Software as an investment

Interesting article at ONLamp.com on Calculating the True Price of Software. The author uses analytical tools normally used for pricing financial derivatives to pick apart a typical $100 software license fee. Basically, if you dissect it into a year's worth of free maintenance, an option to extend the maintenance contract, and an option to buy the next version at a discount, you end up with the software itself being worth about $3.35. That's what a rational investor would pay for it with no service and no price break on the next version. Sound familiar?

So the next time somebody asks you how RedHat, for example, makes money selling a free operating system...

Evil in the office

Apparently, when I installed the driver for the laser printer the other day, it managed to blow away Adobe Acrobat 5 and replace it with 4, which of course rendered some PDFs unrenderable and unprintable. Which seems appropriate somehow.

There is no fscking way installing a printer driver should mess with any other software on my system without (a) checking to see if there's a more recent version and (b) asking my permission. But of course this is Windows we're talking about.

People wonder why their Windows systems become infested with malware.

Actually, this post was just an excuse to show off my shiny new userpic, which I ganked from this T-shirt order form.