Years back we needed people for a project involving formatting documents in Word and some scripting. We started out with requesting for peple that know office and did some programming. these people were more expensive and were mediocre at best. We dropped them all, and requested some random people with 'computer literacy', we requested 3 times as much as needed, with the understanding that we would drop 2 thirds within a week.

We did a day training and let them work on the most simple documents, we sifted through a third within 2 day's, most of them just finished students that were looking for a job, but were not able to find a job in their field (mathematician, chemists), and some high school dropouts. At the end of the week we had 10 people we did the project with, a few of them stuck around after the project for several months or years to become projectleaders, surprising programmers and 'MSWord Wizzards'.
The students were afaik able to get a job in their field of choice after working with us.

And the best part: It was a sound business decision.

Sorry, i seem to have given the wrong impression. The trap part is to lock developers and by extension users into the Windows environment. Someone else said it better: You can get away with some horrid stuff in .NET and it still looks like you made a nice program. It comes with the my nephew made our website kind of thinking. Programming, like all other creative processes, is part skill, part Art. The tools can sometimes hide or compensate a lack of skill. But at the end it comes down to the Art. For some reason I can not get my head fully around Microsofts programming platform. I like the small tools approach, creating independent (more monolithic) stuff that rests only on the Win32 API. This approach makes it work for all Win32 platforms. The stuff i made from scratch with .NET are not working any more, but my old Delphi stuff is still going.

sorry that you think that, mightbe that I’m just a slow learner, I never did enough work in the MS environment to get the hang of it. Somebody else said it much better that i can : .NET lets you make stuff even when you are an horrid programmer. I might be such a horrid programmer, but it never bothered me, or the functioning when I was using Delphi, and as the stuff still works.... but what am I arguing an abusive AC for ?

I'm still not sure with the whole .NET thing. What I see is that everybody seems to be putting it on their resume, but fail to read a small program. Also it does not really mean anything, what do you mean by .NET ? C++ J# C# VB.NET. I can only see it as a nice marketing trick from Microsoft. I find the library that comes with .NET interesting but rather fickle, it listens to the windows policies way too much. When I code something in my (rather archaic) Delphi environment it works from Win2000 up to 2008R2x64 without a hitch. The stuff I made in .NET needs to be recompiled sometimes when a new platform needs to be supported. The MS compiler is updated and it works again for all designed platforms. I know this is good for business for most .NET devs (keeps them coming back) but I find it a terrible sign of moving goalposts. I still can make stuff quicker in Dephi than with the MS environment.

I have seen people say it before, but if you buy a more serious barcode printer than a Dymo thermo printer; like an Intermec, Zebra or Monarch they support (their own flavour) of an ascii based printing language. The downside is lock-in. once you got it working for intermac's (IPL) it probably will not run directly on Zebra's (ZPL). These printers are made to Always work, and in general kan handle quite a lot of physical abuse. You can most of the time put in special labels or ink transfers to make the label work in the crasiest of circumstances. These printers most of the time support stuff like Maxicode, PDF417 or Qcode becides some easier codes as Code128 and 3of9. The advanced ones let you even 'print' RFID's Spoolfiles tend to be extreemly small (like 200-400bytes for a label without an image, packed with barcodes) The downside is that you will not get a nice looking GUI, and that creating a label is like creating a dialog in Clipper. (does my age show ?)

and for people who actually believe this, it would be a good thing, assuming they are recognized as non believers.. Qu'ran 009.005, 009.030, 009.034. Hoping the bigots also remember 009.006. - the reason it is claimed to be a faith of peace :)