Back in the old Infoworld Forum days I pretty much flamed anyone who deserved it, or didn't deserve it, or just plan flamed me and I flamed him back.

Gene Mosher? I never heard of him before, but of course maybe I flamed him and didn't even know it? But hey, that is how empires get built. Did you know that Steve Ballmer used to flame Bill Gates? Heck, Shemp's Father started a business contract with some guy that Shemp started throwing tomatoes at at a family picnic and both families had the park at the same time. It started a big food fight, but ended up with a business partnership between the families.

Heck I even flamed some of you IWETHEY'ers, and then became friends later.

it looks interesting, about the same type of system we have now, except he has some fancy graphics like a green marble background. But apparently he wants [link|http://www.viewtouch.com/buy.html|$2959] per workstation, and our current vendor charges us $2500 per workstation. I'll forward the info to my boss, buy he is going to ask me why he has to pay $459 more per PC for this one. We develop our own custom software do do almost exactly what he is doing. Except we use VB, ADO, and Windows 98 on the workstation and the $2500 covers the Windows 98 license, etc. Then it is just a matter of the other licensing fees from Microsoft, server costs, support costs, etc. I assume that the open source solution would knock down that pricing?

Really, refresh my memory, exactly what did I say to him to tick him off? I don't remember a Viewtouch? Was he one of those Mac Users or something that I used to debate with on the Newsgroups or something? I still get flamed for those postings, even if they were made in 1995, and were true back then, but always someone replies to them in the current year saying something like "You don't know what you are talking about, Apple doesn't use Nubus slots anymore." like I had posted it yesterday, not in 1995 as my posting seems to have on its date stamp. Not that it goes to my email, which I no longer have, but it does come up on a search in Google if I enter my old email address I had in 1995 and see who replied to it.

I can also search my former supervisor's email address and see that he is still having trouble getting that .NET server running the way he wants it to, and cannot get Windows 2000 Server configured properly.

Yes I do know how to use Google, but sometimes I have to sort through a whole ton of crap to find what I want. After about two hours I give up on it because something else pops up, my wife yells at me to do something, or my son starts tearing the house apart and/or hit the power button on my computer. My son was supposed to be watched by my wife or mother so I can get some work done, but they either fell asleep or didn't watch him close enough and he comes down the steps and wanders into my computer room and starts flipping switches. Of course now I see that part of my Linux problem could be a damaged hard drive.

All I asked for was an estimate, an average cost. Not one chisled in stone. My boss is going to ask me "How much?" and I have to tell him "It depends, he has to come out here and look over your system and then he can give you a price." and then he is either going to say "What is his average cost?" or "If he cannot give me a price, I don't want to deal with him." or maybe something else.

I am guessing that he has done pricing for others, and has maybe clients with a simular system that he did a price for. Or is he keeping his prices to other clients a secret?

But I see you may have joined the "Anti-Norman" squad. :( I did not expect that from you Bill. Now just about everyone I cared about or respected has turned on me. Next it will be my wife and son, and I'll find myself living on the street.

I did send my boss an email, and sent Gene one too. I hope this works out, if not, we may have to find something else.

Based on feedback from my coworkers, they think I am wasting time research alternatives to Microsoft. But my boss, who signs my paycheck, had asked me to look into it.

I caled him, I emailed him, but here is the problems:

#1 He replied to my email, and it bounced due to some Internet issue. I think he said authorization issues. Not sure if it is his end or my work's end, or somewhere inbetween someone locked down their SMTP server (maybe his ISP?) to prevent spamming or filtering out from a certain network, etc. Somehow his domain and my work domain and the hops inbetween cannot talk to each other. I figured that I gave him my work number in email, if he could not email me back he would call.

#2 I am so new at the company that I don't even have a phone yet. In fact, after I got unemployed I turned off my cell phone. So he could call the office, and somebody is going to have to take a message and then find the time to give it to me later.

He calls, leaves a message, leaves his phone number with a coworker. Today she gives it to me, but not a date and time when he called. Ok, maybe I was talking to the boss about Viewtouch when he called? The Boss is only interested in looking at parts of it, looks at the web page, is asking me to cut through the BS. What does this guy mean he has the only system that works like that? We does the same thing with hospital trays that he does with plates, etc. I had to tell him about how he didn't know about our system, and we didn't know about his system until now. Then he saw the PDF, Postscript, etc web reports, and he wants to move the Crystal Reports to the web. He asked me, the ASP expert, if Crystal Reports would load in a Unix environment. I answered that there are at least three ways to view a Crystal Report, an ActiveX control that only works in Windows, a Java viewer that can work on any browser that supports Java, and an HTML viewer for those that don't. So he doesn't want the "Ham and Eggs" or the "Web Reporting" part.

Gene is very kind, offers a demo unit.

Now at this point, my boss is maybe like interested in a few features and has not decided if he wants it or not. So far he said he would rather that we write something than gut some plates hospitality program to add in our Intellectual Property methods. But of course we could license Gene's skeleton, convert VB code into whatever Gene is using, and see what we can get to work. I think this would cut back on development time; however, my boss thinks we can do it by ourselves. Since he doesn't have a price on it, yeah yeah I know, Gene has to look at our system and give an estimate, he isn't all that interested in it but wants to learn more.

BTW, Gene has "hidden" html files on his website which explain more. I guess he doesn't give them out until someone talks to him, and then he says read more about it. Remember that my boss is computer savvy and knows a whole lot more than the average business owner, but he hired us computer nerds to work out the details and prodcut for him. So we cut through the techie/nerd stuff and then give him a summary. He was reading Viewtouch's website, made sense of a few things, some of it he called BS because he looks at competitor's products and they have some of the same features that Gene says is unique to his product. I told him that maybe Gene didn't know about the others, that he didn't know about ours until now. Yes it looked mostly like our product, same pop-up keypad, some type of buttons, etc. Except, it was done in Unix.

Chances are that my boss will say "No" to using Gene's product and if we do go to Unix, it will be something that VB can easily convert into, and something that can make the program look like the VB program.

Our boss's Surgical Tools company goes back 20 years, and uses ideas from that 20 years in our computer product. Gene's company apparently, by the Trademark, goes back 16 years. I assume that neither company knew of each other until now.

Sort of like [link|http://freberg.8m.com/text/columbus.html|Columbus] sailing to North America and finding out that the Native/Tribal Americans have the same exact stuff that his country does, and that they sent a ship over to Europe to see if they could reach the other side of North America. "You found us? We found you on our beach!" Sorry, [link|http://freberg.8m.com/|Stan Freeberg] reference. Ever listen to Stan Freeberg Presents:
"The United States of America"? But I got a feeling that we won't buy his product for a bag of beads, it will mostly cost more than that. We aren't the US Government here, just a small business of computer nerds now talking to another company which may obviously also hire computer nerds. We apparently have some things in common. :)

But my boss doesn't want to go for it. he thought it was a neat product, until we learned that Viewtouch only used a text file for a database, etc. I told my boss that if we licensed his code, and used it, that we would have to keep Viewtouch's open sourced license. Even for part of the source code.

Well anyway he wants me to keep an open mind for other projects. He isn't interested in Viewtouch for now. But who knows, maybe later?

Step up from the lawyers? Yeah, I'm working for the mafia now, as my boss once joked to me about it. If I don't like it, I can quit and stop getting a paycheck.

As DeSitter once told me, "Anyway I have to use MS tools for all this, but so what? I've got a job to do." which seems to be my attitude too. I'll use whatever the boss wants me to. Right now that isn't C++ and Unix. if you guys have a problem with that, then help me get a better job using Non-MS technology. Right now my area is a MS-Shop.

We didn't see any parts of Viewtouch's web site that wasn't already in [link|http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=site%3Awww.viewtouch.com+viewtouch&btnG=Google+Search|Google]: so what is the big deal? Some stuff he did like ours, others he did like "Star Trek" did prior to 1985. Great minds think alike, and idiots seldom differ. :)

Gene remembers me, we apparently got into it over an Open Sourced issue. Maybe involving Brett Glass and BSD vs GPL or something. He said he got into flamewars with almost everyone, so don't worry about it. It was 7 years ago, and yes I did flame him, apparently, but we are both big enough to get over that and talk business. Just that I didn't reember everyone I flamed back 7 years ago when Storming Norman ticked off 90% of the InforWorld Forum members as "Cable". ;)