We have a pair of products that are customized tweaks of an opensource ERP/POS combo customized for a particular industry. We've snared two customers away from using Netsuite for their ERP needs and being opensource was a huge hurdle to initially overcome. It takes time for people to understand the concept that they are paying us to come in, install the system, tweak/customize the system for their needs, provide training, and after sale support. The way it works with the POS software is an initial one time fee to do the customization then we provide them with a.iso that is tweaked version of OpenSuSE that is designed to boot and load only the POS software. After that we don't care if they install on one terminal or a million. (Granted we do charge a yearly fee per terminal for backup and support services). Very few other POS systems can offer that.
One of the biggest aces in the hole was PostgreSQL. The cost for us to come in, set up and install everything was cheaper than some other well known DB vendor's cost of database software alone.
Frankly the hardest thing for them to understand was the lack of vender lock-in. If they want, they can hire their own internal IT people to maintain or improve the system or another firm later on. So no matter what happens to us, they will be able to grow and expand the software with or without us.
We deploy on OpenSuSE & SLES by default. No specific reason other than a few months ago during development, SuSE happened to be the first distro where everything worked out of the box.
Went off to college with the machine and it worked extremely well...until I got tired of screwing around with windows and linux and bought a Mac. For it's day, it was comepetitively priced with dell on the high end and offered a better video card and more RAM. Of course back then 256MB was a lot of RAM screaming fast for Windows 98. Especially with a 32MB video card.
At some point I stopped reading PC magazines and all their fluff pieces on technology and stopped paying attention.
So long as Crucial is still around, I'm not too worried.
I've always treated drive mirroring as fail-over redundancy. If the primary drive fails, use the mirrored copy until the drive can be replaced. There have been times that we've used the mirror drive as a back up if the primary drive failed. But every night, the entire site database and file structure is backed up on-site via tape and a FTP copy of critical data (database dump) is sent to a dedicated server at another hosting company in another country as a second copy of this data is backed up to a server in the office. And that server gets backed up to tape weekly.
Does this all cost money? Yes. Has it completely saved our ass before. The worst we've had is a disc failure that took the database server down for 30 minutes until I could reboot it and use the mirrored drive. Drive was swapped out later that day, took the site off line for an hour that night (when it doesn't get a lot of traffic anyway), copied the HDD, and rebooted. That was 98 days ago. *knocking on hard brownish furniture*
I load random copies of the back ups on a local development server twice a week, just to make sure that nothing weird is going on. Some of the other people in the department think their boss (me) is crazy about this stuff, but they're programmers not systems people.
Granted we run e-commerce for others. Every minute it is down is costing people money. Now we run only about 600 transactions a day at this point, but that averages to $15k a day.
We have a trio of applications. Two come from the opensource world, the third is proprietary (Actually, end customers are allowed to tinker with the code, it just invalidates support agreements and they cannot redistribute). We provide the source code back via our branch at the main development SVN. Very few of our changes have seen their way to the main trunk simply because our particular niche is so specific that it has little use out side of our primarily business.
If people want to look at our code and , it's there. Now if they have a question and haven't paid for support, shit out of luck. As it stands right now we're working 10 hour days 5 days a week to support paying customers. The code's there, you can figure it out. If you don't want to invest the time to learn/figure it out for yourself, you can hire others (or us) to do it for you. That's how we make our money.
Leveraging FOSS, we can undercut our competitors by 20 - 35% and still make just as much if not more than they do. We don't have to pay for Linux and PostgreSQL. We don't have to pay for $800 a seat for our IDE's (Netbeans & Eclipse). Our service and support costs are the exact same as our competitors, maybe even a little more. But they have to add the licensing fees they have to charge per user or per terminal to cover the software costs. That's $3500 per user and $650 per terminal not including the cost of windows.
Our sole proprietary application took several thousand hours to development and binds the other two together to complete that package. That's our main competitive advantage at the moment. So we have a reason to keep it under wraps for now.
Here was our experience with Linux as we started development on our latest series of product. We took an off the shelf computer for development machine. Here is what happened:
Fedora 9: Kernel panic on boot. Ubuntu: Hung after splash screen Kubuntu: See Ubuntu PCBSD: Installed, no printer drivers out of the box openSuSE: Installed, printers worked out of the box
I outright prefer FreeBSD on the server side and Mac on the desktop side, but in our case, I can't make a good argument why we should not be deploying almost entirely on *SuSE. All our contract employees have desktops with OpenSuSE loaded on them. Full-time employees get a $2500 signing bonus to select a computer of their choice. Most buy a MacBook pro and then run openSuSE via Parallels or virtual box.
Later we discovered that our database vender of choice deploys on SLES as their default install. So we've pretty much moved all development and deployment of our applications to *SuSE. No all our stuff is written in Java, Python, and PHP. That will deploy on most any platform that supports those three languages.
Another major reason is that our clients can always find support even if something would happen to our company. They could still go and purchase support from Novell. Which is a huge selling point in our business. Most of our code is under an OSI license, either GPL or a modified Mozilla Public License, or in some cases MIT. Again, we get bought out or change direction, they are free to hire programmers or another firm to come in and do whatever they please to the system at any later date.
Agreed. When we put OpenSuSE 11 on our machines, we initially installed KDE 4. We tried it out for about a week and it was universally loathed around here. When we switched over all the boxes KDE 3.5 was the default desktop.
I've downloaded OpenSuSE 11.1 and KDE 4.1 is even worse and KDE 3.5 is no longer an option.
We had similar concerns when we started having 3 year old Dell laptops fail. Everything we had was starting to get towards the end of life.
So we replaced all the laptops with MacBooks, spent $36 on each desktop at Crucial for 2GB of Ram, and replaced Windows XP with OpenSuSE 11. Most people out side of our sales team were already using OpenOffce and increasingly Google Docs. So it was pretty painless in terms of transition.
Only people dual booting with Parallels is the CEO and our CFO. And that really has to do with needing to use Office 2003 as Office 2008 for Mac lacks VBA macro support for some of her forecasting spreadsheets, etc..
I don't remember the model number, but it had a 1.2Ghz Athlon T-bird on it and I had nothing but problems. Bought it to replace an intel PII mother board and nothing ever quite worked. The chipset on board hated my video card and the entire system ran hot. I had to run the machine with the side off. I think the machine lasted only two years and was the primary reason I said screw it, nothing works, and bought a mac.
I have to say it's decent approach to the problem of deploying Web Apps. Granted we did all the backend work connecting the Flex/Air front end to the database using AMFPHP, but it's definitely a decent platform for web applications and hybrid web/desktop apps. However it still suffers one flaw: it requires a third party platform that doesn't run on everything. (think mobile devices)
I see the Support OpenSuSE 10.3, but what about 11 and 11.1 (currently downloading the ISO).
The other approach is what Google and Apple are taking with HTML/Javascript based web applications that try to be browser/standards compliant. The entity that figures out how to make it work as a standalone desktop app has a winner.
As an Episcopalian I'm going to go demand the Communion form a comittee to study the effects of...and in ten years make a ruling...and, screw it. Anyone want a Martini?
I worked in a video production/editing shop for a couple years. They replaced 1/3 of their systems every year. Now granted, they're work is time critical. And faster is always better. But the old systems saw reuse in the front office or were demoted to the render farm.
Things that had been there for 5 years were then finally taken off the line with employees and friends getting first dibs. That's how I ended up with a Quad 500Mhz DEC Alpha machine with a whopping 2GB of Ram for $650. Complete with NT4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5.6!
Linux killed commercial Unix. Apple killed the Linux Desktop. Honestly, I was one of the people who switch back in 2001/2002 from a dual boot Windows/Linux desktop to an Apple laptop and never looked back. I have my Unix Development stack AND handy commercial applications such as MS Office, Adobe et. al., and Quickbooks. Doesn't sound like much, but having spent the last 5 years in small business, quickbooks pays for itself given the discount my CPA gives me for using it.
The company that I am help found is looking at a very specific market and one of our main selling points is that we're platform agnostic thanks to the use of JAVA. (Say what you will about liking or hating Java, for this arena it works and that is all that counts). If clients have existing Windows installs or likes windows, then we deploy on Windows. But if we get our choice, we develop an installation DVD with OpenSuSE or SLED and our POS system.
Server side we either set them up with an ERP platform hosted on Windows Server, if they already have one, managed FreeBSD (if they are small and don't need or require an in house IT shop), or have them buy servers with SLES.
Why SuSE? It was dumb luck that openSuSE happen to be the first linux Distro that installed out of the box and everything on the development box worked. (Fedora kernel panicked on boot, never got past the Ubuntu set up screen, and PCBSD didn't have the needed print drivers pre-loaded) Later on we found out our Enterprise class database vender deploys on SuSE Enterprise Server as their defacto operating platform. So at that point it just made sense to stick with SuSE until something better comes along.
Also, it gives both us and our customers piece of mind knowing that they can seek support elsewhere if something should happen to us. (Say we get bought out, sold, or we do a bad job: they are free to hire another company to come in and extend or service the set up since everything is OSS). They can also buy the 1-800-Help-With-Linux from Novell if they want too. And most people have at least heard of Novell. So there is a big name company there to provide additional support if needed.
Back during the 1970's there was a fuel shortage and the bio-fuels industry picked up. Then we saw $30 a barrel and lower oil that drove all the producers out of business. Some say it was a calculated move on the part of OPEC to make sure that no competition arises. I'm not sure I'd go that far as OPEC nearly destroyed itself due to cheating in that period...
It's not much of a surprise that it's happened again. (Gee what happened to that $200 a barrel mark the media was predicting by the end of the year). Bio-fuels were another way for the agriculture lobby to get more money for corn. So with cheap oil, everyone will go back to worrying about other things and in 10 -15 years when there is another disrupution and the prices sky rocket, people will once again start up bio fuel projects.
You'd think we'd learn, but to quote Mark Twain: History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
My thoughts exactly. Doesn't that just mean the NSA then intercepts data via the traditional satellites, listening posts, and cable taps? After all, one of their original mandates is collecting foreign intelligence. They don't need the Patriot Act for that...it's their jobs.
Currently working on a project that Point of Sale related and uses touchscreens. It makes sense for that application and a lot of POS systems are designed for touch screens. The trick is getting the buttons big enough and then everything works smoothly.
Well, one afternoon I got a little board and installed the latest BSG Fleet Commander (Homeworld 2) mod and tried playing it using the touch screen. It worked quite well for management of the production & launch screens, but pretty much everything else still had to be done by mouse. Not to say with gestures and a game designed for touchscreens couldn't be cool, but after about the initial 15 minutes of "Oh this is cool" I went back to using a mouse and then got back to real work.
When Vista was first released until June of that year, you couldn't select XP as an install option from Dell directly unless you were an existing business client with a fair number of machines. This was a company that was still running on DOS on Pentium I's when I walked in the door.
When Vista was first release, I had a client that used an industry specific billing/accounting/inventory management system for the health care industry. Granted I had been working with them for about 6 months and the software vendor warned them "WILL NOT WORK IN VISTA". I kept pressuring them to buy their workstations before the switch over. They wanted to go through Dell, that was the hardware vendor the software company recommended and why rock the boat, especially since they have to deal with said vendor long term.
At any rate, I warned them that on Jan 31st they wouldn't be able to buy PC's with XP loaded from Dell. Honestly, I think they thought I was lying or making it up. This was a small business less than 10 employees who were waiting for a big public aid check to come in. (80% of their business is public aid, and they get paid it's always a matter of when). I even told them in December to put the workstation purchases on the company credit card or go to the bank and get a 180 day short term note, but just buy the workstations before the switch over.
I finished up the disaster recovery plan and all the work I had been hired for about the middle of Jan. I told them again to buy the workstations then. But long story short, I got a phone call in March saying, "We can't buy XP from DELL, so we had to buy vista and the software won't work". I was working on another project 500 miles away and answered bluntly in six words: "Don't say I didn't warn you."
The software vendor flew down some engineers and the company got the luxury of spending $16k to be the beta testers for their Vista version of the software. Apparently it was July before they had all the kinks worked out.
I heard this story repeated several times with various in house or specialty applications in the early days. Especially in small businesses where suddenly, on of their cheap office PC's broke and they had to run out and buy a replacement, and all they could find was machines with Vista that couldn't run their software. It wasn't until the summer that MS allowed the option to pre-install XP again on machines.
Today, it's not that bad, but at launch, there were some problems.
Depends, do you have corporate people working in a number of time zones? We do. We have sales folks that are routinely +/- 6 hours of main office's time zones. And sometimes they need to access some file that is on their office PC at midnight local time. Same with the CEO and myself. We have our remote servers locked down to only allow SSH and FTP from a single IP (the main office). If I need to fix anything, I either have to come into the office or remote into a box at the office and then SSH out from there.
The CEO is often times accessing stuff from his computer at home. Especially like this past week that his wife was away for her job and he was busy watching the kids.
My development team also routinely remote in after hours. Sometimes they have a good idea @ 2AM, they do it, and some login to their office computer because it's the only machine with the proper development stack, or the latest revision that has yet to merged into the SVN repo, etc.. (Granted my development team doesn't work set hours. They're required to show up to 4 hours worth of meetings a week (Monday and Friday) and meet deadlines.)
Now, this is becoming less and less necessary for employees who have been with the company more than a year (They get MacBooksPros with Parallels and XP Pro), but any new hires or contractors are using desktop PC's with their choice of OpenSuSE or the default PCBSD.
I'm sure that someone will make a plug-in to block the advertising, but considering that Google is an advertising company that sells web ads as their life blood, I can't see them offering ad-blocking in their own product out of the box. Unless it blocks all ads save for the ones from Google.
It isn't going to replace Opera on my desktop anytime soon, but then again, they'd have to release versions for Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD for it even to run on any of my desktops.
in loco parentis (you can google it to find out what it means)
Can your parents confiscate their kid's cd's and computers regardless of reasons? (Maybe they are a MSCE tech and they don't want linux in their house.)
Yes I believe parents have the right to do that. As such, so do teachers in elementary through high schools have this right.
I've been using Opera now as my default browser for about a year now. Why? It's the only browser that will run natively on every platform I use, including Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. Firefox can't claim that last one, at least not since the 1.x branch. Not in any recent versions. And it's had a bunch of the new "features" that people talk about with chrome, like tabs above the address bar and that dial pad thingy that I never use.
One all the platforms, I've found that it is fast and isn't a memory hog like FF. Opera will also do it all, from block ads to bit torrent, all in one place. Now I can argue that there are better bit torrent clients out there, but in a pinch I have used it to pull down ISO's without any problems.
Opera gets almost no press outside the mobile market. It still has issues with some JS out there, but it's pretty rare these days. And it's a shame, because they probably have the best browser on the market.
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We have a pair of products that are customized tweaks of an opensource ERP/POS combo customized for a particular industry. We've snared two customers away from using Netsuite for their ERP needs and being opensource was a huge hurdle to initially overcome. It takes time for people to understand the concept that they are paying us to come in, install the system, tweak/customize the system for their needs, provide training, and after sale support. The way it works with the POS software is an initial one time fee to do the customization then we provide them with a .iso that is tweaked version of OpenSuSE that is designed to boot and load only the POS software. After that we don't care if they install on one terminal or a million. (Granted we do charge a yearly fee per terminal for backup and support services). Very few other POS systems can offer that.
One of the biggest aces in the hole was PostgreSQL. The cost for us to come in, set up and install everything was cheaper than some other well known DB vendor's cost of database software alone.
Frankly the hardest thing for them to understand was the lack of vender lock-in. If they want, they can hire their own internal IT people to maintain or improve the system or another firm later on. So no matter what happens to us, they will be able to grow and expand the software with or without us.
We deploy on OpenSuSE & SLES by default. No specific reason other than a few months ago during development, SuSE happened to be the first distro where everything worked out of the box.
anyone else find it amazing that iPhone now has half the market share of linux?
Went off to college with the machine and it worked extremely well...until I got tired of screwing around with windows and linux and bought a Mac. For it's day, it was comepetitively priced with dell on the high end and offered a better video card and more RAM. Of course back then 256MB was a lot of RAM screaming fast for Windows 98. Especially with a 32MB video card.
At some point I stopped reading PC magazines and all their fluff pieces on technology and stopped paying attention.
So long as Crucial is still around, I'm not too worried.
I've always treated drive mirroring as fail-over redundancy. If the primary drive fails, use the mirrored copy until the drive can be replaced. There have been times that we've used the mirror drive as a back up if the primary drive failed. But every night, the entire site database and file structure is backed up on-site via tape and a FTP copy of critical data (database dump) is sent to a dedicated server at another hosting company in another country as a second copy of this data is backed up to a server in the office. And that server gets backed up to tape weekly.
Does this all cost money? Yes. Has it completely saved our ass before. The worst we've had is a disc failure that took the database server down for 30 minutes until I could reboot it and use the mirrored drive. Drive was swapped out later that day, took the site off line for an hour that night (when it doesn't get a lot of traffic anyway), copied the HDD, and rebooted. That was 98 days ago. *knocking on hard brownish furniture*
I load random copies of the back ups on a local development server twice a week, just to make sure that nothing weird is going on. Some of the other people in the department think their boss (me) is crazy about this stuff, but they're programmers not systems people.
Granted we run e-commerce for others. Every minute it is down is costing people money. Now we run only about 600 transactions a day at this point, but that averages to $15k a day.
We have a trio of applications. Two come from the opensource world, the third is proprietary (Actually, end customers are allowed to tinker with the code, it just invalidates support agreements and they cannot redistribute). We provide the source code back via our branch at the main development SVN. Very few of our changes have seen their way to the main trunk simply because our particular niche is so specific that it has little use out side of our primarily business.
If people want to look at our code and , it's there. Now if they have a question and haven't paid for support, shit out of luck. As it stands right now we're working 10 hour days 5 days a week to support paying customers. The code's there, you can figure it out. If you don't want to invest the time to learn/figure it out for yourself, you can hire others (or us) to do it for you. That's how we make our money.
Leveraging FOSS, we can undercut our competitors by 20 - 35% and still make just as much if not more than they do. We don't have to pay for Linux and PostgreSQL. We don't have to pay for $800 a seat for our IDE's (Netbeans & Eclipse). Our service and support costs are the exact same as our competitors, maybe even a little more. But they have to add the licensing fees they have to charge per user or per terminal to cover the software costs. That's $3500 per user and $650 per terminal not including the cost of windows.
Our sole proprietary application took several thousand hours to development and binds the other two together to complete that package. That's our main competitive advantage at the moment. So we have a reason to keep it under wraps for now.
Here was our experience with Linux as we started development on our latest series of product. We took an off the shelf computer for development machine. Here is what happened:
Fedora 9: Kernel panic on boot.
Ubuntu: Hung after splash screen
Kubuntu: See Ubuntu
PCBSD: Installed, no printer drivers out of the box
openSuSE: Installed, printers worked out of the box
I outright prefer FreeBSD on the server side and Mac on the desktop side, but in our case, I can't make a good argument why we should not be deploying almost entirely on *SuSE. All our contract employees have desktops with OpenSuSE loaded on them. Full-time employees get a $2500 signing bonus to select a computer of their choice. Most buy a MacBook pro and then run openSuSE via Parallels or virtual box.
Later we discovered that our database vender of choice deploys on SLES as their default install. So we've pretty much moved all development and deployment of our applications to *SuSE. No all our stuff is written in Java, Python, and PHP. That will deploy on most any platform that supports those three languages.
Another major reason is that our clients can always find support even if something would happen to our company. They could still go and purchase support from Novell. Which is a huge selling point in our business. Most of our code is under an OSI license, either GPL or a modified Mozilla Public License, or in some cases MIT. Again, we get bought out or change direction, they are free to hire programmers or another firm to come in and do whatever they please to the system at any later date.
Err you mean like "Error: lp0 on fire"
Agreed. When we put OpenSuSE 11 on our machines, we initially installed KDE 4. We tried it out for about a week and it was universally loathed around here. When we switched over all the boxes KDE 3.5 was the default desktop.
I've downloaded OpenSuSE 11.1 and KDE 4.1 is even worse and KDE 3.5 is no longer an option.
We had similar concerns when we started having 3 year old Dell laptops fail. Everything we had was starting to get towards the end of life.
So we replaced all the laptops with MacBooks, spent $36 on each desktop at Crucial for 2GB of Ram, and replaced Windows XP with OpenSuSE 11. Most people out side of our sales team were already using OpenOffce and increasingly Google Docs. So it was pretty painless in terms of transition.
Only people dual booting with Parallels is the CEO and our CFO. And that really has to do with needing to use Office 2003 as Office 2008 for Mac lacks VBA macro support for some of her forecasting spreadsheets, etc..
I don't remember the model number, but it had a 1.2Ghz Athlon T-bird on it and I had nothing but problems. Bought it to replace an intel PII mother board and nothing ever quite worked. The chipset on board hated my video card and the entire system ran hot. I had to run the machine with the side off. I think the machine lasted only two years and was the primary reason I said screw it, nothing works, and bought a mac.
I have to say it's decent approach to the problem of deploying Web Apps. Granted we did all the backend work connecting the Flex/Air front end to the database using AMFPHP, but it's definitely a decent platform for web applications and hybrid web/desktop apps. However it still suffers one flaw: it requires a third party platform that doesn't run on everything. (think mobile devices)
I see the Support OpenSuSE 10.3, but what about 11 and 11.1 (currently downloading the ISO).
The other approach is what Google and Apple are taking with HTML/Javascript based web applications that try to be browser/standards compliant. The entity that figures out how to make it work as a standalone desktop app has a winner.
As an Episcopalian I'm going to go demand the Communion form a comittee to study the effects of...and in ten years make a ruling...and, screw it. Anyone want a Martini?
I worked in a video production/editing shop for a couple years. They replaced 1/3 of their systems every year. Now granted, they're work is time critical. And faster is always better. But the old systems saw reuse in the front office or were demoted to the render farm.
Things that had been there for 5 years were then finally taken off the line with employees and friends getting first dibs. That's how I ended up with a Quad 500Mhz DEC Alpha machine with a whopping 2GB of Ram for $650. Complete with NT4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5.6!
Linux killed commercial Unix. Apple killed the Linux Desktop. Honestly, I was one of the people who switch back in 2001/2002 from a dual boot Windows/Linux desktop to an Apple laptop and never looked back. I have my Unix Development stack AND handy commercial applications such as MS Office, Adobe et. al., and Quickbooks. Doesn't sound like much, but having spent the last 5 years in small business, quickbooks pays for itself given the discount my CPA gives me for using it.
The company that I am help found is looking at a very specific market and one of our main selling points is that we're platform agnostic thanks to the use of JAVA. (Say what you will about liking or hating Java, for this arena it works and that is all that counts). If clients have existing Windows installs or likes windows, then we deploy on Windows. But if we get our choice, we develop an installation DVD with OpenSuSE or SLED and our POS system.
Server side we either set them up with an ERP platform hosted on Windows Server, if they already have one, managed FreeBSD (if they are small and don't need or require an in house IT shop), or have them buy servers with SLES.
Why SuSE? It was dumb luck that openSuSE happen to be the first linux Distro that installed out of the box and everything on the development box worked. (Fedora kernel panicked on boot, never got past the Ubuntu set up screen, and PCBSD didn't have the needed print drivers pre-loaded) Later on we found out our Enterprise class database vender deploys on SuSE Enterprise Server as their defacto operating platform. So at that point it just made sense to stick with SuSE until something better comes along.
Also, it gives both us and our customers piece of mind knowing that they can seek support elsewhere if something should happen to us. (Say we get bought out, sold, or we do a bad job: they are free to hire another company to come in and extend or service the set up since everything is OSS). They can also buy the 1-800-Help-With-Linux from Novell if they want too. And most people have at least heard of Novell. So there is a big name company there to provide additional support if needed.
Back during the 1970's there was a fuel shortage and the bio-fuels industry picked up. Then we saw $30 a barrel and lower oil that drove all the producers out of business. Some say it was a calculated move on the part of OPEC to make sure that no competition arises. I'm not sure I'd go that far as OPEC nearly destroyed itself due to cheating in that period...
It's not much of a surprise that it's happened again. (Gee what happened to that $200 a barrel mark the media was predicting by the end of the year). Bio-fuels were another way for the agriculture lobby to get more money for corn. So with cheap oil, everyone will go back to worrying about other things and in 10 -15 years when there is another disrupution and the prices sky rocket, people will once again start up bio fuel projects.
You'd think we'd learn, but to quote Mark Twain: History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
My thoughts exactly. Doesn't that just mean the NSA then intercepts data via the traditional satellites, listening posts, and cable taps? After all, one of their original mandates is collecting foreign intelligence. They don't need the Patriot Act for that...it's their jobs.
Currently working on a project that Point of Sale related and uses touchscreens. It makes sense for that application and a lot of POS systems are designed for touch screens. The trick is getting the buttons big enough and then everything works smoothly.
Well, one afternoon I got a little board and installed the latest BSG Fleet Commander (Homeworld 2) mod and tried playing it using the touch screen. It worked quite well for management of the production & launch screens, but pretty much everything else still had to be done by mouse. Not to say with gestures and a game designed for touchscreens couldn't be cool, but after about the initial 15 minutes of "Oh this is cool" I went back to using a mouse and then got back to real work.
Not in this case because they had no XP licenses. It was all DOS/Windows 3.1 believe it or not. So they went from DOS to Vista in one jump.
When Vista was first released until June of that year, you couldn't select XP as an install option from Dell directly unless you were an existing business client with a fair number of machines. This was a company that was still running on DOS on Pentium I's when I walked in the door.
When Vista was first release, I had a client that used an industry specific billing/accounting/inventory management system for the health care industry. Granted I had been working with them for about 6 months and the software vendor warned them "WILL NOT WORK IN VISTA". I kept pressuring them to buy their workstations before the switch over. They wanted to go through Dell, that was the hardware vendor the software company recommended and why rock the boat, especially since they have to deal with said vendor long term.
At any rate, I warned them that on Jan 31st they wouldn't be able to buy PC's with XP loaded from Dell. Honestly, I think they thought I was lying or making it up. This was a small business less than 10 employees who were waiting for a big public aid check to come in. (80% of their business is public aid, and they get paid it's always a matter of when). I even told them in December to put the workstation purchases on the company credit card or go to the bank and get a 180 day short term note, but just buy the workstations before the switch over.
I finished up the disaster recovery plan and all the work I had been hired for about the middle of Jan. I told them again to buy the workstations then. But long story short, I got a phone call in March saying, "We can't buy XP from DELL, so we had to buy vista and the software won't work". I was working on another project 500 miles away and answered bluntly in six words: "Don't say I didn't warn you."
The software vendor flew down some engineers and the company got the luxury of spending $16k to be the beta testers for their Vista version of the software. Apparently it was July before they had all the kinks worked out.
I heard this story repeated several times with various in house or specialty applications in the early days. Especially in small businesses where suddenly, on of their cheap office PC's broke and they had to run out and buy a replacement, and all they could find was machines with Vista that couldn't run their software. It wasn't until the summer that MS allowed the option to pre-install XP again on machines.
Today, it's not that bad, but at launch, there were some problems.
Depends, do you have corporate people working in a number of time zones? We do. We have sales folks that are routinely +/- 6 hours of main office's time zones. And sometimes they need to access some file that is on their office PC at midnight local time. Same with the CEO and myself. We have our remote servers locked down to only allow SSH and FTP from a single IP (the main office). If I need to fix anything, I either have to come into the office or remote into a box at the office and then SSH out from there.
The CEO is often times accessing stuff from his computer at home. Especially like this past week that his wife was away for her job and he was busy watching the kids.
My development team also routinely remote in after hours. Sometimes they have a good idea @ 2AM, they do it, and some login to their office computer because it's the only machine with the proper development stack, or the latest revision that has yet to merged into the SVN repo, etc.. (Granted my development team doesn't work set hours. They're required to show up to 4 hours worth of meetings a week (Monday and Friday) and meet deadlines.)
Now, this is becoming less and less necessary for employees who have been with the company more than a year (They get MacBooksPros with Parallels and XP Pro), but any new hires or contractors are using desktop PC's with their choice of OpenSuSE or the default PCBSD.
I'm sure that someone will make a plug-in to block the advertising, but considering that Google is an advertising company that sells web ads as their life blood, I can't see them offering ad-blocking in their own product out of the box. Unless it blocks all ads save for the ones from Google.
It isn't going to replace Opera on my desktop anytime soon, but then again, they'd have to release versions for Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD for it even to run on any of my desktops.
If GPL, I'm not sure they want the modified source my body expels after drinking...
in loco parentis (you can google it to find out what it means)
Can your parents confiscate their kid's cd's and computers regardless of reasons? (Maybe they are a MSCE tech and they don't want linux in their house.)
Yes I believe parents have the right to do that. As such, so do teachers in elementary through high schools have this right.
I've been using Opera now as my default browser for about a year now. Why? It's the only browser that will run natively on every platform I use, including Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. Firefox can't claim that last one, at least not since the 1.x branch. Not in any recent versions. And it's had a bunch of the new "features" that people talk about with chrome, like tabs above the address bar and that dial pad thingy that I never use.
One all the platforms, I've found that it is fast and isn't a memory hog like FF. Opera will also do it all, from block ads to bit torrent, all in one place. Now I can argue that there are better bit torrent clients out there, but in a pinch I have used it to pull down ISO's without any problems.
Opera gets almost no press outside the mobile market. It still has issues with some JS out there, but it's pretty rare these days. And it's a shame, because they probably have the best browser on the market.