None of them seemed concerned about annoying potential customers with advertising that they didn't want.
That's what always utterly mystified my about marketing dweebs:
Maybe I'm different then other folks, but annoy me only once, be it by a dumb, sexist, racist adds, by an insult of my intelligence, by rotten customer service, or by a flashy awfully colored popup blurting "HELLO, YOU HAVE HEMEROIDS!!!" into my general direction and you can bank on the fact that you lost my business...
...forever
(OK, it gets kind of difficult to live up to ones principles when dealing with phone companies, but you get the gist)
Not to bitch and moan. I think the Code Weavers dudes do an excellent job, but for people who neither own an IPod, nor can buy from the apple store for country restricitions reasons it looks like a rather lost proposition.
Not that I would buy any digital restrictions managed music from anywhere in the first place, but I digress...
Maybe, just maybe, this is how Microsoft intends to do business in the future?
Which would mean that they have to adapt to the business model of enterprise software.
See - some other commentor pointed this out excelently - the cost for the software vendor for shipping a "finished" product is essentially nill. So with every seat sold and regardless of the price the vendor makes a profit.
The main job of an account manager (that's a glorified sales man for major accounts of a software vendor) is to figure out the effective budget of the vict^H^H^H^Hcustomer. Because that's exactly the money he will gauge them for and thus price the licenses appropriately.
This is a risky strategy of course, since as the purchaser for MegaCorp I get mightily pissed when I realise that the purchase manager of CompetiCorp got his database seats for 20$ each because that was all they had in the budget, while they charged us 1200$ per seat.
So lesson 1 in the pretty immoral business of software sales is to never ever reveal your budget to a vendor.
you cannot win that argument, and argue that adult porn does not also demean, abuse, or cause the same issues for adult pornography..
Can you spell the difference between 'consenting adult' and 'child'?
The adult porn industry (of which the global epicenter is Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley) is pretty heavily regulated or
self regulating, while the child porn industry is obviously not.
I'm not arguing that abuse isn't happening in the adult porn industry, but in the case of of kiddie porn abuse of the child is inevitable.
so, what's you're feeling about using computer graphics to produce porn with no humans involved, humans that resemble 5 year olds? is a child abused because of it directly?
May I kindly refer you to this post in order to answer your question?
In many parts of the world, possession of synthetic child porn is illegal.
As reprehensible I might personally find such images: I have no argument here.
The big difference is that if you punish virtual kiddie porn you punish in essence a thought crime, this is inacceptable. However: 98% [disclaimer: this is a pulled-out-of-my-arse-figure] of the "product" out there has a real suffering and a real exploation of a real kid in order to cater to the kinks of the "customers".
I'm pretty sure you're a troll, but I bite anyway.
I understand that its illegal and not moral to watch, but still it seems like sertain people have an urge for it.
Those sites are blocked because it's contents is illegal, duh.
In order to produce this crap children (who are by definition not able to consent) are abused and based on societal consensus this is not acceptable, period.
Anyone can walk into a Wal-Mart (and I happen to know their labs are well-maintained and keep *precise* process control) and get an 8x10 or nice full-frame bordered 8x12 of any negative for a nominal fee.
I think that Ansel Adams (inventor of the zone system and arguably one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century) very much disagrees with this notion.
Considering Enrons dirty tricks during the California energy crisis this is arguable, to put it politely.
Even government services are funded by corporations that pay taxes.
Considering that the ilks of Microsoft don't pay taxes (with some 60 billion $ cash reserve) and the fine people of Arthur Anderson fled to Bermuda as a tax shelter in order to stiff the community you're talking out of your arse, sir.
An improvement of over 1000 times is spectacular in anybody's books, and is one hell of a boost for the proponents of Linux at the back-end of the financial world."
Unless specifics about the query and the physical database model are comparable in both systems this isn't really impressive.
Comparable - not equal - since each database engines optimizer has it's individual quirks and strength.
Assuming that you have large joins on huge tables a couple of good indexes, which make the optimizer happy can reduce execution time from hours to seconds.
That's a kludge that sort of works. But it is almost guaranteed to cause problems at some stage. And you could always just say SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE mycol IS [NOT] NULL.
Which reminds me of something else on which NULL columns are very bad. As (part of) an index column:).
Again: In most cases allowing NULL columns works just fine (if I wasn't clear on that). What I wanted to point out is that there are certain applications where you might have to think very carefully about allowing them and where even a kludge (as you accurately describe it) might be better. This is certainly an exception, but it happens.
In addition (and to contradict myself): Usually I'm a very big fan of delegating all kinds of constaints to the database, since letting the application folks deal with them is a clear reciepe for desaster.
Physical implementation of a logical data model is never clear cut and straight forward. You usually have to compromise one way or the other.
NULL columns do have a couple specific problems in a relational database:
It's a not defined value (comparable with a division by zero). One of the consequences (for example) is that you can't join on NULL columns. Theoretically you can't even sort (ORDER BY) on null values.
It can be bad for performance. Sybase for example (they still exist and partially in some very performant databases, i.e. in the financial and telecom sector) internally represents NULL columns as VARCHAR, which can be a bad idea since it might invalidate fairly cheap in-place updates.
That said however, you are right that it doesn't make sense to implement an anal-retentive model in most physical database schemas in order to be compliant with clarity and purity as defined in a number of mathematical textbooks.
If you have to design a database able to handle 30 million bookings over a 24 hour period, then it might make a lot of sense to avoid NULLs. In your example to replace the NULL by an impossible death date (i.e. 31-Dec-9999) and let the application deal with it.
(And now, I don't want to argue about the Y10K problem...)
My absolute favourite part of the talk was when Barley started to extol the virtues of Windows because everything in it was made by one manufacturer. A fair point which would have been well taken had he not gone on to draw an idiotic analogy. He asked us to imagine an aeroplane where different components were made by different companies. Apparently he's never heard of Airbus.
Even worse, does Airbus (or Boeing for that matter) manufacture every single of a million parts in a plane themselves?
Hell no! Certainly not. There's an abundance of suppliers supplying parts for a plane, from the altimeter to the leather chairs in first class.
You don't even have to go so far as to look at the airplane industry. Car manufacturers make only a miniscule percentage of the components themsleves. The rest is manufactured and delivered by suppliers.
Otherwise the cost for a car would be comparatively so outrageously high like the cost for some uh! software...
Even one of the two grand old ladies of the German speaking press (the other one can be found here stops just an inch short of labeling him a laughable fraud (in German) in their last Friday IT and Media section.
The fishs translation (which is pretty hillarious in itself) can be found here.
An Oracle salesman dies and goes to heaven where he is welcomed by St.Peter.
St. Peter gives hime a lute shows him to a cloud and instructs him to sit on the cloud, play the lute and rejoice.
So the Oracle salesman sits on the cloud, plays the lute and rejoices. Evening comes and St. Peter is coming to the salesmans cloud and asks him how he likes it in heaven.
The guy goes: I'm honest with you, St.Peter. I think it's a pretty bland place."
OK, says St. Peter, instructs the salesguy to follow him and takes him to the express elevator that leads straight to the gates of hell.
St. Peter knocks and the door is opened by Lucifer himself. Behind Lucifer there's an unbelievable scene to be viewed:
Miles and miles of white beach. A nice surf on the ocean. Muscle bound young men and tasty looking bikini clad girls play beach volleyball. Laughter fills the air. There are piles of food and multiple open bars (with an outstanding selection of single malt whiskies).
After having taken in the view St. Peter leads the Oracle guy back to the express elevator which takes them straight up back to heaven.
"Well", says St. Peter. "You have seen what hell is all about and you have to make your final decision now. Do you want to stay in heaven, sitting on a cloud, playing your lute and rejoice, or do you want to go back to hell? But, whatever you do: Your decision is final and can't be changed."
"Alright", sais the sales guy. "I think I rather chose hell".
"Fine", says St. Peter, guides him to the express elevator and down he goes; straight back to the gates of hell.
He knocks and almost burns his knuckles from the hot door. Lucifer opens with a smile and a complete different scenery evolves behind Lucifer:
There's fire and heat everywhere; torchured people with pained faces try to escape their miseries. The screams and yells of the tormented fill the air.
The Oracle salesman is stunned and says: "But, but... this is incredible. I've been here only 15 minutes ago and this place was completely differen!"
"Well", smiles Lucifer: "That was the demo..."
Ok, it's old, but nevertheless illustrates the power of good demo...
Let me share a theory with you. It's the same theory I share with one of my best friends who is the head media purchaser for a chain of department stores. He tends to agree:)
When new music file formats really hit mass market the media dinosaurs went apeshit. "They'll steal and rob us blind!" was the common consensus instead of "Interesting, now this is a real challenge, but also a real opportunity!"
Imagine the following scenario:
We (the recording industry) recognize that our distribution model is running into senility (I apologise to the music retail industry, of which I was a part until 1987, but that's just the way it is), we however have an asset. A huge asset, which consists of our catalog. Digital - for good or for bad - happens. Lossy compression is real, sounds good enough and is wanted by the consumer. So: Let's offer it!
Imagine Itunes, just larger. The whole fscking back catalog of every esoteric sound you could have ever wanted. A good lossy (or even lossless) audio format, a buck a song (Euro and US). Say, 8 bucks an album and no half assed digital restrictions throtteling. Like allofmp# (as you call it), but with a more realistic price for the western hemisphere.
The execs would have been bathing in cocaine (gak!) in their stretch limos (yuk!) They wouldn't know how to spend the money pouring in. If the system would have been cheap enough they would have had multiple sales to each enthusiastic customer, since she didn't have the tune along and had the urge to listen to it NOW.
Would there be trading and stealing? Probably, but never that excessive and there would have been a bonus point for the music industry.
Maybe this point of view is naive, but what the hell: They would have the moral high ground. Not the laws on their side (they have that anyway) but the moral authority to whack and wahck hard if there's massive, unauthorized file trading. I for one would support them.
But as it goes in reality (and I switch back to CaptainZapp mode here) they leave their customers no choice then ripping them off. Because they demand from me to pay top $ for a crippled product, which I can get far more convenient and unthrottled from my russian friends.
Sorry for being so long-winded. I guess you hit a nerve.
A brief analysis' of the industries feeble efforts to regain control and protect their turf (basically the distribution channells)
You guys sold corrupted and crippled disks to your customers.
Did it work? No
You tried this super duper water marking scheme.
Did it work? No, in fact Prof. Felten and his team broke it within a week
You're attacking your customers, insult them and threaten legal action..
Did it work? No, in fact you're pissing your customers off
You tried yet different approaches to "copy protect" the medium.
Did it work? No, in fact you piss people off, since the can't play their legally purchased product on their legally purchased car cd player
Is there no more new material available since you tried to force all those smart schemes on your customers? Hell! of course! within minutes after availability on "cd"
So here's a free hint for you:
Why don't you make a product available, which is of good quality, cheap, readily available and doesn't force us to give up our privacy and suck your ducks just so that we can listen to a song? You know, sort of like Apple did it (and which rumour says you're in the process of killing by higer prices and enforced bundling).
Provide us with a convenient, realistically priced product, not being throttled by rediculous schemes (region coding anyone?). Stop insulting our intelligence and integrity and stop treating us like criminals and I'll promise:
We buy!
NB: Focusing on a good products might help sales too. There's only so much Britney and Back Street Boys you can listen to before throwing up.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what always utterly mystified my about marketing dweebs:
Maybe I'm different then other folks, but annoy me only once, be it by a dumb, sexist, racist adds, by an insult of my intelligence, by rotten customer service, or by a flashy awfully colored popup blurting "HELLO, YOU HAVE HEMEROIDS!!!" into my general direction and you can bank on the fact that you lost my business...
(OK, it gets kind of difficult to live up to ones principles when dealing with phone companies, but you get the gist)
That doesn't mean however that I welcome such crap. SMS spam is by its nature far more intrusive then email spam.
Not that I would buy any digital restrictions managed music from anywhere in the first place, but I digress...
Which would mean that they have to adapt to the business model of enterprise software.
See - some other commentor pointed this out excelently - the cost for the software vendor for shipping a "finished" product is essentially nill. So with every seat sold and regardless of the price the vendor makes a profit.
The main job of an account manager (that's a glorified sales man for major accounts of a software vendor) is to figure out the effective budget of the vict^H^H^H^Hcustomer. Because that's exactly the money he will gauge them for and thus price the licenses appropriately.
This is a risky strategy of course, since as the purchaser for MegaCorp I get mightily pissed when I realise that the purchase manager of CompetiCorp got his database seats for 20$ each because that was all they had in the budget, while they charged us 1200$ per seat.
So lesson 1 in the pretty immoral business of software sales is to never ever reveal your budget to a vendor.
Can you spell the difference between 'consenting adult' and 'child'?
The adult porn industry (of which the global epicenter is Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley) is pretty heavily regulated or self regulating, while the child porn industry is obviously not.
I'm not arguing that abuse isn't happening in the adult porn industry, but in the case of of kiddie porn abuse of the child is inevitable.
May I kindly refer you to this post in order to answer your question?
As reprehensible I might personally find such images: I have no argument here.
The big difference is that if you punish virtual kiddie porn you punish in essence a thought crime, this is inacceptable. However: 98% [disclaimer: this is a pulled-out-of-my-arse-figure] of the "product" out there has a real suffering and a real exploation of a real kid in order to cater to the kinks of the "customers".
Of course.
But if that happens we're pretty fucked as society. Wouldn't you agree?
I understand that its illegal and not moral to watch, but still it seems like sertain people have an urge for it.
Those sites are blocked because it's contents is illegal, duh.
In order to produce this crap children (who are by definition not able to consent) are abused and based on societal consensus this is not acceptable, period.
I think that Ansel Adams (inventor of the zone system and arguably one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century) very much disagrees with this notion.
You're not required to be a US company to be traded on a US Stock exchange.
Telekom Austria, Swisscom, Novartis, UBS and a lot more foreign companies are traded at NYSE.
You do of course have to follow SEC rules if you wish to be traded on an US exchange.
Considering Enrons dirty tricks during the California energy crisis this is arguable, to put it politely.
Even government services are funded by corporations that pay taxes.
Considering that the ilks of Microsoft don't pay taxes (with some 60 billion $ cash reserve) and the fine people of Arthur Anderson fled to Bermuda as a tax shelter in order to stiff the community you're talking out of your arse, sir.
diebold ?
Unless specifics about the query and the physical database model are comparable in both systems this isn't really impressive.
Comparable - not equal - since each database engines optimizer has it's individual quirks and strength.
Assuming that you have large joins on huge tables a couple of good indexes, which make the optimizer happy can reduce execution time from hours to seconds.
Table scans are expensive in database speak.
Which reminds me of something else on which NULL columns are very bad. As (part of) an index column :).
Again: In most cases allowing NULL columns works just fine (if I wasn't clear on that). What I wanted to point out is that there are certain applications where you might have to think very carefully about allowing them and where even a kludge (as you accurately describe it) might be better. This is certainly an exception, but it happens.
In addition (and to contradict myself): Usually I'm a very big fan of delegating all kinds of constaints to the database, since letting the application folks deal with them is a clear reciepe for desaster.
Physical implementation of a logical data model is never clear cut and straight forward. You usually have to compromise one way or the other.
It's a not defined value (comparable with a division by zero). One of the consequences (for example) is that you can't join on NULL columns. Theoretically you can't even sort (ORDER BY) on null values.
It can be bad for performance. Sybase for example (they still exist and partially in some very performant databases, i.e. in the financial and telecom sector) internally represents NULL columns as VARCHAR, which can be a bad idea since it might invalidate fairly cheap in-place updates.
That said however, you are right that it doesn't make sense to implement an anal-retentive model in most physical database schemas in order to be compliant with clarity and purity as defined in a number of mathematical textbooks.
If you have to design a database able to handle 30 million bookings over a 24 hour period, then it might make a lot of sense to avoid NULLs. In your example to replace the NULL by an impossible death date (i.e. 31-Dec-9999) and let the application deal with it.
(And now, I don't want to argue about the Y10K problem...)
Er, isn't prostitution illegal in most US states?
That might be and it wouldn't even be a problem, unless...
It's like a newspaper masquarading a "sponsored feature" as an actual article and not as an advertisment.
That's about the lowest low you can reach in journalism. I wouldn't see why this should be different with "think tanks".
Even worse, does Airbus (or Boeing for that matter) manufacture every single of a million parts in a plane themselves?
Hell no! Certainly not. There's an abundance of suppliers supplying parts for a plane, from the altimeter to the leather chairs in first class.
You don't even have to go so far as to look at the airplane industry. Car manufacturers make only a miniscule percentage of the components themsleves. The rest is manufactured and delivered by suppliers.
Otherwise the cost for a car would be comparatively so outrageously high like the cost for some uh! software...
He and his brother where in the US travelling from Chicago south in a car.
Upon checking into a motel they where asked if they want a smoking - or non-smoking room.
Jamie: Well, give us a smoking room. You know, I love to bum a fag before going to bed.
The lady was not amused.
The fishs translation (which is pretty hillarious in itself) can be found here.
Unfortunately Heise (publisher of c't and iX) is the probably most clueful German publishing house when it comes to technology.
Those Netgear bozos really seem to be dumber then my cigar cutter.
The other explanation is that the equipment has such a fundamental design flaw that it can't be fixed at all. But then they act damn unresponsible.
Then again: Thanks to such blunders I know what equipment not to buy.
St. Peter gives hime a lute shows him to a cloud and instructs him to sit on the cloud, play the lute and rejoice.
So the Oracle salesman sits on the cloud, plays the lute and rejoices. Evening comes and St. Peter is coming to the salesmans cloud and asks him how he likes it in heaven.
The guy goes: I'm honest with you, St.Peter. I think it's a pretty bland place."
OK, says St. Peter, instructs the salesguy to follow him and takes him to the express elevator that leads straight to the gates of hell.
St. Peter knocks and the door is opened by Lucifer himself. Behind Lucifer there's an unbelievable scene to be viewed:
Miles and miles of white beach. A nice surf on the ocean. Muscle bound young men and tasty looking bikini clad girls play beach volleyball. Laughter fills the air. There are piles of food and multiple open bars (with an outstanding selection of single malt whiskies).
After having taken in the view St. Peter leads the Oracle guy back to the express elevator which takes them straight up back to heaven.
"Well", says St. Peter. "You have seen what hell is all about and you have to make your final decision now. Do you want to stay in heaven, sitting on a cloud, playing your lute and rejoice, or do you want to go back to hell? But, whatever you do: Your decision is final and can't be changed."
"Alright", sais the sales guy. "I think I rather chose hell".
"Fine", says St. Peter, guides him to the express elevator and down he goes; straight back to the gates of hell.
He knocks and almost burns his knuckles from the hot door. Lucifer opens with a smile and a complete different scenery evolves behind Lucifer:
There's fire and heat everywhere; torchured people with pained faces try to escape their miseries. The screams and yells of the tormented fill the air.
The Oracle salesman is stunned and says: "But, but... this is incredible. I've been here only 15 minutes ago and this place was completely differen!"
"Well", smiles Lucifer: "That was the demo..."
Ok, it's old, but nevertheless illustrates the power of good demo...
Let me share a theory with you. It's the same theory I share with one of my best friends who is the head media purchaser for a chain of department stores. He tends to agree :)
When new music file formats really hit mass market the media dinosaurs went apeshit. "They'll steal and rob us blind!" was the common consensus instead of "Interesting, now this is a real challenge, but also a real opportunity!"
Imagine the following scenario:
We (the recording industry) recognize that our distribution model is running into senility (I apologise to the music retail industry, of which I was a part until 1987, but that's just the way it is), we however have an asset. A huge asset, which consists of our catalog. Digital - for good or for bad - happens. Lossy compression is real, sounds good enough and is wanted by the consumer. So: Let's offer it!
Imagine Itunes, just larger. The whole fscking back catalog of every esoteric sound you could have ever wanted. A good lossy (or even lossless) audio format, a buck a song (Euro and US). Say, 8 bucks an album and no half assed digital restrictions throtteling. Like allofmp# (as you call it), but with a more realistic price for the western hemisphere.
The execs would have been bathing in cocaine (gak!) in their stretch limos (yuk!) They wouldn't know how to spend the money pouring in. If the system would have been cheap enough they would have had multiple sales to each enthusiastic customer, since she didn't have the tune along and had the urge to listen to it NOW.
Would there be trading and stealing? Probably, but never that excessive and there would have been a bonus point for the music industry.
Maybe this point of view is naive, but what the hell: They would have the moral high ground. Not the laws on their side (they have that anyway) but the moral authority to whack and wahck hard if there's massive, unauthorized file trading. I for one would support them.
But as it goes in reality (and I switch back to CaptainZapp mode here) they leave their customers no choice then ripping them off. Because they demand from me to pay top $ for a crippled product, which I can get far more convenient and unthrottled from my russian friends.
Sorry for being so long-winded. I guess you hit a nerve.
You guys sold corrupted and crippled disks to your customers.
Did it work? No
You tried this super duper water marking scheme.
Did it work? No, in fact Prof. Felten and his team broke it within a week
You're attacking your customers, insult them and threaten legal action..
Did it work? No, in fact you're pissing your customers off
You tried yet different approaches to "copy protect" the medium.
Did it work? No, in fact you piss people off, since the can't play their legally purchased product on their legally purchased car cd player
Is there no more new material available since you tried to force all those smart schemes on your customers?
Hell! of course! within minutes after availability on "cd"
So here's a free hint for you:
Why don't you make a product available, which is of good quality, cheap, readily available and doesn't force us to give up our privacy and suck your ducks just so that we can listen to a song? You know, sort of like Apple did it (and which rumour says you're in the process of killing by higer prices and enforced bundling).
Provide us with a convenient, realistically priced product, not being throttled by rediculous schemes (region coding anyone?). Stop insulting our intelligence and integrity and stop treating us like criminals and I'll promise:
We buy!
NB: Focusing on a good products might help sales too. There's only so much Britney and Back Street Boys you can listen to before throwing up.