Re:what about a QuickBooks replacement?
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GnuCash 2.0.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Get yourself a copy of VMWare workstation, or if you can't afford that get VMWare player and have someone make an image file for you. About 3-4 gigs ought to be enough. Install windows xp onto the image file, and you can use Quickbooks in your VMWare virtual machine without having to dual-boot. The only thing you should need dual-booting for these days is games.:)
Money is only a valid reason if the data is worth LESS than the cost of a backup solution. In many cases, the nominal cost of a backup solution is far less than the value of the data on the computer.
Someone may say "I can't afford a new $80 drive to back up my data." But when they lose years of family photos and other documents, that $80 doesn't seem like so much compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it costs to do data recovery on a broken hard drive.
The parallels to Orwell's book are quite interesting. One that seems especially appropriate is the way in which the evil dictator gets replaced every few years. In 1984, the enemy was switched from Eurasia to Eastasia (or vice versa), and all the newspaper and historical records were purged of any references to the previous enemy, replacing them with the new one.
In the same way, we went from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, and it looks like the next one is Mohammad Khatami.
I recently did some searching to find a PDA to replace my old Handspring Visor Deluxe.
Unfortunately I was disappointed to find that none of the newer models, Palm or Pocket PC, use regular AAA batteries anymore. Rechargeable is supposed to be more convenient, but I like my battery life to be measured in weeks, not days or hours. I can easily go 4-5 weeks between battery changes with my Visor, but with one of the new color PDAs I'm afraid this would be cut much shorter.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I like the grayscale screen. It doesn't drain the batteries quickly, and is quite legible even in bright sunlight.
Hopefully there will be some breakthrough battery technology soon, because right now it sucks. In my ideal world, the ipod, cell phone, and PDA would all go for several weeks without needing a charge.
Let us see how well Darwin's theory of evolution holds up to the scientific method.
Observation: Darwin's theory of evolution will never be proven with the traditional scientific method, because it can't even meet the first qualification of this method, namely observation. We have no way to actually OBSERVE the actual process of evolution that takes billions of years to occur. At best we might speculate based upon micro-evolution of one species into a slightly different one, but human lifespan and history are far too short to do any real observation of the actual phenomena.
Things are already not looking so good for Mr. Darwin's theory, but for the sake of argument let's move on to step 2.
Hypothesis - Darwin's hypothesis was that variations in genetic distribution would cause some members of a species to be better adapted to survive than others, allowing those members to pass on the useful genetic traits to future generations. Eventually this process of natural selection is supposed to create brand a new species. Ok, we can move on to step 3.
Prediction - The submitted article has some element of prediction, eg, here's where we thought the fish with legs would be located, and how old it would be, etc. But this finding tells us nothing about FUTURE evolution, which is required for us to do step 4. So to meet the qualifications of step 3, someone needs to predict how, when, and under what specific conditions one species is going to evolve into another species.
Testing - Here's where the whole theory completely falls apart. Because of the inability to do step 1, eg, actually observing one species turn into a completely different one over millions of years, there's no way to even test the hypothesis!
Flame me all you want, but Darwin's theory of evolution is NOT a proper scientific theory, because it doesn't conform to the scientific method. It's unfortunate that it's presented as a factual proven theory by our schools and universities.
We use Fedora extensively in my workplace, and I'm frankly glad that Red Hat is keeping the Fedora project under it's wing rather than spinning it off as a separate non-profit.
Having worked with several non-profits over the years, I can say from experience that a for-profit company will probably be more accountable and responsible, and better at "getting the job done".
We like being the "testing" arm of Red Hat. We get a free, open-source operating system, and Red Hat gets our bug fix submissions and feedback. It's a nice relationship. We also like that some of Red Hat's profits pay for developers to maintain different parts of our operating system. The end result is a very slick, easy to use, and easy to configure, multi-purpose operating system.
I am not so sure that a separate Fedora foundation would do as good a job as Red Hat is doing. Free software zealots will probably disagree, but guess what folks - it takes money and manpower to get things done. There's nothing wrong with a company making a healthy profit, and using some of that profit to give back to the community.
Maybe he's working within Microsoft's yearly budget plan? If Bill sticks with the budget, then he's setting a good example of fiscal responsibility for his subordinates.
The problem with this idea is that the fundraising marathons are conducted by member stations. The member stations pay NPR for the rights to air their shows. Shows like Morning Edition are broadcast on hundreds of stations. NPR couldn't be reasonably expected to create hundreds of different podcast downloads, each with a donation plea for a different station.
NPR does accept donations directly, but as far as I know a large chunk of their revenue comes from member stations who pay for access to the shows.
My, touchy aren't we? It's early, maybe you haven't had your coffee yet this morning.
We use Linux and we support Linux development with our money, bugfix suggestions, and by encouraging other companies and clients also to use Linux. We don't use OpenBSD, and the only part of it that is useful to us is OpenSSH. Why should we pay to support an entire operating system that we have no use for?
Cable companies would also rather we pay for 100 channels of stuff we don't watch, but that is finally starting to change. You can now purchase individual shows or movies, and not have to pay for things you don't want. This is a good thing, because it puts more control in the hands of the end-user.
OpenSSH works fine on Linux or other flavors of Unix and could easily stand alone as it's own product with it's own management team. You might even get a corporate sponsor like IBM or Sun to 'adopt' the project.
Theo needs to A. Figure out a way to provide a service or product people are willing to pay for or B. Go work for someone else. Begging and whining about freeloaders is not the way to win support for your project.
Our company would be more inclined to donate if we knew that the money we gave would go directly to support OpenSSH. We have no interest in supporting OpenBSD. Fork OpenSSH into it's own project with separate financing and management, and we'll send you some money.
A lot of great educational software runs on either DOS or Windows 95/98. An added bonus is that these older programs, such as Reader Rabbit, etc. can be gotten really cheap on ebay or garage sales, etc. You could try installing Ubuntu and using Dosbox and WINE to get some of these programs running.
Ok, not to encourage this but I just refreshed the wikipedia beaver page about 5 times and watched the text literally changing before my eyes. The slashdot effect - in stop motion capture!
In Finland, and other European countries, the average person spends a lot more time on public transportation than we do here in the USA. Most Americans drive, and therefore have a lot less time for viewing content or surfing the web, or playing games on their cell phones. I don't see the cellphone/TV thing really taking off here in the United States for this reason.
As a nation we would do well to spend more time on bicycles or walking as you folks do on the other side of the pond. On the whole, the United States is a nation of fatties. I just talked to some neighbors who were shocked that my wife and I were going to walk less than 1/2 mile to the grocery store. Unfortunately there's just no impetus for people to actually use the public transportation, except for the very poor class, and in large cities like New York or San Francisco. Maybe if our gas was $8.00 a gallon people would think twice about driving!
Are your clients all in the same city, or do they connect remotely to the server. If so, and some of the clients are remote, how do you deal with latency? We have found VNC to be a bit laggy, so I'm assuming running a thin client across the Internet would also lag a bit.
We have carefully weighed the benefits of doing things each way, eg, thin-client vs. standalone desktop. With LTSP or thin-clients there are advantages as well as disadvantages.
At this point it's too easy for one user to unintentionally bog down the entire server with a runaway application. Uninstalling the application is not an option - we need to be able to read PDF and.doc files, and therefore we have to have Adobe Acrobat and OpenOffice. xpdf and ggv do not work properly most of the time, and our users find them difficult to use.
Instead of putting all our eggs in one basket (the server, or servers) we would rather spread the risk across several machines. This way if there is a problem with one of the desktop machines, the rest of our users will not be adversely affected. As it is now, any problem with our server(s) will affect all of our users, because they are all logged into desktop sessions on the same box, sharing the same CPU, etc.
The apps we run are just too bloated - try firing up OpenOffice, Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, Evolution and several Gnome desktop applets. Now multiply that by 12 users all logged into their GUI desktop at the same time. Now try having two or three users open a 50 page PDF file that was not properly created. I think you can see where I'm going with this.
If it was just a web browser that they needed to use, I would have stuck with thin clients. But in this case we chose to have the extra processing power on the desktop, and reduce the load and risk factor on the servers.
We are a much smaller company - at only $8m a year in sales, but here's how we do it:
12-15 users all log into a central server running Fedora Core 3 using thin clients. We currently use the excellent LTSP (www.ltsp.org) packages to accomplish this. Through experience we have found that a Pentium 4 server with about 2 gigs of RAM can comfortably handle up to 15 users or so, more than that and the load gets a bit too heavy. The programs that eat up the most memory and CPU cycles are Firefox, Evolution, Open Office, and Adobe Acrobat. We do allow streaming radio with xmms, because it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth or memory, and our users like it. The desktop clients themselves are old Pentium II boxes with 64mb of ram, no hard drives, and no cd-roms.
All our sales reps use OpenOffice every day to type up their quotes, fax cover sheets, etc. My secretary uses OpenOffice Calc to do spreadsheet work for our government contracts. It's easy to set all your clients to default to MS file formats - go into the File > Save settings and set them to always use.xls or.doc for your files.
You don't need to use thin clients, however, to use Open Office. We just went the thin client route because it was inexpensive and easy to do with existing hardware. We are planning to upgrade soon so that each user has their own desktop machine running local apps, but still mounting the home directories on the server.
I suppose if it can be done with 15 computers running linux, you could also do it with your Windows boxes. Just make sure they all have the same OO settings, and that they are all set to save in the proper file formats before your users even get a chance to work with it. OO works almost like MS Office - but be prepared for lots of complaining from users who will say "But Microsoft Office didn't work this way" . . .
Whoa, wait a minute there. The customer has *already* paid to 'use the pipes'. I pay a monthly fee for internet access - why should I or Google, or Vonage have to pay extra to use the pipe for whatever I want?
Consider that it is mainly the poor neighborhoods inhabited by blacks and Mexicans where law and order are maintained only by the presence of police. Generally speaking, the middle and upper class live outside US cities in comfortable suburbs.
This is America's dirty little secret, and Mother Nature has washed the whole thing out in the open for the rest of the world to see. Almost 30% of New Orleans residents live below the poverty line. Almost all of them are black. The truth is, we have a *huge* number of people in this country who live beneath the poverty line. Many of them canot afford even basic health care or food for their families, so they turn to drug dealing and prostitution to make more money. There are practially NO jobs and nothing for these people to do so they suck off the nipple of the government and sit around idle, getting into all sorts of mischief. Look what's happened to Detroit to get a small taste for what this urban decay looks like.
I'm embarrassed to say also that the most powerful country in the world has no national health care system! Most of the "working poor" in this country such as the Wal-Mart employees have no access to even basic health care for their families. Even Costa Rica has a basic health care plan for all its citizens!
We have already received thousands of refugees here in San Antonio, Texas. I've been listening to the police scanner the last couple of days and it's a complete mess. The last part I heard today, someone was asking where to deliver some insulin, and the reply was that nobody was available to answer the question, because most of the gov't office supervisors were OUT OF TOWN for the 3 day weekend!
These days I am embarassed to be an American, which has become something completely different than what the founding fathers envisioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Get yourself a copy of VMWare workstation, or if you can't afford that get VMWare player and have someone make an image file for you. About 3-4 gigs ought to be enough. Install windows xp onto the image file, and you can use Quickbooks in your VMWare virtual machine without having to dual-boot. The only thing you should need dual-booting for these days is games. :)
Money is only a valid reason if the data is worth LESS than the cost of a backup solution. In many cases, the nominal cost of a backup solution is far less than the value of the data on the computer.
Someone may say "I can't afford a new $80 drive to back up my data." But when they lose years of family photos and other documents, that $80 doesn't seem like so much compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it costs to do data recovery on a broken hard drive.
I think it was posted because it's rare that Google offers an application like this for Linux users.
Yes, but you didn't have a Harvard medical school graduate working on you. I think that was the point the parent poster was trying to make.
Sorry, I meant to say Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, instead of Mohammad Khatami. My bad.
The parallels to Orwell's book are quite interesting. One that seems especially appropriate is the way in which the evil dictator gets replaced every few years. In 1984, the enemy was switched from Eurasia to Eastasia (or vice versa), and all the newspaper and historical records were purged of any references to the previous enemy, replacing them with the new one.
In the same way, we went from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, and it looks like the next one is Mohammad Khatami.
I recently did some searching to find a PDA to replace my old Handspring Visor Deluxe.
Unfortunately I was disappointed to find that none of the newer models, Palm or Pocket PC, use regular AAA batteries anymore. Rechargeable is supposed to be more convenient, but I like my battery life to be measured in weeks, not days or hours. I can easily go 4-5 weeks between battery changes with my Visor, but with one of the new color PDAs I'm afraid this would be cut much shorter.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I like the grayscale screen. It doesn't drain the batteries quickly, and is quite legible even in bright sunlight.
Hopefully there will be some breakthrough battery technology soon, because right now it sucks. In my ideal world, the ipod, cell phone, and PDA would all go for several weeks without needing a charge.
1. Observation
2. Hypothesis
3. Prediction
4. Testing
Let us see how well Darwin's theory of evolution holds up to the scientific method.
Observation: Darwin's theory of evolution will never be proven with the traditional scientific method, because it can't even meet the first qualification of this method, namely observation. We have no way to actually OBSERVE the actual process of evolution that takes billions of years to occur. At best we might speculate based upon micro-evolution of one species into a slightly different one, but human lifespan and history are far too short to do any real observation of the actual phenomena.
Things are already not looking so good for Mr. Darwin's theory, but for the sake of argument let's move on to step 2.
Hypothesis - Darwin's hypothesis was that variations in genetic distribution would cause some members of a species to be better adapted to survive than others, allowing those members to pass on the useful genetic traits to future generations. Eventually this process of natural selection is supposed to create brand a new species. Ok, we can move on to step 3.
Prediction - The submitted article has some element of prediction, eg, here's where we thought the fish with legs would be located, and how old it would be, etc. But this finding tells us nothing about FUTURE evolution, which is required for us to do step 4. So to meet the qualifications of step 3, someone needs to predict how, when, and under what specific conditions one species is going to evolve into another species.
Testing - Here's where the whole theory completely falls apart. Because of the inability to do step 1, eg, actually observing one species turn into a completely different one over millions of years, there's no way to even test the hypothesis!
Flame me all you want, but Darwin's theory of evolution is NOT a proper scientific theory, because it doesn't conform to the scientific method. It's unfortunate that it's presented as a factual proven theory by our schools and universities.
We use Fedora extensively in my workplace, and I'm frankly glad that Red Hat is keeping the Fedora project under it's wing rather than spinning it off as a separate non-profit.
Having worked with several non-profits over the years, I can say from experience that a for-profit company will probably be more accountable and responsible, and better at "getting the job done".
We like being the "testing" arm of Red Hat. We get a free, open-source operating system, and Red Hat gets our bug fix submissions and feedback. It's a nice relationship. We also like that some of Red Hat's profits pay for developers to maintain different parts of our operating system. The end result is a very slick, easy to use, and easy to configure, multi-purpose operating system.
I am not so sure that a separate Fedora foundation would do as good a job as Red Hat is doing. Free software zealots will probably disagree, but guess what folks - it takes money and manpower to get things done. There's nothing wrong with a company making a healthy profit, and using some of that profit to give back to the community.
Maybe his office is so sparse because Steve Ballmer breaks all his furniture?
Maybe he's working within Microsoft's yearly budget plan? If Bill sticks with the budget, then he's setting a good example of fiscal responsibility for his subordinates.
The problem with this idea is that the fundraising marathons are conducted by member stations. The member stations pay NPR for the rights to air their shows. Shows like Morning Edition are broadcast on hundreds of stations. NPR couldn't be reasonably expected to create hundreds of different podcast downloads, each with a donation plea for a different station.
NPR does accept donations directly, but as far as I know a large chunk of their revenue comes from member stations who pay for access to the shows.
My, touchy aren't we? It's early, maybe you haven't had your coffee yet this morning.
We use Linux and we support Linux development with our money, bugfix suggestions, and by encouraging other companies and clients also to use Linux. We don't use OpenBSD, and the only part of it that is useful to us is OpenSSH. Why should we pay to support an entire operating system that we have no use for?
Cable companies would also rather we pay for 100 channels of stuff we don't watch, but that is finally starting to change. You can now purchase individual shows or movies, and not have to pay for things you don't want. This is a good thing, because it puts more control in the hands of the end-user.
OpenSSH works fine on Linux or other flavors of Unix and could easily stand alone as it's own product with it's own management team. You might even get a corporate sponsor like IBM or Sun to 'adopt' the project.
Theo needs to A. Figure out a way to provide a service or product people are willing to pay for or B. Go work for someone else. Begging and whining about freeloaders is not the way to win support for your project.
Our company would be more inclined to donate if we knew that the money we gave would go directly to support OpenSSH. We have no interest in supporting OpenBSD. Fork OpenSSH into it's own project with separate financing and management, and we'll send you some money.
A lot of great educational software runs on either DOS or Windows 95/98. An added bonus is that these older programs, such as Reader Rabbit, etc. can be gotten really cheap on ebay or garage sales, etc. You could try installing Ubuntu and using Dosbox and WINE to get some of these programs running.
Google Video of some kid arguing with his mom, while on Xbox live with a headset
Ok, not to encourage this but I just refreshed the wikipedia beaver page about 5 times and watched the text literally changing before my eyes. The slashdot effect - in stop motion capture!
In Finland, and other European countries, the average person spends a lot more time on public transportation than we do here in the USA. Most Americans drive, and therefore have a lot less time for viewing content or surfing the web, or playing games on their cell phones. I don't see the cellphone/TV thing really taking off here in the United States for this reason.
As a nation we would do well to spend more time on bicycles or walking as you folks do on the other side of the pond. On the whole, the United States is a nation of fatties. I just talked to some neighbors who were shocked that my wife and I were going to walk less than 1/2 mile to the grocery store. Unfortunately there's just no impetus for people to actually use the public transportation, except for the very poor class, and in large cities like New York or San Francisco. Maybe if our gas was $8.00 a gallon people would think twice about driving!
Are your clients all in the same city, or do they connect remotely to the server. If so, and some of the clients are remote, how do you deal with latency? We have found VNC to be a bit laggy, so I'm assuming running a thin client across the Internet would also lag a bit.
Colin:
.doc files, and therefore we have to have Adobe Acrobat and OpenOffice. xpdf and ggv do not work properly most of the time, and our users find them difficult to use.
We have carefully weighed the benefits of doing things each way, eg, thin-client vs. standalone desktop. With LTSP or thin-clients there are advantages as well as disadvantages.
At this point it's too easy for one user to unintentionally bog down the entire server with a runaway application. Uninstalling the application is not an option - we need to be able to read PDF and
Instead of putting all our eggs in one basket (the server, or servers) we would rather spread the risk across several machines. This way if there is a problem with one of the desktop machines, the rest of our users will not be adversely affected. As it is now, any problem with our server(s) will affect all of our users, because they are all logged into desktop sessions on the same box, sharing the same CPU, etc.
The apps we run are just too bloated - try firing up OpenOffice, Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, Evolution and several Gnome desktop applets. Now multiply that by 12 users all logged into their GUI desktop at the same time. Now try having two or three users open a 50 page PDF file that was not properly created. I think you can see where I'm going with this.
If it was just a web browser that they needed to use, I would have stuck with thin clients. But in this case we chose to have the extra processing power on the desktop, and reduce the load and risk factor on the servers.
We are a much smaller company - at only $8m a year in sales, but here's how we do it:
.xls or .doc for your files.
12-15 users all log into a central server running Fedora Core 3 using thin clients. We currently use the excellent LTSP (www.ltsp.org) packages to accomplish this. Through experience we have found that a Pentium 4 server with about 2 gigs of RAM can comfortably handle up to 15 users or so, more than that and the load gets a bit too heavy. The programs that eat up the most memory and CPU cycles are Firefox, Evolution, Open Office, and Adobe Acrobat. We do allow streaming radio with xmms, because it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth or memory, and our users like it. The desktop clients themselves are old Pentium II boxes with 64mb of ram, no hard drives, and no cd-roms.
All our sales reps use OpenOffice every day to type up their quotes, fax cover sheets, etc. My secretary uses OpenOffice Calc to do spreadsheet work for our government contracts. It's easy to set all your clients to default to MS file formats - go into the File > Save settings and set them to always use
You don't need to use thin clients, however, to use Open Office. We just went the thin client route because it was inexpensive and easy to do with existing hardware. We are planning to upgrade soon so that each user has their own desktop machine running local apps, but still mounting the home directories on the server.
I suppose if it can be done with 15 computers running linux, you could also do it with your Windows boxes. Just make sure they all have the same OO settings, and that they are all set to save in the proper file formats before your users even get a chance to work with it. OO works almost like MS Office - but be prepared for lots of complaining from users who will say "But Microsoft Office didn't work this way" . . .
Whoa, wait a minute there. The customer has *already* paid to 'use the pipes'. I pay a monthly fee for internet access - why should I or Google, or Vonage have to pay extra to use the pipe for whatever I want?
Too bad there's no comments section on the blog, but I can see why they would never allow something like that. It would be an instant flamefest.
I just upgraded to Gallery v. 2.0, but now I can't use Gallery Remote to upload photos. I keep getting the following error message:
Server contacted, but Gallery not found at this URL ( http://www.mysite.com/gallery2/main.php )
Any pointers? Has anyone else experienced this? Does Gallery Remote work at all with g2?
Consider that it is mainly the poor neighborhoods inhabited by blacks and Mexicans where law and order are maintained only by the presence of police. Generally speaking, the middle and upper class live outside US cities in comfortable suburbs.
This is America's dirty little secret, and Mother Nature has washed the whole thing out in the open for the rest of the world to see. Almost 30% of New Orleans residents live below the poverty line. Almost all of them are black. The truth is, we have a *huge* number of people in this country who live beneath the poverty line. Many of them canot afford even basic health care or food for their families, so they turn to drug dealing and prostitution to make more money. There are practially NO jobs and nothing for these people to do so they suck off the nipple of the government and sit around idle, getting into all sorts of mischief. Look what's happened to Detroit to get a small taste for what this urban decay looks like.
I'm embarrassed to say also that the most powerful country in the world has no national health care system! Most of the "working poor" in this country such as the Wal-Mart employees have no access to even basic health care for their families. Even Costa Rica has a basic health care plan for all its citizens!
We have already received thousands of refugees here in San Antonio, Texas. I've been listening to the police scanner the last couple of days and it's a complete mess. The last part I heard today, someone was asking where to deliver some insulin, and the reply was that nobody was available to answer the question, because most of the gov't office supervisors were OUT OF TOWN for the 3 day weekend!
These days I am embarassed to be an American, which has become something completely different than what the founding fathers envisioned.