Background: I work since ten years on a fairly low level with various RDBMSs. I know Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise extremely well and Microsofts SQL Server quite well (the architecture's pretty much comparable). I know Postgresql and Oracle both fairly well.
Of course I acknowledge, that Oracle has the biggest market share, but in every other term I think it's the pits. It's a badly scattered assortment of various operating system files on (preferreably) multiple disks. Pricing is absolutely horrendous and you pay through the nose for additional options.
It's a heinous monster to manage as compared to Sybase or Postgresql (which is also very much file based, but far less messy, alas offers less features).
Oracle might be a great marketing organisation, but it's my last choice when it comes to a RDBMS.
OK, I slip into my asbestos suit now and await the incoming flames...
Gawd, how I really hat those smooth corporate jaspers, talking in press releases. Now this one is really a gem:
Mr. Girard, the Experian spokesman, said the company would work with the F.B.I. to catch and prosecute the intruders. "It just shows that today, even big companies can be victimized," he said. "it's a never-ending struggle against the bad guys."
Look mate, if anybody is victimized here it's those 13000 er! customers while you guys obviously didn't protect their data adequately.
The good folks in Redmond just don't see, that you can apply bullying tactics only where you have a monoploy. They definitely don't have one in the console market (yet) and they desperately need partners here to ever be successful.
The problem nowadays is probably that Microsoft id a wholly untrustworthy company to partner with. Just ask all the companies that received the kiss of death.
That the same companies, that started their business model by initially stealing (and later cheaply licensing) TV signals have something against companies cleaning TV signals and they would like to prosecute you for theft of service, if you dare to go to the loo, instead of oogling their crappy ads?
Indeed. And that is the job of the *consumer* to be informed. It is not my job as a business person to forcibly inform the consumer. For example: I own a hot dog stand around the corner from another hot dog stand. My stand is on a very popular route, with most people passing mine first. If I choose to sell my hot dogs to passerbys for $5.00, while the cart around the corner (and out of sight) sells the same thing for $0.50, do I have an obligation to tell them that they can save $4.50 by walking 15 feet? No. Of course not. It is not the hot dog guy's fault if the consumers are dupes/idiots/uninformed.
OK, so you part with a hot dog and your patron parts with five $. We have a clear change of ownership here. So what the fuck has that to do with my data, which I own in the first place, which is infinitely copyable (including all errors introduced) and which will be used against me, be it by annoying telemarketers or by spammers?
I believe that the EU has a far better grasp of the problem and far better instruments to protect the individual, while the US approach is to protect the "right" of businesses to make money, with something they don't own.
In essence:
I own my data
You may only collect and store data, which is pertinent to the transaction(s)
You may not sell or provide access to my data to third parties without my explicit agreement. And no! some lawyerese on page 49 of the EULA is not considered explicit agreement
I have a right to see what you stored about me and I have a right to get it corrected
Special protection applies for medical and (partially) financial data.
You are liable for criminal and civil penalties if you don't obey the data protection directives. This goes for business as well for government entities.
If you believe, that personal data is a tradable commodity we can stop right here. If we can agree that I'm the owner of my personal data (same as I'm the owner of the hot dog, for which I just payed 5$), then there's no way in the world, why the eu guidelines don't make sense.
er! That might be an unpopular one, but what the fuck:
In Europe (for good or for bad) we're fairly used to pay VAT on our purchases. This is matter of factly a tax and despite common musings it partially goes for good things,
So why the heck shouldn't be oversea purchases be taxed the same as if you buy a stash of Gilette razorblades at our local stores around the corner?
Here you get an administrative fine of about $165 with 30 days time to pay with no admission of guilt and no entry into the drivers "DMV"-record.
If you don't pay in time, the whole thing goes to a police-judge, who determines the fine.
Nah, this is not the eastern block where the cop is the judge is the jury and you can always contest the police courts verdict and ask for a real court with a real judge determining your guilt, which is also the first time where you get to see your fotos.
Fotos? Yes, right: They take your picture from the back and the front and you'll have to be wearing a mickey-mouse mask to lie your way out.
Of course, if you don't pay the initial fine and have the whole thing go to court it gets mighty expensive, plus you risk your license for a month or more if you've done something exceedingly dumb - like running the light after it turned red for over a second. Yakking away on a cell phone will turn you in for the added bonus contest.
Facsist police state? Well, people here don't quite see it that way. If you run a light you're endangering lifes and if you're so fucking dumb to believe that you can lie your way out, then you deserve the full treatment of the law.
This is a really crisp and up to the point analysis of the marketing crap we all have to wade through. There's are however important features, that you forgot and you don't need to thank me for pointing them out. You forgot the:
Right now on the other tab I was reflecting about buying it. Honestly, just a click away.
The problem is their plugin, which I bought an licensed and it kicks ass. And more then that, it views Office documents rather nicely via the Word/Excel/Powerpont viewers.
So, shall I really cough up EUR 60 for a piece of software, that enables me to install my (legally obtained) copy of Office, SB edition and actually edit documents instead of just viewing them?
I think not.
Kudos to the Codeweavers dudes nevrtheless. This includes sales and quite likely support. I couldn't tell, since I never needed it.
Now let's look at Outlook. There are hundreds of developer years tied up in that code base. 99% of the code is fine. 1% of the code isn't. Throwing out the whole code base and beginning from scratch is extremely unlikely to be cost-effective, because you have to reproduce most of those hundreds of developer years from scratch, and what guarantee do you have that the new code won't have just as many bugs
True, scrapping and re-creating Outlook is certainly not cost-effective for the Microsoft.
Unfortunately the current Outlook mess is not very cost effective for their customers, just hit by the worm-du-jour.
So I guess it just depends from whose perspective you define "cost-effectiveness".
Because if we can't connect to our remote machines, it will be really easy to convince my boss, that I peronally have to fix the problems in our datacenters in Hawaii, Papeete & Sydney
WPA is there to make it impossible to keep using an OEM-version on a new computer and really forcing to upgrade.
Which might be illegal as hell, for example in Germany (which is a rather big market).
Don't forget, that the German supreme court ruled it illegal, that M$ makes a distinction between OEM and retail copies of software, which was one of the major reasons, why the evil empire started to impose those "recovery disks" on OEMs.
So, dragging this reasoning a tad further, they are circumventing a court decision by technical means. As a judge I'd take a pretty dim view on that.
OTOH; personally I really don't give a flying fsck. My company (for which I have the ultimate purchasing power) bought it's last piece of M$ software (W2K retail) in 2000. Not so much for technical reasons, but I just bloody hate it to be treated as a dumb AOL user, which is a pira^H^H^H^H terrorist by default. And that by a frigging supplier.
I was not trolling (who gives a shit anyway) btw. It was more fond rememberance of the 144k C64 diskettes, which we worked over with a hole puncher to crank out double capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
I skipped and got the 6510 instead, which is a damn finde phone which appears to agree very much with how I use a cell.
The killer criteria was size. And being an ascii kind guy and not really seeing a need to browse /. on the road I skipped, reluctantly.
It's a damn fine phone and has cult status herearound nevertheless.
The vast majority in Europe (which was part of civilized society, last I checked) pays by the second.
On the other hand, and provided you don't receive cell phone calls while roaming in other countries, cell phone reception is free as in beer.
Overall and givcen the really rotten mess called mobile phone services in the US, my assessment in that specific respect is:
Europe 1 : US 0
Great product, horrid management...
Background: I work since ten years on a fairly low level with various RDBMSs. I know Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise extremely well and Microsofts SQL Server quite well (the architecture's pretty much comparable). I know Postgresql and Oracle both fairly well.
Of course I acknowledge, that Oracle has the biggest market share, but in every other term I think it's the pits. It's a badly scattered assortment of various operating system files on (preferreably) multiple disks. Pricing is absolutely horrendous and you pay through the nose for additional options.
It's a heinous monster to manage as compared to Sybase or Postgresql (which is also very much file based, but far less messy, alas offers less features).
Oracle might be a great marketing organisation, but it's my last choice when it comes to a RDBMS.
OK, I slip into my asbestos suit now and await the incoming flames...
free alternatives
Look mate, if anybody is victimized here it's those 13000 er! customers while you guys obviously didn't protect their data adequately.
No need to thank me
The good folks in Redmond just don't see, that you can apply bullying tactics only where you have a monoploy. They definitely don't have one in the console market (yet) and they desperately need partners here to ever be successful.
The problem nowadays is probably that Microsoft id a wholly untrustworthy company to partner with. Just ask all the companies that received the kiss of death.
Hmmm, Etwas ist faul im Staate Daenemark...
OK, so you part with a hot dog and your patron parts with five $. We have a clear change of ownership here. So what the fuck has that to do with my data, which I own in the first place, which is infinitely copyable (including all errors introduced) and which will be used against me, be it by annoying telemarketers or by spammers?
I believe that the EU has a far better grasp of the problem and far better instruments to protect the individual, while the US approach is to protect the "right" of businesses to make money, with something they don't own.
In essence:
I own my data
You may only collect and store data, which is pertinent to the transaction(s)
You may not sell or provide access to my data to third parties without my explicit agreement. And no! some lawyerese on page 49 of the EULA is not considered explicit agreement
I have a right to see what you stored about me and I have a right to get it corrected
Special protection applies for medical and (partially) financial data.
You are liable for criminal and civil penalties if you don't obey the data protection directives. This goes for business as well for government entities.
If you believe, that personal data is a tradable commodity we can stop right here. If we can agree that I'm the owner of my personal data (same as I'm the owner of the hot dog, for which I just payed 5$), then there's no way in the world, why the eu guidelines don't make sense.
In Europe (for good or for bad) we're fairly used to pay VAT on our purchases. This is matter of factly a tax and despite common musings it partially goes for good things,
So why the heck shouldn't be oversea purchases be taxed the same as if you buy a stash of Gilette razorblades at our local stores around the corner?
Next!
I'm aware, that this doesn't necessarily sit well with a lot of people here, but wtf...
For the fine burgers of California to switch to a real database.
If you don't pay in time, the whole thing goes to a police-judge, who determines the fine.
Nah, this is not the eastern block where the cop is the judge is the jury and you can always contest the police courts verdict and ask for a real court with a real judge determining your guilt, which is also the first time where you get to see your fotos.
Fotos? Yes, right: They take your picture from the back and the front and you'll have to be wearing a mickey-mouse mask to lie your way out.
Of course, if you don't pay the initial fine and have the whole thing go to court it gets mighty expensive, plus you risk your license for a month or more if you've done something exceedingly dumb - like running the light after it turned red for over a second. Yakking away on a cell phone will turn you in for the added bonus contest.
Facsist police state? Well, people here don't quite see it that way. If you run a light you're endangering lifes and if you're so fucking dumb to believe that you can lie your way out, then you deserve the full treatment of the law.
Driving is a privilege, not a right.
BUY NOW button and the
ONE CLICK BUY button.
Right now on the other tab I was reflecting about buying it. Honestly, just a click away.
The problem is their plugin, which I bought an licensed and it kicks ass. And more then that, it views Office documents rather nicely via the Word/Excel/Powerpont viewers.
So, shall I really cough up EUR 60 for a piece of software, that enables me to install my (legally obtained) copy of Office, SB edition and actually edit documents instead of just viewing them?
I think not.
Kudos to the Codeweavers dudes nevrtheless. This includes sales and quite likely support. I couldn't tell, since I never needed it.
Yeah, I think we have a deal...
I'm a business user with a pure Linux setup and finally I'm able to read those pesky documents with the official Micro$oft viewers.
I don't know, if this violates any license agreements, but frankly, I don't give a shit.
Yes your honor, those evil communists break our monop^H^H^H^H^H customer experience by using CrossOver.
20$ is a bargain and I shelved it out gladly.
True, scrapping and re-creating Outlook is certainly not cost-effective for the Microsoft.
Unfortunately the current Outlook mess is not very cost effective for their customers, just hit by the worm-du-jour.
So I guess it just depends from whose perspective you define "cost-effectiveness".
Er, YES!
And what about those pesky snowboarders ?
It is a little larger then a normal Swatch and you can load it at umpteen or so ski resorts, where it can be used instead of a normal ski pass.
Which might be illegal as hell, for example in Germany (which is a rather big market).
Don't forget, that the German supreme court ruled it illegal, that M$ makes a distinction between OEM and retail copies of software, which was one of the major reasons, why the evil empire started to impose those "recovery disks" on OEMs.
So, dragging this reasoning a tad further, they are circumventing a court decision by technical means. As a judge I'd take a pretty dim view on that.
OTOH; personally I really don't give a flying fsck. My company (for which I have the ultimate purchasing power) bought it's last piece of M$ software (W2K retail) in 2000. Not so much for technical reasons, but I just bloody hate it to be treated as a dumb AOL user, which is a pira^H^H^H^H terrorist by default. And that by a frigging supplier.
Ah, glorious memories...
Man, you obviously don't read the propaganda by the Business Software Alliance.
According to those fine folks, software companies lose twentysevenbazillion $ a year, by pimply faced pirates that run a warezed copy of Autocad.
Of course it's the same guy, who'd have otherwise caughed up a couple K to purchase a license.
er, not quite. 5 Gig capacity is a helluva lot more then you can store on those pesky diskettes.
On the other hand: Software also tends to be a tad more bloated nowadays. Mind you, not better, just more bloated...