When we started development of our software, we noticed that everyone else in our business were all depolyed on Windows. When we were doing research on our main competitor in this region, it was pretty clear why they were Windows based, all of the company's founders had worked for Microsoft or were certified MS techs.
From the outset we were going to be using *iux based servers with PHP & PostgreSQL and JAVA for desktop apps. OpenBravo powers our ERP and POS systems.
Originally I pushed for FreeBSD, but we went OpenSuSE for no other reason that it was the first distro to work out of the box with all drivers with our development machine. So when it came time to go live, our servers were running OpenSuSE on the web and application servers and FreeBSD to power the Database Server.
Our Jr. Coders & Contract employees all currently use OpenSuSE based desktops with Eclipse, OpenOffice, and/or Google Docs for internal communications. Right now we're spending about $95 per developer in software costs. And that is for a single Windows box that people can remote into to test or use a rapid development CRUD program that is windows only.
When were looking at our main competitor in the geographic region, we figured we could hire at least one, possibly two full time developers for what they spend on software licenses alone. (They use MSSQL and roll their own database servers in house.) Now they may have a bit more scalability built in. But our plans was to use PostgreSQL until it reaches the point where we need a true enterprise class database. Then we call Teradata and be done with it. But that is likely going to be a coupe years until we reach that point.
And that funding was mostly from the military for military related stuff. The DOD didn't create ARPANET for you and me, they did it for themselves. The fact that it took off in the civilian sector was not the point. Same thing with computers. They were needed to break enemy codes. The fact that afterwards they were able to commercialize the technology for you and me was never the point. They were created because the government needed the technology and then needed to stay one step ahead of the (insert Nazi's, Soviets, or other party here).
It's not like the government was spending the money to develop products so we could sit here and discuss on slashdot...
Didn't Yahoo go before the 9th circuit of appeals about 10 years ago and get a ruling that a US company need not know or comply with all the laws of other countries if they are operating a business out of the US and designed for a US audience?
Wire it to a bank in one of a number of countries where it is illegal to even ask who owns a bank account. There aren't as many places today, but there are still a few where accounts are all numbers. It's a numbered account and you have an id number, not a name. You call in, give the proper ID number and password and wire the money on to another bank, usually controlled by your friends in the >.
I've used them as Schuland Partner AG when I was working in Germany, although the accounts were on Solaris at the time with few problems and hosted a number of personal sites on their shared hosting up until 2004 or 2005. My old comapny had a dedicated server with them and had a few problems. On paper they had (and still do) have the best price on dedicated server hosting when you compare between companies. But if anything goes wrong, you're screwed. We had a hard disk fail and tried to get it replaced. Meanwhile our customers were bitching at us because their site was down. I had warned the boss about this previously. We had to contact their tech support for something minor once before and we finally got ahold of someone in the dedicated server department that could actually speak english. (They do all their tech support out of the far east)
We ended up going elsewhere and when the next bill came in, the boss put a stop payment with American Express. He explained the reasoning that 1and1 had not lived up to a reasonable expectation of delivered service and AE agreed. 1and1 still sent it to collections. (It still never got paid as far as I know).
Their customer service is beyond useless and their control panel features are always lagging behind everyone else. I know about a year ago, they added "Click-n'build" application of common programs like Joomla, etc.. Kind of like Fanastico in Cpanel. Well, there's a catch, with their click and build you get their default config. Just try to add plug-ins or new themes....you can't.
Where I work now came across them when we were pricing out dedicated servers. I was pushing for Pair Networks, but the $350 vs. $99 a month kept the owner making me justify why one costs three time as much for arguably less services. At least on Paper. I've been using Pair Networks since 1998. They've always been expensive, but I've never had to wait more than 20 minutes for a problem to be fixed either. Especially in set up costs (we needed a few extra ports installed and Pair Networks only does managed servers. Want an extra Port installed, it's $50).
It's an argument that I initially lost. The guy is a small business owner and has started 2 other successful businesses, but he has never dealt in the technology world before where time kills. So we have a dedicated server at 1and1. So far no problems, and I have to say that things are a bit better than the last time I used them other than their software offerings are a bit out of date. Still, the ability to reimage and the off site back ups work. We back up nightly to the 1and1 FTP server and then back up to our internal back-up system every 2 hours. We can switch from the 1and1 dedicated system to the one in the office in less than 20 minutes and we've tested this just to make sure. I've been through the week long nightmare once before if a hard disk fails.
Now that we have enough clients that we know that the business is going to fly, I am now fighting the battle to get everything moved to Pair Networks when we launch the next version of our system. He's since read a few reviews of 1and1 and has come to realize that they can't be trusted.
I have an old book on how to build your own telescope from the 1980's that included how to hook up a C64 and use a joystick to control the telescope's movements all written in C64 Basic. I remember porting it to QBasic circa 1994/5 and using it for a telescope I had to account for planetary motion for photography. (Back before every telescope came with such features).
That would almost be fun...wow I really am a geek....*shudders* I'm going back to my cave now.
What's the point with VM software these days like VM ware or Parallels? We use intel macs as our primary development platform. Why? Paraellels allows us to have OSX and then boot XP Pro, Vista, Linux, BSD, and OpenSolaris with a double click of the mouse. We've found it much of efficient to use VM's for this kind of stuff than boot camp or triple booting because we can change environments with a mouse click, not a restart. And then if something does go heywire, we can kill the VM from inside OSX usually. Hell I have OS 10.5, XP Pro, and OpenBSD open right now on my MacPro.
Part of the reason of buying the macs was so we could easily test products across various platforms and no bitching from our developers. They want to use Kdevelop for a project, fine, install the Linux flavor of your choice in Parallels and go. Want to use Visual Studio, fine, boot up windows and run visual studio, not a problem. Want to use BBedit or Textmate and go, again, not a problem.
Triple booting maybe cool for an experiment, but these days, VM makes it far easier for most tasks to just double click and go.
Cloud computing as defined by IEEE is where your data is permanently stored on a server somewhere on the internet and then cache it locally as needed on a computer, smartphone, etc.. If you are a larger company that hosts your own data centers and have control over your own network, there maybe some merit to this.
But for most consumers I think they are looking for something similar to Mobile Me or similar type application where you cache the item online temporarily (whether that be hours, days, weeks, whatever) to be synced and then stored on the various devices. You still control the data. It is synced and stored on multiple devices providing a measure of redundancy for your files.
That is exactly how we operate. Most of our files are still done on laptops in MS Word and then we upload to Google Docs when we need to share or edit a document or spreadsheet. But once we delete the document online, is it really gone? It is not important to what we do, but to others it maybe.
Blender has made a lot of progress, but it is still way behind Maya and even Lightwave. I've not been using Blender in the past couple releases, but it used to have some issues on my Quad Core Power Mac and using more than 4GB of Ram. I think this has been addressed now though. But I've never run into the problem of RAM or processor speed being the problem, but video ram when modeling an object. I have created scenes that will even grind a decent 256MB video card into the ground. Sure, it would be nice to render a bit faster, but for $20 - $60 a month, I do as much rendering as I want at Respower.
But let's look at cost. For $25k I can buy about 75 commodity boxes that are dual core, 2GB of Ram each & networking gear. That's about 150 Cores and 150GB of Ram. Put Linux on there and you can run ScreamerNet (you get to put the LW rendering engine on 999 machines per license) or one of a number of Maya distributed rendering programs. End result are going to be more frames being processed at one time. (for animation)
If I went the Mac Mini route, that's about 40 Mac Minis, which is still 80 Cores, 80GB of Ram total and with ScreamerNet or Xgrid....
Now the downsides are, 40 - 80 computers take up a lot of space and probably would eat up more power/cooling costs. But then again, if a couple boxes kick the bucket or hiccup, the other 35 - 75 are still processing. You only loose a percentage of total output.
Where it maybe nice is for folks who are rendering a single frame, like for a large poster. The 64 cores would make quick work of most jobs, but for animation, you're better off going with with a farm.
I was waiting for this as we have a need for a few digital signage/internet kiosk application and I can't think of a better OS that OpenBSD on the default security side. Now to see if I can get it to boot off a Compact Flash card.
Or Go to Macmall.com and look at their price drop section. 2.4Ghz MBP with 15.4" screen, 2GB Ram, 16-GB HDD, $1550. 2.2Ghz for even less. And you get Parallels free.
Already ordered one for our development lap where we're testing under lots of hardware configurations. We've been using old PC server towers, the kind that stand like 4ft tall, so we can easily access all the components when we need to swap out this or that. But they do take up quite bit of space. As the article said, it's a niche product. So i guess next week we'll see.
Integrate more with Google Apps to lure corporate users. Really, most of the people we see using MSIE are coming from businesses. Places where they don't get the choice and IE is on the desktop because it's on the machine.
with a bunch of engineering students last night. A few had Chrome on their laptops (We were meeting at a coffee shop about a conference), but most of the people in the shop were using FireFox. FF works fine for them and most asked why should they try chrome when what they have works with few or no complaints. There was nothing revolutionary in Chrome from their perspective. Hell, I opened it up and the first thing I saw was the dial pad area and I thought, "what the hell, looks just like Opera with different looking tabs at the top." To me there was no reason to use Chrome over Opera or FF or Safari.
People are generally hesitant to change unless there is a good reason. Look at how long it to FF to make in roads. Finally when MSIE was having the hijack of the week, people moved to FF because of the perception it was somehow safer. A lot of Mac users, myself included, use Safari because it works. That was not always the case, but these days I don't have many problems with safari and webpages. I have FF and Opera but I rarely use either unless I'm testing.
I'll still buy mini's. I love the things. I've got 8, mostly still 1.25 and 1.42Ghz G4's that I've picked up off ebay. I have one hooked up to my 32" LCD TV as a media center (basically an Apple TV before there were apple TV's) and then use the others as a cheap rendering grid for Final Cut and Blender. Best part is they take up a shelf on my book case and don't drive up the powerbill that much nor heat the den as bad as the quadcore. (used to heat a bloody 1 bedroom apt with the thing.)
At work we've bought mini's to replace all the point of sale and desktop units. Worked out well since they already had monitors/touchscreens and keyboards and mice that were all USB.
Right now where I work was running 6 different OS's. Right now all the Point-of-sale system are XP-based, the laptops are a mix of Dell's and Apple, the router/firewall runs off Gentoo, and they have a couple OpenSuSE workstations.
On the server side, the webservers were a mix of Debian, the application server and database server were both OpenSuSE. They remote monitor a number of digital signage/interactive kiosks using another Linux package (Debain-based I believe). At the end of the day each system had it's quirks based on the developer who worked on that particular project. Bottom line it was a mess.
It was time for new hardware and the shop is going to OSX for everything in house, Mac Mini's & MBP's, shifting to a customPOS system based on OpenBravoPOS running off a Mac Mini and then all our remotely hosted items are being shifted to all FreeBSD based servers managed by Pair.
End result is that my life becomes much easier and we can shift my attention towards development projects instead of maintaining the system.
Actually, most people don't care about multiple music stores because they use one: iTunes. By far and large it works for most people and they are happy with it.
Definately. When my old Windows laptop croaked a month ago, I was on the verge of finally breaking down and getting a MacBook or MacBook pro to replace this 12.1" Powerbook. I happen to be at Best Buy, saw the Acer Aspire One with 1GB of Ram, 120GB HDD, and XP home for $350 and brought it home with me.
I only need to test compatibility with MSIE for webpages and there are 2 windows-only applications that I love to use for rapid development/deployment of database driven sites and the Aspire One handles them great. True, I have to carry around two machines, but it is nice to be able to write code on my 12.1" Powerbook and view the changes on the Aspires screen or the other way around. I can fit the two small laptops on a small table at the coffee shop I usually work out of side by side and it's almost like having a dual monitor set up that is 7lb total.
My only problem is going from an apple keyboard to the netbook's keyboard layout side by side. That can cause some copy paste errors when I'm tired.
probably will develop a line of code that allows developers to place google ads in their apps so developers can offer "free" apps that are ad supported.
You are assuming we're hosting things in house for our current project. We're not. All the boxes are Leased dedicated servers (managed) from Pair Networks with 1 box co-located with them (needed Root access) and then we leased a dedicated server with root access from The Planet with as backup.
Of course we have a development system in house that is synced nightly with the live system. We've got FIOS and a 10mb/s D/U business cable connection in case all else fails.
All the code is written in PHP with ADOdb for database support. (Currently MySQL, but looking towards moving to PostgreSQL in the future to integrate with OpenBravoERP and OpenBravoPOS with in the next 18 months).
I've used FreeBSD and Pair Networks for 10 years without a problem. As I said, go with what you know.
I'm actually giving a presentation on this in a couple weeks at an academic conference on innovation. "Cloud Computing" had another name in the 1970's, Time Share. Ask folks how well that worked back in the day. Two years ago I did a consulting gig at a Medical Supply company that was still running their inventory and billing off a 486 with DOS, I kid you not. Fortunately their software vender was still around and did offer an upgrade route, but they were pushing to use their new online based system. We shopped around at a few other medical software companies who were pushing the same thing.
The owners of the business were in their 50's and 60's. They were savvy enough with the computers, but everything kept coming back to what would happen to their data. End of the day, they would not trust their business data to an outside vender, period. And for good reason dealing with HIPPA and other privacy considerations. The only way out for the data is a modem that is used to connect to the state's electronic billing system for public aid & medicare and that's it. Not internet connection to the server or the workstations that connect to it.
I work around a college town with several folks who are on the cutting edge. I just built online ordering system for another company that is hosted off a dedicated server. Every day the interns came in, the first thing out of their mouths were, "Why don't you just use Amazon?"
My short answer was, "I know how this will scale. If it gets hammered, add more servers, load balance it out, and cluster the database when it comes time. I've done it before and it will work. And until something better comes along and is proven, stick with what you know."
Most smaller businesses I chat with are not comfortable with the idea of other people hosting their critical data. Basically my conference topic is that we'll see something close to the Adobe Air model where applications can run either online or from the web in some type of VM and enable users to still save their work locally. Whether that be a hard drive or USB thumb drive. No matter how cool a web app is, if I can't run it while I'm not connected and can't save data to my local machine, it is not going to replace traditional desktop apps anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had great luck with both a konqueror ad block script as well as safari ad block on FreeBSD/Mac respectively.
When we started development of our software, we noticed that everyone else in our business were all depolyed on Windows. When we were doing research on our main competitor in this region, it was pretty clear why they were Windows based, all of the company's founders had worked for Microsoft or were certified MS techs.
From the outset we were going to be using *iux based servers with PHP & PostgreSQL and JAVA for desktop apps. OpenBravo powers our ERP and POS systems.
Originally I pushed for FreeBSD, but we went OpenSuSE for no other reason that it was the first distro to work out of the box with all drivers with our development machine. So when it came time to go live, our servers were running OpenSuSE on the web and application servers and FreeBSD to power the Database Server.
Our Jr. Coders & Contract employees all currently use OpenSuSE based desktops with Eclipse, OpenOffice, and/or Google Docs for internal communications. Right now we're spending about $95 per developer in software costs. And that is for a single Windows box that people can remote into to test or use a rapid development CRUD program that is windows only.
When were looking at our main competitor in the geographic region, we figured we could hire at least one, possibly two full time developers for what they spend on software licenses alone. (They use MSSQL and roll their own database servers in house.) Now they may have a bit more scalability built in. But our plans was to use PostgreSQL until it reaches the point where we need a true enterprise class database. Then we call Teradata and be done with it. But that is likely going to be a coupe years until we reach that point.
And that funding was mostly from the military for military related stuff. The DOD didn't create ARPANET for you and me, they did it for themselves. The fact that it took off in the civilian sector was not the point. Same thing with computers. They were needed to break enemy codes. The fact that afterwards they were able to commercialize the technology for you and me was never the point. They were created because the government needed the technology and then needed to stay one step ahead of the (insert Nazi's, Soviets, or other party here).
It's not like the government was spending the money to develop products so we could sit here and discuss on slashdot...
Didn't Yahoo go before the 9th circuit of appeals about 10 years ago and get a ruling that a US company need not know or comply with all the laws of other countries if they are operating a business out of the US and designed for a US audience?
Wire it to a bank in one of a number of countries where it is illegal to even ask who owns a bank account. There aren't as many places today, but there are still a few where accounts are all numbers. It's a numbered account and you have an id number, not a name. You call in, give the proper ID number and password and wire the money on to another bank, usually controlled by your friends in the >.
I've used them as Schuland Partner AG when I was working in Germany, although the accounts were on Solaris at the time with few problems and hosted a number of personal sites on their shared hosting up until 2004 or 2005. My old comapny had a dedicated server with them and had a few problems. On paper they had (and still do) have the best price on dedicated server hosting when you compare between companies. But if anything goes wrong, you're screwed. We had a hard disk fail and tried to get it replaced. Meanwhile our customers were bitching at us because their site was down. I had warned the boss about this previously. We had to contact their tech support for something minor once before and we finally got ahold of someone in the dedicated server department that could actually speak english. (They do all their tech support out of the far east)
We ended up going elsewhere and when the next bill came in, the boss put a stop payment with American Express. He explained the reasoning that 1and1 had not lived up to a reasonable expectation of delivered service and AE agreed. 1and1 still sent it to collections. (It still never got paid as far as I know).
Their customer service is beyond useless and their control panel features are always lagging behind everyone else. I know about a year ago, they added "Click-n'build" application of common programs like Joomla, etc.. Kind of like Fanastico in Cpanel. Well, there's a catch, with their click and build you get their default config. Just try to add plug-ins or new themes....you can't.
Where I work now came across them when we were pricing out dedicated servers. I was pushing for Pair Networks, but the $350 vs. $99 a month kept the owner making me justify why one costs three time as much for arguably less services. At least on Paper. I've been using Pair Networks since 1998. They've always been expensive, but I've never had to wait more than 20 minutes for a problem to be fixed either. Especially in set up costs (we needed a few extra ports installed and Pair Networks only does managed servers. Want an extra Port installed, it's $50).
It's an argument that I initially lost. The guy is a small business owner and has started 2 other successful businesses, but he has never dealt in the technology world before where time kills. So we have a dedicated server at 1and1. So far no problems, and I have to say that things are a bit better than the last time I used them other than their software offerings are a bit out of date. Still, the ability to reimage and the off site back ups work. We back up nightly to the 1and1 FTP server and then back up to our internal back-up system every 2 hours. We can switch from the 1and1 dedicated system to the one in the office in less than 20 minutes and we've tested this just to make sure. I've been through the week long nightmare once before if a hard disk fails.
Now that we have enough clients that we know that the business is going to fly, I am now fighting the battle to get everything moved to Pair Networks when we launch the next version of our system. He's since read a few reviews of 1and1 and has come to realize that they can't be trusted.
PERL? Absolutely, now go away before I replace you with a small PERL script you insensitive clout!
I have an old book on how to build your own telescope from the 1980's that included how to hook up a C64 and use a joystick to control the telescope's movements all written in C64 Basic. I remember porting it to QBasic circa 1994/5 and using it for a telescope I had to account for planetary motion for photography. (Back before every telescope came with such features).
That would almost be fun...wow I really am a geek....*shudders* I'm going back to my cave now.
NSA, it's the NSA that reads your emails
CIA will just write long reports about what you wrote....
What's the point with VM software these days like VM ware or Parallels? We use intel macs as our primary development platform. Why? Paraellels allows us to have OSX and then boot XP Pro, Vista, Linux, BSD, and OpenSolaris with a double click of the mouse. We've found it much of efficient to use VM's for this kind of stuff than boot camp or triple booting because we can change environments with a mouse click, not a restart. And then if something does go heywire, we can kill the VM from inside OSX usually. Hell I have OS 10.5, XP Pro, and OpenBSD open right now on my MacPro.
Part of the reason of buying the macs was so we could easily test products across various platforms and no bitching from our developers. They want to use Kdevelop for a project, fine, install the Linux flavor of your choice in Parallels and go. Want to use Visual Studio, fine, boot up windows and run visual studio, not a problem. Want to use BBedit or Textmate and go, again, not a problem.
Triple booting maybe cool for an experiment, but these days, VM makes it far easier for most tasks to just double click and go.
Cloud computing as defined by IEEE is where your data is permanently stored on a server somewhere on the internet and then cache it locally as needed on a computer, smartphone, etc.. If you are a larger company that hosts your own data centers and have control over your own network, there maybe some merit to this.
But for most consumers I think they are looking for something similar to Mobile Me or similar type application where you cache the item online temporarily (whether that be hours, days, weeks, whatever) to be synced and then stored on the various devices. You still control the data. It is synced and stored on multiple devices providing a measure of redundancy for your files.
That is exactly how we operate. Most of our files are still done on laptops in MS Word and then we upload to Google Docs when we need to share or edit a document or spreadsheet. But once we delete the document online, is it really gone? It is not important to what we do, but to others it maybe.
Time sharing 2.0?
Blender has made a lot of progress, but it is still way behind Maya and even Lightwave. I've not been using Blender in the past couple releases, but it used to have some issues on my Quad Core Power Mac and using more than 4GB of Ram. I think this has been addressed now though. But I've never run into the problem of RAM or processor speed being the problem, but video ram when modeling an object. I have created scenes that will even grind a decent 256MB video card into the ground. Sure, it would be nice to render a bit faster, but for $20 - $60 a month, I do as much rendering as I want at Respower.
But let's look at cost. For $25k I can buy about 75 commodity boxes that are dual core, 2GB of Ram each & networking gear. That's about 150 Cores and 150GB of Ram. Put Linux on there and you can run ScreamerNet (you get to put the LW rendering engine on 999 machines per license) or one of a number of Maya distributed rendering programs. End result are going to be more frames being processed at one time. (for animation)
If I went the Mac Mini route, that's about 40 Mac Minis, which is still 80 Cores, 80GB of Ram total and with ScreamerNet or Xgrid....
Now the downsides are, 40 - 80 computers take up a lot of space and probably would eat up more power/cooling costs. But then again, if a couple boxes kick the bucket or hiccup, the other 35 - 75 are still processing. You only loose a percentage of total output.
Where it maybe nice is for folks who are rendering a single frame, like for a large poster. The 64 cores would make quick work of most jobs, but for animation, you're better off going with with a farm.
I was waiting for this as we have a need for a few digital signage/internet kiosk application and I can't think of a better OS that OpenBSD on the default security side. Now to see if I can get it to boot off a Compact Flash card.
Or Go to Macmall.com and look at their price drop section. 2.4Ghz MBP with 15.4" screen, 2GB Ram, 16-GB HDD, $1550. 2.2Ghz for even less. And you get Parallels free.
Already ordered one for our development lap where we're testing under lots of hardware configurations. We've been using old PC server towers, the kind that stand like 4ft tall, so we can easily access all the components when we need to swap out this or that. But they do take up quite bit of space. As the article said, it's a niche product. So i guess next week we'll see.
Integrate more with Google Apps to lure corporate users. Really, most of the people we see using MSIE are coming from businesses. Places where they don't get the choice and IE is on the desktop because it's on the machine.
with a bunch of engineering students last night. A few had Chrome on their laptops (We were meeting at a coffee shop about a conference), but most of the people in the shop were using FireFox. FF works fine for them and most asked why should they try chrome when what they have works with few or no complaints. There was nothing revolutionary in Chrome from their perspective. Hell, I opened it up and the first thing I saw was the dial pad area and I thought, "what the hell, looks just like Opera with different looking tabs at the top." To me there was no reason to use Chrome over Opera or FF or Safari.
People are generally hesitant to change unless there is a good reason. Look at how long it to FF to make in roads. Finally when MSIE was having the hijack of the week, people moved to FF because of the perception it was somehow safer. A lot of Mac users, myself included, use Safari because it works. That was not always the case, but these days I don't have many problems with safari and webpages. I have FF and Opera but I rarely use either unless I'm testing.
I'll still buy mini's. I love the things. I've got 8, mostly still 1.25 and 1.42Ghz G4's that I've picked up off ebay. I have one hooked up to my 32" LCD TV as a media center (basically an Apple TV before there were apple TV's) and then use the others as a cheap rendering grid for Final Cut and Blender. Best part is they take up a shelf on my book case and don't drive up the powerbill that much nor heat the den as bad as the quadcore. (used to heat a bloody 1 bedroom apt with the thing.)
At work we've bought mini's to replace all the point of sale and desktop units. Worked out well since they already had monitors/touchscreens and keyboards and mice that were all USB.
Right now where I work was running 6 different OS's. Right now all the Point-of-sale system are XP-based, the laptops are a mix of Dell's and Apple, the router/firewall runs off Gentoo, and they have a couple OpenSuSE workstations.
On the server side, the webservers were a mix of Debian, the application server and database server were both OpenSuSE. They remote monitor a number of digital signage/interactive kiosks using another Linux package (Debain-based I believe). At the end of the day each system had it's quirks based on the developer who worked on that particular project. Bottom line it was a mess.
It was time for new hardware and the shop is going to OSX for everything in house, Mac Mini's & MBP's, shifting to a customPOS system based on OpenBravoPOS running off a Mac Mini and then all our remotely hosted items are being shifted to all FreeBSD based servers managed by Pair.
End result is that my life becomes much easier and we can shift my attention towards development projects instead of maintaining the system.
Actually, most people don't care about multiple music stores because they use one: iTunes. By far and large it works for most people and they are happy with it.
Definately. When my old Windows laptop croaked a month ago, I was on the verge of finally breaking down and getting a MacBook or MacBook pro to replace this 12.1" Powerbook. I happen to be at Best Buy, saw the Acer Aspire One with 1GB of Ram, 120GB HDD, and XP home for $350 and brought it home with me.
I only need to test compatibility with MSIE for webpages and there are 2 windows-only applications that I love to use for rapid development/deployment of database driven sites and the Aspire One handles them great. True, I have to carry around two machines, but it is nice to be able to write code on my 12.1" Powerbook and view the changes on the Aspires screen or the other way around. I can fit the two small laptops on a small table at the coffee shop I usually work out of side by side and it's almost like having a dual monitor set up that is 7lb total.
My only problem is going from an apple keyboard to the netbook's keyboard layout side by side. That can cause some copy paste errors when I'm tired.
probably will develop a line of code that allows developers to place google ads in their apps so developers can offer "free" apps that are ad supported.
You are assuming we're hosting things in house for our current project. We're not. All the boxes are Leased dedicated servers (managed) from Pair Networks with 1 box co-located with them (needed Root access) and then we leased a dedicated server with root access from The Planet with as backup.
Of course we have a development system in house that is synced nightly with the live system. We've got FIOS and a 10mb/s D/U business cable connection in case all else fails.
All the code is written in PHP with ADOdb for database support. (Currently MySQL, but looking towards moving to PostgreSQL in the future to integrate with OpenBravoERP and OpenBravoPOS with in the next 18 months).
I've used FreeBSD and Pair Networks for 10 years without a problem. As I said, go with what you know.
I'm actually giving a presentation on this in a couple weeks at an academic conference on innovation. "Cloud Computing" had another name in the 1970's, Time Share. Ask folks how well that worked back in the day. Two years ago I did a consulting gig at a Medical Supply company that was still running their inventory and billing off a 486 with DOS, I kid you not. Fortunately their software vender was still around and did offer an upgrade route, but they were pushing to use their new online based system. We shopped around at a few other medical software companies who were pushing the same thing.
The owners of the business were in their 50's and 60's. They were savvy enough with the computers, but everything kept coming back to what would happen to their data. End of the day, they would not trust their business data to an outside vender, period. And for good reason dealing with HIPPA and other privacy considerations. The only way out for the data is a modem that is used to connect to the state's electronic billing system for public aid & medicare and that's it. Not internet connection to the server or the workstations that connect to it.
I work around a college town with several folks who are on the cutting edge. I just built online ordering system for another company that is hosted off a dedicated server. Every day the interns came in, the first thing out of their mouths were, "Why don't you just use Amazon?"
My short answer was, "I know how this will scale. If it gets hammered, add more servers, load balance it out, and cluster the database when it comes time. I've done it before and it will work. And until something better comes along and is proven, stick with what you know."
Most smaller businesses I chat with are not comfortable with the idea of other people hosting their critical data. Basically my conference topic is that we'll see something close to the Adobe Air model where applications can run either online or from the web in some type of VM and enable users to still save their work locally. Whether that be a hard drive or USB thumb drive. No matter how cool a web app is, if I can't run it while I'm not connected and can't save data to my local machine, it is not going to replace traditional desktop apps anytime soon.