Wow, where do you get "Contracts" from. Where I live (Earth) you get a "contract" (no caps, what a shame) which isn't worth the paper it is written on once a bankruptcy judge steps in.
I sure hope by "Contract" you meant "emergency data processing center with all applications and data in a runable state within the day". Otherwise, you're fired.
I picked up the recompiled version of Plane Scape: Torment (that works under XP). Those 1999 graphics are not going to blow anyone's mind.
But the game is immersive. The *story* is immersive, to be specific: you actually can enjoy the interactions of the characters and your choices do make a difference.
Meanwhile, making the "game world" a FPS with a physics engine is no guarantee of immersion. The story can still be poorly written and artificial stupidity can ruin the experience.
People who think that high end technology is the only way to achieve immersion must have never picked up a good book.
All that a queue system did was to create a different value structure. With the new rules in place, it would seem painfully clear to anyone with Econ 101 under their belt (and probably many people without it) that the queue meant that having more "places in line" would give you better value, for not much investment. Duh.
One of the things that capitalism does well is work *with* basic human nature. It is basic human nature to exploit the world for personal gain. Queues work against that by trying to be "fair" but instead simply modify the exploitation requirements. Now if they had *verified* the registrars status as legitimate businesses with working web sites and different phone numbers, it would have upped the difficulty of "gaming" the system. It would *not* have removed gaming though: I'm sure you would have simply seen a lot of home answering machines changed to answer as a business and a lot of throw away domains. Even having two chances per round would be a noticable improvement.
They would have been better off with a straight up auction: they would have made piles of money. No, auctions are not "fair": those with cash take the prizes. Duh again. How is that worse than what happend, where those who saw through the system exploited those who took the high road?
While the armor is pretty, I can see how a "skin" (even if it adds armor points to the horse) at $2.50 does seem to be nickel and dimeing the player. Especially for people who were used to Morrowinds free mods that completely revamped the world.
I guess this is an experiment with the micro content that Microsoft was looking to build an "ecosystem" of. Bah, I hate that marketoid term. Apparently the ecosystem complains loudly; wonder what that bodes for sustaining such prices for such small add-ons.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the announced *intent* was enough to get these guys to address the issue pro-actively, but I'm not quite seeing where what your issue is. If they are proposing something like this it is because the issue has stirred up enough of a fuss to get them to mobilize (they don't burn political capital for amusement).
Shall we always wait for bad things to happen before they are addressed? The companies have made their stance clear: data pipes don't carry common carrier requirements so they can do as they please. This is an attempt to put them back in the box that we thought the were in originally.
(A few items prior to this one was an article where the claim was being made that a company that was bringing their own VOIP solution was hampering other VOIP connection. May be paranoia, but that is the world they want to bring in the long run: pay us, use our flavor of product or be degraded and blocked).
All this hoopla about nothing really. Just don't buy HD anything. That has been my policy, and I'm glad I have old fashioned tech. I had no intention of purchasing HD anything because this has outcome has been predicted for years. I have likewise discouraged others from placing their bets when such stupid outcomes were likely.
The reality of this is that a bunch of "must have latest gizmo" yahoos broke thier piggy bank thinking the industry was going to hand them everything on a silver platter. Well, reality is now coming to roost. Those with the busted piggy banks figure out if HD or BR rulz, OK? While your at it, could you figure out where reasonable use dies so I can stay on this side of it? Something tells me that I will be buying standard DVDs for some time to come.
Since I said that my company is *subscription* based, in what way are they not my customers again? Likewise, treating users as product being sold is probably going to give the wrong focus: if you fail to provide for your users, no matter what you call them, they won't be back, meaning no ad impressions anyway.
OK, since the original poster didn't bite, I will.
If you make your site unusable without Javascript, Flash, Java and whatever else you want to impose, you *do* end up missing some customers. Making your site gracefully degrade means that people won't think that you are a failure as a programmer. See, when people go to a site and get broken links, partial page loads and other things like that, they think it is the sites fault, not their configuration (your Nemesis in the parent posts notwithstanding).
That may mean simply saying up front "Javascript is required for this site and is not currently available in your configuration" along with some instructions based on the browser detected. That's what we do, and it works well enough. Those who refuse to use Javascript, as you point out, are not your customer anyway. But more importantly, those who just had it switched off, had a security setting or some other configuration issue know that your site isn't just some loserweb that failed to work. Which is important because some of them will turn it on, and even those who won't can't badmouth your company for failing to make the requirements clear.
Likewise, in the case of advertisements (we are subscription based, so it isn't an issue for us), you can detect if the ads load and give a polite notice to unblock *your specific* ad server. Instead of just failing to operate, which makes your site look like a slipshod operation and again creates a negative customer experience. Never underestimate the power of a negative experience with an user to impact *other potential customers*. Any site that doesn't take that in consideration isn't doing their shareholders/investors any favors.
Sometimes the worst films become the best material for future amusement. See: MST3K, Ed Wood. I would for one have had less joy in my life if Plan 9 had not been made.
I'm quite clear on the reality, having been divorced once (and won sole custody of my son and garnered zero financial or other obligations due to my divorce). You on the other hand have convinced yourself of the terrible plight of a male who marries. It is a plight that can be avoided by arranging things prior to the marrage properly. No, I'm not afraid: I faced the situation and came out victorious. You, on the other hand, appear afraid to try, which is the worst type of fear.
"Love is an emotion, and it is a relevant consideration, but it is not itself a source of knowledge, truth, or wisdom."
You sure know how to keep those sweet nothings coming, don't you Vulcan boy? I'm not going to argue with someone who is quite clearly living in terror, especially if that is what makes you happy. I'll just say that I'm quite happy in my marriage, and clearly you wouldn't be happy in one. Live long and prosper, however your boat gets floated.
"If you check your sales figures you'll be surprised to learn which one sells the best (hint: it's not number three)."
Well, I hate to break the news to you, but I worked at an electronics store when I was in college. I handled the product on a daily basis with customers, read the reports on a weekly basis and did inventory on a quarterly basis for years. Part of it was evaluating what sold and what didn't so management could pick and choose the new product mix to order (you get that job if you are the "computer guy" and everyone else isn't: running spreadsheets was boring but the rest were clueless).
Anyway, the reality is that we carried the base line models because there was a small percentage of bargain shoppers who would buy them, but we usually used them as loss leaders and ad bait. A much larger percentage purchased the midline gear, often with an emphasis on gizmo factor over quality of the product itself.
There was another contingent of people who bought the high end gear even when it was in reality no better than a solid midline piece, but they were as small of a population as the base line purchasers. No, the real money is on the gizmo endowed midline products, not the base and not the premium. You had to carry the stuff (why throw away sales), but it wasn't the bread and butter.
I doubt people have changed that much in fifteen years, especially considering what I see going out the door of those kinds of stores (I notice out of habit really). Looks like the same midline gear we used to sell.
If you can't read that and understand why people get married, then you will enjoy a long, prosperous and emotionally empty life. See, there is more to life than the rational, the cost benefit analysis and love falls in that domain. I'm sure when you present that argument to a girlfriend, she gets all *tingly* inside knowing that objectivity trumps emotion. Oooh baby, now that's romance.
Ya' know, answering an Anonymous Coward is one of the stupidist things one can do, but for anyone who comes after and wonders what this anonymous "but oh so wise" coward is spouting about:
You know, I agree with this up to the point that there was an already existing method for obtaining authorization *after the fact*. By neglecting to take that step, it has offended even people like me who believe in executive power during times of crisis.
The existing methods were put in place to create a paper trail of what was being done, and it is clear that paper trail was an unwanted nuisance. *That* is what ticks me off, not that they follow up on leads. Nothing in the law would have prevented those wiretaps and there would be little heat if the president would simply follow established, auditable procedures.
The suit likewise is going after the idea that AT&T opened the networks up far beyond the requirements (and potentially legal bounds) of a normal, legal wiretap. I have no idea if they did or didn't do that.
Have you opted out? Personally, I find the idea that people might be directed to my content (on or off line) by search to be thrilling. Google is working very hard to take those people who find my content and convert it into sales. If it turns out they do something evil with the search tools, perhaps I will change my mind, but free (cost to me) exposure seems a benefit not a negative.
Of course, there are those who feel that libraries should be burned down and the only way knowledge should be transferred is via direct payment to the holder of that knowledge. Several of the textbooks in the University here have come in the new "limited duration license" CDs where they become coasters six months after purchase (at the end of the semester). That way, it kills the used book market without the expense of needing a new edition. I find that pathetic in a money-grubbing sort of way and my wife refuses to use such "textbooks". Sadly, I suspect that in fifty years, that will be the norm and the fact that I have my old textbooks on the shelf will be look upon as a quaint oddity.
We use open source internally, but we never mention it to our clients (since the systems *they* use live on Microsoft platforms). The reason: when we tried to use open source foundations the clients balked. (These are large insurance companies and are very conservative). So our costs are higher than neccessary and that is transferred on in pricing to the client. I think it is silly as what we do could easily be done with open source components from top to bottom, but when we say.NET, SQL Server and Windows 2003 we get nods of approval. When we let slip our internal systems are PHP, Postgres and Linux we get furrowed brows. Even though if we were using open source for their systems they could be up and running *much cheaper* if we were to fail. Ah well, corporate is as coprate does.
I agree to a point, but the ruling made it clear that the "additional social value" of access was a consideration for the fair use acceptance. Google is using the same argument for the book search tool, and since it was accepted here, perhaps it will have a leg to stand on.
The realities of the case that was just ruled in Google's favor would seem on a literal reading of copyright law to be in the copyright owners favor. The judge quite clearly found that fair use applied in a context I was suprised by.
He also found in the section discussing license that because Google has several opt out mechansims (robots.txt, meta tags and direct contact) that the client failed to avail himself to, they had an implied license. Google has been very vocal in the book effort that any work would be excluded simply by asking for it to be excluded. I thought that was weak, but the judge her found passive licensing to be in force in this case, which may mean that anyone who doesn't actually request removal in the book effort may be seen as passively approving the indexing.
My point wasn't that it made it a slam dunk, but that this case went so favorably that it made it more likely that the book scanning cases might as well, something that surprised me.
That is an excellent point, but for services the financial risk is much greater than for applications. If Microsoft poofed off the planet tomorrow, I could continue to run my Windows based operating systems and applications for an undefined amount of time. If Google poofed off the planet tomorrow, I will be looking for a new search solution. Immediately.
The issue of patents affects both applications and services fairly equally: if Windows was determined to violate a patent and was withdrawn, I'm either operating illegally the next day or am scrambling to migrate my data (and hoping it wasn't a file system patent, so I can actually read that data). If Google is found to violate a patent, I have a similar situation, except perhaps my data (say Gmail) is harder to get to (backups, backups, backups!). So while code escrow (and the continuation assurance that goes with it in the case of a service) only addresses company failures and not IP issues, I don't think it creates a *higher* risk of IP issues than applications sitting on disks.
Meanwhile, if an open source product is determined to violate patents, in theory using the software is no more legal than in either of the above cases. Sure, you might be able to operate below radar longer, but I would hate to have *that* as my contingency plan.
After reading the actual opinion that granted summary judgement, if this same logic is applied to the scanning and offering of search on "real world" materials, Google may be able to withstand lawsuits on the book scanning effort quite well. There are some differences that could create a different outcome, but this outcome was 100% favorable to Google and the idea of indexing and caching of materials to allow such search and reference was solidly defended by the judge.
Service of any kind can fail; companies should always have contingency plans in place in case of such failure. BlackBerry is a great tool, but there are other tools now that can do the same task and companies have known for some time the risk that existed to the service. Those who haven't a migration plan have simply failed to plan, but the loss won't be too grave as e-mail itself will continue internally and there are plenty of PDAs/Phones that can take over the workload.
On the other hand, when a service is key to the operations of the company it is far more important to have solid contingency plans. We provide such a system and the big concern our large clients have is "how do we continue if your company fails". Even though we have escrowed code, it wouldn't do the clients much good as they would have to bring up servers, restore the data and understand the operations side. For that reason some clients are paying for "continuity insurance" which funds us for three to six months at a maintenance level to operate the system until the escrowed code running and ownership is transferred.
We are handling this continuity by placing the funds in a reserve controlled by a third party that is releasable via the "triggering conditions" of a contract ending or our normal operations being threatened. Obviously, if our product was open source, there would still be the transfer concerns, so I don't think open source provides some magic bullet in the case of "software as service" since typically such arrangements include the hosting. It would provide the availability to continue development after the failure of the service, but again our code escrow and transfer effectively is the same thing (although the various clients would do so independently instead of under the banner of some foundation. I see the possibilities of a foundation that could better steer such development as perhaps the only real benefit to OSS, and frankly it isn't out of the question to BSD license the code upon failure (we don't but we could).
I have heard Wipeout referred to as the "one night stand" because of length. Meanwhile, I am not a sports gamer (that's why they invented outside: for sports). Neither system has really impressed me, but the DS edged out with backwards compatibility and some innovative games that at least were interesting from interface standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, where do you get "Contracts" from. Where I live (Earth) you get a "contract" (no caps, what a shame) which isn't worth the paper it is written on once a bankruptcy judge steps in.
I sure hope by "Contract" you meant "emergency data processing center with all applications and data in a runable state within the day". Otherwise, you're fired.
I picked up the recompiled version of Plane Scape: Torment (that works under XP). Those 1999 graphics are not going to blow anyone's mind.
But the game is immersive. The *story* is immersive, to be specific: you actually can enjoy the interactions of the characters and your choices do make a difference.
Meanwhile, making the "game world" a FPS with a physics engine is no guarantee of immersion. The story can still be poorly written and artificial stupidity can ruin the experience.
People who think that high end technology is the only way to achieve immersion must have never picked up a good book.
Wow, people are surprised by this result?
All that a queue system did was to create a different value structure. With the new rules in place, it would seem painfully clear to anyone with Econ 101 under their belt (and probably many people without it) that the queue meant that having more "places in line" would give you better value, for not much investment. Duh.
One of the things that capitalism does well is work *with* basic human nature. It is basic human nature to exploit the world for personal gain. Queues work against that by trying to be "fair" but instead simply modify the exploitation requirements. Now if they had *verified* the registrars status as legitimate businesses with working web sites and different phone numbers, it would have upped the difficulty of "gaming" the system. It would *not* have removed gaming though: I'm sure you would have simply seen a lot of home answering machines changed to answer as a business and a lot of throw away domains. Even having two chances per round would be a noticable improvement.
They would have been better off with a straight up auction: they would have made piles of money. No, auctions are not "fair": those with cash take the prizes. Duh again. How is that worse than what happend, where those who saw through the system exploited those who took the high road?
While the armor is pretty, I can see how a "skin" (even if it adds armor points to the horse) at $2.50 does seem to be nickel and dimeing the player. Especially for people who were used to Morrowinds free mods that completely revamped the world.
I guess this is an experiment with the micro content that Microsoft was looking to build an "ecosystem" of. Bah, I hate that marketoid term. Apparently the ecosystem complains loudly; wonder what that bodes for sustaining such prices for such small add-ons.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the announced *intent* was enough to get these guys to address the issue pro-actively, but I'm not quite seeing where what your issue is. If they are proposing something like this it is because the issue has stirred up enough of a fuss to get them to mobilize (they don't burn political capital for amusement).
Shall we always wait for bad things to happen before they are addressed? The companies have made their stance clear: data pipes don't carry common carrier requirements so they can do as they please. This is an attempt to put them back in the box that we thought the were in originally.
(A few items prior to this one was an article where the claim was being made that a company that was bringing their own VOIP solution was hampering other VOIP connection. May be paranoia, but that is the world they want to bring in the long run: pay us, use our flavor of product or be degraded and blocked).
All this hoopla about nothing really. Just don't buy HD anything. That has been my policy, and I'm glad I have old fashioned tech. I had no intention of purchasing HD anything because this has outcome has been predicted for years. I have likewise discouraged others from placing their bets when such stupid outcomes were likely.
The reality of this is that a bunch of "must have latest gizmo" yahoos broke thier piggy bank thinking the industry was going to hand them everything on a silver platter. Well, reality is now coming to roost. Those with the busted piggy banks figure out if HD or BR rulz, OK? While your at it, could you figure out where reasonable use dies so I can stay on this side of it? Something tells me that I will be buying standard DVDs for some time to come.
Since I said that my company is *subscription* based, in what way are they not my customers again? Likewise, treating users as product being sold is probably going to give the wrong focus: if you fail to provide for your users, no matter what you call them, they won't be back, meaning no ad impressions anyway.
OK, since the original poster didn't bite, I will.
If you make your site unusable without Javascript, Flash, Java and whatever else you want to impose, you *do* end up missing some customers. Making your site gracefully degrade means that people won't think that you are a failure as a programmer. See, when people go to a site and get broken links, partial page loads and other things like that, they think it is the sites fault, not their configuration (your Nemesis in the parent posts notwithstanding).
That may mean simply saying up front "Javascript is required for this site and is not currently available in your configuration" along with some instructions based on the browser detected. That's what we do, and it works well enough. Those who refuse to use Javascript, as you point out, are not your customer anyway. But more importantly, those who just had it switched off, had a security setting or some other configuration issue know that your site isn't just some loserweb that failed to work. Which is important because some of them will turn it on, and even those who won't can't badmouth your company for failing to make the requirements clear.
Likewise, in the case of advertisements (we are subscription based, so it isn't an issue for us), you can detect if the ads load and give a polite notice to unblock *your specific* ad server. Instead of just failing to operate, which makes your site look like a slipshod operation and again creates a negative customer experience. Never underestimate the power of a negative experience with an user to impact *other potential customers*. Any site that doesn't take that in consideration isn't doing their shareholders/investors any favors.
No, no, no. Because resorting to singles sites is hysterical.
Sometimes the worst films become the best material for future amusement. See: MST3K, Ed Wood. I would for one have had less joy in my life if Plan 9 had not been made.
http://www.okcupid.com/profile?tuid=12079750184124 94804
http://amliebsch.yafro.com/profile
Dude, you need to know that even if you choose different user names (which shows at least some geek cred) for different systems, *don't* link them.
Geeze.
I'm quite clear on the reality, having been divorced once (and won sole custody of my son and garnered zero financial or other obligations due to my divorce). You on the other hand have convinced yourself of the terrible plight of a male who marries. It is a plight that can be avoided by arranging things prior to the marrage properly. No, I'm not afraid: I faced the situation and came out victorious. You, on the other hand, appear afraid to try, which is the worst type of fear.
"Love is an emotion, and it is a relevant consideration, but it is not itself a source of knowledge, truth, or wisdom."
You sure know how to keep those sweet nothings coming, don't you Vulcan boy? I'm not going to argue with someone who is quite clearly living in terror, especially if that is what makes you happy. I'll just say that I'm quite happy in my marriage, and clearly you wouldn't be happy in one. Live long and prosper, however your boat gets floated.
"If you check your sales figures you'll be surprised to learn which one sells the best (hint: it's not number three)."
Well, I hate to break the news to you, but I worked at an electronics store when I was in college. I handled the product on a daily basis with customers, read the reports on a weekly basis and did inventory on a quarterly basis for years. Part of it was evaluating what sold and what didn't so management could pick and choose the new product mix to order (you get that job if you are the "computer guy" and everyone else isn't: running spreadsheets was boring but the rest were clueless).
Anyway, the reality is that we carried the base line models because there was a small percentage of bargain shoppers who would buy them, but we usually used them as loss leaders and ad bait. A much larger percentage purchased the midline gear, often with an emphasis on gizmo factor over quality of the product itself.
There was another contingent of people who bought the high end gear even when it was in reality no better than a solid midline piece, but they were as small of a population as the base line purchasers. No, the real money is on the gizmo endowed midline products, not the base and not the premium. You had to carry the stuff (why throw away sales), but it wasn't the bread and butter.
I doubt people have changed that much in fifteen years, especially considering what I see going out the door of those kinds of stores (I notice out of habit really). Looks like the same midline gear we used to sell.
"when it doesn't make sense, objectively"
If you can't read that and understand why people get married, then you will enjoy a long, prosperous and emotionally empty life. See, there is more to life than the rational, the cost benefit analysis and love falls in that domain. I'm sure when you present that argument to a girlfriend, she gets all *tingly* inside knowing that objectivity trumps emotion. Oooh baby, now that's romance.
Ya' know, answering an Anonymous Coward is one of the stupidist things one can do, but for anyone who comes after and wonders what this anonymous "but oh so wise" coward is spouting about:
http://cryptome.org/nsa-ussid18.htm
You know, I agree with this up to the point that there was an already existing method for obtaining authorization *after the fact*. By neglecting to take that step, it has offended even people like me who believe in executive power during times of crisis.
The existing methods were put in place to create a paper trail of what was being done, and it is clear that paper trail was an unwanted nuisance. *That* is what ticks me off, not that they follow up on leads. Nothing in the law would have prevented those wiretaps and there would be little heat if the president would simply follow established, auditable procedures.
The suit likewise is going after the idea that AT&T opened the networks up far beyond the requirements (and potentially legal bounds) of a normal, legal wiretap. I have no idea if they did or didn't do that.
We have a winner. Ah the joy little red blinking lights could bring.
Have you opted out? Personally, I find the idea that people might be directed to my content (on or off line) by search to be thrilling. Google is working very hard to take those people who find my content and convert it into sales. If it turns out they do something evil with the search tools, perhaps I will change my mind, but free (cost to me) exposure seems a benefit not a negative.
Of course, there are those who feel that libraries should be burned down and the only way knowledge should be transferred is via direct payment to the holder of that knowledge. Several of the textbooks in the University here have come in the new "limited duration license" CDs where they become coasters six months after purchase (at the end of the semester). That way, it kills the used book market without the expense of needing a new edition. I find that pathetic in a money-grubbing sort of way and my wife refuses to use such "textbooks". Sadly, I suspect that in fifty years, that will be the norm and the fact that I have my old textbooks on the shelf will be look upon as a quaint oddity.
We use open source internally, but we never mention it to our clients (since the systems *they* use live on Microsoft platforms). The reason: when we tried to use open source foundations the clients balked. (These are large insurance companies and are very conservative). So our costs are higher than neccessary and that is transferred on in pricing to the client. I think it is silly as what we do could easily be done with open source components from top to bottom, but when we say .NET, SQL Server and Windows 2003 we get nods of approval. When we let slip our internal systems are PHP, Postgres and Linux we get furrowed brows. Even though if we were using open source for their systems they could be up and running *much cheaper* if we were to fail. Ah well, corporate is as coprate does.
I agree to a point, but the ruling made it clear that the "additional social value" of access was a consideration for the fair use acceptance. Google is using the same argument for the book search tool, and since it was accepted here, perhaps it will have a leg to stand on.
The realities of the case that was just ruled in Google's favor would seem on a literal reading of copyright law to be in the copyright owners favor. The judge quite clearly found that fair use applied in a context I was suprised by.
He also found in the section discussing license that because Google has several opt out mechansims (robots.txt, meta tags and direct contact) that the client failed to avail himself to, they had an implied license. Google has been very vocal in the book effort that any work would be excluded simply by asking for it to be excluded. I thought that was weak, but the judge her found passive licensing to be in force in this case, which may mean that anyone who doesn't actually request removal in the book effort may be seen as passively approving the indexing.
My point wasn't that it made it a slam dunk, but that this case went so favorably that it made it more likely that the book scanning cases might as well, something that surprised me.
That is an excellent point, but for services the financial risk is much greater than for applications. If Microsoft poofed off the planet tomorrow, I could continue to run my Windows based operating systems and applications for an undefined amount of time. If Google poofed off the planet tomorrow, I will be looking for a new search solution. Immediately.
The issue of patents affects both applications and services fairly equally: if Windows was determined to violate a patent and was withdrawn, I'm either operating illegally the next day or am scrambling to migrate my data (and hoping it wasn't a file system patent, so I can actually read that data). If Google is found to violate a patent, I have a similar situation, except perhaps my data (say Gmail) is harder to get to (backups, backups, backups!). So while code escrow (and the continuation assurance that goes with it in the case of a service) only addresses company failures and not IP issues, I don't think it creates a *higher* risk of IP issues than applications sitting on disks.
Meanwhile, if an open source product is determined to violate patents, in theory using the software is no more legal than in either of the above cases. Sure, you might be able to operate below radar longer, but I would hate to have *that* as my contingency plan.
After reading the actual opinion that granted summary judgement, if this same logic is applied to the scanning and offering of search on "real world" materials, Google may be able to withstand lawsuits on the book scanning effort quite well. There are some differences that could create a different outcome, but this outcome was 100% favorable to Google and the idea of indexing and caching of materials to allow such search and reference was solidly defended by the judge.
Service of any kind can fail; companies should always have contingency plans in place in case of such failure. BlackBerry is a great tool, but there are other tools now that can do the same task and companies have known for some time the risk that existed to the service. Those who haven't a migration plan have simply failed to plan, but the loss won't be too grave as e-mail itself will continue internally and there are plenty of PDAs/Phones that can take over the workload.
On the other hand, when a service is key to the operations of the company it is far more important to have solid contingency plans. We provide such a system and the big concern our large clients have is "how do we continue if your company fails". Even though we have escrowed code, it wouldn't do the clients much good as they would have to bring up servers, restore the data and understand the operations side. For that reason some clients are paying for "continuity insurance" which funds us for three to six months at a maintenance level to operate the system until the escrowed code running and ownership is transferred.
We are handling this continuity by placing the funds in a reserve controlled by a third party that is releasable via the "triggering conditions" of a contract ending or our normal operations being threatened. Obviously, if our product was open source, there would still be the transfer concerns, so I don't think open source provides some magic bullet in the case of "software as service" since typically such arrangements include the hosting. It would provide the availability to continue development after the failure of the service, but again our code escrow and transfer effectively is the same thing (although the various clients would do so independently instead of under the banner of some foundation. I see the possibilities of a foundation that could better steer such development as perhaps the only real benefit to OSS, and frankly it isn't out of the question to BSD license the code upon failure (we don't but we could).
I have heard Wipeout referred to as the "one night stand" because of length. Meanwhile, I am not a sports gamer (that's why they invented outside: for sports). Neither system has really impressed me, but the DS edged out with backwards compatibility and some innovative games that at least were interesting from interface standpoint.