Another work(ish)-related post, but a subject close to my heart, and usually good for some thoughts and rants.

In this case, we’re currently considering buying one of the most-pirated pieces of software in Christendom, Adobe’s Creative Suite. The reason it’s massively pirated is simple – the fucking ridiculous cost of it.

If we look at getting one licenced copy of the full bells-and-whistles CS5 Master Suite, it costs no less than £2,700. For a piece of software that’ll be updated/outdated within a year. What small company (or even medium-sized company) is going to pay nearly three grand for CS5 ? Let alone what little one-man-band web design company.  And yes, you can get a smaller/cheaper CS5 Web Premium for web design. That’s a mere £1,680.

Even more insane, that’s the prices if they send the software in a box. For download purposes, CS5 Master Suite is – um – £2,780. Yep – it costs you more to download the fucking thing than for them to box it up and stick it in the post. What?

Adobe are forever bitching that their software is the most pirated. There’s a reason for that – it’s priced itself out of the “reasonably affordable” market.

I’m pretty sure that if Adobe charged (for argument’s sake) £270 for the CS5 Master – 10% of the current price – the piracy figures for it would drop like a stone. £270 is reasonable for the software – perhaps even a bit more, but 10% was a nice example. Piracy wouldn’t stop completely – there will always be those for who even a pound is “too much” – but it would reduce epically. More people would buy the software – my own suspicion is that they’d actually sell more and make more by having the software at the cheaper price.

Sure, the price has been cut by 90%. But if you get 100 people buying it at £270 instead of one or two at £2,700, you’ve made a shitload more money on your bottom line than you have at £2,700 per copy. Even on the upgrades, people would be more likely to pay again for an upgrade, rather than pirating it.

And that’s the logic that seems to escape these companies. Reduce the price to a sensible/affordable level, more people will buy, less people will evade. Seems logical to me, anyway.

Always nice to see when the Daily Fail gets to screw things up. (again)

In this case, they’ve managed to forget to put two photo captions in on one story. (This may have changed on the page by the time you look at it)

First example

Second example

Way to go, Daily Fail!

I love all the garbage being spouted about the ‘leak’ of 100million Facebook users publically-available details.

Radio One’s headline on this was “Facebook users details are available online” – which elicited a “Well, duh!” response from me. They’ve always been available online – at Facebook. All of the information held in this file was already available at Facebook – it’s just it would’ve taken a bit more effort to get it all.

Every one of the people listed in the file hadn’t set their privacy settings properly. That’s more of an indictment about either

1. how complex Facebook made their privacy settings
2. how stupid / lazy people are when it comes to those settings
3. how people really don’t think about their privacy and security at all

And that’s it.

If you can’t be bothered to check your privacy settings, you deserve to have your details published. After all, if one person can do it, so can others.

It’s currently looking like one of the victims of this new political Age of Austerity (AKA The”Can we cut it? Yes, we can!” years) will be the funding for speed-cameras. Sorry, ‘safety cameras’.

So far Oxfordshire is one of the first to say they’ll be turning the fixed cameras off, which will save them some £600,000 a year.

I have to say that I really don’t have an issue with this – I think that getting rid of the cameras will (in most cases) actually make the roads a bit safer. Yes, there are rat-runs where people are stupid and drive too fast – but in my experience, speed cameras cause far more dangerous driving than they prevent.

One prime example of this is the A11/A14 around Cambridge (and I think I’ve written about this before) – the intersection where they join has a speed camera just after it. I’ve seen far too many near-accidents at that point, where people have been feeding in just fine from the A11 at 70mph(ish) and then have to slap the brakes on because the people in front of them have dropped from 70mph to 50mph to get past the camera.  Yes, it’s down to human stupidity to drop to 50mph – 70mph is fine for going past that particular camera – but it’s still a much more dangerous junction because of the speed camera.

You see the same thing all over the place – people suddenly slowing from an already-legal speed, just to “make sure” they don’t get done by the camera.

So yeah, I think that getting rid of the cameras might just be an improvement to road safety in general, rather than a detriment to it.

Yesterday I noticed a new spam / scam / phishing email that seems to have appeared.

It purports to come from Amazon, and tells you that your order has been despatched, along with some links that are clickable.  The links actually go off to a russian site, but I’ve no idea what that does, and have no intention of finding out.

The biggest clue that it’s a spam/scam are

• the prices are all in dollars (which is a bit of a giveaway for us in the UK)
• you haven’t ordered anything from Amazon
• it’s got a link to “see the ordered items”, rather than just listing them in the mail
• the email address it’s been sent to isn’t the one you’ve got listed with Amazon

But all told it’s one of the better spam/scam/phishing-type emails of the moment.  Best to publicise it and be aware of it.

Following on from yesterday’s post about Pink, Portman Stadium, and signs in general, some extra thoughts…

1) I can be a total arse. I know that’s not really news, but all the same, it’s worth re-iterating.

2) I fucking hate getting lost, being late etc.

3) If I’ve had a crap day, my tolerance for 2) is particularly low, leading to qualifying even more for 1)

Tuesday was, however I look at it, an exceedingly crap day. Stuff had come up at work that had affected me – nothing seriously traumatic of negative, it’d just been one of those days. In all fairness I really wasn’t in the mood for a late night – particularly with the knowledge of an early start in the morning. (For a number of reasons, last working day of the month is a big day in the current job, and requires coming in earlier than usual)

So the afternoon/evening didn’t start off all that well, and my mood wasn’t the best. Not being able to find the stadium just pissed me off a lot, and I didn’t do what I should’ve done, which was either

1. Stop and think a bit
2. Call someone else already there and find out how to get there
3. Use the iPhone to do the same as 2
4. Stop somewhere and ask someone.

I should have done one or more of those. Instead I got locked in to trying to find the place by driving along the A14.

Admittedly, I also didn’t expect the stadium to be in the town/city centre. All the other stadia (stadiums? I dunno) I know of are on the outskirts, not in the centre. Manchester, Norwich, Oxford, Crewe, Stockport – all on the outskirts. I also kind of expect there to be signs to say where the hell to go – after all, it’s not like a stadium is somewhere that no-one ever goes to.

But anyway, I did get pissed off, and went home. It wasn’t my smartest move, but it was the one I did.

No excuses for it at all, just sometimes an extra explanation is worthwhile.

Hey Ho.