PCRetro Computer Warehouse

PCRetro Computer Warehouse

Guantanemo: An Icon of Lawlessness

We'll return to our regularly scheduled program...TFNP, after this note, but between reading this Amnesty International Report, and recent articles in the NYT, I feel compelled to express outrage. I can't help but believe that history will judge the United States of America's behavior in these past few years in the same light as our behavior in Central America in the 70's and 80's and in Viet Nam.

Would the USA tolerate this treatment of its citizens by another government? Would the international community accept this threat to the rule of law and human rights? Surely not, and yet the USA continues to perpetrate just such abuses in the far from hypothetical Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, where almost 550 detainees of more than 30 nationalities remain detained without charge or trial. On 11 January 2005, the Guantánamo prison will enter its fourth year. In its more than 1,000 days of executive detentions, Guantánamo has become a symbol of a government’s attempt to put itself above the law. The example it sets is of a world where basic human rights are negotiable rather than universal. Such a world, although built in the name of national security, is dangerous to us all.

Responding to the Shrink, Shift, and Shaft Tax Cut Agenda

by Chuck Collins

Seen on the Nonprofit Quarterly web site.

Meanwhile, federal tax cuts in 2001, 2002, and 2003 have fueled massive deficits and blocked possibilities for spending on human needs. Over 70 percent of these cuts went to the richest fifth of U.S. households. These tax cuts have “trickled down” to worsen state and local budget deficits, forcing deep and immoral cuts in social spending on poverty, healthcare, and education.

Almost every state in the union has faced terrible budget gaps in the last four years. While the situation this year has improved slightly, 24 states are facing budget gaps of over $35 billion in the coming year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

As the result of budget shortfalls, localities have laid off teachers, firefighters, police officers, and social workers; closed libraries and health clinics; and cut childcare, mental health services, public transit, and pollution control. And the list goes on.

Most of these state and local tax systems are very regressive, imposing a higher burden on the poor than the wealthy. In Washington, Tennessee, and Florida, for example, the lowest 20 percent of income-tax payers pay as much as 14 percent of their income in state and local taxes, whereas the wealthiest 1 percent of income earners pay less than 5 percent.

Link

TFNP Strategic Manifesto

Here is a first attempt at defining a set of strategic principals for technology within a non-profit organization. Several strategies are common among organizations that successfully implement technology.

Have a Technology Plan

Your organization should have a Technology Plan. This is a printed version of the ongoing conversation you should be having throughout the organization about technology. The plan should describe what is currently in place, what is disfunctional, and where new opportunities lie. You should consider a time horizon of three years. An effective plan is one of the single most important factors contributing to the success of obtaining technology grants. It is important to remember that technology is a means to an end. However, it is also important to identify new opportunities for improvement and leverage.

Document Everything

As part of the technology plan, you should have complete documentation of your existing systems. Part of this is just due diligence. The idiosyncrasies of your systems should not be held hostage by a single technical person who may keep the system in their head. The act of documenting the system is itself a learning experience.

Standardize Software and Hardware

Technology is complex. The fewer varieties of the same component that need to be maintained the better. You should have a single hardware vendor for desktop machines, a single suite of office software, a single manufacturer of printers, and so on.

You should consider having a single standard for memory and components for desktop machines. This can be updated once a year or so to include hardware improvements.

Standardize Procedures

By standardizing hardware and software, you have the basis for standardizing procedures within the office, so that you can begin to build an institutional memory. For example, if you have a documented single procedure for producing a mail-merge, then everyone can learn that procedure, and the staff can help each other out when they have problems mail-merging. You should also standardize storage folders for word-processing files, backup procedures, email standards, virus protection etc.

Practice Good Computer Hygiene

All users need to be in the habit of practicing good computer hygiene.You should establish procedures for preventing and dealing with computer viruses and email spam and provide documentation outlining policies for computer use that are consistent with your mission and expectations.

Ok...What else?

Welcome to Battery University

Battery University

Everything you’ve wanted to know about batteries and their recharging.  I was interested to note that a new electric lawnmower recommended not discharging the battery all the way…whereas the old lawnmower, I used to run the batteries down flat (which maybe accounts for the poor performance of the batteries…which had to tbe replaced every year.  

Anyway, had I gotten my degree from B.U. maybe I’d be using the old electric mower today! But I’m delighted with the Neuton.

Linux Journal: Linux in Government: Optimizing Desktop Performance

From Linux Journal’s Linux in Government column, a look at creating a desktop version for normal users.  What a concept.

Part I

Part II

From the Part I introduction:
For most of its existence, people have distributed Linux as a workstation or a server rather than as a desktop. In effect, the default workstation that has evolved has existed mostly for developers. So, when you install a Linux distribution with a graphical interface, it generally looks like what a developer might want. It performs similar to many UNIX workstations, which can seem slow for many knowledge workers. In this article, we look at the Linux desktop in a slightly different light. We think of it as a computer system that maximizes its strength as a consumer product. When we optimize Linux for the consumer, it becomes a fast interface.

Wireless In Vermont - State grant benefits Brandon

This made a splash on BroadBand Reports. The town of Brandon will have a crack at high-speed wireless, provided by a company I had never heard of, a reconstituted LightShip? A sold-off portion of Adelphia's Business Services?

Keyhole: GIS for Everyone

Keyhole makes spy satellite photos available, and distributes an elegant viewer program to allow you to “fly” around the world and zoom in to see details. The resolution varies depending on the satellite photo that was used. At its best you can clearly see cars and trucks. I played with this on a rainy Sunday afternoon, for hours. It is compelling.

Zoom in on your favorite atomic energy plant. See the twin plumes of steam from the cooling towers on the left. You can clearly see the twin reactors. There is a disused third reactor at the bottom of the picture, with its domed containment. building.

This imagery would have its uses for anyone working with or studying land-use patterns and urban sprawl to name only two ideas.

There is an active user community that creates new overlays and interprets existing data. Someone has found all the campsites along the Apalachian Trail. Someone has found all the U.S. atomic plants. Someone found a Concorde sitting on the tarmac in Toulouse. There is an overlay of air pollution hot spots, which can be shown on any portion of the world to create a gobal polution map.

The flyovers are amazing, and you can change your angle of perspective so that you aren’t directly over an area but appear to be flying to it. They acquire updated imagery on a regular basis.

After playing with this for several hours, a couple of questions and ideas come to mind.

• What are the ways that ordinary citizens can use this information to document environmental problems? For example, could it be used to docuement clear-cutting of forests, or water pollution?
• How can this application be misused? Is it helpful to terrorists?
• If what we’re seeing is this good, presumably the military/intelligence versions of these images are orders of magnitudes better. Can they tell whether my shoes are untied from 150 miles up?

Tech Friday: HP PSC 2355 All-In-One Printer/Scanner

While I've complained loudly about cheap HP ink-jet printers, and all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines, this number seems to be working well out of the box.

This unit is an inkjet printer/scanner. List price is around US$179.00. You'll need to add a USB cable for another $24.00 or so, and when you start to buy cartridges for it, they'll run over $50.00 for a combination of black and a photo color cartridge.

Output is impressive, and if you have memory cards from a digital camera, you can put that in and print directly. It makes nice borderless glossy photo prints on the sample HP photo paper which comes with the unit.

With an HP print server, the unit can be placed on the network and you can scan and send the scanned files directly to up to five workstations, or print to it across the network.

The software installation takes about 30 minutes, and they devote several pages in the manual to troubleshooting problems that come up if you attach the printer via the USB cable before installing the software.

We'll put this one in the "preliminary recommendation" category.

Tech Friday: Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate V10.0

Tech Friday is our Friday feature that consists of miscellanous programming, database, hardware, or network management esoterica, that we'd forget if we didn't write it down somewhere right after discovering it.

Just received notice that Symantec Anti-Virus has an update to version 10.0, and the update is downloadable.

After moving to a new parent server, I was attempting to figure out how to update the clients so that they look for the new server. Deep in the bowels of the tech support knowledgebase is a document describing how to do it. Essentially, you need to find a file grc.dat which is on the server, and copy this to the following folder on the client workstation:

[OS Drive]:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5

Note is that the 7.5 folder name is applicable even for SAV versions 8.0 and 9. Even though the document doesn't mention it, the client Norton Anti-Virus version 7.6 (which looks identical to SAV 8.0 and 9.0) seems to update fine using the same method. Maybe we can get all the workstations back in sync by upgrading to version 10. Just not today.

A Quick Look at Macromedia Captivate

A Quick Look at Macromedia Captivate

Here is a useful review with examples and ideas for Macomedia Captivate.  The one inaccuracy I found was the promise that you can have a presentation up and running in five minutes. I don’t think so.  But the software learning curve is reasonable, and the results promising. 

The review is from the American Society of Training and Development web site;  Learning Circuits.  They also have blog. From the heading:

Learning Circuits Blog is dedicated to sharing ideas and opinions about the state of learning and technology. Please use it to launch trial balloons,debate with others, and challenge assumptions. Join us in sharing pointers to new and interesting stuff. Continue the discussion of issues raised in Learning Circuits. Raise questions you'd like the Learning Circuits community to answer.  

And from the May 12th entry: “Just Showing Up”

On my long-term and short-term projects, I am around motivated and talented people.

But a theme has come up when talking to colleagues. A lot of people these days, according to a lot of good sources, are just "showing up. "

They are just showing up to meetings, unprepared.
They are showing up to league basketball games without having done much practice.
They write reports and letters without doing much research.
I have seen sales calls when both sides knew nothing about the other.

If the theme is just "showing up," however, the expectations seem to vary.

Some people still expect to be great. Some people think we will revel in their wondefulness, unprepared as they are.

Others just want to get by. The years of incredible rewards for incredible efforts are over, they think. Why push?

Both have implications for formal learning. But first, let's test the premise. Are people seeing this in their own workplace?

 

Internet Nonprofit Center : The Nonprofit FAQ

Internet Nonprofit Center : The Nonprofit FAQ

In their own words:

Scores of items of information and advice about nonprofits are included in this online resource. The items come from discussions on email lists, in UseNet, and other sources.

The list of articles on automation is extensive.

Nonprofit Online News: Frictionless Fundraising

Nonprofit Online News: Frictionless Fundraising

A thoughtful article by Michael Gilbert of the Nonprofit Online News.  Just as relevant now, as it was when written in January 2003.  

Wainhouse Research - Surveys

Wainhouse Research - Surveys

Survey results on use of videoconferencing.

Priceless - Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling interview - cost-benefit analysis

Priceless - Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling interview - cost-benefit analysis

about their book  Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

Seen on Stay Free!

Dan's Data - PC hardware and gadget reviews!

Dan's Data - PC hardware and gadget reviews!

A fun down-under take on the build-it-yourself hardware scene.  Kind of like Don Lancaster with more humor, (and frankly a little less mumbo-jumbo) or Jerry Pournelle but not as serious. His note from April 28th, is about home-built or off-brand rack mount servers.  And indeed, as soon as you start thinking about these, the hardware people get $$$ -signs in their eyes. Not entirely without reason, as the cooling in  rack mount is a huge problem, when compared to the same motherboard and components in a generously-sized tower case.  A little excerpt:

There's nothing magic about this kind of server hardware; if you're talking four or more CPUs and/or non-x86 architecture then there's a considerable real baseline price increase, but any old PC can do many server tasks. And a PC built with better-than-average components - good PSU, motherboard that you didn't buy at an open air market, maybe a 10,000RPM drive - should be just as durable as a purpose-built x86 server.

Once you start talking rackmount, though, you also start talking excitingly pumped-up prices. Maybe you're paying for a serious support contract, but disturbingly often, you're not (or the contract you do pay for turns out not to be worth what you pay...).

Server makers also have an annoying tendency to assume you want a "server class" CPU. Now, if you want multiple processors in an x86 server, then you definitely do want a Xeon or Opteron box. But a lot of people buying up-to-two-processor Xeon and Opteron machines with only one chip in them will never add another processor - or will, by the time they do need more speed, be able to buy another single-chip box that's faster than upgrading their current machine.

My own home server, for the past six months, has been a repurposed Dell Dimension 100TX (if memory serves) workstation, that had one or two motherboard upgrades. It currently has a 450Mhz Pentium III or IV processor, and 256Kb of RAM.  Its running Windows 2003 Enterprise (!)  Since the on-off switch broke, I removed the cover, and it is sitting there, in all its utilitarian glory in my wire shelf…which almost looks like a rack mount. As Don Lancaster says in his classic book The Incredible Secret Money Machine II “Think cheap. Think skungy”.

And while we’re on the subject, don’t forget the O’Reilly publication Make which according to its home page, says, “we’ll also show you how to make a video camera stabilizer, a do-it-yourself alternative to an expensive Steadicam.” Don’t miss their round-up of sonic clothing…wearable clothing which generates sounds.

TechFoundation - TechFoundation Homepage

TechFoundation - TechFoundation Homepage

http://www.techfoundation.org/

As described in a VON magazine interview of Brian Allain:

TechFoundation is a non-profit organization headquartered in Cambridge that is focused on providing technology support to other non-profit organizations. That market segment has been technologically underserved and often lacks the internal skills to optimally utilize technology. TechFoundation supports non-profits thorough technology education, subsidized technology staff, discounted products, and assistance with obtaining technology grants.

HBS Working Knowledge: Social Enterprise: Nonprofit Networking: The New Way to Grow

HBS Working Knowledge: Social Enterprise: Nonprofit Networking: The New Way to Grow 

book review from Harvard Business School.

Spam oddiites and new filter for OutLook

Microsoft has released a new junk eMail filter for OutLook.  This one is dated May 10th.  I’m finding that the combination of OutLook (not Express), with its Microsoft-supplied junk mail filter, and basic filtering of my eMail at my ISP, seems to be effective.

What’s odd, is that just this weekend, I got four spams in German…and they weren’t even obscene.  

Laptops versus Desktops

Over at Everything Sysadmin, there is an interesting discussion of laptop economics. 

However laptops are different. Laptops seem to be treated like crap by even the daintiest of users. People drop them, slam them, toss them into the trunk of the car before speeding off bouncing it around. That's a lot of wear-and-tear. Even if you have a fancy carrying case, there can never be enough padding in my opinion.

Disparity between workers and executive salaries

True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today's dollars - and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.

Italics mine. 

From Paul Krugman’s column in The New York Times

Global Warming...again.

“It may seem impossible to imagine that the technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”  The Climate of Man by Elizabeth Holbert, is a three part New Yorker article about climate change.  The first two parts on are online.   

Tech Friday: End-User Internet Phone experience with SipPhone

I've been experimenting with SipPhone for some weeks. They offer a service that connects your internet phone to a standard telephone number  for approximately two cents per minute.  Like a pre-paid phone card or pre-paid cell service, you can purchase a block of time for $10.00 minimum. When you make a call a voice comes on the line telling you how much time you have available for the call.  I’ve been using the service when traveling to client sites. Once I connect my laptop to the client’s network, I can fire up EyeBeam (the XTen software phone)  on the laptop.  EyeBeam is configured to use SipPhone as the telephone provider. 

The EyeBeam is pretty spectacular; it includes the ability to do videoconferencing (which I haven’t even gotten around to trying yet…) However, there are numerous free softphones that you can download, including one from SipPhone itself which is a go-branded version of the X-Ten softphone.

Once the software is runing on the laptop the phone will automatically attempt to register with the SipPhone directory service, and you’ll see a message “logged in — enter phone number” and a display of your own SipPhone phone number, which is usually (?) in the 747 area code. (You can buy a customized “viritual” phone number too, in a number of different area codes.)

Other SipPhone users can dial your SipPhone number, and the call is completed over the Internet. This costs nothing. Only if you connect to a regular phone, do the SipPhone charges apply.  

Several issues as far as the calls are concerned:

1. A broadband connection is required. Both Verizon DSL and Adelphia cable seem to work fine.
2. The service appears to be much more reliable, with better voice quality, and fewer delays, in the mornings.
3. Depending on internet traffic, and presumably local LAN traffic on your office network, the software phone may not even register with SipPhone Central, and you will be unable to make calls.
4. At its best, voice quality is identical to that on a standard telephone.
5. If both parties talk at once there is a “collision”. As such, the service appears to be less than “full duplex”. 
6. There is sometimes delay between the time you speak, and the time that the other party hears your voice. 
7. The time to connect the call, that is, between the time you dial a number and the time it starts ringing can sometimes be a minute or more.
8. International rates are great. 4 cents/minute to Germany, for instance.

Note that items 1–6 are not necessarily related to SipPhone per se. I’ve had similar experience with Free World Dialup.

 

Alternatives: 

Maybe Skype+SkypeOut.   Phonecard minutes from Costco phonecards. (2 cents/minute)  Cellphone minutes. 

Software Project Management Resources -- Columbia University

Software Project Management Resources -- Columbia University: "Project management resources: templates, samples, articles, software, lecture notes on software & general PM. Updated Apr 14, 2005."

Everything you ever wanted to know about software project management.

Alternative Software for Partitioning Drives

which could be subtitled..."Bonehead Network Manager Saves Neck With Nifty Software Utility".

The Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 is an alternative to Norton Partition Magic and its ilk. What is great about this software is 1. It works
2. It is reasonable. $50.00
3. It is available as a download.

When installing Windows 2003 server, there was a default of 4 gigabytes for the system partition. Like an idiot I chose this, and about 10 days after installing it we were down to 5% free disk space. The Acronis software resized the disk partition almost effortlessly, taking free space from the main data partition and applying it to the system partition. Once the software is installed on a machine, you can create a boot disk (diskette or CD) and then boot the machine from that media.

I was a little worried about this because the "disk" is actually a RAID array... but since all of the NTFS partitioning takes place at the Windows software level, the Acronis software still treated the array as a single disk for partitioning purposes.

Recommended.

Desktop Utilities

 Visual Mind is a simplified, and elegant implementation of mind-mapping. $89.00 for the basic version, $199 for a “business version” that interfaces with Microsoft Office.

 BlogJet is a desktop application for putting entries into a web log. It works with most common blogging software. Free!

 X1 is still on top for desktop indexing. About $79.00.

 Onfolio: used both reading RSS feeds, and for organizing web links and information.  About $80.00 If I had to take one piece of software to a desert island, (assuming I could still bring my office suite, operating system and development tools) this would be it.  I even like it better than …

 ITunes which I like pretty much, although I don’t care for the restrictions that they put on the use of the music that you download, and I have to say that the sound quality of CD that you create from downloaded music leaves much to be desired.

 UltraMon A great utility that manages dual monitors.

 

Welcome to TGCI - The world's leader in grant information and grantsmanship training

Years ago, I took what was then called The Grantsmanship Seminar. This was a three-day proposal-writing workshop held in a sweaty meeting room in a Waltham, Mass. Then, for years afterwards, I got a quarterly update from the seminar in the form of a thick newsprint tabloid. Hadn't heard from them for a long time, but I see they are alive and well. Their web site has an outstanding series of articles on grant seeking.

The Fight for Municipal Wireless Broadband Networks in the U.S.

There is a scary history of cable and telecom companies lobbying for laws to prevent local cities to offer broadband service. In Telco Lies and the Truth about Municipal Broadband Networks (.pdf link) Ben Scott and Frannie Wellings take several instances where cites and telecom companies have been at loggerheads and provide a rebuttal to the disinformation campaigns that have been mounted by the telcos. From the Executive Summary:

The attention of policymakers in both parties is now focused on the question of how to promote competitive broadband markets that will deliver high-speed Internet access to all Americans at affordable rates. It is a difficult problem. Present estimates are that around 30% of US households subscribe to DSL or cable modem service. This compares to over 70% in countries like South Korea. Virtually every rural state remains underserved and uncompetitive. In urban areas, many families are priced out of the market. The telecom and cable kings of the broadband industry have failed to bridge the digital divide and opted to serve the most lucrative markets at the expense of universal, affordable access. As a result, local governments and community groups across the country have started building their own broadband networks, sometimes in a purely public service and more often through public-private partnerships. The incumbents have responded with an aggressive lobbying and misinformation campaign. Advocates of cable and DSL providers have been activated in several state capitols to push new laws prohibiting or severely restricting municipalities from serving their communities. Earlier this year, Verizon circulated a “fact sheet” to lawmakers, journalists and opinion leaders proclaiming the so-called “failures” of public broadband. Many of the statistics come from a widely discredited study of municipal cable TV networks published in 1998. This paper debunks these lies case by case, juxtaposing information direct from the city networks with quotations from the telco propaganda. The results are unequivocal and damning.

 My own experience in this contretemps was about a month ago, when I testified at a public service board hearing in favor of a certificate of public good that the local municipal broadband company was seeking to offer cable television programming over its no-yet-actually-existing fiber network. Their idea is that they’ll bring fiber to the home. They will offer telephone service, broadband internet, and cable tv over the fiber. And they will allow other content providers, including commercial providers like Verizon and Adelphia access to the fiber as well. The company, Burlington Telecom, is a subsidiary of the local municipal electric company, that is, it is run by the city on a non-profit basis. As an electric company, they have provided some of the lowest rates in the state, some 10–20% less than the other state utilities. 

Since the local company is offering competition, and not replacement for Adelphia and Verizon, you have to wonder what the naysayers are thinking when they say this is unfair. Its not as if they are providing comprehensive broadband at all, in fact, many outlying areas are still using dialup. With DSL limited to three miles or so from a central office, and Adelphia cable years behind in their deployment plans (and the company is bankrupt), the municipal projects are just what the doctor ordered.   

Networking with Windows 2003 Server Standard

Spent last weekend bringing up Windows 2003 server standard and attaching 10 user workstations and their accounts. Before I forget the pain, I want to get down some random observations. This was an upgrade to the server hardware, and from the Windows NT operating system to Windows 2003 Server Standard. 

1. Biggest change is adding Active Directory. AD is an order-of-magnitude increase in complexity from the old NT domain system. It is based in part on LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which is derived from DNS, the domain naming system used for the internet. The upshot is if you want to manage network user security, you have to have an (NT type) domain on the network, and to do that you have to install Active Directory, and to do that you have install DNS on the server. I’ve installed AD on several servers in the past but it remains a black box to a certain extent. Also, in terms of scale, AD may be great for multi-site companies, but for a single office it is way overkill. Once added there are no native client applications which access all that AD information anyway. What’s all the fuss?  

2. The fact that you have to install DNS is a pain. Everyone has an Internet Service Provider, and everyone normally uses their DNS. So why the heck would you need to install it on your small-office local area network?  The good news, is, when you do have it, and when it is working properly, your workstations will use the locally stored DNS for DNS look-ups, and that means you’ll get snappier performance when surfing the web, and doing other internet-based things that use DNS.

3. Once the server and DNS are up and running, it makes sense to change the DNS mappings of the local workstations, to include the local DNS as the first DNS server for look-ups. For Windows XP workstations, you have to do this anyway, otherwise, the workstation will take forever to find the server.

4. Attaching Windows XP machines and creating machine accounts works fairly smoothly by using the File and Settings Transfer Wizard at each workstation. Since changing the domain name requires new profiles and security settings at the workstations, the users’ desktops have to be rebuilt, unless…

5. …you don’t create machine accounts, and have the user log into the local account on their local workstation. You can still access resources on the domain, even though you are accessing them from a machine that doesn’t have a server machine account. This is the approach that you have to take anyway with any O/S other than WinXP Professional or Win 2000 Professional.

All the above reminds me of the phrase, “the beatings will stop when morale improves”. I suppose all this is “good for me” in the long run.

A couple of pleasant surprises:

Group Objects. There are dozens of ways to secure and customize desktops. Don’t like “balloon help” that comes up saying you’ve got obsolete desktop icons?  You can surpress this and other annoyances. You can turn off user access to the control panel. All these can be adjusted based on group membership.

SharePoint Services. This is among other things, a web-based content and document mangement system. Great for collaborative projects. It reminds me of the old E-Groups system    

Service Pack 1 was recently released  which includes several new security improvements.

 

TFNP Monthly Introduction: May 2005

Welcome to Tech for Non Profits. As the banner says, non-profit organizations (NGOs) need technology as much as for-profit businesses. As consultants to non-profit clients, we are interested in finding hardware and software for office networks that provides outstanding value both for the money invested but also for the time required to get them working.

Comments and suggestions are appreciated. And drop by the Microdesign Consulting web site.