Google Wave - Mixed Reviews

Last June I pointed out some videos Google had posted to the web showing a preview of Google Wave.  Quite a while after those Google announcements a public preview of Google Wave began.  I eventually managed to find a friend who'd gotten Google Wave invites to share, signed myself up and have found myself mostly disappointed with the preview of Google Wave.  To be fair, the good folks at Google aren't even calling this a "beta" release.   But I really expected better quality and more features than seem to be present.

I now have a limited number of Wave preview invites to give out.   If you'd like to have one, send me some e-mail, please.   (drewclist@rdd.name).

What's wrong with the Google Wave preview?

Here's my list from a Wave I have in my collection:

• There doesn't seem to be an adequate feedback mechanism associated with the preview.
  
  Even if there was a clearly designated way for me to report problems that I've encountered, there doesn't seem to be any clear way to see what version of the software I was using when I had the problem. That's going to limit the utility of any trouble reports unless there's a completely marvelous change control mechanism lurking in the background so my time stamp immediately identifies exactly what versions of everything I had involved. I expect there are multiple servers and they aren't in lock step, so this change control identification mechanism starts to sound mythical even before thinking about what I'm running on my PC. 
  
  Bit by bit Google has added some limited feedback mechanisms.   http://productideas.appspot.com/#16/e=224f1 is for submitting ideas for improving Wave.   I suppose I could twist that and submit bug reports as "an idea", but that certainly doesn't seem to be what the page is meant for.   And Google added a "Feedback" link to the top of the Wave page.  But, again, that survey form doesn't appear aimed at collecting bug reports.
  
  
• The server sometimes loses content. Contacts on the contact list have been seen to vanish. "Hey, where did that Wave go?" has been too often asked.  A communication tool that loses messages has to expect to be criticized for that. 
  
  I have one wave with a couple of pictures embedded in it. Spontaneously, it is mysteriously reporting it can't load one of the attachments (wave without title)    But today they are again visible.   Flakey!

• It seems to have scaling problems. Waves can be very slow to load and to edit. Hundreds of blips and hundreds of users on a Wave seem to be a troubling combo as seen in many public Waves.  Intolerably slow times to echo typing keystrokes, long pauses to open a Wave.   If that's the price of having the pleasure of watching my friends type as they type, I'd rather give that up and have snappy system response times.

  
  

  Google Chrome Browser (4.1.249.1042) seems far better as a Wave interface than Firefox on Windows (Vista) and Ubuntu.

  
  

  WaveBoard on the iPod Touch seems to have bugs of its own, but when it isn't failing, it seems to work more smoothly than Firefox on Ubuntu for working with Waves. 

  
  
• The translation Robot, Aunt Rosie, dribbles.  There should be a general rule that one blip gets translated to just one blip.    But if I set a target language for a blip and continue to type into that blip, a long sequence of nearly identical translation blips gets dribbled into the message.
  
  Another simple complaint about Aunt Rosie is that when she's invited to a Wave, the target language for translation has to be set with each new Blip added to the Wave.  Something on a per-user basis would make more sense.
  
  A deeper complaint about Aunt Rosie that needs to be noted somewhere, is that the language translations are still low quality. As robots go, Aunt Rosie is still a long way from C3P0 in her linguistic skills.

• There ought to be a way to limit the view of a large Wave to "the good parts". Perhaps a slash-dot style voting up/down of a blip would make large public Waves more manageable.

  
  

  Another suggestion I saw of "the good parts" is where someone has posted a reply in a Wave to something I said. 

  
  

• The revision tracking evidenced by "playback" is a seemingly very good idea, but access to the revision history is far more primitive than is available in Wikipedia.
  
  

  I think I found a bug (or feature?) in the revision tracking. I went back to where a Sudoku game was added to a Wave and played the game at that point in the past. I noted down the answers on a piece of paper and then returned to the present state of that message. I tried to complete the game from my notes. Things froze. Is that a feature to defeat cheaters or a bug when there's a side branch of the revision history? 

  
  

• In general, Wave doesn't seem to have been designed with the presence of bad-citizens taken into account. With better tools, the revision tracking would seem to be a way to clean up spam and defacements, but better control of who has access to Waves involving me might be a better way to head off spam and defacements before they happen.
  
  

  The preview's inability to uninvite a user (not even to uninvite "public"!) from a Wave is a huge short coming, especially given that some unimplemented robots add public to a Wave on their own. 

  
  

• I've been unhappy with the preview's lack of a mechanism for telling me what robots and gadgets are available or even when someone has updated something such that it is now worth another look. e.g. I tried bloggy early on in the preview. It didn't work at all. Am I expected to just come back and try it again now and then to notice when it has gotten implemented?
  
  

  I received a Wave about Extensions from Dr. Wave back on Sep 30, 2009. Surely there has been activity on Extensions since that time, but that Wave is showing no activity.   Is Dr. Wave asleep? 

  
  
• The text editor of the preview front end is not sufficiently full featured. I'd like it to be easy to paste in snips of code, and then I'm sure I'd want to way to peel the snips of code out of a message and into a file where I could try doing a compile. But there could be snips of multiple files in one Wave (e.g. a C program, and some #include files, and, say, a makefile). Maybe I'm on my way to reinventing tangle and weave, but it would seem there ought to be a "Software Developer's Wave" where code and test cases can be discussed and revised without my having to go crazy to extract the products of that colloboration out into the file system.
  
  Another structured use that I'm not seeing as obvious how to do it. Suppose some folks are collaborating on constructing an exam. There's some overall outline of the material to be covered by the exam. Questions and answers in various forms get added to the exam (e.g. multiple choice question, fill in the blank question, true/false question, essay question). Eventually, I want to extract a numbered list of questions (without identifying the answers) as the test, and a likewise numbered set of questions with answers as the answer key. 

• Didn't the demos promise slick integration with Google docs?   Yet to come? 
  
  
• Integration with the rest of the world needs more attention.   e.g. there should be a way to mail a Wave to an outsider and for the outsider's e-mailed reply to tidily get integrated into the wave as a fresh blip (with quoted material automagically stripped out since it is already in the original wave).
  
  
• Notification to my e-mail inbox of when there's a Wave with new activity?    Polling the site seems like such a 1960's way of seeing what's new. Distinguishing "new activity" from "interesting new activity" is asking too much?
  
  

  On 12/13/2009 Chip noted: There's a bot which does email notification.  It sucks.  I added it to a wave then turned on notification.  It sent an email to everyone on the wave.  Needs to be completely opt-in. Also, I'd prefer not to have to add something to every wave I want notification about. Seems more of a per-user preference thing.
  
  

  There's a bot which does XMPP notification.
  
  

  Speaking of Chrome... The Beta channel added extensions this week. One (two?) of the extensions is a wave notifier. So this morning there was a W in my browser with the number 1 hanging off it. 
  
  And the tragic reply from Fred was:
   This is strange. I made a whole bunch of comments. They seem to have been lost. I had an "unsynced waves" thing on my page but could find no way to sync. I went to the wave home page and now things are lost. GRRRRR 
  
  

• A gentler initiation to Wave for new-comers is needed so I don't have to cringe when inviting a non-Wave user to join a discussion on Wave. The original Looonnggg video is way too long and "promotional". Searching YouTube for Google Wave turns up an overwhelming number of clips. A short tutorial video and a concise tutorial document is needed for newbie users.
   
  
• Here's a public wave talking about much the same things as this gripe list is discussing.The Six Most Important Features to Add to Wave - Article - ContentWave (TM)
  
  Fred's 12/20/2010 reply to that item:    I avoid public waves. Too much noise.  
  
  
• The limit on the maximum size of a Wave is startling low. "Is Google Wave Succeeding" has trouble. Less than 500 blips and the Wave is declared to be too big. 
  
  
• A bug provokes a bug?  I was adding a brief plain old text blip to a small wave when a dire looking error message appeared: "This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence and may explode" and a details button revealed what looked like a stack trace.  I opened a wave addressed only to myself to save a copy of the error message and details.  Next day I found that Wave would not allow me to access that message, saying "You are not a participant in this wave".    Perhaps a small bug, but it bothers me that I have no clue who to report it too.
  

OK, so Drew has gripes.   What do others think?

   Reviews so far have been, at best, mixed.

Google Wave Crashes on beach of Overhype.

Google Wave Sucks and Why You will use it anyway.

Lifehacker - Google Wave First Look.

Google Wave - Why it will fail.

Mashable: Testing Google Wave - This Thing is Tidal.

But, hey!   Don't just take my word for it.   (Maybe I picked unrepresentative reviews here).    Use your favorite search engine to search for google wave review and see for yourself.

Bottom line.

Google Wave is an interesting experiment, but from what I've seen so far, I don't think it is likely to rock the world of online collaboration.  I'm disappointed.

Drew

Backyard Swimming Pool? - Just say No!

Back in the old days when I had young children, we had one of those inflatable wading pools.   They are little so they only kill a modest size spot on your back lawn, and aside from the perpetual quest for the leak that is letting the air out, maintenance mostly consisted of dumping the water out and refilling the pool each day before letting the kids cool off in the carefully supervised pool.  I still recall the miracle of totally instant toilet training of my daughter.  She wanted to go into the pool.   Mom explained a rule that she wouldn't be allowed in the pool while wearing a diaper.  Made sense to the little girl.  From that day forward, she always used the toilet when she had to go.  Of course it follows that the little girl taught herself removal of her diaper on her own too.  There was no formal "Swim suits optional" sign in the back yard, but how can you claim to be closely monitoring the kids in the pool if you're going to take the time to run upstairs to fetch a swimsuit for one of them.  You've got to keep your priorities straight.  The kids survived the wading pool and eventually earned 4 year degrees from college.   I'm leaving out some of the details, but to this day my daughter favors bikinis that are only slightly more modest than "Swim suits optional" when she's vacationing on exotic beaches, many of which are well south of Belmar.

But this little essay isn't to dissuade you from the simple pleasures of an inflatable wading pool.  My target audience today is anyone thinking of installing a more serious swimming pool in their backyard, perhaps an aboveground pool.   From experience, my advice is to just say "no!" to that.   Instead, buy the family an annual membership in some nice local community pool.   It might look expensive, but I assure you the community pool will get you more hours enjoying the cool pool instead of endless expensive trips to the pool store for parts and supplies.

I'm willing to concede that my advice is not equally applicable to everyone.  Maybe you're rich and have found a reliable pool maintenance person who will take care of the pool chores for you.   I'm not rich so hiring someone to mind the pool isn't something I'm comfortable doing.  We did try it one year and the guy we hired wasn't too reliable.   He left the pool rover plugged in and sitting on the deck.

http://www.waterworksmarketing.com/aquabot/pool-rover.htm

The pump motor in the rover burned out.  In fact it got so hot it melted the rover's bag and casing.  I think as the insulation in the motor broke down, the rover's power supply died.   Debate continues to this day as to just how close did it come to sitting the deck on fire.   That would have been expensive compared to the several hundred dollars to buy a complete new pool rover.  We remember that expense each time the idea resurfaces that maybe the solution is to find someone who we can hire to do the work for us.

So what's the hassle of maintaining an 18 foot round body of water in your back yard?   You'll need a GFI outlet to power the pool filter.  Ours is a cartridge filter with a Chlorinator attached.   In theory, I need only keep the Chlorinator stocked with Chlorine tablets, and take out the cartridge once in a while to rinse the gunk off of the filter element.   And every few years a replacement cartridge is a nice treat to assure the pool that you still love it.  Current price on a small bucket of Chlorine tablets is about $25.   A replacement cartridge is about $50.   But the local pool supply store this year is no longer selling the same brand of filter as the one he sold to us.   The in-stock cartridges don't have the same model numbers as they used to.   I've got to haul the drippy wet dirty cartridge on another trip to the pool store to try to find a match to it.   Imagine my delight.

But the pool chemicals don't stop with only chlorine.   You need a little pool chemistry test kit to keep an eye on the water.   This year we got a bottle of test strips that seems a lot easier to use then the add 3 drops of this liquid to a vial of water and match the colors after you give it a shake.   Then add 3 drops of another liquid to another vial of water and match the colors to a different chart.   Then count the drops you need to add to the first vial to wipe out the color.   And at this point I'll confess that over the winter the instructions for the test kit were lost, so I'm not quite sure what to do with some of the test liquids.  The general idea is to adjust the water's Ph to a slightly alkaline reading, and to make sure there's enough buffering alkaline molecules in the water to protect against sudden swings in Ph level.   They'll sell you powder to add to raise the Ph, another powder to add to lower the Ph, and another to condition the Ph by providing additional buffering.

Wait, there's more:   There's Green-out, strong chlorine to shock the pool to clear it of algae, but then you have to close the pool until the chlorine level drops back down to a safe level.  $8 for a 1 lb bag.   Buy 2 and get 1 free.   For an 18-foot round pool, I was told to throw in 3 pounds to get the pool started this year.  But there were a lot of leaf particles in the water (because I'm past due for a replacement filter cartridge) and the organic matter in the water seemed to instantly gobble up the chlorine.   Even 3 pounds of "shock" didn't raise the chlorine level to "keep everyone out of the pool this afternoon" levels.  Oh, and you might also want to have a bottle of "Golden Glop" water clarifier and maybe a bottle of algacide.   Not exactly an organic approach to maintaining the water quality.

With each passing day of skimming leaves and bugs out of the water, the idea of getting a swim club membership is looking more and more attractive.    And with each expensive trip to Island Recreational for supplies and parts, a swim club membership is looking more and more affordable (and that's before trying to tally up the price of electricity to run the filter).

I drafted this cautionary tale late in the summer of 2009.  Cold weather arrived and I was able to ignore the pool and the draft of this essay for mercifully many months.  Now that the ice is gone from the pool, fixing the GFI on the post next to the pool filter pump is weighing on my mind and it seemed time to post this entry to my blog in case anyone maybe comes along online to read it.

Dissenting opinions are welcome.   Post comments or send me email (r.drew.davis@gmail.com).  Have a great summer!

Drew

Increasing Innovative Work Behavior

Pretty much random travels on the web this morning brought me to an interesting little presentation on Increasing Innovative Work Behavior by  Gisela Jönsson.    The slide show is on her blog, http://www.mindspark.se/blog/, and though the slide show is in English, her blog is mostly in Swedish, which I can't read.  So, for all I know, she may have lots of other wonderful things to say, but they whizzed right by my English-only head.

As summarized on her opening slide:

Fear does not make fertile soil for ideas.  To succeed at innovation, you must learn to embrace failure.

The posting I'm recommending is dated 3/7/2010.  Based on this sample of 1, I'm impressed with the results she got from using the presentation tool http://prezi.com/, which I confess I hadn't heard of before.  I'd have been happier if I could have figured a way to snag a copy of her slide show instead of having to depend on the lifespan of the URL I referenced for you to be able to see Gisela's slide show.  Anyhow, enjoy.

A link to another place for her slide show outside her blog:  http://prezi.com/fmwnrxxhje3c/increasing-innovative-work-behaviour/.

Drew

Vitamin D re-visited

Vitamin D re-visited

Well, in case you haven't been following my blog over the past months, I'll start by referring back to

my article from last July about Vitamin D.

It would be lovely to report that all the good reports about Vitamin D had turned out to be true, but of course life is never quite that simple and science, especially health science, is rarely that definitive.   Anyhow, I haven't seen much reading along the lines of "Debunking the myths about Vitamin D", which means the news on Vitamin D so far is about as good and consistent as health news gets.

On 02/01/2010, the N Y Times ran an article The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype? by Tara Parker-Pope that you might find to be of interest.    Unlike my lonely blog, her article has already drawn 311 comments from the reading public as of this moment.   She seems to have a high quality crowd as followers of her columns.   That is to say, she gets pretty decent sounding comments with actual references to source material and so forth.

As for me, I continue taking a Vitamin D (1000 IU) each day, as well as fish oil capsules (following my doctor's advice to up my Omega-3 in-take).   I didn't get flu shots this year (neither seasonal nor H1N1) at Barbara's insistence.   I've never had problems myself from flu shots, but she's gotten ill every time she gets a flu shot.   I think she worries that if I get similarly ill from a flu shot that she'll be at risk of contracting the flu from me.   She promises to publically apologize in the unlikely event that I contract a fatal case of the flu for lack of appropriate immunization.   Anyhow, I've gotten through this winter without any serious cold or flu so far.   Barbara takes fish oil, but not Vitamin D.   She had a fairly severe cold/bronchititis in December and on into January as a terrible way to finish off the Fall semester.   I'm not claiming any conclusive cause/effect, but am offering the data point for what it is worth.

Drew

Good News and Bad News for Python Dev...

Good News and Bad News for Python Developers

As you've probably figured out by now I've become a fan of the Python programming language.

I haven't done anything large scale or in a team with it, but it looks like it can scale well.   It also has an increasing presence in the infrastructure of the various Linux distributions.   One of the pluses of that is that the distributions now have to worry though at least some of the challenges of easing forward to new releases of Python.   Python 3.1 is not a trivial target from 2.4 or 2.6, so I'm happy to see the transition is something that the Fedora and Ubuntu folks are working out while I bravely lag behind cheering their progress.

Anyhow, the good news is that it is possible to mix C and C++ libraries in with Python code.  The bad news is that you need to be some kind of guru to untangle a stack trace from such a combined environment when something crashes.

Dave Malcolm has proposed some additions to the gdb debugger for Fedora 13 to make it easier to debug such mixed stacks.   For a good time, take a look at the stack trace that Dave points to from his description of the proposed enhancement.   It certainly left me convinced I'm not ready to do any heavy duty mixing of Python and extensive C & C++ libraries.    And back in the day I did my share of Assembler language programming above and below PL/I wrestling with SYSUDUMPs back on the mainframes.

I'll stick my neck out and assert that programming with a mix of complex programming languages is always going to present challenges.   But after I saw Dave's example, I felt like I had to point it out so you can't later say that I never warned you.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!  (I borrowed the beautiful Christmas tree picture from the web page of Lynne Marshall. The page gave no attribution for the picture, so I don't have further credits to give for it).

Drew

Revised 02/03/2010 to correct a typo.

Financial engineering

Re-engineered to Smithereens is interesting reading. Linkedin.com pointed me to the piece via a posting there by the piece's author. I think her essay dwells a bit much on baby boomers, but maybe you have to have come from Lucent to see how losing sight of the purpose of a company can mess up the jobs of far more than one generation of (former) employees.  What the financial engineers seem to overlook is that if a company's stated mission is no grander than "Our mission is to make money for the stockholders", that that is not going to inspire many of the company's staff to rally round the corporate flag.  My undergrad degree is in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, so I kind of can see where the numbers argue that its a great idea to sell off all the factories and outsource all the production of the company's products, but somehow along the way, the company (formerly known as Western Electric) lost the idea that the way the company earns its money is to sell products.   I'll not insist that you have to manufacture the products in order to sell them, but somehow with the factories gone, the management seemed to lose its sense of direction.  Didn't anyone understand that to sell products with a fat profit margin, you need to have products that people can't get from anyone else, not commodities.  Last year's gee-whiz item is next year's commodity (if not sooner).  Seems to me that things worked out better when the Great Depression idled the factories and management's reaction was to find ways to keep the factories working, even if that meant producing washing machines or some such things that are far out of the company's usual scope.  (Confession:  I tried to find something on the web to substantiate my assertion that Western Electric built washing machines during the Great Depression, but was surprised to learn they were making washing machines and sewing machines in the early 1920's.   Not what I expected to find   But I did find of Western Electric in the Great Depression:

The company paid its employees to make "articles in general
demand" from furniture to cigarette lighters to keep them employed,
then it distributed the goods at-cost through the company stores.

according to http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1802.html).  But now, in the 21st century, with no factories, the management just seems to blame the economy and look for more costs to slice ("The beatings will continue until company morale improves"). 

They sold off vast portions of the company, including the chip-business, which produces the raw materials (integrated circuits) from which innovative products can be built.   I'm a bit less comfortable with the notion that all the chips we'd ever need can be purchased from elsewhere.   If we buy commodity chips, how distinctive can our products be?   And if we pay other companies to make custom chips to our specifications, who is going to pocket the profit margin on those chips?   Surely Lucent management didn't make the humerous assumption that they are consumate deal-makers!

Lucent had some interesting starts on products that far out-distanced what the marketplace was currently demanding.    I'm thinking about the micromirror based optical router, long since canceled to the best of my knowledge.   "Nobody" needs that kind of bandwidth capacity.   Why walk away from a future market.   Wouldn't it have been smarter to help cultivate demand for more bandwidth.   Lucent had pioneered development of HDTV.    Why not work with web cam companies to bring HDTV to the PC?   HDTV video chats might step up the demand for IP bandwidth.  Youtube, I hear is already pressing the capacity of Internet service providers.   Verizon is gambling on the future by building FIOS now.   More bandwidth than the customer demands at present, but it'll take some real work and hefty investment for the cable companies to provide as much capacity as FIOS can.   Capacity isn't all that's needed to compete with the cable TV companies, but at least Verizon apparently noticed that they had competition and had to do something about it for Verizon to have a future.

(Disclosure:    I'm a Cablevision "triple play" subscriber.   I use Vonage for my home phone [though the Cablevision phone line has been useful to provide a phone for Aunt Dolly, who currently lives here].   My only monthly bill from Verizon is from Verizon Wireless for cell phone service.  [In other words, I'm not a FIOS subscriber even though they tell me it is now available in my neighborhood].  Since I am no longer employed by Bell Laboratories, I have so far managed to resist the call of the marketplace to move on up to HDTV.   I watch HBO on a plain old NTSC [that is, old non-digital] television set).

"Field of Dreams" projected the kind of thinking that Lucent management lacked.   "Build it and they will come".  But somehow Lucent was never interested in a market space until Cisco or someone had demonstrated that there was a significant market there.   That's not leadership.   "Me too" products are not a good way to bang big bucks to the bottom line.   At Lucent, the bottom line was "a lot fewer bottoms on the line".

Drew

How not to sell to me

From http://www.limofoundation.org/solutions/index.php

comes this gem of marketing speak:

MOTO U9 is designed for those who want to talk, rock, capture memories and send messages in style.

Sorry, but this is not an effective way to sell a cell phone to me.   Tell me how it makes it easier to send or organize my messages, but don't tell me how stylish I'll look when I'm using the phone.   Now maybe the marketer who crafted those words will smile and shrug and say "obviously I'm not in their target market", but I think what bothers me is the amount of stuff that gets marketed without any meaningful distinguishing characteristics that make the product worth its price.   I guess that explains why I use Linux and OpenOffice (both "free open source software") even as I help people with virus and malware afflictions on their Windows PC's.

My most recent adventure with a Windows Vista PC was a friend's HP that was afflicted with something that kept it away from Internet sites that might have been useful for curing what ailed it.    My friend had purchased Norton 360 Premier, but the infection on the computer kept the Norton package from being able to "Activate".   I tried bringing a copy of the install program for the AVG free (for home use) antivirus to the machine on a USB solid state drive since Google could find the site but when I'd click on the link on the infected machine, the browser would tell me the link is broken.  I checked the etc/hosts file, but that file wasn't what was mis-directing the http traffic.   I was disappointed that the AVG program wouldn't install from the USB drive.   Seems that much like Norton's "activation", the AVG installer looks back to an avg.com site to fetch the actual software to install.   For the next round, I rebooted the PC into "safe mode with networking".   From there I could install AVG.     After I got AVG installed, I ran it and it found a Ddnsfilter.dll file that it didn't like so it got rid of it.   Once that file was out of the way, Norton activation, et al was happy to run.   After scrubbing the machine with AVG, I scrubbed it again with Norton, finding another small number of comlaints, which were cleaned.    Then I scrubbed again with Windows Defender, ran Windows update to install all available patches.   Uninstalled AVG so there isn't the conflict of having 2 anti-virus scanners competing with each other, found some Adobe reader updates that wanted to be installed, so I let them in, found some HP updates, including an update to the PC's flash BIOS, so I let them in, scrubbed the whole thing with Adaware, finding only some cookies and the usual WildTangent garbage, scrubbed the whole thing with Spybot, finding very little to complain about.   If he had decent backups of his files, I'd have felt more confident in reloading the hard drive from scratch, but I think the machine is now as clean as it'll get.    I was impressed that Norton 360 Premier is more than just an antivirus for the money.   It also did a registry clean-up, a disk optimization and even made off-site (via the Internet) backups of something (his data files?).  If it chose wisely what it backed up, that makes it a pretty good deal for what I think amounts to about $35/year.

But I've gotten off the topic of this Blog entry:   "How not to sell to me".   From http://www.netezza.com/testdrive/ comes yet another approach to offend my sense of what I want from an ad:

Get meaningful, actionable analysis faster than you thought possible.

We'll tell you about the low price point later. Right now, just stand back and

watch Netezza TwinFin™ perform!

The good news for the marketeers is that I was only visiting the web site because the product name intrigued me enough that I wanted to know what it was.   I learned only that it is some kind of data warehouse server of unspecified capacity and unspecified price point, but they'll loan me one to try if I'll just fill out their lead-collection form.   All will be revealed to me later.    No thanks.   I was especially unimpressed that they had a link on the site that was supposed to take me to a video about the product, but just dumped me back at the promo page for the free loaner unit.  And don't get me started about the word "actionable"!

Drew

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