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Bruce Schneier Weighs in on IT Lock-in Strategies
dhavleak writes "Wired has an article from Bruce Schneier on the intersection of security technologies and vendor lock-ins in IT. 'With enough lock-in, a company can protect its market share even as it reduces customer service, raises prices, refuses to innovate and otherwise abuses its customer base. It should be no surprise that this sounds like pretty much every experience you've had with IT companies: Once the industry discovered lock-in, everyone started figuring out how to get as much of it as they can.'"
Right down to the processor level, even. If they're going to try to lock me into their hardware and software, I want none of it.
Does anyone have a link to some resources on how one might build one's own processor? How much does it cost to do that sort of thing?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Nope.
Lock-in is anything that creates barriers to moving to a competitor. For example, file formats. Or email address non-portability between different ISPs (or freemail providers, for that matter). Or (in the case of telecoms) number non-portability.The subscription model is one of the ways to milk extra bucks from lock-in, but it isn't itself a "lock-in."
Kevin Smith on Prince
http://www.opencores.org/
As far as the cost of getting one of those built, I'd like to know that myself... Reminds me when I was part of the crew dismantling the old fabs responsible for the Z80... Shoulda paid one of the drivers to deliver one of those Canon machines to my garage...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Prohibitively expensive and time consuming (unless you want to make a 4 bit processor, some one did that recently by hand).
Is the freaking worst. We finally switched when their AV client, sitting idle on a PC that was just booted, was using 50MB of RAM. (Some of our systems only had 256 at the time). Over 4 years, our renewal costs (we're a school), went from $5/machine to $18/machine. We still use ghost, and have not seem one damn improvement in the last 4 years, even though it has gone through all sorts of different versions. (now using Ghost solution suite 2.0) I don't see any difference in the software. dear god, you would think they would use WinPE by now, and stop breaking up Ghost images into 2GB chunks. I guess 2 years ago they fixed some multicast issues. Thats it. We just moved from Backup Exec 9.1 to Backup Exec 11d (We had starting using when it was Veritas), mainly for tape encryption capabilities. Of course, it is working fairly well, unless I do something crazy Like try to encrypt our backups to tape. I sat on hold for 45 minutes yesterday, and gave up.. They just bought Altiris, which is who we were looking at to switch to from Ghost. GRRR.. They just buy companies, and then raise prices..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
By being greedy for lockin one also increases the difficulty of getting the initial sale.
expandfairuse.org
Don't stop at the processor level. The fundamental laws of physics already contain signs of corporate lock-in. The No-cloning feature of quantum mechanics clearly is a sign of DRM built into the fundamental laws of the universe. And the inner workings of about everything we use is tied to the exact laws of the universe we are in. Therefore you have to start at the very beginning: First build your own universe!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Or having to buy a bank of hours for your outsourcing partner, as we do :/ d'oh!
which is totally what she said
That's completely wrong! A lock-in is when the consumer is "stuck" with a particular vendor. This may be due to any number of things, but subscription is not one of them. A subscription-based service only locks you in if it makes unsubscribing difficult (which may translate to costly), which has nothing to do with being a subscription-based service in the first place.
A company that runs on a subscription-based business model would *benefit* from lock-in (to keep subscriptions going), but it doesn't have to do it. Magazines don't lock you in, neither do websites with subscription-based access (e.g. IGN, or newspapers), etc. You're always free to cancel and subcribe to something else if you wish.
I like basketball!!1!
Hmm? I highly doubt that any computer maker will lock you into hardware/software it just is bad business. Think of Dell, Vista failed, people started to not buy computers so they switched to letting people use XP, enough people wrote in and now they offer Linux, the hardware companies just want to sell hardware, if they can get that by offering Vista they will, if enough people request Linux they will offer that. Most hardware manufacturers want their product to be used as much as possible, if that means using standards they will (and mostly have) use it to get people to buy it. We are far away from computers (laptop and desktops not PDAs and Cell Phones and such) that have hardware/software lockin and the only one to have done it was Apple however now they let even Windows boot on Macs. The fact is, hardware manufacturers don't care about locking you into software, they just want money, if they can get that by offering MS, Linux, or whatever they will so lockin is a bad choice for them.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I would think that it would be possible to work within subscription models almost more flexibly than non-subscription models since you don't have any ownership interest. Of course the devil is in the details.
Hell, my management fears vendor lock-in more than they fear Death itself (which probably explains why we're a very heavy Linux shop)...
I realize that a lot of PHB's couldn't care less (and an alarming # of CIO's and IT management don't either), but we're far enough along now that it's starting to bite a lot of accountants and IT critters square in the ass.
IMHO, it does matter, and it explains why a lot of shops are moving away from proprietary solutions, going to Linux/BSD and such.
Now if only we can definitively tackle the two biggest examples of attempted vendor lock-in alive (Exchange and MS Office), we'd be set.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"The subscription model is one of the ways to milk extra bucks from lock-in"
:)
Of course - I in no way declared there was a singular definition, but thanks for expanding the subject, none-the-less
So the small company in Malaysia that hires a consulting company in Singapore to set up a CRM, and then has to subscribe to service if it wants anything fixed or changed isn't locked into a never-ending relationship if it doesn't want to start over with another vendor or DIY...right.
I really don't think you should be talking about Bruce Schneier like that when you clearly know nothing about the man. For example, did you know that Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of Alpha Bits? Or that he knows the state of Schroedinger's cat? It's true!
Just some things that are more onerous than others. This has been going on since the beginning of the industry, and it won't change. You can complain about it all you want, but it's going to continue to happen.
Everyone wants a revenue stream not a revenue pond.
That doesn't justify boorish behavior, but it explains how companies want to stay in existence, and few other models exist that allow them to do this. Once again, Bruce thinks we were born yesterday.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Per the article, sure, you can switch to a Pepsi in a second if you don't like the Coke, but both Pepsi and Coke spend *enormous* amounts of money to suggest that switching to the competitor's product will make you less desirable to women, less success at your job, etc. That's what advertising is all about, trying to get you to lock *yourself* in, willingly, to a single product.
But I digress...
Everybody dreams of being Ma Bell, where even putting a plastic cone on a headset could "damage the network". A lot of companies have had their turn too. We all think of Microsoft as being the king of lock-in, but for my money, it would still be IBM, where their mainframes and mid-range machines were so locked down that you had to get approval to install *anything*. At least with a PC or even a Mac, you can install another OS and you're free and clear. With IBM equipment, they could shut you down remotely if you missed a single "usage" payment (which was calculated *by* *the* *processor* *cycle*!!).
I cannot think of a single company that wouldn't want total lock-in of its users, regardless of industry. Some are just more capable of doing it than others.
I got locked into Ballmer's secret office after he found Linux on my laptop while sitting in the park.
I did manage to escape the MS compound dodging flying chairs!
The article is misleading. A big reason for "lock-in's" is due to service contracts. While I can surely move away from microsoft to linux, it would require a new service contract. I just paid for the next 3 years of Microsoft Gold Ass Pirate Support Line or whatever it is called now. Why would I ever switch to RedHat? I could do the same, maybe even cheaper... but in three years the entire place will be built on microsoft. Its not rocket science, its lazyness.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I built my own universe once, but the startup Bang really hosed up my wife's microwave.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
As Gruber noted, that's not really that complicated. It doesn't count as complicated if you can explain it in two sentences.
I think we need another word for this than "lock-in", because a lot of the examples he cites are lock-in but mostly in the sense that Nintendo probably doesn't want to be an international standards body for video game formats. The word might be "cost". If Nintendo worries about Nintendo's problems, then they're easier to solve than trying to solve everyone's problems. Why? It's lower cost. Costs less time, less money, it's less risky. And in defense of some of those entities, firm standards rarely result in innovation. Having an ISO for hand-held game controllers might result in an easy way to write code for controllers with six buttons and vibration, but having standards for game controllers doesn't result in the Wiimote. Not worrying abut six-button vibrating controllers does.
Schneier's half-right, but he's also saying that lock-in is always a conscious factor and not just, yanno, the cost of the thing. I'm locked into my current metropolitan area by the cost of moving, but it's not city hall's problem.
As for conscious lock-in, if you don't want a phone with lock-in, you're free to get one. Enjoy paying twice as much for calls and having a per-call fee. Lock-in costs less than stuff without lock-in because it reduces risk. It's a valuable tool and one that, despite the Slashdot crowd's feeling, most consumers have little problem with as a way to get goods more cheaply.
This being an unintentional form a lock-in, of course. You wouldn't actually expect an email address to be portable, would you?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
You haven't provided enough information to determine whether that's a case of lock-in or not. If the CRM system provides the necessary tools to make it easy for the customer to export all of their data into a format which can then be imported by other CRM systems should the customer choose to change vendors, then there is no lock-in.
Now, granted, that's unlikely to be the case. However, it is the inability to move your data to a competing system which creates the lock-in. The subscription aspect has nothing to do with it one way or the other.
erm, the fact that you contracted a "small malaysian company" (which I assume produced custom, proprietary, non-open software for you) is the reason you are locked in. It is this lockin that makes it necessary for you to pay them (and only them) for a "support subscription" post purchase.
The subscription does not create the lockin, it is the end result of the lockin. If you bought an open standards based (or even widely deployed proprietary off-the-shelf) solution then you would have no lockin problem and you could then subscribe to the support service from whatever vendor you choose to.
Good grief, it's not rocket science you know.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
That's why it's called a lock-in -- you know the customers won't like what you're about to do, so you lock them in. And lock-in isn't a bool, it's a float: all companies lock customers in, but some do it intentionally and to much greater extents than others.
I do agree with what you said when it comes to smaller companies/non-monopolies -- they don't have much reason to lock-in customers, because they don't have very many customers to lock in, and because it's much more beneficial to look like the consumer-friendly guys. And even though Dell makes a lot of computers, they're not the only PC manufacturer, and any edge over their competition helps.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You'd be locked into a relationship with the vendor regardless of whether or not you were paying for a subscription simply bacause a CRM system costs so much to develop. The subscription has nothing to do with the lock in.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
A subscription model can be a form of lock in, when you don't tell the subscribers how to halt their subscription. TW/AOHell did that to a lot of people. People were reluctant to spend twice the nominal cost of gettin on line each month, so making it difficult to leave was effectively a way to keep them on AOL. The difficulty involved in terminating any subscription acts as a form of lock in.
Inversely, the myriad of lock in mechanisms employed by M$ and partners are virtual subscriptions. You don't really own the software, only a vague right to use that can be terminated without cause. The interlocking nature of the many lock in mechanisms both keep the victim from leaving and make sure the victim will need to replace everything every three years and the subscription model is complete. Windows, like a newspaper, only has value in context and for a limited time. Your old copy of MSDOS is worthless today as are most of every copy of software you have released before 2001. It only had value in context and the sooner you lose that context the better off you are.
"Lock-in" = one more way that companies that are successful in a "free market" immediately go to work to make the market less free.
One more reason that Free-Market Theology is nothing but a scam to keep most people poor and working hard, and to make rich people richer and increasingly powerful and protected.
The operative word is "protected". Note that "lock-ins" are said to "protect market share". The world is uncertain and nothing bothers the rich and powerful like uncertainty. They believe that if God was good enough to make them rich and powerful, then it's unfair that they should be subject to the same rules of uncertainty as the rest of us.
It's why they hate things like Universal Health Coverage, Social Security, Minimum Wage, etc. If you have to be just as vulnerable to fate as the poor, then what good is being rich?
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you do it, you gotta do it right. Because if you allow the user to get out (considering that it was a painful process since you had some lock in), he is going to avoid making the same mistake again...
You and I wouldn't, but that doesn't mean much (sigh). How many people do you know who won't change ISPs because they can't "bring their email address with them" if they change?
It's also one of the reasons Yahoo! is worth so much to Microsoft - a lot of people who are using their email won't bother to move, because of inertia and lock-in.
I don't understand why most people don't get together with friends and family and each pitch in a few bucks each year and have their own domain, with their own email address.
Kevin Smith on Prince
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Probably meant as a joke, but this is very profoundly insightful from a spiritual point of view. This is in essence what spiritual adepts in many spiritual paths will do. The "physical" lock-in is happening in your own mind at a very deep level. It is non-trivial to overcome it.
Different from phone numbers, e-mail addresses aren't arbitrary. The domain part is by design tied to a particular service, server, whatever.
Portability for phone numbers makes sense, because they are just arbitrary numbers and AT&T can give you 12345 just as well as any other provider.
But portability for e-mail addresses makes as much sense as portability of your street address when you move. The best you can ask for is forwarding.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
lock-in = subscription based business model...
Right, that's why Microsoft typically offers a subscription, while most linux companies only charge once per copy.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
"I don't understand why most people don't get together with friends and family and each pitch in a few bucks each year and have their own domain, with their own email address."
Comfort zones and insecurity. Speaking as the "computer guy" for about 15-20 friends and family members, the idea of registering a domain name and then paying a very small monthly fee (less than $5, sometimes $0) to permanently own your own domain name and e-mail is uncomfortable when they can just keep their free 5-10 year old AOL/LocalISP address. Only my Mom owns her own domain name (which she really likes).
Chuck
Well, not exactly lock-in, but stories of CA gouging their customers are stuff of legend - so I'm told. Wanna chime in here?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I believe that phone numbers were assigned much like IP addresses are, in blocks. The routing would obviously be significantly easier if the numbers are sold in blocks.
It's about on-board security sub applications or attributes which are specific to that application or that applications vendor. Such as MS applications using MS specific DRM. Is this a bad thing? I don't think that it is.
That was just a technical challenge. An email address has the provider right in the freakin' address. That said, you can get portable email addresses. You just need your own domain and you can have it hosted anywhere that hosts domains.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
just make a pledge: As a software developer or pointy haired type, I swear that I will never make a decision that will actively add lock-in into my product without making a tangible improvement to the product. This pledge does not obligate me to go out of my way to embrace standards or interoperability but just to do my citizenly duty to play fair with my users and competitors and to refuse to kill standards or interoperability that naturally find their way into the software. Freedom is good, bottom line be damned, and I will fight for it.
"...Or that he knows the state of Schroedinger's cat?"
Maybe he does, but even Schneier cannot *make* the cat choose a state!
Not everyone who wants a free market is doing it for the evil reasons you paint, and not everyone who doesn't want the programs you mention is a greedy bastard who wants to be better than poor people.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
This has nothing to do with IT. Business is all about lock-in. If this comes as a surprise, you don't know the basics of business. You can do it "cleanly" and morally and ethically through things such as superior customer service, superior product functionality, and superior value for the price. Or, you can be "dirty" and use things such as technology and software barriers, vendor pressure tactics, bias contracts and user agreements, biological mechanisms such as addiction, and lobbying and manipulating the law. The stock market, our way of evaluating and rewarding corporate perforance, unfortunately does not make any distiction between these clean and dirty lock-in tactics. The system's only real requirement is that we obide by the law and don't get caught cheating. Given this requirement, companies gain enormous advantages by being dirty. In this free capitalist market, those with advantages ultimately win and they get heavily rewarded for it. The result? Hello Microsoft, hello Nike, hello Exxon Mobil, hello Time Warner AOL Cable. And just when you thought Apple was gaining marketshare, what a surprise, we talk about how they are just getting better at being dirty.
Eventhough the government talks about being all for fair competition in an open market, their behavior and the law which they help create says otherwise. Intellectual property law, anti-trust law, and much of the consitution is comprised of lock-in catalysts. Mergers and aquisitions heavily support lock-ins as well.
Whether you are selling iPhones at Apple Stores or hotdogs at an intersection in Manhattan, you are still trying to lock-in your customers. And the better you do it, the more the United States of America will reward you.
...is that it works. I don't know how many times I've heard the argument about going with all Microsoft or all SAP or all this and that because it's so hard to make it work with everything else. You don't throw out the incompatible software, you buy more of it until you use it for things it's not suited for and has a hundred interfaces to other applications. And once you make yourself a little "mini-monopoly" with no real alternatives, they sure know how to gauge you. While there's plenty work left ahead, I think compatibility and multiple vendors will become the major advantages of open source.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's weird -- In my alternate Soviet universe, the microwave hose really banged up my wife's startup.
Now our stock options are worthless.
/Was gonna go with 'I started up my microwave and then banged my wife with a hose' but I thought better of it for some reason.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Where did you get this information? Quantum mechanics tells us that Bruce Schneier cannot be observed directly.....
My DSL provider is having problems with the SMTP server today, so my parents are unable to send e-mail on their main account. After explaining to them that the address was on their old (dialup) ISP, they were forced to use the DSL SMTP server to send e-mail(because of port 25 blocking).
They weren't happy when they realized they've been paying $10 a month for an e-mail address for the past 18 months.
That's a shame. Maybe you should have intelligently designed it and avoided the bang altogether?
"...what kind of response involves getting the example backwards...?"
One based on negating your assertion and see what happens since, in order for a biunivocal relationship to be if A->B, then !A->!B.
All in all it's very obvious that in your example the vendor is able to drain money from the client in the form of a service subscription *because* the vendor successfully has locked-in the client, the contrary being plain absurd: you don't undesiringly pay money to enter a lock-in situation, you undesiringly pay money because you are locked-in.
Not really.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
The key published in tuaw's erica sadun's blog post is NOT the iphone's application signing key (as wrongly infered by Scheneier).
The key is actually an AES key for the DMG ram disk image file that is part of the iphone firmware update process. Nothing to do with application signing. The key doesn't even have enough size to be mistaken for an usable RSA key (I wonder if Scheier has noticed that).
Anyone can check that out on the various iPhone hacking blogs (and also on the very same one that posted this key in the first place).
People should get their facts straight before spreading misinformation.
They used their DevNet developer database to locate a colleague at my place of work through whom they applied pressure at senior management level, i.e. vailed threats to withdraw discounts etc., in an attempt to prevent further criticism from me.
Fortunately, Microsoft's emails to management actually confirmed everything that I'd said was true. I still have copies with management's handwritten comments.
At least I'm not paranoid anymore - I know what they'll do with all that information.
.forward, at least?
You need to read up on how the internet naming works before you make such ridiculous assertions.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
You need to read up on how the internet naming works before you make such ridiculous assertions.
Yeah, because that's SO different from how telephony worked before they actually did solve that problem. I guess I should just not use my phone now, because I'm not in the area code it says I am.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Warrent Buffet calls it a moat.
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
And subscriptions often result in the opposite of lock-in.
For example, if you were able to buy a Zune music subscription there is nothing preventing you from switching to another service. However, if you buy a bunch of songs on iTunes then you lose the ability to play them should you switch from iPod to Zune. Apple gets to charge a premium on iPods partly because of this fact (the fact that they are beautifully designed also helps). Buyng songs on iTunes locks you into Apple. Subscribing to the Zune service does not lock you into Zune.
In fact, if someone else offers a slightly less expensive equivalent service it is really easy to switch subscriptions.
Of course the music companies would not license at a rate that allows a slightly less expensive service.
Another contradiction of capitalism that is an observation in Marxist theory is the desire of an individual firm to pay its employees as little as possible, but that depends on well-paid consumers having enough money to buy their products.
All that is is negative feedback. If you want to create a system capable of optimizing itself to changing conditions without a very complicated model and detailed control system (with attendant long, involved tuning process), be it an economy or a simple industrial process, you'll probably find it best to put multiple forces in place that oppose each other in such a way that they balance at an equilibrium point that's near the optimum. There is nothing "contradictory" about market forces being in opposition. One can argue about how well it works (imho, it clearly does a near-perfect job in some cases and an awful job in others), but as part of a design of an economic framework it's not at all clear it's a bad route to take.
Seriously, try creating a *good* control scheme for a simple system that doesn't involve a negative feedback loop. Then consider how amazingly not simple an economy is.
Telephone number portability only became possible when the telcos added an additional level of abstraction into the call-routing systems. This wasn't trivial -- the telephone switching system as it exists today looks almost nothing like the system that was around when the telephone numbering system was conceived and evolved. (Mechanical rotary switches that turned in response to the dial on your phone producing pulses; these switches cascaded, one after another, for each digit, routing the call.)
You could probably get 'portable email addresses' with some sort of extension to DNS; basically allow DNS records for individual email addresses instead of just domains. It would be a weird use for DNS, thinking of it as we think of it now, and in fact it might overwhelm the current infrastructure, but it's not impossible. Just probably more trouble than it's worth.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah, sure. What you are suggesting is that I should be able to move house from one country/city/town/suburb but still be able to receive the mail sent to my old home address*. It's an utterly retarded idea.
When you use an @domain symbol your dns server directs the query to the server that is responsible for that domain. ie, the server operated by (or on behalf of) the owner of the domain.
If you want email portability then you can register your own domain . It's really quite simple.
If you don't want to do that then guess what, you can get an email address on somebody elses domain. If you choose to move from their domain you don't retain any rights to continue using a domain name that you don't own
How is that difficult to understand?
Honestly, sometimes I think we need a better class of geeks on slashdot. Is Digg down at the moment?
* Yes, I realise that you can do a temporary mail redirect but this costs money and is very resource intensive. If *everyone* tried to do this in perpetuity then the system would be completely unworkable, both logistically as well as inuitively.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Over time, telephone call routing got more flexible. I'm not familiar with exactly how it works today, but there is obviously another layer, probably many layers, beneath the "phone number" you use and remember. That has been abstracted away from the actual 'hardware' and can be assigned arbitrarily.
Email addresses are currently hierarchical, in the same way that phone numbers used to be (under exchanges). If you want to send it to bob@company.com, you first send it to the mailserver for "company.com" and then it sends it on to Bob. But that's sort of an arbitrary design consideration. If you wanted to have a different MX record for "bob@company.com" than "joe@company.com", there's no fundamental reason why you couldn't, provided you were willing to completely trash and rewrite the DNS servers and MTAs.
More usefully, rather than screwing around with DNS, the best way to accomplish email portability would be to build another layer of abstraction on top of email as it currently exists. Instead of remembering people's emails, remember their real names or handles, and then have your email program consult some sort of global distributed database in order to find their email address (which would change whenever they moved ISPs or networks). Then you could change emails whenever you wanted and the people sending you mail would never know; it would all be hidden below the user level. And in fact there are some electronic-mail systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) that don't operate using user and domain names, and have their own systems allowing for more flexibility.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I realise this, but there was one MAJOR difference. All phone numbers were owned by only a few telco companies and as such it was politically possible for them to be forced into providing cross provider portability or run the risk of losing their common carrier status ie licence.
The domain system is much different. There are hundreds of thousands of domains owned by almost as many individuals and companies. It is not politically or technically feasible to force some sort of email portability across domains without changing the fundamental nature of how dns currently works.
Why should I (as an email admin) be forced to allow people to use the domain name that I legally own for free? Am I required to maintain some sort of forwarding list on my mail server of all the people for which I am required to forward mail to? Do I do this for free? If my server crashes and the list is lost am I held legally liable? Who is responsible for tracking where email for my domain should go? Me? The government? Which government?
Should the entire planets email-address-to-ip-address-cross-reference-table be stored in some central servers somewhere? Where? Who pays?
It's a ridiculous idea.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Or having a low id on Slashdot (I don't seem to have that problem)
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
What is termed "contradictions" here is merely conflicting interests. One of the nice properties of a market system is the ability to resolve these conflicts of interest via the market.
We could argue over the meaning of "lock-in", but utlimately whether it is willingful or unwillingful, locking your customers in is one of the bottomlines of any successful enterprise, and your company too is well aware of that, and is working hard to accomplish it.
Lock-in is anything that creates barriers to moving to a competitor.
Often lock-in is the driving force to open standards and the proprietary vendors have to change or die. The most recent example of this that I can point to is the theatrical lighting industry. Martin, Strand, MSI, and other inteligent lighting manufactures all had their own standard for running lighting. Touring companies found it difficult to interface with all the lighting systems. A committie was formed to produce a standard that wasn't any of the already established standards to avoid any patent and royalty bias toward any one manufacture.
The birth of the DMX-512 standard came out. Now it is almost impossible to sell any lighting system that doesn't support the standard.
http://www.usitt.org/standards/DMX512.html
"This standard is intended to provide for interoperability at both communication and mechanical levels with controllers made by different manufacturers."
Almost everything now uses the new standard from Drama, Dance, and Club Nightlife. If you buy an intelligeht moving light, It's almost guaranteed to use the DMX-512 signal, even if the connector isn't the standard 5 pin XLR. An exception to the DMX standard is the one for architectural using multiple wall stations for building lights. Even these control systems often output DMX-512 signals to use standard dimmers.
In some specialty fields some still try with something other than the standard. As an example the animated Christmas lights often use the Lights-o-Rama system which is incompatible with everything else.
http://www.lightorama.com/
It is a cheaper alternative with a lower cost per dimmer, but it is limited to dimmers only. It won't run all the disco and concert moving color changing lights. And of course you can only use their software and interface to run the dimmers.
The truth shall set you free!
Even if Social Security doesn't collapse, from a financial point of view, it's an extremely bad investment.
Besides, the government broke every single promise they made about Social Security. For example, the promised the money would go into a special fund that wouldn't be touched. Of course it went right into the general fund and pissed away. They also promised (and put into the law!) that the Social Security number would never be used for identification purposes.
I'd much rather put the money into a 401k.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Go and use UPI, then:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/upi/
E-Mail addresses have an obvious meaning. I can't be quite sane and think that jane@ibm.com is still available under that address after she's left IBM. It simply wouldn't make sense. (except as a forward for some time, of course.)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's just it. Seeing welfare as a purely financial thing misses the entire point.
Where I live, we have nowhere near the ratio of people in deep poverty that some other countries do. Having fewer really poor and desperate people in my society makes my society safer, cleaner and generally a bunch happier. In my society, I'm not waiting for the end of my career to experience the benefits of a functional welfare system, paid back as a pension; rather, I live today without so much fear that I need to go armed in public like people do overseas.
I'm not trolling, I'm just Australian.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Product unreliability ordinarily doesn't benefit manufacturers, because most consumers are smart enough not to buy the same make next time; but the situation is inverted when the manufacturer of the unreliable products holds a monopoly. And sometimes it doesn't even need to be a full monopoly: you can have several players ostensibly competing in a free market. But that freedom is often just an illusion.
Think about it: If John Thomas's Panasonic stereo breaks, and he already has lots of CDs, he might buy a Philips next time -- after all, it will plug into the same mains socket and play all the same discs. If John Thomas's Glow-worm boiler packs up in the middle of winter, he might replace it with a Worcester or Baxi boiler -- which will use the same gas and electricity, and plumb in just fine to his existing radiators and hot water system. If John Thomas's Ford Focus breaks down one time too many, he might trade it in for a Vauxhall Astra -- it will use the same fuel and can be driven on the same roads.
But if John Thomas's Wii breaks, and he already owns several Wii games, he has precious little choice but to buy another one from Nintendo. The games may well have cost more than the console -- it would be a waste not to have anything on which to play them.
Despite outward appearances, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't really competing in a free market; because their products are not interchangeable in practice -- unlike CD players, gas boilers or cars. Once you have invested in a game on one platform, it can only be used on that platform -- you can't replace your Wii with a PS3 and take your games across. And if you ask the vendors to replace your Wii games with PS3 equivalents, they'll laugh at you. (A store will probably exchange a few unopened games bought in ignorance as a gift for someone who has a different console than you thought; but even then it's technically ex gratia, not a statutory right.)
And if John Thomas's copy of Microsoft Word pisses him off one time too many, and he has many documents already in .doc format that he needs to be able to access, he can't replace it with anything else and still be sure that his documents will render correctly. Even worse, if his sister Fanny buys a brand new computer that comes with a brand new version of Word, John's copy now most probably won't be able to read documents saved by Fanny in future (unless she saves them as an older version, which is deliberately made awkward and throws up dire warnings) -- so he is all but forced to buy his own new copy of Microsoft Word.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I sincerely hope you manage to draw twice as much money from the healthcare system than you put in so it becomes an excellent financial investment.
Personally I'd rather stay healthy.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Anyone who buys software and doesn't insist to have the Source Code, is going to get a harsh lesson one day.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There may well be perfectly good reasons to hate inefficient services. However, the same thing can be done in many different ways. For example, see WHO/Europe Highlights on health, Finland 2004. In 2001, the total expenditure on health care in Finland was $1841 (purchasing power parity) per capita; in the US it was $4887. This includes both the private and public sectors. (Health expenditure trends in OECD countries, 1990-2001, p. 11; see also p. 4)
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Having your email address on your own domain can be considered the same as a POBox for post. People can send mail to you, even if you move, and they can't see where you REALLY live.
Opensource applications aside. Isn't buying an OS sort of a locking too? I grant that alot of opensource software can be recompiled for a target OS, but what about closed source software? It really is a pity that languages like Java did not fully deliver to the expectations of freedom from OS lockin. Java free's you from vendor lockin when it comes to choosing databases, messaging servers and on the ODD occasion some rich client applications etc etc, (Eclipse comes to mind), but imagine a world where any app you wrote runs on any platform with no everheads.
Ask these guys, they may be able to help. http://cymer.com/
You are welcome on my lawn.
Tell you what, why not let everybody put their retirement funds on a big roulette table and the one whose number comes up gets all the money?
Better to invest in family, community. When I get old, they're going to be the ones that take care of me, anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
they are the worst offenders when it comes to proprietary file types, non-replaceable batteries and odd shaped plugs on hardware DON'T BUY MAC
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Yes?
Simple forwarding is not a good solution, but there are a few options. Simply carrying a .forward for a transitional period would help, and should be available for a reduced monthly fee (since it doesn't use zero resources, but also doesn't use as much as the 23 exabyte mailspool).
The best solution might be if ISPs would willingly be the MX for a current customer's personal domain. Then when you change ISP, you update your domain record and your new ISP adds the domain to their cw file. The real difficulty might be having something like a readable email address that's globally unique, nodody wants their email address to be ghh3ycqyucbdd.email but there's a lot of john.smith out there.
... and if Bruce Schneier gets what he wants with liability legislation for software developers/vendors, then a big way of avoiding lock-in---free and open-source software---will cease being viable.
http://outcampaign.org/
Portability for phone numbers makes sense, because they are just arbitrary numbers and AT&T can give you 12345 just as well as any other provider.
They are arbitrary NOW, but before making the changes for number portability, they certainly were not. The area code and prefix addressed a particular CO. Within the CO, the last 4 digits would actuate physical relays from rack to rack finally selecting your physical copper pair. At that time, a sufficiently knowledgable person could physically locate every single relay actuated and what position it would be in for any arbitrary phone number dialed from any other number. There was a particular path through the telco's hardware hard wired.
Gradually over time, the system became more 'virtual' in nature and numbers more arbitrary. By virtue of starting out on computers rather than mechanical relay based state machines, IP and DNS started out less hard-wired, but there are still limits. While in theory, we could route IP addresses arbitrarily, in practice, no router above the AS level will accept a route for less than a /24. To handle /32, each router would need at least 4GB of RAM just for the table. They'd need far more to maintain enough state to avoid regularly screwing up.
Sure, and while we're at it we can make my home mailing address portable.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I have worked as a consultant for electrical utilities. On the surface, it would appear that these companies would resist IT lock-in because 1) as utilities, they have a natural barrier to competition built into the establishment of service territories, access to customers, etc. and 2) they have a compelling reason to interoperate efficiently with their neighboring utilities to ensure reliability and share best practices. Furthermore, utilities tend to be larger customers with knowledgeable staffs and (one would think) a better ability to influence vendors to their benefit. And yet, the IT systems they purchase tend to be some of the most proprietary, incompatible, poorly designed and unreliable systems I've seen. Look at the role that software has played in high profile outages like this one.
I have also done some work for architectural and engineering firms. Here, one would expect to see healthier competition based upon proprietary technologies and practices. Competition is greater than in the utility business and, given the leverage a better and/or more efficient tools set could provide to improve profits and aquire more business, one would expect them to opt for proprietary solutions, NDA agreements, etc. Because these firms are smaller and have less leverage with large s/w vendors like AutoDesk and Microsoft, one would expect to see these vendors lock their customers in to a much greater degree and then, giver the customers motivation to build proprietary in-house processes and tools on top of these that cannot easily be moved to other platforms. But these businesses operate with pretty much the same s/w tools. And its not uncommon to see employees move from one job to another and bring customized macros, scripts and process knowledge from a previous employer to a new one and expect to plug them right into their new work environment.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, I do. It's called forwarding. Just like with physical mail when I move to a new house, they should forward messages for X amount of time until everyone learns my new address.
My school (WPI) allows alumni to set up an email address that does nothing but bounce messages to whatever address you are using at the time, and a lot of places allow me to set up a "reply to" address field in my email. I don't see why this is such an unreasonable request.
Agreed. When my friend moved to a new home and wanted her mail, I told her she should create her own town with her own post office to handle mail portability for her. How difficult is that to understand?
Have you ever moved to a new house? What is the first form you file at the post office? A mail forwarding form. But I suppose it's unreasonable to expect ISPs to keep up with the cutting edge technology implemented by the US postal service. Oop, though I turned sarcasm off.
Since it's my damn money, I should be allowed to decide how it gets invested.
How about a compromise. Let me invest half the money the way I see fit. If I used a dart board to choose my investment strategy, I'd still get a better return on my investment than Social Security.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The best solution might be if ISPs would willingly be the MX for a current customer's personal domain. Then when you change ISP, you update your domain record and your new ISP adds the domain to their cw file.
Thank you. That's the kind of thing I was thinking of. People around here can be a bit too concrete in their thinking.
The real difficulty might be having something like a readable email address that's globally unique, nodody wants their email address to be ghh3ycqyucbdd.email but there's a lot of john.smith out there.
True, but "JohnSmith.GobbledyGook.email" should be fine. It's relatively rare to actually manually enter an email address these days (at least in my experience.) Once it's in your address book, auto complete should relieve you from typing the whole thing out.
Of course, there are a whole lot of other schemes that could more closely emulate the type of addresses we're used to. The point is that it isn't all that difficult a nut to crack.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Universal health care is cheaper and gets better results: is that why you hate it? There is a term for people who are happy to spend more for poorer service: it is the opposite of "genius".
Global trade is not a requirement for capitalism. Neither does capitalism require someone to be poor in order for it to work. Basically, capitalism is just a trade system where people can own capital.
The inevitable problems arise when everyone has outsourced the same way and there simply isn't anyone left in the "high wage" category to buy the product. (it's an oversimplified argument, but the the fact that much of the American Rust Belt is indeed being left to rust illustrates the point.)As I see it, why should obselete industries linger?
Similarly ordered systems can decrease thier own internal entropy only at the cost of greater increased entropy outside the system.The Earth is not a closed system. It radiates considerable heat into space. That is your entropy sink for human society.
The American capitalist system has been running on the assumption that consumers will simply keep spending no matter what the situation. (As Bush urged Americans to do while gearing us to war, a total reversal on the personal belt-tightening and rationing Americans went through through the Great War), now being pressed agaisnt the wall, most Americans are finding staying in the mid-income lifestyle tough enough that they're pinching thier pennies and holding off thier luxury purchases just to pay rents, mortagages, utilities, and have enough left over to put food on the table, hoping to hell that no one in the family gets catstrophically sick.No, it's always been run on the assumption that a society with trade and ownership of capital is better than one without. I think our experience confirms that assumption. Further, people are always concerned about their future. It is reasonable. Insurance, savings, and investments help address that.
Of course they should forward your email for a certain amount of time, but that isn't the same thing as making an address portable.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You better make sure you don't retire the week the stock market drops 1000 points.
Why? Can you show a situation where Social Security actually produces a better return for an individual who had a good career?
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
The only reason I have to be apprehensive (not even hate, as you wrongly inferred from my post) is that I don't trust the US government to do it right. At all. Period. I consider them to be a bunch of incompetent morons in Washington, and personally, I'd rather not be forced into some crappy, badly-run system that they come up with. If it's good, fine then, I'll use it, but if it's bad, I'd be pretty pissed about being forced to pay for sub-par service.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yes, but you presume from the outset that the service will be bad, or more expensive, or both, contrary to the experience of just about every other country in the West. Believe me, the U.S. does not have a monopoly on corruption and incompetence. Other countries undoubtedly suffer from both of these forms of corrosion, yet they manage to cover everybody while offerring better service than the U.S. -- at half the cost of the crazy U.S. system.
You automatically dismiss universal health care when the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence -- generations of it, in many countries -- is against you. Who objects to better service at half the cost? Only an unreasonable hater, such as yourself.
See, you have this bad interpretation going on. You think, and have thought, from the start (erroneously) that I hate universal health care. No. For starters, I only said that there are good reasons to hate it, but I don't even hate it, although I recognize good reasons to do so. I merely want an excellent plan in place so that we won't be permanently stuck with the bad system that, without caution, our government is liable to design.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Umm, snail mail redirect costs you money. You don't get it for free. Most people only have their mail redirected for a short time to give them time to change their address registrations at all the places necessary. It doesn't go on in perpetuity.
And guess what! You can do the same thing with your email address right now! All you need to do is pay your isp rental on your old email address and have them redirect it for you. It'd probably cost lest than the postal service redirect too.
I'm sure you would be happy to do that? Or are you bitching because you can't get your email redirected for free?
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
So where is your option to pay half and get better service? Answer: you don't have that option today. Your choices -- six of one HMO or half a dozen of another -- is actually pretty limited compared to the options available to others in the West. You have been brainwashed to believe that you are free, when actually you are not. Wake up!