I can't think of a 2 mp CCD that can be had for under $10. It would be worth it for me just to pry open the thing and get the ccd and the lens. Spycam city, baby -- girl's dorm shower, here I come!
Well, it wouldn't be a good business model. Good digital cameras have a high learning curve and bad digital cameras are cheap enough where it would be better just to purchase it. I used to work at a "video memories" place down the road from my house in the mid 80s...it was my job to answer half hour long phone calls from people who had rented (that's the word we Yanks use) a VHS recorder and couldn't figure out how to get it to play back. These things had about 10 buttons on them, clearly labelled, and instruction books were still in plain english back then. Nowadays, a $100 digital camera does many times over as much, and it's not worth renting something that's only $100 that you'll probably use all the time.
Combine that with the volitility of media, all the accessories you have to keep track of, and you've got one hell of a mess with very little chance for profit -- because most people will just buy some POS camera anyway.
As for renting professional strength gear...check with your local college. Mine had an A/V co-op that rented cameras, lenses, digicams, editing equipment for REAL cheap prices.
What's ironic here is that Buy.com has classically had really good service, decent prices, a nice search engine and, overall, less of a soul crushing "sell them everything" attitude than some of the other big retailers (*cough*amazon*cough).
Suddenly, they get into the business of music -- a "happy" thing, we can all agree -- and they feel the need to whack everybody on the hand with the DRM ruler and give the shittiest service ever. Not to mention the "cost cutting" method of buying other people's plug ins rather than supporting them themselves (good thing it's cheaper, because selling hacks instead of solutions isn't the way to gain trust). And, if I remember correctly, Apple got its store up by making deals with LABELS, not distributors. Meaning that there's fewer middlemen, so artists probably get a bigger take.
So much heartache in the world of music today. So many people trying to wrap their fist around a talented musician's balls. This is why I bought a new guitar and a copy of the Mel Bay Method to Blues. Can't sue me for the shit that spews out of my own brain...especially if I never record it.
Whoa. You're a company with limited development resources. How would you maximize your time:
1 -- Rewrite your application for an operating system used by 96% of users, with a single API for burning, playing music, and displaying graphics.
2 -- Rewrite your application for an operating system used by 3% of users, with several different APIs for burning, several different APIs for playing audio, and a half dozen graphics systems and toolkits, the majority of which are fundamentally at odds with your own tight look and feel.
Apple has proven they're not against open source. So if iTunes -- Windows takes off, EXPECT a linux version. But they're not fucking stupid.
Because the organization that was out there to protect the rights of musicians became the RIAA. You see, all private organizations designed to help the "common man" are susceptable to greed. When it became obvious that they would have to either back the artists, or the copyright holders, the RIAA went with the ones that had the money. And it hasn't hurt them.
(wish i could stick a "yet" at the end of this, but i'm far too cynical. you want great music with no legal heartache? go to an open mic)
Go back to the standards body and release the codecs into the public domain and give up the idea of being their 'own' standard. Which is a concept that has killed so many companies and products over the years.
Oh yeah. Closed standards sure has killed off Word, Excel, Access...AVI...
(Lots of other companies have also done good business with "closed" standards...Adobe, Quark, even Apple with Quicktime and Sorenson)
Yeah, no shit. Compression's gone to hell on this thing. But I just got it (traded a copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for it) and am not quite ready to rip it apart yet.
Unless you can convince one of them Texas juries that shooting a solicitor was self defense or protection of your property. And I'm betting you'd have a pretty hard time of it.
Actually, when fines go up that usually isn't a deterrant. They're doubled in work zones and people routinely violate the limit regardless. The road near my house has been under construction for roughly two years, speed limit 45, average speed 70. It's just as dangerous to slow down as it is to go fast...just ask the guy who hit my car in a work zone three weeks ago (please do -- he hasn't called me back yet). I was doing 45...traffic stopped completely in less than 100 feet (the assholes were throwing cones accross traffic instead of to the side of the road that was closed...$1200 damage to my car so they could save a few minutes when laying down the pattern tomorrow).
To be honest, nothing is "effective" at slowing people down along the entire highway except constant surveilance and zero tolerance fines. Who wants that? Placing cops in dangerous areas to ensure people don't blast around curves at 120 MPH is about as good as we're going to get without going all Orwellian.
Sun shines around here just fine for my solar needs. I just don't have the money for it. My power needs are meager (thanks to an energy star kick last year), and I could cover them with about $7500 in solar shingles and a further $2500 in batteries. $10k seems like it'd be worth it pay basically nothing for power...but we don't plan on staying in our house for more than another 5 years. Solar cells, believe it or not, do not add a lot of value to your house...most people don't care and if they find out about the maintenance (cells dry out, need to be replaced often, etc), they aren't willing to pay for them.
It's a shame -- if the solar industry were subsidized...but alas, solar isn't a cash cow so it doesn't have lobbiests like coal, gas, nuclear, or even hydro.
Nothing like toting around 7 speakers and a subwoofer for a handheld game.
Seriously, I think that the majority of people using these things are going to be wearing headphones. So why not devote some time to that, and make this the first handheld device designed to be binaural (with all the spooky positional audio that entails)? Make a really great feature instead of a buzzterm that'll need to get downmixed.
I'm worried that this gadget's going to be too big, too expensive, and too unwieldy. Remember the Lynx? The turbo express? The game gear? They all failed because they ignored the basic features that make nintendo handhelds so successful: they're small and cheap, so parents can hand them to whining children without worrying that they'll break. And kids will play anything, regardless of specs...my brother still plays Tiger handhelds from when I was a kid.
Actually, his name is Generalissimo Augusto Nicolas Calderon Sandino, which you think may be a rather big and subversive name for a cat, but I assure you he is, in fact, a big subversive cat. Just look at the way he kicks a llama's ass in NWN.
When a person tries to save American jobs from going over sees through tariffs and legislation, he's essentially trying to avoid a large group of people from sucking at the tit of welfare and unemployment. This is protecting the core of consumer capitalism: the middle class. Market prices are higher, but since average salaries are also higher, everything evens out. General security increases, and the quality of life is higher. This is the viewpoint of the "liberal" mob.
When a person tries to fight for free trade, he is trying to maximize profits. The best way to do this is to use the cheapest labor available and decrease prices to give themself an advantage over their competition. Problem is, that the competetion soon follows suit, because their goods are now "too expensive." The result is a downward spiral of ever decreasing wages, decreasing quality, and an eternal need to decrease both (or establish a monopoly) to maintain a hold on a market that has become driven by price, not quality. Meanwhile, only a handful of people are benefiting from this practice. The majority of the country is faced with lower salaries (more unemployed workers means more desperate people meaning a lower salary for "comparable" work) along with lower prices, so very little has changed -- except the reduction in the quality of goods, and the gap between the rich and the poor which becomes ever wider and more unfathomable. Constant stress of the cycle of cheap employment and unemployment decreases the quality of life. This is the viewpoint of the "conservative" mob.
There is no magical third option, where free trade is opened to desperate second wave nations and the general populous benefits. This myth has been disproven throughout history, and yet a lot of the "fucking idiots" out there still think that these cheap labor conservatives are on to something when they say "trickle down" economics. Personally, I don't want to be a wage servant to the lucky 95%. But hey, you vote how you like.
Why would they go up just because there are more people on welfare? The war in Iraq has cost 70 billion so far, and our taxes haven't gone up. In fact, our benevolent conservative rulers are trying to give all of us working saps making over $100k a break.
See? 1) Government spends more money. 2) 3) Profit!
Considering these people can make as little as 6.50 per hour, that's only $27 billion. But I'm sure the tax cut would be good enough to buy up some more land fresh from the national forest registry...
Yeah, but having a "No solictors" sign on your door doesn't give you the right to sue solicitors who ignore it for $500. In fact, it gives you no rights at all. It just lets solicitors know they'll be bothering people who aren't interested. Chances are the smart ones won't waste their time.
We've got one of those on our door. We still get people coming in off the street, touting themselves as consultants, and leaving their cards. We thank them and throw their cards away, usually makin sure they can see it. This makes things a little awkward at user group meetings, but saves us a lot of time in hearing people prattle on about what bullshit certifications they have ("I got an 85% in networking from Brainbench," woopdiefuckingdoo, my FAT ASS CAT can network PCs and he doesn't charge $150 an hour).
Nice idea. But this state doesn't have quotas. So back to the ole' drawing board.
(Not too far, though...handing out tickets is a nice revenue stream for many small municipalities through which run heavily travelled highways. So even though there are no hard quotas, state police are expected to hand out tickets at a fairly constant rate)
Actually, there seems to be a lot of evidence that speed limits are not effective in reducing average motorist speed or in reducing accidents. Reduced speed increases survivability but not the likelihood of a crash, so it's a noble goal. But speed limits aren't the way to do it (http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html).
The most effective method of reducing speed is a visible patrol car. People are guaranteed to slow down when being watched. Which is interesting, because many state policeman seem to think that sneaking around is going to slow people down -- around here, they love parking in the shadow of underpasses and the like. Which is silly, because here in NY people flash their beams to indicate "hey, hidden cop ahead." The fastest guys slow down, while the rest of us play it cool.
Average traffic speed around here is 70 MPH. I mean, all three lanes are doing at least 15 MPH over at all times during the day. Only bluehairs drive the limit, and that's not hyperbole -- I bought a beetle with a max speed of about 63 and I get passed by people on the damn offramp. HOWEVER -- when a cop is visible in the U-turn lane, speed drops to about 60 MPH average for at least a mile before and after. Which is good, because during rush hour they lurk in the most dangerous parts of the throughway.
The parable here is this: the RIAA could save a LOT of money by simply sending a letter to people "caught" file sharing that says "Cut it out, or we'll sue you." I think most of us would be sufficiently scared to curb out practices. And those of us sharing legal files (there's got to be somebody else besides me sharing Proj. Gutenberg texts on KaZaa) wouldn't have to worry about some fool legislature BANNING peer to peer.
I love that song. I got it off KaZaa, on account of those subversives in Rage Against the Machine recorded with Sony, who wants $17 for each record in their catalogue.
Well, "Fair Use" for brewers has existed for some time. In fact, since Jimmy Cahtah, the rules for homebrewing have been so loose and carefree that you basically have unlimited home brewing rights (more on what this means below).
Since you can't patent either a food manufacturing process OR a recipe, you're free to make a perfect clone of a beer recipe. The beer industry often helps out, giving recipes for their beer, because they know a few things about brewing: homebrewers buy more beer than most people (so you want to establish a relationship with them), homebrewing is a difficult process to perfect in small batches in a home kitchen without a giant sterile vat (sterility is next to godliness in beermaking) and homebrewing is a time consuming process.
If you can either plunk down $25-$50 (the price of a home brewing "kit," buying your own hops/malt/yeast in bulk makes it cheaper by a factor of 10) and then wait 8 or more weeks for the equivalent of four cases of skunky Heineken, or you can just go buy them for $52, which would you do? If you're a homebrewer, you'd do both. To see how close you got. Then you'd screw around with the recipe.
Because beermaking isn't really about cloning. It's about perfecting your favorite beer through experimentation, like sudsy alchemy. You say you like rolling rock, but wish it was more bitter? Add more cascade hops when making the wort. Like Newcastle, but wish it was more alcoholic? Add more priming sugar before bottling.
Any way you look at it, your brewing rights protected by federal law: up to 200 gallons per year (400 gallons if you're married). That's the equivalent of 4.4 pints per day, enough to keep a 150 lb male too drunk to drive for about 8 hours out of the day.
Drink up, boyos! That's one freedom you still got!
Software doesn't have lemon laws because consumer software is only $50-$200. It would take a class action suit for the return to equal the expense of pursuit, and people already due this. Therefore, no law is necessary. Cars have lemon laws because they're expensive and often sold in high pressure situations by shady people. Shady practices often pay off bigtime in the auto industry.
Automotive recalls are to prevent people from DYING due to stupid little problems. They recalled the liner around my wheels, because in intense breaking situations the sparks from the asbestos free breaks were melting the special lightweight impact resistant platic and causing fires.
No program I have ever written has melted plastic or caused a fire or killed a person. If my dumb bugs were capable of this, then we'd have to send out a free update. My company does this, I'm sure MS would too...it's just good PR.
Yes, smart software companies SHOULD start offering warranties as part of the purchase price. But they don't, yet, and they are not obliged to by law. If MS starts charging for updates to its products after they've been out for, say, 3 years, it may be worthwhile for those of us unwilling to move to a completely new operating system, and may greatly reduce the "upgrade-as-new product" marketting that MS currently undertakes. I definitely wouldn't consider that a bad thing. But then again, I don't feel people owe me free stuff.
If your car has a 5 year bumper to bumper warranty, then you DID pay extra for it. It may have been included in the price of your car, but you paid for it. When I bought my car, the guy offered to knock off $1000 if I didn't take the warranty (which, in retrospect, i should have done, as I never used it).
Consumer software companies don't offer warranties by year right now, because who knows how long a company like, say, Ahead, might produce the same product. Chances are, they'll eventually add so many new features that they'll feel it's not fair to them to for them to give you the upgrade for free. That would be like you paying for a Honda, then getting an Acura for free if it broke under warranty.
Industrial software generally DOES have a warranty on it. Every package my company sells comes with one. Some online service providers (ASPs and the like) roll that into a fee along with bandwidth and hosting...which makes it a bit more transparent. Still others expect you to buy both upgrades and service charges, to pay for the different aspects of their industry: new development (innovations and creations), and support (diagnostics and repairs).
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I can't think of a 2 mp CCD that can be had for under $10. It would be worth it for me just to pry open the thing and get the ccd and the lens. Spycam city, baby -- girl's dorm shower, here I come!
Well, it wouldn't be a good business model. Good digital cameras have a high learning curve and bad digital cameras are cheap enough where it would be better just to purchase it. I used to work at a "video memories" place down the road from my house in the mid 80s...it was my job to answer half hour long phone calls from people who had rented (that's the word we Yanks use) a VHS recorder and couldn't figure out how to get it to play back. These things had about 10 buttons on them, clearly labelled, and instruction books were still in plain english back then. Nowadays, a $100 digital camera does many times over as much, and it's not worth renting something that's only $100 that you'll probably use all the time.
Combine that with the volitility of media, all the accessories you have to keep track of, and you've got one hell of a mess with very little chance for profit -- because most people will just buy some POS camera anyway.
As for renting professional strength gear...check with your local college. Mine had an A/V co-op that rented cameras, lenses, digicams, editing equipment for REAL cheap prices.
How many secret, unreported installations of Windows are there?
I know when the BSA sent us our "Welcome to Self Audit Hell" stuff, there were at least 5 machines which we pulled from the network first...
What's ironic here is that Buy.com has classically had really good service, decent prices, a nice search engine and, overall, less of a soul crushing "sell them everything" attitude than some of the other big retailers (*cough*amazon*cough).
Suddenly, they get into the business of music -- a "happy" thing, we can all agree -- and they feel the need to whack everybody on the hand with the DRM ruler and give the shittiest service ever. Not to mention the "cost cutting" method of buying other people's plug ins rather than supporting them themselves (good thing it's cheaper, because selling hacks instead of solutions isn't the way to gain trust). And, if I remember correctly, Apple got its store up by making deals with LABELS, not distributors. Meaning that there's fewer middlemen, so artists probably get a bigger take.
So much heartache in the world of music today. So many people trying to wrap their fist around a talented musician's balls. This is why I bought a new guitar and a copy of the Mel Bay Method to Blues. Can't sue me for the shit that spews out of my own brain...especially if I never record it.
Whoa. You're a company with limited development resources. How would you maximize your time:
1 -- Rewrite your application for an operating system used by 96% of users, with a single API for burning, playing music, and displaying graphics.
2 -- Rewrite your application for an operating system used by 3% of users, with several different APIs for burning, several different APIs for playing audio, and a half dozen graphics systems and toolkits, the majority of which are fundamentally at odds with your own tight look and feel.
Apple has proven they're not against open source. So if iTunes -- Windows takes off, EXPECT a linux version. But they're not fucking stupid.
Because the organization that was out there to protect the rights of musicians became the RIAA. You see, all private organizations designed to help the "common man" are susceptable to greed. When it became obvious that they would have to either back the artists, or the copyright holders, the RIAA went with the ones that had the money. And it hasn't hurt them.
(wish i could stick a "yet" at the end of this, but i'm far too cynical. you want great music with no legal heartache? go to an open mic)
Gotta pay taxes too. iTMS includes tax in the .99.
Go back to the standards body and release the codecs into the public domain and give up the idea of being their 'own' standard. Which is a concept that has killed so many companies and products over the years.
Oh yeah. Closed standards sure has killed off Word, Excel, Access...AVI...
(Lots of other companies have also done good business with "closed" standards...Adobe, Quark, even Apple with Quicktime and Sorenson)
The way Microsoft upgrades go, you risk losing everything if you *DO* upgrade as well.
They did this. In Montana. It worked.
Yeah, no shit. Compression's gone to hell on this thing. But I just got it (traded a copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for it) and am not quite ready to rip it apart yet.
Actually, there in Texas, you can't.
/ 08 -02/thePrice.asp
http://www.thecattlemanmagazine.com/issues/2002
Unless you can convince one of them Texas juries that shooting a solicitor was self defense or protection of your property. And I'm betting you'd have a pretty hard time of it.
Actually, when fines go up that usually isn't a deterrant. They're doubled in work zones and people routinely violate the limit regardless. The road near my house has been under construction for roughly two years, speed limit 45, average speed 70. It's just as dangerous to slow down as it is to go fast...just ask the guy who hit my car in a work zone three weeks ago (please do -- he hasn't called me back yet). I was doing 45...traffic stopped completely in less than 100 feet (the assholes were throwing cones accross traffic instead of to the side of the road that was closed...$1200 damage to my car so they could save a few minutes when laying down the pattern tomorrow).
To be honest, nothing is "effective" at slowing people down along the entire highway except constant surveilance and zero tolerance fines. Who wants that? Placing cops in dangerous areas to ensure people don't blast around curves at 120 MPH is about as good as we're going to get without going all Orwellian.
Sun shines around here just fine for my solar needs. I just don't have the money for it. My power needs are meager (thanks to an energy star kick last year), and I could cover them with about $7500 in solar shingles and a further $2500 in batteries. $10k seems like it'd be worth it pay basically nothing for power...but we don't plan on staying in our house for more than another 5 years. Solar cells, believe it or not, do not add a lot of value to your house...most people don't care and if they find out about the maintenance (cells dry out, need to be replaced often, etc), they aren't willing to pay for them.
It's a shame -- if the solar industry were subsidized...but alas, solar isn't a cash cow so it doesn't have lobbiests like coal, gas, nuclear, or even hydro.
Nothing like toting around 7 speakers and a subwoofer for a handheld game.
Seriously, I think that the majority of people using these things are going to be wearing headphones. So why not devote some time to that, and make this the first handheld device designed to be binaural (with all the spooky positional audio that entails)? Make a really great feature instead of a buzzterm that'll need to get downmixed.
I'm worried that this gadget's going to be too big, too expensive, and too unwieldy. Remember the Lynx? The turbo express? The game gear? They all failed because they ignored the basic features that make nintendo handhelds so successful: they're small and cheap, so parents can hand them to whining children without worrying that they'll break. And kids will play anything, regardless of specs...my brother still plays Tiger handhelds from when I was a kid.
Actually, his name is Generalissimo Augusto Nicolas Calderon Sandino, which you think may be a rather big and subversive name for a cat, but I assure you he is, in fact, a big subversive cat. Just look at the way he kicks a llama's ass in NWN.
I think you're confusing your mobs here.
When a person tries to save American jobs from going over sees through tariffs and legislation, he's essentially trying to avoid a large group of people from sucking at the tit of welfare and unemployment. This is protecting the core of consumer capitalism: the middle class. Market prices are higher, but since average salaries are also higher, everything evens out. General security increases, and the quality of life is higher. This is the viewpoint of the "liberal" mob.
When a person tries to fight for free trade, he is trying to maximize profits. The best way to do this is to use the cheapest labor available and decrease prices to give themself an advantage over their competition. Problem is, that the competetion soon follows suit, because their goods are now "too expensive." The result is a downward spiral of ever decreasing wages, decreasing quality, and an eternal need to decrease both (or establish a monopoly) to maintain a hold on a market that has become driven by price, not quality. Meanwhile, only a handful of people are benefiting from this practice. The majority of the country is faced with lower salaries (more unemployed workers means more desperate people meaning a lower salary for "comparable" work) along with lower prices, so very little has changed -- except the reduction in the quality of goods, and the gap between the rich and the poor which becomes ever wider and more unfathomable. Constant stress of the cycle of cheap employment and unemployment decreases the quality of life. This is the viewpoint of the "conservative" mob.
There is no magical third option, where free trade is opened to desperate second wave nations and the general populous benefits. This myth has been disproven throughout history, and yet a lot of the "fucking idiots" out there still think that these cheap labor conservatives are on to something when they say "trickle down" economics. Personally, I don't want to be a wage servant to the lucky 95%. But hey, you vote how you like.
Why would they go up just because there are more people on welfare? The war in Iraq has cost 70 billion so far, and our taxes haven't gone up. In fact, our benevolent conservative rulers are trying to give all of us working saps making over $100k a break.
See?
1) Government spends more money.
2)
3) Profit!
Considering these people can make as little as 6.50 per hour, that's only $27 billion. But I'm sure the tax cut would be good enough to buy up some more land fresh from the national forest registry...
Yeah, but having a "No solictors" sign on your door doesn't give you the right to sue solicitors who ignore it for $500. In fact, it gives you no rights at all. It just lets solicitors know they'll be bothering people who aren't interested. Chances are the smart ones won't waste their time.
We've got one of those on our door. We still get people coming in off the street, touting themselves as consultants, and leaving their cards. We thank them and throw their cards away, usually makin sure they can see it. This makes things a little awkward at user group meetings, but saves us a lot of time in hearing people prattle on about what bullshit certifications they have ("I got an 85% in networking from Brainbench," woopdiefuckingdoo, my FAT ASS CAT can network PCs and he doesn't charge $150 an hour).
Nice idea. But this state doesn't have quotas. So back to the ole' drawing board.
(Not too far, though...handing out tickets is a nice revenue stream for many small municipalities through which run heavily travelled highways. So even though there are no hard quotas, state police are expected to hand out tickets at a fairly constant rate)
Actually, there seems to be a lot of evidence that speed limits are not effective in reducing average motorist speed or in reducing accidents. Reduced speed increases survivability but not the likelihood of a crash, so it's a noble goal. But speed limits aren't the way to do it (http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html).
The most effective method of reducing speed is a visible patrol car. People are guaranteed to slow down when being watched. Which is interesting, because many state policeman seem to think that sneaking around is going to slow people down -- around here, they love parking in the shadow of underpasses and the like. Which is silly, because here in NY people flash their beams to indicate "hey, hidden cop ahead." The fastest guys slow down, while the rest of us play it cool.
Average traffic speed around here is 70 MPH. I mean, all three lanes are doing at least 15 MPH over at all times during the day. Only bluehairs drive the limit, and that's not hyperbole -- I bought a beetle with a max speed of about 63 and I get passed by people on the damn offramp. HOWEVER -- when a cop is visible in the U-turn lane, speed drops to about 60 MPH average for at least a mile before and after. Which is good, because during rush hour they lurk in the most dangerous parts of the throughway.
The parable here is this: the RIAA could save a LOT of money by simply sending a letter to people "caught" file sharing that says "Cut it out, or we'll sue you." I think most of us would be sufficiently scared to curb out practices. And those of us sharing legal files (there's got to be somebody else besides me sharing Proj. Gutenberg texts on KaZaa) wouldn't have to worry about some fool legislature BANNING peer to peer.
I love that song. I got it off KaZaa, on account of those subversives in Rage Against the Machine recorded with Sony, who wants $17 for each record in their catalogue.
Like this white flag song too...
Well, "Fair Use" for brewers has existed for some time. In fact, since Jimmy Cahtah, the rules for homebrewing have been so loose and carefree that you basically have unlimited home brewing rights (more on what this means below).
Since you can't patent either a food manufacturing process OR a recipe, you're free to make a perfect clone of a beer recipe. The beer industry often helps out, giving recipes for their beer, because they know a few things about brewing: homebrewers buy more beer than most people (so you want to establish a relationship with them), homebrewing is a difficult process to perfect in small batches in a home kitchen without a giant sterile vat (sterility is next to godliness in beermaking) and homebrewing is a time consuming process.
If you can either plunk down $25-$50 (the price of a home brewing "kit," buying your own hops/malt/yeast in bulk makes it cheaper by a factor of 10) and then wait 8 or more weeks for the equivalent of four cases of skunky Heineken, or you can just go buy them for $52, which would you do? If you're a homebrewer, you'd do both. To see how close you got. Then you'd screw around with the recipe.
Because beermaking isn't really about cloning. It's about perfecting your favorite beer through experimentation, like sudsy alchemy. You say you like rolling rock, but wish it was more bitter? Add more cascade hops when making the wort. Like Newcastle, but wish it was more alcoholic? Add more priming sugar before bottling.
Any way you look at it, your brewing rights protected by federal law: up to 200 gallons per year (400 gallons if you're married). That's the equivalent of 4.4 pints per day, enough to keep a 150 lb male too drunk to drive for about 8 hours out of the day.
Drink up, boyos! That's one freedom you still got!
Software doesn't have lemon laws because consumer software is only $50-$200. It would take a class action suit for the return to equal the expense of pursuit, and people already due this. Therefore, no law is necessary. Cars have lemon laws because they're expensive and often sold in high pressure situations by shady people. Shady practices often pay off bigtime in the auto industry.
Automotive recalls are to prevent people from DYING due to stupid little problems. They recalled the liner around my wheels, because in intense breaking situations the sparks from the asbestos free breaks were melting the special lightweight impact resistant platic and causing fires.
No program I have ever written has melted plastic or caused a fire or killed a person. If my dumb bugs were capable of this, then we'd have to send out a free update. My company does this, I'm sure MS would too...it's just good PR.
Yes, smart software companies SHOULD start offering warranties as part of the purchase price. But they don't, yet, and they are not obliged to by law. If MS starts charging for updates to its products after they've been out for, say, 3 years, it may be worthwhile for those of us unwilling to move to a completely new operating system, and may greatly reduce the "upgrade-as-new product" marketting that MS currently undertakes. I definitely wouldn't consider that a bad thing. But then again, I don't feel people owe me free stuff.
If your car has a 5 year bumper to bumper warranty, then you DID pay extra for it. It may have been included in the price of your car, but you paid for it. When I bought my car, the guy offered to knock off $1000 if I didn't take the warranty (which, in retrospect, i should have done, as I never used it).
Consumer software companies don't offer warranties by year right now, because who knows how long a company like, say, Ahead, might produce the same product. Chances are, they'll eventually add so many new features that they'll feel it's not fair to them to for them to give you the upgrade for free. That would be like you paying for a Honda, then getting an Acura for free if it broke under warranty.
Industrial software generally DOES have a warranty on it. Every package my company sells comes with one. Some online service providers (ASPs and the like) roll that into a fee along with bandwidth and hosting...which makes it a bit more transparent. Still others expect you to buy both upgrades and service charges, to pay for the different aspects of their industry: new development (innovations and creations), and support (diagnostics and repairs).