Who still uses clunky optical discs to watch movies anyway? One movie, per easily scratched easily lost optical disc? No thanks... With 64GB or 80GB internal storage, i can copy a fair few movies on to there... And an external 250GB HD (2.5" so it doesnt need its own power supply" is still smaller than a dvd case, while being capable of holding many more movies and only a single item to keep track of instead of stacks of easily-misplaces DVDs.
No, that would be overclocking, where as you describe a CPU which wasn't up to scratch (and therefore inferior) is being sold as a lower priced product (because it genuinely is inferior)... I don't have a problem with that, you pay less money and get an inferior product... Same could be said for multi core CPUs where one or more cores are disabled because they are defective, or the old style CPUs where cheaper inferior versions often had the floating point unit, mmu or cache disabled because they didn't work..
Instead, what i talked about was re-enabling cores on multi core chips where the only reason those cores are disabled is because the manufacturer wants to charge you extra to enable them at some point in the future. There's nothing wrong with the cores, and it's well within the design spec, and the manufacturer will even enable them for you if you pay extra. High end manufacturers already do this, IBM mainframes usually come fully specced with hardware, but only the cpus you paid for are enabled.
Those formats are deprecated, the currently selling ms products use the OOXML based formats.
On the other hand, why should it be explicitly limited to old formats? All data should be in open formats for a huge number of reasons, archiving is just one of them. And formats should be opened up while they are new, once they become old the specs often get lost (try opening a really old word document in the current version), often there never were any formal specs beyond "whatever the program outputs".
Finally as to other formats, yes they should request the release of other proprietary formats, but they are going after the biggest target first as it affects more people... As noble as it would be to get the format specs for Wordworth on the Amiga (a long forgotten app, and its original vendor wont sell me a new copy, give it to me for free, or release the source or any specs, their official line is that my documents are lost), this would only benefit a very small number of people. Also, microsoft disclosing their old formats would set a powerful precedent for others in the industry to follow.
This is crippleware, and a terrible idea for the average consumer... Paying more for a product that costs the same to produce, or potentially even less because they don't have to disable the extra cores is a terrible rip off, and it happens already...
The same people who currently overclock, will buy the cheaper cpus with cores disabled and re-enable them... You will also get third parties who make a business out of doing the same, tho without the "exceeding design spec" risks of overclocking.
Personally, I will never pay more for a more expensive version of the same product, i will buy the cheapest available just as soon as people have worked out how to re-enable the disabled cores, and i will help my less technical friends do the same.
You can farm out first line support to companies that specialise in doing so, the support will be crap but it's first line... Depending on the nature of your app, higher levels of support may not even be required out of hours, and you can be on cal to provide proper support during business hours. Also you don't need to sell 24/7 support, or even immediate support... You could sell support with a 24 hour response time (obviously cheaper) or such...
Reasonable depends on content... Any software is likely to be completely worthless after 14 years for instance, certainly after 28... Right now we'd be getting...
Windows NT 3.x Solaris 2.3 (SunOS 5.3) AmigaOS 3.1
etc... not massively useful, and if extended to 28 years even less so... I cant even think what software was around in 1980. None of these products are still on sale, and i doubt many are even still in use...
Also, you'd probably only get the binaries, which wouldn't be terribly useful anyway. There's no provision in copyright law to release software source code when copyright expires.
Copyright for things like software need to be much shorter, and require that a given product is still available on the same (or cheaper, but not more expensive) terms to retain copyright protection, and to require that source code is released when copyright expires. How much software is lost forever now? AMIX certainly is (commodore unix), only ever available as binaries and the source code was lost, a very small piece of our history is gone forever... What else have we lost?
By contrast, linux 0.01 is still available and was even modified/used recently.
It only costs that much up front because those involve in the industry have come to expect to be paid ridiculous and unrealistic amounts... A big name actor will demand several million alone for instance. The equipment for doing special effects is now much cheaper too, there are plenty of quality software packages for such things etc.. All you really need is time and motivation.
Get started with loss leaders... Give stuff away for free, get em hooked. Or work out a way to make money, eg live performances or cinema showings (even a 1080p hd source can't be enlarged to cinema size without looking fairly crap).
Yes, the media industry was given an easy ride by easily copyable media, but they want to keep that to themselves and not allow others to benefit from it. How did the media industry survive in the days before home players in their various forms (vinyl, vhs, etc) became widely available?
Performances... Big screen cinema (its as much about the experience as the movie) Live performance (theatre is still alive and well)
It will still be possible to make money, but harder (like it used to be)... you will have to actually work for your money, not release one movie (6 months work, maybe?) and make enough money to live on for 20 years.
There is also a case for the hardware being more expensive, so that it's profitable from day one... People will be more willing to pay for an expensive console if the games are cheap/free... There's also online games, where the service being offered is what you're paying for, not the game itself. Games like eve online are downloadable for free, but not really playable without a subscription, beyond perhaps a single player training mode. Some people also like owning physical media... Not me, i find physical media old and clunky and very inconvenient.
A lot of companies that do "bespoke" development of applications often reuse code too... They may develop 10 online shopping cart apps for 10 different online retailers, but they will all be based on the same code and have the same bugs/security holes... Often the only differences will be branding and any specific customization a particular customer has demanded. However every customer will be charged for the same man-hours of coding time, even tho most of the code doesn't get rewritten.
Similar story for me, i publish a number of tools which people in my field use... As a consequence, for the last few technical interviews i've been to the guy interviewing me has heard of or even used one or more of my tools, and is often familiar with the websites i run or contributed to that publish such tools.
Or if it's a server based app, rent access to hosted instances of the app... Or sell appliances which come with the app already configured...
Selling the binaries won't help much, as someone else will compile it and make the binaries available. But you can make supported versions available for a price, and include priority telephone/email support with a guaranteed response time. Support which guarantees the ability to speak to the original developer if necessary is a good service. Also charge for implementing additional/customized features to those who need them.
Software is intangible, a lot of people don't like paying for something they can't physically hold in their hands. Once people learn that copying software costs nothing, then obtaining software for nothing seems to be the natural cost, and anything higher is a blatant rip off.
Yes, the lack of hassle and cost appeals to a lot of people.. Some people may argue that because it's free it's not worth anything, but a lot of people also don't like the idea of paying for intangible goods. If you can't hold it in your hand, then it has no physical value. Once you point out that all software is like that people tend to be a lot happier with it. And they can purchase a physical cd or physical manual if they want, but then as you pointed out above it's just one more thing to lose.
Chemicals that are hard to get? Thermite is pretty easy to make, and burns at 2500 degrees C, more than enough to melt anything a hard drive is made of... Some drives have steel cases, which thermite can easily melt... Other drives use aluminum cases, which melts very quickly.
As for how hard these chemicals are to get, what you need is aluminum powder and iron oxide, and something like magnesium ribbon to ignite it... A quick ebay search reveals:
Your right about the paranoia aspect, it's unlikely that your data is important enough that anyone would go to significant effort to recover it, but melting drives down is easy, cheap and fun.
See http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ for a few drive vs thermite experiments, the first pic was actually 3 drives when we started out, and the bright silver blob is where one of the drives completely liquified.
You can get various USB IDE/SATA controllers which will let you hook up an old drive easily, there are also SCSI controllers but they are far less common.
In the case of really old (ie very small) drives, i just create a compressed dd image of them incase i will need them in future, as unlikely as that might be it's quite easy to archive several late 90s hard drives onto a DVD these days.
Then i overwrite the drives using shred or dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net) and throw them out...
A bigger problem is dead or semi dead drives, as i'm unable to shred them... I usually opt for Thermite. Thermite is easy to make, and makes sure no data will ever be retrieved from drives. This: http://www.ev4.org/thermite/IMG00020.jpg used to be 3 hard drives. The aluminum cased drives completely melt very rapidly, to the point you can stir them with a stick... The steel cased drives take far more heat before they become molten but it's still more than doable. You might also want to strip off the circuit board before you set the drives on fire because the burning circuit boards can produce some pretty nasty smoke.
The site http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ contains a few more pictures of thermite'd drives and a small mobile phone video...
IE is only installed on all the systems, if all the systems are up to date windows boxes (2k and below are stuck with ie6)... If you have older windows systems, or anything else (macs, unix, phones etc) then you can't use these ie-only apps at all. If you develop your apps for firefox, then you can supply firefox to virtually all desktops, and on any other devices (eg embedded devices like phones) an app designed for firefox is far more likely to be standards compliant and work on these embedded devices.
However there are similar situations which go the other way... I know of at least one company that didn't want to develop/test their internal apps for more than 1 browser, but they have a number of mac and solaris based workstations in the company... Their solution was to have firefox installed on every machine and make people use that. Several of their internal apps don't work with ie at all.
IE is capable of passing your credentials over the network by default without prompting you, but i would hardly call that secure... Firefox is a cross platform browser, and non windows systems typically don't have a facility to send auth data over the network without prompting, that would be a ridiculous idea.
Several of the SIP providers supply a skype-like client which is a point+click install... I imagine voipcheap (www.voipcheap.co.uk) would be just as easy for your mother to use as skype, but it's also standards compliant and doesn't force you to use their client.
// Looking back, the C64 was really a lesson in marketing--there was technically superior competition out there on all fronts except sound
Yes, a pity what happened to the Commodore marketing department... When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing.
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Who still uses clunky optical discs to watch movies anyway?
One movie, per easily scratched easily lost optical disc? No thanks...
With 64GB or 80GB internal storage, i can copy a fair few movies on to there... And an external 250GB HD (2.5" so it doesnt need its own power supply" is still smaller than a dvd case, while being capable of holding many more movies and only a single item to keep track of instead of stacks of easily-misplaces DVDs.
No, that would be overclocking, where as you describe a CPU which wasn't up to scratch (and therefore inferior) is being sold as a lower priced product (because it genuinely is inferior)... I don't have a problem with that, you pay less money and get an inferior product...
Same could be said for multi core CPUs where one or more cores are disabled because they are defective, or the old style CPUs where cheaper inferior versions often had the floating point unit, mmu or cache disabled because they didn't work..
Instead, what i talked about was re-enabling cores on multi core chips where the only reason those cores are disabled is because the manufacturer wants to charge you extra to enable them at some point in the future. There's nothing wrong with the cores, and it's well within the design spec, and the manufacturer will even enable them for you if you pay extra. High end manufacturers already do this, IBM mainframes usually come fully specced with hardware, but only the cpus you paid for are enabled.
Did you actually read the original article?
Those formats are deprecated, the currently selling ms products use the OOXML based formats.
On the other hand, why should it be explicitly limited to old formats? All data should be in open formats for a huge number of reasons, archiving is just one of them.
And formats should be opened up while they are new, once they become old the specs often get lost (try opening a really old word document in the current version), often there never were any formal specs beyond "whatever the program outputs".
Finally as to other formats, yes they should request the release of other proprietary formats, but they are going after the biggest target first as it affects more people... As noble as it would be to get the format specs for Wordworth on the Amiga (a long forgotten app, and its original vendor wont sell me a new copy, give it to me for free, or release the source or any specs, their official line is that my documents are lost), this would only benefit a very small number of people. Also, microsoft disclosing their old formats would set a powerful precedent for others in the industry to follow.
This is crippleware, and a terrible idea for the average consumer...
Paying more for a product that costs the same to produce, or potentially even less because they don't have to disable the extra cores is a terrible rip off, and it happens already...
The same people who currently overclock, will buy the cheaper cpus with cores disabled and re-enable them... You will also get third parties who make a business out of doing the same, tho without the "exceeding design spec" risks of overclocking.
Personally, I will never pay more for a more expensive version of the same product, i will buy the cheapest available just as soon as people have worked out how to re-enable the disabled cores, and i will help my less technical friends do the same.
You can farm out first line support to companies that specialise in doing so, the support will be crap but it's first line...
Depending on the nature of your app, higher levels of support may not even be required out of hours, and you can be on cal to provide proper support during business hours.
Also you don't need to sell 24/7 support, or even immediate support... You could sell support with a 24 hour response time (obviously cheaper) or such...
Reasonable depends on content...
Any software is likely to be completely worthless after 14 years for instance, certainly after 28...
Right now we'd be getting...
Windows NT 3.x
Solaris 2.3 (SunOS 5.3)
AmigaOS 3.1
etc... not massively useful, and if extended to 28 years even less so...
I cant even think what software was around in 1980.
None of these products are still on sale, and i doubt many are even still in use...
Also, you'd probably only get the binaries, which wouldn't be terribly useful anyway. There's no provision in copyright law to release software source code when copyright expires.
Copyright for things like software need to be much shorter, and require that a given product is still available on the same (or cheaper, but not more expensive) terms to retain copyright protection, and to require that source code is released when copyright expires. How much software is lost forever now?
AMIX certainly is (commodore unix), only ever available as binaries and the source code was lost, a very small piece of our history is gone forever... What else have we lost?
By contrast, linux 0.01 is still available and was even modified/used recently.
It only costs that much up front because those involve in the industry have come to expect to be paid ridiculous and unrealistic amounts... A big name actor will demand several million alone for instance.
The equipment for doing special effects is now much cheaper too, there are plenty of quality software packages for such things etc.. All you really need is time and motivation.
Get started with loss leaders...
Give stuff away for free, get em hooked.
Or work out a way to make money, eg live performances or cinema showings (even a 1080p hd source can't be enlarged to cinema size without looking fairly crap).
Yes, the media industry was given an easy ride by easily copyable media, but they want to keep that to themselves and not allow others to benefit from it.
How did the media industry survive in the days before home players in their various forms (vinyl, vhs, etc) became widely available?
Performances...
Big screen cinema (its as much about the experience as the movie)
Live performance (theatre is still alive and well)
It will still be possible to make money, but harder (like it used to be)... you will have to actually work for your money, not release one movie (6 months work, maybe?) and make enough money to live on for 20 years.
There is also a case for the hardware being more expensive, so that it's profitable from day one... People will be more willing to pay for an expensive console if the games are cheap/free...
There's also online games, where the service being offered is what you're paying for, not the game itself. Games like eve online are downloadable for free, but not really playable without a subscription, beyond perhaps a single player training mode.
Some people also like owning physical media... Not me, i find physical media old and clunky and very inconvenient.
A lot of companies that do "bespoke" development of applications often reuse code too...
They may develop 10 online shopping cart apps for 10 different online retailers, but they will all be based on the same code and have the same bugs/security holes... Often the only differences will be branding and any specific customization a particular customer has demanded. However every customer will be charged for the same man-hours of coding time, even tho most of the code doesn't get rewritten.
Similar story for me, i publish a number of tools which people in my field use... As a consequence, for the last few technical interviews i've been to the guy interviewing me has heard of or even used one or more of my tools, and is often familiar with the websites i run or contributed to that publish such tools.
Or if it's a server based app, rent access to hosted instances of the app...
Or sell appliances which come with the app already configured...
Selling the binaries won't help much, as someone else will compile it and make the binaries available. But you can make supported versions available for a price, and include priority telephone/email support with a guaranteed response time. Support which guarantees the ability to speak to the original developer if necessary is a good service.
Also charge for implementing additional/customized features to those who need them.
Software is intangible, a lot of people don't like paying for something they can't physically hold in their hands.
Once people learn that copying software costs nothing, then obtaining software for nothing seems to be the natural cost, and anything higher is a blatant rip off.
Yes, the lack of hassle and cost appeals to a lot of people..
Some people may argue that because it's free it's not worth anything, but a lot of people also don't like the idea of paying for intangible goods. If you can't hold it in your hand, then it has no physical value. Once you point out that all software is like that people tend to be a lot happier with it.
And they can purchase a physical cd or physical manual if they want, but then as you pointed out above it's just one more thing to lose.
Chemicals that are hard to get? Thermite is pretty easy to make, and burns at 2500 degrees C, more than enough to melt anything a hard drive is made of... Some drives have steel cases, which thermite can easily melt... Other drives use aluminum cases, which melts very quickly.
As for how hard these chemicals are to get, what you need is aluminum powder and iron oxide, and something like magnesium ribbon to ignite it... A quick ebay search reveals:
Aluminum powder:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150202139025
Iron oxide powder:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200189637708
Magnesium ribbon:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250203671690
And if your really lazy, a guide for making your own:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180202428709
Or a ready made "thermite kit" which includes everything you need, $10 for 1lb of thermite good to go:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320202959476
Your right about the paranoia aspect, it's unlikely that your data is important enough that anyone would go to significant effort to recover it, but melting drives down is easy, cheap and fun.
See http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ for a few drive vs thermite experiments, the first pic was actually 3 drives when we started out, and the bright silver blob is where one of the drives completely liquified.
You can get various USB IDE/SATA controllers which will let you hook up an old drive easily, there are also SCSI controllers but they are far less common.
In the case of really old (ie very small) drives, i just create a compressed dd image of them incase i will need them in future, as unlikely as that might be it's quite easy to archive several late 90s hard drives onto a DVD these days.
Then i overwrite the drives using shred or dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net) and throw them out...
A bigger problem is dead or semi dead drives, as i'm unable to shred them... I usually opt for Thermite. Thermite is easy to make, and makes sure no data will ever be retrieved from drives.
This: http://www.ev4.org/thermite/IMG00020.jpg used to be 3 hard drives.
The aluminum cased drives completely melt very rapidly, to the point you can stir them with a stick... The steel cased drives take far more heat before they become molten but it's still more than doable. You might also want to strip off the circuit board before you set the drives on fire because the burning circuit boards can produce some pretty nasty smoke.
The site http://www.ev4.org/thermite/ contains a few more pictures of thermite'd drives and a small mobile phone video...
A good PPC laptop using a Cell as it's main processor would be good, not just a hybrid using one as a co-processor...
IE is only installed on all the systems, if all the systems are up to date windows boxes (2k and below are stuck with ie6)...
If you have older windows systems, or anything else (macs, unix, phones etc) then you can't use these ie-only apps at all. If you develop your apps for firefox, then you can supply firefox to virtually all desktops, and on any other devices (eg embedded devices like phones) an app designed for firefox is far more likely to be standards compliant and work on these embedded devices.
But you can also get Firefox support from Sun, IBM, RedHat etc, on pretty much the same terms - that it's supported as part of a larger package.
However there are similar situations which go the other way...
I know of at least one company that didn't want to develop/test their internal apps for more than 1 browser, but they have a number of mac and solaris based workstations in the company... Their solution was to have firefox installed on every machine and make people use that. Several of their internal apps don't work with ie at all.
IE is capable of passing your credentials over the network by default without prompting you, but i would hardly call that secure...
Firefox is a cross platform browser, and non windows systems typically don't have a facility to send auth data over the network without prompting, that would be a ridiculous idea.
Several of the SIP providers supply a skype-like client which is a point+click install...
I imagine voipcheap (www.voipcheap.co.uk) would be just as easy for your mother to use as skype, but it's also standards compliant and doesn't force you to use their client.
// Looking back, the C64 was really a lesson in marketing--there was technically superior competition out there on all fronts except sound
Yes, a pity what happened to the Commodore marketing department...
When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing.