Try being a business customer and paying for directory inclusion, then want to cancel. Canceling via the site, removing for CC data from your profile, and sending a cancellation letter, still gets you an automatic renewal. So try to send an email that's on your Terms of Service, bounces... Try calling their various phone trees, no option for directory services. Try just hitting zero on the three phone numbers you can find, get transfered a half a dozen time sometimes to the same person. Get your credit card company to try can call with you? They get the same run around trying to talk to anyone from billing. Google it sometimes and see the dozens of stories similar to mine. So to summarize:
1) violate your own terms of service
2) provide no way to communicate
3) force credit card companies to chargeback
Priceless Customer Service
I have experience at two companies that did site aggregation. First, with a company that did travel deals but searching other sites and the next was a job site that did the same. Searching and presenting a summary with link to the real live content is legal. Taking the content and re-purposing even with credit is illegal.
So as an example, with a travel sight, searching all the airlines, Expedia and so on, and displaying links with prices is valid. However, showing the flights and prices without links and then booking it in the background never displaying the site, illegal.
We had a number of companies that tried to sue us, we send over legal opinions and case history on the topic, the suits would disappear. However, we did have a few sites that blacklisted our IPs, tried to break our scraper, and post nasty things about us on other sites.
As for usability or personal preference, I have no argument with you. My biggest frustration comes from more of a development slant. There still will be a people using IE and now IE 7 and pages that rely heavily on CSS will have to have a different stylesheet because of the horrible implementation of CSS. Load this page using IE, http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html# top, and see what happens. Load the same page in Firefox, close but no cigar, I have to go to Safari to actually see the page rendered as designed. The point is Firefox is much closer to passing the Acid2 test making web developers lives much easier than the mish mosh of support in IE.
IE7 and FF2, I have to say its really no contest. Despite just plain hating how much vertical real estate the new tab toolbar takes up, performance with IE 7 is just horrible. Even a light page like the Google home page take about about half second longer to render on my Core 2 Duo machine. Let's not forget only really giving lip service to CSS standards, there is still going to be a ton of web pages that need hacks or workarounds for IE CSS issues. Check out http://www.positioniseverything.net/ for the latest hoops you need to jump through for IE. In no means is Firefox perfect in its CSS support but at least they respond to incompatibilities in a reasonable time frame.
The retail channel has nothing to be worried about. I still need to buy a copy so my kid can watch the movie on his DVD player in the car.
Other factors help too, the HD formats, extras only available on DVD, desire to own the physical...
CDs have not disappeared and the DVD has a stronger value proposition going forward; these are just threats to negotiate more of a margin for retail...
First, this idea of a web-only network computer type world is great for the readers of Slashdot and ZDNet where complaints of my 6Mb pipe getting enough throughput. People tend to forget that broadband is not universal in this country even for businesses. 70% percent of all US businesses are less than 10 people which equates to 1 Trillion dollars in revenues, this is the foundation of our environement. Only about half of these small business have broadband access, so you expect them to dial up to use a AJAX version of QuickBooks? Go out side the US and it gets worse, there are major manufacturing firms in Asia and India who power is still an issue let alone bandwidth. ASP, SaaS, and Web 2.0 is not an option for a large segment of businesses worldwide and will not be for years to come.
Local OSes will be needed for the decade to come for most businesses. Businesses drive the majority of software revenue.
..you then need the right policies, procedures, and security to deal with it. Data Cleansing or Data Scrubbing is not a trivial process and unless you have the right models and expertise, you start to get buried.
My guess is that this decision was one half poor planning and the other half was fear from all the bad press.
Adding true relevancy to searching will take some type of historical data, but you need to how to use it correctly and protect it wisely...
Apple is now suing the estate of Stanley Kubrick and trying to extradite Sir Arthur C. Clarke for their abusive use of the term "pod" in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After being served papers Clarke responded "Any sufficiently rapid litigation is indistinguishable from Evil."
Until there are general limitations on IP and patent litigation, this type of lawsuit will continue. It's the legal equivalent to chicken, which company runs out of money or guts first. The case will remain in some fashion until there are no more avenues to attack. With out some changes in the system, or best case a "loser pays" system, we will see this case and many others like it in the system for years. My prediction is that this case will drag on long into 2008, wasting million of shareholders dollars on both sides for very little gain.
I'll have almost $60,000 worth of student loans when I get out of school this December. How much will I own in student loans when I get out? The same $60,000... At a minimum need to pay the accruing interest on the loans while you are in school. Say if you have Federal loans at 4% interest and you invest in safe investment which you have immediate access to you money, which would be around the same 4%, you are not making anything. I would also bet that in fact you are losing money because the loan balance is larger, hence accruing debt faster than the amount you are making off the savings.
Budget, pay the interest on the student loans, and stick the rest in an investment account from which you can have a debt card to access the funds immediately in an emergency. It acts like a credit card until the end of the month where the securities are liquidated to pay off the bill or you send a check to cover the charges. Either way it prevents the panic call to your broker or planner to sell something now and still have to wait for the FedEx'ed check or the 24 hour EFT... It also gives you a grace period which you are not making decision under duress, maybe you have the cash at the end of the month and don't need to sell. I had my first through ML, but now have moved to Ameriprise...
This speedbump just increase my resolve to stick with BlueSecurity. I think I am going to start installing the BlueFrog client on a few more machines as well. Between the web reporting tool for my web mail accounts and a few Outlook rules to forward spam to my BlueSecurity address, I only have to see a few email a day. Let them flood, it will just increase the amount of mail I send to BlueFrog.
The BlueSecurity site is not responding... it it the./'ing or the spammers causing the issue?
Hmmmm. Where's the graphical management tools?
Well if you were a real DBA, Oracle's OEM would be good enough for you...;) However, if you want to spend another $6,000+ there are tools like Quest Central.
Thanks for the condensing tone, did you really read what I said?
When did I say that "the tuning tools on MySQL are anywhere near the ones on Oracle", I didn't. What I said is that Oracle is difficult to tune and takes specialized staff. "Full time on staff DBA that works with your development team, understands the data and understands how the system is being used" is great and goes so far, when you need to get greater performance, a expensive and rare person is required. BTW, what does a Oracle "Full time on staff DBA" cost? My point is that MySQL is much simpler and doesn't require the staff and expense of an Oracle. Sometimes a lightweight and simple system is going to get you the bang for the buck you need versus a heavy complicated system. My whole post was to point out that there are tradeoffs and just bashing MySQL without looking a context is bigoted.
Oracle has had a great product since about Oracle 7, I do not disagree there. However, there a few counters to a number of your points. First, not every application needs Oracle and the power it brings to the table. Many applications today just need persistence of a few dozen tables. They will never need PL/SQL and the few times they do they just might code that logic into their application instead of proprietary language. Yeah, PL/SQL is faster but most applications don't require that level of performance.
Second, Oracle has become a beast. The tuning a production database has become near black magic. I had a project where it was all Oracle and a Oracle-recommended consultant was brought in to help increase performance. The bill was $7000 for two days and we had decreased performance. Oracle paid the bill after bitching and a new consultant was brought in this time $8200 with T&E and no real increase. This fight took another two months and three escalations before that was refunded. Third consultant was much more truthful and gave a things to test over time and told us that the sheer number of parameters to play with and their inter-dependencies make tuning very difficult and impossible for one person to know all the variations without years of dedication. Many companies don't have the resources (staff, money, time) to run Oracle.
The support for MySQL is good, better than most software companies these days. Not to mention, at $4995 it has been cheaper than an Oracle dev license until Express.
MySQL isn't crap; it just is not at the same tier at Oracle. IMHO, MySQL is easier to set up and use than Postgres. Postgres had the advantage with more features than MySQL, but that distance is much, much smaller with the release of MySQL 5.0. It's ironic that you slam MySQL for support yet say Postgres is better, commercial support for MySQL exists. The user community for MySQL is large and also very helpful.
Reality is that you need to select the right database that fits your architecture. Creating a massive data mart which millions of dollars depend the availability of the data, might want to think Oracle. Running a website that needs storage for a 100,000 user profiles, I bet MySQL would fit your needs. Blindly dismissing any technology instead of evaluating attributes based on business and technology needs is just dumb.
Wow, Linux is more flexible and you can customize the installation routine!
This is completely unexpected...
In other breaking news, water still wet and gravity still in effect
Scientists are blaming greenhouse gases for "global warming" however, there one's point we're leaving out:
More evidence of global warming on Mars from the January 2006 issue of Astronomy:
Mesas of dry ice at the martian south pole have been retreated by about 10 feet (3m) per Mars year since Mars Global Surveyor arrived in 1999. These images compare the same region in 1999 and 2005. Mars seems to be in a warm spell. Dry ice turns to gas on the mesas's sides, but no new ice is being deposited. Over time, the polar pits will merge into plains, mesas will shrink into buttes, and buttes will vanish forever.
No SUVs on Mars, however, we both get our warmth from the sun... The sun is in a cycle which its increasing its output, hence "global warming." CO2 is a problem but not of the scale the fear mongers whould have you believe.
I'm on Tiger and upgraded from 4.9 to 5.0 and now iTunes hangs while trying to do something with my Store purchased music. I even tried readding all my music to the Library and it hangs on any iTunes purchased music. I'm sure it some type of DRM upgrade bug... And I'm not alone check out the Apple Discussions, http://discussions.info.apple.com/ for more stories like mine.
Actually we all didn't. There were a bunch of people who posted "Microsoft is doing this for the common good" crap when the announcement of the purchase was./'ed hopefully will wake up and smell the coffee.
No public company spends hundreds of millions of dollars to put a company out od business.
The stated plan is to compete with Google... So they want to use their ad serving technology to compete with AdWords. http://www.claria.com/products/searchscout/
You really don't think Microsoft would spend $500 to but an adware compnay out of business? And the reason www.msnbc.com doesn't work with Firefox anymore is to protect the user experience...
I was a fan of the show since the aired pilot but what I did was bring three friends who never even heard of the show prior to the screening.
They were amazed, they are heading out to buy the DVD's ASAP. The movie had action, adventure, humor, supense, heart, and a real plot. They loved the movie. I had more issues with it than they did. I still loved just had some issues with minor points.
For fans of the show, this is great closure, for new people, this is an excellent Sci-Fi film.
This universe is also non-sci-fi fan friendly. Firefly doesn't have a lot of the leaps of faith that a lot of space genre contain like : FTL, aliens, super weapons, and utopian cultures.
My view is this Firefly universe is a future time where all the flaws of the real-world exist. People here are still pretty much thes same other than western clothing fetish and an folksy way of speaking with a Chinese influence. Greed, self-centeredness, and some downright evil exists in people.
Think Bladerunner-style universe without replicants with a dash of Sliverado, a generous helping of Buffy, with a pinch of Red Dwarf, and slice of Cowboy Bebop...
Slashdot Mirror
Try being a business customer and paying for directory inclusion, then want to cancel. Canceling via the site, removing for CC data from your profile, and sending a cancellation letter, still gets you an automatic renewal. So try to send an email that's on your Terms of Service, bounces... Try calling their various phone trees, no option for directory services. Try just hitting zero on the three phone numbers you can find, get transfered a half a dozen time sometimes to the same person. Get your credit card company to try can call with you? They get the same run around trying to talk to anyone from billing. Google it sometimes and see the dozens of stories similar to mine. So to summarize:
1) violate your own terms of service
2) provide no way to communicate
3) force credit card companies to chargeback
Priceless Customer Service
"Candle in the Tubes" Relevance ran out long before, you bandwidth ever did...
I have experience at two companies that did site aggregation. First, with a company that did travel deals but searching other sites and the next was a job site that did the same. Searching and presenting a summary with link to the real live content is legal. Taking the content and re-purposing even with credit is illegal. So as an example, with a travel sight, searching all the airlines, Expedia and so on, and displaying links with prices is valid. However, showing the flights and prices without links and then booking it in the background never displaying the site, illegal. We had a number of companies that tried to sue us, we send over legal opinions and case history on the topic, the suits would disappear. However, we did have a few sites that blacklisted our IPs, tried to break our scraper, and post nasty things about us on other sites.
As for usability or personal preference, I have no argument with you. My biggest frustration comes from more of a development slant. There still will be a people using IE and now IE 7 and pages that rely heavily on CSS will have to have a different stylesheet because of the horrible implementation of CSS. Load this page using IE, http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html# top, and see what happens. Load the same page in Firefox, close but no cigar, I have to go to Safari to actually see the page rendered as designed. The point is Firefox is much closer to passing the Acid2 test making web developers lives much easier than the mish mosh of support in IE.
IE7 and FF2, I have to say its really no contest. Despite just plain hating how much vertical real estate the new tab toolbar takes up, performance with IE 7 is just horrible. Even a light page like the Google home page take about about half second longer to render on my Core 2 Duo machine. Let's not forget only really giving lip service to CSS standards, there is still going to be a ton of web pages that need hacks or workarounds for IE CSS issues. Check out http://www.positioniseverything.net/ for the latest hoops you need to jump through for IE. In no means is Firefox perfect in its CSS support but at least they respond to incompatibilities in a reasonable time frame.
I thought that was Barbara Walters who need them to cry... Katie like to ambush them with questions for her own agenda
So Katie, How does it feel to be in third place? "Suck Suck Suck"
I'm sure that cost will not be passed on to customers nor will it reduce the adoption of e-commerce and broadband in the country...
The retail channel has nothing to be worried about. I still need to buy a copy so my kid can watch the movie on his DVD player in the car.
Other factors help too, the HD formats, extras only available on DVD, desire to own the physical...
CDs have not disappeared and the DVD has a stronger value proposition going forward; these are just threats to negotiate more of a margin for retail...
First, this idea of a web-only network computer type world is great for the readers of Slashdot and ZDNet where complaints of my 6Mb pipe getting enough throughput. People tend to forget that broadband is not universal in this country even for businesses. 70% percent of all US businesses are less than 10 people which equates to 1 Trillion dollars in revenues, this is the foundation of our environement. Only about half of these small business have broadband access, so you expect them to dial up to use a AJAX version of QuickBooks? Go out side the US and it gets worse, there are major manufacturing firms in Asia and India who power is still an issue let alone bandwidth. ASP, SaaS, and Web 2.0 is not an option for a large segment of businesses worldwide and will not be for years to come. Local OSes will be needed for the decade to come for most businesses. Businesses drive the majority of software revenue.
..you then need the right policies, procedures, and security to deal with it. Data Cleansing or Data Scrubbing is not a trivial process and unless you have the right models and expertise, you start to get buried. My guess is that this decision was one half poor planning and the other half was fear from all the bad press. Adding true relevancy to searching will take some type of historical data, but you need to how to use it correctly and protect it wisely...
Apple is now suing the estate of Stanley Kubrick and trying to extradite Sir Arthur C. Clarke for their abusive use of the term "pod" in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After being served papers Clarke responded "Any sufficiently rapid litigation is indistinguishable from Evil."
Until there are general limitations on IP and patent litigation, this type of lawsuit will continue. It's the legal equivalent to chicken, which company runs out of money or guts first. The case will remain in some fashion until there are no more avenues to attack. With out some changes in the system, or best case a "loser pays" system, we will see this case and many others like it in the system for years. My prediction is that this case will drag on long into 2008, wasting million of shareholders dollars on both sides for very little gain.
I'll have almost $60,000 worth of student loans when I get out of school this December. How much will I own in student loans when I get out? The same $60,000... At a minimum need to pay the accruing interest on the loans while you are in school. Say if you have Federal loans at 4% interest and you invest in safe investment which you have immediate access to you money, which would be around the same 4%, you are not making anything. I would also bet that in fact you are losing money because the loan balance is larger, hence accruing debt faster than the amount you are making off the savings. Budget, pay the interest on the student loans, and stick the rest in an investment account from which you can have a debt card to access the funds immediately in an emergency. It acts like a credit card until the end of the month where the securities are liquidated to pay off the bill or you send a check to cover the charges. Either way it prevents the panic call to your broker or planner to sell something now and still have to wait for the FedEx'ed check or the 24 hour EFT... It also gives you a grace period which you are not making decision under duress, maybe you have the cash at the end of the month and don't need to sell. I had my first through ML, but now have moved to Ameriprise...
This speedbump just increase my resolve to stick with BlueSecurity. I think I am going to start installing the BlueFrog client on a few more machines as well. Between the web reporting tool for my web mail accounts and a few Outlook rules to forward spam to my BlueSecurity address, I only have to see a few email a day. Let them flood, it will just increase the amount of mail I send to BlueFrog. The BlueSecurity site is not responding... it it the ./'ing or the spammers causing the issue?
Hmmmm. Where's the graphical management tools? Well if you were a real DBA, Oracle's OEM would be good enough for you... ;) However, if you want to spend another $6,000+ there are tools like Quest Central.
Thanks for the condensing tone, did you really read what I said? When did I say that "the tuning tools on MySQL are anywhere near the ones on Oracle", I didn't. What I said is that Oracle is difficult to tune and takes specialized staff. "Full time on staff DBA that works with your development team, understands the data and understands how the system is being used" is great and goes so far, when you need to get greater performance, a expensive and rare person is required. BTW, what does a Oracle "Full time on staff DBA" cost? My point is that MySQL is much simpler and doesn't require the staff and expense of an Oracle. Sometimes a lightweight and simple system is going to get you the bang for the buck you need versus a heavy complicated system. My whole post was to point out that there are tradeoffs and just bashing MySQL without looking a context is bigoted.
Oracle has had a great product since about Oracle 7, I do not disagree there. However, there a few counters to a number of your points. First, not every application needs Oracle and the power it brings to the table. Many applications today just need persistence of a few dozen tables. They will never need PL/SQL and the few times they do they just might code that logic into their application instead of proprietary language. Yeah, PL/SQL is faster but most applications don't require that level of performance.
Second, Oracle has become a beast. The tuning a production database has become near black magic. I had a project where it was all Oracle and a Oracle-recommended consultant was brought in to help increase performance. The bill was $7000 for two days and we had decreased performance. Oracle paid the bill after bitching and a new consultant was brought in this time $8200 with T&E and no real increase. This fight took another two months and three escalations before that was refunded. Third consultant was much more truthful and gave a things to test over time and told us that the sheer number of parameters to play with and their inter-dependencies make tuning very difficult and impossible for one person to know all the variations without years of dedication. Many companies don't have the resources (staff, money, time) to run Oracle.
The support for MySQL is good, better than most software companies these days. Not to mention, at $4995 it has been cheaper than an Oracle dev license until Express.
MySQL isn't crap; it just is not at the same tier at Oracle. IMHO, MySQL is easier to set up and use than Postgres. Postgres had the advantage with more features than MySQL, but that distance is much, much smaller with the release of MySQL 5.0. It's ironic that you slam MySQL for support yet say Postgres is better, commercial support for MySQL exists. The user community for MySQL is large and also very helpful.
Reality is that you need to select the right database that fits your architecture. Creating a massive data mart which millions of dollars depend the availability of the data, might want to think Oracle. Running a website that needs storage for a 100,000 user profiles, I bet MySQL would fit your needs. Blindly dismissing any technology instead of evaluating attributes based on business and technology needs is just dumb.Wow, Linux is more flexible and you can customize the installation routine! This is completely unexpected... In other breaking news, water still wet and gravity still in effect
Scientists are blaming greenhouse gases for "global warming" however, there one's point we're leaving out: More evidence of global warming on Mars from the January 2006 issue of Astronomy: Mesas of dry ice at the martian south pole have been retreated by about 10 feet (3m) per Mars year since Mars Global Surveyor arrived in 1999. These images compare the same region in 1999 and 2005. Mars seems to be in a warm spell. Dry ice turns to gas on the mesas's sides, but no new ice is being deposited. Over time, the polar pits will merge into plains, mesas will shrink into buttes, and buttes will vanish forever. No SUVs on Mars, however, we both get our warmth from the sun... The sun is in a cycle which its increasing its output, hence "global warming." CO2 is a problem but not of the scale the fear mongers whould have you believe.
I'm on Tiger and upgraded from 4.9 to 5.0 and now iTunes hangs while trying to do something with my Store purchased music. I even tried readding all my music to the Library and it hangs on any iTunes purchased music. I'm sure it some type of DRM upgrade bug... And I'm not alone check out the Apple Discussions, http://discussions.info.apple.com/ for more stories like mine.
See I'm surprised they bludgeoned him in the head... I would have figured it would have taken a stake to the heart...
Let hope they follow the same plan as their other new products and have a looong free beta period... Somebody send me an invite!
Actually we all didn't. There were a bunch of people who posted "Microsoft is doing this for the common good" crap when the announcement of the purchase was ./'ed hopefully will wake up and smell the coffee.
No public company spends hundreds of millions of dollars to put a company out od business.
The stated plan is to compete with Google... So they want to use their ad serving technology to compete with AdWords. http://www.claria.com/products/searchscout/ You really don't think Microsoft would spend $500 to but an adware compnay out of business? And the reason www.msnbc.com doesn't work with Firefox anymore is to protect the user experience...
I was a fan of the show since the aired pilot but what I did was bring three friends who never even heard of the show prior to the screening. They were amazed, they are heading out to buy the DVD's ASAP. The movie had action, adventure, humor, supense, heart, and a real plot. They loved the movie. I had more issues with it than they did. I still loved just had some issues with minor points. For fans of the show, this is great closure, for new people, this is an excellent Sci-Fi film. This universe is also non-sci-fi fan friendly. Firefly doesn't have a lot of the leaps of faith that a lot of space genre contain like : FTL, aliens, super weapons, and utopian cultures. My view is this Firefly universe is a future time where all the flaws of the real-world exist. People here are still pretty much thes same other than western clothing fetish and an folksy way of speaking with a Chinese influence. Greed, self-centeredness, and some downright evil exists in people. Think Bladerunner-style universe without replicants with a dash of Sliverado, a generous helping of Buffy, with a pinch of Red Dwarf, and slice of Cowboy Bebop...