Suppliers of small amounts of machinable materials.

Bob. I can't see any of Mr. Fawkes messages so I must have put him on my blocked senders list at some time in the past. Having now seen your quotation from his posting I now realise why I did so, and fully agree with your comment.

Cliff Coggin.

I've been trading with Crew for at least 25 years. No problem with the service or indeed when I visited them to sell him some stock. I agree the web interface is poor but he still has good stuff promptly dispatched at very good prices.

Cheers

Bob

doesn't

customers

quotation from

Could Mr Fawkes be persuaded to concentrate on his proper area of expertise, and devise a method (more successful than the last he used) of blowing up Parliament ?

AWEM

In article , Andrew Mawson writes

Actually from the (very impressive) reconstruction on TV a year or two ago it could have been very successful, but was rumbled before put into effect.

David

I doubt you'd get a sale website up for a grand outlay + =A35 a month for hosting. =A32-3000 would be more like it and professional standard hosting or broadband is more like =A350 a month than a fiver.

Mike

I wasn't making up numbers, I was stating fact, from experience, if you want to know more drop me a line.

"professional standard hosting" is another ball of wax, and by implication the quite separate "professional standard broadband" is quite another ball of wax.... however, the fact is that an ecommerce website on a host like servage is "good enough", and for the times it ain't you have your local mirror on your own server (eg s/h raq for 50 quid) on your business broadband, between the two of them it is more than good enough for this type of small business. Business broadband to his house he already has to have, this way he gets to claim it as a business expense. NTL Business 20/1 for 50 quid a month, yes it is capped, ALL Virgin/NTL stuff is being capped now, even 50 mbit, this is straight from the top.

leased lines + pukka cisco brick can start at about 450 quid a month for a 2mbit on 10 mbit bearer (no install fee) but to be honest you may as well go for 10 mbit on 10 mbit bearer for 670 a month, if the business needs it then it is just another expense, all claimable.

case in point is avisim, 12 years of work and customer accounts down the drain because they don't know the difference between mirrored servers and a pukka backup

HTH cheers

No thanks.

Cobalt raq's? Puhlease, no MCSE is gonna be able to work on that s**te. If you've got a good cheap nerd on hand maybe - but ooops, the problem here is that there isn't a good cheap nerd on hand.

Bar codes? Maybe appropriate, but have you included the cost of printing and applying maybe 40,000 barcode labels to 4,000 lines of stock?

Nochex? Maybe, but expensive and ugly.

You are doing the exactly same thing as the bad webmaster - you are supplying what you think is cool, or what you think is cheap, or what you think is good value - rather than what the customer needs.

(I won't get into customer wants vs customer needs here!)

-- Peter Fairbrother

MCSE Must Consult Someone Else

Your argument is a straw man anyway, it's like pointing at a Win2kAD box and saying no RHCE or CISCO is gonna be able to work on that s**te.

Interesting definition of s**te, RAQ's are bulletproof, and at what they do, seriously hard to beat, an in any event I was only advocating the use of a RAQ for the business mirror server.

Quite frankly, as someone who has run RAQ's since the MIPS RAQ2 days, I can tell you that apart from the odd fan failing, all "work" was doable and done via the browser, and that anyone incapable of "working" on a RAQ via the browser is someone who doesn't know what a domain name is, or an MX record, or what ASP is, so, by inference, you are saying that MCSE's do not have clue #1 as to what a domain name is, an MX record, etc etc etc.

If you can buy a product on amazon or ebay you can teach yourself in

I run a RAQ4 with RAQ550 OS here on my LAN, it is also accessible from the net which is useful for me if I am away and want to access a file or document, it draws about 22 watts, effectively it cannot get a virus, it basically never ever falls over or stops working, it effectively requires no input or control from me since I spent literally 10 minutes setting it up some years ago, provides DNS and SMTP/POP and FTP, both locally and remotely, and all remote access is by HTTPS by default. I keep all manner or stuff on ther, ebooks, multimedia, application software. It runs various PHP/MySQl software packages (websites / blogs / jukebox / etc)

It sits in a box the size of a pizza box, it runs stone cold and silent, apart from the 50 quid I paid for it s/h and the 5 pence worth of electricity it uses every week it has cost me precisely nothing, yet all the software is legitimate. I am not joking when I say that my garden gate is less reliable and less trouble and maintenance free.

And, despite all these varied tasks that it performs, UNIX load averages (if you're MSCE you won't know what that means, it means the number of threads waiting for CPU time) are consistently below unity.

It does all this on a "mere" 512 MB of ram and an AMD K6-3 450 mHz CPU.

Oh noes, this is too complicated for me to "work" with

Don't need a cheap nerd, LAMP is universally known and understood (by everyone more experienced than MCSE types) and administration of everything (on the rare occasions required) can be done quite adequately via browser, even a firefox browser.

Cost of printing a barcode label is like the cost of a postage stamp or jiffy bag, it is a legitimate expense you pass on to the customer, should add all of 3 pence to a item.

By your logic, have you thought of the cost of buying shelving to hold

Rubbish, a flat 50 quid set up fee, transaction rate of 2.9% plus 20p for a small business, =A31,000 individual max transaction limit, instant availability of funds, takes basically any plastic, and only "ugly" if you choose to make it so, because it is totally configurable.

No I'm not, I'm just giving one example that refutes the argument that a small business e-commerce package costs several grand, fact is any / all of the parts of the example I cited can be changed without affecting the cost or difficulty.

There's a damn sight more MCSEs than RHCEs or CISCOs about - and they work cheaper.

Besides, most RHCEs or CISCOs will be entirely capable of working on Win2K boxen, though I can't see the relevance of that.

You miss the point. If you introduce barcoding you have to barcode everything - which takes money upfront, and you don't get it back until you have sold your stock.

That's a cost - the client has to pay for it, about £800 in this case - and it should be included in the system upgrade estimate.

I expect he already has those. Besides,that's not a system upgrade issue.

Sure you can do an e-commerce package for less - but what I said was in this case 3-5 grand is what's needed, not that it's needed in every case.

Sometimes £50 is enough - I did a website and a business package recently for a mate. It took about 2 hours work, he spent £30 for a year's hosting, a .co.uk registration and proper emailing, and £20 for beer.

-- Peter Fairbrother

Remind me, what's a RAQ ?

Mike

Shirley its "an RAQ"

Richard

It's that middle eastern country that the US and UK are using for target practice.

I thought that was Wales ?

John S.

...wait's for the inevitable responses :-} --

Chris Edwards (in deepest Dorset) "There *must* be an easier way!"

re the crappy website at

Correction: I just looked at the site, and they sell a much smaller range than I'd misremembered, ~ 500 lines rather than 5,000. Should be doable for well under a grand.

-- Peter F

On or around Sun, 17 May 2009 08:34:27 +0100, Peter Fairbrother enlightened us thusly:

then port it, dear liza, dear liza...

On or around Sun, 17 May 2009 14:45:48 -0700 (PDT), snipped-for-privacy@ymail.com enlightened us thusly:

that rather depends on the level of business and the expected bandwidth. Hosting starts from pretty cheap, even including a built-in basic e-commrce setup (which may be crap, for all I know).

Hosting mostly goes up with increased bandwidth, although storage also goes up.

Mine's with daily.co.uk and has 12GB storage, my info says unlimited bandwidth, but the web page says 150GB (monthly) and costs 9 quid a month, but it's half price if you buy a year upfront.

They also do cheaper ones, and eshop packages. I might get one of the latter sometime...

Port IE to a 'nix? If the source was available... nah, if the little Windows source I've seen is anything to go by it's probably too horrible for anything.

The doodah in question opens pages/links in an IE window. You have to have IE to do that. I already have Firefox/Iceweasel in several dozen covens of 'nixen ..

OT, I once was talking to a Microsoft guy who might actually be able to arrange it, and who had asked me [1], and I suggested that MS should open the source for Windows - not saying for free, or implying any loss of legal IP rights, their source, their ideas (if any), just open the source so we could see what Windows *actually* does ...

... but he said no, and well ... on reflection, I can't say overall I'm too unhappy about that.

-- Peter F

It was designed on a 'nix.

'course, it was called NCSA Mosaic in those days :-(

Mark Rand RTFM