The exception is the higher education market (colleges and universities), who are choosing Drupal over WordPress.

You can read more about the FCC's E-Rate Modernization Order :https://www.fcc.gov/page/summary-second-e-rate-modernization...

The latest victims are the small CMS vendors who have been selling proprietary CMS solutions to public school districts for the past 15 years, charging far too much money (your U.S. taxpayer dollars!) for barely functional CMS's. The FCC voted recently to prohibit spending federal money on these solutions, a practice that basically created the market, so now every school district in the U.S. (14,000+) are looking around for cheaper and better solutions. A large percentage of them are migrating to WordPress.

Newark, CA --> Newark Unified School District

Newark, NJ --> Newark Public Schools

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-mark-z...

I work for a large school district and a large majority of our vendor solutions come with their own proprietary, locked-down technologies. When queried, some of these vendors see the writing on the wall and say they are working on integrating with Clever while others keep their heads stuck in the sand while counting their millions of taxpayer dollars spent on overly-complex, un-flexible and un-interoperable solutions.

The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.

I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.

What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.

I like browsing their Designer News links on a daily basis, but I would think twice about signing up for a service run by people with questionable character and morals, which is the feeling I am coming away with after reading through this thread.

This whole thing could have been handled a lot better and with far more professionalism.

It's trying to fix 200+ differently-shaped circles into the exact same square.

I made some bad decisions in my 20s and early 30s and ended up with $40K in credit card debt. I met my wife, got married and had a kid - and in the course of four years paid off all that debt, saved $50K, bought a house and continue to save.

It was hard, and required a lot of hard work, coupon clipping and clearance sales.

Paying off your debts can be done.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3909216

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