Say you have a very famous grandfather.

Now say you've gone into the 'family business', but you're not nearly as famous as he is.

Now say you'd like some publicity.

Do you:

• a) mope that nobody ever pays attention to anything you do
• b) name drop the hell out of your grandfather so people will at least tune in

In the 70s damned near everybody knew who Jacques Cousteau was. The kids born recently likely have no idea.

But if you can get the press to invoke your famous grandfather to get you a little PR for your stuff ... well, such is modern life.

He's media whoring because he has his grandfather's name.

When you need to keep up the PR campaign, I'd say it's indispensable.

This whole thing is at least 25% PR stunt, as much as 100% depending on your cynicism.

And, the reality is, if you want people to pay attention to you these days, you pretty much do it via these things.

And since people have shorter attention spans, if you didn't remind them you were still there ... they'd forget entirely by day 2.

Why ever for? He's advocating for finding ways to do it better. You think he should hobble himself with the best of 1970s technology?

Look, this is a PR stunt, and a press release designed to drive awareness to him. Let's not suddenly start acting like he needs to recreate the exact same conditions to be able to say he stayed down longer than his very famous grandfather.

You have to remember what this is before you start arguing the semantics of it. Because there's not a lot of point or value in doing that once you remember that this is mostly a stunt, with some actual attempts to do some research.

At the end of the day, he's saying "I will do this longer than my grandfather did, but with newer technology -- and if people didn't mention my grandfather, nobody would even cover this". Because he's nowhere near as famous as his grandfather was in his day.

This is as much about awareness (and probably fund raising) as it is the specifics of the 'record'.

This is the headline:

Fabien Cousteau Takes Plunge To Beat Grandfather's Underwater Record

What is your source of confusion?

It's not a world record, it's longer than Jacques Cousteau did it.

Compared to Oracle, I'm sure Micros were lightweights when it came to gouging their customers.

Hmmmm ... so, are customers safer with an incompetent company, or a malicious and greedy company?

It's so hard to keep track these days.

I'm sure this also gets Oracle access to all of that tasty data, which they can monetize, sell, or otherwise mis-handle.

I also predict a lot of smaller businesses getting completely gouged by their new overlords on their licensing costs. What do you mean I need to buy a Solaris server with a 10 year service plan to get to my existing data?

Shortly after they hire editors who can actually write in the English language, which will be slightly before we all decide that Beta is awesome, which will then lead to hell freezing over.

Come on, your UID is low enough to know that dupes are an integral part of the Slashdot experience. :-P

In Soviet Russia, Slashdot dupes you.

Riiiiight. You should try leaving your mom's basement sometime.

My Mom doesn't have a basement, you insensitive clod.

LOL ... it probably failed because it didn't have enough glitter.

I was thinking Wild Wild West sorta contraptions

Wouldn't the Wild Wild West stuff actually be steampunk?

I seem to remember all sorts of steam and brass and the like.

That, or you've lost track of how to use google. Because for me, it's the first search result.

It's most certainly defined in the Urban Dictionary.

If you deploy new software where it does not improve the user experience, then it's valid for the userbase to punish that move to a reasonable extent.

This is what happens when you do this to your users instead of for your users.

I have seen instances of IT saying "we're switching to this because it's cheaper/easier for us", and which left the business users completely screwed because IT didn't bother to find out how those systems were used, what depended on them, and what the business needs were.

This sounds like it was deployed pretty poorly.

And, for those of us who have worked in regulated industries ... how someone in law enforcement could do something like this is staggering.

This sounds like an epic fail of UAT and actually being sure your software works as the vendor claims.

Bees, however, are everywhere.

Increasingly, less so.