Yes, you need a lawyer. If you receive a subpoena, you should let a lawyer handle it. It takes a rat to talk to a rat. If you structure your answer poorly, it will come back to bite you.
Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Seriously, there's no reason to drop these devices. Why not include them with the newer stuff.
Becauses the busses are slow, kludgy, and cost sillicon and valuable board real-estate that could be used for UATA133 or additional USB 2.0 (450+ MB/Sec) or IEEE1394 / FireWire (400+ MB/Sec) connectors, or to make motherboards smaller and/or less expensive.
However, there are uses for serial porst. I have a customer who installs four or so systems each month to his clients, hotels and restaurants. He puts two or three external US Robotics modems on them. They process credit card transactions. Speed of the bus is not important; it takes longer to dial the credit card processor than it takes to process the credit card. What is important is reliability. In the hotel and restaurant industry, external modems and serial ports have a long established reputation for reliablilty. Some customers process $50K or more on credit cards each day. Convincing them to switch to a newer technology is an impossible sell. From the customer's point of view, they have no reason to switch from what has proved to be reliable and effective. To take a chance on new tech means risking a nights worth of transactions and for what? What is the gain for the change? Just because it's newer does not make it better.
I am A+ Certified and I work with others who are. The quality of the tech varies greatly. I have also worked with tech who have no certificaions and are better than many of the A+ techs. Also, I have seen an A+ tech who could not figure out how to unzip a downloaded driver file.
The quality of the A+ techs I have worked with vary to greatly for me to put any faith in the A+ certification.
Need more applications. OpenOffice is a great start. However, I use Quicken and Quickbooks a lot. Also, I rely heavily on MS Publisher. I don't know of a similar program for Linux.
Other program issues are accounting programs in general. Best software (MAS90, ect) is all Windows based for the front end. I would love a good accounting program to run on Linux, in the power class of MAS90. BTW, in can be configured to use MS SQL 7. Don't know if it will work using MySQL.
If you want to get some mid-sized businesses using linux, get some integrated accounting software that is linux based available.
Even a Linux equilivant to PeachTree accounting would go a long way. I had a small retail store that I sold recently. I would love to have used linux. Could not do so. I ran Peachtree for my accounting and did lots of projections with Excel. All of my ads, including Yellow Page proofs, I did in MS Publisher. As hard as I tried, I could not duplicate my Windows software in linux.
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Yes, you need a lawyer. If you receive a subpoena, you should let a lawyer handle it. It takes a rat to talk to a rat. If you structure your answer poorly, it will come back to bite you.
Becauses the busses are slow, kludgy, and cost sillicon and valuable board real-estate that could be used for UATA133 or additional USB 2.0 (450+ MB/Sec) or IEEE1394 / FireWire (400+ MB/Sec) connectors, or to make motherboards smaller and/or less expensive.
However, there are uses for serial porst. I have a customer who installs four or so systems each month to his clients, hotels and restaurants. He puts two or three external US Robotics modems on them. They process credit card transactions. Speed of the bus is not important; it takes longer to dial the credit card processor than it takes to process the credit card. What is important is reliability. In the hotel and restaurant industry, external modems and serial ports have a long established reputation for reliablilty. Some customers process $50K or more on credit cards each day. Convincing them to switch to a newer technology is an impossible sell. From the customer's point of view, they have no reason to switch from what has proved to be reliable and effective. To take a chance on new tech means risking a nights worth of transactions and for what? What is the gain for the change? Just because it's newer does not make it better.
I am A+ Certified and I work with others who are. The quality of the tech varies greatly. I have also worked with tech who have no certificaions and are better than many of the A+ techs. Also, I have seen an A+ tech who could not figure out how to unzip a downloaded driver file. The quality of the A+ techs I have worked with vary to greatly for me to put any faith in the A+ certification.
Other program issues are accounting programs in general. Best software (MAS90, ect) is all Windows based for the front end. I would love a good accounting program to run on Linux, in the power class of MAS90. BTW, in can be configured to use MS SQL 7. Don't know if it will work using MySQL.
If you want to get some mid-sized businesses using linux, get some integrated accounting software that is linux based available.
Even a Linux equilivant to PeachTree accounting would go a long way. I had a small retail store that I sold recently. I would love to have used linux. Could not do so. I ran Peachtree for my accounting and did lots of projections with Excel. All of my ads, including Yellow Page proofs, I did in MS Publisher. As hard as I tried, I could not duplicate my Windows software in linux.
Any how, thats my 2 cents.