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?

First major book on ICANN?

MIT Press has published Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace, a new book by Milton Mueller, ICANNWatch.org editor and director of the graduate program in telecommunications and network management at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. Salon’s Andrew Leonard’s review provides a brief yet illuminating narrative description of ICANN’s relatively short history and its current challenges.

Nice quote from Francis Bacon about the difficulty of explaining complex stuff to a bemused public

” Those whose conceits are seated in popular opinions, need only but to prove or dispute; but those whose conceits are beyond popular opinions, have a double labor: the one to make themselves conceived, and the other to prove and demonstrate. So that it is of necessity with them to have recourse to similitudes and translations [that is, metaphors] to express themselves.”

How broadband connections change online life
New report from Pew Internet Project.

24 million Americans have high-speed access at home and they use the Internet in dramatically different ways from dial-up users

Americans with high-speed Internet connections at home are strikingly different from dial-up Internet users in three ways:

First, they use their broadband connections to create content that they post online and they share many of their files with other Internet users. All told, 59% of broadband users have created content such as their own Web sites or shared their files with others online.

Second, the range of their online world is much greater than dial-up users. Broadband users have done substantially more Internet activities than dial-up users such as getting news, purchasing products, checking for health information, accessing government Web sites, doing work-related research, and pursuing their hobbies.

Third, a typical broadband user performs an average of seven Internet activities on any given day, more than twice the number of a typical dial-up user. The ‘always-on’ aspect of the Internet connection is as important to them as the speed of it.

A new survey of home broadband users by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that the act of getting high-speed Internet access changes Americans’ online behavior: They spend more time online, do more things, and do them more often than dial-up Internet users. They also high levels of satisfaction with the way the Internet helps them connect to family and friends, learn new things, pursue their hobbies, do their jobs, and connect to local organizations.

Access to these new Internet experiences also changes the way people spend their time. Many report that they spend less time watching television, less time shopping in stores, less time working at their offices, less time reading newspapers, and more time working at home.

The Project’s report, called ‘The Broadband Difference’, also finds that home high-speed Internet adoption is steadily growing, with 12% of all Americans — 24 million people — now enjoying broadband in the home; this is 21% of all U.S. adult Internet users and it is up from 6 million home broadband users that the Project first tracking in June 2000.

‘When people get an always on, high-speed connection, they treat the Internet as a “go to” tool for a wide range of information and communication needs’, said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. ‘The most elite users have clearly adopted a broadband lifestyle that is built around finding, generating, and manipulating digital content. They are shaping the character of the online world every day.’

Some highlights from the survey of 507 broadband users conducted between January 29 and February 20 this year (the margin of error is plus or minus four points):
* 39% of broadband users have at one time or another created online content, by building or adding material to Web sites, posting comments or material to online bulletin boards, or creating an online diary. Some 16% of broadband users create content on a typical day.
* 43% of broadband users share files from the computers with other Internet users. Some 17% of broadband users do this on a typical day.
* 63% of broadband users have downloaded games, videos, or pictures, and half having downloaded music. About one in five do these things on a typical day.
* 49% of broadband users access some kind of multimedia content during a typical day online such as streaming videos or audio or playing games.
* Broadband users spend about 95 minutes online on the average day compared to 83 minutes for dial-up users. Fully 82% of broadband users are online on the average day compared with 58% of dial-up users.
* 55% of broadband users have networked all the computers in their homes so they all have access to the high-speed connection.
* One third of broadband users telecommute.

‘Broadband users drive both in both directions on the information superhighway,’ said John B. Horrigan, Senior Research Specialist with the Pew Internet Project. ‘With their tendencies to create and post online content, they value not only fast uploading speeds, but also an open Internet. This allows them to reach the widest audience for their content and gives them the greatest range of sources to satisfy their voracious appetite for information.’

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a nonpartisan, independent research organization funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study the impact of the Internet on families, communities, health care, education, civic and political life, and the work place.

For the full report see: http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=63

Steven Levy’s scoop on the Microsoft Palladium project.

Standfirst reads:”An exclusive first look at Microsoft’s ambitious-and risky-plan to remake the personal computer to ensure security, privacy and intellectual property rights. Will you buy it? “

Sounds to me like Gates and Intel want to do Fritz Hollings’ dirty work for him, by pitching security as the upside. Or, as The Register puts it,

“According to Levy, Palladium is a hardware and software combination that will supposedly seal information from attackers, block viruses and worms, eliminate spam, and allow users to control their personal information even after it leaves their computer. It will also implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) for movies and music to allow users to exercise ‘fair use’ rights of such products. Palladium will essentially create a proprietary computing environment where Microsoft is the trusted gatekeeper, guard, watchstander, and ruler of all it surveys, thus turning the majority of computing users into unwilling corporate serfs and subjects of the Redmond Regime. ”

Mystery about Dave Winer’s health solved

“OK, here’s the deal. I did not have a heart attack, but it was close. I had bypass surgery, which I am now recovering from. It was my fault — I had classic warning signs that I ignored. No family history of heart disease. Most important — I wanted to keep smoking. The numbers are good if I quit smoking. If I don’t the numbers are totally awful. “

Phew! What with Dave suddenly going offline and Quentin moving house, there’s been precious little to read around here.