Well let's see.. your calculations are correct in terms of raw numbers, but in my case this was a few decades ago and the grandparents were in their late 70's pushing close to 80.
Except that grandma will have an equally or almost equally hard time figuring out a Windows box for an indefinite period of time, or even to a lesser degree a Mac box.
The grandma test largely fails since not all grandmas are equal (my grandma and grandpa taught me how to program FORTRAN when I was 8!) and since not all Linux boxes are equal (compare Lyrcoris to Debian).
Part of the trouble with being in charge is that you get to inform people that they are not every going to do certain things. Bummer for the trekkies out there, but that's just the way it is...
You are aware that the space program exists because of nationalistic pride, right?
That was it's original goal, of course. But not anymore. It certainly *shouldn't* be.
Mars would make the population happy, then it's the right and proper thing for the government to do
I would agree. Luckily, that is not really the case. NASA's support is ever dwindling. When confronted with how long and how costly a mission to Mars would be, public support is tepid at best.
say thankfully, of course, because I, for one, am quite happy we put men on the moon
Me too. But that doesn't mean that NASA's only goal is to put man on various interstellar rocks.
Robots give us a better return on investment, more science, more applied technology, more flexibility, and 100% insulation from needless loss of life.
If NASA sends another Shuttle into space only to see it explode another crop of astronauts the fallout will set back NASA dramatically, and all it's good endevours. Robotic exploration gives everything we want without the cost, constrainants of the fraility of humankind, and without the strings attached.
If private individuals want to fund human space exploration, go ahead be my guest. But NASA's goal is not to do that. Creating an elistist minority that gets to survive if/when Earth is trashed is not NASA's goal, nor should it be. The legitimate end of space exploration is not space colonization or resource mining, but the improvement of life on Earth, for humankind.
IF the modern day Perry's and Hillary's want to go to mars, fine by me. Don't harm the Earth, don't harm civilians and non-participants, and let them do their best. For government money the benefits of the space program must be collective, not the inflation of ego or nationlistic pride, or anything else so petty.
Further, you cannot simply tell a robot to 'explore that rock over there' like you could a skilled human.
You can't do that *now* with Spirit, but there is no reason you can't do that now with current robotic technology. There are numerous robots that function semi-autonomously with complex behaviours that could be modified for Mars. Additionally, *THERE IS NO RUSH*. If we build more durable robots for Mars we can take a few days to do what a human could do in a single day. So what? When the robot "dies", we just leave it. Shipping enough supplies for a 12-month round-trip through space for a human to consume is a monumentally expensive (time, weight, and design requirements) expenditure. Let's say we ship a human to Mars for a 60 day stay. That means we need to ship 14 months of life-support supplies for each human. That's a lot! How many backup robots, replacement parts, and redudant robots could we send for the same cost in dollars and weight?
Even if we sent a team of 5 robots, more advanced than currently possible, they would still require about 30-50 people micromanaging the robots
So what! Engineers on earth cost far less than astro-persons in Space! Give control to various robots to Univeristies around the world.
Given one week they would still, as a group, complete less science than one astronaut would complete in a day.
Let's say that's true. So, how long could a human stay on Mars? Two months at max? That's 60 man days. If we sent 12 various robots up, and all 12 robots can only do 1/7th the work of a human, we would by this point (landing plus one year), but far ahead of that one manned mission. Who knows how long we could design robots to last on Mars? Is there any reason we couldn't design a team of robots to function nominally for 5 years?
Lastly, we can do it, there are people who want to do it, and there are those who want to finance it. Why should they be stopped? Who are you to tell them the best way to do what they want to do?
For 100% private money, fine. But for government tax dollars the goal should be the most most valuable science for the least most safe dollars.
If you are talking about preparing for future colonization, it won't be NASA doing it. Period. That is not their goal now, nor has it ever really been.
This was a very basic attempt at a robot. If we redirected the money spent on manned space flight, the space station, and other human-based space flight projects into the robotic missions, you'd see some damn fine robots.
We aimed very small with this mission. Yet we got big. Very big. What we really need is a coherent team of robots that work together to go to Mars. Overlapping functions, semi-autonomy, semi-intelligent bots that are able to function together for a common goal.
But, actually, we can't. That's the big difference. We'd like to be able to, but so far, we are a long way off.
And why try when robots are more durable, less prone to die, less likely to embarrass NASA, less likely to go nuts on the long trip, far cheaper, far more likely to do real hard science, better suited to exploration, and every bit as interesting?
The real reason seems to be that if we sent some actual people up it is much easier for them to give interviews, to spout the government line about the space program, and generally have a higher paradability factor than robots. Would you go to a parade that had a team of 200 NASA engineers in it, or a group of dashing brave looking astrocore men and women?
I am waiting for a good reason to send man to mars. But so far, we got nothing.
where those involved would have to fight the insurance companies and judicial system at every turn.
First, that's not true. Simply false. If you die in an auto-accident, and you have life insurance that covers auto-accident related/caused death, they pay. I've dealt with it first hand. It's simple. There is no haggling with courts. There is no haggling. You have a policy for $100,000, you die, they pay. It's pretty simple. You may be thinking of wrongful death lawsuits which are very tricky to win. Then there are lawyers, courts, etc.
The 9/11 toll was huge because it was a psychological blow on top of the real (1) human loss (3000 people) and (2) economic loss (major center of commerce, destruction of airliners, loss of businesses and assets). The mental damage it did was huge. GDP dropped. Sales of everything durable dropped. Stocks dropped. People were laid off due to uncertain economic prospects. A huge part of the US economy is optimism about the future, and the nation suffered in that department, and so did the economy. You don't have that from isolated car accidents. Some 50,000 people die in car accidents which is sad, but someone on the otherside of the country isn't going to wonder about his job, or his mortgage, or his kids safety because of any specific accident (unless it directly impacts him - family member, friend, etc).
On 9/12 virtually every American knew of the tradegy, and was wondering what would happen next. It was a collective attack against all Americans in a hugely symbolic way. That is not the case in car-crashes.
, but they CLAIM it to be their #1 priority
An act of major terrorism hurts the country far more than the loss of life from automobile accidents. After 9/11 the human toll as well as the economic toll was massive and instant. Automobile deaths accumlate over time, and affect small groups of people as units. The difference in effect is massive.
As far as searching containers, you have to think for a second to understand this. The cost is not the reason we do not open containers coming into this country. The reason is the economic effect. Right now goods come in and out of the country very quickly. Something made last week in Europe or Asia can be on the shelf in this country before this weekend or next weekend. Stopping every container, opening it, examining it's contents, and then passing it on its way - at every port - would end the ability of industry to use "just in time warehousing" techniques that virtually *every* business uses today. 30 or 40 years ago the stock that would sold in 6 months was already warehoused, waiting to get into circulation. Products made last week were sold in 9-12 months. Maybe 6-9 months if you had an efficent supply chain. Today if you followed this schedule you'd be out of business in a no time as the competitors around you were able to better use market conditions and react to demand.
The upfront cost - a few billon dollars - is not prohibitive. The economic cost though would dial our economy back beyond what anyone can comprehend. Even with a huge work force, inspecting each container that comes through the US's ports would effectively cripple the modern US economy.
It was an unoffical job action (aka not a strike) - about 1/3 of the flight crew personell called in sick, or did not show for work.
It was a very, very selfish thing to do - stranding thousands of people on Christmas to complain about pay cuts. Will it be effective? Time will tell...
We should condemn it when it harms both the producers and the customers, but we should tolerate it when the negative effect on developers is bearable and the positive effect for all the freeloaders is significant.
No, we shouldn't.
Having a law that is different based on who it effects to this degree and to this degree is inviting choas.
Getting something your competitors are required to pay for is a business advantage. Allowing some business to get this advantage and others to fail to get the advantage is just damn wrong. Laws that redistribute wealth and power from "developers" to "freeloaders" creates a disincentive to develop software. Most software is developed by small companies with a small number of developers. Not the other way around. These companies cannot afford what you suggest. And killing of thse companies is expensive and for what - so some people can get some stuff for free? Its fundamentally unfair.
It does not have net economic gains. The company I mentioned went out of business. That software ceased to be. People who already paid for it have to buy something else, because the software becomes out of date due to changes in the law and billing procedures within 12-18 months. Those people have to re-invest, and even the people who pirated it have to either pirate something else or actually buy another package.
Either way, people have to spend money on something they already bought and paid for. It requires a big outlay of capital and labor costs. Spending money on something you didnt need to replace is a net drain on the economy. Plus, on top of that, you have people who lost their jobs, tax revenue that was lost, etc.
There is no net economic gain from your scenario at all. There is a huge net loss.
One final thing. Most software that people pay lots of money for is not word processors or photoshop style apps. They are specific custom applications with small user bases.
If you run a medical billing company, you need medical billing software. Your investment of $50k in software does not gain you a $30k return. Without it there is no business. Without it you are not in the medical billing business. Period. If you have revenue $250k, that $50k investment is well spent. Ideally it'd be best if you didnt have to spend that money, but in the real world, it will never be the case. It may be cheaper, but it will always be there. The OSS projects that do exist always stagnate on this level. Why? There are 25,000 pages of laws regarding the topic. Thousands of rules for each insurance company. Books and books and books of information regarding the process, procedures, customs, etc. Data that must be licensed from monopolist sources, etc. It is impossible right now for an OSS app to do thse things. It is a full time job to maintain an app like this. Congress will pass a law and give you 30 days to enact changes. It's beyond what you can imagine almost!
Let's say that they make so much money that they end up on Microsoft or some other big company's radar.
Most software is vertical market, customized to a small market. This market is bigger than MS, bigger than Adobe, bigger than any vendor. Hundreds, thousands of companies selling products priced $10k - $50k to a few hundred or dozen clients.
MS will never compete on this scale. Why? It's not that profitable. It takes too many resources. And too much local knowledge. Each state is different.
Like to compromise the business model because customers asked that it be done. While this decision had advantages, it also turned out to have been expensive.
Absolutely. They believed, hook line and sinker, that the customers were honest and that they just didnt have the 30 seconds to retrieve a new binary from the web site when they replaced or added a new PC.
After 15 years of steady customer base growth and good reviews, the owner really believed her customers could be trusted to be honest and ethical.
I also point out that basing a business on a single product is inherently risky. Success or failure of the business is tied to the success or failure of the product.
In theory its easy to diversify, but most small companies rely on a few or a single product or client account for its sustained size or health. Regardless, whether they had 1 or 100 products, a 40% drop in revenue in short period of time will really destroy a bottom line.
Any software product can be copied. Even if it is made of patented uncopyable bits, if the product is truly successful, then it will be reverse engineered...
You assume that their will be competitors. In the market I was in, there are very few competitors. The software and its protocols and formats are heavily regulated by federal and state government. The standards are dictated haphazardly and poorly. The billing procedures are a mess, and require constant tweaking. Every time Congress gets into office they add new rules or remove rules or change them or muck about. The product isn't static, it's not fixed in stone. It's a dynamic thing.
At the end of the day, was it relay the right decision to have licensing account for 25% of the total cost of the service?
Licensing is all a software company has to offer. They don't build houses, or cars, or anything else. What else is there? T-shirts? The income is what each site pays yearly to use the software. New sales adds a little extra to that - upfront costs, etc, but in reality, what else is there for a software company? A little bit of professional services/consulting - mostly done at break even to keep clients happy, but, unless people are willing to pay the yearly licensing costs there is nothing else.
Piracy was the pure cause. The customers claimed that anti-piracy measures were a big drain on them even though it was maybe 5 minutes a year of effort for them to deal with it. (Literally). I'd have to check, but out of thousands of annual support tickets maybe 5 were due to the anti-piracy measures. When, after customer request, copy-protection was disabled a huge percentage of clients didnt renew, and virtually no new sales were recorded. Yet, the installed base would increase. Sales guys would visit new businesses in the industry to find out how their new package was working out only to find that they were using a pirated copy of the software. "You selling XYZ? Ohh, we already use that. Nice job, its a good product!"
5,000 paying customers becomes half that in one revenue cycle. Growth in customers becomes massive loss.
There is no way to side-step the issue. The management deciding that anti-piracy features should be disabled killed the company. It allowed pirates to destroy the business.
Sounds easy to 'crack'
1. run VMware.
2. install inside VMware.
3. copy vmware image for everyone.
4. 10000s copies running all thinking theyre unique.
Right. Well, excepting that the verification the app does expects a sequence of bits from the binary to verify. When the first verification takes place, the server tells the app to send bits xxxx through xxxy at the next random interval. The central server contains a database which holds which bits it is expecting next. If the client doesnt provide those bits next the server instructs the client to become disabled, and the jig is up. With 1000s of clients running in VMWare the problem becomes that each copy thinks it should send bits xxxx next when in fact another copy has promised to send bits yyyy next.
Sounding easy and being easy are too different birds.
Sounds like real pain to support.
For the client/end-user, it only required HTTP access to the central server OR HTTP access to the internal server: pretty much if your machine is either (1) connect to the Internet or (2) connect to a server that is connect to the Internet you had zero problems. Since it used standard HTTP we never had problems with firewall/ports to forward, etc.
After an OS upgrade, it is very likely that some of those breaks and if you want to support several versions of operating systems you need to tweak license manager tools for the magical combination.
Not so much in this case. It was a well designed system. Each binary was encoded with a serial number and a the challenge hash for the hardware of the machine. Bits of that binary were compared against a master copy back on the central server. The application would not function unless matched. Very fool proof, transparent, and painless. The installer for the client downloaded the binary and registered the copy automatically or there was a web-front end for it.
I wonder why companies must treat their customers as thieves. If your customer cannot use software because your copy protection sucks, she may end downloading a cracked version. Then you wonder why those customers do not pay to you...
The reason in this case was there are less than 5,000 paying licenses for the entire company. When we removed the copy protection and licensing enforcement renewels dropped drastically, new sales ceased, and the company went under. Each year about 95% of licenses renewed as the sale contract specified. A few went out of business or merged. A few changed software platforms. That's fine. But after removing the copy protection/licensing (at customer demand) about 40% of customers did not renew - meaning technically they should have stopped using the software. Based on some research by the sales guy it was determine that, no suprise, those 40% of users did not stop using the software, they just stopped paying.
If your customer cannot use software because your copy protection sucks, she may end downloading a cracked version. Then you wonder why those customers do not pay to you...
That was the reasoning used to remove the copy protection. The results were that 40% of the customers stopped paying, and new sales virtually halted since you could make a copy of the software in about 5 minutes and install new site in less than an 1 hour.
Unfortunately, "eccentrics" can have a very negative effect on your own situation.
HOAs do cause people to conform. The level of conformity is up to the agreement, but it is a very important idea.
If you buy a condo in an typical place, you are sharing a single building structure with dozens of people. Your actions can affect the real property of another person.
You lament your contractor went out of business because someone else sold "your" work 25% cheaper.
No. The legitimate customers of the company went out of business because competitors took their business.
See, the software in question is for medical billing. It is a niche. Highly regulated, highly specific, very expensive. If you want to do billing for a doctors office, you need software to do it - to generate billing files to sent to insurance carriers to get paid etc etc. Everyone must have it in the industry. No questions. There are a limited number of players in the market.
The legimitate users of the software pay monthly or yearly licensing fees per user or machine or whatever. The illegitimate users do not have to pay this large expense, and therefore, can offer much lower prices. As a business person you are at an advantage if you have $10k a month fewer expenses. This drives legitimate users out of business and therefore hurts the software companies revenue.
Add to that the fact that new businesses spring up but do not need to buy the software (its readily available online, for free), and suddenely very healthy company making a small profit for 15 years is now bankrupt.
See how that works? Nothing to do with counterfeiting. Everything to do with pirating.
As far as the name of the company and all that, I will happily disclose it to you: just drop me an e-mail. I now work for a competitor and signed a strict NDA which forbids me publically from speaking about certain things.
Any software company which can't compete when someone offers a 25% discount is just run wrong.
You are misreading the situation. Its not the software company doing the discounting. A split-off company who uses the illegal copies of the software in question closes down the legitimate user of the software. That is a client lost to the software company. The discount effects the legal user of the software.
Secondly, any software of note should be sold through the various distribution channels. Those suckers want 30-50% off list, for starters. And your supposed fairy-tale company couldn't compete at those levels?
Most software is not sold at Staples or Best Buy, but rather, locally through sales people. Most software is not retail, but rather, targetted for vertical markets.
The bottom line is that your management put your mythical company out of business. It wasn't the pirates.
It was pirates, and ultimately the customers. The customers stopped paying licensing fees, because they pirated the software. Plus, customers who would have bought the software pirated it instead.
I don't believe this at all. Those 13,000 titles probably consisted of every song ever recorded by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and various other "musicians," seventeen versions of Photoshop + crack, and various popular games.
The article mentions: "Members gain access to copyrighted material, often before its release, crack the digital protections and put it online for others to access, reproduce or pass along." This leads me to believe that this was actually a ring of the crackers themselves, not so much mules, but really, aritects of the infringement. The lead me to believe that it wasnt so much music/movies, but software/warez.
I'd add that the situation you describe has *nothing* to do with what the FBI is doing, and further that the FBI will *never* help out with such situations if things keep going the way they are, because the vast majority of piracy is against the recording and motion picture industries, and if our law enforcement agencies go after that they'll never get around to helping out the little guys.
I think it does. These are the people who actually crack the software. The FBI taking these people out is a big step to making it unpalattable to the "warez" scene to crack all kinds of software. The FBI will get involved if they have the ability to - evidence, clear economic damage, wide scale pirating, etc. Regional FBI offices often get involved with the "little guy" cases, but its just not often that it gets in the news like a worldwide bust.
As an aside, it's well-known and statistically obvious that file-sharing has been an enormous boon to the recording industry; thousands upon thousands of people who previously didn't pay much attention to music got hooked by the simplicity of downloading from their computers, and their new interest in music has been driving large numbers of new sales.
That's fine, music is not all thats at stake. Smaller software packages rely on small sales - $40/each @ 3000 sales a year is typical for a 3-5 person software company. That's only 8 sales a day. If a crack for a nifty piece of software gets out, those 8 sales may be reduced to 6 sales a day. That's a $25k a year difference in sales. That's a big cut. That's someone job being cut. Or a major benefit. Health-insurance for 3-5 people costs around that much.
The big companies can benefit and can handle piracy. It's true. I don't deny it. But there are side-effects.
No source code was stolen: a working copy of the software - which was newly setup not to require activation, and heavy onerus copy protection - was taken.
And what makes you call that "cracking"?
There was a small binary hack applied to a copy that was floating around. Certain advanced (dangerous) features of the software could only be executed with a support person on the phone. To control access you had to do a challenge/response with the support person. This was stepped over using a simple decompiler and a minor change.
Slashdot Mirror
Well let's see.. your calculations are correct in terms of raw numbers, but in my case this was a few decades ago and the grandparents were in their late 70's pushing close to 80.
Except that grandma will have an equally or almost equally hard time figuring out a Windows box for an indefinite period of time, or even to a lesser degree a Mac box.
The grandma test largely fails since not all grandmas are equal (my grandma and grandpa taught me how to program FORTRAN when I was 8!) and since not all Linux boxes are equal (compare Lyrcoris to Debian).
I thought of that myself. Shocking similiarity isnt it?
Part of the trouble with being in charge is that you get to inform people that they are not every going to do certain things. Bummer for the trekkies out there, but that's just the way it is...
The moving target is emulating IE's handling of broken Javascript.
If Moz tried to implement this, they'd be climbing uphill.
I was referring to the goal of space colonization. That is not nor has it been NASA's goal.
You are aware that the space program exists because of nationalistic pride, right?
That was it's original goal, of course. But not anymore. It certainly *shouldn't* be.
Mars would make the population happy, then it's the right and proper thing for the government to do
I would agree. Luckily, that is not really the case. NASA's support is ever dwindling. When confronted with how long and how costly a mission to Mars would be, public support is tepid at best.
say thankfully, of course, because I, for one, am quite happy we put men on the moon
Me too. But that doesn't mean that NASA's only goal is to put man on various interstellar rocks.
Robots give us a better return on investment, more science, more applied technology, more flexibility, and 100% insulation from needless loss of life.
If NASA sends another Shuttle into space only to see it explode another crop of astronauts the fallout will set back NASA dramatically, and all it's good endevours. Robotic exploration gives everything we want without the cost, constrainants of the fraility of humankind, and without the strings attached.
If private individuals want to fund human space exploration, go ahead be my guest. But NASA's goal is not to do that. Creating an elistist minority that gets to survive if/when Earth is trashed is not NASA's goal, nor should it be. The legitimate end of space exploration is not space colonization or resource mining, but the improvement of life on Earth, for humankind.
IF the modern day Perry's and Hillary's want to go to mars, fine by me. Don't harm the Earth, don't harm civilians and non-participants, and let them do their best. For government money the benefits of the space program must be collective, not the inflation of ego or nationlistic pride, or anything else so petty.
Further, you cannot simply tell a robot to 'explore that rock over there' like you could a skilled human.
You can't do that *now* with Spirit, but there is no reason you can't do that now with current robotic technology. There are numerous robots that function semi-autonomously with complex behaviours that could be modified for Mars. Additionally, *THERE IS NO RUSH*. If we build more durable robots for Mars we can take a few days to do what a human could do in a single day. So what? When the robot "dies", we just leave it. Shipping enough supplies for a 12-month round-trip through space for a human to consume is a monumentally expensive (time, weight, and design requirements) expenditure. Let's say we ship a human to Mars for a 60 day stay. That means we need to ship 14 months of life-support supplies for each human. That's a lot! How many backup robots, replacement parts, and redudant robots could we send for the same cost in dollars and weight?
Even if we sent a team of 5 robots, more advanced than currently possible, they would still require about 30-50 people micromanaging the robots
So what! Engineers on earth cost far less than astro-persons in Space! Give control to various robots to Univeristies around the world.
Given one week they would still, as a group, complete less science than one astronaut would complete in a day.
Let's say that's true. So, how long could a human stay on Mars? Two months at max? That's 60 man days. If we sent 12 various robots up, and all 12 robots can only do 1/7th the work of a human, we would by this point (landing plus one year), but far ahead of that one manned mission. Who knows how long we could design robots to last on Mars? Is there any reason we couldn't design a team of robots to function nominally for 5 years?
Lastly, we can do it, there are people who want to do it, and there are those who want to finance it. Why should they be stopped? Who are you to tell them the best way to do what they want to do?
For 100% private money, fine. But for government tax dollars the goal should be the most most valuable science for the least most safe dollars.
If you are talking about preparing for future colonization, it won't be NASA doing it. Period. That is not their goal now, nor has it ever really been.
This was a very basic attempt at a robot. If we redirected the money spent on manned space flight, the space station, and other human-based space flight projects into the robotic missions, you'd see some damn fine robots.
We aimed very small with this mission. Yet we got big. Very big. What we really need is a coherent team of robots that work together to go to Mars. Overlapping functions, semi-autonomy, semi-intelligent bots that are able to function together for a common goal.
Robots are the best future of NASA.
But, actually, we can't. That's the big difference. We'd like to be able to, but so far, we are a long way off.
And why try when robots are more durable, less prone to die, less likely to embarrass NASA, less likely to go nuts on the long trip, far cheaper, far more likely to do real hard science, better suited to exploration, and every bit as interesting?
The real reason seems to be that if we sent some actual people up it is much easier for them to give interviews, to spout the government line about the space program, and generally have a higher paradability factor than robots. Would you go to a parade that had a team of 200 NASA engineers in it, or a group of dashing brave looking astrocore men and women?
I am waiting for a good reason to send man to mars. But so far, we got nothing.
where those involved would have to fight the insurance companies and judicial system at every turn.
First, that's not true. Simply false. If you die in an auto-accident, and you have life insurance that covers auto-accident related/caused death, they pay. I've dealt with it first hand. It's simple. There is no haggling with courts. There is no haggling. You have a policy for $100,000, you die, they pay. It's pretty simple. You may be thinking of wrongful death lawsuits which are very tricky to win. Then there are lawyers, courts, etc.
The 9/11 toll was huge because it was a psychological blow on top of the real (1) human loss (3000 people) and (2) economic loss (major center of commerce, destruction of airliners, loss of businesses and assets). The mental damage it did was huge. GDP dropped. Sales of everything durable dropped. Stocks dropped. People were laid off due to uncertain economic prospects. A huge part of the US economy is optimism about the future, and the nation suffered in that department, and so did the economy. You don't have that from isolated car accidents. Some 50,000 people die in car accidents which is sad, but someone on the otherside of the country isn't going to wonder about his job, or his mortgage, or his kids safety because of any specific accident (unless it directly impacts him - family member, friend, etc).
On 9/12 virtually every American knew of the tradegy, and was wondering what would happen next. It was a collective attack against all Americans in a hugely symbolic way. That is not the case in car-crashes.
, but they CLAIM it to be their #1 priority
An act of major terrorism hurts the country far more than the loss of life from automobile accidents. After 9/11 the human toll as well as the economic toll was massive and instant. Automobile deaths accumlate over time, and affect small groups of people as units. The difference in effect is massive.
As far as searching containers, you have to think for a second to understand this. The cost is not the reason we do not open containers coming into this country. The reason is the economic effect. Right now goods come in and out of the country very quickly. Something made last week in Europe or Asia can be on the shelf in this country before this weekend or next weekend. Stopping every container, opening it, examining it's contents, and then passing it on its way - at every port - would end the ability of industry to use "just in time warehousing" techniques that virtually *every* business uses today. 30 or 40 years ago the stock that would sold in 6 months was already warehoused, waiting to get into circulation. Products made last week were sold in 9-12 months. Maybe 6-9 months if you had an efficent supply chain. Today if you followed this schedule you'd be out of business in a no time as the competitors around you were able to better use market conditions and react to demand.
The upfront cost - a few billon dollars - is not prohibitive. The economic cost though would dial our economy back beyond what anyone can comprehend. Even with a huge work force, inspecting each container that comes through the US's ports would effectively cripple the modern US economy.
It was an unoffical job action (aka not a strike) - about 1/3 of the flight crew personell called in sick, or did not show for work.
It was a very, very selfish thing to do - stranding thousands of people on Christmas to complain about pay cuts. Will it be effective? Time will tell...
We should condemn it when it harms both the producers and the customers, but we should tolerate it when the negative effect on developers is bearable and the positive effect for all the freeloaders is significant.
No, we shouldn't.
Having a law that is different based on who it effects to this degree and to this degree is inviting choas.
Getting something your competitors are required to pay for is a business advantage. Allowing some business to get this advantage and others to fail to get the advantage is just damn wrong. Laws that redistribute wealth and power from "developers" to "freeloaders" creates a disincentive to develop software. Most software is developed by small companies with a small number of developers. Not the other way around. These companies cannot afford what you suggest. And killing of thse companies is expensive and for what - so some people can get some stuff for free? Its fundamentally unfair.
It does not have net economic gains. The company I mentioned went out of business. That software ceased to be. People who already paid for it have to buy something else, because the software becomes out of date due to changes in the law and billing procedures within 12-18 months. Those people have to re-invest, and even the people who pirated it have to either pirate something else or actually buy another package.
Either way, people have to spend money on something they already bought and paid for. It requires a big outlay of capital and labor costs. Spending money on something you didnt need to replace is a net drain on the economy. Plus, on top of that, you have people who lost their jobs, tax revenue that was lost, etc.
There is no net economic gain from your scenario at all. There is a huge net loss.
One final thing. Most software that people pay lots of money for is not word processors or photoshop style apps. They are specific custom applications with small user bases.
If you run a medical billing company, you need medical billing software. Your investment of $50k in software does not gain you a $30k return. Without it there is no business. Without it you are not in the medical billing business. Period. If you have revenue $250k, that $50k investment is well spent. Ideally it'd be best if you didnt have to spend that money, but in the real world, it will never be the case. It may be cheaper, but it will always be there. The OSS projects that do exist always stagnate on this level. Why? There are 25,000 pages of laws regarding the topic. Thousands of rules for each insurance company. Books and books and books of information regarding the process, procedures, customs, etc. Data that must be licensed from monopolist sources, etc. It is impossible right now for an OSS app to do thse things. It is a full time job to maintain an app like this. Congress will pass a law and give you 30 days to enact changes. It's beyond what you can imagine almost!
Let's say that they make so much money that they end up on Microsoft or some other big company's radar.
Most software is vertical market, customized to a small market. This market is bigger than MS, bigger than Adobe, bigger than any vendor. Hundreds, thousands of companies selling products priced $10k - $50k to a few hundred or dozen clients.
MS will never compete on this scale. Why? It's not that profitable. It takes too many resources. And too much local knowledge. Each state is different.
Like to compromise the business model because customers asked that it be done. While this decision had advantages, it also turned out to have been expensive.
Absolutely. They believed, hook line and sinker, that the customers were honest and that they just didnt have the 30 seconds to retrieve a new binary from the web site when they replaced or added a new PC.
After 15 years of steady customer base growth and good reviews, the owner really believed her customers could be trusted to be honest and ethical.
I also point out that basing a business on a single product is inherently risky. Success or failure of the business is tied to the success or failure of the product.
In theory its easy to diversify, but most small companies rely on a few or a single product or client account for its sustained size or health. Regardless, whether they had 1 or 100 products, a 40% drop in revenue in short period of time will really destroy a bottom line.
Any software product can be copied. Even if it is made of patented uncopyable bits, if the product is truly successful, then it will be reverse engineered...
You assume that their will be competitors. In the market I was in, there are very few competitors. The software and its protocols and formats are heavily regulated by federal and state government. The standards are dictated haphazardly and poorly. The billing procedures are a mess, and require constant tweaking. Every time Congress gets into office they add new rules or remove rules or change them or muck about. The product isn't static, it's not fixed in stone. It's a dynamic thing.
At the end of the day, was it relay the right decision to have licensing account for 25% of the total cost of the service?
Licensing is all a software company has to offer. They don't build houses, or cars, or anything else. What else is there? T-shirts? The income is what each site pays yearly to use the software. New sales adds a little extra to that - upfront costs, etc, but in reality, what else is there for a software company? A little bit of professional services/consulting - mostly done at break even to keep clients happy, but, unless people are willing to pay the yearly licensing costs there is nothing else.
Piracy was the pure cause. The customers claimed that anti-piracy measures were a big drain on them even though it was maybe 5 minutes a year of effort for them to deal with it. (Literally). I'd have to check, but out of thousands of annual support tickets maybe 5 were due to the anti-piracy measures. When, after customer request, copy-protection was disabled a huge percentage of clients didnt renew, and virtually no new sales were recorded. Yet, the installed base would increase. Sales guys would visit new businesses in the industry to find out how their new package was working out only to find that they were using a pirated copy of the software. "You selling XYZ? Ohh, we already use that. Nice job, its a good product!"
5,000 paying customers becomes half that in one revenue cycle. Growth in customers becomes massive loss.
There is no way to side-step the issue. The management deciding that anti-piracy features should be disabled killed the company. It allowed pirates to destroy the business.
Sounds easy to 'crack' 1. run VMware. 2. install inside VMware. 3. copy vmware image for everyone. 4. 10000s copies running all thinking theyre unique.
Right. Well, excepting that the verification the app does expects a sequence of bits from the binary to verify. When the first verification takes place, the server tells the app to send bits xxxx through xxxy at the next random interval. The central server contains a database which holds which bits it is expecting next. If the client doesnt provide those bits next the server instructs the client to become disabled, and the jig is up. With 1000s of clients running in VMWare the problem becomes that each copy thinks it should send bits xxxx next when in fact another copy has promised to send bits yyyy next.
Sounding easy and being easy are too different birds.
Sounds like real pain to support.
For the client/end-user, it only required HTTP access to the central server OR HTTP access to the internal server: pretty much if your machine is either (1) connect to the Internet or (2) connect to a server that is connect to the Internet you had zero problems. Since it used standard HTTP we never had problems with firewall/ports to forward, etc.
After an OS upgrade, it is very likely that some of those breaks and if you want to support several versions of operating systems you need to tweak license manager tools for the magical combination.
Not so much in this case. It was a well designed system. Each binary was encoded with a serial number and a the challenge hash for the hardware of the machine. Bits of that binary were compared against a master copy back on the central server. The application would not function unless matched. Very fool proof, transparent, and painless. The installer for the client downloaded the binary and registered the copy automatically or there was a web-front end for it.
I wonder why companies must treat their customers as thieves. If your customer cannot use software because your copy protection sucks, she may end downloading a cracked version. Then you wonder why those customers do not pay to you...
The reason in this case was there are less than 5,000 paying licenses for the entire company. When we removed the copy protection and licensing enforcement renewels dropped drastically, new sales ceased, and the company went under. Each year about 95% of licenses renewed as the sale contract specified. A few went out of business or merged. A few changed software platforms. That's fine. But after removing the copy protection/licensing (at customer demand) about 40% of customers did not renew - meaning technically they should have stopped using the software. Based on some research by the sales guy it was determine that, no suprise, those 40% of users did not stop using the software, they just stopped paying.
If your customer cannot use software because your copy protection sucks, she may end downloading a cracked version. Then you wonder why those customers do not pay to you...
That was the reasoning used to remove the copy protection. The results were that 40% of the customers stopped paying, and new sales virtually halted since you could make a copy of the software in about 5 minutes and install new site in less than an 1 hour.
Pirating can hurt real people.
Unfortunately, "eccentrics" can have a very negative effect on your own situation.
HOAs do cause people to conform. The level of conformity is up to the agreement, but it is a very important idea.
If you buy a condo in an typical place, you are sharing a single building structure with dozens of people. Your actions can affect the real property of another person.
You lament your contractor went out of business because someone else sold "your" work 25% cheaper.
No. The legitimate customers of the company went out of business because competitors took their business.
See, the software in question is for medical billing. It is a niche. Highly regulated, highly specific, very expensive. If you want to do billing for a doctors office, you need software to do it - to generate billing files to sent to insurance carriers to get paid etc etc. Everyone must have it in the industry. No questions. There are a limited number of players in the market.
The legimitate users of the software pay monthly or yearly licensing fees per user or machine or whatever. The illegitimate users do not have to pay this large expense, and therefore, can offer much lower prices. As a business person you are at an advantage if you have $10k a month fewer expenses. This drives legitimate users out of business and therefore hurts the software companies revenue.
Add to that the fact that new businesses spring up but do not need to buy the software (its readily available online, for free), and suddenely very healthy company making a small profit for 15 years is now bankrupt.
See how that works? Nothing to do with counterfeiting. Everything to do with pirating.
As far as the name of the company and all that, I will happily disclose it to you: just drop me an e-mail. I now work for a competitor and signed a strict NDA which forbids me publically from speaking about certain things.
Any software company which can't compete when someone offers a 25% discount is just run wrong.
You are misreading the situation. Its not the software company doing the discounting. A split-off company who uses the illegal copies of the software in question closes down the legitimate user of the software. That is a client lost to the software company. The discount effects the legal user of the software.
Secondly, any software of note should be sold through the various distribution channels. Those suckers want 30-50% off list, for starters. And your supposed fairy-tale company couldn't compete at those levels?
Most software is not sold at Staples or Best Buy, but rather, locally through sales people. Most software is not retail, but rather, targetted for vertical markets.
The bottom line is that your management put your mythical company out of business. It wasn't the pirates.
It was pirates, and ultimately the customers. The customers stopped paying licensing fees, because they pirated the software. Plus, customers who would have bought the software pirated it instead.
I don't believe this at all. Those 13,000 titles probably consisted of every song ever recorded by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and various other "musicians," seventeen versions of Photoshop + crack, and various popular games.
The article mentions: "Members gain access to copyrighted material, often before its release, crack the digital protections and put it online for others to access, reproduce or pass along." This leads me to believe that this was actually a ring of the crackers themselves, not so much mules, but really, aritects of the infringement. The lead me to believe that it wasnt so much music/movies, but software/warez.
I'd add that the situation you describe has *nothing* to do with what the FBI is doing, and further that the FBI will *never* help out with such situations if things keep going the way they are, because the vast majority of piracy is against the recording and motion picture industries, and if our law enforcement agencies go after that they'll never get around to helping out the little guys.
I think it does. These are the people who actually crack the software. The FBI taking these people out is a big step to making it unpalattable to the "warez" scene to crack all kinds of software. The FBI will get involved if they have the ability to - evidence, clear economic damage, wide scale pirating, etc. Regional FBI offices often get involved with the "little guy" cases, but its just not often that it gets in the news like a worldwide bust.
As an aside, it's well-known and statistically obvious that file-sharing has been an enormous boon to the recording industry; thousands upon thousands of people who previously didn't pay much attention to music got hooked by the simplicity of downloading from their computers, and their new interest in music has been driving large numbers of new sales.
That's fine, music is not all thats at stake. Smaller software packages rely on small sales - $40/each @ 3000 sales a year is typical for a 3-5 person software company. That's only 8 sales a day. If a crack for a nifty piece of software gets out, those 8 sales may be reduced to 6 sales a day. That's a $25k a year difference in sales. That's a big cut. That's someone job being cut. Or a major benefit. Health-insurance for 3-5 people costs around that much.
The big companies can benefit and can handle piracy. It's true. I don't deny it. But there are side-effects.
No source code was stolen: a working copy of the software - which was newly setup not to require activation, and heavy onerus copy protection - was taken.
And what makes you call that "cracking"?
There was a small binary hack applied to a copy that was floating around. Certain advanced (dangerous) features of the software could only be executed with a support person on the phone. To control access you had to do a challenge/response with the support person. This was stepped over using a simple decompiler and a minor change.
Should have been more clear.