As an "older Programmer" 40+ years experience in hardware and software, my experience shows it depends on who you are dealing with. I left the corporate world and startups years ago, been consulting since. Most of my clients do not understand the cost of building a product, hence they want to hire you on the cheap, which I refuse to do. If you want my years of experience than you have to pay the price. I can't tell you how many projects I have rescued or fixed because the "newbie's totally screwed it up or the budget/expectations were unrealistic. The H1B visas are not helping things here for American programmers. I only take jobs now from people I can work with that cooperate to get to the finish line, so I pass up many deals that look good on paper but are just a headache in the long run. The key factor here is to make it work for the client, they are all results oriented and don't want to hear 'I wish I did this differently'or 'I'll fix it in the next release' They can't budget your time on this, so understanding the monetary and marketing constraints they are under goes along way to keeping employed. there is plenty of work, you just have to search it out. We need to get back to apprenticing the young programmers. Only actual experience will make them better. Ken

I have been having the same issue for almost a year now. I tracked down the the problem to windows 10, any version past 1809. what is happening here is win 10 is disabling internet traffic on some hidden parameters. It loses DNS, never comes back and tries to turn off the NIC even if you specifically state NOT to turn it off in power panel. I have a sat internet connection. Delays run 600ms to 1.2 sec turnaround and win 10 won't play with it. If I make a direct connection to my modem it's a little better, but fails miserably through any router, I tried 4 different models, same results. On Downloads, I always get no more than 50kb/sec even though firewall on defender is supposedly off. If I switch to an older win xp system, everything is fine and this nonsense goes away so clearly it is a win 10 problem microsoft refuses to acknowledge. Search web, many complaints on this with crap answers from them. Time for windows to die and be replaced..IMHO.

I'm 59 and just started to do the same thing.. I downloaded 6 different distro's and tried to install them on various machines I have around. i tried..KUbunto 12.04, Ubunto 11 Damn small linux Debian, latest Slax Linux Older Fedora and Redhat versions what I found is that DSL booted on all machines tried. Slax only booted on 1 Ubunto 9-11 booted on all, but didn't configure networks correctly on all. Ubunto 12 is a pig, needs a big machine to run. Debian booted on all, but didn't configure all hardware correctly. So far it's not been pretty, especially since I cut my teeth on building unix disk drivers, so I am not unfamiliar with unix/linux..and certainly not a novice here. fixed the network issues after about 3 hrs of net trolling, easy but docs are all over the place. I thought I would settle on Debian since it seems to have the most stable developer base. I like KDE, but it is slow with a mouse on a 1ghz machine. The zoom features are good for these tired eyes. I don't like Konquerer..not close enough to firefox, my standard, would not even find firefox to install... So far, I have not been able to install any apps I'm interested in on Debian..a brick wall here. I don't like Ubunto with Unity desktop..this is just glitz and crap, can't do real work with this and it's difficult to port any developement tools i use to it. I liked Gnome 2, 3 is so-so, jury still out, but since the dev team is now fractured I'm not sure this will survive.I think it has the best dev support for moving apps over from windows. In the KDE world, I'm not sure reliance on the QT world is a smart idea right now... I wanted to port alot of windows apps I wrote over to Linix, hence the search. Doing ths is a big investment in my time, so I wanted to pick a good platform and UI to start with..So far I am very dissapointed in the state of things and the constant infighting in the Linux community..Where are the adults here? IMHO if Linux is to survive, developers need to spend NO time on glitz and phone apps, this is just stupid. Different platforms require different UI's, you will NEVER merge them into 1, take this on 45+ years of coding and hardware design experience. As hardware evolves this will be impossible to maintain. The first focus should be on a PERFECT app/get/install scenario with a GOOD GUI front end that runs and looks the same on all distributions. All of the apt-get-installs have failed to work properly, can't seem to see the reason why this is Second,a good dev scenario like visua

Guys, you have a really big challange ahead here. I know alot about RF, so here are the facts. 433mhz is pretty standard for this type of device. You will also see it used in things like remote temp sensors(oregon scientific) and such. You can get some good inexpensive receivers from companies like Linx. The bad news is these don't work like you imagine. the radios are very basic, just simple ASK(amplitutde shift keyers). This means there is NO protocol of any kind out of them, just a bit indicating energy was transmitted, this is called a data slicer. To use them you need to bolt them up to an encoder or a microcontroller to generate a bit sequence. this could be something like an RS232 byte, but not usually the case. Most times these are manchester encoded bit streams, this to meet FCC specs and produce a reliable transmission. If you take the output and just hook it up to an RS232 level converter, you probably won't have much sucess even if you can decode the enoding scheme in the pc. I suggest you open up the remote. Look at the chips in it. There will be either 1 of 2 methods. 1 is a microcontroller doing all the work and scanning the buttons(I'll bet not for this cheap a deal). 2. a holtec encoder chip doing the work, this is a very cheap solution. If you have this, then you can eliminate all the pain. You just need to tap the switch contacts with relays or fets and connect this back to the pc. A parallel port would work, or just soemthing like the RTDI rs232->parallel chips. They also make cables with these parts in them that could be made to work easily on the 3.3v levels(if that is what is in there...) Good luck...:cool: ken