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Comment Re:Customizing ERP frequently fails (Score 1) 71

My company writes ERP software (business accounting software if you are unfamiliar with the term ERP - my company website has a good description https://www.eaerich.com/ ). While changing business processes can be required, it is also important to remember that often those very business processes are what set a business apart from the competition. I'm not talking about creative accounting, either.

In order to survive a business needs a competitive edge. That can include products and services, and can also include their business processes. So conforming a business to the ERP software can have a result of destroying a competitive edge. Yes, customization is expensive. But loosing your ability to differentiate your business from the competition is even more expensive.

Honestly, most ERP solutions are just ridiculously overpriced. Oracle maybe more than most. Using ERP software shouldn't be such a huge expense. My company works hard to make it affordable.

Comment Re:Open source DBs have caught up (Score 1) 96

I agree. My company's ERP software can use PostgreSQL or IBM's db/400 (db/2 on an IBM i). We have found both work equally well. The IBM i is known for its reliability and support, but I have found damaged objects on the IBM i and have yet to ever see anything similar with PostgreSQL. IBM has the upper hand with hardware support, but running PostgreSQL on Linux is a lot cheaper and easier. A LOT cheaper. https://www.eaerich.com/ if you want to know more.

Submission + - The Origin of the Blinking Cursor (inverse.com) 1

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: These were some of the first growing pains of early word processing. Devoid of the seamless trackpad and mouse control we take for granted today, wordsmiths of the era were instead forced to hack through a digital jungle of their own creation. Unbeknownst to them, engineers were already developing a seemingly innocuous feature that would quietly change computing forever: the blinking cursor.

Patented in 1967 by Charles Kiesling, the blinking cursor "is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text." According to Kiesling's son, his father said, "there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."

Submission + - The Rise And Fall of The PlayStation Supercomputers (theverge.com)

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation The Verge shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers:

Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's campus, sucking up energy and investigating astrophysics. It's a popular stop for tours trying to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their parents, and it's one of the few living legacies of a weird science chapter in PlayStation's history.

Those squat boxes, hulking on entertainment systems or dust-covered in the back of a closet, were once coveted by researchers who used the consoles to build supercomputers. With the racks of machines, the scientists were suddenly capable of contemplating the physics of black holes, processing drone footage, or winning cryptography contests. It only lasted a few years before tech moved on, becoming smaller and more efficient. But for that short moment, some of the most powerful computers in the world could be hacked together with code, wire, and gaming consoles.

Submission + - Electric Cars Are Changing The Cost of Driving (qz.com)

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: Quarts reports:
Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop, a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing.

These long days have pushed Tesla's engineering to the limit, making Tesloop an extreme testbed for the durability of Elon Musk's cars. Tesloop provided Quartz with five years of maintenance logs, where its vehicles racked up over more than 2.5 million miles, to understand how the electric vehicles (EV) are living up to the promising of cheaper vehicles with unprecedented durability compared to their conventional combustion-engine counterparts.

Submission + - How Enceladus got its tiger stripes (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers say they have solved a long-standing mystery about Saturn’s tiny, frozen moon Enceladus: why its south pole features long, water-spewing geysers known as tiger stripes. The study could also help explain why these unique formations aren’t seen on any other satellite in the solar system. According to the new study, led by Douglas Hemingway of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., as the moon cooled over time and some of the ocean water refroze, the new ice generated strain that built up in the surface until it broke. “It’s like your pipes freezing on a cold day,” says Nimmo, who was not involved in the study.

Comment Re:It's the IBM mainframe model (Score 1) 29

by jimminy_cricket (#59410374) Attached to: Dell Unveils Subscription Model To Counter Amazon, Microsoft

I disagree that this works well for the small business owner generally. I believe that for most small businesses, computer hardware is not the primary expenditure or focus. Most small businesses are concerned with things like running a gas station, supermarket, metal fabrication, automobile repair/sales, etc., things that typically aren't pure computer technology focused. For these businesses, it makes a great deal more sense to buy the few computers and licenses they need and then use them for a very long time.

Submission + - The next graphene? Shiny and magnetic, a new form of pure carbon dazzles (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A “happy accident” has yielded a new, stable form of pure carbon made from cheap feedstocks, researchers say. Like diamond and graphene, two other guises of carbon, the material seems to have extraordinary physical properties. It is harder than stainless steel, about as conductive, and as reflective as a polished aluminum mirror. Perhaps most surprising, the substance appears to be ferromagnetic, behaving like a permanent magnet at temperatures up to 125C—a first for carbon. The discovery, announced by physicist Joel Therrien of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell on 4 November here at the International Symposium on Clusters and Nanomaterials, could lead to lightweight coatings, medical products, and novel electronic devices.

Submission + - Salesforce Transit Center: San Fransisco's $2.2 Billion Cracks (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: It was supposed to be the safest building in the world. Then it cracked.

Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditionsâ"low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stressâ"it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-âreview committee overseeing the STC's response to the cracked-beam crisis.

"Engineers can predict ductile fracture and make adjustments during design, such as redistributing the load among various parts of the structure," Engelhardt says. "Brittle fractures, by contrast, happen suddenly and release a great deal of energy. They're concerning. They arenâ(TM)t supposed to happen."

Submission + - 50 years ago, the internet was born in Room 3420 (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: On October 29, 1969, a graduate student in a UCLA computer science lab logged into a computer hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first connection via ARPANET, which—after 20 years as a government and academic network—evolved into the modern internet. Over at Fast Company, Mark Sullivan marked the anniversary by visiting the room where the historic login took place and talking to three of the people who made it happen.

Submission + - Critical Remote Code Execution Flaw Fixed in Popular Terminal App for macOS (csoonline.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: iTerm2 users: It’s time to upgrade. A security audit sponsored by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program uncovered a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the popular open-source terminal app for macOS. The flaw, which is now tracked as CVE-2019-9535, has existed in iTerm2 for the past seven years and is located in the tmux integration. The flaw was fixed in iTerm2 version 3.3.6,which was released today.

Submission + - Blizzard In Hot Water With Lawmakers For Hearthstone Player Ban (theverge.com)

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: Due to the ban placed on a Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong protestors, Blizzard is now receiving criticism from US senators. Quoting The Verge:
"‘Blizzard shows it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party,’ Sen. Ron Wyden said."

Submission + - Tor Project removes 13.5% of current servers for running EOL versions (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Tor Project has removed from its network this week more than 800 servers that were running outdated and end-of-life (EOL) versions of the Tor software. The removed servers represent roughly 13.5% of the 6,000+ servers that currently comprise the Tor network and help anonymize traffic for users across the world. Roughly 750 of the removed servers represent Tor middle relays, and 62 are exit relays.

The Tor team said it banned these servers because of security reasons, as the outdated Tor relays were now vulnerable to various attacks, or lacked security features added in more recent versions of the Tor server software.Tor Project removes 13.5% of current servers for running EOL versions

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