I do this, been doing it for some time. It's basically just the same as any other business... You stay at it long enough to get more customers while keeping your current customers satisified.
I have clients from all over the united states and a couple of foreign nations as well. Nothing that really pays well. Most of the work that keeps me in business comes from the local community... A couple of meetings are usually required to set up a contract of a couple of grand or more.
If you want to do that type of work remotely you have to establish a client base and a reputation.. Slowly over time you will start to receive virtual business. But in the beginning you will have to either work extremely cheap or focus on your local community. Takes a couple of years before you can command decent prices without a face to face meeting.
Speaking as an ex-ATT employee. It's really not a problem with sending the memo out to the world...
These are the standard policies that ATT uses to verify the authenticity of calls. It's nothing out the ordinary, just a reminder to people that they should be verifiying identity before they give out information.
You really need to step back and consider what you want to do here.
Do you want a data center, ie computer server room, a noc, a workroom, etc?
If you have 4 admins, why do they need to see a massed array of consoles? Thats a job for Operations, not administrators. Put your administrators in cubes... Various cube designs out there.
Datacenter use open space and raised floor if possible.
Operations, couple of screens maybe 2 for each operator and use programs to pipe information to said operators, they shouldn't need a screen each. If your running MVS systems which "require" dedicated consoles... You can find cards and "hllapi" interfaces to run several console servers on one machine.
It doesn't sound like you actually have that big of needs.
Myself, I would just take over some custodial closet for the computers, beef up the ventilation and add in a ups system... Your going to need an electrical engineer to look over the power situation which should provide most of the space requirements for you.
As far as the admins go, find out what they want, usually 6x6 cubes with room for 2 computers is adequate...
As far as working on machines, find a room somewhere 20*40 or so that has a locking door. This way your's not concerned with parts walking out the door...
In truth, the computer room with be more of a engineering design, and set by your space requirements. The workspace for the admins is mainly set by getting input from management and admins.
Hmmm,
Well it might be Open Source, but it certainly doesn't seem to be accessable... Did a web search and was unable to find any website or other access to any information.
Well I am clueless as to how this is news... It's not really important as far as I can tell... I don't use Linux to spite Microsoft, I use Linux so that I can get my work done. What does it matter what Microsoft does?
Granted buying laws and that is important to know about, but the fact that they are getting a booth at a Linux Expo doesn't really matter other than something to gossip about.
Not much you can do to block IM services... Since if you leave:80 port open for webbrowsing people can send information through that port. I think that the only viable solution you have is to block people from installing software on their machines. You'll of course have to block all java applets as well, and take out the cd rom and disk drives...
Hmmmm, come to think of it about the only way to stop them, in the long run, is to unplug your internet connection...
So it's not called through a wrapper. And why exactly does this make a difference? When I use php I'm making a call to the GD libraries, so there is a bit of a wrapper in there, it hardly effects the time it takes to send back an image.
phpdatabase is a great little script, but it really doesn't provide the functionality of access.... Grin
Actually I used to be a MCP in access 94-97, Most of my knowledge of access and the jet database comes from that time... Until Microsoft came out with MSSQL 7.0 they didn't have a proper database, and I doubt that they have put that technology into access...
Anyway, I don't work with Microsoft products much anymore, but I do miss the ease of access. But power, flexibility, security and costs are a bit more important.
Hmmm,
Comparing PHP with Visual Basic might not be too far off. Basically the reason I started writing in PHP was that mod_perl was not available at the time and kicking off cgi scripts was becoming a royal pain in the butt.
PHP is a focused language though and doesn't have the full functionality of perl, but then again it is easier to pick up than perl. I'd agree.
As for MySQL comparied to access. They aren't compariable in the least... First and formost MySQL is a database something that I wouldn't even consider Access for. Access is slow clunky and doesn't or at least didn't support SQL standards. MySQL is one of the fastest databases available currently, for most sites it can do anything that they require.... The only thing Access has going for it is the user interface... The tools for developing new databases quickly for non-admins can be helpful at times..
Hmmm, sorry for the lack of details, but while I think your comparison of php and vb is reasonable, access just doesn't compare to mysql as a database.
So if I understand what you are saying correctly, is that you have an application that was written in a 4GL language and you want it converted to another compiler/system.
Unfortunatly, there generally is no quick fix to doing this that I know of... Your outside contractors are going to basically have to write a language parser and then output syntax to the new language you are moving to. It's very likely to take a lot of time.
Personally, I think trying to write a system to do this is going to take longer than going in and recoding for the new language, ie go through the system module by module and figure out what each one does, rewrite it as an object and see if things work correctly, move on to next module, repeat ad nausium.
As far as using rexx, other than being slow if they are trying to write an automatic conversion utility, it's probably not a terrible choice however I would probably use perl for syntax structuring since string manipulation is perl's strong point.
As far as object oriented design goes, REXX OOP is rather clucky and is not really OOP, been a while since I used it, but I think it basically provides OOP like interface by using linked lists and such... Nor does it provide for inheritance, better to go with a more OOP oriented language than to try to do so in REXX.
What you probably need to do is to go back to the company, spend a week or two finding out what progress they have made, and determine when the project is likely to be done based on what they have done.
Then decide if that is acceptable.
Also try to decide whether the project is more than they can handle... Do they understand what is going on? From your description, it appears that they are not checking whether the project even works as the are doing it, therefore they probably are in over their heads... If so, yank the project and get someone else to look at doing it... If they are making progress and can show you that they do understand what is happening, it will probably be better to work with them to complete the project since a new development team is going to have to relearn the application before starting.
It appears that your company wanted a silver bullet solution, ie an easy fix to convert the code from one system to another. They don't really exist. The other company promised to do so, but they weren't able to make it work either. In conversion was a simple affair then all windows programs would work on linux and vice versa... The conventional path would be to hire programers to do conversion line by line as suggested above...
SCORE is made up of retired executives to help provide advice to small business owners. Not only can they help you work through the production process, but they can also give advice and help with administration, personal, etc.
I'm not really sure what type of work your doing where you need access to your files... I can relate my knowledge on dealing with unison over the past year though.
I do a lot of back end web development. As such I usually like to copy the entire site down to a local machine, work on the system, upload to a test machine, test, and then move to a development machine. Unison has made my job a lot easier than it using a bunch of ssh scripts since unison automatically checks for changes and only copies over files with changes.
A sample script is as follows:
From my local file system $HOME/web/(website) I execute the following script
unison -auto -batch include ssh://user@somehost.com//www/(website)/include
This script pulls all my programming work in include and the website accessable files www to my local system... I then work on the files and upload using the following script
unison -auto -batch include ssh://user@testhost.com//www/(website)/include
I then check the coding and on the test host, when I get it to the point I want I upload it to the production machine...
If I have problems on the test host, I can go in and remove all files on my development system and pull a fresh copy of files from the live site...
Since I don't need to program and compile on different systems, just uploading the the test and production machines it works well.
Recently I took a trip and did not have access to my local system. I was able to borrow a windows system and after installing putting, winscp and unison I was up and running within 10-15 minutes at the remote site, which allowed me to get back to work.
The problem with using a remote mounting system is that you have to maintain network connectivity while working on files, not always an option, plus you are working with the live production files...
So basically I use unison just like a cp command except that it does not copy files that already are synced between systems and it automatically keeps my permissions sync'd as well.
Actually this code doesn't do much to help. Jamie's code merely handles running a kiosk and auto setting up the system.. In a cybercafe scenerio you have to track the time used and log out users automatically... If merely web browsing, it's simple enough to do with a Linux system, but windows is far harder to deal with since as a single user system you have no way to keep users from having access to any information on the computer system.
I've set up and run a cybercafe in the past so I'll try to provide some feedback for you.
"Pure" cybercafe's do not make money on their computers. Primarily income is made on the food and drinks served at the cybercafe, with the computers are most breaking even...
Generally connection costs will eat any money that you bring in to run the computers.
Internet gaming computers can make money, but most games currently coming out have a prohibition against rental or use in a cybercafe setting. Furthermore, contacting companies to get a cybercafe license you find that there is no such license. Activision for one is a big one that does this... There is a prohibition against use in a cybercafe and contacting Activision itself you discover that Activision doesn't see a market there and has no provisions for licensing to a cybercafe... Activision is just an example, but most companies are like this.
So in general your only choice is trying to either a) operate beneath the gaming company's radar level. ie just giving the games out for use on systems. Or b) hiring a lawyer to help work around the legal issues.
Certain states in the US, treat computer software as a book. As long as you have the licenses you can have people playing the games on your systems. The state will not recognize the eula probition against rent, resale, or cybercafe's. A lawyer is needed to provide at least basic protection.
I recommend not trying to support yourself by operating beneath the radar, therefore if you want to run the cybercafe as a business venture, definately get a lawyer.
That's all I can say about legal issues.
Technical issues:
Internet connection... I feel that the internet connection is very important in a cybercafe... The ability to contact the net and play online games is important. However when you set up this type of connection understand that most firewalls that you place between your machines and the internet are going to block some access to systems... Getting IP addresses for each of your machines rather than using NAT will help this to some degree. When I first set up my cybercafe I went with a full T1 and a C block of ip addresses and did not place a firewall between the systems and the net.... When doing this though, you need to understand that your machines will be compromised/hacked and will require frequent reinstalls. Generally once or twice a week.... In order to do this I set up an inactive partition with a copy of the standard install made with norton ghost... In order to rebuild the system I made a disk that fdisked and set the partition active, installed the drive image and then fdisked the partition inactive... Took about 20 minutes, but was simple enough any of the staff could do it.
In order to keep track of your users time, you can try to do it by hand, which requires a lot of administrative overhead from your staff. Or you can go with an automated system. The one that I used at the type was Cybertime. www.cybertime.com may be the url haven't checked it in a while.... If I were doing it now, I would probably write a small website and stick it in a linux box to act as a router... When people go to log in, they have to go to the website and sign in... The linux box receives their request and rewrites the routing tables to allow access to the web. Basically only routing traffic to the box when someone is logged in...
Other technical considerations... You might want to try setting up some linux boxes, but if your doing games you basically will have to run windows.
Marketing Considerations: I mentioned before "PURE" cybercafes do not make money the food and drinks are what make money... If you want you computers to make money you need to create a community to use the computer systems. Web browsers don't have much of a community, gamers do... As long as your computers are fairly decent, people will come in to play against and with one another and will draw in their friends..... Rather than try to launch your own cybercafe without a support group especially when you are just starting out, instead try to get your computers installed into a business that already has a fairly good customer base... My cybercafe was installed in a Warhammer gaming store, when people were not playing minitures or RPG games they would generally sit down and play on the computers for a while... I'd highly recommend installing the systems in some type of business where people come to socialize rather than trying to start your own place from scratch.
Games... Games are important.... Diablo, Starcraft and Counter-strike were the games that people came in to play the most.... Basically look for games where teamwork helps out and the games take some time to play. Running your own local servers is also a necessity, which also means that people from the net need to be able to reach those servers, see technical... Generally with 6 gaming systems I made weekly trips to the computer store and bought 2 copies of most multiplayer games... If during the first week the games did well, I would return and buy 4 more copies for the rest of the systems.
Featured games... Tuesday nights were generally slow, because of this, I made Tuesdays a free night where people could come in and just get on the systems for an hour free... If all computer were full, they either waited an hour for someone to get off or could pay, and bump one of the people playing for free.
Thursdays, while not extremely slow, I decided to make featured game night.... Where people could come in and play 1 specific game for free. If they wanted to play a different game, or wanted on a system, they could of course pay....
One other thing... Most people would not sit down to play on a computer unless someone else was already playing... Leaving 1 "free" machine all the time insures that someone will play most of the time... Which will encourage others to sit down and play. When all other computers are in use and a paying customer wants the free computer he gets it.
To paraphase: Try to establish your systems in a location that already has a community.
To increase your computer usage, try to get people involved with the games, by giving away some freebee time on specific slow nights and get your customers "hooked"... If you can get them involved you chances of becoming profitable are greatly increased.
Business Concerns: First, if you take my marketing advice and install into a location that already is established, just offering computer use you won't have to worry about quite a few things, which will make your life easier.
First Salaries and employees... If you place yourself into an established business, it already has employees of it's own who can take money and add time to various user accounts... Basically these tasks are simple and thus minor training is necessary to get up and running... If a system has problems a reboot will generally fix the problem or at most sticking in the disk to recopy the image. For other problems, the employees can call you to come in an fix... and just stick a note on the computer that it is out of order until you can get in to fix it.
Doing this, you are going to probably have to pay the owner some type of income from the systems...
My advice is a 30/70 split... You will be shouldering all costs, such as new equipment, internet connection, new games etc. And a 30/70 split seems fair in my opinion.
Under this situation bill the owner either bi-weekly or monthly. Your user setup times should show how much time was paid for during the week.
Pricing...
First I recommend selling blocks of time in advance, don't try to get the customers to pay after they use their time and don't refund unused time...
For myself I used the following pricing scheme: $5/hr $20/5 hours $20/ day pass... Basically play all day for $20 this differs from the $20/5hours in that the 5 hours are usable anytime... however the $20/day meant that customers had full access for 10 hours. most people generally paid $20 and played 3-6 hours before having to leave... It generally was not abused
$50/ Week pass Pretty good deal for those users that came in fairly regularly...
$150/Month pass
$600/Year Pass
When I originally started I charged $4/hour but had no internet connection... I was profitable after 3 months(ignoring startup costs) When I added internet I raise prices by $1 hour and it took 5 months building my customer base to the point where the internet connection was paying for itself...
Calculations for determining price of computers:
I based by price on the following calculations:
Computers should be replaced every 2 years: (Note system costs are far less now than they were a couple of years ago...)
S = System Costs $2500/ 2 = $1250/Year
The computers take up floorspace... I generally figured this as a 3'x4' aread 12 sq ft. Then determined how much the floorspace cost.
12 * $12/square foot per year = $144
Figure out how much each square foot needs to make per year. The business owner might have an actual number. I just multiplied by 5 to account for electricity, maintenance, etc.
$144 * 5 = $720/Year
Your costs, figure 2 Hours a week, service and 1 hour a week at computer store 3hours @ $30/hour * 52 weeks
3 * 30 * 52 = $4680/Year
Divide that by number of systems (5 pay + 1 free = 5) $4680/5 = $936/year
Internet connection $1200/mnt * 12 Months = 14400
Divided by systems 14400/5 = $2880/Year
Add up costs $1250 System $ 720 Floorspace $ 936 Technical support $2880 Internet connection
$5786/Year
Divide by your percentage.7 since you also have to pay the owner 30% of your gross for running the store and such
5786 /.7 = $8266 Year
So we have to make $8266 year just to pay for the machines
Number of estimated hours in use per week 30 number of weeks 52
30*52 = 1560 hours/year
Our price per hours ends up being $5.29 / hour
I charged a little less since I was just guesstimating in the beginning, luckily I was close to actual costs...
In the end, I ended up closing the cafe because the owner stopped paying me. He had outside bills and was using my income in order to pay those bills...
At the end of 2 years the machines were bringing in around $800/month each which while making a profit, I was spending about $200/month in new games per each machine and thus was only making a small profit per month.
I know a lot of people that take on interns. Might not be paid experience, but it is work experience and looks good on a resume.
I've had interns use me as references to get jobs plenty of times. Mainly it takes a little effort on the employers part, but several of the companies I work with have similiar programs... It's merely a matter of students contacting us and asking for free training in exchange for helping out.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of small computer companies out there, even now... We've had our incomes cut because it's been hard to sell with the internet crash and then 911. Most of us know what it's like to be at the bottom and are willing to help give experience.
Keep in mind as well, going to work on an OSS project is just as valid to most of the computer programming firms I know. It probably won't help getting you a job at Big Blue, ATT or any other fortune 500 company, however most software companies are not that big and while a cvs/resume gets you a chance to be heard, pulling out a software package that you helped to produce can blow anything else away.
First and formost, if you feel that you have the skills to host your own system, and your willing to put in the time... I'd say go for it.
I run a hosting company, though rather small. The truth is that competition is pretty rough out there. And you can find hosting fees that are about half of what it costs me to provide the service to my customers... Heck, free sites abound. The $20 bucks that you spend on hosting is neglegent.
So let's discount price as being relavant, at least the $20 hosting fee.
Which is why I rebuff the parent post here. 10-20 users at $5 -$10 a month.
First commercial grade connection, needs at a minimum a t1 or partial if you want service. Local loop $400/month internet connection fees at least $200/month. So you would spend $600/Month just to get an income of 50-200 dollars, doesn't add up.
And remember you have to run customer service along with that... Talking 10 minutes a month to each user 1 hours - 4 hours a month.... Hmmm, cheap sysop $20/hour there goes another hundred dollars.... No profit at all.
If you want to set up the hosting, it's not a big deal... Plenty of help out there as well. But if you want to get into the web server business you need to count on sinking major bucks into something that won't payout for years, if ever...
So, let's discount hosting for someone else it's not worth the effort.
Which leaves us with the question still host yourself or host elsewhere.
Many the factors to consider are: Bandwidth Control Price (upscale) Reliability
Most of the companies out there are pretty resonably price for webhosting. Bandwidth generally runs 3G month, sufficient for most applications and have good uptimes... Control is a different issue since you are a user on their systems and not root.
Running a T1 or partial to your house and hosting your own servers. Bandwidth around 500G a month, uptimes depends on your UPS system and whether the provider can support you. Here in Georgia, Bellsouth has a lot of reliability issues, so expect a 2 hour outage once a year... Paying for a commercial grade connection though does have it's advantages.... When you have a problem you are bumped to the top of the list for repair... Price is a little inflated though typical partial T1 costs around 500-700/month with fulls going for 700-1400 depending on provider. Control ahhh, full control is so nice... no driving to fix the problem no waiting on customer support.
DSL is a little bit less expensive than t1, except that the 2hour repair time is somewhere between 2days and 2 weeks. Add to the fact that the tech just gets the DSL running and probably won't switch you to clean wires in order to minimizing the chance it might happen again... Cheaper yes 50-120 dollars for home use 200-300 for business. Server CO-LO. Server colo is a nice option, usually around $150/month for hosting and full control of the machine. $150 usually gets you 10-20GB a month and that's more than sufficient for most purposes. Uptime is great, clean power feeds generally and if the network goes down, the hosting company has other problems to deal with besides your problem... It will or better be fixed quickly. You do lose a little control though, no reaching over and hitting the power switch... I suggest Linux or some type of UNIX but I doubt you wanted to run windows.
The last option is renting a cabinet and sublet your space to others with whatever you have left over. This normally runs $1500/month and you usually have to pay around $4/GB a month. Not a bad option, but you then get into the business of supporting other people and it's really a money loss at this point. Get some experience running a co-lo box and making sure you are comfortable before going this route...
Oh, one other option, buy ATT I understand they are available, probably overkill though... Grin
If you need any help or advice drop me a line and I'll do what I can to help out.
It appears that you are talking more about interface design than programming.
For what it's worth, check out "Interface Design" by Peter Bickford ISBN 0-12-095860-0. Its a bit dated but provides a reasonably good introduction and foundation for interface design...
I can't give a definate answer to this question, but I will throw in my.02 for what it's worth.
Pros of Incorporation:
Liability Protection
Reduced Tax burden through use of write-offs
Cons of Incorporation:
Increased time overhead to keep books, separate accounts, licenses etc
"C" Corp taxed twice
The only reason That I think you might want to incorporate is to save tax money. As such speaking with an accountant will be your best bet.
The company you work for may want to shift the burden of paper work onto you, which will save them money. You will have to spend a couple of hours a month updating your records, play you will have to spend more money on Social Security 7.5%, provide your own health insurance, etc. Unless they are paying an extra 30% over being a W2 employee I don't think it would be worth it.
Liability Protection:
Incorporation is an excellent way of separating your own finances and liablities from that of the company. However, you will likely not receive full protection if you are the only employee of the company.
Separation of Funds:
Never ever spend anything on personal items from the corporate accounts. Doing so may open you to any company liability. The income and equipment that is owned by the company are not for your personal use.
If for any reason you have to have the company declare bankrupcy(sp?) your personal finances will not be damaged. However, during the first 2 years of a business most creditors will require that you co-sign any loans the company might receive. I doubt this applies to you since your basically working for someone else and have no expenses.
Reduced Taxes:
A LLC or "S" corp be used to write off expenses and save "income" since you can spend write off purchases relating to the corporation. Medical insurance becomes a little easier pay for since you can allocate pre-tax dollars or have corporate benefits which pay full medical. Again business expense pre-tax write-off.
Ummm,
Sorry, just want to note that mutex and semaphore programming is not all that difficult if you do it much. True windows have a few kinks, but the concept is pretty basic. Basically I would have to disagree that mutex and thread programming makes programming hard. It's just programming once you understand it, it's pretty straight forward.
As for the windows problem use startthreadx instead of startthread (Yeah probably not the real api functions, but close enough haven't worked on windows for a while.)
Lando
Re:What are the weakest parts of Linux?
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
I do this, been doing it for some time. It's basically just the same as any other business... You stay at it long enough to get more customers while keeping your current customers satisified.
I have clients from all over the united states and a couple of foreign nations as well. Nothing that really pays well. Most of the work that keeps me in business comes from the local community... A couple of meetings are usually required to set up a contract of a couple of grand or more.
If you want to do that type of work remotely you have to establish a client base and a reputation.. Slowly over time you will start to receive virtual business. But in the beginning you will have to either work extremely cheap or focus on your local community. Takes a couple of years before you can command decent prices without a face to face meeting.
Speaking as an ex-ATT employee. It's really not a problem with sending the memo out to the world...
These are the standard policies that ATT uses to verify the authenticity of calls. It's nothing out the ordinary, just a reminder to people that they should be verifiying identity before they give out information.
You really need to step back and consider what you want to do here.
Do you want a data center, ie computer server room, a noc, a workroom, etc?
If you have 4 admins, why do they need to see a massed array of consoles? Thats a job for Operations, not administrators. Put your administrators in cubes... Various cube designs out there.
Datacenter use open space and raised floor if possible.
Operations, couple of screens maybe 2 for each operator and use programs to pipe information to said operators, they shouldn't need a screen each. If your running MVS systems which "require" dedicated consoles... You can find cards and "hllapi" interfaces to run several console servers on one machine.
It doesn't sound like you actually have that big of needs.
Myself, I would just take over some custodial closet for the computers, beef up the ventilation and add in a ups system... Your going to need an electrical engineer to look over the power situation which should provide most of the space requirements for you.
As far as the admins go, find out what they want, usually 6x6 cubes with room for 2 computers is adequate...
As far as working on machines, find a room somewhere 20*40 or so that has a locking door. This way your's not concerned with parts walking out the door...
In truth, the computer room with be more of a engineering design, and set by your space requirements. The workspace for the admins is mainly set by getting input from management and admins.
What difficulties are you forseeing?
Ummm,
Shouldn't that be
Idiots Controlling All National Networks?
Hmmm,
Well it might be Open Source, but it certainly doesn't seem to be accessable... Did a web search and was unable to find any website or other access to any information.
Lando
I'm assuming you are using UNIX... I consider Windows insecure and don't use it myself...
Start out by getting and reading a copy of "Practical UNIX & Internet Security" Oreilly Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford.
After that read the documentation on your tools, apache, bind, sendmail, etc and watch www.securityfocus.com
Well I am clueless as to how this is news... It's not really important as far as I can tell... I don't use Linux to spite Microsoft, I use Linux so that I can get my work done. What does it matter what Microsoft does?
Granted buying laws and that is important to know about, but the fact that they are getting a booth at a Linux Expo doesn't really matter other than something to gossip about.
ie Nothing here move on.
Not much you can do to block IM services... Since if you leave :80 port open for webbrowsing people can send information through that port. I think that the only viable solution you have is to block people from installing software on their machines. You'll of course have to block all java applets as well, and take out the cd rom and disk drives...
Hmmmm, come to think of it about the only way to stop them, in the long run, is to unplug your internet connection...
Lando
So it's not called through a wrapper. And why exactly does this make a difference? When I use php I'm making a call to the GD libraries, so there is a bit of a wrapper in there, it hardly effects the time it takes to send back an image.
I don't see that this is any advantage.
Lando
phpdatabase is a great little script, but it really doesn't provide the functionality of access.... Grin
Actually I used to be a MCP in access 94-97, Most of my knowledge of access and the jet database comes from that time... Until Microsoft came out with MSSQL 7.0 they didn't have a proper database, and I doubt that they have put that technology into access...
Anyway, I don't work with Microsoft products much anymore, but I do miss the ease of access. But power, flexibility, security and costs are a bit more important.
Hmmm,
Comparing PHP with Visual Basic might not be too far off. Basically the reason I started writing in PHP was that mod_perl was not available at the time and kicking off cgi scripts was becoming a royal pain in the butt.
PHP is a focused language though and doesn't have the full functionality of perl, but then again it is easier to pick up than perl. I'd agree.
As for MySQL comparied to access. They aren't compariable in the least... First and formost MySQL is a database something that I wouldn't even consider Access for. Access is slow clunky and doesn't or at least didn't support SQL standards. MySQL is one of the fastest databases available currently, for most sites it can do anything that they require.... The only thing Access has going for it is the user interface... The tools for developing new databases quickly for non-admins can be helpful at times..
Hmmm, sorry for the lack of details, but while I think your comparison of php and vb is reasonable, access just doesn't compare to mysql as a database.
So if I understand what you are saying correctly, is that you have an application that was written in a 4GL language and you want it converted to another compiler/system.
Unfortunatly, there generally is no quick fix to doing this that I know of... Your outside contractors are going to basically have to write a language parser and then output syntax to the new language you are moving to. It's very likely to take a lot of time.
Personally, I think trying to write a system to do this is going to take longer than going in and recoding for the new language, ie go through the system module by module and figure out what each one does, rewrite it as an object and see if things work correctly, move on to next module, repeat ad nausium.
As far as using rexx, other than being slow if they are trying to write an automatic conversion utility, it's probably not a terrible choice however I would probably use perl for syntax structuring since string manipulation is perl's strong point.
As far as object oriented design goes, REXX OOP is rather clucky and is not really OOP, been a while since I used it, but I think it basically provides OOP like interface by using linked lists and such... Nor does it provide for inheritance, better to go with a more OOP oriented language than to try to do so in REXX.
What you probably need to do is to go back to the company, spend a week or two finding out what progress they have made, and determine when the project is likely to be done based on what they have done.
Then decide if that is acceptable.
Also try to decide whether the project is more than they can handle... Do they understand what is going on? From your description, it appears that they are not checking whether the project even works as the are doing it, therefore they probably are in over their heads... If so, yank the project and get someone else to look at doing it... If they are making progress and can show you that they do understand what is happening, it will probably be better to work with them to complete the project since a new development team is going to have to relearn the application before starting.
It appears that your company wanted a silver bullet solution, ie an easy fix to convert the code from one system to another. They don't really exist. The other company promised to do so, but they weren't able to make it work either. In conversion was a simple affair then all windows programs would work on linux and vice versa... The conventional path would be to hire programers to do conversion line by line as suggested above...
http://www.score.org/
SCORE is made up of retired executives to help provide advice to small business owners. Not only can they help you work through the production process, but they can also give advice and help with administration, personal, etc.
I'm not really sure what type of work your doing where you need access to your files... I can relate my knowledge on dealing with unison over the past year though.
I do a lot of back end web development. As such I usually like to copy the entire site down to a local machine, work on the system, upload to a test machine, test, and then move to a development machine. Unison has made my job a lot easier than it using a bunch of ssh scripts since unison automatically checks for changes and only copies over files with changes.
A sample script is as follows:
From my local file system $HOME/web/(website) I execute the following script
unison -auto -batch include ssh://user@somehost.com//www/(website)/include
unison -auto -batch www ssh://user@somehost.com//www/(website)/www
This script pulls all my programming work in include and the website accessable files www to my local system... I then work on the files and upload using the following script
unison -auto -batch include ssh://user@testhost.com//www/(website)/include
unison -auto -batch www ssh://user@testhost.com//www/(website)/www
I then check the coding and on the test host, when I get it to the point I want I upload it to the production machine...
If I have problems on the test host, I can go in and remove all files on my development system and pull a fresh copy of files from the live site...
Since I don't need to program and compile on different systems, just uploading the the test and production machines it works well.
Recently I took a trip and did not have access to my local system. I was able to borrow a windows system and after installing putting, winscp and unison I was up and running within 10-15 minutes at the remote site, which allowed me to get back to work.
The problem with using a remote mounting system is that you have to maintain network connectivity while working on files, not always an option, plus you are working with the live production files...
So basically I use unison just like a cp command except that it does not copy files that already are synced between systems and it automatically keeps my permissions sync'd as well.
Hope that helps
Actually this code doesn't do much to help. Jamie's code merely handles running a kiosk and auto setting up the system.. In a cybercafe scenerio you have to track the time used and log out users automatically... If merely web browsing, it's simple enough to do with a Linux system, but windows is far harder to deal with since as a single user system you have no way to keep users from having access to any information on the computer system.
I've set up and run a cybercafe in the past so I'll try to provide some feedback for you.
.7 since you also have to pay the owner 30% of your gross for running the store and such
.7 = $8266 Year
"Pure" cybercafe's do not make money on their computers. Primarily income is made on the food and drinks served at the cybercafe, with the computers are most breaking even...
Generally connection costs will eat any money that you bring in to run the computers.
Internet gaming computers can make money, but most games currently coming out have a prohibition against rental or use in a cybercafe setting. Furthermore, contacting companies to get a cybercafe license you find that there is no such license. Activision for one is a big one that does this... There is a prohibition against use in a cybercafe and contacting Activision itself you discover that Activision doesn't see a market there and has no provisions for licensing to a cybercafe... Activision is just an example, but most companies are like this.
So in general your only choice is trying to either a) operate beneath the gaming company's radar level. ie just giving the games out for use on systems. Or b) hiring a lawyer to help work around the legal issues.
Certain states in the US, treat computer software as a book. As long as you have the licenses you can have people playing the games on your systems. The state will not recognize the eula probition against rent, resale, or cybercafe's. A lawyer is needed to provide at least basic protection.
I recommend not trying to support yourself by operating beneath the radar, therefore if you want to run the cybercafe as a business venture, definately get a lawyer.
That's all I can say about legal issues.
Technical issues:
Internet connection... I feel that the internet connection is very important in a cybercafe... The ability to contact the net and play online games is important. However when you set up this type of connection understand that most firewalls that you place between your machines and the internet are going to block some access to systems... Getting IP addresses for each of your machines rather than using NAT will help this to some degree. When I first set up my cybercafe I went with a full T1 and a C block of ip addresses and did not place a firewall between the systems and the net.... When doing this though, you need to understand that your machines will be compromised/hacked and will require frequent reinstalls. Generally once or twice a week.... In order to do this I set up an inactive partition with a copy of the standard install made with norton ghost... In order to rebuild the system I made a disk that fdisked and set the partition active, installed the drive image and then fdisked the partition inactive... Took about 20 minutes, but was simple enough any of the staff could do it.
In order to keep track of your users time, you can try to do it by hand, which requires a lot of administrative overhead from your staff. Or you can go with an automated system. The one that I used at the type was Cybertime. www.cybertime.com may be the url haven't checked it in a while.... If I were doing it now, I would probably write a small website and stick it in a linux box to act as a router... When people go to log in, they have to go to the website and sign in... The linux box receives their request and rewrites the routing tables to allow access to the web. Basically only routing traffic to the box when someone is logged in...
Other technical considerations... You might want to try setting up some linux boxes, but if your doing games you basically will have to run windows.
Marketing Considerations:
I mentioned before "PURE" cybercafes do not make money the food and drinks are what make money... If you want you computers to make money you need to create a community to use the computer systems. Web browsers don't have much of a community, gamers do... As long as your computers are fairly decent, people will come in to play against and with one another and will draw in their friends..... Rather than try to launch your own cybercafe without a support group especially when you are just starting out, instead try to get your computers installed into a business that already has a fairly good customer base... My cybercafe was installed in a Warhammer gaming store, when people were not playing minitures or RPG games they would generally sit down and play on the computers for a while... I'd highly recommend installing the systems in some type of business where people come to socialize rather than trying to start your own place from scratch.
Games... Games are important.... Diablo, Starcraft and Counter-strike were the games that people came in to play the most.... Basically look for games where teamwork helps out and the games take some time to play. Running your own local servers is also a necessity, which also means that people from the net need to be able to reach those servers, see technical... Generally with 6 gaming systems I made weekly trips to the computer store and bought 2 copies of most multiplayer games... If during the first week the games did well, I would return and buy 4 more copies for the rest of the systems.
Featured games... Tuesday nights were generally slow, because of this, I made Tuesdays a free night where people could come in and just get on the systems for an hour free... If all computer were full, they either waited an hour for someone to get off or could pay, and bump one of the people playing for free.
Thursdays, while not extremely slow, I decided to make featured game night.... Where people could come in and play 1 specific game for free. If they wanted to play a different game, or wanted on a system, they could of course pay....
One other thing... Most people would not sit down to play on a computer unless someone else was already playing... Leaving 1 "free" machine all the time insures that someone will play most of the time... Which will encourage others to sit down and play. When all other computers are in use and a paying customer wants the free computer he gets it.
To paraphase: Try to establish your systems in a location that already has a community.
To increase your computer usage, try to get people involved with the games, by giving away some freebee time on specific slow nights and get your customers "hooked"... If you can get them involved you chances of becoming profitable are greatly increased.
Business Concerns:
First, if you take my marketing advice and install into a location that already is established, just offering computer use you won't have to worry about quite a few things, which will make your life easier.
First Salaries and employees... If you place yourself into an established business, it already has employees of it's own who can take money and add time to various user accounts... Basically these tasks are simple and thus minor training is necessary to get up and running... If a system has problems a reboot will generally fix the problem or at most sticking in the disk to recopy the image. For other problems, the employees can call you to come in an fix... and just stick a note on the computer that it is out of order until you can get in to fix it.
Doing this, you are going to probably have to pay the owner some type of income from the systems...
My advice is a 30/70 split... You will be shouldering all costs, such as new equipment, internet connection, new games etc. And a 30/70 split seems fair in my opinion.
Under this situation bill the owner either bi-weekly or monthly. Your user setup times should show how much time was paid for during the week.
Pricing...
First I recommend selling blocks of time in advance, don't try to get the customers to pay after they use their time and don't refund unused time...
For myself I used the following pricing scheme:
$5/hr
$20/5 hours
$20/ day pass... Basically play all day for $20 this differs from the $20/5hours in that the 5 hours are usable anytime... however the $20/day meant that customers had full access for 10 hours. most people generally paid $20 and played 3-6 hours before having to leave... It generally was not abused
$50/ Week pass Pretty good deal for those users that came in fairly regularly...
$150/Month pass
$600/Year Pass
When I originally started I charged $4/hour but had no internet connection... I was profitable after 3 months(ignoring startup costs) When I added internet I raise prices by $1 hour and it took 5 months building my customer base to the point where the internet connection was paying for itself...
Calculations for determining price of computers:
I based by price on the following calculations:
Computers should be replaced every 2 years: (Note system costs are far less now than they were a couple of years ago...)
S = System Costs $2500/ 2 = $1250/Year
The computers take up floorspace... I generally figured this as a 3'x4' aread 12 sq ft. Then determined how much the floorspace cost.
12 * $12/square foot per year = $144
Figure out how much each square foot needs to make per year. The business owner might have an actual number. I just multiplied by 5 to account for electricity, maintenance, etc.
$144 * 5 = $720/Year
Your costs, figure 2 Hours a week, service and 1 hour a week at computer store 3hours @ $30/hour * 52 weeks
3 * 30 * 52 = $4680/Year
Divide that by number of systems (5 pay + 1 free = 5)
$4680/5 = $936/year
Internet connection
$1200/mnt * 12 Months = 14400
Divided by systems
14400/5 = $2880/Year
Add up costs
$1250 System
$ 720 Floorspace
$ 936 Technical support
$2880 Internet connection
$5786/Year
Divide by your percentage
5786 /
So we have to make $8266 year just to pay for the machines
Number of estimated hours in use per week 30
number of weeks 52
30*52 = 1560 hours/year
Our price per hours ends up being
$5.29 / hour
I charged a little less since I was just guesstimating in the beginning, luckily I was close to actual costs...
In the end, I ended up closing the cafe because the owner stopped paying me. He had outside bills and was using my income in order to pay those bills...
At the end of 2 years the machines were bringing in around $800/month each which while making a profit, I was spending about $200/month in new games per each machine and thus was only making a small profit per month.
Hope that helps
I know a lot of people that take on interns. Might not be paid experience, but it is work experience and looks good on a resume.
I've had interns use me as references to get jobs plenty of times. Mainly it takes a little effort on the employers part, but several of the companies I work with have similiar programs... It's merely a matter of students contacting us and asking for free training in exchange for helping out.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of small computer companies out there, even now... We've had our incomes cut because it's been hard to sell with the internet crash and then 911. Most of us know what it's like to be at the bottom and are willing to help give experience.
Keep in mind as well, going to work on an OSS project is just as valid to most of the computer programming firms I know. It probably won't help getting you a job at Big Blue, ATT or any other fortune 500 company, however most software companies are not that big and while a cvs/resume gets you a chance to be heard, pulling out a software package that you helped to produce can blow anything else away.
Lando
Trying to kill 2 birds with one stone here.
First and formost, if you feel that you have the skills to host your own system, and your willing to put in the time... I'd say go for it.
I run a hosting company, though rather small. The truth is that competition is pretty rough out there. And you can find hosting fees that are about half of what it costs me to provide the service to my customers... Heck, free sites abound. The $20 bucks that you spend on hosting is neglegent.
So let's discount price as being relavant, at least the $20 hosting fee.
Which is why I rebuff the parent post here. 10-20 users at $5 -$10 a month.
First commercial grade connection, needs at a minimum a t1 or partial if you want service. Local loop $400/month internet connection fees at least $200/month. So you would spend $600/Month just to get an income of 50-200 dollars, doesn't add up.
And remember you have to run customer service along with that... Talking 10 minutes a month to each user 1 hours - 4 hours a month.... Hmmm, cheap sysop $20/hour there goes another hundred dollars.... No profit at all.
If you want to set up the hosting, it's not a big deal... Plenty of help out there as well. But if you want to get into the web server business you need to count on sinking major bucks into something that won't payout for years, if ever...
So, let's discount hosting for someone else it's not worth the effort.
Which leaves us with the question still host yourself or host elsewhere.
Many the factors to consider are:
Bandwidth
Control
Price (upscale)
Reliability
Most of the companies out there are pretty resonably price for webhosting. Bandwidth generally runs 3G month, sufficient for most applications and have good uptimes... Control is a different issue since you are a user on their systems and not root.
Running a T1 or partial to your house and hosting your own servers. Bandwidth around 500G a month, uptimes depends on your UPS system and whether the provider can support you. Here in Georgia, Bellsouth has a lot of reliability issues, so expect a 2 hour outage once a year... Paying for a commercial grade connection though does have it's advantages.... When you have a problem you are bumped to the top of the list for repair... Price is a little inflated though typical partial T1 costs around 500-700/month with fulls going for 700-1400 depending on provider. Control ahhh, full control is so nice... no driving to fix the problem no waiting on customer support.
DSL is a little bit less expensive than t1, except that the 2hour repair time is somewhere between 2days and 2 weeks. Add to the fact that the tech just gets the DSL running and probably won't switch you to clean wires in order to minimizing the chance it might happen again... Cheaper yes 50-120 dollars for home use 200-300 for business.
Server CO-LO. Server colo is a nice option, usually around $150/month for hosting and full control of the machine. $150 usually gets you 10-20GB a month and that's more than sufficient for most purposes. Uptime is great, clean power feeds generally and if the network goes down, the hosting company has other problems to deal with besides your problem... It will or better be fixed quickly. You do lose a little control though, no reaching over and hitting the power switch... I suggest Linux or some type of UNIX but I doubt you wanted to run windows.
The last option is renting a cabinet and sublet your space to others with whatever you have left over. This normally runs $1500/month and you usually have to pay around $4/GB a month. Not a bad option, but you then get into the business of supporting other people and it's really a money loss at this point. Get some experience running a co-lo box and making sure you are comfortable before going this route...
Oh, one other option, buy ATT I understand they are available, probably overkill though... Grin
If you need any help or advice drop me a line and I'll do what I can to help out.
Lando
Nod,
Looking it up on the web I notice that you are correct. I guess that by the time it was released on the 64 or DOS that I had tired of the game.
I remember playing the game at the local ComputerLand and being somewhat desperate to find a copy that I could play at home. Never saw one though.
Sorry about that...
Lando
Hmmm,
The original Castle Wolfenstein was only released on the Apple II. Perhaps you mean Castle Wolfenstein 3D?
Lando
It appears that you are talking more about interface design than programming.
For what it's worth, check out "Interface Design" by Peter Bickford ISBN 0-12-095860-0. Its a bit dated but provides a reasonably good introduction and foundation for interface design...
I can't give a definate answer to this question, but I will throw in my .02 for what it's worth.
Pros of Incorporation:
Liability Protection
Reduced Tax burden through use of write-offs
Cons of Incorporation:
Increased time overhead to keep books, separate accounts, licenses etc
"C" Corp taxed twice
The only reason That I think you might want to incorporate is to save tax money. As such speaking with an accountant will be your best bet.
The company you work for may want to shift the burden of paper work onto you, which will save them money. You will have to spend a couple of hours a month updating your records, play you will have to spend more money on Social Security 7.5%, provide your own health insurance, etc. Unless they are paying an extra 30% over being a W2 employee I don't think it would be worth it.
Liability Protection:
Incorporation is an excellent way of separating your own finances and liablities from that of the company. However, you will likely not receive full protection if you are the only employee of the company.
Separation of Funds:
Never ever spend anything on personal items from the corporate accounts. Doing so may open you to any company liability. The income and equipment that is owned by the company are not for your personal use.
If for any reason you have to have the company declare bankrupcy(sp?) your personal finances will not be damaged. However, during the first 2 years of a business most creditors will require that you co-sign any loans the company might receive. I doubt this applies to you since your basically working for someone else and have no expenses.
Reduced Taxes:
A LLC or "S" corp be used to write off expenses and save "income" since you can spend write off purchases relating to the corporation. Medical insurance becomes a little easier pay for since you can allocate pre-tax dollars or have corporate benefits which pay full medical. Again business expense pre-tax write-off.
Lando
Ummm,
Sorry, just want to note that mutex and semaphore programming is not all that difficult if you do it much. True windows have a few kinks, but the concept is pretty basic. Basically I would have to disagree that mutex and thread programming makes programming hard. It's just programming once you understand it, it's pretty straight forward.
As for the windows problem use startthreadx instead of startthread (Yeah probably not the real api functions, but close enough haven't worked on windows for a while.)
Lando
Quick Note: CPU Hot swapping Lando
Further notes on friends.
U se r #]
Friends can by added with no journal entry by locating the user and entering their slashdot user # in the url below.
http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=addmeta&uid=[