This was also the case in the UK when the Net Book Agreement was in force in the early 90's.

For a while, everyone played ball, the smaller retailers were able to stay in business because nobody could undercut them, and a book cost the same price no matter where you bought it. Two larger booksellers (Dillons and Waterstones) then started to exploit a loophole by either punching a hole in the cover, or marking the edge of the pages with a pen. Then they could sell books at a discount as they were "damaged goods"

The Net Book Agreement stopped being effective for this reason, and was eventually formally scrapped.

I've spent the best part of my career undertaking tasks like this (as an external consultant), with my average time on an assignment lasting somewhere between 18 months and 3 years.

My aim on every project is to make myself obsolete - in that I try to get documentation up to a point where a suitably qualified individual could come in, read the documentation, and work the rest out for themselves.

My primary objectives are to implement some form of inventory control to document the what / where / why...

• What - What have you got (servers, software, services, contracts, operating systems, databases, users)
• Where - Where is it - where are your servers, what machine is this software licence running on?
• Why - What is the Business Justification for this service - what is the Business Impact if this database stopped running tomorrow?

Once you've got to that stage, then you're ready to get in to the real technical details. Remember that you are pitching your documentation to your successor, or to some imaginary "suitably qualified individual", so documenting what a system does and why is a higher priority than commenting every line of code.

It is possible to do with one person, depending on the size of the organisation, it can be particularly rewarding to do on your own - in a small business you often find some of the users have a good understanding of some of the systems, or are keen to learn.

You stated in your post that you've assumed the role of programmer and sole IT personnel - which means you need to learn to think like a manager as well as a techie (which is harder than most people imagine!). Once you learn to focus on the business priorities, you'll understand where to begin with the technical detail, and what level of documentation is required.

Here in the UK, drones have already been used by civilians to survey the masonary of the Stirling Bridge

The civilian contractors, however, appear to be more adept at handling the technology than Merseyside Police, who forgot to get permission from the Civil Aviation Authority to use their drone, before crashing it in to the River Mersey a year later.

I noticed some "Black Friday" emails from Amazon.co.uk and thought it was weird to name a promotion like a stock market crash. I honestly thought from the emails that they were running a consumer electronics promotion, and the only tenuous link they could find between all the offers was the colour black.

It was only when I saw this poll on Slashdot that I bothered to google "Black Friday" and promptly lost interest, as it has as much relevance to me here in the UK as "Thanksgiving" (which I discovered was last Thursday, only by googling "Black Friday").

Personally when I'm interviewing for staff (in the UK), I only look at what university they went to, not what they studied.

I'm not sure what other countries are like, but over here everyone under 30 years old has a degree, so the only interest I have in their university experience is whether they went to a "Red Brick" (Ivy league equivalent) or a "modern" university (re-branded technical college or polytechnic)

The fact you have a degree shows your ability to learn. What you learned in the past 4 years of University is of less interest to me compared to your potential to learn over the next 30 or 40 years of your career.

I personally value the fact someone even managed to get in to Oxford or Cambridge higher than someone else's 2:1 "degree" from some "university" I've never heard of in the North of England. Sadly this is what happens when governments devalue higher education with misguided targets such as 50% of the population must have a degree.

In ye days of antiquity, before even single digit /. UIDs, my parents actually used to drive a Ford Prefect. Well sometimes they drove it - the rest of the time they had someone tow it.

I can't say I've ever felt the need to use Public Transport to get to and from work, but if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't try to VNC or SSH on to anything during the journey. Maybe this is how I get by with a small amount of RAM?

Incidentally, I'm typing this on a mobile dongle as I'm not near any wired or wireless network tonight. The mobile package I have is pretty cheap - about £15 per month for unlimited bandwidth. I've never noticed any particular performance issues with SSH on this setup, and don't use VNC, so couldn't comment on that one

Because I don't do anything that requires heaps of RAM. My main Mac has 4 GB, which is plenty for what I do - and I'm typing this message on my 7 year old G4 PowerBook which has 1.5GB of RAM and I've never even felt the need to upgrade it to the maximum 2 GB.

I guess I just don't need heaps of RAM to send emails, post messages on Slashdot, and run a Terminal window to SSH in to anything I have to do real work on!

I fully agree - I notice this acutely at the moment, as I've been learning Russian for the past few months.

When I'm reading a book or an article, I skim over the common words, and slow down to sound out the unfamiliar ones. I noticed as my learning was progressing, that I would sometimes slow down to read every letter of a word in print, then realise it's actually a word I'm familiar with once I'd sounded it out in my head

Also, I noticed as I was becoming better at reading in Russian, that once I had started recognising common syllables, my reading started to speed up almost exponentially - for example, imaging learning English from scratch - it starts off as a load of jumbled letters on the page, then you start noticing recurring patterns - ~ing ~ate ~eral int~ ext~ ~ated etc

Since making this observation, I've also noticed that I'm able to quickly take in unfamiliar words in English, largely because I'm only actually processing a couple of syllables rather than a whole word.

Interestingly, I am almost completely unable to read Russian transliterated in to Latin characters, but can quickly read unfamiliar words in Cyrillic.

I'm pretty sure not many of my friends know the difference between IOS and Android.

If I asked everyone I know outside of work what kind of phone they have, the answers would be something like this:

iPhone
HTC
Nokia
iPhone 4
Samsung
Motorola
etc

I'm not even sure the responses would be particularly different at work (I work in a technical environment). Perhaps tomorrow I'll try it and see if anyone actually mentions the terms "IOS" or "Android". I hadn't realised until very recently that lots of different phones ran the same operating system, and I'm reasonably technical - I just don't have much interest in phone technology beyond making sure the one I buy does the things I want it to do (make phone calls, sync with iTunes) without me having to learn how to work something new.

My first mobile phone was a Nokia. Over the next 15 years, every phone I had was a Nokia. There were probably "better" phones on the market, but I liked Nokia, I knew how to work them, and I couldn't see any reason to change. When the iPhone came out, I thought "I wouldn't need to carry my iPod around everywhere as well as my phone if I bought one of those", so I got an iPhone. I like my iPhone, it does everything I want it to, and I know how to work it. Which probably means my next phone will also be an iPhone.

In many respects, despite having a technical profession, and being a "geek" in many areas which interest me, I'm actually just a typical consumer. I buy stuff from brands which have made stuff I like in the past.

Most consumers recognise brands, not technical specifications

This reminds me of Christmas and birthdays as a child, eagerly opening the cards from generous relatives in the hope of finding money, and often discovering only Book Tokens inside.

If you were really lucky and you caught the part time staff on a Saturday, sometimes they let you buy an LP or an audio cassette, even through they were only meant to exchange the tokens for actual books