Version to use: 1.2.0 (though they update often, I may be out of date here...)

Version to use: Whatever you can get from the website

Cygwin gives you the ability to run "Linux" tools on MSWindows. Old favorites like bash, wc, find, and awk run beautifully and help me daily in my work.

Version to use: .57

PuTTY allows SSH connections to remote machines so you can get a system prompt. Plus, Simon is a pretty cool guy. I sent him an email with a question and he got back in a day or two with a reasonably helpful response, bless him.

WinSCP and ncftp (via Cygwin) are the best file transfer programs

Version to use: WinSCP-3.7.4 :: ncftp whatever Cygwin includes

Version to use: hey, it's a mature product - whatever you've got is probably good.

Once you get tired of Crimson and want to do more inside of your editing environment (like cvs updates/commits, or send/read email, or compile programs...) it's time to use XEmacs which is the better fork from the popular Emacs software.

Version to use: something above 3.7

If you have to do lots of crazy stuff in your "light" editing, you might like UltraEdit, but it costs too much for the features in my opinion. Instead, Crimson Editor provides a nice fast editor with plenty of features, but not so many it hurts your head.

"Churn" is a bit of jargon that companies use to describe the loss of customers in a given period, usually in a month. You'll hear it in press releases, analyst reports, and sales material from CRM vendors like "we brought our churn way down by using XYZ customer pleaser tool and our stock has been doing great ever since!"

I had heard about churn before, but never really dealt with it. For work I had to take a tool I was developing and replace an "expected customer lifetime in months" input for a "churn" input because "churn" is easier for our people to think about. That's fine, but what does "churn" mean when I'm calculating something over the life of a customer? My models needed a number of months.