Starbucks Via is a Poor Man's Starbucks from a Starbucks

If you like a good coffe but don’t want to shell out a few bucks/quid for someone else to make one for you the Starbucks Via instants are pretty good. You need to buy them at Costco or a supermarket and they’re not as cheap as Lidl coffee, however they are very strong and authentic tasting…. and if you’re working somewhere remote they save you a car journey.

I actually prefer the Via to the majority of Sb drinks as they're generally not strong enough... 'brewing' a via lets you make it the perfect strength!

PMV Sql Diff Required...

In a change to the regular programme I'm requesting some suggestions on how to produce a Poor Man's Version of Apex SqlDiff or Redgate's Sql Compare.  I'm sure there's a way to do it straight from Sql 2008 using windiff to compare the schemas... anyone had a go?

Archos 2 8GB Poor Man's iPod nano

Archos 2 offers exactly the same set of features and looks quite similar to one of the apple key products iPod nano. 

Unfortunately user interface and quality of the product is not even close to Apple product. Price of the Archos is 3-4 times less than iPod so obvious poor man's choice would be Archos. 

BBC Jams Cams are Poor Man's Weather Service

A quite reasonable 'looking out the nearest window' technique that works well in the UK.  Simply browse to your nearest BBC jam cam site and see what the weather looks like.

Sure you could use a proper weather service but I like the combination of old technology and new...

Ruby on Rails is Poor Man's Asp.net MVC

I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails and use it for most of my websites including Wakeboard UK.  Asp.net MVC appears to be reasonable copy of rails, and runs on the .net platform, so good for enterprise development integration.  MVC includes most of the good things in rails, though the M part of asp.net MVC is more DIY M as you don't get ActiveRecord.

This is one case where the Poor Man's Version  is also the best!

Deflated all season tyres – Poorman's winter tyres

If you are stucked not getting up the hill on the snow, you could deflate slightly your tyres that could help. However it is not as good as using proper winter tyres.

OpenOffice is poor man's Microsoft Office

Open Office is poor man's version of Ms Office, so if you do not like to spend £200 download free version. Open office is able to open Ms Office files or even save new files in Ms Office compatible format.
One of the Open Office advantages over Ms Office is simplicity, source code of the document does not contain 1 million tags when my font is bold.  

As a poor man I really love Open Office it is almost as good as Microsoft version