I believe getting a Micros system installed is on the order of $30k for a small restaurant. There are open source POS systems, but you aren't going to save half that money with it when all is said and done.
A spreadsheet is asking for problems if you ever get audited.
To the OP, a couple things are missing from your request. What do you want to track? Do you want your solution to help with running the business, or just maintaining records? How are you going to do payroll? Are there any regulatory issues you need to address (sales tax, liquor laws, etc.)?
I hate Quick Books. Our small business used it for five years, and only last year switched to an industry-specific ERP system. The new system requires 50-100% more work to maintain, is completely inflexible, and cost over $50k to get implemented. It is a huge improvement. (I have to keep telling myself that, in hopes I will really believe it some day.) The improvement it made was that timesheets were now integrated into project accounting, so we had better profit visibility at a project level. Unfortunately, far too much of the workflow still ends up being pivot tables in Excel.
My advice would to be to keep things simple as you start out, and avoid lock-in. A small business generally has more time than money, so inefficient workflows aren't a huge problem. Don't get a POS until you have made enough profit to pay for it. Break down and get QuickBooks, but don't integrate your workflow with it; it makes switching harder.
It depends on the purpose, but I am guessing 20 3TB NAS drives in a weekly rotation at $4,000 is going to be cheaper and more portable than even a drobo. The reliability, assuming it isn't used as JBOD and each drive is independent, will likely be better than you can get with anything else.
If it is for "live" data, then the argument goes out the window and the OP should go with a SAN. But I have trouble finding a case where tape is a better solution.
Hell, USB is a pain, but going with single-drive NAS units is the easiest (portable) approach I can think of. The WD MyBookLive units are Linux based, so you can even run an rsync daemon on them.
Our setup is just for offsite backup, but we run a cron job every day to detect what drives are present, determine which drives to use by even/odd week, and rsync portions of the system to each. The drives are put into sleep mode and can be rotated in the morning. If you are backing up from a server with high throuput, you can rsync running in parallel so the individual drives aren't a limiting factor
You have to plan for how the data will change; in the/blonde/brunette/redhead case, changing tastes could put more stress on a single drive... But it is easy to sub-divide later if need be as your collection grows. If however, those directories reside in a 24TB tru-crypt container you make things much less portable, needing access to all drives for any useful data transfer.
Lonely Planet used to do a good job until their redesign around 2003. Critical information was centrally located, and important items (such as language reference and major maps) were at the covers.
While it is easy to bag on the people who look at the guidebook as an itinerary, they do serve a useful purpose of consolidating information about a place. Never would have found places like Sihanukville, or how to get out of Phou Khoun when the bus broke down without one. It is also hard to get a sense of what a city has to offer in 3-4 days, or find other places to go when the weather changes.
One: I don't like vanilla lattes, so a grande would really be out of the question.
Two: my wife and I use the same account-- her with the card, me with the phone. How does this let us share?
Three: it is the human interaction that makes a place like Starbucks special and worth $3 for a disposable cup of colored water. Convenience and efficiency are great, but destroying that culture will be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
When they pay you $0.25, they don't expect to sell it; they are making a market. It is likely to take more used games off the market so they don't need to compete at half the re-sale price.
A non-issued ssn (if such a thing exists) would raise flags quickly, but a name mismatch is only generated after filing a tax return with the incorrect number.
If you don't report the income, and the IRS catches the discrepancy, it just goes to government coffers.
Does the government knowingly accepting taxes with bogus SSNs make them complicit in illegal immigration?
If the losses are really only in the millions, how is there a market for zero-day exploits of ~$50k each? To engage in your average criminal activity, you need at least a 10:1 payout for something low-risk logically. If the packaged exploit is half the cost of executing the scam, your average zero-day should gross $1MM. Isn't it easier to skim $100k from a brokerage account than mine bit coins?
Of course, your average criminal isn't too good at math, but it hardly seems that difficult to cast a big enough net that would be useful. $1T isn't logical, but a couple $B isn't that hard to imagine across 100 effective scams....or are the banks really smart enough to catch on before it spirals out of control.
My take is that the equilibrium and dampening required takes minutes to achieve at a minimum; the HFT algorithms need to minimize risk to make a profit on gains of less than 1% per transaction. This gives a disincentive to enter trades with high volatility in direction terms, and focus on variability between exchanges. Their algorithms need to be based on the first or second derrivative of price from what i can surmise. Check out this graphic of what happened after Apple's last earnings release.
Compare that arbitrage to a 10-day window on AAPL, and the risks associated with hasty decisions should be abundantly clear...
Cash reserves aren't regulated, just profit. I would agree though that the PUC should have efficiency targets for the utilities, but logistically that doesn't come from the profit they have already made.
Not really. You could argue that Unions played a roll, or in broader terms the "old boy" network, but it was likely intermodal shipping containers, air freight, and globalization that are really to blame.
Cost of doing business in a particular location only became a dominant issue when goods could move easily across the globe.
The factors that are always cited in Silicon Valley's success are things like cultural openness, strong public schools and exceptional universities, mild weather, cultural acceptance of taking risks and failing, local venture capital, etc. Phoenix fails on pretty much all counts. Austin has a couple going for it, but is surrounded by Texas. Kansas City is pretty unlikely (Maybe Lawrence KS has a chance though...?). New York will never create that culture, but it will always be a finance/fashion mecca.
It is interesting to look at the things that made Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and New Orleans hubs in their day by comparison.
I agree with what you are saying minus the profit motive. It is economics--the investments can't be made while providing electricity at the current costs. The regulators and consumers are just as much to blame as the power companies. Nukes aren't really commercially viable today compared to gas-fired combined cycle plants in terms of time to market, cost per MWh when operational, or general risk. When natural gas prices go back up to $3-4 then alternatives make sense again... But today generating from nat gas during peak summer hours only offers something like a 5 year payback. Going 24x7 brings you down to 4 years or so.
From what I am seeing in southern California, it looks like the substations and sub-transmission lines are going to start to be a bigger problem... At least after San Onofre gets back online.
Distributed generation does help unload transmission lines, while allowing for stabilization of supply across a broader region. Unfortunately though, it sounds like every aspect of India's grids are stressed to the point where your benefit to reliability with major wind farms might be very limited. (Environmental benefits are a separate matter.)
The other option is to parallel all the diesel generators in buildings to the grid. Assuming proper protective devices are provided, and that the reduction in air quality can be tolerated, this would also unload substations to restore their function.
But there are so many heads to this problem that it really takes addressing it on many different fronts. The US grid isn't in that much better shape.
Netflix is a complete joke. Older is the understatement of the century-- I don't think there are more than a dozen movies that have been released within the past two years! Sadly, they have some things Amazon doesn't, and vice-versa.
But, the distribution model is at least logical. Let the cable tv industry just die...
If it is any consolation, I live in a densely populated portion of a large metropolitan area, and to get ANY digital channels, I would need a 100' antenna according to tvfool.com to stand a chance at -50dBA. Five blocks away, no problem, but I live in a black hole.
So, I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and now flicking cable because someone wants to watch the Olympics with a DVR. It is a criminal rip-off. All I can do in protest is split Internet and tv across different providers so they aren't getting the golden margins.
What I hate isn't as much the money, but the fact that I need three different content providers to be able to watch 8 hours of tv per week because of asinine content distribution agreements built around advertising models that make no sense.
They might do a good job for books, but my wife is sick of being recommended soldering irons and I am sick of fitness products. Since I already have a very nice soldering iron that they are well aware of, it is unlikely that I will be buying another any time soon.
And we shop on our iPads in a bar! How much more impressionable can we be?!
Pretty much every merchant loses money on groupons. They hope to build a following, but that really isn't what grouponners are after-- they just want the next deal.
The fact that ad value is hard to quantify is what built the advertising business. It has been proven effective for maintaining brand awareness, but that is a dangerous game because how many brands do most people have a capacity for? My guess is around 100 to a maximum of about 300. Drowning out your competitor with more ads quickly hits diminishing returns-- you have to try different approaches. (Flugtag comes to mind.)
The other ad segment, actually measurably selling stuff, is constrained by the amount of shopping people do while being distracted by an ad. From personal experience, it is less than 1% of my discretionary spending, which doesn't do much for the value of those ads.
All the bundling of the same data in Facebook's arsenal is ultimately less valuable than what Amazon has on its Prime customers in terms of commercial benefit. Amazon does a miserable job of working with the data right now, but with time they are much more likely to capitalize on it.
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I believe getting a Micros system installed is on the order of $30k for a small restaurant. There are open source POS systems, but you aren't going to save half that money with it when all is said and done.
A spreadsheet is asking for problems if you ever get audited.
To the OP, a couple things are missing from your request. What do you want to track? Do you want your solution to help with running the business, or just maintaining records? How are you going to do payroll? Are there any regulatory issues you need to address (sales tax, liquor laws, etc.)?
I hate Quick Books. Our small business used it for five years, and only last year switched to an industry-specific ERP system. The new system requires 50-100% more work to maintain, is completely inflexible, and cost over $50k to get implemented. It is a huge improvement. (I have to keep telling myself that, in hopes I will really believe it some day.) The improvement it made was that timesheets were now integrated into project accounting, so we had better profit visibility at a project level. Unfortunately, far too much of the workflow still ends up being pivot tables in Excel.
My advice would to be to keep things simple as you start out, and avoid lock-in. A small business generally has more time than money, so inefficient workflows aren't a huge problem. Don't get a POS until you have made enough profit to pay for it. Break down and get QuickBooks, but don't integrate your workflow with it; it makes switching harder.
It depends on the purpose, but I am guessing 20 3TB NAS drives in a weekly rotation at $4,000 is going to be cheaper and more portable than even a drobo. The reliability, assuming it isn't used as JBOD and each drive is independent, will likely be better than you can get with anything else.
If it is for "live" data, then the argument goes out the window and the OP should go with a SAN. But I have trouble finding a case where tape is a better solution.
Hell, USB is a pain, but going with single-drive NAS units is the easiest (portable) approach I can think of. The WD MyBookLive units are Linux based, so you can even run an rsync daemon on them.
Our setup is just for offsite backup, but we run a cron job every day to detect what drives are present, determine which drives to use by even/odd week, and rsync portions of the system to each. The drives are put into sleep mode and can be rotated in the morning. If you are backing up from a server with high throuput, you can rsync running in parallel so the individual drives aren't a limiting factor
You have to plan for how the data will change; in the /blonde /brunette /redhead case, changing tastes could put more stress on a single drive... But it is easy to sub-divide later if need be as your collection grows. If however, those directories reside in a 24TB tru-crypt container you make things much less portable, needing access to all drives for any useful data transfer.
Nah... No bus would ever start or end in Phou Khoun... Hence the problem...
And coefficient of friction...
Lonely Planet used to do a good job until their redesign around 2003. Critical information was centrally located, and important items (such as language reference and major maps) were at the covers.
While it is easy to bag on the people who look at the guidebook as an itinerary, they do serve a useful purpose of consolidating information about a place. Never would have found places like Sihanukville, or how to get out of Phou Khoun when the bus broke down without one. It is also hard to get a sense of what a city has to offer in 3-4 days, or find other places to go when the weather changes.
It is more expensive to cross availability zones with Amazon, so many sites (foolishly) do not have geographic diversity.
One: I don't like vanilla lattes, so a grande would really be out of the question.
Two: my wife and I use the same account-- her with the card, me with the phone. How does this let us share?
Three: it is the human interaction that makes a place like Starbucks special and worth $3 for a disposable cup of colored water. Convenience and efficiency are great, but destroying that culture will be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
When they pay you $0.25, they don't expect to sell it; they are making a market. It is likely to take more used games off the market so they don't need to compete at half the re-sale price.
A non-issued ssn (if such a thing exists) would raise flags quickly, but a name mismatch is only generated after filing a tax return with the incorrect number.
If you don't report the income, and the IRS catches the discrepancy, it just goes to government coffers.
Does the government knowingly accepting taxes with bogus SSNs make them complicit in illegal immigration?
If the losses are really only in the millions, how is there a market for zero-day exploits of ~$50k each? To engage in your average criminal activity, you need at least a 10:1 payout for something low-risk logically. If the packaged exploit is half the cost of executing the scam, your average zero-day should gross $1MM. Isn't it easier to skim $100k from a brokerage account than mine bit coins?
Of course, your average criminal isn't too good at math, but it hardly seems that difficult to cast a big enough net that would be useful. $1T isn't logical, but a couple $B isn't that hard to imagine across 100 effective scams. ...or are the banks really smart enough to catch on before it spirals out of control.
Well, they did start selling the Pale Ale in cans. Small scale manufacturing ramp?
My take is that the equilibrium and dampening required takes minutes to achieve at a minimum; the HFT algorithms need to minimize risk to make a profit on gains of less than 1% per transaction. This gives a disincentive to enter trades with high volatility in direction terms, and focus on variability between exchanges. Their algorithms need to be based on the first or second derrivative of price from what i can surmise. Check out this graphic of what happened after Apple's last earnings release.
Compare that arbitrage to a 10-day window on AAPL, and the risks associated with hasty decisions should be abundantly clear...
Cash reserves aren't regulated, just profit. I would agree though that the PUC should have efficiency targets for the utilities, but logistically that doesn't come from the profit they have already made.
Not really. You could argue that Unions played a roll, or in broader terms the "old boy" network, but it was likely intermodal shipping containers, air freight, and globalization that are really to blame.
Cost of doing business in a particular location only became a dominant issue when goods could move easily across the globe.
There is a big difference between 102 and 106F. That feeling like your eyeballs are on fire when you walk outside? That's Phoenix.
The factors that are always cited in Silicon Valley's success are things like cultural openness, strong public schools and exceptional universities, mild weather, cultural acceptance of taking risks and failing, local venture capital, etc. Phoenix fails on pretty much all counts. Austin has a couple going for it, but is surrounded by Texas. Kansas City is pretty unlikely (Maybe Lawrence KS has a chance though...?). New York will never create that culture, but it will always be a finance/fashion mecca.
It is interesting to look at the things that made Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and New Orleans hubs in their day by comparison.
I agree with what you are saying minus the profit motive. It is economics--the investments can't be made while providing electricity at the current costs. The regulators and consumers are just as much to blame as the power companies. Nukes aren't really commercially viable today compared to gas-fired combined cycle plants in terms of time to market, cost per MWh when operational, or general risk. When natural gas prices go back up to $3-4 then alternatives make sense again... But today generating from nat gas during peak summer hours only offers something like a 5 year payback. Going 24x7 brings you down to 4 years or so.
From what I am seeing in southern California, it looks like the substations and sub-transmission lines are going to start to be a bigger problem... At least after San Onofre gets back online.
Distributed generation does help unload transmission lines, while allowing for stabilization of supply across a broader region. Unfortunately though, it sounds like every aspect of India's grids are stressed to the point where your benefit to reliability with major wind farms might be very limited. (Environmental benefits are a separate matter.)
The other option is to parallel all the diesel generators in buildings to the grid. Assuming proper protective devices are provided, and that the reduction in air quality can be tolerated, this would also unload substations to restore their function.
But there are so many heads to this problem that it really takes addressing it on many different fronts. The US grid isn't in that much better shape.
Netflix is a complete joke. Older is the understatement of the century-- I don't think there are more than a dozen movies that have been released within the past two years! Sadly, they have some things Amazon doesn't, and vice-versa.
But, the distribution model is at least logical. Let the cable tv industry just die...
If it is any consolation, I live in a densely populated portion of a large metropolitan area, and to get ANY digital channels, I would need a 100' antenna according to tvfool.com to stand a chance at -50dBA. Five blocks away, no problem, but I live in a black hole.
So, I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and now flicking cable because someone wants to watch the Olympics with a DVR. It is a criminal rip-off. All I can do in protest is split Internet and tv across different providers so they aren't getting the golden margins.
What I hate isn't as much the money, but the fact that I need three different content providers to be able to watch 8 hours of tv per week because of asinine content distribution agreements built around advertising models that make no sense.
They might do a good job for books, but my wife is sick of being recommended soldering irons and I am sick of fitness products. Since I already have a very nice soldering iron that they are well aware of, it is unlikely that I will be buying another any time soon.
And we shop on our iPads in a bar! How much more impressionable can we be?!
Pretty much every merchant loses money on groupons. They hope to build a following, but that really isn't what grouponners are after-- they just want the next deal.
The fact that ad value is hard to quantify is what built the advertising business. It has been proven effective for maintaining brand awareness, but that is a dangerous game because how many brands do most people have a capacity for? My guess is around 100 to a maximum of about 300. Drowning out your competitor with more ads quickly hits diminishing returns-- you have to try different approaches. (Flugtag comes to mind.)
The other ad segment, actually measurably selling stuff, is constrained by the amount of shopping people do while being distracted by an ad. From personal experience, it is less than 1% of my discretionary spending, which doesn't do much for the value of those ads.
All the bundling of the same data in Facebook's arsenal is ultimately less valuable than what Amazon has on its Prime customers in terms of commercial benefit. Amazon does a miserable job of working with the data right now, but with time they are much more likely to capitalize on it.