It used to be for the free merchandise that people went there. Now it's because people are just mental.

Back in the early 90's my father used to go to CeBit wearing a tidy suit with a pocket full of fake business cards. You'd be surprised at the stuff he screwed out of people by looking the part. That was why people went. Not to look at the new products, which were mainly crap.

Now it is Stevie B's sweaty ape-like figure prancing across the stage link a baboon with hemorrhoids after a vindaloo which drooling dropped mouths foam at the prospect of another half finished fad that probably won't sell because someone will sue them off the planet for it being round or something within the week.

Actually the point of chip and pin is to move the liability of the transaction from the bank to the card holder. It gives the banks plausible deniability when it comes to fraud claims. It is however marketed differently.

In the UK, we have to suffer chip and pin which is just as flawed. The pin is copied to the device and validated there rather than hashed and sent off for a Boolean "yes/no" answer. So the chip and pin reader at any point in time may have active memory which references the card id and the pin number. Utterly stupid.

Just sell the thing then. Seriously. There's some good beer money locked up in that tablet that's "not quite right" for you. All tablets are "not quite right" so just use the damn laptop :)

That is a good thing. They don't tie their implementation to their external contracts and API. That's application architecture 101. Exposing SQL is death by coupling.

Yes I understand that. We have run our large financial sector web application with *zero* downtime for over 7 years. This is all down to application architecture and failure planning and mitigation rather than spending money on Oracle. We have half of the service model hosts running on a SQL 2005 cluster and half on SQL 2008 R2. We can upgrade/swap each of these out with zero downtime at the *application level*.

Yeah sorry. Here you go: win+d and I'm back to my desktop with visual studio and SQL management studio doing 'real work' as you call it. Same with office. Oh and back to JIRA: no alt tabbing to the window: winkey then type jira and I'm there. Need both? Jira (via ie) gets docked on the right of my second monitor. Its like unity on Ubuntu but not shit.

Certainly not a shill. I mean you could be a paid shill from apple couldn't you? I just rather like it because for once they managed to make windows work properly. I've been plagued for years with shit that doesn't work from Microsoft. This just ain't one of those things, which to be honest surprises the crap out of me. CP was a turd but RTM with the recent app updates is spot on. Bear in mind I'm running it on proper kit (Sony 22" AIO touch screen).

Ah yes where they replaced integration incompatibility with service contract versioning problems and monolithic broker based messaging instead!

I've been through both phases as a solution architect - same turd rolled in different glitter.

This is the typical opinion here I know, but it's all like the doomsayer with the board that reads "the end of the world is nigh" just because it's different. You do a disservice to everyone.

For those of us who have actually used Windows 8 for a bit (i.e. installed it rather than watched someone whinge about it on youtube), you will find a "singularity moment" where you go "holy shit I get this now". It's somewhere between when you're listening to a piece of music you flick open the charms bar and sent it straight to your TV (and it actually fucking works without editing a single config file!) and when it tells you your appointment on the start screen (that you entered on your phone about a minute before) without something modal poking you in the eyeball from the system tray or dredging through a folder of "sync conflicts" trying to find out what happened.

Sorry but it does work, it works wonderfully and is a beautiful thing. If you give it a chance that is...

I think you are confused. The only 99% uptime that Oracle gets are their lawyers, and the other 1% is spent upside down in their coffins.

I wish to back up your point here - my company uses several kludged together bits of crap that sit on salesforce. They regularly fall over and leave people SOL. Even the helpdesk runs off it, which usually means when the EMEA cluster goes bang, we can't take support calls. The only advantage being that a couple of years ago, everyone's holiday entitlement was wiped out, which was nice as we had to tell the company what it was :)

From experience (I used to work for a well known SaaS provider but left when I saw what an absolute state it was all in), the teenager who lives next door to you and plays WoW on his infested laptop is less likely to fuck up then an average SaaS provider. As per any business, their objective is to maximise profit and to do this, they take seriously big risks and hope the hell the string and sticky tape doesn't go snap. When it does, you have no recourse as there are contracts to protect the profit-mongering. Using a "service provider" as you call them is akin to shutting your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears and taking a whiz.

If you do your own IT in house, you have control over the standards and where your standards are implemented.

Salesforce don't like the whole pay for it once and keep it model. They like the pay once a month (SaaS) model. They are also pretty shitty at giving data back when you want it. You can have it but it's a bastard to get it out.

BYOD + Salesforce is a wet dream for them which is why they're spinning it like this.

Unfortunately, a blanket statement here: It's just a 100% fucking retarded model that needs to go to hell.

You no longer have control over your data (lock in, data protection, availability, regulatory requirements).

You can't access it reliably *all of the time* (network issues, "cloud" outages).

You don't always know where your data is (Data protection issues).

You purchase purely a portal device rather than a general purpose computer (control, availability).

Your support sucks (availability).

At the end of the day, your cost cutting results in loss of your data, poor availability, data protection issues and legal exposure. Also do you want your clap-infested users' devices plugged into your network, authenticating against your web applications? Are you sure your business can handle all that?

I'd take Windows 8 (not RT) with local storage over the above any day and put it in a corporate environment. Hell, I'd even buy an Oracle license over it.

I'd upvote you if I could, but I can't. It really annoys me how the hell religious folk twist and bend words to their own meaning when it's clear what the intent is. It's almost as if being religious entitles you to misinterpret stuff and spin it towards your religion. That in itself puts me off the concept (bar from the fact it's bollocks). Religion enables the worst self-righteous individuals to push their views with a label to the detriment of all.