IANAL, so I won't offer legal advice. However in many states it is illegal for stores to refuse refunds for defective merchendise. They don't want to take DVDs and CDs back, but legally they have to. Thus they will try to say they can't.
I suspect record companies require the fuss, but I'm not sure.
Remember though, you need to check your local laws.
I don't want to get email from every place I've ever done buisness with, but at least that list of places is manageable. I can unsubscribe from them all if I have to, and if they are a legitimate buisness I even have reasonable confidence that the unsubscribe will remove me from their list, forever.
Compare that to the 80 spam messages I deleted just today! I hope I didn't delete anything that is not-spam but was automaticly tagged as spam. At one time the false positive rate was 5% so it was worth my while to go through them all looking for mistakes. Now the false positive rate is less than 1%, so I delete them all, but the number of false positives hasn't changed, just the number of unwanted messages.
The list of places I've don't buisness with that will email me is much smaller yet though, because most places don't get it. SubWay didn't get my email address last week, the local cafe didn't get it yesterday. Cub didn't get it today. Those are all places I do buisness with fairly often that don't have my phone number or email address. They don't need it.
More than one person fell into the sysadmin job because the old guy left and only one person remembered to ask for root. The old guy didn't care cause he was leaving, the people who remember to ask care because they are staying. Of course if there are junior guys to this person you don't need to get the password (assuming the juniors are smart enough to get it, maybe you should check...).
As for source code: if you ahve the source code you can audit it. I'm willing to audit it if you need someone. (I have no special expirence in this area, but I'll do it. I won't feel bad if you find someone better qualified though) Make sure someone audits that code. And make sure you re-compile it with a clean compiler, remember the old login hack?
I signed up for a contest at the local Menards, and since my prefered mythod of contact is email I gave them my email address. Now I get weekly emails from them. Sure I'm a customer, but I didn't give them permission to SPAM me. (and their remove doesn't work) I've signed up before giving a telephone number and they never called that, but as soon as they get an email address they think it is okay to send me whatever they want.
Fortunatly Home Depot is in the same town (and soon coming to mine). Menards just lost a customer.
But my point wasn't about me, it was about others in my hosuehold who are not computer litterate. My Mom can switch back and forth no problem. So does my sister. These are real cases of people not interested in computers who use them once in a while and have no problems with KDE.
Mind you semi-advanced users might need it, that is a secratary who types all day and uses the features of Word often might need help finding them in the new program. The manager who types up a report and then sends it off to someone else to format won't need any help.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I bought a house with a garrage so I had a place to practice my high tempature hobbies. I do NOT want 1500 degree (f) alumimun in my house, much less 2600 degree steel. Even 600 degree pot metal is a bit too much of a fire hazzard for use indoors.
Sure it is nice to park in the garrage once in a while, but that space is better used for other projects. (except when fixxing the car on a rainy day is the project)
I'm getting tired of the training argument. The fact is you don't have to train msot users to switch them. KDE (and I presume Gnome, but I don't use it) works close enough to windows that nobody will notice. Setup your default install with KDE configured to act like windows, replace all the applications with K equivelents and many will not notice.
My parents have macs, windows and linux installed at home. My mom knows nothing about computers yet manages to use whichever is free to play solitary. Sure they look a little different, but in the end all she cares is that she can find the icon.
Actually I'll grant you that linux isn't quite ready, but only because Project isn't cloned enough for management use yet. Kword is plenty good for all but a few users. I'll go so far to make the argument that if Kword isn't good enough for a user that the document should be send to a layout group with artists trained to put the document into the corporate form anyway.
Ahh, but did they do it RIGHT? Now did they do it right by design, or accident? Do they even know the difference? Novice admins should never be left loose on a production network. Therefore you choice of target users is incorrect and any results you draw from them are inapplicable. Your target users for configuring DHCP are expirenced admins, who mostly have done it before on this server and need to update something. I don't want a novice messing with my dhcp server configuration, I want one of the few guys I work with who know our particular network's configuration.
DHCP is simple at first, it didn't take me an hour to set it up at my home. (I don't count time to download and install, since I just did "cd/usr/ports/network/ ; ls *dhcp* ; cd dhcp-foo, make install, and then went to lunch) I'm sure I could have done my simple home network in less time in windows. I don't think I could have done a complex corporate network in that time. In the real world you have to enter each non-dhcp configed machine manually (and we had plenty of them).
I should also point out that in my hour of configuring dhcp I saw lots of options that I could provide. How many of them could have dhcp return which font server to use, just to point out one? (Note, picked because it is X11 specific and therefore windows only sites don't need it) I doupt windows provides that option easially.
And DHCP is simple to configure compared to some things I've worked with.
Start picking the right users for your focus group and I'll pay more attention to your results.
Why don't you run all those services on one machine. I could see serving 2000 users DNS, NIS (There are better replacements today, but I'm not up on them), sendmail/pop/imap, NFS, Apache, all on the same machine. If I can't it is because the users are using too much bandwidth for the hardware, these are (or should be) IO bound problems. 10 years ago I knew of a sun that served Apache and mail (pine mostly) for 15,000 users. Todays machines are much faster, so why can't they do it?
I'll grant that sql often requires a big CPU, and should be on a different machine. With a good OS though you should be able to run all those on one machine considering today's CPU speeds. Mind you I can understand the argument that you don't because that way a mistake on one machine doesn't take down the rest, I don't buy the argument that you need to do it. (though you should have a hot backup for those services that can take over the load anyway)
Ahh, but that was the point: they had a working setup that was replaced by someone buying MS, and that person got fired for it. That fact that that person was incompitent and would have been fired soon for a different reason doesn't change the fact that people get fired for buying Microsoft.
I'm always amused by people who think GUI configured servers are easier to admin than other ways of configuing it. The asumption is always that the hard part is the interface, when in fact the hard part is knowing how to make it work right for your enviorment, anyone who can get that part right is smart enough to learn the interface. I'm not saying that GUIs are not easier, cause a well designed GUI is easy (but a well designed command line is easy too, perhaps easier if you need to script something), but the config interface is not the hard part. The Moron we are talking about made this mistake and lost his job for it.
Some at NASA have a sense of humor
on
ScavHunt211
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· Score: 1
I have no doupt that somewhere there is a piece of derbies that they will let you borrow for a short time. I don't think a piece of the arm mount is of much use to the investigation for instance, so if they have that they can be talked into letting you borrow if for a short time. Finding the right person is likely difficult, but that is a different story.
P.S. I know the arm wasn't installed, I'm refering to whatever part of the shuttle it would attach to if it was installed.
I'd do much the same thing. Slightly different, but not much.
(1) But don't cut the tellephone sanitizers, they do a vital function
(2)But all the individual departments that make it up, go back to whichever department had them before, plus all the extra jobs.
(3)No, raise them to pay the dept. No, lower them to create ecconomic activitey which will raise the amount collected.
(4)But don't cut the fighter plane they make in my state.
(5)FudgeFactor7 can't count, don't elect him. I probably spells potato with an e too. And other attacts that are baseless.
(6)Along with your ammendment we need a clause to ban abortion. Any likely some other pork.
(7)But what about the enviorment? Don't give me facts, cause I got artist renditions of what your proposal will do
(8)Like what? He just needs a good sound bite, and has no intention of ever delivering on this.
(9)But we need federal involvement or internet companies will just have big loopholes like catalog companies have.
You forgot my favorite one: education belongs to the local school board. Anyone who wants to control education should run for school board. The president, and congress should have nothing to do with it. (unless they want to resign to run for school board, nothing wrong with that)
P.S. I hope you enjoyed comparing response 8 to the rest of them as much as I enjoyed creating it.
I may be a typical geek who rarely goes anywhere or does anything other than comptuers. I'm in the group that considers a cell phone in the theator worthy of death. I may only attend one play a year, (often a high school production) but I still want to see it uninterupted. I may not get many dates, but when I have one I don't want to go to work.
Sure the odds might be against it, but that isn't enough when I'm the only support guy. When there are 10 support guys no problem, you rotate who has to stay home that night. Someone has a lawn to mow, or book to read anyway. Not when me alone though.
Forget about XYZcorp going out of business. XYZcorp is still in business, but you need something and after forcing the salesman to get a real answer (not the typical lie that many will use when they don't know or don't like the right answer) you discover they won't do it for any amount of money.
With open source you just hire a programer. Sure I know nothing about package foo, but if you off me a job modifying foo I will learn foo, and modify it for you. All I need is open source code, money. (Possible legal help if there are patents to get around.) I can't do that for whatever XYZcorp will give you. I'm not good at giving estimates of time and cost, but there are contractors out there who are willing to give them, and stick to them. (You of course pay extra for the assurance that your modifications will come in at exactly some amount)
Before you say that, try living someplace where you actions are illegal? My church has several ministers in China. They store all their mail, both snail and real outside the country. They don't write letters back home (and some write excellent letters) while they are in the country. They must travel outside the country to do those activites that most of us consider everyday.
Sure there are many bad uses to forged headers. However if even once it can be used to get legitimate communication out of a repressive country then I'd prefer all the Spam I get (60+/day, most of it offensive) to losing that one communication.
True the little projects are not planned, but the big ones are. Most developers of things like Apache, Linux (kernel), freeBSD, Samba, etc will tell you that they now plan all their new features. Samba just got a major re-write that was planned (still in progress if I remember right). Note that with the possible exception of FreeBSD all these started out unplaned, but as things grew programers realized that they could not put the changes they wanted in without planning a head. (FreeBSD is only an exception because it started with a large code base that had been planed for years)
For small projects I doupt there is much planning, but then much less is needed. Remember "plan to throw one away, you will anyway"? Many projects are still in the version one throw away code stage. There is no reason to designe your code until you have an idea of what problems you will encounter late. Better to make something that sort of works, and then decide if you need a plan for version 2 to solve those problems, or a plan to solve those problems in version 1. A plan is pointless if you don't know what to plan for.
Most people don't realise how much work is done behind the schene. We don't normally see it. It is there though at some level.
Seriously, CVS may have a lot of warts, but it is a lot better than the comercial systems we were using before. Mind you that doesn't mean CVS is good, or that there are no good comercial systems, only that there are some really terribal systems out there that make CVS look good.
Sorry, but to most gun owners a S&W gun is the most politicly incorrect thing you can own. After an agreement with the federal goverment to develop a lot of technology to prevent guns from firing except for the legal owner, most gun people decidxed S&W must die. Their sales have gown down and stayed down significantly since then (about 40%)
An AK47 is a well respected gun, and a part of every complete collection.
I don't think your memory is very good, because I recall serious bugs from that age.
I didn't work with the TRS80, but I did work with the atari 800. Basic SHIPED with a bug that is locked up randomly. I learned to save my work often so that I didn't lose much, a skill that is still critical in todays world, because most other program lock up or crash once in a while. The correction for that problem worked, but now everytime you save a bunch of garbage was written to the file, after several save/load cycles the program would no longer fit in memory due to the appended garbage. In all it was nearly 10 years before Atari released a basic that didn't have bug that you needed to be aware of.
As for booting fast, sure cartrages booted fast, but then my BIOS boots fast. Anything from disk took a long time. Windows boots fast on most computers today than atari dos did then, despite the atari only having 80k disks, while windows is many meg.
I'm not an expert on pacemakers, but I don't know if I believe your claim that I want the reliable vs the featureful pacemaker for all cases. Imangine that your heart condidition requires a feature that doesn't exist in the stable pacemaker to correct. What do you do? Use the unstable version and die beacause your rythems are not corrected right, or risk a failure in the less stable version?
Point is, in some cases failure isn't allowed, but smaller stable code is not nessecarly a compromise that you can make either.
Of course if the unstable pacemaker just allowed a me to pull up statistics with no medical value, then of course I don't want it.
My local power coop says that underground lines are LESS reliable than above ground. Sure tree can fall on above ground wires, but moles can chew through underground wires. The difference isn't big, but it is statisticly significant: there are more outages in underground wires than above ground.
The arguement for underground is looks. People don't like looking at power poles. (personally I think a power pole running through the yard is less intrusive than the big transformers they put in front of a hosue with underground wires, but most people disagree.)
WordStar was the big killer app when word processing first became a big deal. WordStar killed themselves through some stupid decisions. (They admited their interfaced sucked, and built a better one, but didn't provide a good migration path. Since everyone then had to migrate they looked around and decided wordPerfect was better)
Mind you there were other word processors at the time. I doupt wordStar was first.
Your questions are real, and improtant, but you are obviously not at the point where you need to ask them yet.
First you need a buisness plan. Odds are you local library carries a few books on writing one. Get them and read them. And remember the buisness plan is for YOU before the bankers, so don't fill in some forms, do real work to make sure that it is reasonable.
Part of the plan is deciding what you will do, and proving to yourself it will sell. You might be able to make a better Quicken, but odds are you can't sell it because Quicken is good enough and has the name. You might be able to sell a almost as good Quicken, that has all the numbers for you local tax code that Quicken doesn't have. (IF indeed this is an issue to local, something your buisness plan research will reveal). Or you could write a game, which if it is good will make your a ton of money, if not you still have options, and you should know what they are. (Bundel it with every dell for some amount of money for example)
What is your sales plan? I'm a good programer, but I havn't started my buisness yet because I don't do sales well. You will have to, and if you are not convinced that you can sell this, why invest money in it? Mind you, there is no need to sell it yourself, hiring someone else to sell your products is just fine, IF you can find a salesmen who will sell it right. The world won't beat a path to your door just because you have a perfect mouse trap.
Who are your customers? Are there enough that they can afford to pay your?
Way too much is all I have to pay. Most people I know see phone bills of $40+/month. I'm down to about $32, but I have measured service and pay by the minute. (Like many I only have the phone for DSL, I use the cell phone for calls)
Note, I include taxes. It makes no difference what the base price is when I have to pay a bill that includes taxes.
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IANAL, so I won't offer legal advice. However in many states it is illegal for stores to refuse refunds for defective merchendise. They don't want to take DVDs and CDs back, but legally they have to. Thus they will try to say they can't.
I suspect record companies require the fuss, but I'm not sure.
Remember though, you need to check your local laws.
I don't want to get email from every place I've ever done buisness with, but at least that list of places is manageable. I can unsubscribe from them all if I have to, and if they are a legitimate buisness I even have reasonable confidence that the unsubscribe will remove me from their list, forever.
Compare that to the 80 spam messages I deleted just today! I hope I didn't delete anything that is not-spam but was automaticly tagged as spam. At one time the false positive rate was 5% so it was worth my while to go through them all looking for mistakes. Now the false positive rate is less than 1%, so I delete them all, but the number of false positives hasn't changed, just the number of unwanted messages.
The list of places I've don't buisness with that will email me is much smaller yet though, because most places don't get it. SubWay didn't get my email address last week, the local cafe didn't get it yesterday. Cub didn't get it today. Those are all places I do buisness with fairly often that don't have my phone number or email address. They don't need it.
More than one person fell into the sysadmin job because the old guy left and only one person remembered to ask for root. The old guy didn't care cause he was leaving, the people who remember to ask care because they are staying. Of course if there are junior guys to this person you don't need to get the password (assuming the juniors are smart enough to get it, maybe you should check...).
As for source code: if you ahve the source code you can audit it. I'm willing to audit it if you need someone. (I have no special expirence in this area, but I'll do it. I won't feel bad if you find someone better qualified though) Make sure someone audits that code. And make sure you re-compile it with a clean compiler, remember the old login hack?
I signed up for a contest at the local Menards, and since my prefered mythod of contact is email I gave them my email address. Now I get weekly emails from them. Sure I'm a customer, but I didn't give them permission to SPAM me. (and their remove doesn't work) I've signed up before giving a telephone number and they never called that, but as soon as they get an email address they think it is okay to send me whatever they want.
Fortunatly Home Depot is in the same town (and soon coming to mine). Menards just lost a customer.
But my point wasn't about me, it was about others in my hosuehold who are not computer litterate. My Mom can switch back and forth no problem. So does my sister. These are real cases of people not interested in computers who use them once in a while and have no problems with KDE.
Mind you semi-advanced users might need it, that is a secratary who types all day and uses the features of Word often might need help finding them in the new program. The manager who types up a report and then sends it off to someone else to format won't need any help.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I bought a house with a garrage so I had a place to practice my high tempature hobbies. I do NOT want 1500 degree (f) alumimun in my house, much less 2600 degree steel. Even 600 degree pot metal is a bit too much of a fire hazzard for use indoors.
Sure it is nice to park in the garrage once in a while, but that space is better used for other projects. (except when fixxing the car on a rainy day is the project)
I'm getting tired of the training argument. The fact is you don't have to train msot users to switch them. KDE (and I presume Gnome, but I don't use it) works close enough to windows that nobody will notice. Setup your default install with KDE configured to act like windows, replace all the applications with K equivelents and many will not notice.
My parents have macs, windows and linux installed at home. My mom knows nothing about computers yet manages to use whichever is free to play solitary. Sure they look a little different, but in the end all she cares is that she can find the icon.
Actually I'll grant you that linux isn't quite ready, but only because Project isn't cloned enough for management use yet. Kword is plenty good for all but a few users. I'll go so far to make the argument that if Kword isn't good enough for a user that the document should be send to a layout group with artists trained to put the document into the corporate form anyway.
Ahh, but did they do it RIGHT? Now did they do it right by design, or accident? Do they even know the difference? Novice admins should never be left loose on a production network. Therefore you choice of target users is incorrect and any results you draw from them are inapplicable. Your target users for configuring DHCP are expirenced admins, who mostly have done it before on this server and need to update something. I don't want a novice messing with my dhcp server configuration, I want one of the few guys I work with who know our particular network's configuration.
DHCP is simple at first, it didn't take me an hour to set it up at my home. (I don't count time to download and install, since I just did "cd /usr/ports/network/ ; ls *dhcp* ; cd dhcp-foo, make install, and then went to lunch) I'm sure I could have done my simple home network in less time in windows. I don't think I could have done a complex corporate network in that time. In the real world you have to enter each non-dhcp configed machine manually (and we had plenty of them).
I should also point out that in my hour of configuring dhcp I saw lots of options that I could provide. How many of them could have dhcp return which font server to use, just to point out one? (Note, picked because it is X11 specific and therefore windows only sites don't need it) I doupt windows provides that option easially.
And DHCP is simple to configure compared to some things I've worked with.
Start picking the right users for your focus group and I'll pay more attention to your results.
Why don't you run all those services on one machine. I could see serving 2000 users DNS, NIS (There are better replacements today, but I'm not up on them), sendmail/pop/imap, NFS, Apache, all on the same machine. If I can't it is because the users are using too much bandwidth for the hardware, these are (or should be) IO bound problems. 10 years ago I knew of a sun that served Apache and mail (pine mostly) for 15,000 users. Todays machines are much faster, so why can't they do it?
I'll grant that sql often requires a big CPU, and should be on a different machine. With a good OS though you should be able to run all those on one machine considering today's CPU speeds. Mind you I can understand the argument that you don't because that way a mistake on one machine doesn't take down the rest, I don't buy the argument that you need to do it. (though you should have a hot backup for those services that can take over the load anyway)
Ahh, but that was the point: they had a working setup that was replaced by someone buying MS, and that person got fired for it. That fact that that person was incompitent and would have been fired soon for a different reason doesn't change the fact that people get fired for buying Microsoft.
I'm always amused by people who think GUI configured servers are easier to admin than other ways of configuing it. The asumption is always that the hard part is the interface, when in fact the hard part is knowing how to make it work right for your enviorment, anyone who can get that part right is smart enough to learn the interface. I'm not saying that GUIs are not easier, cause a well designed GUI is easy (but a well designed command line is easy too, perhaps easier if you need to script something), but the config interface is not the hard part. The Moron we are talking about made this mistake and lost his job for it.
I have no doupt that somewhere there is a piece of derbies that they will let you borrow for a short time. I don't think a piece of the arm mount is of much use to the investigation for instance, so if they have that they can be talked into letting you borrow if for a short time. Finding the right person is likely difficult, but that is a different story.
P.S. I know the arm wasn't installed, I'm refering to whatever part of the shuttle it would attach to if it was installed.
Yesterday's (5/7/2003) eddition, front page. Any reasonably equiped library should have it. I don't read their online version so I don't have a URL.
I'd do much the same thing. Slightly different, but not much.
(1) But don't cut the tellephone sanitizers, they do a vital function
(2)But all the individual departments that make it up, go back to whichever department had them before, plus all the extra jobs.
(3)No, raise them to pay the dept. No, lower them to create ecconomic activitey which will raise the amount collected.
(4)But don't cut the fighter plane they make in my state.
(5)FudgeFactor7 can't count, don't elect him. I probably spells potato with an e too. And other attacts that are baseless.
(6)Along with your ammendment we need a clause to ban abortion. Any likely some other pork.
(7)But what about the enviorment? Don't give me facts, cause I got artist renditions of what your proposal will do
(8)Like what? He just needs a good sound bite, and has no intention of ever delivering on this.
(9)But we need federal involvement or internet companies will just have big loopholes like catalog companies have.
You forgot my favorite one: education belongs to the local school board. Anyone who wants to control education should run for school board. The president, and congress should have nothing to do with it. (unless they want to resign to run for school board, nothing wrong with that)
P.S. I hope you enjoyed comparing response 8 to the rest of them as much as I enjoyed creating it.
I may be a typical geek who rarely goes anywhere or does anything other than comptuers. I'm in the group that considers a cell phone in the theator worthy of death. I may only attend one play a year, (often a high school production) but I still want to see it uninterupted. I may not get many dates, but when I have one I don't want to go to work.
Sure the odds might be against it, but that isn't enough when I'm the only support guy. When there are 10 support guys no problem, you rotate who has to stay home that night. Someone has a lawn to mow, or book to read anyway. Not when me alone though.
Forget about XYZcorp going out of business. XYZcorp is still in business, but you need something and after forcing the salesman to get a real answer (not the typical lie that many will use when they don't know or don't like the right answer) you discover they won't do it for any amount of money.
With open source you just hire a programer. Sure I know nothing about package foo, but if you off me a job modifying foo I will learn foo, and modify it for you. All I need is open source code, money. (Possible legal help if there are patents to get around.) I can't do that for whatever XYZcorp will give you. I'm not good at giving estimates of time and cost, but there are contractors out there who are willing to give them, and stick to them. (You of course pay extra for the assurance that your modifications will come in at exactly some amount)
Before you say that, try living someplace where you actions are illegal? My church has several ministers in China. They store all their mail, both snail and real outside the country. They don't write letters back home (and some write excellent letters) while they are in the country. They must travel outside the country to do those activites that most of us consider everyday.
Sure there are many bad uses to forged headers. However if even once it can be used to get legitimate communication out of a repressive country then I'd prefer all the Spam I get (60+/day, most of it offensive) to losing that one communication.
True the little projects are not planned, but the big ones are. Most developers of things like Apache, Linux (kernel), freeBSD, Samba, etc will tell you that they now plan all their new features. Samba just got a major re-write that was planned (still in progress if I remember right). Note that with the possible exception of FreeBSD all these started out unplaned, but as things grew programers realized that they could not put the changes they wanted in without planning a head. (FreeBSD is only an exception because it started with a large code base that had been planed for years)
For small projects I doupt there is much planning, but then much less is needed. Remember "plan to throw one away, you will anyway"? Many projects are still in the version one throw away code stage. There is no reason to designe your code until you have an idea of what problems you will encounter late. Better to make something that sort of works, and then decide if you need a plan for version 2 to solve those problems, or a plan to solve those problems in version 1. A plan is pointless if you don't know what to plan for.
Most people don't realise how much work is done behind the schene. We don't normally see it. It is there though at some level.
Seriously, CVS may have a lot of warts, but it is a lot better than the comercial systems we were using before. Mind you that doesn't mean CVS is good, or that there are no good comercial systems, only that there are some really terribal systems out there that make CVS look good.
Sorry, but to most gun owners a S&W gun is the most politicly incorrect thing you can own. After an agreement with the federal goverment to develop a lot of technology to prevent guns from firing except for the legal owner, most gun people decidxed S&W must die. Their sales have gown down and stayed down significantly since then (about 40%)
An AK47 is a well respected gun, and a part of every complete collection.
I don't think your memory is very good, because I recall serious bugs from that age.
I didn't work with the TRS80, but I did work with the atari 800. Basic SHIPED with a bug that is locked up randomly. I learned to save my work often so that I didn't lose much, a skill that is still critical in todays world, because most other program lock up or crash once in a while. The correction for that problem worked, but now everytime you save a bunch of garbage was written to the file, after several save/load cycles the program would no longer fit in memory due to the appended garbage. In all it was nearly 10 years before Atari released a basic that didn't have bug that you needed to be aware of.
As for booting fast, sure cartrages booted fast, but then my BIOS boots fast. Anything from disk took a long time. Windows boots fast on most computers today than atari dos did then, despite the atari only having 80k disks, while windows is many meg.
I'm not an expert on pacemakers, but I don't know if I believe your claim that I want the reliable vs the featureful pacemaker for all cases. Imangine that your heart condidition requires a feature that doesn't exist in the stable pacemaker to correct. What do you do? Use the unstable version and die beacause your rythems are not corrected right, or risk a failure in the less stable version?
Point is, in some cases failure isn't allowed, but smaller stable code is not nessecarly a compromise that you can make either.
Of course if the unstable pacemaker just allowed a me to pull up statistics with no medical value, then of course I don't want it.
My local power coop says that underground lines are LESS reliable than above ground. Sure tree can fall on above ground wires, but moles can chew through underground wires. The difference isn't big, but it is statisticly significant: there are more outages in underground wires than above ground.
The arguement for underground is looks. People don't like looking at power poles. (personally I think a power pole running through the yard is less intrusive than the big transformers they put in front of a hosue with underground wires, but most people disagree.)
WordStar was the big killer app when word processing first became a big deal. WordStar killed themselves through some stupid decisions. (They admited their interfaced sucked, and built a better one, but didn't provide a good migration path. Since everyone then had to migrate they looked around and decided wordPerfect was better)
Mind you there were other word processors at the time. I doupt wordStar was first.
Your questions are real, and improtant, but you are obviously not at the point where you need to ask them yet.
First you need a buisness plan. Odds are you local library carries a few books on writing one. Get them and read them. And remember the buisness plan is for YOU before the bankers, so don't fill in some forms, do real work to make sure that it is reasonable.
Part of the plan is deciding what you will do, and proving to yourself it will sell. You might be able to make a better Quicken, but odds are you can't sell it because Quicken is good enough and has the name. You might be able to sell a almost as good Quicken, that has all the numbers for you local tax code that Quicken doesn't have. (IF indeed this is an issue to local, something your buisness plan research will reveal). Or you could write a game, which if it is good will make your a ton of money, if not you still have options, and you should know what they are. (Bundel it with every dell for some amount of money for example)
What is your sales plan? I'm a good programer, but I havn't started my buisness yet because I don't do sales well. You will have to, and if you are not convinced that you can sell this, why invest money in it? Mind you, there is no need to sell it yourself, hiring someone else to sell your products is just fine, IF you can find a salesmen who will sell it right. The world won't beat a path to your door just because you have a perfect mouse trap.
Who are your customers? Are there enough that they can afford to pay your?
Way too much is all I have to pay. Most people I know see phone bills of $40+/month. I'm down to about $32, but I have measured service and pay by the minute. (Like many I only have the phone for DSL, I use the cell phone for calls)
Note, I include taxes. It makes no difference what the base price is when I have to pay a bill that includes taxes.