Beside shooting blood everywhere and doing quests for others, talking to monsters that I’ll never find in real life ... I found this game interesting for surviving ( although are lot’s of topics to be covered ).
A difference from Wikipedia ( you only have content ) this game kind of force you to read about topics / ideas / concepts ( learning without knowing it )
Idea of the game: Win credits for solving questions and use the credits to post your own questions for other users to solve!
Take a look around you can find the concept useful for you.
]]>“Focusing on helping our local citizens do more with less when it comes to Informational Technology (IT) needs in the workplace and/or at home.”
However, when it comes to selling services and products to businesses in rural areas, this motto seems to just go right out the door. Most of the people I run into are using home PCs to do business-like activities like accounting, payroll, and inventory on a simple peer to peer network. Some even have taken the liberty to use something like Microsoft Home XP and use it as a graphics workstation running CPU hogs like AutoCAD and FlexiPRO.
As a network infrastructure solution specialist, I try to make it easier on the business owner where they don’t have the risk of a hard drive failing on their workstation, thus loosing all of their accounting or day-to-day business data files. When they ask me to come in an give them a technical assessment (which I do for free), most business owners go into ‘sticker shock’ when they find out the cost of a simple server, upgrades to their existing PCs and an improved network layout to supply what they need.
Anyone have any ideas on how to actually help customers like these in these types of assessments?
-- M
]]>Like all small town IT shops, we are about as Horizontal as it gets in order to maintain a flow of revenue through the door. “Going Vertical” just isn’t an option in rural area like ours, yet everything I see from anyone marketing product is strictly vertical in the approach. Worse yet, it wastes our time. What good are offers for the top end products when no one in this county uses them? We have one enterprise organization in the area, the hospital, and they have their own IT staff.
Intel told us a few years ago that “we little folk”, the thousands of small IT shops, are the majority of their business. Too bad the rest of the market only seems to cast nets for the big fish, letting all us little guys through, or rather not seeing the forest for all the trees in the way.
If what Intel says is true and we little fish represent the majority of the market, is it the marketing engines (Ziffdavis/CMP/Etc) of the industry creating the problem, or is it the marketing divisions of these companies? How is it that we little folks don;t seem to be part of the movers and shakers that affect the industry.
If we little guys represent a respectable share of the market, where is the Intel advertisement on TV that promotes what we do for small town and small business America?
There is a huge untapped potential in the small IT shop market, but the challenge is how to actually get and keep my attention??
]]>I’m a 13 year veteren of the IT field working in a rural Maine community. I have followed the IT industry for around 18 years and have been avtive in a national ISP organization, writing for an ISP publication and at one point engaged in communication with the major IT publications.
Here we have what is billed as a publication and resource designed for us… you and I… the little poeple who make IT work for the untold quantities of small business that supposedly are the back-bone of this country.
I sincerely hope that this resource lives up to the billing.
To my veiw the last independent publication that had the guts to tell it like it is was Byte magazine and it was bought up and silenced by the IT publication monopolies. Since that day, no publication has dared to take on the industry for fear of offending the vendors that pay for the publications to continue.
I my view this industry is driven from the top down and we get to deal with what we are fed. Having realistic product reviews and opinions are not part of the current IT press and have been pointedly prevente dand removed.
Simple issues like the true reliability of Hard Drives. Our experience has shown that over the last 3 years Maxtor had serious quality issues. We have seen nearly all of the Maxtor drives we installed 2-4 years ago die. We stopped buying them over two years ago. Seagate had to do some serious pedaling in order to placate folks liek us that were afraid that the crappy Maxtor drives would start coming out with Seagate labels…
Anywho.... this industry has been run by the vendor community.
Will this publication be able to make inroads?
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