I don't know about Quickbooks Pro on Wine, but I use Quickbooks 2000 (non-Pro) on Win4Lin and it works fine. It also works for Internet Explorer, PWS, eFax, etc.
The most annoying thing about "registration required" sites is the stupid way they implement the registration requirement. Publishers need to realize that some people visit their site once in their lifetime to read an individual article that someone has linked to, while others visit the site and read a dozen articles every day. There is no point to collecting and storing registration information for a user that rarely visits the site, and attempting to do so just puts up a barrier that turns such users (and search engine spiders too) away.
Instead of forcing everyone who wants to read an article to register, simply nag them into registering. For example, if the user attempts to access an article without registering, provide them with the page, but also embed JavaScript code in the page to pop-up a registration form. A user who comes to read a single article (e.g. by following a link) will probably ignore the registration form, but their registration would have little value anyway since they are unlikely to return to the site often. Users who read many of the articles on the site (the ones that you actually care about) will eventually give in and register to avoid being harassed by registration pop-ups all of the time. An added benefit of this approach is that search engines can access the articles, thus providing the site with extra (free) traffic. A drawback for this approach is that people using pop-up-blocking software may not see the pop-up registration forms.
They claim that they don't want anybody linking to anything but their homepage, but they don't have a robots.txt file on their website. The robots.txt standard has been around since 1994 to give website owners a simple way of denoting that certain parts of their site should not be indexed by spiders. According to the standard, the absence of a robots.txt indicates that all robots should consider themselves welcome to access all of the pages. Why is The Dallas News calling out the lawyers when they haven't made even the most basic effort to denote that they don't want search engines indexing (and hence linking to) their articles?
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Your estimate may be too low by more than a factor of 10. This eWeek article puts the number at $300/year per employee (compared to your $25.60).
I don't know about Quickbooks Pro on Wine, but I use Quickbooks 2000 (non-Pro) on Win4Lin and it works fine. It also works for Internet Explorer, PWS, eFax, etc.
Instead of forcing everyone who wants to read an article to register, simply nag them into registering. For example, if the user attempts to access an article without registering, provide them with the page, but also embed JavaScript code in the page to pop-up a registration form. A user who comes to read a single article (e.g. by following a link) will probably ignore the registration form, but their registration would have little value anyway since they are unlikely to return to the site often. Users who read many of the articles on the site (the ones that you actually care about) will eventually give in and register to avoid being harassed by registration pop-ups all of the time. An added benefit of this approach is that search engines can access the articles, thus providing the site with extra (free) traffic. A drawback for this approach is that people using pop-up-blocking software may not see the pop-up registration forms.
They claim that they don't want anybody linking to anything but their homepage, but they don't have a robots.txt file on their website. The robots.txt standard has been around since 1994 to give website owners a simple way of denoting that certain parts of their site should not be indexed by spiders. According to the standard, the absence of a robots.txt indicates that all robots should consider themselves welcome to access all of the pages. Why is The Dallas News calling out the lawyers when they haven't made even the most basic effort to denote that they don't want search engines indexing (and hence linking to) their articles?