If anything, this will increase theft. People steal things all the time that they can't use, thinking that they might be able to use them. What this will do is bring the expensive items out from behind the counter to where it's easier for the shoplifter to steal them.
Once the thief gets the disk home and figures out they can't use it, they will either sell the item to a used DVD house that has the enabling tech, or trash the disk.
Can't we just teach people to turn off the water while they shave or brush their teeth to conserve water? Can't we just teach people to set their thermostats a couple of degrees higher in the summer and lower in the winter to save electricity and gas? Can't we just teach people to take colder showers? Or turn off the lights when they leave a room?
Just raise the cost of any of these activities, and people will do them less often. The most effective way to get people to use less energy is to stop subsidizing it, tax it, and make it cost more. If the alternative is more environmentally friendly, you win. If, on the other hand, you make natural gas cost more, so people burn more coal or wood from old growth forests, you lose.
I'll be sad to see the summer blockbuster go away.
So will I. When my friends and I found out that another friend's dad *owned* an empty movie theater we all try to figure out a way to open it up, but it was in a dying small town in Indiana, and there was just no way to get enough traffic there to make a profit.
Slashdotters are gearing up right now to see Spider-Man 3 tomorrow night, and that's the sort of movie that can't be made to be released on YouTube.
I was astounded by "Star Wrecked: In the Pirkirking". It's no "Spider Man", but give the amateures a few more years. I'm thinking that inside of 10 years or so, you'll be able to feed your computer a script and it will generate a movie for you.
People like me and my wife should scare the studios far, far more than the pirates. We havn't seen a movie in a theater in 7 years. (We did take our daughter to a kid flick *once*) We don't download or copy movies, but we get all we can consume and more from broadcast TV, the library, yardsales and trades with other families. We just don't buy new movie stuff anymore.
If you want movies like that to be made in the future, then some way to gather those hundreds of millions to do it will need to be found.
Robert Rodriguez made "El Mariachi" for $5000. Does a 300 million dollar spiderman movie really provide 60 thousand times the entertainment of "El Mariachi"? I don't think so.
We should concentrate on the garage bands and videos. Let the studios wither and die. Power to the People!!! and all that crap.
A maximized profit, to be sure, but it's clear that one sale at $20 followed by an infinite number of copies is untenable.
That's not clear at all.
Unfortunatly for the Studios, progress isn't going to stop just for their convenience. Just ask the man who's house got bulldozed to make way for the freeway.
The reality is that copying is here to stay. The studios have to face this fact and adapt or die.
Their was a time when recording music was impossible. Every musician's art was stolen by the wind once it was played. The audience (if there was one) might remember small parts of it, but most of the essence of the music was lost. Guess what? There still were musicians, and they got paid to do what they did.
Enter music recording. With the first recordings, no-one, not even the studio knew how to make a copy. Then someone figured out how to flatten the cylinders, make a master onto a metal disk and press plastic disks much cheaper than you could make one-off recordings. At this time, all this equipment was astoundingly expensive, most of if was invented by the studios themselves.
Now we are entering an age where anyone can make professional level recordings at home. (audio and video) The side effect is that anyone can copy audio and video at home as well.
You've asked about alternatives. I suspect the alternates are already out there, we just don't realize them yet. Just like the age of the great ocean liners have past, the age of the > $200,000,000 movie may be past. Just like ocean liners, there might come a time when only one giant movie is made and people go to a movie theater just once every year or so. The Axiom is that there won't be room for all the current players in the business, not the studios, not the stars. What's going to replace the 200 million dollar movie? YouTube, CGI films made directly on your computer, video games like 2nd Life or EverQuest or some killer app that will be released tomorrow. Don't forget all the movies that have already been made. There may come a time when a studio can make much more by translating its entire back library into Swedish than it can make by creating a new movie.
The message for the studios: The businesses that adapt will probably outlast those that fight. DRM and the DMCA are just busy work for the lawyers and only succeed in getting people mad at you.
If you've read this far, then what are you going to do about it? Most likely just welcome our new media conglomerate overlords.
Or not.
Most of us, in that senario, to paraphrase Nancy Reagan, would "Just Say, Hell, No!"
HD and BlueRay and HiDef are too new to make a dent on the markets, and the rest of us are voting with our wallets and letting the DRM crap sort itself out before we jump. DVDs are good enough. It will take me 1/2 the rest of my lifetime just to watch all the available used disks out there.
F.y.i. If you haven't checked out your local library for DVDs, do. My wife and I get almost all of our kid's movies there, and there's more stuff than we have time to watch. Add yardsales and used purchases from eBay and we're happy.
So does this guy have a better case if there's prior art for his particular school? Could he sue the authorities saying they *should* have known that there were other maps of the school, or that school maps were not rare?
..., but many other companies that would lose respect for a security company publically shaming potential clients.
Let's do a thought experiment. For each of these "potential clients", estimate the potenitial that they might realistically become your client within a reasonable timeframe given your current advertising budget. Then estimate the percent of these potential clients that would have hired you, that won't. Compare that to the number of potential clients that don't even know your name, that might hire you after you embarass them in public.
If a company is really your "potential client", that means you know the name of a decision maker that can spend the money to buy your product. If there's a problem with the company spewing spam, you can just call that decision maker for a polite, non-sales chat, and problem solved. This was not the case in this article. These people didn't have the ear of any decision makers in these companies, and thus couldn't get anything done.
Remember, the best way to make sales, is to establish a non-sales relationship beforehand, person-to-person with a decision maker in the target company. Then when it's time to do business, that decision maker will do business with your company 9 times out of 10.
Execpt that what I am allowed to do is buy a copy of a DVD, copy it to this device, then destroy the original copy.
Yes, someone who pays $20,000 for a device like this, might do just that, buy DVDs, process them and throw them in the trash, because, hey they're rich and don't like clutter. (What happens after things are "thrown away" is left as an exercise for the reader.)
"LONDON, England -- A bizarre legal battle over a minute's silence in a recorded song has ended with a six-figure out-of-court settlement."
I do like the quote, "Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."
Perhaps they bought a salable license to a library that they used to build the code they are selling you, thus they can't sell you a copyright they don't own. Double check that their coders wrote 100% of the code.
Is anyone else puzzled that the climate scientists have complete faith in the climate models that predict the warming effect (granted there is no great reason to suspect otherwise), but not an iota enough faith in the models to confirm that any proposed human intervention in, say, global cloud cover, would reverse this effect?
"First, do no harm", attributed to Hippocrates, is one of the guiding priciples of medicine. Thus, it's always ok to tell your patient to stop smoking, and eat less salt, but think twice before prescribing a medicine that might cause more harm than good. Stopping smoking and lowering salt intake might trigger depression and send your patient over the edge, but they are far less invasive treatments than just about anything else. Even exercise has to be properly evaluated, and could cause some patients harm.
Telling the world to stop polluting just seems like a good thing. Actively intervening in the weather is much more tricky.
I had an artist friend who made dark depressing fused glass art that didn't sell well. I gave her the advice that bright colorful pieces would sell better. They did. In this one case, her business sense overrode her artistic sense and she was able to maximize profit. (After she's dead, collectors will probably bid up the dark depressing pieces, but what good does that do her?)
Not all business owners will put aside their ego like this. Many consider themselves "Artists" that are above things like business. They seem to feel that the world should be beating a path to their door, just because of their greatness. Look at the way the RIAA is handling itself. Sueing it's best customers. Sueing MIX DJs that promote acts that have no other venue of promotion. It's always possible that the RIAA goons are actually evil geniuses that have every move covered and these actions are really the best way to maximize profits, but I tend to think they are just trying to maximize control and money is secondary.
It's been shown through psychological testing that people would rather make a small amount of money if they live around people who make less, than make a large amount of money if they have to live around people who make more.
Back to my thesis. If you give the small business owner a choice between making $5 or $10, they'll choose the $10 every time, except when you get in that one area they really care about. Look how many businesses are named for the person who started them rather that what they do. "Johnson & Sons" tells you nothing about the business, but "AAA Hairdressing", tells you what they do, and gets them first in the phone book.
But you are right about the corporate manager vs. the small business owner. The corp. manager is just there to make a paycheck. Someone once wrote in the Wall Street Journal that if you ever hear anyone talking about a "corporate family", you need to put your bullsh*t detector on high alert. A corporation is *not* a family. When money gets tight for a family, they cancel cable and eating out, they don't lay off little Timmy. "I'm sorry Timmy, I know you've been with us for 6 years now, but your services just won't be needed any more. No need to cry."
The business owner puts his heart and soul into the business. This makes him go the extra mile, but sometimes it can trip him up. I knew this other guy that was into wood working. He did great stuff making wooden games and ornimental wooden things that he'd take to art & craft shows. He said he couldn't keep up with demand, and at the price he was selling, there wasn't enough profit to make a go of it. He quit and got a 9-5 job, because he couldn't justify in his own mind selling his great stuff for enough money to make a living. This would not be a problem from a business standpoint, but from the artistic view it was enough to stop him.
I've heard from many independent computer programmers that demand for their services acually goes up when they raised their rates, because it made them seem more valuable. Back to the glass artist. She had one expensive piece that she'd take to art show that would never sell, and she was thinking of not taking it any more. I told her that might not be a good idea, because if it's a piece that people want, but can't afford, it will attract customers who might then buy a less expensive piece. Just having an expensive piece around increase the perceived value of her other pieces.
What puzzles me, though, is how those companies manage to stay in business. By the laws of the market, they should actually crumble and die.
The problem with the standard Adam Smith style "laws of the market" is that they are to economics what Newton was to physics. That's the easily observable stuff that's true, but there are invisible forces that also have great affect on markets. An economist recently won the noble prize for his work applying psychology to economics which makes a lot of the "stupid politics" of corporate life make sense. You can probably learn more about this stuff by watching a season or two of Don Trump's "Apprentice" than reading most economics 101 text books.
My alias, Maximum Prophet, was choosen because I have an idea I'm working on that most, if not all business decisions in the world today are *not* decided based on maximum profit, but on the ego of the business person. Large corporations have interia and are insulated from the effect of the mistakes of their individuals. Small business have no such luxury. If a small business owner makes even one major error because of his own ego, he can sink his company in a hardbeat. It's much harder for a large corporation to be sunk due to one mistake like that, not impossible, but harder.
Imagine there are several quick serve restaurants in town, some are chains, some are independent. Each makes mistakes that might drive customers away. The independents most likely will not be able to weather the loss of business, but at some of the chains, the corporations will decide to spend the money to stay in the area. As restaurants go out of business and are replaced with new ones, after awhile, only chains are left.
Corporations were originally a method for many investors to share the risk of the shipping trade. If one person invested in a boat, and that boat sunk, he lost everything, but if 10 people invested in 10 boats, most likely they would all make some money. That in a nutshell, is how companies stay in business despite some poor decisions.
And Rob Reiner was a member of "The Commitee", which included Howard Hessman. Howard and other commitee members were on "WKRP in Cincinnati" which just release it's first season on DVD. (With some/all of the orginal music replace because of licensing issue. bleck) Howard was also in "Spinal Tap"
I've seen that as well and it's baffled me. What I think is going on in the minds of the middle managers is something like this. "I can pick small shop X or IBM. If the product breaks, small shop X might go out of business or IBM might stiff us. In the first senario, I get blamed for choosing X. In the 2nd senario, it gets bumped to our corporate lawyers and if they can't get a settlement, well, that's their fault for not having the cojones to take on the big boys."
Similar "logic" has been used when I've built a tool in house. It was about 3000 lines of code and had a multi-week testing schedule. So far so good. We were also looking at an outside product that was over 1,000,000 lines of code from a vendor known to produce buggy software. Did we prepare for an 80 week testing cycle? No, just a few weeks. An in-house solution produced so much c.y.a. behaviour and fear on the part of management I couldn't believe I was working for a fortune 100 company.
True story. Large Company was writing a large application in VB version N. They ran into a memory leak. Microsoft said, "We're not going to fix version N, migrate to version N+1, it's fixed there"
Now, Large Company had Hobson's choice. Their large application needed a lot of work to compile/run in VB version N+1 and they couldn't live with the memory leak problem. No matter which choice they went with, it was going to be expensive. I never did find out which path they took.
If they had written their application in something like Perl or Tk/Tcl, they would have had more choices when faced with a memory leak problem. They would have been able to decide to live with the problem, fix it in house, hire another firm to fix it, or upgrade the the latest version where it's fixed.
Vendor lock-in can bite you. Smart companies have at least two suppliers of everything they buy. That way they can get the suppliers to beat each other up on price.
I've always heard that you can win a judgement against a large corporation and they can just sit on it, forcing you to go to court to sue to get your money. Then they sit on that judgement, ad infinitum. (Look up the guy who sued Ford Motor Corporation for the delayed windsheild wiper device)
How far can it go before a judge orders the Sheriff to go down to the RIAA headquarters and begin to auction off their property to pay the judgement? That's what would happen if an individual "just sat on a judgement" against him.
But the general slashdot bellyaching is that plumbers get paid more that I do, where I have upteen degrees and an IQ in the stratosphere. If a plumber really gets paid more than you do, do your own plumbing.
I guess what it all boils down to, is that most of the complainers haven't found something that they can get paid at that they love to do, or at least tolerate.
That's a real life challenge.
Find something you love to do.
Become very good at it.
Figure out how to make it pay the bills.
If you can get from step 1 through step 3 without starving to death, you join the ranks of the truly rich. If you have a job that is doing what you really love to do, you can be "in the zone" all the time.
100 mid-high level executives take aim at the corporage dart board. 50 of them miss, 50 hit. The 50 that miss, more on to other "opportunities." The 50 that hit get promoted.
Someone at company X, that needs a CEO, notices one of those 50 and says, "Hey, lets get them, they hit it big there!!!" Company X makes an offer to hire the executive, but the exec, not being too dumb, won't leave a good thing without guarantees, says "Ok, but I want A, B, and C and you have to give me M million dollars if you let me go early." Company X says, "No good exec would leave their current gig without a guarantee, so OK." Once the new exec is in place, not only do they not have their former support staff that may have been the reason for their success, but now they have the corporate equivelent of tenure and can try any goofy idea they want without fear that they will loose their shirt like if you or I if we lost our jobs.
Sometime it takes several iterations of step 1 before you can become CEO, but it's a good job when you can get it.
There are CEOs that worked their way up the ranks of the company they work for. We rarely hear their names associated with big corporate collapse do we? (Usually the insiders are too static for the board, so they go with a outsider to shake things up.)
Your mechanic (and mine) has a ton of specialized tools and the experience to use them properly to get the job done in less than 1/2 the time it would take you to do it yourself if you had the tools, parts, and books.
But what's this about plumbing? I haven't hired a plumber in over 7 years, and that's where they had to bring in a backhoe because the main sewer line in my old house had collapsed. (I don't have any place to keep a spare backhoe around, alas) I do all my own plumbing, it's not that hard, and most of the tools aren't that expensive.
I don't know about the guys who just paint, but I knew a drywall contractor who also painted who owned his own business and made more than I did. He's retired now, but he could throw a double sheet of drywall over his shoulder and carry it around all day, and was capable of painting a window sash without tape just by putting the exact amount of paint on the brush and freehanding it. In short, he was very good at what he did, could teach it to his crew and was in demand all the time. Add in some good business sense, and I imagine he was making the equivilent of >$150K/ year adjusted for today's dollars.
Done properly, there's nothing easy about drywalling, painting, or even plumbing.
Me, I'd rather work in the air conditioning with the 401K and pension that comes with my job.
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If anything, this will increase theft. People steal things all the time that they can't use, thinking that they might be able to use them. What this will do is bring the expensive items out from behind the counter to where it's easier for the shoplifter to steal them.
Once the thief gets the disk home and figures out they can't use it, they will either sell the item to a used DVD house that has the enabling tech, or trash the disk.
People like me and my wife should scare the studios far, far more than the pirates. We havn't seen a movie in a theater in 7 years. (We did take our daughter to a kid flick *once*) We don't download or copy movies, but we get all we can consume and more from broadcast TV, the library, yardsales and trades with other families. We just don't buy new movie stuff anymore.
We should concentrate on the garage bands and videos. Let the studios wither and die. Power to the People!!! and all that crap.
Unfortunatly for the Studios, progress isn't going to stop just for their convenience. Just ask the man who's house got bulldozed to make way for the freeway.
The reality is that copying is here to stay. The studios have to face this fact and adapt or die. Their was a time when recording music was impossible. Every musician's art was stolen by the wind once it was played. The audience (if there was one) might remember small parts of it, but most of the essence of the music was lost. Guess what? There still were musicians, and they got paid to do what they did.
Enter music recording. With the first recordings, no-one, not even the studio knew how to make a copy. Then someone figured out how to flatten the cylinders, make a master onto a metal disk and press plastic disks much cheaper than you could make one-off recordings. At this time, all this equipment was astoundingly expensive, most of if was invented by the studios themselves.
Now we are entering an age where anyone can make professional level recordings at home. (audio and video) The side effect is that anyone can copy audio and video at home as well.
You've asked about alternatives. I suspect the alternates are already out there, we just don't realize them yet. Just like the age of the great ocean liners have past, the age of the > $200,000,000 movie may be past. Just like ocean liners, there might come a time when only one giant movie is made and people go to a movie theater just once every year or so. The Axiom is that there won't be room for all the current players in the business, not the studios, not the stars. What's going to replace the 200 million dollar movie? YouTube, CGI films made directly on your computer, video games like 2nd Life or EverQuest or some killer app that will be released tomorrow. Don't forget all the movies that have already been made. There may come a time when a studio can make much more by translating its entire back library into Swedish than it can make by creating a new movie.
The message for the studios: The businesses that adapt will probably outlast those that fight. DRM and the DMCA are just busy work for the lawyers and only succeed in getting people mad at you.
Most of us, in that senario, to paraphrase Nancy Reagan, would "Just Say, Hell, No!"
HD and BlueRay and HiDef are too new to make a dent on the markets, and the rest of us are voting with our wallets and letting the DRM crap sort itself out before we jump. DVDs are good enough. It will take me 1/2 the rest of my lifetime just to watch all the available used disks out there.
F.y.i. If you haven't checked out your local library for DVDs, do. My wife and I get almost all of our kid's movies there, and there's more stuff than we have time to watch. Add yardsales and used purchases from eBay and we're happy.
So does this guy have a better case if there's prior art for his particular school? Could he sue the authorities saying they *should* have known that there were other maps of the school, or that school maps were not rare?
If a company is really your "potential client", that means you know the name of a decision maker that can spend the money to buy your product. If there's a problem with the company spewing spam, you can just call that decision maker for a polite, non-sales chat, and problem solved. This was not the case in this article. These people didn't have the ear of any decision makers in these companies, and thus couldn't get anything done.
Remember, the best way to make sales, is to establish a non-sales relationship beforehand, person-to-person with a decision maker in the target company. Then when it's time to do business, that decision maker will do business with your company 9 times out of 10.
Execpt that what I am allowed to do is buy a copy of a DVD, copy it to this device, then destroy the original copy.
Yes, someone who pays $20,000 for a device like this, might do just that, buy DVDs, process them and throw them in the trash, because, hey they're rich and don't like clutter. (What happens after things are "thrown away" is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Then why did they sue this guy:
u k.silence/
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/
"LONDON, England -- A bizarre legal battle over a minute's silence in a recorded song has ended with a six-figure out-of-court settlement."
I do like the quote, "Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."
Yep, since this guy's been sued for recording it, you could be sued for performing it:
u k.silence/
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/
"LONDON, England -- A bizarre legal battle over a minute's silence in a recorded song has ended with a six-figure out-of-court settlement."
Nope.
u k.silence/
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/
"LONDON, England -- A bizarre legal battle over a minute's silence in a recorded song has ended with a six-figure out-of-court settlement."
Perhaps they bought a salable license to a library that they used to build the code they are selling you, thus they can't sell you a copyright they don't own. Double check that their coders wrote 100% of the code.
Telling the world to stop polluting just seems like a good thing. Actively intervening in the weather is much more tricky.
I had an artist friend who made dark depressing fused glass art that didn't sell well. I gave her the advice that bright colorful pieces would sell better. They did. In this one case, her business sense overrode her artistic sense and she was able to maximize profit. (After she's dead, collectors will probably bid up the dark depressing pieces, but what good does that do her?)
Not all business owners will put aside their ego like this. Many consider themselves "Artists" that are above things like business. They seem to feel that the world should be beating a path to their door, just because of their greatness. Look at the way the RIAA is handling itself. Sueing it's best customers. Sueing MIX DJs that promote acts that have no other venue of promotion. It's always possible that the RIAA goons are actually evil geniuses that have every move covered and these actions are really the best way to maximize profits, but I tend to think they are just trying to maximize control and money is secondary.
It's been shown through psychological testing that people would rather make a small amount of money if they live around people who make less, than make a large amount of money if they have to live around people who make more.
Back to my thesis. If you give the small business owner a choice between making $5 or $10, they'll choose the $10 every time, except when you get in that one area they really care about. Look how many businesses are named for the person who started them rather that what they do. "Johnson & Sons" tells you nothing about the business, but "AAA Hairdressing", tells you what they do, and gets them first in the phone book.
But you are right about the corporate manager vs. the small business owner. The corp. manager is just there to make a paycheck. Someone once wrote in the Wall Street Journal that if you ever hear anyone talking about a "corporate family", you need to put your bullsh*t detector on high alert. A corporation is *not* a family. When money gets tight for a family, they cancel cable and eating out, they don't lay off little Timmy. "I'm sorry Timmy, I know you've been with us for 6 years now, but your services just won't be needed any more. No need to cry."
The business owner puts his heart and soul into the business. This makes him go the extra mile, but sometimes it can trip him up. I knew this other guy that was into wood working. He did great stuff making wooden games and ornimental wooden things that he'd take to art & craft shows. He said he couldn't keep up with demand, and at the price he was selling, there wasn't enough profit to make a go of it. He quit and got a 9-5 job, because he couldn't justify in his own mind selling his great stuff for enough money to make a living. This would not be a problem from a business standpoint, but from the artistic view it was enough to stop him.
I've heard from many independent computer programmers that demand for their services acually goes up when they raised their rates, because it made them seem more valuable. Back to the glass artist. She had one expensive piece that she'd take to art show that would never sell, and she was thinking of not taking it any more. I told her that might not be a good idea, because if it's a piece that people want, but can't afford, it will attract customers who might then buy a less expensive piece. Just having an expensive piece around increase the perceived value of her other pieces.
My alias, Maximum Prophet, was choosen because I have an idea I'm working on that most, if not all business decisions in the world today are *not* decided based on maximum profit, but on the ego of the business person. Large corporations have interia and are insulated from the effect of the mistakes of their individuals. Small business have no such luxury. If a small business owner makes even one major error because of his own ego, he can sink his company in a hardbeat. It's much harder for a large corporation to be sunk due to one mistake like that, not impossible, but harder.
Imagine there are several quick serve restaurants in town, some are chains, some are independent. Each makes mistakes that might drive customers away. The independents most likely will not be able to weather the loss of business, but at some of the chains, the corporations will decide to spend the money to stay in the area. As restaurants go out of business and are replaced with new ones, after awhile, only chains are left.
Corporations were originally a method for many investors to share the risk of the shipping trade. If one person invested in a boat, and that boat sunk, he lost everything, but if 10 people invested in 10 boats, most likely they would all make some money. That in a nutshell, is how companies stay in business despite some poor decisions.
And Rob Reiner was a member of "The Commitee", which included Howard Hessman. Howard and other commitee members were on "WKRP in Cincinnati" which just release it's first season on DVD. (With some/all of the orginal music replace because of licensing issue. bleck) Howard was also in "Spinal Tap"
I've seen that as well and it's baffled me. What I think is going on in the minds of the middle managers is something like this. "I can pick small shop X or IBM. If the product breaks, small shop X might go out of business or IBM might stiff us. In the first senario, I get blamed for choosing X. In the 2nd senario, it gets bumped to our corporate lawyers and if they can't get a settlement, well, that's their fault for not having the cojones to take on the big boys."
Similar "logic" has been used when I've built a tool in house. It was about 3000 lines of code and had a multi-week testing schedule. So far so good. We were also looking at an outside product that was over 1,000,000 lines of code from a vendor known to produce buggy software. Did we prepare for an 80 week testing cycle? No, just a few weeks. An in-house solution produced so much c.y.a. behaviour and fear on the part of management I couldn't believe I was working for a fortune 100 company.
True story. Large Company was writing a large application in VB version N. They ran into a memory leak. Microsoft said, "We're not going to fix version N, migrate to version N+1, it's fixed there"
Now, Large Company had Hobson's choice. Their large application needed a lot of work to compile/run in VB version N+1 and they couldn't live with the memory leak problem. No matter which choice they went with, it was going to be expensive. I never did find out which path they took.
If they had written their application in something like Perl or Tk/Tcl, they would have had more choices when faced with a memory leak problem. They would have been able to decide to live with the problem, fix it in house, hire another firm to fix it, or upgrade the the latest version where it's fixed.
Vendor lock-in can bite you. Smart companies have at least two suppliers of everything they buy. That way they can get the suppliers to beat each other up on price.
I've always heard that you can win a judgement against a large corporation and they can just sit on it, forcing you to go to court to sue to get your money. Then they sit on that judgement, ad infinitum. (Look up the guy who sued Ford Motor Corporation for the delayed windsheild wiper device)
How far can it go before a judge orders the Sheriff to go down to the RIAA headquarters and begin to auction off their property to pay the judgement? That's what would happen if an individual "just sat on a judgement" against him.
I guess what it all boils down to, is that most of the complainers haven't found something that they can get paid at that they love to do, or at least tolerate.
That's a real life challenge.
- Find something you love to do.
- Become very good at it.
- Figure out how to make it pay the bills.
If you can get from step 1 through step 3 without starving to death, you join the ranks of the truly rich. If you have a job that is doing what you really love to do, you can be "in the zone" all the time.This is how this happens:
100 mid-high level executives take aim at the corporage dart board. 50 of them miss, 50 hit. The 50 that miss, more on to other "opportunities." The 50 that hit get promoted.
Someone at company X, that needs a CEO, notices one of those 50 and says, "Hey, lets get them, they hit it big there!!!" Company X makes an offer to hire the executive, but the exec, not being too dumb, won't leave a good thing without guarantees, says "Ok, but I want A, B, and C and you have to give me M million dollars if you let me go early." Company X says, "No good exec would leave their current gig without a guarantee, so OK." Once the new exec is in place, not only do they not have their former support staff that may have been the reason for their success, but now they have the corporate equivelent of tenure and can try any goofy idea they want without fear that they will loose their shirt like if you or I if we lost our jobs.
Sometime it takes several iterations of step 1 before you can become CEO, but it's a good job when you can get it.
There are CEOs that worked their way up the ranks of the company they work for. We rarely hear their names associated with big corporate collapse do we? (Usually the insiders are too static for the board, so they go with a outsider to shake things up.)
Your mechanic (and mine) has a ton of specialized tools and the experience to use them properly to get the job done in less than 1/2 the time it would take you to do it yourself if you had the tools, parts, and books.
But what's this about plumbing? I haven't hired a plumber in over 7 years, and that's where they had to bring in a backhoe because the main sewer line in my old house had collapsed. (I don't have any place to keep a spare backhoe around, alas) I do all my own plumbing, it's not that hard, and most of the tools aren't that expensive.
I don't know about the guys who just paint, but I knew a drywall contractor who also painted who owned his own business and made more than I did. He's retired now, but he could throw a double sheet of drywall over his shoulder and carry it around all day, and was capable of painting a window sash without tape just by putting the exact amount of paint on the brush and freehanding it. In short, he was very good at what he did, could teach it to his crew and was in demand all the time. Add in some good business sense, and I imagine he was making the equivilent of >$150K/ year adjusted for today's dollars.
Done properly, there's nothing easy about drywalling, painting, or even plumbing. Me, I'd rather work in the air conditioning with the 401K and pension that comes with my job.