should make them happy to hear that. Treat them with respect, cut off IT access as early and quickly as possible, but realistically that probably means their last day. Get their laptop and phone (if its not BYOD) their last day and check and double check accounts (VPN, Dropbox) they might have set up.
Senior/Upper Management - fired - be careful. If you're terminating senior management and they've been there a while, you need to specifically ask HR if they're going to be malicious. They probably won't (I've never run into it), but cut off account access immediately and redirect emails to somewhere appropriate. Tell HR that severance needs to be withheld until you know things are ok if you think it's appropriate.
IT staff - resigns - be nice. I always like to try to treat them like I would senior management. I've hired many a former employee on a 1099 basis later.
IT staff - fired - be paranoid. Ok, this is where you do everything BEFORE HR sits down with them. Accounts cut off, especially remote access, change admin passwords, etc. Have them go clean something the hour before you all them in and quietly take care of it all. When a regular employee quits, you don't worry about them walking into the lobby later with a laptop loaded up with vSphere Client and wirelessly deleting VM's. Check backups.
Staff - resigns - be nice. If you can handle the situations above, you can handle this. I agree with the other post about cutting off access as quickly as possible - take away shared Inboxes, etc.
Staff - fired - be careful. Get the laptop and phone, turn off access.
I remember working with a telecom guy who installed a campus wide fiber network. When he was terminated I was slightly concerned he was going to take a pair of boltcutters to a fiber ped.
I'm just chiming in to agree. NetSol sucks beyond belief and is a small nightmare to work with, to top it off, you get to pay extortion level rates for poor service.
I suspect their business model at this point is to basically rape and pillage fees from customers they still have from fifteen years ago when they were the only game in town.
I'd recommend teaching her to go out of her way to meet awesome people. Go work at that amazing summer job that pays crap but lets you be a scuba instructor. Spend a few months traveling around Thailand. Take a NOLS course. Volunteer for a fantastic organization. I imagine to some degree she'll have a safety net in life - she can always move back in with Mom. Let her know that failing won't be the end of the world and risks are worth taking.
I disagree too. My grandfather died of cancer when I was young and he spent A LOT of time with me those last few years. I look back and I know he did it to pass some wisdom on to the next generation, but unfortunately it's thirty years later and my memory of that stuff is pretty thing. The stuff I remember isn't as much as I want it to be. There were also some things I was just too young to understand and I wish he would have had a way to let me know. I love the book idea above - I really wish I knew what he enjoyed reading. He also had some pretty formative events in his life and I wish I knew what he thought of those.
Now, just be realistic - record these videos late at night after she's gone to bed or in school.
Do you really want more efficiency? Even the simplest technology adoption would help immensely help that group of self-serving luddites. How about using email to mail copies of documents in advance of actual signed copies? How about using electronic records for managing cases? How about sharing information between jurisdictions? How about better surveillance equipment so we can simply have better evidence? WHOA.. wait.. maybe not some of those.. Hm.. maybe this is a slippery slope and you should be careful what you wish for.
As everyone is suggesting, look for some specialized tools. A lot of the world uses Sharepoint and there's other benefits to using it. You can purchase Sharepoint through cloud service folks and pay a monthly per user fee. There's also some very good companies that just specialize in this stuff Although, I suspect this is a small office and no one wants to pay for a real solution.
If you can't afford to pay for a real solution, you should be prepared to invest an exceptional amount of time in a custom solution, most of which you probably won't bill them for. If they can afford to pay you the proper consulting amount, then they should pay for the right software. If you're willing to dedicated an exceptional amount of time, you can make something like SVN work. To do it with something like SVN - to do the training, to set up the automation, etc - it will likely take WAY longer than you think. And then it will likely fail. Or, it will work and you will be forced to support this until the end of time. If you're getting paid, that's awesome. If you're not, it sucks.
So what I recommend is:
stay away from this project if they won't pay the right amount for a solution
kindly recommend that they use Google Drive. It's dumb, it's simple, it provides some extra backup for them for cheap. Let them set it up. (Note: there may be regulations involved that prevent them from using a service like that. IANAL.)
Well, presumably that's what we were told at the time, but truly what was going on was Netscape throwing as much open source code out there before being gobbled up by AOL. There was zero promise AOL would continue browser development, they had a deal with IE. Netscape was very much aware that IE might be the only game in town. Much of the email code couldn't be open sourced because I don't think Netscape had full rights to the code.
Like most businesses, we're not deploying Win 8. Anyone know if there's a way to get Windows 7 preloaded by Dell on this laptop? (Business site doesn't show it, but I'm wondering if there's a gov't, educational, or other channel that does.)
Fear is the hardest thing to get over on the road to being happy. And for this purpose, I'll define happy as "doing what you want", both professionally and in the rest of your life.
If you want to keep doing what you're doing, then you should just do that. Don't worry about what your friends are doing. If you want to go start your own business, then you should just go do that. If you want to write code until you're 50, you should do that.
You're probably pretty bright and perhaps you haven't realized it yet, but because of that you'll always be employed. Don't worry about your job, you'll find another and if you want to switch career paths, it's probably easier than you think. I know those pay checks are comfy and they arrive regularly. That health insurance you probably don't use much is comforting too. You're probably afraid what might happen to your family if you decided to chance upon something different. Just keep in mind, the market or perhaps even the company you work for has very carefully determined the bare minimum it should pay you or otherwise compensate you to keep your job.
If you're already happy, keep doing what you're doing. If you're not happy, stop being afraid.
(Just a bit over a year ago the company I worked for slowly melted down over the course of the summer. Losing my job was the best thing that ever happened to me. Along the way to where I'm at now, I had to take some small risks - at each turn life got better.)
Having spent a lot of time around such things, I have to ask, who's project is this? Who wants this? Just you?
If your boss or the CEO is asking for this - great. Go do it. That's your job. (The RFID comments seem in the right ballpark.)
If a mid-level manager or you is taking this on as a pet project, then you need to do some soul searching. This doesn't seem to have much immediate benefit to the bottom line of the company. This doesn't drive revenue creation and it doesn't drive product development. Almost every time I hear someone say, "We need to track X", I rarely ever hear someone else say, "Get me the statistics on X". Tracking shit is easy, crunching the numbers to calculate metrics isn't. If this is simply compliance tracking, listen to the guy who says to install cameras and then dump it to a crapload of drives. If there's an audit, hand over the video and let the auditors sort it out.
There is a whole lot of not-your-job in here and very little hero making to be done.
AT&T.
I would hope Comcast or someone would take this news and announce they'll be expanding service to try to edge out AT&T, but we're much more likely to just end up and an announcement from Comcast that they'll do the same thing.
Where reporting is really needed is with finance. So all those lovely metrics you collect should at some level get tied to financials. That site traffic has expenses associated with it - labor, acquisition, and hard costs like data pipes. Downtime has costs associated with it. At the end of the day, I'd venture that nearly every company just uses Excel to crunch those kinds numbers. (Perhaps they get stored in a database, in which case the staff accountant who generates the reports likely exports them to Excel, makes a few modifications or fixups, and then emails them on.) So yes, in order to intelligently run your company you need to meld together all kinds of different numbers and that's where reporting typically comes into play.
Also, the higher up the food chain you go in any company, typically the older the employees are. The folks higher up typically have very little time to twiddle around with a web interface. In fact, they probably just use Outlook all day long and just send email around. So, if the report comes in via email, there's a reasonable chance they'll look at it. Not every day, but at least occasionally.
First off, if you enjoy your job and this is the single sticking point, then I would consider it to be relatively minor. In which case you either play by their rules, quit, or some how convince them to pay. If I was in the position of your manager, I think their offer is fair. For instance, it might be easy for him to get payments made for an actual training or conference, but employee expenses might involve a lot of scrutiny.
So, in your ideal world you want him to pay for it. Well, every time I've been in this situation (i.e. paying for training that wasn't budgeted), I've always told the person that if they can directly show me a cost/benefit that I'll go to bat for them and sign off on it. For example, one guy wanted us to pay for his CCNA and later CCNP training and at the time we had an external support contract in a specific area. Well, he made a convincing case we'd be able to cut back on that support contract. He was right - the first year we went from a $48000 expense to a $24000 expense and later down to a $6000 expense. I wanted to go to a conference to meet some contacts, so I told my boss we'd be able to save on custom reporting that was being outsourced. Sure enough, 3 months later a guy I met at the conference did some simple modifications to a canned report that our vendor would have charged a bunch for. I've almost always been able to send someone to training or a conference if I can directly show how it'll benefit.
1. You don't seem to be the one in control of this project. So, you are stuck on this path. Or, do you have the political capital and will to fight to get your way? You're seriously going to piss in someone's Wheaties and when you're standing in the shower in the morning, you better have a smile on your face knowing it's worth it.
2. You work for a major HVAC manufacturer. That's the most exciting thing you can do with your life? It would make me want to slit my wrists every day with a spoon.
3. You have to re-do these applications and make the data integrity robust. That means seriously looking at things like where you can get the most benefit for least amount of cost and/or where the data integrity is shit. "Oh, Jim manages our entire Northwest supply chain and inventory using that Excel spreadsheet he keeps on his desktop." I don't care if you use and Oracle product to get there or a cloud-based, super-redundant shade of the color blue. The only thing your boss's boss cares about is whether you a) prevent the company from losing money or b) make the company more money.
4. Speaking about data center room makes you sound like a systems or support person. This is an application and developer thing.
5. I'm not sure I understand where your pain points are. Customer relationship management? Supply chain? Inventory? Quality control? Payroll/HR? Quantify.
6. Do they pay you enough to worry about this? That might seem flippant, but it's very valid.
I find it a bit ironic that Microsoft has helped usher in this huge digital age where none of us really want to "own" digital content any more. We don't rush out to buy CD's any more, we subscribe to music services or stream Pandora. We don't go out and purchase DVD's, we subscribe to Netflix or rent some viewing via iTunes.
Yet, despite some little things like Office 365, Microsoft still makes its bread and butter via selling software to OEM's and volume customers that runs on hardware, both of which many of us are increasingly not wanting to own. I f*cking hate installing an OS on a server and then making sure the damn thing stays running. I'd much rather rent the VM in the cloud. Even better, just let me subscribe to your web service.
I live in Montana and I'm rather looking forward to global warming. This place is gonna be even more amazing when it gets warmer. I might even have to buy a summer home in the Yukon.
On a slightly more serious note, as Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
Obviously architecture is the biggest hindrance to what you proposed.
You could get away with some modern hardware, as long as it's x86 based. Or, maybe what you really want to consider is virtualizing an old distro on other modern hardware along with a modern distro, assuming the other modern hardware supports it.
There is some novelty in running old stuff, and I suppose everyone goes through that phase (along with the "I'm going to build a massive home network with multiple servers and run my own email" phase). But, I suspect you'll tire of it so you're just better off keeping it at a small budget and use hardware you can repurpose when you get bored with that little experiment.
First off, be sure to read that post higher up about the guy who had a similar condition due to a ski accident - heed his advice - get a brain stem specialist contacted ASAP.
Down the road, you may want to consider looking at some software that was put together and found at suecenter.org. The fella who developed it is very enthusiastic about it and willing to help out. It doesn't sound like she has enough motor movement yet for the tracker to work, but conceivably you could attach the tracker to her lip to let her control the mouse in the application.
What about some kind of DIY thing? Get a Raspberry Pi, use the GPIO pins to run some wires from the cases of each device (something thing like telco cross-connect), drive it and if the circuit breaks then send out an email or something. Bonus points for integrating a camera and snapping photos at the same time the wires break. Similarly, if the device is an always on kind of thing, just use some kind of network monitoring.
Seriously, at some point managing operations has to come second to company growth. Put your strategic vision goggles on when you leave the house every morning.
Now, as someone who has also very recently transitioned from the world of IT to money stuff, I will say you need to be very careful about it. Right now I have very few resources at my disposal to turn to when things get mucky. And, sometimes you need some accounting magic to get that balance sheet to balance (find an asset, depreciate it! have the company loan itself money!) Now, I've found it to be ridiculously easy compared to IT - oh, sure, I have a vast amount to learn, but I've found I absorb the knowledge quite fast. My recommendation to you is to begin building that safety net - find some friends who are amazing accountants (controllers) you can discuss things like P&L's and balance sheets with. Find finance friends who can give you sage advice on everything you don't know - are there tax ramifications if you make that purchase this quarter?
Then, just remember, always make sure the decision you're making isn't going to affect making payroll. If it does, what's your plan?
Slashdot Mirror
So all of Elon's companies get $5b in subsidies? The oil industry in the US get $37.5 billion in subsidies a year, including $21 billion for production and exploration. That's a far worse proposition for this country.
Want some insulation? Start a side business. A friend and I both started separate businesses about 18 months ago. Him, because he wanted to. Me, because I had to. His business, really a side business, is beekeeping. Mine is IT consulting, but I have a very specific focus based on a specific thing here. We're both doing really well and last weekend we compared notes. We've both kind of knew this, but this is the conclusion we came to: His day job isn't the most thrilling and has ups and downs through the year, but he loves his side business. Me, I have a stable new business, but I might consider getting full time employment somewhere just to make my commute easier, however I love the business so much I'd have to keep parts of the work as a side business. Most people in other parts of the world seem to work like this. End result - side business is f*cking awesome and most people just seem too lazy to do it.
If you haven't heard of the Long Now Foundation, check it out - http://longnow.org/ I think the whole paradigm is pretty cool - civilization has been in existence for 10,000 years, so let's build stuff now that will last for another 10,000 years. Surely by then any civilization will wonder what the hell we were thinking. Anyway, one of their projects is the cryptically named "Long Server". Now, assuming humans just disappeared tomorrow, it's completely possible that Hoover Dam could run for 50-100 years and thereby entire data centers could stay up and running. That's a blink of an eye in geologic terms though.
I've got a Moto X 2013 that I love. It might not be the phone for everyone, but it does exactly what I need in the way I want it done. It's standard Verizon firmware, nothing too fancy, and fairly stable - maybe one crash or reboot needed every other month. My contract will be up in less than 6 months and the timing seems like it might be right to wait it out for one of the Project Ara phones - the modular Google phones. Part of that is because there will likely be a Nexus reference spec phone that I can just use on a pay-as-you-go plan. I think I'm ditching the whole contract thing - I think I'd be much happier with an MVNO.
First off, backups are the solution to this - don't let important things be stored locally. (Not that it matters, the new hires always like to reinvent the wheel.)
However, a bunch of things need to be solved from an HR perspective. You need to make a checklist for HR on how to handle IT things. Things like, "Get the PIN code to their iPhone" or "Make sure social media accounts have documented passwords" that'll make your life easier.) Basically you have 6 different situations:
I remember working with a telecom guy who installed a campus wide fiber network. When he was terminated I was slightly concerned he was going to take a pair of boltcutters to a fiber ped.
I'm just chiming in to agree. NetSol sucks beyond belief and is a small nightmare to work with, to top it off, you get to pay extortion level rates for poor service. I suspect their business model at this point is to basically rape and pillage fees from customers they still have from fifteen years ago when they were the only game in town.
I'd recommend teaching her to go out of her way to meet awesome people. Go work at that amazing summer job that pays crap but lets you be a scuba instructor. Spend a few months traveling around Thailand. Take a NOLS course. Volunteer for a fantastic organization. I imagine to some degree she'll have a safety net in life - she can always move back in with Mom. Let her know that failing won't be the end of the world and risks are worth taking.
I disagree too. My grandfather died of cancer when I was young and he spent A LOT of time with me those last few years. I look back and I know he did it to pass some wisdom on to the next generation, but unfortunately it's thirty years later and my memory of that stuff is pretty thing. The stuff I remember isn't as much as I want it to be. There were also some things I was just too young to understand and I wish he would have had a way to let me know. I love the book idea above - I really wish I knew what he enjoyed reading. He also had some pretty formative events in his life and I wish I knew what he thought of those.
Now, just be realistic - record these videos late at night after she's gone to bed or in school.
Do you really want more efficiency? Even the simplest technology adoption would help immensely help that group of self-serving luddites. How about using email to mail copies of documents in advance of actual signed copies? How about using electronic records for managing cases? How about sharing information between jurisdictions? How about better surveillance equipment so we can simply have better evidence? WHOA.. wait.. maybe not some of those.. Hm.. maybe this is a slippery slope and you should be careful what you wish for.
BSEE, 19 years experience.
If you can't afford to pay for a real solution, you should be prepared to invest an exceptional amount of time in a custom solution, most of which you probably won't bill them for. If they can afford to pay you the proper consulting amount, then they should pay for the right software. If you're willing to dedicated an exceptional amount of time, you can make something like SVN work. To do it with something like SVN - to do the training, to set up the automation, etc - it will likely take WAY longer than you think. And then it will likely fail. Or, it will work and you will be forced to support this until the end of time. If you're getting paid, that's awesome. If you're not, it sucks.
So what I recommend is:
Well, presumably that's what we were told at the time, but truly what was going on was Netscape throwing as much open source code out there before being gobbled up by AOL. There was zero promise AOL would continue browser development, they had a deal with IE. Netscape was very much aware that IE might be the only game in town. Much of the email code couldn't be open sourced because I don't think Netscape had full rights to the code.
Like most businesses, we're not deploying Win 8. Anyone know if there's a way to get Windows 7 preloaded by Dell on this laptop? (Business site doesn't show it, but I'm wondering if there's a gov't, educational, or other channel that does.)
Fear is the hardest thing to get over on the road to being happy. And for this purpose, I'll define happy as "doing what you want", both professionally and in the rest of your life. If you want to keep doing what you're doing, then you should just do that. Don't worry about what your friends are doing. If you want to go start your own business, then you should just go do that. If you want to write code until you're 50, you should do that. You're probably pretty bright and perhaps you haven't realized it yet, but because of that you'll always be employed. Don't worry about your job, you'll find another and if you want to switch career paths, it's probably easier than you think. I know those pay checks are comfy and they arrive regularly. That health insurance you probably don't use much is comforting too. You're probably afraid what might happen to your family if you decided to chance upon something different. Just keep in mind, the market or perhaps even the company you work for has very carefully determined the bare minimum it should pay you or otherwise compensate you to keep your job. If you're already happy, keep doing what you're doing. If you're not happy, stop being afraid. (Just a bit over a year ago the company I worked for slowly melted down over the course of the summer. Losing my job was the best thing that ever happened to me. Along the way to where I'm at now, I had to take some small risks - at each turn life got better.)
Having spent a lot of time around such things, I have to ask, who's project is this? Who wants this? Just you?
If your boss or the CEO is asking for this - great. Go do it. That's your job. (The RFID comments seem in the right ballpark.)
If a mid-level manager or you is taking this on as a pet project, then you need to do some soul searching. This doesn't seem to have much immediate benefit to the bottom line of the company. This doesn't drive revenue creation and it doesn't drive product development. Almost every time I hear someone say, "We need to track X", I rarely ever hear someone else say, "Get me the statistics on X". Tracking shit is easy, crunching the numbers to calculate metrics isn't. If this is simply compliance tracking, listen to the guy who says to install cameras and then dump it to a crapload of drives. If there's an audit, hand over the video and let the auditors sort it out.
There is a whole lot of not-your-job in here and very little hero making to be done.
AT&T. I would hope Comcast or someone would take this news and announce they'll be expanding service to try to edge out AT&T, but we're much more likely to just end up and an announcement from Comcast that they'll do the same thing.
Where reporting is really needed is with finance. So all those lovely metrics you collect should at some level get tied to financials. That site traffic has expenses associated with it - labor, acquisition, and hard costs like data pipes. Downtime has costs associated with it. At the end of the day, I'd venture that nearly every company just uses Excel to crunch those kinds numbers. (Perhaps they get stored in a database, in which case the staff accountant who generates the reports likely exports them to Excel, makes a few modifications or fixups, and then emails them on.) So yes, in order to intelligently run your company you need to meld together all kinds of different numbers and that's where reporting typically comes into play. Also, the higher up the food chain you go in any company, typically the older the employees are. The folks higher up typically have very little time to twiddle around with a web interface. In fact, they probably just use Outlook all day long and just send email around. So, if the report comes in via email, there's a reasonable chance they'll look at it. Not every day, but at least occasionally.
First off, if you enjoy your job and this is the single sticking point, then I would consider it to be relatively minor. In which case you either play by their rules, quit, or some how convince them to pay. If I was in the position of your manager, I think their offer is fair. For instance, it might be easy for him to get payments made for an actual training or conference, but employee expenses might involve a lot of scrutiny. So, in your ideal world you want him to pay for it. Well, every time I've been in this situation (i.e. paying for training that wasn't budgeted), I've always told the person that if they can directly show me a cost/benefit that I'll go to bat for them and sign off on it. For example, one guy wanted us to pay for his CCNA and later CCNP training and at the time we had an external support contract in a specific area. Well, he made a convincing case we'd be able to cut back on that support contract. He was right - the first year we went from a $48000 expense to a $24000 expense and later down to a $6000 expense. I wanted to go to a conference to meet some contacts, so I told my boss we'd be able to save on custom reporting that was being outsourced. Sure enough, 3 months later a guy I met at the conference did some simple modifications to a canned report that our vendor would have charged a bunch for. I've almost always been able to send someone to training or a conference if I can directly show how it'll benefit.
Just quit.
1. You don't seem to be the one in control of this project. So, you are stuck on this path. Or, do you have the political capital and will to fight to get your way? You're seriously going to piss in someone's Wheaties and when you're standing in the shower in the morning, you better have a smile on your face knowing it's worth it.
2. You work for a major HVAC manufacturer. That's the most exciting thing you can do with your life? It would make me want to slit my wrists every day with a spoon.
3. You have to re-do these applications and make the data integrity robust. That means seriously looking at things like where you can get the most benefit for least amount of cost and/or where the data integrity is shit. "Oh, Jim manages our entire Northwest supply chain and inventory using that Excel spreadsheet he keeps on his desktop." I don't care if you use and Oracle product to get there or a cloud-based, super-redundant shade of the color blue. The only thing your boss's boss cares about is whether you a) prevent the company from losing money or b) make the company more money.
4. Speaking about data center room makes you sound like a systems or support person. This is an application and developer thing.
5. I'm not sure I understand where your pain points are. Customer relationship management? Supply chain? Inventory? Quality control? Payroll/HR? Quantify.
6. Do they pay you enough to worry about this? That might seem flippant, but it's very valid.
I find it a bit ironic that Microsoft has helped usher in this huge digital age where none of us really want to "own" digital content any more. We don't rush out to buy CD's any more, we subscribe to music services or stream Pandora. We don't go out and purchase DVD's, we subscribe to Netflix or rent some viewing via iTunes.
Yet, despite some little things like Office 365, Microsoft still makes its bread and butter via selling software to OEM's and volume customers that runs on hardware, both of which many of us are increasingly not wanting to own. I f*cking hate installing an OS on a server and then making sure the damn thing stays running. I'd much rather rent the VM in the cloud. Even better, just let me subscribe to your web service.
I live in Montana and I'm rather looking forward to global warming. This place is gonna be even more amazing when it gets warmer. I might even have to buy a summer home in the Yukon.
On a slightly more serious note, as Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
Obviously architecture is the biggest hindrance to what you proposed.
You could get away with some modern hardware, as long as it's x86 based. Or, maybe what you really want to consider is virtualizing an old distro on other modern hardware along with a modern distro, assuming the other modern hardware supports it.
There is some novelty in running old stuff, and I suppose everyone goes through that phase (along with the "I'm going to build a massive home network with multiple servers and run my own email" phase). But, I suspect you'll tire of it so you're just better off keeping it at a small budget and use hardware you can repurpose when you get bored with that little experiment.
First off, be sure to read that post higher up about the guy who had a similar condition due to a ski accident - heed his advice - get a brain stem specialist contacted ASAP.
Down the road, you may want to consider looking at some software that was put together and found at suecenter.org. The fella who developed it is very enthusiastic about it and willing to help out. It doesn't sound like she has enough motor movement yet for the tracker to work, but conceivably you could attach the tracker to her lip to let her control the mouse in the application.
Prayers to ya.
What about some kind of DIY thing? Get a Raspberry Pi, use the GPIO pins to run some wires from the cases of each device (something thing like telco cross-connect), drive it and if the circuit breaks then send out an email or something. Bonus points for integrating a camera and snapping photos at the same time the wires break. Similarly, if the device is an always on kind of thing, just use some kind of network monitoring.
+1
Seriously, at some point managing operations has to come second to company growth. Put your strategic vision goggles on when you leave the house every morning.
Now, as someone who has also very recently transitioned from the world of IT to money stuff, I will say you need to be very careful about it. Right now I have very few resources at my disposal to turn to when things get mucky. And, sometimes you need some accounting magic to get that balance sheet to balance (find an asset, depreciate it! have the company loan itself money!) Now, I've found it to be ridiculously easy compared to IT - oh, sure, I have a vast amount to learn, but I've found I absorb the knowledge quite fast. My recommendation to you is to begin building that safety net - find some friends who are amazing accountants (controllers) you can discuss things like P&L's and balance sheets with. Find finance friends who can give you sage advice on everything you don't know - are there tax ramifications if you make that purchase this quarter?
Then, just remember, always make sure the decision you're making isn't going to affect making payroll. If it does, what's your plan?