LarryMade

Something similar has been in IDEs. Quanta+ had a good popup PHP reference... Aptana/Eclipse has PHPdocumentor in it, which lets you annotate your functions and such so information pops in when you type in a function.

If I wanted to get more detailed I go to php.net on-line manual, there's not really anything comparable to that site, description, examples and relevant discussion of all the commands/functions.

When there's a chance of serious competition they will act.

Years ago in our spot in rural California Sierra Nevada foothills we were patiently waiting for DSL... Every time we called AT&T they said DSL was a year or two away. According to rumor it took a fire for it to finally happen.

Around 2001 we had a major wildland fire that burned off a lot of trees and such which cleared off line of sight for satellite reception for TV and internet to a lot of folks. According to some, that possibility prompted Comcast to stretch out their cable access to beat the satellite service to the punch, and at the same time they started working on digital cable service here-which meant high speed internet, and lo and behold DSL was available in mere months!

Not to say it was a total roll out - there are still some areas beyond the 5000 meters from the CO and too far from the cable routes that have to suffer with satellite - and its really lousy, just above dial up - unless cable or DSL moves in I'm sure Hughes/WildBlue wont bother on improving that.

Linux? Get one with an Intel or nVidia graphics chipset (if you want graphics speed, go nVidia) avoid ati/radeon - its support on Linux has been touchy, the drivers have a long history of installation issues.

if you want speed again i5 is a good minimum, don't skimp on the processor, you can't pop in a better one if its too slow... you can always improve the drive/ram later - make those less a factor.

drive if possible SSD, but then don't make it a major priority as that can be swapped out on most wintel machines.

Just about any distro should work fine, the only main sticking point for Linux users are the graphics chipsets.

Go southward and look for lodging in San Mateo or farther south. Make sure it's near a commute channel (bus or rail) the neighborhoods are nice and the fees are more down to earth.

while it may be a point that they may have to rewrite it down the road, the advantage is they retain the logic so they don't have to start again from square one with a new vendor trying to get their system to work.

Also they could opensource it or sections to get help in hardening the code, create interoperability APIs, or anything they choose. Such an option is usually not a possibility with a private vendor.

Another issues is when you do have a significant change in law or policy getting the vendor to get those updates out in a timely/inexpensive manner may not be so easy.

Interoperability is overrated, what happens when HR decides they to get a new system? ...and that new system doesn't work with your current tracking system X but only with the much more expensive and over complex Y pro system?

I guess it comes down to is how important is it to have your hands on the data and process? I know some schools are really tiring of the "new system every five years or so" cycle that they go through (this can include, besides software, new hardware, training, reassigning staff responsibilities - all depending on the systems needs,) having control of costs and process might help them in the long run.

I've done similar when working for a non-profit.

Having the tech guys on campus helps drive the development you get access to the people who work with the data as well as updates on requirements of what is needed (there's always something people will forget in a spec... until some report is due and they mention it.) They can also bring in staff to test components as they are being developed.

My thing was child care related; student tracking is a whole new level, key things are relationships as in families, adults to children children to education, teachers to children to classes to teachers to credentials, etc. Plus whatever factors affect all that (social assistance qualifications, immunizations, gpas, etc.)

Though once you get the core data figured out and organized (which is the major bit) the rest starts falling into place.

It's not rocket science but it is a definitely a detailed data situation, which you need people dedicated to it for years to put it all together.

As far as anything like that being "done" not in the public sector... you got everything going then some new law changes and you need to adjust tracking/claims based on some new factor or add in an adjusted reimbursement calculation etc. so you have to restructure some data add some new entry methods, new reports, etc. Easier on an open system than a closed system.

Problem with "canned" software is it is usually developed out of one district with their own unique needs when it gets packaged as a one thing fits all it needs to be patched for other conditions and environments... It is usually geared for a specific administration staffing method, so buying something canned may mean you have to do administrative changes in order to work with the new system, etc.

It's good work though, and a nice challenge to sort out all the data and get it collected, properly managed, and accessible to the right people.

Software center... never use it, in fact the way it had mixed the non-installed stuff with installed software really ticked me off (this is probably my biggest gripe with unity, wheres the menu of all the installed apps??? I don't want to shop ALL THE TIME!). I had installed gnome classic (for getting to whats installed) and Synaptic/Web sites to get to what's not.

So went to find software center - not in the classic menu, but entering software-cetner got it from the terminal.

Seems it suffers like all the others, only one level of hierarchy, looking for Desktop publishing, select office and start reading through the hundred plus entries, most of which have a clever name and icon which does nothing to relate it to desktop publishing at all.

You want o make big bucks at your app, help develop better app stores, so people can find your app.

Donate to your local library would be my suggestion.

Radio shack had a good early start, the first personal computer I saw was a TRS-80 (model 1) looked nice and the software was cool (think I saw backgammon as the first program) the monitor was cheesy though, literally a cheap BW TV in a somewhat nicer case. School went for Commodore PETs which I really enjoyed. I did get to use a TRS-80 for a few months the BASIC was great had simple character block graphics, program line editor kinda sucked. (except for the Commodore, all of the other computer BASIC line editors were pretty bad.) Another recollection of TRS, was the disk drives were pretty expensive - had to buy an expansion bus, a disk controller then the drive(s). I just used tape.

Radio Shack by then was it was long on the tooth with soundless black and white computers (OK, you could get sound by using a radio to tune into RF interference - not kidding). The color computer was kinda of a late comer, with the Apple, Atari then Commodore already on the market with compelling color systems... and games.

Another trend that was emerging was they were pretty much working on a lock-in strategy, it was buy only their stuff or the highway, all the way down to printers. They kept with that MO into their PC clones which had slightly incompatible card spaces in their PCs to force customers to buy RS cards.

RS users seemed to be a pretty nice sort though, I'm sure a lot of HAM radio guys got them since they frequented the store already. Their magazines like 80 Micro were informative.

I always thought tl;dr was some sort of utf 8 encoded symbol or something that didn't come across on my browser.

If you were like me back in the 80s on a PET you did that and then moved up to more complex randomness with other graphic symbols like the four corner curves or bends. I think they had that line in one issue of Creative Computing with a bunch of other character graphic effect snippets.

In the stock market there are no sanity checks, else the whole thing would grind to a halt. :-)

More like Western Micro. I agree with the comments, $959 a month doesn't seem like "low income" rent to me either.

Heh, my programmer view is CSS smells cause it's CSS. with aids you can work on fixing the syntax to be more logical, but it could have been done much better in the first place.