That all progammers ask him for a doubling of salary and a halving of work time. Because you were reading on Slashdot that having free time and enough money is the best way to produce happy, productive employees?

Or suggest that if he wants to grow his business, then he either needs to employ more developers, or give his employees stock in exchange for the crunch,

BTW you should tell him to check out ReWork from 37signals. It makes a good counter argument to "features features features" (or, as I like to think of it: Microsoft vs Apple philisophy - both are evil overlords, but both take a different approach to building their dominions).

Now I've RTA I do.. it's just talking about hardware..

I know that it sounds like a lot of money, but it may not actually be that bad, depending on what, exactly, is included in that budget.

If, say, they're including upgrading all IT infrastructure for the agency (all desktops, laptops, network etc), and they're including things such as training of users and rollout costs, then it really isn't such a crazy figure at all.

That's also the problem with these projects. They include everything under the sun in one project budget, instead of splitting it out into multiple smaller budgets.

Nerds are people too.

> More to the point, why would you want to use Windows?

Because, dispite what the fruit-hugging hipsters will claim, it's very stable stable, runs on a massive range of hardware (including hardware from Apple), it's the market leader, it's more open then Apple's dictatorship and actually a really nice well designed and implemented OS?

It's not perfect, but it's better than the commercial competition.

I've never had an actual person read our meters.

We have to supply the readings ourselves, and I assume that they then investigate if the readings don't match / are above the norm from your neighbourhood.

Smart meters aren't about meter reading. They're about being able to cut off your energy without having anyone physically visit you. Plus, I guess, a way to provide greater lock-in / revenue growth (i.e. customers must pay for meters, energy company buys them, so they always pay 10x the real price and pocket the difference).

This is slashdot. What do you expect me to do? Actually READ the f***** article? ;)

Still seems odd that so many students fail, what with all of the talk right now of growing carbon sinks..

Huh. They teach you in high school biology that 60%+ of the mass of most organisms is water.

Because some posters speak more than one language? and make occasional mind farts when writing in English?

"en" is a pluralising suffix in Dutch, and might well be in other languages.

1. We can do it for sewer/subways, so we can do it for this.
2. ...and trucks, roads etc don't neet maintence?
3. ...unsticking trucks when they get stuck on bridges / ontop of passanger cars.
4. ...have you ever been on the M25 (or insert-name-of-big-highway) on a Friday afternoon?
5. ...you think it'll be worse than shoplifting / 'falling off the back of a lorry'?
6. ...and this is worse than road deaths / train deaths right now?
7. Fuel strikes?

Sure, you've raised some valid points, but you've completely omitted any mention of perspective. What's important is how such a system would compare in relation to the alternatives... and from where I'm standing, it certainly sounds like it's an idea worth investigating.

> I threw up after looking at that nerd. He has the whitest skin I've ever seen

Racist.

Her, and she doesn't even know what RAM is let alone how to upgrade it. The Apple Store have done everything for her.

Not sure what version she has, but her macbook's about 18 months old.

I dunno about the whole 'just works' thing. A friend of mine is a big mac user (non-techie), she seems to have the mac equivelent of BSOD several times a week. Graphics designer, so the mac is needed.

I gather that this is pretty standard in the Mac world.

Haven't seen BSOD in Windows for a long while.

26 years supporting Windows Desktops and Server Products
10 years VMware.
BA in Computer Science from Correspondence University of Pennsylvania.
Post-it-note with "Please hire me ;-)" attached to a USD bill sporting the face of Ben Franklin

and a picture of the hiring manager in a compromising position with he CEO's wife?

Microsoft's Small Business Server isn't that expensive, and is as idiot proof as Microsoft OSes go.

Now, considering that the OP seems to have 0 experience in IT (so he/she is either a kid out of uni, or has blagged it), it would be prudent to recommend he look at the simplest solution from the market leader. Something he can't mess up.

Anyhow, my 2p:

Computers: buy them from dell. Best price/quality ratio. Pick a cheapish desktop for office-based users. Consider buying 1-2 extra as hot swaps (cut downtime during repairs). Laptops for users who're mobile (Dells are again okay, especially the Latitudes).
Internal network: buy a general purpose server with Windows SBS. That'll be your domain controller, file server, and exchange server.
Web server: host it externally. either rent a server, a colocation or just rent shared space.

Depending on just how much media you've got, you could invest in a NAS box / SAN. QNAP are pretty well rated.

Backups: you're probably looking at USB drives. You'll have too much data to have to rely on tape.