...it's called extortion and is pretty common paractice in Germany. Essentially it works like this:
Find a victim
Go to a court and demand preliminary injunction. It's not really important that you have grounds for that, you only have to convince a judge
A mass-cease and desist mailing (with hefty lawyerly costs attached) is an alternative approach
Offer entity suffering from the injunction that for a low, low service charge the injunction could be lifted
Find new victim and repeat ad nauseum
That's not to say that I condonce such behavior. It's pretty much a rip-off scheme comparable with what some US ambulance chasers do by suing companies on a grondless basis. But as long some German laws are pretty rediculous*), this will not stop.
*)For example, C&A offered customers a 20% discount in the first week of the Euro intorduction, if they didn't pay cash. A court prohibit that, even though the rebate laws in Germany where relaxed a while ago. If a competitor (or anybody for that matter) doesn't like what you're doing, they get you on grounds of "unfair competition" laws, nowadays.
In a COBOL class a couple aeons ago we had an instructor explaining the REDEFINE statement.
(For those that didn't have the good fortune to program in this er, well! self documenting language: COBOL very much lives within it's data descriptions and is very record oriented. There's entire section called the DATA DIVISION (I think, it's a long time since) where you define your records with it's columns and their respective data type. Now you can overlay a "column" with multiple data types in order to process them appropriately.)
Well now, this instructor claimed, no insisted! that the REDEFINE statement enabled you to multiply your physical memory. That is, if you define a character field with length 10 (10 bytes for all intents and purposes) and redefine it numeric then that guy claimed that you could store 20 bytes in this 10 byte address space.
Therefore you can't be right. In COBOL you can write the most complex applications like an air traffic control system or a sophisticated telephone exchange that serves Manhatten with just 1 byte of storage space. It's only a matter of clever REDEFINEing. That's what I claim is the true breakthrough in compression technology, now isn't it?
It's probably needless to say that this guy didn't really helped to build confidence and enhance our pleasure in the great language of COBOL...
Employers could do this, and they could drug test all employees, and crack down on their personal freedoms.
This drug testing business is fairly tightly related to the US of A and would (indiscrimenately and on a large scale) quite likely be illegal throughout the EU.
Besides that, it's just outright rediculous. You catch a guy, who commited the horrible crime of smoking a doobie four weeks ago, while the cop with a serious booze problem (and a loaded gun on his side) or the air traffic controller with a knack for pills goes undetected.
And before somebody chimes in with the usual crap. No I don't appreciate to be flown by a pilot who has smoked some nice, orginically grown weed. Same as I don't apreciate pilots who drink, take mind altering pills, let their 15 year old son fly an Airbus or fscked their brains off all night instead of getting sleep prior to a flight.
Actually it can make a lot of sense, depending on the project.
When I was a totally green, newbie consultant for a specific, industry strength database I was hired into a major- major project (one of those systems, that move 10billion$ plus a day, literally). The project manager and senior dba knew precisely what they got and that totally matched their needs.
They had their own wiz-bang specialists, but needed an interface to the database vendors tech support and engineering full time.
They where willing to spend 250'000$ a year for a glorified switchboard operator and asskicker at that specific vendor. And ass kicking I did, very much to the dismay of some of the management type geezers at the vendor.
My point is: For really important projects it can make sense to hire a dedicated support liaison to keep the back of those folks that actually work on the project free.
Folks, for some of these projects, ten thousands for OS licenses is NOT a factor. Having a custom-written support contract, with phone numbers you can call at four o'clock in the morning that WILL be answered by YOUR technical account manager, who's ONLY PURPOSE IN LIFE is to keep you happy with his parent company, however, IS a factor.
You're sure right there. I worked in such situations where I didn't care a flying fsck what we pay a vendor for support (and it's a lot), but where I had immideately a product knowledgeable techie who would go miles to help me out of a bad jam at a Sunday night at 3am. Such a support contract is worth every damn cent.
Unfortunately Microsoft is not the company I would entrust with 24 hours alliance support for my most critical infrastructure -, specifically database - and data replication products.
[...] And they tend to be found most often within Sales & Marketing roles (I know, I know... that's a broad brush I'm using. [...]
After working for 15 years in IT, most of the time for either major (at that time) hardware - or software vendors I suggest that you don't discount yourself on that.
There are some very good, knowledgeable and dedicated sales people, but most that I met where inhumane greed freaks that sell their family to the hog processing plant in order to make the quarterly target. My assessment of marketing folks is even worse.
Although you are right, that "anonymous sources" should be eyed with suspicion, I think the memo is legit. The Register fscked up at times, but I consider it one of the more accurate sources in the day and age of instant-journalism.
Kill yourself! Drink Coke Light
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There's quite a sinister story about Aspartame, Monsanto and the FDA, essentially ignoring brain tumors in animal testing, politely put: extremely shoddy to non-existent documentation of research and outright fraud and cover ups by Monsanto and FDA officials to get Aspartame (Searle - the manufacturer of Nutra Sweet - is a Monsanto subsidiary) approved.
Try this Google Search as a starting point. You might switch to Mineral Water (not genetically engineered) after reading some of that stuff.
Even Adobe left it alone after all the protesting began.
See, that where's our opinion differs.
I had more the impression that they politely tiptoed back, after realizing that their disgraceful action wasn't that good in terms of public relations.
They're still the bad guys with lots of egg on their face, which just won't wash off.
A lot of fine advise has been provided, here are some gems from my carreer:
Specialise! There are thousands of MCSEs, web-developers, access programmers, pc-support tinkerers. Each of them knows from everything a little bit, but nothing really in-depth. If you want to bill top dollar, you need to provide specialised services.
Document! document! document more! Customer relationships are always nice and cosey, until the blame game starts and the shit is flying around by the truckloads.
(that has been mentioned, but since it's important: If you don't know precisely what you offer or the exact scope of a project, don't offer fixed price. Never! Major consultancy outfits got burned with fixed price offers, there's bo reason why you should have more luck. Always define exit criteria for fixed price projects in advance.
Never start on a project which has either no project sponsor or more then one sponsor. Both cases will burn you badly.
Don't start from a hole. Ideally you have a customer or two, which can help you bootstrap your business.
Forced software upgrades are a bad thing from a business perspective. This is especially applicable when it comes to critical back end components (databases, middleware), but also for operating systems.
As an end user, you can easily install the latest and greatest. If it doesn't work out, too bad, you revert to your old installation (you have backups, right?).
Now imagine a company, with 2500 desktops. It's not that simple to just upgrade to the latest and greatest. Hardware might have to be replaced, printer drivers might not be available, connectivity with third party vendor products may break, users and support staff have to be trained, etc. Upgrading the corporate desktop can involve thousands of $ per desktop (literally) and no end of grief and confusion.
Now, look at the database backend. The one application that, if it fscks up, your corporation might be a casualty after a few days. You don't go ahead and just install Sybase 12.5. because the salesman told you it's nice and 11.0.3.3. is anyway no more supported.
What you do is very carefully evaluate the merrits of the new version including testing each and every query of your application towards that release. If this is not feasible you test at the bear minimum all those queries that have to be assumed to have changed their behavior. For example: Sybase is notorious for changing sub query behavior from release to relase (this is not necessarily a bad thing). Now at the very minimum you will have to test all sub queries and you'll have to function test the application in order to avoid nasty surprises.
Add to that complexity, that you have interconnected middleware and probably a platform to create the application front end. That's not all just interchangeable with a snap of a finger.
Now, on automatic software updates: Don't even get me started...
I opened a business, a couple years ago. It's a modest consultancy, specialising on big, complex data management architectures.
When evaluating the IT infrastructure, I almost fell into the Ye know, my customers use NT and we'll have to interchange documents trap.
For one reason or another a properly licensed OEM copy failed to install on my box (which only was Win98 taxed, so I had to buy NT in addition).
To make a long story short: I was rather pissed, went to a bookstore, obtained a copy of SuSE-Linux and installed away (I planned Linux as a second partition anyway).
Was it painless ? Hell, no! Wasting a day, trying to configure a modem which turns out to be defective is not much fun. The learning curve is partially steep (and that's not an install matter) and surprises clutter your path. But
It was the best business decision that I made. Not only do I have three industry strength databases running on essentially on a PC reliaby, but I very rarely have IT problems and if I do, they can usually be solved.
Yep, definitely a competitive advantage. And this is not a price issue.
In Europe (Switzerland) GSM phones with a prepaied SIM can be purchased at most gas stations. If you want to pay cash, nothing more is required then a 100 francs bill. Refills can be purchased at ticket vending machines at virtually every train station (no, they don't take a photo, when you pay cash)
The only disadvantage is, that outgoing calls are fairly expensive. Else then that, no restrictions apply (even international roaming works just fine).
Incoming calls are not only possible and free, one of the carriers even offers a measly (3cents or so) per minute reward for incoming calls.
A couple years ago the federal district attourney required, that purchasers of pre-payed cell phones can be identified. That idea was given up, since - although the palament agreed that it is an inconvenience for law enforcement - the bureaucratic hassle and the impact on commerce outweighed the federal cowboys' concerns.
Interestingly enough Switzerland doesn't seem to be infested by evil wrong-doers and grass can be bought (well not quite legally, but almost) in a couple hundred shops around the country. You don't need an anonymous cell phone to buy drugs.
Methinks, that the current histerya visible in the US is not very effective in combating the evil ones. It seems to be very effective though, in reducing everybodies quality of life.
Nope, spam started in the early / middle nineties, when two lawyers (Cantor/Siegel) spammed hundreds of newsgroups, in order to sell their lawyerly immigration services.
Needless to say, that the usenet community took a very dim view on the issue, and literally harrassed them off the net.
They later wrote a book (something around the line: "How to get rich quick by selling penis extension pills on the Internet").
Actually Broderbund pioneered the idea of a game, where "oponents" must help each other some 15 years ago.
Castles of Dr. Creep was a mixture between a graphics adventure- a D&D - and a jump & run game. Although graphics & sounds where far from what you have today (it wasn't even state of the art on a C64), it was one of the best games designed, ever
I think the NT kernel was designed by very competent people (Dave Cutler et al). It probably was a good OS until M$ marketing laid their clutches upon it.
NT was created by someone with decades of experience and it is 'C4' certified
To the best of my knowledge, NT got a C2 certification umpteen years ago. But (and I'm not making this up), It only achieved C2 when the disk drive was removed and the machine was not attached to any network
I don't think Microsoft attempted to brag about orange book certification since then.
The accusation of astroturfing is just untrue, those are lies and FUD spread by/.
In fact, embedded XP is the best thing since sliced bread and the Stinger platform will rarely crash your phone. The XBox kicks ass and Steve "Fester" Balmer is the nicest guy you can imagine.
In essence, it's really not true that Microsoft employees subvert discussion groups. I can prove it if you send mail to captainzapp@microsoft.com.
That's easy. An investment into the etoy.CORPORATION is the ultimate in chick and cool this holiday season.
Not only do you reap cultural value for your investment, but etoy also pays tangible dividends. Like the etoy.AGENT-PACKAGE (30 shares). But for the truely paranoied geek, the etoy.PROTECTION-PACKAGE (100 shares), which includes a personal data locker on Sealand , comes in mighty handy.
Slashdot Mirror
Find a victim
Go to a court and demand preliminary injunction. It's not really important that you have grounds for that, you only have to convince a judge
A mass-cease and desist mailing (with hefty lawyerly costs attached) is an alternative approach
Offer entity suffering from the injunction that for a low, low service charge the injunction could be lifted
Find new victim and repeat ad nauseum
That's not to say that I condonce such behavior. It's pretty much a rip-off scheme comparable with what some US ambulance chasers do by suing companies on a grondless basis. But as long some German laws are pretty rediculous*), this will not stop.
The Reg has it in more detail.
*)For example, C&A offered customers a 20% discount in the first week of the Euro intorduction, if they didn't pay cash. A court prohibit that, even though the rebate laws in Germany where relaxed a while ago. If a competitor (or anybody for that matter) doesn't like what you're doing, they get you on grounds of "unfair competition" laws, nowadays.
(For those that didn't have the good fortune to program in this er, well! self documenting language: COBOL very much lives within it's data descriptions and is very record oriented. There's entire section called the DATA DIVISION (I think, it's a long time since) where you define your records with it's columns and their respective data type. Now you can overlay a "column" with multiple data types in order to process them appropriately.)
Well now, this instructor claimed, no insisted! that the REDEFINE statement enabled you to multiply your physical memory. That is, if you define a character field with length 10 (10 bytes for all intents and purposes) and redefine it numeric then that guy claimed that you could store 20 bytes in this 10 byte address space.
Therefore you can't be right. In COBOL you can write the most complex applications like an air traffic control system or a sophisticated telephone exchange that serves Manhatten with just 1 byte of storage space. It's only a matter of clever REDEFINEing. That's what I claim is the true breakthrough in compression technology, now isn't it?
It's probably needless to say that this guy didn't really helped to build confidence and enhance our pleasure in the great language of COBOL...
This drug testing business is fairly tightly related to the US of A and would (indiscrimenately and on a large scale) quite likely be illegal throughout the EU.
Besides that, it's just outright rediculous. You catch a guy, who commited the horrible crime of smoking a doobie four weeks ago, while the cop with a serious booze problem (and a loaded gun on his side) or the air traffic controller with a knack for pills goes undetected.
And before somebody chimes in with the usual crap. No I don't appreciate to be flown by a pilot who has smoked some nice, orginically grown weed. Same as I don't apreciate pilots who drink, take mind altering pills, let their 15 year old son fly an Airbus or fscked their brains off all night instead of getting sleep prior to a flight.
When I was a totally green, newbie consultant for a specific, industry strength database I was hired into a major- major project (one of those systems, that move 10billion$ plus a day, literally). The project manager and senior dba knew precisely what they got and that totally matched their needs.
They had their own wiz-bang specialists, but needed an interface to the database vendors tech support and engineering full time.
They where willing to spend 250'000$ a year for a glorified switchboard operator and asskicker at that specific vendor. And ass kicking I did, very much to the dismay of some of the management type geezers at the vendor.
My point is: For really important projects it can make sense to hire a dedicated support liaison to keep the back of those folks that actually work on the project free.
No need to thank me...
You're sure right there. I worked in such situations where I didn't care a flying fsck what we pay a vendor for support (and it's a lot), but where I had immideately a product knowledgeable techie who would go miles to help me out of a bad jam at a Sunday night at 3am. Such a support contract is worth every damn cent.
Unfortunately Microsoft is not the company I would entrust with 24 hours alliance support for my most critical infrastructure -, specifically database - and data replication products.
After working for 15 years in IT, most of the time for either major (at that time) hardware - or software vendors I suggest that you don't discount yourself on that.
There are some very good, knowledgeable and dedicated sales people, but most that I met where inhumane greed freaks that sell their family to the hog processing plant in order to make the quarterly target. My assessment of marketing folks is even worse.
Although you are right, that "anonymous sources" should be eyed with suspicion, I think the memo is legit. The Register fscked up at times, but I consider it one of the more accurate sources in the day and age of instant-journalism.
Try this Google Search as a starting point. You might switch to Mineral Water (not genetically engineered) after reading some of that stuff.
Boy, this advise is simple, cuts down to the bone and unfortunately wont solve his problem.
Why the fuck specify companies requirements, which are not directly relevant for the business, but make life a helluva lot harder?
sigh...
See, that where's our opinion differs.
I had more the impression that they politely tiptoed back, after realizing that their disgraceful action wasn't that good in terms of public relations.
They're still the bad guys with lots of egg on their face, which just won't wash off.
Specialise! There are thousands of MCSEs, web-developers, access programmers, pc-support tinkerers. Each of them knows from everything a little bit, but nothing really in-depth. If you want to bill top dollar, you need to provide specialised services.
Document! document! document more! Customer relationships are always nice and cosey, until the blame game starts and the shit is flying around by the truckloads.
(that has been mentioned, but since it's important: If you don't know precisely what you offer or the exact scope of a project, don't offer fixed price. Never! Major consultancy outfits got burned with fixed price offers, there's bo reason why you should have more luck. Always define exit criteria for fixed price projects in advance.
Never start on a project which has either no project sponsor or more then one sponsor. Both cases will burn you badly.
Don't start from a hole. Ideally you have a customer or two, which can help you bootstrap your business.
Well, good luck I guess...
Given all the negatives, that you describe, it sounds like a rather good idea and a lot safer to stick with Linux.
As an end user, you can easily install the latest and greatest. If it doesn't work out, too bad, you revert to your old installation (you have backups, right?).
Now imagine a company, with 2500 desktops. It's not that simple to just upgrade to the latest and greatest. Hardware might have to be replaced, printer drivers might not be available, connectivity with third party vendor products may break, users and support staff have to be trained, etc. Upgrading the corporate desktop can involve thousands of $ per desktop (literally) and no end of grief and confusion.
Now, look at the database backend. The one application that, if it fscks up, your corporation might be a casualty after a few days. You don't go ahead and just install Sybase 12.5. because the salesman told you it's nice and 11.0.3.3. is anyway no more supported.
What you do is very carefully evaluate the merrits of the new version including testing each and every query of your application towards that release. If this is not feasible you test at the bear minimum all those queries that have to be assumed to have changed their behavior. For example: Sybase is notorious for changing sub query behavior from release to relase (this is not necessarily a bad thing). Now at the very minimum you will have to test all sub queries and you'll have to function test the application in order to avoid nasty surprises.
Add to that complexity, that you have interconnected middleware and probably a platform to create the application front end. That's not all just interchangeable with a snap of a finger.
Now, on automatic software updates: Don't even get me started...
When evaluating the IT infrastructure, I almost fell into the Ye know, my customers use NT and we'll have to interchange documents trap.
For one reason or another a properly licensed OEM copy failed to install on my box (which only was Win98 taxed, so I had to buy NT in addition).
To make a long story short: I was rather pissed, went to a bookstore, obtained a copy of SuSE-Linux and installed away (I planned Linux as a second partition anyway).
Was it painless ? Hell, no! Wasting a day, trying to configure a modem which turns out to be defective is not much fun. The learning curve is partially steep (and that's not an install matter) and surprises clutter your path. But
It was the best business decision that I made. Not only do I have three industry strength databases running on essentially on a PC reliaby, but I very rarely have IT problems and if I do, they can usually be solved.
Yep, definitely a competitive advantage. And this is not a price issue.
Nah, oracle is busy supplying the US government with free (cough) software for the national ID card database.
The only disadvantage is, that outgoing calls are fairly expensive. Else then that, no restrictions apply (even international roaming works just fine).
Incoming calls are not only possible and free, one of the carriers even offers a measly (3cents or so) per minute reward for incoming calls.
A couple years ago the federal district attourney required, that purchasers of pre-payed cell phones can be identified. That idea was given up, since - although the palament agreed that it is an inconvenience for law enforcement - the bureaucratic hassle and the impact on commerce outweighed the federal cowboys' concerns.
Interestingly enough Switzerland doesn't seem to be infested by evil wrong-doers and grass can be bought (well not quite legally, but almost) in a couple hundred shops around the country. You don't need an anonymous cell phone to buy drugs.
Methinks, that the current histerya visible in the US is not very effective in combating the evil ones. It seems to be very effective though, in reducing everybodies quality of life.
Nope, spam started in the early / middle nineties, when two lawyers (Cantor/Siegel) spammed hundreds of newsgroups, in order to sell their lawyerly immigration services.
Needless to say, that the usenet community took a very dim view on the issue, and literally harrassed them off the net.
They later wrote a book (something around the line: "How to get rich quick by selling penis extension pills on the Internet").
E-mail spam followed shortly after.
that those swines started to intentionally cripple CDs in order to copy protect (cough) them, now that's a real disgrace and an insult to the artists.
Castles of Dr. Creep was a mixture between a graphics adventure- a D&D - and a jump & run game. Although graphics & sounds where far from what you have today (it wasn't even state of the art on a C64), it was one of the best games designed, ever
I think the NT kernel was designed by very competent people (Dave Cutler et al). It probably was a good OS until M$ marketing laid their clutches upon it.
Nevertheless: My interpretation of the assessment was: As long as you don't touch it, it's C2.
I didn't intend to spread fud, it was an honest (possibly Freudian ?) error.
To the best of my knowledge, NT got a C2 certification umpteen years ago. But (and I'm not making this up), It only achieved C2 when the disk drive was removed and the machine was not attached to any network
I don't think Microsoft attempted to brag about orange book certification since then.
In fact, embedded XP is the best thing since sliced bread and the Stinger platform will rarely crash your phone. The XBox kicks ass and Steve "Fester" Balmer is the nicest guy you can imagine.
In essence, it's really not true that Microsoft employees subvert discussion groups. I can prove it if you send mail to captainzapp@microsoft.com.
Nah, it's really not the temperature, which Europeans don't like about American Beer.
Except maybe the Limeys, but they're a strange lot in the first place...
Not only do you reap cultural value for your investment, but etoy also pays tangible dividends. Like the etoy.AGENT-PACKAGE (30 shares). But for the truely paranoied geek, the etoy.PROTECTION-PACKAGE (100 shares), which includes a personal data locker on Sealand , comes in mighty handy.
Remember, nobody invests to lose money...