Seems to me the question you should be asking management is "Why do you want to change from an OSS Environment to Windows" ? Since you're already in an OSS shop the current and past performance of said environment already speaks for itself, if management has particular issues with the current environment that they think will be addressed by going to a Microsoft based solution, let them verbalize those and be prepared to show them how those same issues can be addressed with OSS solutions. I'd also keep in mind that the decision may be driven entirely by Microsoft Marketing their wares directly to management and thus it's rather easy to refute the typical Microsoft "talking points" one by one (Microsoft tends to sell based on very general statements with respect to how their products are superior to OSS products).
"False positives aren't uncommon however, but this is something that should be caught during regression testing. "
Email from the Test Group to Product Marketing: "Hey when did we announce an uninstaller product?"
Email from Product Marketing to Test Group: "We didn't"
Email from the Test Group to Product Marketing: "What are we supposed to do with this then?"
Email from Product Marketing to the Test Group: "Just Ship the damn thing whatever it is, we're sick of you guys screwing up our ship dates, now go away"
Even if it was from a positive rated seller. If he sold some very small items it would have been easy to get a good rating
Which I think is one reason why eBay puts a link to the item sold for each buyer comment (as well as the rating of the commentor), if you don't look at the details of the seller ratings they really don't do you much good. However you're right, they could also be using a hiijacked accounts. The seller rating system on eBay isn't of course foolproof, but I have found it's usually a good starting point and indicator as to whether it's worthwhile to give an item a further look or just pass it right on by.
I haven't known anybody who HAS NOT gotten scammed from eBay at least once.
Well I haven't (ever been scammed on eBay) and I've bought literally thousands of items so I'm not "one of those suckers" but apparently everybody you know IS to some degree. My comment regarding escrow and seller ratings were not intended to be all inclusive, in other words based on the article it does not appear that these buyers even went that far. eBay attempts to provide the minimal protections that can be implemented without interfering with the free market nature of their service and I for one think they do a decent job given the intent & limitations. This would be why I specifically pointed out Caveat Emptor and that many of the tools for DUE DILLIGENCE (such as MLS, City Records, etc.,) were at your fingertips, but apparently you didn't read that far.
Yes on the surface on might conclude that this is a solution looking for a problem until you stop and consider that research organizations and governments have already spent a significant amount of money on planetary mapping missions (Venus, Mars, Titan for example), Google has provisioned the technology to put the results back in the public domain (in an easy to use format), which I would also imagine will drive at least some additional traffic to their site. It seems that they are only adapting the existing google maps technology to new data and not writing the code base from scratch (so it was probably not all that costly).
One might also conclude as this technology continues to evolve that it will ultimately be saleable (universities for example?) in it's own right, in which case this is all R&D and testing which could thru advertising pay for itself.
On another note, I'm looking forward to seeing "Google Venus" using the radar mapping data of the Venusian Surface, should be interesting.
Well, the buyer can just turn around and resell it on eBay -- hopefully recouping their loss. One idiot can sell to another, right?
Sure, if the idiot doing the selling is an idiot with no integrity.
But I'm concerned by this sentence: "The practice, local government leaders say, is destabilizing already weakened urban neighborhoods by displacing legitimate investment." That is a real problem. Perhaps it should be illegal to purchase a house unless you sign something stating that you (or your legal representative) has seen the place in person. I mean, you cannot legislate intelligence, but you might be able to erect a few barriers to stupidity.
I see your point, however I suspect the comment regarding market destabilization is specifically designed to drive legislation, how can a market where there is apparently no practical way to sell under legitimate circumstances be "destabilized" any further? Personally I don't think the public should pay to protect adults from their own blatant stupidity and laziness (via additional legislation).
May not be the super nice advertised place hey said, but they could at least give it to a charity working with these type of people (read : homeless, prostitutes, etc.) and let them turn it into a safe house of sorts to supply food to people if nothing else.
Unless of course the cost of getting the building up to code or tearing it down is greater than the value of the place, in which case a charity isn't going to take it, since they would in effect be paying you to take the property off your hands. I'd imagine that's the goal of some of these Real Estate "flippers", sell it for way less than the value of the land and pass along the incumberances of the house to somebody else, in essence they are making the seller pay for the priviledge of paying the liabilities on the property. Which ends up being a ponzi scheme, everybody in the chain makes money except the last guy (who can't even then give the property away).
Damn right. In fact, any money spent online that doesn't go to well-established companies should always be money that you are willing to lose.
Great point, I think I would take it even farther, when dealing with anybody less than a well-established company on the net, you should EXPECT to get ripped-off and take appropriate measures to protect yourself BEFORE you buy. Way too many people just assume that the government (or some other 3rd party) will protect them from fraud on the net, which IMHO is just plain foolish.
"Mr. Hoyt said he had repeatedly appealed to eBay officials, asking the company to make specific changes, like informing sellers that they must comply with New York State disclosure laws and requiring a copy of written sales contracts. But Mr. Hoyt said he had received little cooperation from the company.
"What eBay is doing, in my opinion, is immoral," he said. "They have a responsibility to not facilitate activity like this."
Wait a minute, eBay has a seller rating system, eBay has an escrow service, so who in there right mind buys a HOUSE sight unseen, from an unrated or negatively rated seller, without using escrow? I think this is a problem with some people, they make stupid buying decisions and then turn around and want the listing agent (or the government) to take some sort of responsibility for it.
I'm not trying to relieve any of the responsibility for this off unscrupulous sellers (it is in fact immoral to intentionally rip off buyers), however at some point buyers need to have enough common sense to do at least a modicum of due diligence don't you think? Apparently people think that caveat emptor doesn't apply on the Internet, when in fact it's probably the most important consumer protection mechanism, especially when most of the tools you need to do your due diligence are at your fingertips (MLS services, city records, etc..,)
Also from the article, this one IMO is a true "gem"
"Mr. Krug said Mr. Tanner had asked him the same question. "I told him the first thing he did wrong was buy a computer," Mr. Krug said."
The dude writing the article should not should not just copy/paste something produced by Cisco market department.
Well I don't know about you but I did get the impression that author of the Article had no idea that Cisco even existed before he got this assignment, the whole article smacks of "Golly Gee, This Cisco is really great ! They made the whole Internet ! You guys should check these folks out!". Therfor I would not be surprised if the Cisco Marketing Group wrote a big portion of his article for him.
I think John Chambers is given to these mild flights of fancy from time to time though, I can recall a few years back at InterOP where he was going on and on about Internet Connected Gasoline Pumps where you could order pizzas, movies, check on your dry cleaning, yada, yada. Guess it's takes such things to be a "visionary".
So, how long until MS OneCare starts getting flagged as malicious spyware by Norton, or vice versa?
LOL, Great Point, I can see it now "Symantec Client Security Has Detected A Serious Vulnerability On Your Computer Click OK to Uninstall..... Microsoft Office":D
Great way to drive pay-per-incident Technical Support too.
"Personal Security Suite Wars 2006 Coming to a Windows PC Near You."
I wonder if Symantec's "rethinking" of it's position has anything to do with Microsoft Announcing a Competeing offering (OneCare Live), apparently Symantec will no longer just take Microsofts word whether a suspected flaw is actually a bug/vulnerability or not, Sorry Microsoft that ole "Naw, that's not a vulnerability, it's just an undocumented feature" doesn't look like it's going to fly anymore.
I especially like the author's point about the liquidity of the Microsoft "standard" API which is so touted as a counterpoint to *nix implementation -- DOS, Win16, OS/2, Win32, WinNT, WinXP,.NET, Vista... versus POSIX.
Good point, I think the most distinguishing factor is marketing, Microsoft has been consistantly been able to map out a clear transition from API to API (as well as inserting a dash of FUD when required), even if customers and/or ISVs knew there was going to be transition pain, Microsoft was there to assure them of backward compatibility and/or easy portability (even if some of those "assurances" were a bit "hyped") . It's a bit harder for the *NIX world to communicate this to customers & ISV's since you have vendors competeing in the same space against each other and trying to differentiate their *NIX based offerings from everybody elses.
It's funny but I think a lot of customers & ISVs happily accept vendor lock-in in the case of Microsoft, but are hestitant when it comes to *NIX, even though in reality *NIX generally speaking turns out to be the more flexible (portable) platform. No accounting for taste I guess:).
If the 'analysts' can't get it right most of the time without 'guidance', and this causes stock price instability, then perhaps they should stop making predictions and just admit that they don't know?
That would be asking the analysts to stop doing what they do for a living, IMHO not going to happen. Far better that the company itself puts forth guidance as a sanity check than to have the stock buying public relying solely on the predictions of analysts (handicappers) which are often based on incomplete (or worse dead wrong) information and/or a desire to push a given stock because it's advantageous for their own portfolios to do so.
Google is a public company now and current and prospective shareholders should expect their management to have the most insight as to how the company is going to perform in the future, it's not like guidance amounts to giving away the crown jewels of the company or anything.
They already do, but as a shareholder it seems to me that it's far better to have the company issue guidance alongside what the analysts publish. Otherwise when the analysts get it wrong it just generates artificial volitility in the stock, if the company is providing guidance then you have a sanity check against what the street is putting out and vice versa.
Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that Google is challenging the "status quo" practices of Wall Street, I just think that the way they are "challenging" this particular practice isn't the way to go about it, the suits on Wall Street have a point this time.
Seems to me it still won't help, since you can run as many hashes as you want to any given file, but since you are potentially starting out with 2 different hashes (for example unencrypted and encrypted) you still run the risk of ending up with 2 completely different files getting the same checksum and thus one being thrown out in error. Even if you only get a collision.00000001% of the time, this wouldn't be acceptable if it happened to a users critical data (for example all their financial data gets flushed on a collision). I would think with the cost of storage (that would be bottlenecked at the network anyways), it wouldn't be justified to go with a single instance model.
Good points, I suspect it a bit different under the hood for single instance attachments in an email system versus single instance mass storage, since from an email standpoint you can always trace back an attachment to the original message (i.e. theres a paret-child relationship), and single instance normally doesn't work if say 2 senders send the same file in 2 original (i.e not forwards or replys) messages (in this case the attachment would be stored twice).
For a mass storage system to do this it seems to me it would have to somehow checksum every file and then compare that checksum to the checksum of every other file stored within the system to determine if it's already got a copy or not, seems to me with a very high volume of transactions this would be a very expensive operation to do versus just allocating enough storage space to store multiple instances. You also might run into problems with encrypted files, since the checksum of an encrypted file could very well match that of a totally different unencrypted file, and thus one or the other would get tossed out in error to keep a single instance on the system.
I think part of that comes from the constant news about how we need to update our software because of virus X or worm Y or some other vulnerability Z. People have been conditioned to believe for example that weekly updates to Microsoft Windows is a normal and good thing.
I think you hit the nail right on the head here, Microsoft has do a great deal to condition the response from users. For any of us that provide informal "tech support" to our friends & family (or as a full time job) know that it can be somewhat of a difficult proposition to explain "Yeah you need to keep up to date with Microsoft updates, but as far as your applications, check with me before you upgrade any of them it'll save you some potential hassles", to which the standard reply generally goes something along the lines of "What do you mean by applications?".:)
Good idea, but in order for you to be able to access your file easily from anywhere, wouldn't google have to be in possession of your accounts private key (i.e. stored on their servers)? in which case they would technically have access to any users unencrypted data stored on their servers. I suppose they could get around this by making you download your private key, in which case the portability would be up to you and the easy of use wouldn't be as great.
Unfortunately most non-technical users have "Upgradeitis", which means that all it takes to get them to upgrade a piece of software is to tell them in straight forward language "An upgrade to XYZ software is available" and make the upgrade process painless. The average user (in most cases I think) doesn't stop and ask themselves, do I really need this? Is the software I have now doing what I want it to do? What's in this upgrade that I really want/need? How will this upgrade affect my data and/or other applications?
Seems to me that they've become almost programmed to think of anything new as necessarily "better" and thus desirable without ever thinking of the old addage "If it ain't broke don't fix it", couple this with the propensity of many users to load up on drive by download software that they'll probably only ever use once and you end up with a pay per incident support providers wet dream.
Personally I'd probably use something like this to backup all my media files (Songs, Movies, Audiobooks, etc.,) In which case who cares if it ends up all over the Internet, Sharing is good, sharing MP3's, well that's even better.:)
As the owner of a small IT services startup, I advocate a mixture of closed and open source software to my clients based on their budget and needs and it has worked beautifully so far.
I think that's a great approach and tends to maximize customer value. The one thing that wasn't pointed to in the article which I think bears mentioning with respect to OSS solutions is that one should keep in mind the viability of the development/support community OUTSIDE of the vendor that's selling the solution.
In the event that said vendor does go belly up you still have some place to turn when 2 years down the road you need to make some changes, It's frustrating to get into the middle of a project only to find that dependencies have been built upon obscure and now long forgotten OSS components just because the original vendor figured they be in business forever (and are now long gone). It Seems to me that vendors that are using your model need to pay extra careful attention to dependencies and assumptions on the OSS side.
Ummm..so using your logic if someone leaves there front door unlocked then that means it's okay for you to walk in and steal anything you want? I agree people should secure their AP's, however if they don't and you connect to it then IMHO your machine is fair game, might not be legal (dunno but it very well may be), but I'd damn sure support anyone's right to do it to a piggybacker, if you don't want to risk it...buy your own network.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me the question you should be asking management is "Why do you want to change from an OSS Environment to Windows" ? Since you're already in an OSS shop the current and past performance of said environment already speaks for itself, if management has particular issues with the current environment that they think will be addressed by going to a Microsoft based solution, let them verbalize those and be prepared to show them how those same issues can be addressed with OSS solutions. I'd also keep in mind that the decision may be driven entirely by Microsoft Marketing their wares directly to management and thus it's rather easy to refute the typical Microsoft "talking points" one by one (Microsoft tends to sell based on very general statements with respect to how their products are superior to OSS products).
"False positives aren't uncommon however, but this is something that should be caught during regression testing. "
Email from the Test Group to Product Marketing:
"Hey when did we announce an uninstaller product?"
Email from Product Marketing to Test Group:
"We didn't"
Email from the Test Group to Product Marketing:
"What are we supposed to do with this then?"
Email from Product Marketing to the Test Group:
"Just Ship the damn thing whatever it is, we're sick of you guys screwing up our ship dates, now go away"
Even if it was from a positive rated seller. If he sold some very small items it would have been easy to get a good rating
Which I think is one reason why eBay puts a link to the item sold for each buyer comment (as well as the rating of the commentor), if you don't look at the details of the seller ratings they really don't do you much good. However you're right, they could also be using a hiijacked accounts. The seller rating system on eBay isn't of course foolproof, but I have found it's usually a good starting point and indicator as to whether it's worthwhile to give an item a further look or just pass it right on by.
I haven't known anybody who HAS NOT gotten scammed from eBay at least once.
Well I haven't (ever been scammed on eBay) and I've bought literally thousands of items so I'm not "one of those suckers" but apparently everybody you know IS to some degree. My comment regarding escrow and seller ratings were not intended to be all inclusive, in other words based on the article it does not appear that these buyers even went that far. eBay attempts to provide the minimal protections that can be implemented without interfering with the free market nature of their service and I for one think they do a decent job given the intent & limitations. This would be why I specifically pointed out Caveat Emptor and that many of the tools for DUE DILLIGENCE (such as MLS, City Records, etc.,) were at your fingertips, but apparently you didn't read that far.
Yes on the surface on might conclude that this is a solution looking for a problem until you stop and consider that research organizations and governments have already spent a significant amount of money on planetary mapping missions (Venus, Mars, Titan for example), Google has provisioned the technology to put the results back in the public domain (in an easy to use format), which I would also imagine will drive at least some additional traffic to their site. It seems that they are only adapting the existing google maps technology to new data and not writing the code base from scratch (so it was probably not all that costly).
One might also conclude as this technology continues to evolve that it will ultimately be saleable (universities for example?) in it's own right, in which case this is all R&D and testing which could thru advertising pay for itself.
On another note, I'm looking forward to seeing "Google Venus" using the radar mapping data of the Venusian Surface, should be interesting.
Well, the buyer can just turn around and resell it on eBay -- hopefully recouping their loss. One idiot can sell to another, right?
Sure, if the idiot doing the selling is an idiot with no integrity.
But I'm concerned by this sentence: "The practice, local government leaders say, is destabilizing already weakened urban neighborhoods by displacing legitimate investment." That is a real problem. Perhaps it should be illegal to purchase a house unless you sign something stating that you (or your legal representative) has seen the place in person. I mean, you cannot legislate intelligence, but you might be able to erect a few barriers to stupidity.
I see your point, however I suspect the comment regarding market destabilization is specifically designed to drive legislation, how can a market where there is apparently no practical way to sell under legitimate circumstances be "destabilized" any further? Personally I don't think the public should pay to protect adults from their own blatant stupidity and laziness (via additional legislation).
May not be the super nice advertised place hey said, but they could at least give it to a charity working with these type of people (read : homeless, prostitutes, etc.) and let them turn it into a safe house of sorts to supply food to people if nothing else.
Unless of course the cost of getting the building up to code or tearing it down is greater than the value of the place, in which case a charity isn't going to take it, since they would in effect be paying you to take the property off your hands. I'd imagine that's the goal of some of these Real Estate "flippers", sell it for way less than the value of the land and pass along the incumberances of the house to somebody else, in essence they are making the seller pay for the priviledge of paying the liabilities on the property. Which ends up being a ponzi scheme, everybody in the chain makes money except the last guy (who can't even then give the property away).
Damn right. In fact, any money spent online that doesn't go to well-established companies should always be money that you are willing to lose.
Great point, I think I would take it even farther, when dealing with anybody less than a well-established company on the net, you should EXPECT to get ripped-off and take appropriate measures to protect yourself BEFORE you buy. Way too many people just assume that the government (or some other 3rd party) will protect them from fraud on the net, which IMHO is just plain foolish.
from the article:
"Mr. Hoyt said he had repeatedly appealed to eBay officials, asking the company to make specific changes, like informing sellers that they must comply with New York State disclosure laws and requiring a copy of written sales contracts. But Mr. Hoyt said he had received little cooperation from the company.
"What eBay is doing, in my opinion, is immoral," he said. "They have a responsibility to not facilitate activity like this."
Wait a minute, eBay has a seller rating system, eBay has an escrow service, so who in there right mind buys a HOUSE sight unseen, from an unrated or negatively rated seller, without using escrow? I think this is a problem with some people, they make stupid buying decisions and then turn around and want the listing agent (or the government) to take some sort of responsibility for it.
I'm not trying to relieve any of the responsibility for this off unscrupulous sellers (it is in fact immoral to intentionally rip off buyers), however at some point buyers need to have enough common sense to do at least a modicum of due diligence don't you think? Apparently people think that caveat emptor doesn't apply on the Internet, when in fact it's probably the most important consumer protection mechanism, especially when most of the tools you need to do your due diligence are at your fingertips (MLS services, city records, etc..,)
Also from the article, this one IMO is a true "gem"
"Mr. Krug said Mr. Tanner had asked him the same question. "I told him the first thing he did wrong was buy a computer," Mr. Krug said."
Amen Mr. Krug, Amen.
The dude writing the article should not should not just copy/paste something produced by Cisco market department.
Well I don't know about you but I did get the impression that author of the Article had no idea that Cisco even existed before he got this assignment, the whole article smacks of "Golly Gee, This Cisco is really great ! They made the whole Internet ! You guys should check these folks out!". Therfor I would not be surprised if the Cisco Marketing Group wrote a big portion of his article for him.
I think John Chambers is given to these mild flights of fancy from time to time though, I can recall a few years back at InterOP where he was going on and on about Internet Connected Gasoline Pumps where you could order pizzas, movies, check on your dry cleaning, yada, yada. Guess it's takes such things to be a "visionary".
So, how long until MS OneCare starts getting flagged as malicious spyware by Norton, or vice versa?
..... Microsoft Office" :D
LOL, Great Point, I can see it now "Symantec Client Security Has Detected A Serious Vulnerability On Your Computer Click OK to Uninstall
Great way to drive pay-per-incident Technical Support too.
"Personal Security Suite Wars 2006 Coming to a Windows PC Near You."
I wonder if Symantec's "rethinking" of it's position has anything to do with Microsoft Announcing a Competeing offering (OneCare Live), apparently Symantec will no longer just take Microsofts word whether a suspected flaw is actually a bug/vulnerability or not, Sorry Microsoft that ole "Naw, that's not a vulnerability, it's just an undocumented feature" doesn't look like it's going to fly anymore.
:D
I especially like the author's point about the liquidity of the Microsoft "standard" API which is so touted as a counterpoint to *nix implementation -- DOS, Win16, OS/2, Win32, WinNT, WinXP, .NET, Vista... versus POSIX.
:).
Good point, I think the most distinguishing factor is marketing, Microsoft has been consistantly been able to map out a clear transition from API to API (as well as inserting a dash of FUD when required), even if customers and/or ISVs knew there was going to be transition pain, Microsoft was there to assure them of backward compatibility and/or easy portability (even if some of those "assurances" were a bit "hyped") . It's a bit harder for the *NIX world to communicate this to customers & ISV's since you have vendors competeing in the same space against each other and trying to differentiate their *NIX based offerings from everybody elses.
It's funny but I think a lot of customers & ISVs happily accept vendor lock-in in the case of Microsoft, but are hestitant when it comes to *NIX, even though in reality *NIX generally speaking turns out to be the more flexible (portable) platform. No accounting for taste I guess
If the 'analysts' can't get it right most of the time without 'guidance', and this causes stock price instability, then perhaps they should stop making predictions and just admit that they don't know?
That would be asking the analysts to stop doing what they do for a living, IMHO not going to happen. Far better that the company itself puts forth guidance as a sanity check than to have the stock buying public relying solely on the predictions of analysts (handicappers) which are often based on incomplete (or worse dead wrong) information and/or a desire to push a given stock because it's advantageous for their own portfolios to do so.
Google is a public company now and current and prospective shareholders should expect their management to have the most insight as to how the company is going to perform in the future, it's not like guidance amounts to giving away the crown jewels of the company or anything.
They already do, but as a shareholder it seems to me that it's far better to have the company issue guidance alongside what the analysts publish. Otherwise when the analysts get it wrong it just generates artificial volitility in the stock, if the company is providing guidance then you have a sanity check against what the street is putting out and vice versa.
Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that Google is challenging the "status quo" practices of Wall Street, I just think that the way they are "challenging" this particular practice isn't the way to go about it, the suits on Wall Street have a point this time.
Seems to me it still won't help, since you can run as many hashes as you want to any given file, but since you are potentially starting out with 2 different hashes (for example unencrypted and encrypted) you still run the risk of ending up with 2 completely different files getting the same checksum and thus one being thrown out in error. Even if you only get a collision .00000001% of the time, this wouldn't be acceptable if it happened to a users critical data (for example all their financial data gets flushed on a collision). I would think with the cost of storage (that would be bottlenecked at the network anyways), it wouldn't be justified to go with a single instance model.
....
Just a thought
Good points, I suspect it a bit different under the hood for single instance attachments in an email system versus single instance mass storage, since from an email standpoint you can always trace back an attachment to the original message (i.e. theres a paret-child relationship), and single instance normally doesn't work if say 2 senders send the same file in 2 original (i.e not forwards or replys) messages (in this case the attachment would be stored twice).
For a mass storage system to do this it seems to me it would have to somehow checksum every file and then compare that checksum to the checksum of every other file stored within the system to determine if it's already got a copy or not, seems to me with a very high volume of transactions this would be a very expensive operation to do versus just allocating enough storage space to store multiple instances. You also might run into problems with encrypted files, since the checksum of an encrypted file could very well match that of a totally different unencrypted file, and thus one or the other would get tossed out in error to keep a single instance on the system.
I think part of that comes from the constant news about how we need to update our software because of virus X or worm Y or some other vulnerability Z. People have been conditioned to believe for example that weekly updates to Microsoft Windows is a normal and good thing.
:)
I think you hit the nail right on the head here, Microsoft has do a great deal to condition the response from users. For any of us that provide informal "tech support" to our friends & family (or as a full time job) know that it can be somewhat of a difficult proposition to explain "Yeah you need to keep up to date with Microsoft updates, but as far as your applications, check with me before you upgrade any of them it'll save you some potential hassles", to which the standard reply generally goes something along the lines of "What do you mean by applications?".
Good idea, but in order for you to be able to access your file easily from anywhere, wouldn't google have to be in possession of your accounts private key (i.e. stored on their servers)? in which case they would technically have access to any users unencrypted data stored on their servers. I suppose they could get around this by making you download your private key, in which case the portability would be up to you and the easy of use wouldn't be as great.
Ouch, that sux... BTW now might be a good time to hit management up for a testing environment. :)
Unfortunately most non-technical users have "Upgradeitis", which means that all it takes to get them to upgrade a piece of software is to tell them in straight forward language "An upgrade to XYZ software is available" and make the upgrade process painless. The average user (in most cases I think) doesn't stop and ask themselves, do I really need this? Is the software I have now doing what I want it to do? What's in this upgrade that I really want/need? How will this upgrade affect my data and/or other applications?
Seems to me that they've become almost programmed to think of anything new as necessarily "better" and thus desirable without ever thinking of the old addage "If it ain't broke don't fix it", couple this with the propensity of many users to load up on drive by download software that they'll probably only ever use once and you end up with a pay per incident support providers wet dream.
Personally I'd probably use something like this to backup all my media files (Songs, Movies, Audiobooks, etc.,) In which case who cares if it ends up all over the Internet, Sharing is good, sharing MP3's, well that's even better. :)
I know that many of us have at least a whole room dedicated to their computers but we are the minority.
I know I do, it's referred to in hushed tones around the household as "The Temple" and smells of incense and candles.
As the owner of a small IT services startup, I advocate a mixture of closed and open source software to my clients based on their budget and needs and it has worked beautifully so far.
I think that's a great approach and tends to maximize customer value. The one thing that wasn't pointed to in the article which I think bears mentioning with respect to OSS solutions is that one should keep in mind the viability of the development/support community OUTSIDE of the vendor that's selling the solution.
In the event that said vendor does go belly up you still have some place to turn when 2 years down the road you need to make some changes, It's frustrating to get into the middle of a project only to find that dependencies have been built upon obscure and now long forgotten OSS components just because the original vendor figured they be in business forever (and are now long gone). It Seems to me that vendors that are using your model need to pay extra careful attention to dependencies and assumptions on the OSS side.
Ummm..so using your logic if someone leaves there front door unlocked then that means it's okay for you to walk in and steal anything you want? I agree people should secure their AP's, however if they don't and you connect to it then IMHO your machine is fair game, might not be legal (dunno but it very well may be), but I'd damn sure support anyone's right to do it to a piggybacker, if you don't want to risk it...buy your own network. ;)