Pissed off by pop-up ads?Who isn’t. But here’s how to get rid of them.

Software Subscriptions: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come
A nice piece by the “NYT”‘s David Pogue outlining Microsoft’s outrageous licensing plans. Quote:

“But this much I’m sure of: for companies that don’t automatically buy every new version of Windows and Office that comes down the pike, the new program is a bad deal. The Gartner Group research firm estimates that the new program will raise prices for these companies between 33 and 107 percent.

Companies that sign up for Software Assurance are, in essence, committing in advance to buying every upgrade — without knowing whether it will be any good, or even whether or not Microsoft will, in fact, release any upgrades at all during the three-year contract.

“In the old days, a company could buy one version of Office,” a Microsoft spokesperson told me. “They could run it for 50 years, and then tell us, [OE]I want the newest version, and I want the upgrade price.[base ‘] For Microsoft, this income stream was uneven and unpredictable.”

On that we can agree: the beneficiary of the new program is Microsoft, not the customer. ” Amen!

What does the Worldcom collapse mean for Joe Public?

Useful analysis by The Motley Fool. Basically, it matters to anyone with an investment-based pension.

Nathan Myhrvold on software defects. It’s all the user’s fault, apparently.

“The classic dilemma in software is that people continually want more and more and more stuff,” says Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft. Unfortunately, he notes, the constant demand for novelty means that software is always “in the bleeding-edge phase,” when products are inherently less reliable. In 1983, he says, Microsoft Word had only 27,000 lines of code. “Trouble is, it didn’t do very much” — which customers today wouldn’t accept. If Microsoft had not kept pumping up Word with new features, the product would no longer exist.        ”Users are tremendously non-self-aware,” Myhrvold adds. At Microsoft, he says, corporate customers often demanded that the company simultaneously add new features and stop adding new features. “Literally, I’ve heard it in a single breath, a single sentence. ‘We’re not sure why we should upgrade to this new release — it has all this stuff we don’t want — and when are you going to put in these three things?’ And you say, ‘Whaaat?'” Myhrvold’s sardonic summary: “Software sucks because users demand it to.”[Source.]

Why is software so bad?

“What’s surprising — astonishing, in fact — is that many software engineers believe that software quality is not improving. If anything, they say, it’s getting worse. It’s as if the cars Detroit produced in 2002 were less reliable than those built in 1982.”

[…]

‘ Microsoft released Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001. That same day, in what may be a record, the company posted 18 megabytes of patches on its Web site: bug fixes, compatibility updates, and enhancements. Two patches fixed important security holes. Or rather, one of them did; the other patch didn’t work. Microsoft advised (and still advises) users to back up critical files before installing the patches. Buyers of the home version of Windows XP, however, discovered that the system provided no way to restore these backup files if things went awry. As Microsoft’s online Knowledge Base blandly explained, the special backup floppy disks created by Windows XP Home ‘do not work with Windows XP Home. ” [more…]

The author believes that the problem will only be solved when a software company is successfully sued for a problem arising from its malfunctioning software. Could this be the first time in history that lawyers were the solution to a problem?