Because I know that people who read these books end up buying more books
And they can buy them in the same formats that the Free Library uses at Webscription.net. It's the next best thing to throwing money directly at the authors.
I mean they have a place in the house with rows of couches and chairs, excellent lighting and sound, a huge TV -- either plasma, LCD or a projector, and even a little popcorn machine and lighting strips lining the hallway to the room.
But do they have two robots who sit next to them and talk back to the movie? That's what really matters.
The secret to achieving five nines uptime is not to improve the reliability of the systems, but instead to be very careful about how you define "uptime".
"Hey, about those two hours of downtime last night..."
"There wasn't any downtime."
"No, really, the phones were lit up with people complaining that the applications weren't answering properly..."
"So the applications were answering queries? Then they were up. It's not downtime."
"But they were answering queries with error messages."
"Then that's an application problem. The system was still up."
"But the error messages said 'No response from database'. The database servers were down."
"No they weren't. They were still running. They still had power. The servers were up. It's not as if they fell down out of the racks. You can't call it downtime just because a few programs aren't behaving exactly the way you want."
If a set of backup tapes belonging to the Bank of New York fell into the hands of Archive America without BNY's knowledge or approval, then there's something even more horribly wrong than we first imagined.
If I borrow your car from you, then hand the keys over to some random drunk guy I meet in a bar, would you still say it's my fault when your car gets wrapped around a tree?
Or perhaps provide a direct link to the source, containing not only his name and likeness but also precise details of the show that was from and where to order it.
Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.
Actually, that was misheard. What he actually said was "Bull, your work is not done. Give me some more, I'll shout when it measures eleven." The rest was just twenty two minutes of misunderstanding, only to be cleared up moments before the final credits.
So yeah, and the Romans went Christian and then we had Christianity for about 1500 years. You know, Catholicism, we believed in the teachings of Cathol, and everything it stood for... Then Henry VIII came along. Henry VIII, a big, hairy king, and he said to the Pope, the head of the Catholic Church:
"Mr. Pope! I'm going to marry my first wife, and then I'm going to divorce her. Now, I know what you're going to say but stick with me, my story gets better. I'm going to marry my second wife and then I'm gong to kill her, cut her head off! Ah, not expecting that, are ya? Third wife, gonna shoot her. Fourth wife, put her into a bag. Fifth wife, into outer space. Sixth wife, on a Rotissimat. Seventh wife, made out of jam. Eighth wife..." ( makes sound similar to putting babies on spikes )
And the Pope's going "You crazy bugger! You can't do all this! What are you, a Mormon? You can't marry all these people! It's illegal! You can't do all this! I am the Pope, I am the head of the Church, I have to keep up... ciao! I have to keep up standards. What have you been reading, the gospel according to St. Bastard?"
So Henry VIII, who was Sean Connery for this film, said:
"Well then, I will set up a new religion in this country. I will set up the Psychotic Bastard religion."
And an advisor said,
"Why not call it Church of England, Sire?"
"Church of England, actually. Much better... Even though I'm Scottish myself."
So they did! That's the birth of Church of England, the birth of the Anglican Church! Disgusting, eh? That's no basis to start a religion on! Nothing to do with the Protestant church,I mean,Henry just shagged and killed a lot of women and then stole all the money off the monasteries. You know, rape and pillage, that is!
Really, unless you were a hand model posing for a notebook computer advertisement, why would you hold a computer like that? It may look pretty, but the slightest sideways impact is going to send the whole thing tumbling to the ground no matter how neatly your fingertips line up with the spots on the case.
First, you have to start by saying "Yes". Then you let the customer decide on his own that he really doesn't want what he just asked for.
Your problem is that the customer has come to you with a business problem. Someone, somewhere, has decided that it might be fun to have full access to SQL queries instead of those boring prepared reports they have been getting. Chances are that it came up in a meeting when one of the customer's own technical people was trying to explain why he couldn't deliver the Moon, two pieces of cake and a pony upon request.
"Why can't we get more detailed data than this?"
"Um, because it's not in the report. We would need, uh, raw SQL access to the database to get that and that's not going to happen."
"Why not?"
"Um, because those guys won't let us."
The idea built up momentum until it got to you. So far all that they can see is that they have business reasons for wanting data and all they need to do is ask you for it so they can have it. Now you have very understandable technical reasons why you do not want unwashed, barely literate knuckle dragging Neanderthals who don't know the difference between an outer join and an outside straight from being able to touch your database. Unfortunately they are _technical_ reasons and not _business_ reasons and business trumps technical. Think of business reasons as being 'Paper' and technical reasons as 'Rock'. Oh, and some kid ran off with the scissors, so that's all you have to play with. The only way to win at that game is to keep choosing 'Paper' until your opponent gets bored and leaves.
So how do you do that? You forget about the technical problems and explain the simple _business_ costs involved in resolving them. Your customer needs access to a database? Fine. Naturally they can't just use the main database for that. They will need their own dedicated reporting database server. (Ching!) With software licenses. (Ching! Ching!) And storage. (Ching!) Plus administrative overhead, datacentre costs, additional bandwidth, and so on. (Ching ching ching!) These are all things which you will need to provide to the customer in order to give them their pony^W own database to play with. All they need to do is pay for them.
Suddenly the technical problem of "No you can't play with the main database server" turns into "Of course you can have that if you pay $X up front and $Y additional annually", which is a business problem. Write up a rough quote, send it to the customers, and let them decide for themselves if their sudden whim of making their own queries justifies the actual costs involved in having it. If you have any alternative suggestions such as how you could provide additional canned reports or develop a slightly more flexible set of queries which they could use, feel free to attach estimates for the real costs of those projects too.
The key here is to make sure you tell them that you would be quite happy to provide any of the solutions you have offered. If they're smart, and your estimation of the costs of replicating your entire DB server are accurate, they should be able to talk themselves into doing the right thing without any further encouragement from you. If, on the other hand, they do decide that it's worth that much to them, and you're smart, then you should be in a good position to sell them that additional service.
You actually seem to believe that you are not only a customer of Microsoft, but that your happiness somehow matters. You probably think that TV stations should support programs you like because you are their customer too. You even used the phrase "class-action suit" as if it was something big and scary.
Microsoft is interested in one thing: Making money. If they can cut corners without losing their multi-bazillion installs every year through Dell, then they will do it. If that happens to piss off a number of self-styled security experts and drives them off to use a third party product, then that just means the corporation has to spend less time and money supporting them. It's not about "doing the right thing" or "making code for code's sake", it's about shipping a whole lot of product and making money off of it.
Given the choice between putting in a one line hack that makes a number of very obvious and potentially embarrassing profiler warnings go away and assigning enough people to make a proper change, a project which could take weeks or months, when nobody is ever going to notice the difference until long after next quarter's financials have come in, and the seven quarters after that, why do you believe that a large corporation is somehow going to be motivated to spend extra money when they don't need to?
That they found 700 techies who were kidding themselves about where the economy is going and what their place in it was. Fish, meet barrel.
I think that some advice from The Woz needs to be brought in here:
"f my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family."
It's a bit like asking Microsoft to accept responsibility for your pirate copy of Windows, then, isn't it?
Or a bit like asking Microsoft to accept responsibility for the copy of Windows that you paid for.
Look through the Windows license agreement some time and see how many times phrases like "THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF ANY KIND", "YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ANY DAMAGES" and "IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE" show up.
The only difference with Microsoft is that if Windows breaks you don't get to keep both pieces.
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Isn't ReiserFS already named after Nina Reiser?
Why are you asking all those questions about Volkswagens?
Is it really that difficult to avoid overloading common acronyms?
Sadly, those days are as gone as the days when you could freely check out the source code from CVS, check the status of up-to-the-minute builds and build the complete application on your own.
Which is to say they're not gone at all.
And they can buy them in the same formats that the Free Library uses at Webscription.net. It's the next best thing to throwing money directly at the authors.
But do they have two robots who sit next to them and talk back to the movie? That's what really matters.
Are you suggesting that the spell chequer was somehow wrong?
Don't you know that the Computer is your friend, and any deviation from its approved spelling can lead to your being used as reactor shielding?
Illusionists.
The secret to achieving five nines uptime is not to improve the reliability of the systems, but instead to be very careful about how you define "uptime".
"Hey, about those two hours of downtime last night..."
"There wasn't any downtime."
"No, really, the phones were lit up with people complaining that the applications weren't answering properly..."
"So the applications were answering queries? Then they were up. It's not downtime."
"But they were answering queries with error messages."
"Then that's an application problem. The system was still up."
"But the error messages said 'No response from database'. The database servers were down."
"No they weren't. They were still running. They still had power. The servers were up. It's not as if they fell down out of the racks. You can't call it downtime just because a few programs aren't behaving exactly the way you want."
"So about this SLA..."
"Five nines, baby. We've still got five nines."
You know what they say about presuming... It makes a pre out of sue and me.
Or something like that.
Personally, I blame Canada.
If a set of backup tapes belonging to the Bank of New York fell into the hands of Archive America without BNY's knowledge or approval, then there's something even more horribly wrong than we first imagined.
If I borrow your car from you, then hand the keys over to some random drunk guy I meet in a bar, would you still say it's my fault when your car gets wrapped around a tree?
Are you trying to say that IBM made Vista?
I think you may need to do a little fact checking there.
Or perhaps provide a direct link to the source, containing not only his name and likeness but also precise details of the show that was from and where to order it.
You know, like I did.
Actually, that was misheard. What he actually said was "Bull, your work is not done. Give me some more, I'll shout when it measures eleven." The rest was just twenty two minutes of misunderstanding, only to be cleared up moments before the final credits.
The Church of England? Also known as the Psychotic Bastard Religion?
So yeah, and the Romans went Christian and then we had Christianity for about 1500 years. You know, Catholicism, we believed in the teachings of Cathol, and everything it stood for... Then Henry VIII came along. Henry VIII, a big, hairy king, and he said to the Pope, the head of the Catholic Church:
"Mr. Pope! I'm going to marry my first wife, and then I'm going to divorce her. Now, I know what you're going to say but stick with me, my story gets better. I'm going to marry my second wife and then I'm gong to kill her, cut her head off! Ah, not expecting that, are ya? Third wife, gonna shoot her. Fourth wife, put her into a bag. Fifth wife, into outer space. Sixth wife, on a Rotissimat. Seventh wife, made out of jam. Eighth wife..." ( makes sound similar to putting babies on spikes )
And the Pope's going "You crazy bugger! You can't do all this! What are you, a Mormon? You can't marry all these people! It's illegal! You can't do all this! I am the Pope, I am the head of the Church, I have to keep up... ciao! I have to keep up standards. What have you been reading, the gospel according to St. Bastard?"
So Henry VIII, who was Sean Connery for this film, said:
"Well then, I will set up a new religion in this country. I will set up the Psychotic Bastard religion."
And an advisor said,
"Why not call it Church of England, Sire?"
"Church of England, actually. Much better... Even though I'm Scottish myself."
So they did! That's the birth of Church of England, the birth of the Anglican Church! Disgusting, eh? That's no basis to start a religion on! Nothing to do with the Protestant church,I mean,Henry just shagged and killed a lot of women and then stole all the money off the monasteries. You know, rape and pillage, that is!
Just follow UK government standards and write all the data on a CD or two then stuff them in the regular mail.
Honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
But what does God do when I kill a kitten?
Well, 'Hitman' was a game too, you know.
Really, unless you were a hand model posing for a notebook computer advertisement, why would you hold a computer like that? It may look pretty, but the slightest sideways impact is going to send the whole thing tumbling to the ground no matter how neatly your fingertips line up with the spots on the case.
First, you have to start by saying "Yes". Then you let the customer decide on his own that he really doesn't want what he just asked for.
Your problem is that the customer has come to you with a business problem. Someone, somewhere, has decided that it might be fun to have full access to SQL queries instead of those boring prepared reports they have been getting. Chances are that it came up in a meeting when one of the customer's own technical people was trying to explain why he couldn't deliver the Moon, two pieces of cake and a pony upon request.
"Why can't we get more detailed data than this?"
"Um, because it's not in the report. We would need, uh, raw SQL access to the database to get that and that's not going to happen."
"Why not?"
"Um, because those guys won't let us."
The idea built up momentum until it got to you. So far all that they can see is that they have business reasons for wanting data and all they need to do is ask you for it so they can have it. Now you have very understandable technical reasons why you do not want unwashed, barely literate knuckle dragging Neanderthals who don't know the difference between an outer join and an outside straight from being able to touch your database. Unfortunately they are _technical_ reasons and not _business_ reasons and business trumps technical. Think of business reasons as being 'Paper' and technical reasons as 'Rock'. Oh, and some kid ran off with the scissors, so that's all you have to play with. The only way to win at that game is to keep choosing 'Paper' until your opponent gets bored and leaves.
So how do you do that? You forget about the technical problems and explain the simple _business_ costs involved in resolving them. Your customer needs access to a database? Fine. Naturally they can't just use the main database for that. They will need their own dedicated reporting database server. (Ching!) With software licenses. (Ching! Ching!) And storage. (Ching!) Plus administrative overhead, datacentre costs, additional bandwidth, and so on. (Ching ching ching!) These are all things which you will need to provide to the customer in order to give them their pony^W own database to play with. All they need to do is pay for them.
Suddenly the technical problem of "No you can't play with the main database server" turns into "Of course you can have that if you pay $X up front and $Y additional annually", which is a business problem. Write up a rough quote, send it to the customers, and let them decide for themselves if their sudden whim of making their own queries justifies the actual costs involved in having it. If you have any alternative suggestions such as how you could provide additional canned reports or develop a slightly more flexible set of queries which they could use, feel free to attach estimates for the real costs of those projects too.
The key here is to make sure you tell them that you would be quite happy to provide any of the solutions you have offered. If they're smart, and your estimation of the costs of replicating your entire DB server are accurate, they should be able to talk themselves into doing the right thing without any further encouragement from you. If, on the other hand, they do decide that it's worth that much to them, and you're smart, then you should be in a good position to sell them that additional service.
You're missing the obvious line.
"It is a sequel. Very dangerous.
"You go first."
But is he master of his domain?
I'll go ask the fishermen.
Okay, how about all of these trailers?
Wow. That's so cute.
You actually seem to believe that you are not only a customer of Microsoft, but that your happiness somehow matters. You probably think that TV stations should support programs you like because you are their customer too. You even used the phrase "class-action suit" as if it was something big and scary.
Microsoft is interested in one thing: Making money. If they can cut corners without losing their multi-bazillion installs every year through Dell, then they will do it. If that happens to piss off a number of self-styled security experts and drives them off to use a third party product, then that just means the corporation has to spend less time and money supporting them. It's not about "doing the right thing" or "making code for code's sake", it's about shipping a whole lot of product and making money off of it.
Given the choice between putting in a one line hack that makes a number of very obvious and potentially embarrassing profiler warnings go away and assigning enough people to make a proper change, a project which could take weeks or months, when nobody is ever going to notice the difference until long after next quarter's financials have come in, and the seven quarters after that, why do you believe that a large corporation is somehow going to be motivated to spend extra money when they don't need to?
That they found 700 techies who were kidding themselves about where the economy is going and what their place in it was. Fish, meet barrel.
I think that some advice from The Woz needs to be brought in here:
"f my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family."
Or a bit like asking Microsoft to accept responsibility for the copy of Windows that you paid for.
Look through the Windows license agreement some time and see how many times phrases like "THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF ANY KIND", "YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ANY DAMAGES" and "IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE" show up.
The only difference with Microsoft is that if Windows breaks you don't get to keep both pieces.