Excellent. Since companies will now fear losing their reputation, perhaps they will put more thought into the operating systems they choose for keeping customer information.
Up until now many companies don't seem to care that they use insecure MS products to store information since it didn't really matter to them if their customer's privacy was being violated. If this now affects the company's reputation, you bet they will care!
[Gates] said he worried that India's enormous progress in information technology - the country has the only Microsoft software development center outside the United States - would be thwarted by AIDS.
Researchers have yet to prove that the AIDS virus is not spread through Microsoft Outlook.
India is using and developing MS products.
Bill realizes that unless drastic steps are taken, enough Indian programmers may not live long enough to create the next version of clippy.
Wanting to do an evaluation is a good idea, however, one can do more damage than good with a poorly done evaluation. I say this not because I know apriori which outcome is best for you, but simply for the fact that your analysis is flawed.
All you did was add up a bunch of numbers (one of which is made up) and then decided which one was lower. Your end result can change based on how big your made up number is.... mmmm, if you were my consultant and submitted that, I would have fired you on the spot. Any monkey can add (and make up) numbers.... consultants are paid for doing some actual work like actually analyzing the details -- at least my consultants are.
In this case the details which you glaring glossed over are some projections (based on historical data) of bug counts, resolution times, platform support, release frequency and the amount of clout you have to influence bug priority. That last one is very important if this system is to become mission critical 24x7 functionality.
Furthermore, it is not enough to know that you're buying support from a software vendor, qualitative factors such as response time guarantees, escalation clauses, level of effort required to submit problem and access to knowledge bases are all very important.
Factoring in all of this information, your analysis becomes one of assessing which software vendor can be your partner for the next 10 years. The best partner for you will depend on your personality, it might be the proverbial Maytag repairman (kind of there, but then again their product is rock solid and you never need them) or it might be like Microsoft (always there, but you stop calling because they can't solve the numerous problems).
Many times the corporate lawyer is a liberal arts person who doesn't understand the finer points of technology and licensing. As such they don't have the background to come up with creative ways for you to achieve your goals while still remaining in compliance with licensing.
I personally had to convince a VP of Development to consider my alternatives over the simple no answer that came from the corporate lawyer. It wasn't easy, but I was able to pursuade 2 other directors who backed up my ideas. No, this wasn't a dot-com startup, but a nasdaq listed company with a strong 25 year history. The conservatism and resistance to change was mind boggling.
My advice is to do exactly what you're doing. Brainstorm the heck out of this and see if you can make it work. Good luck!
I consider myself more in line with Republicans than the Dems, but I find myself p*ssed as hell with the Republican party lately.
According to Open Secrects Microsoft was the third largest contributor to the Republican party in 2002. They were the fourth largest contributor in 2000 -- right before the Justice department coincidentally bent over and let Microsoft continue their monopolistic ways.
On the flip side, Microsoft doesn't even rank in contributions to the Democratic party in 2000 or 2002.
Bush is an intellectual lightweight who has a Saddam fetish carried over from his father... all at a time when the average american is more concerned about their jobs and now paltry retirement accounts.
I'm a Republican, but my party has lost its way. Even though I'm a very highly compensated high tech professional - I don't believe this party is currently in line with my goals, values and beliefs.
At $ 0.25 per hour, I would be paying about $3/day ~ $90/month. Right now I pay about $70/month for unlimited usage.
Americans hate pay per use pricing schemes. Notice how all of the cell phone companies have moved to flat rates for a large number of minutes.... it's because we like to pay for unlimited usage of things whether it be the internet, phones or sex.
Okay, well we've worked out the first two at least.
Add a fourth, which is what my staff kept asking from me: hire some good looking females for the department. Eye candy boosts morale and results in higher productivity... or at least, that's what they said.
While working at a software product company that was core technology supplier to many of the Fortune 500 firms, I had the... ummm... opportunity to interface with IONA support and development. Their product at the time was quality challenged. Unfortunately for us and our customers, it was a core technology in our own product. A couple key showstopper issues required me to engage in almost daily conference calls with their support and development organization. They would try to fix the problems, ship us a new binary, we would run overnight testing on several hundred boxes and report the failures back to them. The sad part is that my senior developers had a good idea of how to solve the main issues... but couldn't because they didn't have access to IONA's source code. We spent weeks going round and round with them when I feel we could have solved the problem in days had we had the ability to look into their code.
While IONA is in this anecdote, it really could be applied to many commercial vendors of software. One of the largest value propositions for Open Source is trust! If you find a bug that prevents you from achieving what you need, you can always dive into the code and fix it. I can't think of any other model that builds that kind of trust on which to base your own products.
I'm sure IONA's products are much better now, but if Michi had had to depend on them for his paycheck back when I was using them, I'm sure he would've wanted the source code also.
To me, boiled down to its essence, what Joel was saying is that you must know what is important to a majority of your customers. If they value features x, y and z delivered in 2 months over having a faster product delivered in 3 months, then you give them the features. That's pretty simple for everyone to understand.
The key element of this, is I said you have to understand what a majority of your customers want. Look around you, the geek sitting to your left or your right are not the majority in the population. Think in terms of your grandmother who may have heard of this internet thing in the last few years. She's part of the majority of Americans who think that Microsoft has added new features to its operating system because they have a different set of backgrounds to choose from. Try explaining the advantages of having a full blown linux operating system on a 1.44 Meg floppy -- it'll be lost on her.
What we're really talking about is how much of the population is composed of software afficianados -- people who can appreciate the subtler distinctions between different pieces of code. Think about how you feel when interacting with a wine snob who's amazed you don't know the difference between an '83 Pinot Noir and a '72 Chateau Lafite - okay I know nothing of wines here so excuse my example. But you get the point. Not having a lot of experience with wine you might not be interested in all the details but may just want to dabble. Your grandmother and others feel the same way about computers and software. They can't appreciate whether you application has a good MVC architecture, but they can tell you if the font is pretty pretty or complain if they can't change the color scheme.
It doesn't matter that people of lesser caliber remain in the gene pool, as it's rare to see mixing among different socio-economic strata anyway.
Breeding is not the only risk of having poor genes in the pool. Abnormal or 'less than desirable' genes result in mass murderers, child molesters and Windows supporters. Personally, I would say the negative impact of lower genes in society is pretty high!
But imagine a world in which teaching in high school is such an attractive profession that it would be worth the trouble of a doctoral level education to get the job. For that to happen, we would have to pay teachers more, at least as much as what graduating doctoral students get. And they should be paid more.
True, elevating the status of the teaching profession will attract better and more qualified teachers. But have you heard the cliche, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink!"? Providing great teachers will help the kids who want to learn. Of course, the kids who want to learn have many places to get information today, namely the library, internet and cable channels like TLC and Discovery.
But the root problem is that most kids don't want to learn. They're more concerned about their clothes, hair and coolness factor than acids, bases and ph levels. "What do I need to know that for?", is the battle cry I've heard so many times from young and old who choose to live a life of ignorance. They then proceed to tell you how they don't care to know this or that detail because it is a waste of time and they'll never need to use the information. To these people, scientific knowledge is an affliction which fills their precious memory cells with
"useless" information. These cells might otherwise be more valuable by containing information on which hollywood actor is doing which actress this week.
You won't make science interesting to these kids until you can relate it to their base drives: food, fashion, sex and the quest for being cool. Relate Newton's laws of motion to how women's breasts move, both with and without a bra, and you'll have a standing room audience for your class. Speak about the aphrodisiac qualities of chocolate, while relating it to dopamine and pleasure centers in the brain and you'll have students begging to take your class. Show them a probability distribution that shows their chance of having a nice salary and pretty wife based on their years of education completed and you'll keep them in school far better than any other method.
If none of that works, skip the Phd's -- hire strippers.
I'm struggling to figure out why Palm would do this acquisition. I mean sure they pick up some world class software developers who could surely help them in working with the PalmOS - but what are they going to do with the BeOS?
Another poster suggested that they port BeOS to the Palm color. I'm sure it's feasible - says my brain even though it can barely spell BeOS - but it wouldn't really shine in the Palm. The BeOS is a true pervasively multi-threaded OS. AFAIK, it was built for heavy multimedia applications that involve a lot of disk I/O -- something you rarely see in a Palm device.
Now if Palm were going to make a play to expand the BeOS product line for the desktop -- ie. try to compete headon with Micro$oft, Linux, BSD, etc. that would be interesting! It's too bad that AOL/Time Warner wasn't the one doing the acquisition - they'd have much deeper pockets to actually make the desktop OS competition interesting.
So before scoffing at this, just think what it would be like if YOU couldn't type. Sure you MIGHT be able to improvise and such - but your productivity would go WAY down...
Well actually my productivity is pretty low to begin with. I'm usually typing with one hand while I'm either eating or jerking off with the other. But I understand what you're saying.
Now if I couldn't werk the gerkin anymore - that would be a disability!
In a separate note, Nicodaemos announced today that he is releasing his new language, Hurl, at the masses. "Many people in the industry are very excited about this new language." says Nico. "In fact, Steve Ballmer was heard to say that this is one language he just couldn't keep down."
Nico states that "Though the software is free, Hurl makes money by metering and charging fees to businesses that 'Hurl' down their users throats." "It's very exciting technology.", says Nico, "Companies will be able to send their content as projectiles to a user's browser in chunks." "Other languages are very watered down. They're here and then they're gone. Hurl sticks to you and seeps into places within your organization you never thought possible. And it's persistent. Even though you don't see it, you'd swear you could smell it. Hurl leaves a lasting impression on you."
This isn't all marketing hype. Hurl does seem to be gaining momentum with developers. One developer was recently heard to say, "... Passports, C#,.NET... Jeez it all just makes me want to Hurl!"
The prediction business is very tricky and although I'm not a psychic, I'm predicting that the upcoming release of Windows XP looks like it will drive many to Hurl, in a big way.
The article does a good job of articulating specific issues with the Microsoft's Passport system. Other people have suggested that we should perhaps look to XNS or other open source single signon systems. However, I believe they are missing an important piece.
This is important because users tend to pick poor (guessable) user names and passwords...
Yes, that's right. What good is a strong single signon system that auto authenticates distributed sites, when the single signon itself may be weak? How much will 3DES encryption protect you when your password is "Swordfish"? You may recall the slashdot article that discussed how the average person tends to do a poor job of picking a secure password.
Fundamentally, Microsoft's passport or any other single signon system is as weak as their weakest link. Which, in many, cases appears to be the original signon authentication. I don't see them really catching on until that problem is better addressed.
These systems will have a much better chance when biometric authenticators become ubiquitous. Then hackers will have a much harder time impersonating you at the single signon.
However, no single signon system is perfect and the world is going to get a whole lot nastier when biometrics arrives en masse. Someday, we'll wax nostalgic about happier times when hackers only attacked computers and didn't pull out your eyeball to break into your bank account. I just saw Demolition Man recently in which Wesley Snipes does a very nice job of faking out a retina scanner with this method - truly gruesome.
Bah, none of these single signon systems for me.
I'll just stick with my secure method of appending the site url to "password". Even if someone compromises one password, they won't know the rest!
Re:If this can't break Microsoft's back nothing wi
on
Code Red Back For More
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This won't break Microsoft's back.... consumers voting with their feet can only achieve that end.
Recently I was looking around for a new insurance company. Looking on the web I came across a couple of companies who would give me a quote if I provided them with some personal information. I was all set to deal with one site, whom I won't name, but I decided to first do a quick background check on them. Using netcraft I was able to tell they were running their site on IIS. That little bit of info told me that they weren't at all serious about keeping my personal information confidential.
Of course I decided not to pursue any business with them. But I also went a step further. I wrote them a quick email informing them that I would never do business with a company who was choosing to base their internet business on the most hacked application platform on the internet.
Let companies know that you won't do business with them if they use inferior products. Your quick and simple message to them will speak more loudly than a thousand rants on various message boards.
In the beginning, things were flat rate because there was no non-burdensone technology to measure use. Phone usage,...
From my recollection, I believe you are mistaken. In the beginning, there was not flat rate phone usage. You were allowed to make x number of local calls per month and were then charged for each call after that. Over time, people despised the pay per use model and effectively forced the phone companies into offering flat fee / unlimited use pricing.
This same trend is happening in internet usage, cell phone usage, etc. -- do you recall when a number of ISP's charged you for x number of hours per month? They rarely, if at all, do that anymore.
The service providers always wish you to pay per use. However, the customers always want unlimited use, flat fee pricing.
Given that in capitalist systems the consumer always ends up deciding how goods are sold, most IP products are moving towards flat fee, unlimited use models.
I could see something like that happening to music where you pay your $30/month and listen to whatever music you want.
... automobile "registration" fees, property taxes. Quit paying on any of these and you are deprived use of items you thought you "bought".
And piracy is the boogeyman used to justify most of this. Unlimited use software, and infinitely reviewable movies will someday be redefined as "theft".
Okay, auto registration and property taxes are not pay per use schemes, nor are they implemented by the "IP holder". This is just plain silly, your argument was questionable before, but this just pushes it over the cliff.
If you go into a store today and purchase an audio CD or video DVD, you have paid a flat fee for an unlimited use license for that intellectual property. It's an unlimited use license as in you can view or listen to it as many times as you like. It doesn't mean you can copy it to other formats and transfer it around.
How on earth do you see the RIAA or MPAA changing how they do business to institute a model where you pay to view or listen to the art only once? How do you imagine the consumers allowing this to happen?
I don't see the trend towards pay per use in the examples you've given. Instead from my blurry specs, I see where more and more providers are bundling their goods in flat fee / unlimited use offerings.
SPACEHAB is now building the Enterprise in a suburb of Moscow in a partnership with the Russian commercial space corporation RSC Energia, which handled the flight of space tourist Dennis Tito.
The centrally planned economic model of Russia is changing to incorporate private enterprise into space exploration. This while the world's largest capitalistic system has NASA rejecting commercial overatures.
I never thought I would see the day when Russia was embracing capitalism more than us.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent. Since companies will now fear losing their reputation, perhaps they will put more thought into the operating systems they choose for keeping customer information.
Up until now many companies don't seem to care that they use insecure MS products to store information since it didn't really matter to them if their customer's privacy was being violated. If this now affects the company's reputation, you bet they will care!
Researchers have yet to prove that the AIDS virus is not spread through Microsoft Outlook.
India is using and developing MS products.
Bill realizes that unless drastic steps are taken, enough Indian programmers may not live long enough to create the next version of clippy.
Wanting to do an evaluation is a good idea, however, one can do more damage than good with a poorly done evaluation. I say this not because I know apriori which outcome is best for you, but simply for the fact that your analysis is flawed.
.... mmmm, if you were my consultant and submitted that, I would have fired you on the spot. Any monkey can add (and make up) numbers .... consultants are paid for doing some actual work like actually analyzing the details -- at least my consultants are.
All you did was add up a bunch of numbers (one of which is made up) and then decided which one was lower. Your end result can change based on how big your made up number is
In this case the details which you glaring glossed over are some projections (based on historical data) of bug counts, resolution times, platform support, release frequency and the amount of clout you have to influence bug priority. That last one is very important if this system is to become mission critical 24x7 functionality.
Furthermore, it is not enough to know that you're buying support from a software vendor, qualitative factors such as response time guarantees, escalation clauses, level of effort required to submit problem and access to knowledge bases are all very important.
Factoring in all of this information, your analysis becomes one of assessing which software vendor can be your partner for the next 10 years. The best partner for you will depend on your personality, it might be the proverbial Maytag repairman (kind of there, but then again their product is rock solid and you never need them) or it might be like Microsoft (always there, but you stop calling because they can't solve the numerous problems).
Many times the corporate lawyer is a liberal arts person who doesn't understand the finer points of technology and licensing. As such they don't have the background to come up with creative ways for you to achieve your goals while still remaining in compliance with licensing.
I personally had to convince a VP of Development to consider my alternatives over the simple no answer that came from the corporate lawyer. It wasn't easy, but I was able to pursuade 2 other directors who backed up my ideas. No, this wasn't a dot-com startup, but a nasdaq listed company with a strong 25 year history. The conservatism and resistance to change was mind boggling.
My advice is to do exactly what you're doing. Brainstorm the heck out of this and see if you can make it work. Good luck!
I consider myself more in line with Republicans than the Dems, but I find myself p*ssed as hell with the Republican party lately.
... all at a time when the average american is more concerned about their jobs and now paltry retirement accounts.
According to Open Secrects Microsoft was the third largest contributor to the Republican party in 2002. They were the fourth largest contributor in 2000 -- right before the Justice department coincidentally bent over and let Microsoft continue their monopolistic ways.
On the flip side, Microsoft doesn't even rank in contributions to the Democratic party in 2000 or 2002.
Bush is an intellectual lightweight who has a Saddam fetish carried over from his father
I'm a Republican, but my party has lost its way. Even though I'm a very highly compensated high tech professional - I don't believe this party is currently in line with my goals, values and beliefs.
At $ 0.25 per hour, I would be paying about $3/day ~ $90/month. Right now I pay about $70/month for unlimited usage.
.... it's because we like to pay for unlimited usage of things whether it be the internet, phones or sex.
Americans hate pay per use pricing schemes. Notice how all of the cell phone companies have moved to flat rates for a large number of minutes
Okay, well we've worked out the first two at least.
Add a fourth, which is what my staff kept asking from me: hire some good looking females for the department. Eye candy boosts morale and results in higher productivity ... or at least, that's what they said.
While working at a software product company that was core technology supplier to many of the Fortune 500 firms, I had the ... ummm ... opportunity to interface with IONA support and development. Their product at the time was quality challenged. Unfortunately for us and our customers, it was a core technology in our own product. A couple key showstopper issues required me to engage in almost daily conference calls with their support and development organization. They would try to fix the problems, ship us a new binary, we would run overnight testing on several hundred boxes and report the failures back to them. The sad part is that my senior developers had a good idea of how to solve the main issues ... but couldn't because they didn't have access to IONA's source code. We spent weeks going round and round with them when I feel we could have solved the problem in days had we had the ability to look into their code.
While IONA is in this anecdote, it really could be applied to many commercial vendors of software. One of the largest value propositions for Open Source is trust! If you find a bug that prevents you from achieving what you need, you can always dive into the code and fix it. I can't think of any other model that builds that kind of trust on which to base your own products.
I'm sure IONA's products are much better now, but if Michi had had to depend on them for his paycheck back when I was using them, I'm sure he would've wanted the source code also.
To me, boiled down to its essence, what Joel was saying is that you must know what is important to a majority of your customers. If they value features x, y and z delivered in 2 months over having a faster product delivered in 3 months, then you give them the features. That's pretty simple for everyone to understand.
The key element of this, is I said you have to understand what a majority of your customers want. Look around you, the geek sitting to your left or your right are not the majority in the population. Think in terms of your grandmother who may have heard of this internet thing in the last few years. She's part of the majority of Americans who think that Microsoft has added new features to its operating system because they have a different set of backgrounds to choose from. Try explaining the advantages of having a full blown linux operating system on a 1.44 Meg floppy -- it'll be lost on her.
What we're really talking about is how much of the population is composed of software afficianados -- people who can appreciate the subtler distinctions between different pieces of code. Think about how you feel when interacting with a wine snob who's amazed you don't know the difference between an '83 Pinot Noir and a '72 Chateau Lafite - okay I know nothing of wines here so excuse my example. But you get the point. Not having a lot of experience with wine you might not be interested in all the details but may just want to dabble. Your grandmother and others feel the same way about computers and software. They can't appreciate whether you application has a good MVC architecture, but they can tell you if the font is pretty pretty or complain if they can't change the color scheme.
Think about it.
Breeding is not the only risk of having poor genes in the pool. Abnormal or 'less than desirable' genes result in mass murderers, child molesters and Windows supporters. Personally, I would say the negative impact of lower genes in society is pretty high!
While (Bear->Chase(me)) { me->run(); }
True, elevating the status of the teaching profession will attract better and more qualified teachers. But have you heard the cliche, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink!"? Providing great teachers will help the kids who want to learn. Of course, the kids who want to learn have many places to get information today, namely the library, internet and cable channels like TLC and Discovery.
But the root problem is that most kids don't want to learn. They're more concerned about their clothes, hair and coolness factor than acids, bases and ph levels. "What do I need to know that for?", is the battle cry I've heard so many times from young and old who choose to live a life of ignorance. They then proceed to tell you how they don't care to know this or that detail because it is a waste of time and they'll never need to use the information. To these people, scientific knowledge is an affliction which fills their precious memory cells with
"useless" information. These cells might otherwise be more valuable by containing information on which hollywood actor is doing which actress this week.
You won't make science interesting to these kids until you can relate it to their base drives: food, fashion, sex and the quest for being cool. Relate Newton's laws of motion to how women's breasts move, both with and without a bra, and you'll have a standing room audience for your class. Speak about the aphrodisiac qualities of chocolate, while relating it to dopamine and pleasure centers in the brain and you'll have students begging to take your class. Show them a probability distribution that shows their chance of having a nice salary and pretty wife based on their years of education completed and you'll keep them in school far better than any other method.
If none of that works, skip the Phd's -- hire strippers.
Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you choose
So that's why my inbox is always filled with gay porno mags and free goatsex offers!
Sheesh, can you try subscribing to Penthouse or Playboy ... the other stuff's getting a bit old.
I'm struggling to figure out why Palm would do this acquisition. I mean sure they pick up some world class software developers who could surely help them in working with the PalmOS - but what are they going to do with the BeOS?
Another poster suggested that they port BeOS to the Palm color. I'm sure it's feasible - says my brain even though it can barely spell BeOS - but it wouldn't really shine in the Palm. The BeOS is a true pervasively multi-threaded OS. AFAIK, it was built for heavy multimedia applications that involve a lot of disk I/O -- something you rarely see in a Palm device.
Now if Palm were going to make a play to expand the BeOS product line for the desktop -- ie. try to compete headon with Micro$oft, Linux, BSD, etc. that would be interesting! It's too bad that AOL/Time Warner wasn't the one doing the acquisition - they'd have much deeper pockets to actually make the desktop OS competition interesting.
Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you decide
Well actually my productivity is pretty low to begin with. I'm usually typing with one hand while I'm either eating or jerking off with the other. But I understand what you're saying.
Now if I couldn't werk the gerkin anymore - that would be a disability!
Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - you decide
Absolutely! And make sure to install that handy dandy webcam on their computer. Especially if there are possibilities of lesbian action!
Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - it's all the same to me.In a separate note, Nicodaemos announced today that he is releasing his new language, Hurl, at the masses. "Many people in the industry are very excited about this new language." says Nico. "In fact, Steve Ballmer was heard to say that this is one language he just couldn't keep down."
Nico states that "Though the software is free, Hurl makes money by metering and charging fees to businesses that 'Hurl' down their users throats." "It's very exciting technology.", says Nico, "Companies will be able to send their content as projectiles to a user's browser in chunks." "Other languages are very watered down. They're here and then they're gone. Hurl sticks to you and seeps into places within your organization you never thought possible. And it's persistent. Even though you don't see it, you'd swear you could smell it. Hurl leaves a lasting impression on you."
This isn't all marketing hype. Hurl does seem to be gaining momentum with developers. One developer was recently heard to say, "... Passports, C#, .NET ... Jeez it all just makes me want to Hurl!"
The prediction business is very tricky and although I'm not a psychic, I'm predicting that the upcoming release of Windows XP looks like it will drive many to Hurl, in a big way.
The article does a good job of articulating specific issues with the Microsoft's Passport system. Other people have suggested that we should perhaps look to XNS or other open source single signon systems. However, I believe they are missing an important piece.
Yes, that's right. What good is a strong single signon system that auto authenticates distributed sites, when the single signon itself may be weak? How much will 3DES encryption protect you when your password is "Swordfish"? You may recall the slashdot article that discussed how the average person tends to do a poor job of picking a secure password.
Fundamentally, Microsoft's passport or any other single signon system is as weak as their weakest link. Which, in many, cases appears to be the original signon authentication. I don't see them really catching on until that problem is better addressed.
These systems will have a much better chance when biometric authenticators become ubiquitous. Then hackers will have a much harder time impersonating you at the single signon.
However, no single signon system is perfect and the world is going to get a whole lot nastier when biometrics arrives en masse. Someday, we'll wax nostalgic about happier times when hackers only attacked computers and didn't pull out your eyeball to break into your bank account. I just saw Demolition Man recently in which Wesley Snipes does a very nice job of faking out a retina scanner with this method - truly gruesome.
Bah, none of these single signon systems for me. I'll just stick with my secure method of appending the site url to "password". Even if someone compromises one password, they won't know the rest!
This won't break Microsoft's back .... consumers voting with their feet can only achieve that end.
Recently I was looking around for a new insurance company. Looking on the web I came across a couple of companies who would give me a quote if I provided them with some personal information. I was all set to deal with one site, whom I won't name, but I decided to first do a quick background check on them. Using netcraft I was able to tell they were running their site on IIS. That little bit of info told me that they weren't at all serious about keeping my personal information confidential.
Of course I decided not to pursue any business with them. But I also went a step further. I wrote them a quick email informing them that I would never do business with a company who was choosing to base their internet business on the most hacked application platform on the internet.
Let companies know that you won't do business with them if they use inferior products. Your quick and simple message to them will speak more loudly than a thousand rants on various message boards.
Here's another place to try it out.
From my recollection, I believe you are mistaken. In the beginning, there was not flat rate phone usage. You were allowed to make x number of local calls per month and were then charged for each call after that. Over time, people despised the pay per use model and effectively forced the phone companies into offering flat fee / unlimited use pricing.
This same trend is happening in internet usage, cell phone usage, etc. -- do you recall when a number of ISP's charged you for x number of hours per month? They rarely, if at all, do that anymore.
The service providers always wish you to pay per use. However, the customers always want unlimited use, flat fee pricing.
Given that in capitalist systems the consumer always ends up deciding how goods are sold, most IP products are moving towards flat fee, unlimited use models.
I could see something like that happening to music where you pay your $30/month and listen to whatever music you want.
Okay, auto registration and property taxes are not pay per use schemes, nor are they implemented by the "IP holder". This is just plain silly, your argument was questionable before, but this just pushes it over the cliff.
If you go into a store today and purchase an audio CD or video DVD, you have paid a flat fee for an unlimited use license for that intellectual property. It's an unlimited use license as in you can view or listen to it as many times as you like. It doesn't mean you can copy it to other formats and transfer it around.
How on earth do you see the RIAA or MPAA changing how they do business to institute a model where you pay to view or listen to the art only once? How do you imagine the consumers allowing this to happen?
I don't see the trend towards pay per use in the examples you've given. Instead from my blurry specs, I see where more and more providers are bundling their goods in flat fee / unlimited use offerings.
Sex, cars or computers? - Pay $0.00 per use.
The centrally planned economic model of Russia is changing to incorporate private enterprise into space exploration. This while the world's largest capitalistic system has NASA rejecting commercial overatures.
I never thought I would see the day when Russia was embracing capitalism more than us.
Some people have said Burr's address doesn't work.
You can also try:
Cara Broglia
cbroglia@adobe.com
408-536-6000
She's the PR Manager in charge of the Adobe Illustrator product, so she should be one of the ones on the firing line, so to speak.
Ohter Adobe contacts can be found here.
Sounds like he went from nothing to a leading contender for a Darwin Award.
"I wish I were a real boy, because then my mommy would love me." Really? I think I see a dead movie.
Saying that they are screwing their customers is a bit harsh, isn't it? I think the proper term is love pat.
Here are a couple more interesting love pats: