I have a small business and going all FOSS seems very difficult.

Linux on the desktop + Openoffice + GIMP has made life a lot better. Less Windows issues, less viruses. Particularly when an employee plugs in a USB device 'just to charge it'.

Zoneminder (newest version) on Ubuntu desktop works well for our needs (with AXIS cameras). Zoneminder is really a cost issue-- I've installed some of the commercial software for managing 40+ cameras on windows servers. Software was very expensive. But also a LOT easier to use, and easier to search and view. Using zoneminder takes probably twice as much time as good commercial software.

Wine: use it to run a very old windows application a vendor uses for ordering. Not perfect in implementation.

Windows: I have windows on an old laptop. Sometimes someone sends me a tricked out excel spreadsheet and nothing in FOSS works with it right. The application to talk to my Sharp cash register only works on windows.

I would love to use a linux based full POS system, but can't find one that makes sense. May go MerchantOS next year.

Accounting: I absolutely hate Quickbooks on the desktop. Constant data corruption issues when you have multiple users. That being said, we use Quickbooks Online. Not that expensive to do our own payroll and can write checks at work/home easily. Constant warnings "does not support Linux" but it's fine.

Zoneminder: I use Zoneminder on Ubuntu desktop with Axis IP cameras in a couple of installs (retail location too). New version is good. It's FSF. Downside is very good cameras are expensive, and Zoneminder is a CPU/memory hog with megapixel IP cameras. (Not a project you could Rasberry Pi) So while the software is free, some of the good Axis cameras are over $600 each. IMHO, if you are not interested in spending that much on cameras, just get a Costco system bundle for the time/cost savings. FYI: You MUST have motion capture/detection. There is simply too much data to go through otherwise.

Camera location: It's tempting to put cameras high to 'see more', but you need to have at least one closer to eye level to get a natural looking face picture. Too many people only have high cameras, and you can never clearly see the whole face. I choose a choke point like a doorway or hallway.

Dogs: Effective. But expensive over the long term and time consuming.

Guns: I'm a proponent, but it takes time to be able to shoot effectively. Chance you'll shoot a robber is low.

Safes: Get a better safe. If they ran off with your safe, it was certainly too cheap and small. Floor safes are fantastic when surrounded by concrete. And cheap.

Neighbors: Get to know your neighbors. Coffee and donuts are cheap.

Self fulfilling prophesy?

The presence of police looking for crime in a neighborhood may lead naturally to more arrests. It's not uncommon for police patrolling a neighborhood to have a "quota" for contacts: pulling over vehicles with expired registration, traffic stops, loitering, etc. On any given street corner, in 30 minutes a police officer can almost always perform a couple traffic stops.

I thought the RV042 was going to be the godsend product: relatively cheap for dual-wan support in small offices. Turns out it just sucks.

My *personal* suspicion is it is part of the constant Cisco screwups of everything Linksys, but that's a different conversation.

RV042's run HOT, break, don't auto-switch or auto-detect a network outage like they are supposed to. Installed a bunch in some offices and had to replace all of them.

DO NOT buy the RV042.

Peplink makes a good but expensive dual-wan router which does everything you want and more. It is a larger, more robust office size product with pricing to match. But very good.

Otherwise you are looking at a BSD/Linux roll your own solution. I haven't seen anything good and small with 3 ethernet ports embedded in.

Mod DigiShaman -1

Korea has *many* entertainment options, just like the USA or Japan. It exports movies, tv shows and music.

Korea's pro gaming leagues don't exist because of poor options! Korea has:

1. Initial strong results in international gaming--and gained a lot of headlines. Whenever a small country can beat Japan and the USA at something, people notice.

2. The PC Bang (computer game room) culture. Most games are played in competitive social gaming situations. It was the norm in Korea for a long time, and you could have consistent results planing on a LAN than laggy Battle.net

3. A youth with less chances for economic opportunity than the USA.

4. Some serious fast twitch gamer kids.

What do you call a MEDIUM size nonprofit? How many individual donations a year/people in the database?

For a while, from about 1999-2007, I was doing some IT consulting almost exclusively with nonprofits, and worked extensively with Raiser's Edge. Raiser's Edge is a deeply entrenched product in a unique niche marketplace. It always seemed like most of the big nonprofits used it in some fashion, and all the really small nonprofits just get along with a weird excel spreadsheet.

(It does seem like an organization could donate to money to start a serious FOSS CRM system for small to medium nonprofits... it's a huge need)

Raiser's Edge is a resource hog and it seemed like nobody at Blackbaud cared about helping to make things faster. Back in the Sybase database versions, nobody realized you could put different database files on different HD's to speed up queries. We also once had a hefty support contract and were down over 25 days because they wouldn't/couldn't fix the database... eventually we needed to Fedex them a copy of the database, which they Fedex'd to Sybase, Sybase back to Blackbaud, and Blackbaud back to us. I asked: I drive by the Sybase headquarters in Emeryville every day, can I just drop it off to make it faster? Answer: No.

Queries and exports can be super slow: put one in at 10am... check after lunch. Make some changes and check just before going home.

Raiser's seems to be the best alternative in a very small pool of candidates, and you're most likely to hire people who have experience with it.

I've used ONSSI's surveillance software for windows. About 40 cameras, all megapixel or above Axis cameras, recording on MPEG. One server on a $175 AMD cpu with a 16 channel Adaptec RAID card. (16-1TB 7200rpm SATA drives). Doing record on motion, the CPU is pegged at about 60% all the time.

I got ONSSI up and running quicker than I am using Zoneminder, although I have more windows IT experience than Linux.

Currently having some issues playing with Zoneminder/Ubuntu memory management, and I don't think the viewer interface is anywhere near as good as the ONSSI solution. ONSSI support is poor to average, and is really a windows only product that seems to break easily when malware screws with Explorer. (that's why I'm trying to move to Linux solution)\

Zoneminder is a LOT better than when I evaluated it 19 months ago. It wasn't a viable alternative then for us, but is now.

Never done more but contribute a little financially to open source, but looking for ways to help the project.

Maybe the Austrailian authorities should import something like a giant Cane Toad to eat all the spiders? What could be the harm in that? Oh wait... they already tried that. Maybe the spiders will eat the cane toads...

This behavior has been quite well documented in bonobos, which until recently were considered chimps or dwarf chimps. I'm not sure what makes this article newsworthy, except that we all like to read about meat and sex...

Try reading a copy of "The Hunting Ape" by Stanford... It's fascinating in covering hunting and culture in apes (including trading food for sex).

From what I've read, I'd also disagree with the article that meat is so valuable to their diet. They LOVE meat, but other research suggests that the amount of energy expended on hunting compared to what they gain in protein/food is a net negative. Hunting is also high risk and includes getting injured in the process.