On that note, let’s say that you are having a Sunday afternoon picnic with your child. The weather’s good, you’ve been running around and playing – but now it’s time for lunch. You open up the cooler, only to discover that you’ve left a couple of the sandwiches in the car. The car’s just a few yards away, so you quickly run to grab the sandwiches.

And in a split second, you look back to see that your child is gone. You catch a black sedan speeding away and you are barely able to catch the license plate. Because you caught that license plate, police are able to search a giant database of plate captures and track the movements of the kidnapper.

A classic question: What is more important, public safety or personal freedom? What are you willing to sacrifice? Let us know in the comments.

Ok, I know this whole scenario seems a little bit Without A Trace or Lifetime movie-esque, but the point is that police were able to use an ever-expanding database of data culled from license plate snapshots in order to generate real-time location information. That’s a reality, and it’s happening in our nation’s capital, among other places.

The Washington Post is reporting that police in D.C. are beefing up the area covered by license plate cameras. More than 250 cameras in D.C. and its suburbs are constantly hard at work, grabbing license plate numbers and sticking them into databases. The police aren’t exactly doing this quietly, but it’s being done with “virtually no public debate.”

The highest concentration of these plate readers in the entire nation exists in D.C. (one reader per square mile), so that means that District police are building the biggest location database based on license plates in the whole country.

Let’s take a brief look at these license plate readers.

First, these are apparently different types of cameras than the cameras cities have been affixing near stoplights and other places to catch people running red lights or speeding – the “here’s a ticket 2 weeks later in the mail” cameras.

These plate readers cost about $20,000 each and can snatch images of numbers and letters on cars traveling nearly 150 mph and across four lanes of traffic. These plate readers in D.C. take 1,800 images per minute, every one of which is stored in a database.

Basically, these plate readers have made it possible for police to track everyone’s movements as they move across the city.

These plate readers and the subsequent database of image captures has tipped the privacy concerns of some – notably the American Civil Liberties Union. One of their main concerns is naturally the privacy implications.

In the District, laws are in place that limit the amount of time that surveillance camera footage can be kept. The images must be dumped after 10 days, unless there is an actual investigatory reason to keep them. But right now, there is nothing keeping data from the plate readers from being stored for years.

The ACLU says that this database is storing the location data of innocent people. And they are right. The plate readers are casting an all-inclusive net, grabbing license plate numbers indiscriminately.

Clearly this technology is rapidly approaching the point where it could be used to reconstruct the entire movements of any individual vehicle. As we have argued in the context of GPS tracking that level of intrusion on private life is something that the police should not be able to engage in without a warrant.

Let’s think back to the slightly-stylized child abduction scene from the beginning of this article. Maybe that seems a bit far-fetched, but the reality of the situation is that the plate reader database has helped police. According to the D.C. police department, they make an arrest a day with the help of the plate readers. In a four month period this year, they also found 51 stolen cars.

And although our child abduction story above might seem unrealistic, the possibilities are there for the plate readers to help in truly significant ways. Police could track cars to and from murder scenes or use it to identify players in organized crime circles like sex trafficking – by logging which cars travel between certain locations.

But the fact that the technology is beneficial or could be beneficial in terms of law enforcement does not assuage concerns of a “surveillance society” becoming the norm in the U.S. It’s a classic argument that pits personal liberties against security and safety. Just how much of your freedom are you able to give up to feel safer? This is a crucial debate that we’ve seen play out most recently after 9/11 with the Patriot Act.

The ACLU channels Minority Report to discuss preemptive law enforcement:

Of course, if the police track all of us all the time, there is no doubt that will help to solve some crimes — just as it would no doubt help solve some crimes if they could read everybody’s e-mail and install cameras in everybody’s homes. But in a free society, we don’t let the police watch over us just because we might do something wrong. That is not the balance struck by our Constitution and is not the balance we should strike in our policymaking.

Obviously, the plate readers are a valuable tool for the police, and there are an abundance of situations where one could imagine the searchable database of plate captures to be extremely useful. But are those plate readers building up a database that’s just a little too full of innocent people’s location information for your liking?

If this kind of thing is to proliferate (both in D.C. and across the country), it is argued that it needs to see the light of day. Basically, society should have time to debate its merits and discuss their concerns. “The police should not be able to run out and buy a new technology and put it in place before anybody realizes what’s going on,” says Jay Stanley of the ACLU’s Privacy and Technology Program.

What do you think about the expansion of the plate reader technology? Do the benefits outweigh the privacy and personal freedom concerns? Or is this an example of big brother yielding too much power with the ability to catalog this data without warrants? Let us know in the comments.

Note, I am only using Oracle as an example here because the pricing of Amazon RDS for Oracle Database is public. This post intends to make no judgments on Amazon or Oracle’s price points whatsoever.

Pay-per-use software pricing limited to entry level product
Amazon RDS for Oracle Database offers two price models, “License Included” or “Bring Your Own License (BYOL)”. The License Included metric is fancy terminology for pay-per-usage, and includes the cost of the software, including Oracle Database, underlying hardware resources and Amazon RDS management.

Three editions of Oracle Database are offered by Amazon, Standard Edition One (SE1), Standard Edition (SE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), listed in order of lowest to highest functionality.

It’s important to note that pay-per-use pricing is only offered on the lowest function edition, namely, Oracle Database SE1. This should not be a surprise as Oracle, like other established vendors, is still experimenting with pay-per-usage pricing models. Customers can also run Standard Edition One using a BYOL model. This fact, along with Oracle’s list pricing, helps us do some quick and interesting calculations.

Oracle Database SE1 software price-per-hour ranges between $0.05 to $0.80
The License Included and BYOL prices both include the cost of the underlying hardware resources, OS and Amazon RDS management. The only difference between the two options is the price of the Oracle Database software license.

This allows us to calculate the per hour cost of Oracle Database Standard Edition One as follows:

The Oracle list price for Oracle Database SE1 is $5,800 plus 22 percent, or $1,276 for software update, support and maintenance. Like most enterprise software, customers could expect a discount between 25 to 85 percent. For lower priced software like Oracle Database SE1, let’s assume a 50 percent discount. Although, most customers buying Oracle software are encouraged to enter into Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs) which frequently offer discounts at the higher end of the spectrum.

All told, Oracle Database SE1 after a 50 percent discount would cost a customer $3,538 (($5,800 + $1,276) x 50%) for 1 year or $4,814 ($5,800 + $1,276 + $1,276 + $1,276) x 50%) for 3 years on a single socket quad core machine like this low end Dell server. Note that Oracle doesn’t use their typical processor core factor pricing methodology for products identified as Standard Edition or Standard Edition One as they are targeted at lower performance servers.

A single socket quad core machine would offer the performance of somewhere between the Amazon “Double Extra Large DB Instance” and the “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance”.

Consider the long term costs of per-per-usage

Using “Double Extra Large DB Instance” pricing, with our calculated cost an Oracle Database SE1 software license on Amazon of $0.40/hr, we can calculate a 1 year cost of $3,504 and a 3 year cost of $10,512. These figures represent a 1 percent lower and 118 % higher cost of using Amazon’s per-per-usage offering versus licensing Oracle Database SE1 through Oracle for on premises deployment or a BYOL for deployment on Amazon RDS.

There are obviously multiple caveats to consider, like the ability to get lower or higher discounts from Oracle, or comparing with the “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” price point.

A customer that is unable to get a 50 percent discount from Oracle could save licensing costs by using Amazon’s pay-per-usage offering for Oracle Database SE1. For instance, with only a 25 percent discount from Oracle, the customer could save up to 34 percent on a 1 year basis, but stands to pay an extra 46 percent a 3 year basis.

Comparing the cost of Oracle Database SE1 using traditional licensing on premises with Amazon’s pricing through RDS, it appears that customers should look hard at Amazon’s per-per-usage offering for up to a 1 year term, but stick with Oracle’s traditional pricing model if the software is going to be used for the typical 3 to 5 year period that companies like to amortize costs over.

The obvious rebuttal to the above calculations would be that a customer electing for a pay-per-usage model would not necessarily run for 24 hours a day for a full year. While this is true, buyers should understand the long term cost implications before making short term decisions.

Originally published on rand($thoughts);

Though understandably frustrated, Ellison is optimistic about the deal being approved. He conveyed this to his audience in a speech at a Churchill Club event in San Jose last night.

If money is really being lost at the rate Ellison says, you have to think he is tapping his foot quite rapidly. This is after all a $7.4 billion deal, and $100 million a month is not exactly small potatoes.

The deal was announced back in April. Oracle would acquire Sun for $7.4 billion at a rate of $9.50 per share in cash. The two companies have been long-term partners, for over 20 years. The acquisition was originally expected to close sometime in the summer, and it was unanimously approved by Sun’s board of directors, but they’re still waiting on the EU to approve it.

The longer it takes to get the deal approved (assuming it does eventually get approved), the more jobs could be in jeopardy. "Analysts have predicted Oracle will have to make major cuts in Sun’s workforce and spending, to achieve its goal of increasing operating profit from Sun’s business," notes Brandon Bailey at Mercury News. "Some analysts have said an extended delay could lead Oracle to cut more deeply, since uncertainty over Sun’s future may be driving more customers to rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM."

The EU is worried that Oracle acquiring MySQL would discourage competition, but Ellison maintains that it would do no such thing. He says that Oracle has no intention of spinning that unit off, which would greatly improve the chances of getting the deal approved.

The EU says that it may take until January to complete its review of the deal. If Sun keeps losing money at the same rate, the deal may look significantly soured.

Today, Yahoo announced a new feature for YQL, and that is the Insert/Update/Delete feature. A spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews this extends the platform by adding “write" capability to its capabilities, including YQL Open Data Tables and Execute."

If you’re interested in seeing some examples of how the new feature can be utilized, Yahoo has a blog post up about it that shows some things it can do.

One thing it can be used for is to bring some Twitter integration to your blog. "This enables YQL’s Open Data Tables to insert new Twitter status messages, not just list them; to add new comments to a blog, as well as read them; to store data in a remote database; to INSERT INTO internet," says Jonathan Trevor of the YQL Team.

"If you’ve developed some Open Data Tables already and the source supports some type of update, you might want to take this opportunity to go back and add the capability in," he says.

Documentation is available here for developers. To get a better understanding of what you can do, keep an eye on Yahoo’s developer blog. Besides the aforementioned post, Trevor says more examples and demos will be covered in the coming weeks.

Let’s hope Marten and team can help Sun realize that there is value in software…good software, not the stuff that was 5th in class, and remains so after open sourcing it.

Oracle also announced it will acquire BEA for $8.5 Bil, a higher price than Larry rejected a little while back. The deal also represents 8% of Oracle’s current market cap (~$109 bil).

The software industry continues to consolidate. Next question…When will Oracle buy Sun?

Comments

It is the frame of thinking which allows them to make the most money (don’t spam unless you do it with us and give us insider information on your business). If you are afraid of the consequences then you become risk adverse. But you are rarely going to do anything great if you let fear control your actions. It is an epiphany the day you realize that you created enough value that the search engines need you more than you need them.

Why does the media like to paint a wall between editorial and content when there is none?

Why is Matt Mullenweg so afraid of spam after he stepped his game up a level above anything I would consider doing? Because he feels he has to be for his credibility, especially after botching it up badly in the past.

As a recruiting technique the US government holds pizza parties with 13 year old children, getting them to play video games where the content is about killing people.

“We want kids to come into the Army and feel like they’ve already been there,” said Col. Casey Wardynski, who as director of the Army’s office of economic and manpower analysis came up with the idea. “A game is like a team effort, and the Army is very much a team effort. By playing an online, multiplayer game, you can get the feel of being in the Army.” – The Washington Post

Yet politicians talk about protecting the children online. Do you notice a moral disconnect here?

If you look at a tag cloud of presidential speeches you won’t just find issues that the population find important. You will find some of them scattered in to make the rest of the sales pitch sound legitimate, but you will also find ample amounts of bogus Orwellian language like death tax.

There is no need to repeat what is actually true and believed. Power sources only repeat things because

• they are untrue or misrepresented
• they set a frame of thinking to the benefit of the speaker
• they pull focus from other issues

Why do authority sources hate the idea of openly selling authority? Because if they openly endorsed it then they might not be able to do it themselves, and people openly and honestly selling influence create more value in richer conversations.

Value systems only exist in our minds. The value of asking for feedback is not just in the chance that people give you a better idea, but also their experience and bonding with the idea which turns the feedback giver into a person who is emotionally connected to your brand… which is especially true if you listen to their feedback. The very ability to influence Digg and Wikipedia directly are what make their brands so powerful.

When language is a commodity that is targeted, bought, sold, and repositioned against ever-shifting arbitrary quality guidelines what could be more valuable than asking influential people what words / tags / ideas they relate you to and how you could do a better job of it?

Comments

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Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
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It’s as if he was focusing on the small things (“Why RSS?”) rather than looking at the bigger picture of where all this is going.

It’s not about building an easier onramp to Google Base.

Well, it is. But, again, that’s the small stuff.

GData is the realization of the future that Adam Bosworth spoke about at the 2004 MySQL Users Conference.

It just so happened that I re-listened to his talk a several weeks ago during a walk to the bank. Hearing it for the second time, I was much more receptive to his ideas about creating a simple and open replacement for all the proprietary communications protocols currently in use by database vendors. By using HTTP and RSS or Atom, one could get 80% of the needed functionality while also greatly simplifying how things work.

The benefit is that you’d have a single API that could be used to query, update, and index structured data on the web–anywhere on the web. It’s a pretty powerful vision and something I didn’t expect to see for a couple more years.

Give his talk a listen and tell me if you don’t see Adam’s fingerprints all over GData. It’s time well spent if you care about this stuff.

Download MP3 here.

The next logical questions, for me at least, are:

1. Will MySQL add native GData support to the server anytime soon?

2. Should Yahoo begin to enable a GData API on our data stores?

I hope the answer to #1 is “yes, they should” and suspect the answer to #2 is “probably–at least for some of them.”

Thoughts?

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

The new pairing is aimed toward companies developing telecommunications and networking equipment, avionics, consumer electronics, industrial controllers and other intelligent devices.

Accelerated Technology’s Nucleus product family includes implementations for C/C++, micro-ITRON and POSIX, software design tools, middleware, Eclipse-based development tools, and software for evaluation, test and verification.

The eXtremeDB database paired up with RTOS is used for critical data management and includes transactions, concurrent access, High Availability and a high-level data definition language. The company says the database maintains a very small code footprint (as little as 50K). It supports varied data and query types, an optional SQL API, and a self-diagnostic API designed to catch programming errors.

“The Nucleus RTOS and eXtremeDB share the virtues of real-time responsiveness, a must’ for embedded systems to meet everyday demands; portability, to leverage the value of source code by enabling wide re-use; and minimal memory and CPU footprint, which lends a manufacturing cost advantage,” said Glen Johnson, product marketing manager at Accelerated Technology.

“With the Nucleus RTOS, Accelerated Technology enables developers to address application complexity with a scalable and flexible OS infrastructure-including file systems, network communications and GUI-to accommodate the most demanding real-time tasks,” said Steve Graves, McObject co-founder and CEO.

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The government designed the program to help screen passengers who could pose a possible security risk. The problem many had with the commercial database side is who has access to information and what they might do with it. The Secure Flight program will now be based on information passengers and airlines provide when the airline ticket is purchased.

“Airlines will provide us with the information and we’ll do the check against the ‘no fly’ list,” Darrin Kayser, a TSA spokesman, told Reuters.

The Reuters story went on to mention the questions raised by politicians and privacy groups alike regarding why the government might need access to all that commercial information.

The problem doesn’t go away though as now the airlines will be required to get more information during the ticketing process and there are privacy questions regarding those as well. According to the Reuters story, airlines are already complaining because they have little money now and they will be forced to upgrade a lot of software and other items in order to make the changes.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

That was not such a good decision, but one you did not care about until you decided to tackle your first mail merge. Instead of getting what you expected to get, you got all variations of address and telephone number formats, an incredible and astounding assortment of confusingly mixed usage of upper and lower case characters and fields with unusual amounts of white space that you’ve finally figured out is due to excessive use of the space bar. The data looks cluttered, inconsistent, and worst of all, unprofessional.

You don’t have time to go back into every record and manually fix these annoying inconsistencies, nor do you want to pay your staff to do this when they have so many other things to do. But you’ve got to get your promotion going so money can start arriving in your business checking account. Now what do you do?

There is a way you can go in and clean up these types of data messes and it won’t involve firing the employees who caused the problems in the first place! Nor will you have to become proficient at database programming. As with any good business problem, there’s a software solution available that you can use instead.

It’s called DataPipe and it will clean up these and other types of database errors faster and less expensively than you can do it manually or by using other software tools. It does not matter which standard ODBC or OLE DB you are using. Just use its drivers to connect to DataPipe. From there, it’s a matter of selecting the database and query or table you need to work on. Then sit back and watch as it works its magic in record time.

Even if you use packaged customer relationship management software at your business – products like Goldmine, ACT!, Epiphany and others – you still can use DataPipe.

DataPipe uses basic search and replace functions to tweak the text that is stored in your databases. Whether you know exactly the text you want modified, want to modify text that sounds like something specific, want to search for wildcards or particular patterns, or want to use fuzzy logic to help find typos, your data will benefit when you use DataPipe.

And best of all, you won’t have to contact your programmer and negotiate a costly change order when you need to use a different format for your date fields, or when you need to swap the order of last and first names. But you can if this is what you need. You or your programmer can create custom filters using industry standard scripting languages.

DataPipe requires Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP or 2003, a hard disk with 15 MB free disk space and 64 MB RAM. It also requires SQL Server, Access, Informix, Sybase, DB2, Oracle, MySQL, DBF, FoxPro, FileMaker Pro, Excel Spreadsheets or any OLE DB/ODBC compliant database.

Isn’t it time your data look and feel more consistent, more professional, and perhaps even more impressive? When you run a business, you need all the help you can get. And in today’s competitive business climate, first impressions make the biggest impression. And unfortunately, sometimes first impressions are the key “make or break” determining factor. So make sure your first impressions count.

Cavyl Stewart is the author of “135 Hot Tech Tips for Small
Business Owners.” To Download your free copy, just visit:

http://www.find-small-business-software.com/135_tips.php