computer philosophy

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  • Kim Ward
    Junior Member
    • Jun 2000
    • 20

    computer philosophy

    I've noted that there are several very computer literate people on the WBF and most are much more adept at computers than I. So perhaps this would be a good place to ask a computer question, really more than a question but a search for some principles to guide me in my ongoing computer conundrum.
    This could easily turn into a rant or a megawhine so first the facts. I have for a decade operated a business, a veterinary practise where we have a networked set of computers. On this network we are on the net, we have shared wordperfect word processing, quickbooks, excel and a veterinary software program that does client data ,animal data,reminders, inventory control, business analysis, invoicing and rudimentary word processing and mail merging. We/me are moderately adept at most of these programs. Up to recently the vet. software was DOS based working on a windows ME network. We have been very happy with the whole system. Then yours truly goes to a convention where I am made to feel the neanderthal because I don't have a windows based vet software program with all the bells and whistles(said bells and whistles being picture sharing capability, practise analysis better inventory control etc etc etc ). Got the system and have nothing but trouble since, Ram size, drive size, speed issues. My supplier and my network geek all of course blame each other but are united in advising a rapid upgrade of all 9 computers and some printers. My head is spinning with the advice ( probably accurate and certainly well intentioned )that I'm getting from all quarters but it's beginning to like the focus of this business is computers and my budget looks the same! Most of the advice I get seems to focus on the details of how to fit this to that or how to patch this to be compatible with that and don't address the fundamental questions of how a tool fits into a business. Nobody seems to realize that the computer system is only a tool and serves us and the real focus of our business. So, rant narrowly avoided, here are some of my questions; Am I really on the bigger and bigger computer is better treadmill? Do I have to stay?
    Is DOS really a dinosaur? If so,in my software it was a lightning fast, accurate, reliable thrifty dinosaur!
    Do all business owners feel as captured by the computer world as I do ?
    Is wordperfect truly on the edge of extinction?
    I'm not desperate enough to go back to a one-write system and typewriters but I certainly don't need these tempermental Lamborghinis to do my Chevrolet tasks. Kim
  • alteran
    Senior Member
    • Nov 2003
    • 1663

    #2
    "I'm not desperate enough to go back to a one-write system and typewriters but I certainly don't need these tempermental Lamborghinis to do my Chevrolet tasks."

    So often we answer our own questions if we only can hear and believe in ourselves. [img]smile.gif[/img]

    My business is in a very different field than yours but in a way the same. Small, customer oriented and a specialized service. My computer and software cost about $1500.00. Is more than I need or know how to use. I hire out my bookkeeping and tax stuff as well as some advertising work. We perform the service that we do well and hire others to do what they do well to do things for us.

    Neutering a cat is not a job for an information technology geek.

    Information technology may not be a job for a vet.

    The info geek may not need a cat neutered.

    The vet may not need all that information managed to the enth degree.

    Food for thought.....

    Al.

    [ 01-13-2004, 11:33 PM: Message edited by: alteran ]

    Comment

    • thebob
      Member
      • Nov 2003
      • 34

      #3
      My advise is, if it aint broke, dont fix it. Sounds to me as if you sole reason for an upgrade is peer pressure. If this is the case dont do it, at least dont do it now.

      Look at some of your peers systems and evaluate them yourself, dont be swayed by sales speak. Remember that people who have spent big money will be biased by their investment, and may try to justify it in none to honest terms.

      The worst that can happen by waiting is that something better/cheaper will come along in the future.

      Just because you have enough doubt to ask here says to me that you dont really need to change.

      There is a lot to be said for sticking to a known good system.

      Comment

      • Øyvind Snibsøer
        Senior Member
        • Jun 1999
        • 1206

        #4
        Since you've already made the plunge into the new software, you should probably get new computers, too. As someone else said, ME is the worst Windows ever. Win XP or Win 2000 is what you'll want. XP is the latest, and at least as good as 2000. Sure, they gave the desktop a gary design to give the users a feeling that they've got something new, but you can very easily revert to a Win 95/ME/NT/2000 look if you prefer that, (I certainly do!)

        One of the problem with running on an old OS is that it will be increasingly difficult to find drivers for new hardware that you may wish to hook up to your system. Also, skilled consultants will be harder to find as there are fewer old systems around.

        OTOH, you probably shouldn't have purchased the new system without first having made a thorough study of your business' actual needs, based on where you are today, and where you want to be, (i.e. evaluating IT as a strategic tool for growing your business, increasing customer loyalty etc.) When considering the purchase of a new system, it's generally a very bad idea to make short cuts in the planning stage. Some money spent on a good consultant to help you through the pre-purchase stage will pay dividends later. Again, the problem here may be to find a consultant that's good enough to tell you when you don't need to upgrade, too.
        Bundin er bátleysur maður

        Comment

        • cs
          Elite Invisible Member
          • Feb 2001
          • 19012

          #5
          It seems that I've been told that you need to upgrade your computers every 2 years. Of course this is coming from folks in the computer buisness, so take that with a grain of salt.

          I don't beleive it. Like said above if it ain't broke don't fix it. The only time I feel the need to upgrade is when the software forces an upgrade. If you need new software to do a task that you couldn't do before or if you need an updated version for exhange information with others, than yes an upgrade is needed.

          When you do upgrade I would recomend getting the fastest, bigest, most expandable, baddest one on the road. By doing that you may be able to stretch out is service by a year or two.

          Here at work I'm responsible for our computer systems, which includes hardware and software. The boss's nephew works here and is always pressureing me to update our computers all the time. I on the other hand hold on to them as long as fesiable. Waste not want not. If I can squeeze a little longer out of a machine I can than get things that are needed more. Maybe by not buying two or three new computers a year I can buy that new plotter or get a new digital camerea.

          We will use my computer as an example. I bought is about 5 or 6 years ago because I was up-grading AutoCAD and I needed a new system to run the updated software. So I go out and get the best I can. It is a pentium 450 and had 128 meg of RAM and runs NT 4.0. At the time this was a screaming machine. Since than I've done a little work to, like adding a CD burner, an IOMEGA zip disk, another 128 of RAM and some partition magic. This machine still does what I need to do with without a problem and carried me through 2 CAD upgrades, except now I've just bought a new release of AutoCAD and I will need to upgrade again. But I reckon I got my moneys worth out of it.

          Oops, got a little long. In short if what you got does what you need with good speed and allows you to share information with others (if this is what you need) I'm not sure I would upgrade.

          Chad
          There are three ways to do things: The right way, the wrong way and my way.

          Three Little Birds
          Love is My Religion

          Comment

          • Bruce Taylor
            Eardstapa
            • Aug 2000
            • 9225

            #6
            If it's any comfort, I know a young vet who owns two clinics in Montreal. As far as I know, he uses computers for 1) billing 2) playing music during operations. He doesn't even use the web.

            On the other hand, I know a physician in Ottawa who owns a "paperless" clinic, and the system seems to work well for him and his staff. All the charting is done on computer, and the docs have quick and easy access to medical info, drug dosages, patients' files, etc. It cost him a lot, initially, but he seems to think it was worth it. Of course, he was enthusiastic about the system to begin with, and was determined to make it work. If he had installed the system reluctantly and resentfully it would surely have failed.

            Comment

            • leiflw
              Leif - of 1946 yawl Torna
              • Oct 2002
              • 515

              #7
              .. And from an electrical engineer, circuit designer, hardware geek: I have several old computers running various flavors of OS (including DOS 6) that I keep specifically to do certain tasks and run old, efficient, fast ultra-reliable software. I disdain modern Curtains (aka Windows) pigware, though in my field I must use it to be connected to the world at large. {Many of us on this forum also prefer vintage boats and disdain modern plastic ones)
              At least the modern-ware still reads .txt files and can use a 3.5" floppy. When those old true standards fall by the wayside I guess I'll need to keep another computer alive to be a translator between the vintage and the neo-modern.

              But back on topic: whatever you do, don't toss your old system in the dustbin until you've fully tested/qualified/accepted the new one. You may want to keep the old one in the closet for a full tax year just in case. It may be old fashioned, but it works, you know it, and by now it's probably irreplaceable.

              just my 2c
              -leif

              Comment

              • htom
                Member #919
                • Dec 1999
                • 11118

                #8
                Kim, that's one of my wife's favorite complaints about business computer use, "what's the business reason for this change?"

                Ask your experts if you can, indeed, "go back". Sometimes this is possible, sometimes it is not.

                If you can go back, do so, pay the bill, and thank the gods.

                If you can't ... you're on the road to upgrade hell. Win2k Pro will run well on a 350 MHz /128M ram box, and is still available. Just installed it on my "new" play box for AOL. For more money you can go to XPPro, but in this case it's probably not worth it. (XP Pro is not happy on that box.)

                And then get off that road and don't get on again. When you do eventually change, keep the old system going until the new system has proved itself in your own offices.

                Microsoft is in the business of selling upgrades; there are usually a pile of hidden upgrade costs, both software and hardware.
                Await dreams, loves, life; | There is always tomorrow. | Until there is not.

                Grieving love unsaid. | Tomorrow will fail someday. | Tell them today, OK?

                Comment

                • Kim Ward
                  Junior Member
                  • Jun 2000
                  • 20

                  #9
                  Thank you all for responding. I was probably unclear, we have already bought the new software. We find that it does not do the core bread and butter tasks any better than the old DOS system, in fact is slower and will hang sometimes. (could be my hardware there). The fluffy stuff and the windows "look" we didn't have before but I find the fringe functions fiddly and when really thought about ,unnecessary to business. Yes , I succumbed to peer pressure, external and internal, this may be a live and expensively learn experience. Kim

                  Comment

                  • Popeye
                    speedo
                    • Jun 2003
                    • 12030

                    #10
                    And where is his apple cheeked side kick :: Linux Boy?


                    Comment

                    • TimHoehn
                      Be as you wish to seem.
                      • Nov 2002
                      • 12717

                      #11
                      Well isnt OS X better than Winders? Its based on X-windows and Unix, so it must be better. no cape and tights necessary
                      "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do, than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain

                      Comment

                      • barteld
                        Member
                        • Feb 2001
                        • 34

                        #12
                        I recently advised a small graphics design company. They were running a few (quite old) pc's an a couple of new macs (total about 6) in a network with a windows NT server. Allthough the design software is state of the art, the project management software is an old tailor built dos application.
                        The main questions I allways ask are :
                        Is your core business dependant on one of the old dos/win95 stations. If so, It's wrong (a five year old harddisk is bound to die if touched). I don't have any problem with people running old software, as long as their data is secured (ie backed up and mirrored).
                        We're gonna migrated the server to windows 2003 sbs(it's five years old) , and leave most of the clients alone. The dos application will live. I've calculated the cost of creating a new application that does the same, or buying and implementing one, and it simply doesn't add up.
                        However, there are a few things that have become more easy and cheap in the last few years. For instance the firewall. Now it's a linux box, of which noone knows what exactly it's running. We're gonna replace that with a simple router/firewall box at about 100$.
                        Migrating the server is mainly done because Microsoft doesn't support NT anymore.

                        In these small environments it's allways important to tell your client what they can expect, that it's not as nice as in the brochures, and let them calculate the cost of a days work to get a new application up and runnning.

                        Comment

                        • nicholasc
                          Flâneur • Seattle
                          • Feb 2001
                          • 20330

                          #13
                          Originally posted by TimH:
                          Well isnt OS X better than Winders? Its based on X-windows and Unix, so it must be better.
                          Actually, it's not based on X/Windows at all. It now comes bundled with X, but X is a completely optional install.

                          The underlying GUI/application frameworks (Cocoa) are derived from Next/OS and are much, much cleaner for what it is intended.

                          They are a very clean and intelligently designed object-oriented abstraction, far more so than Micro$oft's frameworks (MFC: Microsoft Foundation Classes) that come bundled with Visual Studio (which aren't much more than simple wrappers around the underlying Win32 API).

                          Friends don't let friends program with MFC

                          X/Windows's architecture is much different than most modern GUI's because of its primary design requirement: X was designed to always operate across a network, which is to say, the box doing the processing would be a big mainframe server (oddly, in X lingo, called "the X client") and the box providing the GUI services, displaying the UI and hosting the keyboard and mouse being a small, lightweight box (oddly, called "the X Server").

                          The nomenclature is exactly backwards from ordinary client-server architecture.

                          It's that way, because even though the box you might think of as the client is also a server: it provides graphic services to the box that needs them.

                          X also doesn't provide a window manager, unlike other GUIs. X is more a 'toolkit' for building a GUI. That's why there's a million and one window managers for X (Motif, KDE, GNOME for example, along with many others.)

                          From its inception, X was also designed to not be *nix-specific. A high level of portability was also a design requirement. It runs on just about any more-or-less modern hardware/operating system combination you can think of (including Windows and IBM mainframes).

                          Makes my head spin, X does.

                          BTW, X is also completely open-source (ref. http://www.x.org/ ).
                          “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,” Goebbels said as the Nazis rose to power—one of those quotes that sound apocryphal but are not.​
                          — Adam Gopnik

                          Comment

                          • htom
                            Member #919
                            • Dec 1999
                            • 11118

                            #14
                            X's use of client and server are correct, at least for the time when they -- X Windows, client, and server -- were invented. Microsoft turned the definitions about when they "inovated" networking.
                            Await dreams, loves, life; | There is always tomorrow. | Until there is not.

                            Grieving love unsaid. | Tomorrow will fail someday. | Tell them today, OK?

                            Comment

                            • meerkat
                              Senior Member #4667
                              • Feb 2002
                              • 21774

                              #15
                              yeah, in "X-speak", the client runs the application and the terminal serves (presents) it to the user. Way back then, running a GUI was a lot of work for a po' little (expensive: $5-10K!) desktop GUI/keyboard/mouse box and most client applications where expected to run on big (reeeealy expensive: $100-$1000K!) iron like a minicomputer or mainframe, along with a whole bunch of other people's applications! Of course, as time passed, the "little" desktop got to have as much memory, disk space and computing power as the "big" minicomputers and mainframes (at least as much as was needed to run any single, or a few, applications) and so the applications came to the desktop and virtually eliminated most computer operator jobs and all of their irritations! (I'd long since moved on from being a computer operator: I now amuse myself by irritating neocons on the WBF .)

                              X's power as a networked operating system component is still very much in evidence today: if you watched the TV coverage of the mars rover entry and landing and knew where to look (and what you where looking at), you could see people running X-Windows and "dialing in" to various other boxes to get data/images from them, as wanted. Unix/Linux owns the scientific world and great hungs of the engineering world and is heavily used at NASA. The idea of using MS Windows would get you laughed out of the room! It is far too expensive and far too unreliable for what it would be used for.

                              [ 01-15-2004, 03:22 AM: Message edited by: Meerkat ]
                              If you don't think for yourself, someone else will do it for you!

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