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June 30, 2010 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Geniuses and kudos

Editors' Choice Article
w00te on STL Algorithms

Marketing is Dead
Or maybe it should be

More News and Notes
Top of the third: Google, 1, Viacom 0

Nata's Corner
Cookies, texting and interviewing geeks

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through June 26

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Geniuses: Experts Exchange has five members who have reached the 1,000,000 point mark in a single zone. Leading the parade is dariusg, who earned his second Genius certificate, in Windows 2003 Server. Also on board is our old friend, andyalder, who joined EE on 09/09/99, and has earned his first Genius t-shirt in Computer Servers. Joining them are teylyn in Microsoft Excel, bportlock in PHP Scripting Language and scrathcyboyin Miscellaneous Software. Congratulations to all!

Milestones:

• matthewspatrick has earned 3 million points in each of two zones (Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access). Only six other members have reached that level, and his seven Genius certificates puts him in a tie for third place for the most in a career.
• acperkins has earned over 8,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange in May, 2001.
• garycase and DatabaseMX both reached the 7,000,000 point level. DatabaseMX also went over 7,000,000 points in the Microsoft Access zone.
• rrjegan17 has been awarded over 5,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange in December 2008.
• Infinity08 has earned 2,000,000 points in both the C++ and C Programming zones. Only 19 members of EE have done that.

Kudos: We love trial members like kristenbednarz, who respond to the posts made by the Experts, and who close their questions fairly, but mostly because they leave messages for people like matthewspatrick and harfang: "I signed up as a trial member of experts-exchange yesterday. I had two very time sensitive questions that I needed help on and received thorough answers on both of them in a very timely manner. I was skeptical before signing up becasue you never know how/if these things will work but I am definitely going to join as a member now. Thanks again I wish I would have known about this site sooner!!"

digitap had a request in Community Support, and in the course of the discussion with our newest Mod, thermoduric, on why he participates at EE: "What I think I like best about EE is what it gives me that I don't get with my current job. I spend countless hours learning new systems. Clients put me in front of a system that they don't have support for and I read through a manual and fix outstanding issues. I don't get much kudos from that by way of the client or my boss. However, when I've answered a question and I get awarded points, it's quite a feeling to see Good Answer! sitting in my Inbox. And the certifications in zones is quite fun too! I just achieved Master in another zone...that's four zones and another T-Shirt...sigh, I'm such a nerd. My wife found out that I get a shirt for each cert for each zone and went crazy..."I'm not going to have a million of those stupid shirts lying around!""

Speaking of shirts, kudos to alanhardisty and nutsch who offered to donate the value of shirts to charity. The boss is out of town, but EE and the Admins are working on it.

alanhardisty also earned some good will by answering jgillfeather's question about non-delivery reports: "Mate, you're a life-saver, many thanks, 500 points, and sleep well knowing you've made somone's day... Alan Hardisty Saved My Project!"

CNTUCKER had an issue with an Exchange server that had been interrupted by a storm, and demazter helped him get it back on line: "demazter stuck with me through the whole ordeal. He / She is CLEARLY an expert. The entire solution was the troubleshooting and diagnosis throughout the thread. Thank you again."

One way to make sure you get an answer to your question is to ask it where angelIII can see it. That's what MSFanboy did with his T-SQL Stored Procedure issue: "Thanks a bunch. EE was the only forum helping me with that :) I think about renewing my membership running out in July."

nmolliconi had a problem with counting records that was right in matthewspatrick's wheelhouse, since he had written an article on the subject: "If I could give you more points than 500 I would. Thanks for you patience and explanation/education on Aceess."

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Tips From the Moderators

Posting Email Addresses in Questions

Folks, the Moderators would like to remind you that posting your email address in a question so that a discussion about the question can take place offsite is not only not allowed, it's not a good idea.

We don't allow it because it gives the Expert communicating via email an unfair advantage over any other Experts participating. Additionally, the discussion that leads to the eventual solution has a ton of value to Experts Exchange and we don't want that discussion to occur out of the view of anyone else.

It's also not a good idea to post an email address publicly because Experts Exchange questions are fully visible to search engines who will index the email address along with everything else. If you think your spam problem is bad now, just wait to see what awaits you if you start dropping your email address around.

That being said, nothing prohibits you from putting your email address, phone number, fax number, or whatever other personal information you wish in your profile. Many Experts do post a contact method in their profile and do respond to private messages about their involvment with Experts Exchange.

Good luck and post safely!

Editors' Choice Articles

The following article has been designated as Editors' Choice by the Page Editors. For additional information on Articles and making sure your masterpiece is up to EE's publishing standards, check out the Article Guidelines and Article Tips zone.

An Introduction to STL Algorithms
by w00te:

Marketing is Dead

An editor by trade, a writer by avocation and an Expert by some cosmic practical joke, ericpete puts together the newsletter for Experts Exchange.

A few weeks back, we were handed (okay, actually, we picked it up out of a box and asked if we could borrow it, and were told we could have it) a copy of Rework, written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals, a software development company mostly located in Chicago.

We'd pay for it, if only for the chapter (all of a couple of pages) that says "Marketing is not a department."

Over the years, we've developed a pretty low opinion of anything having to do with the marketing "industry"; Rework explains why, in the chapter that discusses press releases. We used to get literally hundreds every day, and I don't think I ever got a follow-up telephone call on any of them; they were the pre-Internet version of spam, and we measured it by the pound (we recycled paper). My inbox -- the domain's email addresses for all but two people come to me -- gets literally hundreds of emails daily that aren't spam in the traditional sense, even though we sold the papers over a decade ago, all of it earnest descriptions of the newest revolutionary widget or the success that some local organization in Pennsylvania has had at raising funds for a new coat of paint for the local park's playground equipment.

Most of the people who send out that email (like their predecessors did) know nothing about us. They don't know that we ran -- until the end of 1997 -- a couple of little weekly newspapers that covered a rural county in California. They don't care that their item has nothing to do with the vast majority of the people here. They know they have a list of addresses, and it's their function to ensure that like it or not, we're going to get something from them every day or so, as if saying the same things over and over will finally make us cave in and actually publish something.

We cannot imagine that the tactic has ever been particularly successful for anyone at any time. Yet marketing people insist on killing trees and contributing to entropy day after day, doing the same things their colleagues (and competitors) do, like so many lemmings to the sea of "trying something".

My colleague and friend Hank (name changed to protect the intelligent) works in a marketing department that does almost no real marketing, and what it does do, it does (in his words) crappily. Among his company's sins:

• No public relations; no working with working with writers of magazines, blogs and newspapers to get the word out. "When someone else tells your story," he says, "you win big."
• No advertising program. "It's all over the place. No coordinated campaign is in place." He says that you need a message that is clear, and then it needs to be delivered consistently at every opportunity, from the big media blitzes to the "message on hold". And it needs to be tracked.
• Stoopid polls (his spelling is fine; he just hates them). Marketers, he says, tend to ask questions that get them the answers they want. We saw some survey results recently that said that 73 per cent of a company's customers wanted to see some product -- but there is no indication that anyone would actually buy or use it.
• Lousy marketing mix. His company does email blasts, some telemarketing and some mailers -- but there's nothing to get new customers. Hank's boss doesn't think he gets his bang for the buck with more traditional advertising (if you can call Google ads "traditional"), but we've spent enough time in the business to know that if you don't promote regularly, you might as well have no budget at all.

The main thing, he says, is to be consistent, all the way down to the people answering the telephone. When you go to McDonalds, you get 'Would you like to try a mocha.' At our place you get, 'This is Suzie. Can I help you?' No message, no positioning, nothing."

We've seen worse. Hank works for a company that has made an artform out of listening to its customers, and more importantly, staying ahead of them (something the 37signals folks would be thrilled to see). So even if the company's marketing department doesn't do all the things marketing departments should do, it at least has the good sense to make sure that when its customers decide to move into a new technology, those customers know who has the expertise to help them. That's a huge edge when they're in an industry that changes almost daily.

And that gets back to what Fried and Hansson are saying in their book. Marketing isn't something one department does; it's what the whole company does. It isn't about selling something to people who may or may not want it; it's about delivering to them what they do want, efficiently, at a reasonable cost, with a minimal amount of extraneous work on their part. It isn't about it being the sales department or the guy at the counter doing what it takes; it's about the engineering staff or the cook doing his job. It isn't about making every single customer happy; it's about making enough customers so happy that they keep buying the products and services you're selling from you.

And that's how marketers are killing marketing. Not every "new" idea is a good one; actually, a lot of them suck, and most aren't really new -- they've just not been tried at this company. They're almost always something that someone thinks people might want, but there's rarely any outreach to customers -- just some of those stoooooopid surveys Hank talks about. And that business of listening to customers, so central to what Rework is all about? Here's what Fried and Hansson say:

Most marketing departments don't do that; instead, they want to appease everyone. They want all customers to only buy from their company, so what starts out as a nice little program gets overloaded with features, or a product list rivals the September issue of Vogue, only without the photos and with as much disjointed and even contradictory information as the US tax code.

What we're left with is a cell phone that mostly works, or software that requires three DVDs to install, or not quite enough shirts in your size because the stats say they won't sell them all. And those of us who are buying will be buying from someone else.

More News and Notes

Top of the third: Google, 1, Viacom 0: Yogi Berra said that "it ain't over 'til it's over", and that will certainly be true with the dustup between Viacom -- the $20.7 billion cable and entertainment company dedicated to protecting the value of its stock creative work of artists -- and Google -- the $151 billion search company dedicated to protecting the value of its stock organizing the world's information such that the world is a free and open society. In case you missed it, Viacom is mad that YouTube -- before it became a part of Google -- let people (nay, encouraged people) to upload clips and even full episodes of Viacom controlled programs. That those programs became more successful because people shared them is irrelevant, according to Viacom; the fact (in Viacom's opinion) is that Google (see: deep pockets) stole Viacom's property, which Viacom says is worth $1 billion, or just under five per cent of Viacom's value, and Viacom shared YouTube's dirty laundry as evidence.

For its part, Google says that Viacom is complaining about things it did itself (see page 35) -- notably uploading videos of its own programs as if they were stolen. The judge in the case agreed with Google that YouTube had complied with the law, and that Viacom didn't really have a case. Viacom, of course, will appeal.

And on the subject of whiny companies, Intel and NVIDIA traded shots over clock speeds with both of them losing. Intel wrote a paper saying that while NVIDIA's chips are faster, Intel's are getting closer; NVIDIA responded by not being completely candid about the tests Intel had run, when all they had to do was shut up.

Just what we need: More access to the Internet in Russia.

How to fix the problem of your iPhone dropping calls: hold it correctly, of course. Now why didn't we think of that? Oh, right... no instruction book. There are other complaints too. Switching to Google Phone apparently won't help. Also, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery, the ongoing BP Twitter feed is now joined by one for AT&T and the iPhone 4M. Our favorite so far: "AT&T and Apple to offer free classes on how to hold your new iPhone4. Yoga experience a plus." The OS has already been hacked.

And lest we forget... the Gulf of Mexico isn't the only one, and British, Norwegian and Danish officials are worried about another disaster, and if they're not, so should US officials.

Annals In The History Of Bad Customer Service: This is in our backyard, so it really jumped out at us: the widow of a Marine killed in Afghanistan is getting no sympathy from Verizon.

Do you think we should tell them? The New York Times had a fascinating series on anosognosia -- the condition best described as someone who is so clueless they don't even realize how clueless they are. Parts two (dealing with the neurological condition), three (about President Woodrow Wilson, who was a fan of limericks and practical jokes), four (about how different parts of the brain disagree) and five (a conversation with David Dunning, whose paper sparked the series) will tell you more about why, when you think you're an idiot, you're probably right -- kind of like the folks at CNN.

Twitter gets red card: Tough week for twits. First, it gets a slap on the wrist for not protecting its members' privacy, and then World Cup fans overwhelm its servers.

The Borg That Roared: Faceborg is insisting that it has fired the shot that will start SearchWars III (coming to a theater near you soon!).

Jason's list:

• A pinup calendar only someone who deals with doctors all day could love. (SFW unless you have an overly vivid imagination.)
• A cease and desist letter that is about as silly as the one we got a few years ago over a badger.
• A lonelyhearts website for Apple users only -- you can't log in unless you're a fanboy/girl.
• People trust Faceborg more than they do traditional media.
• You may be smarter than a fifth-grader, but are you smarter than Watson?

Latest toy for the neurotic IT administrator in your life: Lansweeper will allegedly keep track of every device and program in your network, including, presumably, your rocket launcher. Also, a website you can use to drive him crazy. Alan Taylor, the author of the site, also produces The Big Picture for boston.com.

Yet another one of those things that we can't understand why anyone really cares: There's a new record for the fastest random number generator.

Inspiration for people with too much time on their hands: Lego creations, waiting in line, sand sculpture, and on June 24, 1994, an explanation of the Roswell incident.

Finally, a cause we can get behind: Our buddy Guy sent us a link to the McSweeney's take on Comic Sans as a typeface (the language is pretty salty, so if you're easily offended, don't read it). Then this week, we came across an item that discusses what your choice of fonts says about you, and found several other links regarding Comic Sans, including an online petition to ban it. No offense, people, but pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease...

Sign of the Apocalypse: Social networking a la Faceborg is like falling in love -- or being drugged.

Nata's Corner

You know all those tracking cookies left by the internet advertising companies? The ones that record your every breath, search and click so they can send you the advertising they're convinced you want to see? Now there's a way to automatically block them: PrivacyChoice.org, a website that will keep your cookies updates so your personal information isn't sent to the marketing companies; they also have a FireFox add-on that takes care of it locally for you.

There has been a ton of hand-wringing, mostly because of some highly-visible accidents, about teenagers and the use of cell phones for texting while driving. If that's true, then it makes a lot of sense, because teenagers learn from their parents, and guess what: adults are half-again more likely to use a cell phone while driving. So... let's not blame the kids for doing as Mom and Dad do, rather than as they say.

I know a lot of you out there consider yourselves at least somewhat geeky. Those of you who know me know I'm not, really, but you might not know that I've had to hire quite a few people over the years. So, in the interest of making sure you all have insights into how people think, I'm going to post a list of ten questions you might get asked if you're looking for a geeky job:

1. Star Wars or Star Trek?
2. Who shot first, Han Solo or Greedo?
3. Movie or the original?
4. What are 10 of "Weird Al" Yankovic?s greatest songs? Note that my other half, who I always thought was pretty geeky sometimes, could only remember half a dozen.
5. Remember when Steve Jobs started KoalaSoft?
6. How will you bribe the gamesmaster?
7. What were the original Intel Pentium CPUs most famous for?
8. How would you describe the "real programmer"?
9. Who is your favorite artist/musician?
10. Who was Gary Gygax?

Finally, I'm going to be watching with interest the upcoming "investigation" by the various states into Google's methods of collecting data for its street view. You already know that Google is in trouble with the Europeans, but the state attorneys general can be a lot more of a pain, since they can act fairly independently. And they're right; as a consumer, I do want to know what they collected, and if they collected it from us.

New Certificates