I recall reading , many years ago in a magazine like popular science, that the air force was exploring analog computers for use in fighter jets; the rationale was that analog computers would be resistant to the electromagnetic pulse (emp) emitted by a nuclear blast; jets with analog computers could keep flying...
I have looked at R; it is not suitable Actually, I would use stronger language, but I don't want to start a flame war - I'm more curious: from my perspective R is totally useless garbage. So, u are obviously a bright guy; I can add 2+2 and get 4 three times running, so why do we have this real diversity of opinion. I have looked at R; I can't imagine that the time required to learn it, and the time required to deal with other people would possibly, under any circumstance, be a plus for me..
1) people who use excel for statistics don't know anything about statistics, so it doesn't matter - someone (the boss, the journal editor, your colleague) wanted something (error bars,..) so you put them in. It rarely affects how people actually think (much less, are the underlying numbers suitable for a statistical treatment) 2) at least in molecular biology (biochmemistry, immunology, nucleic acids, etc) excel is the great can opener - (a) I have maybe 10 different instruments in the lab that spit out electronic data, and excel lets me simply handle everything in a single format; (b) most of us can do data manipulation in excel (take the avg of every 3 numbers and make a bar graph with error bars) so it works good enough... 3) the replacements either don't do a whole lot more, or cost a fortune and have a steep learning curve, or both There is a reason a lot of people use excel for a lot of things, it is good enuf
Does anyone have any statistics or real info on what fraction of academics use latex, as opposed to word ? In my personal experience, NOT one person I know uses latex. My guess, latex is restricted to a small % academics, consisting of the partly overlapping set of retrogrouchs and math heavys
it doesn't matter if linux is or isn't ready for the desktop what matters is (a) does someone care about the price difference (if, after taking into accound support, there really is a difference) and (b) does linux do something that wintel or mac doesn't the 1st is beyond linux control; the second isn't the day linux has a must have app that is patented, so wintel/mac cna't run it, is the day linux will sweep all before it users don't buy an OS: they buy a computer to do somethinbg like play movies, chat on facebook or whatever. this focus on the os is totally detrimental to the success of linux. if all those linux programmers worked on finidng that one app, windows would go, deservedly, to the dustbin of history. of course, the linux geeks aren't smart enough to figure this out, they think people care about secure file systems, so M$ is safe for the foreseable future
any good/. er could go on and on about the problems of the times website. I actually had to tell them that they needed a button so people could go back or forward one day at a time (any std site for a journal has this feature - look at say amer chem soc journals, there is a button that goes forward or back one issue)
I have repeatedly told them their comments suck and they should have slashcode and wikipedia - can you imagine how much traffic the times website would generate if each of their great articles formed the basis of a community wiki article
and I'm not that good at this - i'm sure any competent experienced person could find 100s of things they are doing wrong (if you want to GIVE the times money, by being a customer, and purchasing an ad, try and figure out how to do it from the website - its embarrassing)
I guess the website is driven by old guys whoose attitude is, it was good enough for hot lead set by hand, its good enough for the web....nyt, rip
I was , untill the google scuzz fest, a firefox fan boy: got my family and many people at work away from ie and onto ff no longer - why should i support something that is in bed with google, pays its ceo an over inflated salary, and is doing a terrible job upgrading (why does a bad pdf download freeze my ff ? in excusable) I wonder how many people there are like me
thinking that TV cameras are the slippery slope to 24/7 facism is not hilarious; it is reasonable fear. Suppose the british , by spending money, make the cost of cameras and software cheaper - surely that will hasten the day when, say N korea will have cameras implanted in everyone at birth...that is not wacked out/. fear m ongering, that is a reasonable fear. I wonder how old you are: the loss of liberty and freedom, just in my shortlife (i'm 53) is astonishing - but it happens slowly, or in a climate of fear 99/11) and you don't really notice how bad things are: if you ahd told people on 9/10 that to get on an airplane, you had to show up 2 hours early, not carry a penkife,...people would have gasped.
Elsivier is a very large company; they have , over the last 20 years, bought a lot of speciality publishers (academic press) and they really dominate the field of technical/med/science publishin. It is possible the open source models will dethrone them, but this is happening much more slowly in the technical publishing field then in the newspaper field - as another poster noted, scientists need publications on their CVs, and elsivier provides that service. Elsivier, as a large company, has the resource to weather a scandal; I have observed, that at least in the US, when a compny is caught, and acuatlly has to admit to having done something bad, what they do is advertise on npr or public radio (eg, archer daniels midland got caught, i forget for what, and spent money on the mcneill lehrer snooze hour; citigroup is spending money on npr) people will forget how bad elsivier is
not sure aobut science, but nature is for profit: i think (this is my opinion) that they do this deliberately, on the theory that any publicit is good (eg the benviniste antibody dilution travesty)
they are a business, they care about profit. the great thing about being a monopoly is, you don't have to ship quality products - your customers can have whatever they want so long as it's black. seriously, if you are a de facto monopoly, as ms has been for the last, say 20 years, and you make 50 % gross margins , why on earth would you spend money on quality ? that sort of thinking is what seperates techies, who toil in the trenches, from c suite execs
developing new treatments that actually work is extremely hard, and costs a lot, and the incentives to cheat, either concsiously or unconsciouly, are huge. Take the case of the mortgage debacle: I would bet that you could get a majority of people , even people on/., to agree that lack of regulation was part of the problem; The same thing is true about medicine: we have the FDA because of the bad activities of for profit companies; someone has to referee them - they can't be trusted to do it themselves would you really trust some large, for profit company saying that this new pill had no side effects ? Thalidomide, anyone ? The problem is finding the right balance Beyond that, as a PhD,it is my opinion that this whole stem cell thing is WAY overhyped - what we should be doing, at this stage of our knowledge, is looking at a lot of different options, rather then focusing on stem cells. The technical barriers to successfull use of stem cells - many of which have been mentioned - are huge. For instance, if you inject someone with a few thousand cells that have been grown in the lab, how do you know that one (1) of those cells has not mutated, so that it is an aggressive tumor that will kill you in 5 years ? In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they ain't the only way you will know in the real world is to inject 1,000 people and see what happens in 5 years. You could say, I'm dying of cancer today, do what you will. The trouble with that is it opens the doors to charlatans who take advantage of desperate people - all sorts of "companies" with "doctors" and "scientists" will appear, if thereis no FDA regulation, and many of these companies will offer products taht are worse then useless. FDA regulation may not be good, but it is better then any of the alternatives
I went down to microcenter in cambridge, ma, a half mile from mit and harvard. they don't even stock linux computers. I do my taxes on the computer (so even if they make linux tax software, i have to import, or run wine) my kids use windows for gaming (so i have to know something about it to help them)..... I actually installed ubuntu under wubi on my last laptop: it worked fine: so what why should i switch if there is ZERO incentive for me to use linux - i get absolutely nothing from linux that i don't get from windows; it is not easier to use, it is not faster, it is not anything that i need until the linux community patents a new type of software that i have to have and it runs only on linux, I' wont switch, even tho the thought of giving more money to redmond makes me want to puke
to bad the OSS community has no real answers. this is something i submitted a week or so ago:
"I'm looking for software that can help my company manage information in documents that may be in pdf, doc or web form. I work for a biotech company with 15 people, and we have large numbers of documents that range from very technical scientific publications (usually pdf) to company reports like 10-Ks, to web pages to newspaper articles to pictures. We use these documents to review and stay current with the scientific literature; to learn about what competitors are doing, gain market information (who is selling how much of what), generate publicity for our products,and so forth. We currently use the windows file tree as our organizer, which creates several problems: I can't put one file into multiple bins; I can't use keywords to search; I can't organize files into groups. What I would like (I think) to do is organize the information by keywords and subjects; associate groups of files into binders, and create summarys for the binders (eg, I might have 5 files that go together, and my own summary of what the five files mean); add sticky notes to anything at anytime (actuallly, I would like keywords and stickys [comments in adobe acrobat] to be the same: words in stickys are keywords, and keywords show up in the stick; add URLS and webpages directly from the browser; have a function that mimics or is compatible with a package like endnote or procite or papyrus or refcite (formats bibliographys in word docs) I'm not even sure what the solution looks like, but it needs to be cheap (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez. This has a lot of features that scientists need, such as keyword search returns a list of articles that can be viewed by abstract."
this is a problem that comes up a lot, for a lot of people I've tried a lot of the solutions , like zotero, and they just don't cut it for one person,- much less if you need to share the info among a small group of people. There is a fabulous market for someone who wants to write this software
The main problem, which I don't think anyone has addressed, is that free information has a price - a human can only remember so much. So, the glut of free pdf/web info is actually bad, cause you loose sight of the important stuff; this use to be done for you with your $ monthy journal subscriptions - if you are in nanoscience, you might get nanoletters from the american chemical society, the editors do the weeding out for you
the other problem is how does one do natural language querys ?
Of the available answers, most are owned by a de facto monopoly, thomson reuters; refman is probably the best
Surely there must be someone who makes a pdf library database front end better then the collection feature in adobe acrobat
we (well not me, but the engineers i work with )are pretty serious solidworks users. and at the last project mtg, the boss says, i gotta show everyone this, i did a model of our project over the weekend with google sketchup which is free, and he says, of course it isn't solidworks, but the 3d rotation is better... Those of you with memories of more then a few minutes will remember that there use to be this great software called proE, and it was incredibly exspensive, and along came this "low cost" upstart, solidworks...... the innovators dilemman, in software
i think it is you who are mistaken. what happened in the london office of aig - and this was documented by G morgenson of the nytimes - is that they wrote insurance on mortgages (ok, technically it was more complicated) and took huge huge sums in premiums and didn't set any of that money aside as aresrve against losses now maybe they would be in trouble without that,but whenyou do something that reckless and stupid, the burden is on you to show that you are not a crimminal (and i do think they should be prosecuted under RICO)
Mathwise, u r right that 100 million is a minor distraction. However, you miss the big picture. The economic mess was caused not by lazy americans maxing on the credit card, but the cowboy behaviour (if not crimminal)of aig execs (and their counterparts at other financial firms) what will help the economy is to change this culture, and part of that is changing the compensation culture on wall street ; the point is that the bonus are undeserved and un necessary (these guys wanna walk, go for it - lots of unemployed people we can pickup cheaP) and that the bonuses are part of this culture.
how about using stimulus money to encourage companies to locate jobs in mass transit accessible (real mass transit, not those once an yhour bus lines for the cleaning staff at the office parks) of course, that would actually be a good idea,
reading the neauseatingly gushing article, I couldn't quite figure out how this works - does it require limewire servers or exspose you to lime wire ? what is this jabber client ? my impression is that the software basically lets you share a folder, or the equivalent of a folder between a set of computers; the problem, for making this useful, is that only downloaded files appear - what if I just want to share some word docs ? surely someone on/. can offer a clean, simple explanation
"usable" means you download a file, click on it, the complete package is installed and ready to use after a wizard guides you thru setup someone will have the brains to put thiss together, and all these stupid, hard to use, badly designed packages like joomla and word press (their web sites are designed to imitimidate users) will die a deserved death
look at why steve jobs is succesfull: if your grandmother can't use it, it is to complicated look at why DEC and Prime and Data general and Cray are gone: volume trumps sophistication and quality every time
as a noncomputer specialist/. reader, this whole conversation sounds really wierd. Why can't i just call up a bunch of guys in the yellow pages, or whatever passes for yellow pages, and say, I got a 1000 users a day, yadayada, gimme a quote.
all this arcane stuff - you have know this program, that program, why should some small nonprofit even have to think about it
to put this in perspective, it is as if the original poster was the maintenance guy, and he was asking for what type of capacitor to install in the new electric motor controllers in the hvac system. no small or even large nonprofit would even think about - it would just be part of the hvac vendor's bill
I think the answere is that server type stuff is deliberately kept opaque and complicated so sysadmins have jobs - after all, if i could just get a quote on it, most of the people who have posted might not have paychecks, right ?
I'VE BEEN THINKING ALOT ABOUT THIS FOR OUR TOWN some points kids rise to responsiblity; seniors in HS are quite capable, with the right teacher of maintaining most of this - and what great job training, both in th nuts and bolts of computers and in work ethic
it may sound wacko, but i think the hs seniors could maintain the school email, web site, everything but hr and payroll, where there are legal issues
cost - teachers are mostly not into computers, esp the older tenured senior ones with influence, and the people on the school booard are mostly retired - who else has the time - and not yet computer xsavvy
so, you need some SIMPLE carrots cost - find oout how much the school is paying,a nd with a little bs, say, we can save youa bundle all that software the kids need we can now afford and the training they will get - can you imagine the value these kids will have if they are not intimidated by writing debugging and compiling a little C program to do something stupid would look fabulous on a college resume
why is it ok for us to have nukes, but not person X ? From person X's perspective, this might seem unfair. I also might point out, that the various treaties we are signatory to, a treaty under the constitution being recognized as governing law in the US, at least suggest that we should elimminat our nukes. there is something, at least from person X's perspective, hypocritical when the us says, clause x of this treaty requires you to not have nukes, but we are ignoring clause y, which requries us to elimminate nukes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty#Second_pillar:_disarmament
Slashdot Mirror
I recall reading , many years ago in a magazine like popular science, that the air force was exploring analog computers for use in fighter jets; the rationale was that analog computers would be resistant to the electromagnetic pulse (emp) emitted by a nuclear blast; jets with analog computers could keep flying...
SpinRite's strongest and most unique capability
quote from their website
right, so personal anecdotes aside, do we have any decent survey data.
I have looked at R; it is not suitable
Actually, I would use stronger language, but I don't want to start a flame war - I'm more curious: from my perspective R is totally useless garbage.
So, u are obviously a bright guy; I can add 2+2 and get 4 three times running, so why do we have this real diversity of opinion.
I have looked at R; I can't imagine that the time required to learn it, and the time required to deal with other people would possibly, under any circumstance, be a plus for me..
1) people who use excel for statistics don't know anything about statistics, so it doesn't matter - someone (the boss, the journal editor, your colleague) wanted something (error bars, ..) so you put them in. It rarely affects how people actually think (much less, are the underlying numbers suitable for a statistical treatment)
2) at least in molecular biology (biochmemistry, immunology, nucleic acids, etc) excel is the great can opener - (a) I have maybe 10 different instruments in the lab that spit out electronic data, and excel lets me simply handle everything in a single format; (b) most of us can do data manipulation in excel (take the avg of every 3 numbers and make a bar graph with error bars) so it works good enough...
3) the replacements either don't do a whole lot more, or cost a fortune and have a steep learning curve, or both
There is a reason a lot of people use excel for a lot of things, it is good enuf
Does anyone have any statistics or real info on what fraction of academics use latex, as opposed to word ?
In my personal experience, NOT one person I know uses latex.
My guess, latex is restricted to a small % academics, consisting of the partly overlapping set of retrogrouchs and math heavys
it doesn't matter if linux is or isn't ready for the desktop
what matters is (a) does someone care about the price difference (if, after taking into accound support, there really is a difference) and (b) does linux do something that wintel or mac doesn't
the 1st is beyond linux control; the second isn't
the day linux has a must have app that is patented, so wintel/mac cna't run it, is the day linux will sweep all before it
users don't buy an OS: they buy a computer to do somethinbg like play movies, chat on facebook or whatever.
this focus on the os is totally detrimental to the success of linux. if all those linux programmers worked on finidng that one app, windows would go, deservedly, to the dustbin of history.
of course, the linux geeks aren't smart enough to figure this out, they think people care about secure file systems, so M$ is safe for the foreseable future
any good /. er could go on and on about the problems of the times website. I actually had to tell them that they needed a button so people could go back or forward one day at a time (any std site for a journal has this feature - look at say amer chem soc journals, there is a button that goes forward or back one issue)
I have repeatedly told them their comments suck and they should have slashcode and wikipedia - can you imagine how much traffic the times website would generate if each of their great articles formed the basis of a community wiki article
and I'm not that good at this - i'm sure any competent experienced person could find 100s of things they are doing wrong (if you want to GIVE the times money, by being a customer, and purchasing an ad, try and figure out how to do it from the website - its embarrassing)
I guess the website is driven by old guys whoose attitude is, it was good enough for hot lead set by hand, its good enough for the web....nyt, rip
I was , untill the google scuzz fest, a firefox fan boy: got my family and many people at work away from ie and onto ff
no longer - why should i support something that is in bed with google, pays its ceo an over inflated salary, and is doing a terrible job upgrading (why does a bad pdf download freeze my ff ? in excusable)
I wonder how many people there are like me
thinking that TV cameras are the slippery slope to 24/7 facism is not hilarious; it is reasonable fear. ...people would have gasped.
Suppose the british , by spending money, make the cost of cameras and software cheaper - surely that will hasten the day when, say N korea will have cameras implanted in everyone at birth...that is not wacked out/. fear m ongering, that is a reasonable fear.
I wonder how old you are: the loss of liberty and freedom, just in my shortlife (i'm 53) is astonishing - but it happens slowly, or in a climate of fear 99/11) and you don't really notice how bad things are: if you ahd told people on 9/10 that to get on an airplane, you had to show up 2 hours early, not carry a penkife,
Elsivier is a very large company; they have , over the last 20 years, bought a lot of speciality publishers (academic press) and they really dominate the field of technical/med/science publishin. It is possible the open source models will dethrone them, but this is happening much more slowly in the technical publishing field then in the newspaper field - as another poster noted, scientists need publications on their CVs, and elsivier provides that service.
Elsivier, as a large company, has the resource to weather a scandal; I have observed, that at least in the US, when a compny is caught, and acuatlly has to admit to having done something bad, what they do is advertise on npr or public radio (eg, archer daniels midland got caught, i forget for what, and spent money on the mcneill lehrer snooze hour; citigroup is spending money on npr)
people will forget how bad elsivier is
not sure aobut science, but nature is for profit: i think (this is my opinion) that they do this deliberately, on the theory that any publicit is good (eg the benviniste antibody dilution travesty)
they are a business, they care about profit.
the great thing about being a monopoly is, you don't have to ship quality products - your customers can have whatever they want so long as it's black.
seriously, if you are a de facto monopoly, as ms has been for the last, say 20 years, and you make 50 % gross margins , why on earth would you spend money on quality ?
that sort of thinking is what seperates techies, who toil in the trenches, from c suite execs
developing new treatments that actually work is extremely hard, and costs a lot, and the incentives to cheat, either concsiously or unconsciouly, are huge. /., to agree that lack of regulation was part of the problem;
Take the case of the mortgage debacle: I would bet that you could get a majority of people , even people on
The same thing is true about medicine: we have the FDA because of the bad activities of for profit companies; someone has to referee them - they can't be trusted to do it themselves would you really trust some large, for profit company saying that this new pill had no side effects ? Thalidomide, anyone ?
The problem is finding the right balance
Beyond that, as a PhD,it is my opinion that this whole stem cell thing is WAY overhyped - what we should be doing, at this stage of our knowledge, is looking at a lot of different options, rather then focusing on stem cells.
The technical barriers to successfull use of stem cells - many of which have been mentioned - are huge.
For instance, if you inject someone with a few thousand cells that have been grown in the lab, how do you know that one (1) of those cells has not mutated, so that it is an aggressive tumor that will kill you in 5 years ?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they ain't
the only way you will know in the real world is to inject 1,000 people and see what happens in 5 years.
You could say, I'm dying of cancer today, do what you will. The trouble with that is it opens the doors to charlatans who take advantage of desperate people - all sorts of "companies" with "doctors" and "scientists" will appear, if thereis no FDA regulation, and many of these companies will offer products taht are worse then useless.
FDA regulation may not be good, but it is better then any of the alternatives
I went down to microcenter in cambridge, ma, a half mile from mit and harvard. they don't even stock linux computers.
I do my taxes on the computer (so even if they make linux tax software, i have to import, or run wine) my kids use windows for gaming (so i have to know something about it to help them).....
I actually installed ubuntu under wubi on my last laptop: it worked fine: so what
why should i switch if there is ZERO incentive for me to use linux - i get absolutely nothing from linux that i don't get from windows; it is not easier to use, it is not faster, it is not anything that i need
until the linux community patents a new type of software that i have to have and it runs only on linux, I' wont switch, even tho the thought of giving more money to redmond makes me want to puke
to bad the OSS community has no real answers.
this is something i submitted a week or so ago:
"I'm looking for software that can help my company manage information in documents that may be in pdf, doc or web form. I work for a biotech company with 15 people, and we have large numbers of documents that range from very technical scientific publications (usually pdf) to company reports like 10-Ks, to web pages to newspaper articles to pictures. We use these documents to review and stay current with the scientific literature; to learn about what competitors are doing, gain market information (who is selling how much of what), generate publicity for our products ,and so forth.
We currently use the windows file tree as our organizer, which creates several problems: I can't put one file into multiple bins; I can't use keywords to search; I can't organize files into groups.
What I would like (I think) to do is organize the information by keywords and subjects; associate groups of files into binders, and create summarys for the binders (eg, I might have 5 files that go together, and my own summary of what the five files mean); add sticky notes to anything at anytime (actuallly, I would like keywords and stickys [comments in adobe acrobat] to be the same: words in stickys are keywords, and keywords show up in the stick; add URLS and webpages directly from the browser; have a function that mimics or is compatible with a package like endnote or procite or papyrus or refcite (formats bibliographys in word docs)
I'm not even sure what the solution looks like, but it needs to be cheap (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez. This has a lot of features that scientists need, such as keyword search returns a list of articles that can be viewed by abstract."
this is a problem that comes up a lot, for a lot of people
I've tried a lot of the solutions , like zotero, and they just don't cut it for one person,- much less if you need to share the info among a small group of people.
There is a fabulous market for someone who wants to write this software
The main problem, which I don't think anyone has addressed, is that free information has a price - a human can only remember so much. So, the glut of free pdf/web info is actually bad, cause you loose sight of the important stuff; this use to be done for you with your $ monthy journal subscriptions - if you are in nanoscience, you might get nanoletters from the american chemical society, the editors do the weeding out for you
the other problem is how does one do natural language querys ?
Of the available answers, most are owned by a de facto monopoly, thomson reuters; refman is probably the best
Surely there must be someone who makes a pdf library database front end better then the collection feature in adobe acrobat
we (well not me, but the engineers i work with )are pretty serious solidworks users.
and at the last project mtg, the boss says, i gotta show everyone this, i did a model of our project over the weekend with google sketchup which is free, and he says, of course it isn't solidworks, but the 3d rotation is better...
Those of you with memories of more then a few minutes will remember that there use to be this great software called proE, and it was incredibly exspensive, and along came this "low cost" upstart, solidworks...... the innovators dilemman, in software
i think it is you who are mistaken. what happened in the london office of aig - and this was documented by G morgenson of the nytimes - is that they wrote insurance on mortgages (ok, technically it was more complicated) and took huge huge sums in premiums and didn't set any of that money aside as aresrve against losses ,but whenyou do something that reckless and stupid, the burden is on you to show that you are not a crimminal (and i do think they should be prosecuted under RICO)
now maybe they would be in trouble without that
Mathwise, u r right that 100 million is a minor distraction. However, you miss the big picture. The economic mess was caused not by lazy americans maxing on the credit card, but the cowboy behaviour (if not crimminal)of aig execs (and their counterparts at other financial firms)
what will help the economy is to change this culture, and part of that is changing the compensation culture on wall street ; the point is that the bonus are undeserved and un necessary (these guys wanna walk, go for it - lots of unemployed people we can pickup cheaP) and that the bonuses are part of this culture.
how about using stimulus money to encourage companies to locate jobs in mass transit accessible (real mass transit, not those once an yhour bus lines for the cleaning staff at the office parks)
of course, that would actually be a good idea,
reading the neauseatingly gushing article, I couldn't quite figure out how this works - does it require limewire servers or exspose you to lime wire ? what is this jabber client ? /. can offer a clean, simple explanation
my impression is that the software basically lets you share a folder, or the equivalent of a folder between a set of computers; the problem, for making this useful, is that only downloaded files appear - what if I just want to share some word docs ?
surely someone on
"usable" means you download a file, click on it, the complete package is installed and ready to use after a wizard guides you thru setup
someone will have the brains to put thiss together, and all these stupid, hard to use, badly designed packages like joomla and word press (their web sites are designed to imitimidate users) will die a deserved death
look at why steve jobs is succesfull: if your grandmother can't use it, it is to complicated
look at why DEC and Prime and Data general and Cray are gone: volume trumps sophistication and quality every time
as a noncomputer specialist /. reader, this whole conversation sounds really wierd.
Why can't i just call up a bunch of guys in the yellow pages, or whatever passes for yellow pages, and say, I got a 1000 users a day, yadayada, gimme a quote.
all this arcane stuff - you have know this program, that program, why should some small nonprofit even have to think about it
to put this in perspective, it is as if the original poster was the maintenance guy, and he was asking for what type of capacitor to install in the new electric motor controllers in the hvac system.
no small or even large nonprofit would even think about - it would just be part of the hvac vendor's bill
I think the answere is that server type stuff is deliberately kept opaque and complicated so sysadmins have jobs - after all, if i could just get a quote on it, most of the people who have posted might not have paychecks, right ?
I'VE BEEN THINKING ALOT ABOUT THIS FOR OUR TOWN
some points
kids rise to responsiblity; seniors in HS are quite capable, with the right teacher of maintaining most of this - and what great job training, both in th nuts and bolts of computers and in work ethic
it may sound wacko, but i think the hs seniors could maintain the school email, web site, everything but hr and payroll, where there are legal issues
cost - teachers are mostly not into computers, esp the older tenured senior ones with influence, and the people on the school booard are mostly retired - who else has the time - and not yet computer xsavvy
so, you need some SIMPLE carrots
cost - find oout how much the school is paying,a nd with a little bs, say, we can save youa bundle
all that software the kids need we can now afford
and the training they will get - can you imagine the value these kids will have if they are not intimidated by writing debugging and compiling a little C program to do something stupid
would look fabulous on a college resume
why is it ok for us to have nukes, but not person X ?
From person X's perspective, this might seem unfair.
I also might point out, that the various treaties we are signatory to, a treaty under the constitution being recognized as governing law in the US, at least suggest that we should elimminat our nukes.
there is something, at least from person X's perspective, hypocritical when the us says, clause x of this treaty requires you to not have nukes, but we are ignoring clause y, which requries us to elimminate nukes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty#Second_pillar:_disarmament