Thanks to all!

Welcome Rick, and hopefully you can impart to all the newbies the wisdom you've gained with the FM and FF :-)

Thanks for the kind words yoh-dah,
I don't know if I can impart any wisdom but, I will try.
I have a background in Linux from the early days around 1993 -94. There was only about four flavors of the Unix based OS at the time. Most people don't understand Linux, either its capability's or its limitation's or what it was like to get the largest hard drive and that was 200 ~ 400MB, and memory cost about $100 a meg, and the processors were rated at 100 MHz or less! Linux can squeeze more out of a processor than any other GUI Based OS out there(even the x-windows is more efficient). If the general user had an idea of what it took to create a new kernal for linux and make it stable it would stagger them, let alone add new features.(Remember Linux and all the drivers were created by people who didn't get paid, they were volunteers. I love GNU just for the idea of it) Apache was still an emerging and very developmental "work in progress". In today's world everyone expects something to work "Out of the box" exactly the way "they" think it should. I grew up in a world when if a carburetor was malfunctioning, er... gas wasn't getting to it, we learned How to fix it. This Forum is like that (a pioneering effort), if I don't understand, I ask questions? and I'm Polite about it, not demanding, if I was demanding when I was learning how to fix cars somebody would have told me to throw a pound of sand down the intake. Decorum and how we treat others is the reason forum's work. I laud the work(and patience) most people here have done! Unfortunately the large company's have left it to the support staff to fix their mistakes and rush a product out the door(I would blame marketing (the most useless third of any company))
I apologize for the rant, I've seen way too many obnoxious people on this forum, and I would blame their parents! for their incivility.
Rick

Rick welcome to the forum. I must disagree with your assessment of Marketing and by extension Accounting. Just ask Adam Osborne how important good cost analysis and marketing is. Since he didn't have good cost analysis he did not know that while he was selling the Osborne 1 like hot cakes, he was losing money on each one. Because he didn't have a good Marketing staff, he did not know you don't announce the next great improvement in your product (Osborne II) when it is still in the engineering stage, not even the prototype stage. The result - sales of the Osborne 1 tanked (everyone was waiting for the Osborne II which they figured would be out in weeks after the announcement) and with it went the cash flow to bring the Osborne II to market.

While the engineers, development staff and production people sometimes decry the bean counters (I am a retired one) you need to know what your true cost is when you are producing a product. Then the marketing people have to promote the product if you are going to sell it. In a small company, the marketing may be someone doing double duty, but it has to be done. A good example is that in early 2007 PC Word Magazine ran a very good analysis of the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. While it could have just been a fluke, I suspect someone contacted PC World, provided an NV+ and let them do an analysis of it. The glowing evaluation caused me to look at it, down load the manual and I bought mine in May, 2007. I have since added two more units (NVX). Before I read the article, I had never heard of Infrant or the ReadyNAS.

Without marketing, the best product may never really get off the ground. Classic case study is Beta vs VHS. All the engineers and technical people said the Beta format was much better. Yet, VHS outsold it dramatically. VHS had a better marketing plan and put the tapes everywhere, so people gravitated toward what they saw. Sony learned that lesson well and the group that came out with HDDVD forgot it and now Blu-Ray rules the roost.

Without a good marketing plan, as well as superior engineering, outstanding support and continuous development and upgrading of software, the ReadyNAS would not be where it is. Remove any of the elements and the ReadyNAS would be a niche player if it even still existed. But even their marketing group sometimes stumbles. They named the new ARM units the same as the older Sparc units by adding v2 to the name. It has caused confusion among the casual users ever since.

Your experience in Linux will be most helpful here. I duck any question that gets beyond hardware and Frontview. To me as a retired accountant, Linux might as well be written in Greek.