When you start asking multiple thousands of dollars for a software package, no matter WHAT it claims to be capable of doing, you're setting yourself up for a predictable chain of events:

1. You attract the interest of crackers and pirates, who get cheap thrills or bragging rights simply from saying they were able to copy and distribute something so valuable.
2. You lock out a number of potential customers for your product because the price tag is simply too high for them to consider it.
3. You create expectations from those who DO buy your product that they'll receive a superior amount of support and even "hand-holding" long after the sale.

I'm not saying these are reasons you're "charging too much" for your application. Only you can really determine if that's true or not. I'm simply saying these are practically guaranteed side-effects of doing so. In most cases, you see the folks selling such high priced packages implementing all sorts of copy-protection schemes, precisely out of fear about items 1 and 2, but the most effective schemes will put a severe crimp in your ability to deliver on expectations for item 3.

I work for a steel fabricator, a business where very niche (and costly) software is found all over the place. In every single instance, the copy protection schemes included with these programs we've used has caused us considerable hassle in the long haul. For example, many years ago, they spent tens of thousands on a steel detailing package which was loaded on a PC given to an outside detailer, as part of a long-term arrangement. (He'd do detailing of our drawings for us at a greatly reduced rate, in exchange for us supplying the hardware/software -- and he was free to use the equipment to do other peoples' work too, as long as ours too precedent.) That was great, except he suddenly became unreliable (personal/family problems, we assume), and we wound up having to reclaim our hardware/software. Problem is, nobody in-house is currently able to use the software, nor do we really want to hire or train anyone. (At this point, it's cheaper for now to just send the work out and pay regular rates ... We have far less need to detail drawings than we used to anyway.) Meanwhile though, the software maker requires we keep paying thousands annually to maintain a contract on the package, or lose all upgrade rights down the road -- rendering it pretty worthless. Without a current maintenance agreement, we can't even call up and get the key code transferred over if we wanted to migrate the app to different hardware.

In another case (our document management package), we were getting absolutely reamed on annual support costs, but again, were trapped between a rock and a hard place because we had so much data in the package already, and migration costs to use someone else's produce were huge too. We got lucky and found a guy who used to work for the place, who now has his own consulting business. He was able to give us a far cheaper support contract to help us with any issues we had in the program (software crashes, questions about custom coding, etc.) - but was unable to provide us with any update patches. He bailed us out of a serious database problem the software developed at one point ... but again, we're trapped if we ever need the features or fixes put in newer service packs. (They want to back charge us for all previous unpaid years of support to "get current" before we can even buy a new contract from the original vendor!)

Still another situation involves a vendor who has to email us new, lengthy key codes to copy/paste into the application every so often, so it then "phones home" to verify it's allowed to keep legally operating. It could be worse, but it still stinks. If someone isn't available with administrator rights who can get the emails in a timely manner and take care of it, the whole package shuts down on everyone. And you can't update the key code while anyone is actually IN the software either, meaning it's best done after hours.

I'm at the point where I don't even want to deal with the high dollar software anymore, because at least with the cheaper stuff, they're not so damn paranoid that I might be infringing on their precious copyright after I paid tons of cash ....

Exactly!

But where I've seen this fall apart is when management lacks the backbone to manage properly.

EG. My wife works in I.T. for an area hospital, and their department is insanely stressed out and disorganized. They have a system in place, at least on paper, for assigning priority level to trouble tickets. (It's based on pretty clear criteria, such as only getting the highest level if it's a piece of computer equipment required by doctors in the process of doing medical procedures.) The problem is, any of their medical staff who complain loudly enough about an issue get priority, thanks to managers who regard high-paid medical staff as "more important to please" than anyone working in I.T. (There's a general, overall perception of the I.T. workforce as similar to the janitors or other maintenance people ... useful when you need them, but ultimately disposable, if it turns into one of them vs. a doctor, nurse, or medical technician.)

Just last week, she encountered a situation where a manager went along with assigning "level 1" priority to a staffer because she didn't have enough mice on hand for a bunch of spare computers she wanted to set up in a conference room for training. (She should have been prepared in advance, but wasn't bothered to make sure everything was ready ahead of time, so she put in the emergency ticket a couple hours before training began, making an on-call I.T. person drive in, very early in the morning, just to give her extra mice!)

Depends on your use case... You're right about Keynote, but it's probably the single strongest component of Apple's iWork suite for the Mac to begin with. It was developed before any of the other parts, as a program for Steve Jobs to use personally when giving his presentations and speeches, because he found it distasteful and limiting to keep using a competitor's product for the purpose.

I happen to like Pages too, but honestly, it wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it weren't for Apple including some very elegant templates with it. For my business, I was able to knock out a new invoice and a 3-fold flier which looked like I paid a high dollar firm to design them for me, just by modifying templates included with the software. The Microsoft Word templates, by contrast, look more like "basic starting points" and they're so widely used, people recognize when you've used one.

For serious work with spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel has the competition beat hands-down, and that's proving to be their single strongest app in their Office suite. Apple's Numbers app is really more suitable for someone who's not even a "numbers person" to begin with, but finds him/herself with the occasional need to generate some basic spreadsheets anyway. It can produce results that look really nice, but it doesn't have the raw number crunching power of Excel (gets VERY slow with large spreadsheets), and lacks the power Excel had to do complex calculations with Visual Basic macros attached to cells.

Obviously, I'm talking about the full blown desktop/laptop versions of these programs here, but all of this translates to the iPad in fairly equal proportions. So I'd say yes, SOME iPad owners would like Office on it, especially if they do a lot with Excel. But many of us wouldn't see a point to it.

You make a valid point, but I still wouldn't call him "foolish", necessarily. For starters, the "good credit" assumption is just that; a guess on your part. Maybe this individual had a bankruptcy in the relatively recent past but won the lottery after that, or successfully started a profitable business venture after the first attempt crashed and burned, or ??

Mortgage rates are crazy low, but unobtainable if your credit score falls below their "magic number" they're looking for. I don't even claim to know enough about the industry to tell you what that number is -- but I know even for a new car loan, they're generally looking for something over 700 or you'll get rejected.

Besides that, there's the fact that the U.S. govt. is operating under a massive debt-load right now (should really be bankrupt themselves, except for their ability to print their own money and borrow from other nations). If you're the type who doesn't have an optimistic long-term outlook for things, you may well feel you've bought "insurance" against losing your home by paying for it in cash, vs. it technically still belonging to a lender, if things go sour.

"God's only merciful sometimes, other times he's wrathful, dopey, sleepy, happy, grumpy, sneezy, bashful, doc, and pissed."

Yep... hence the many claims that God must be a woman. :P

I went through a (by all counts HORRIBLY messy) divorce myself, some years ago. But at that time, despite both of us being avid "computer people", there was no such thing as "social networking" websites or "cloud storage".

I'm not even sure there was much in the way of "digital data" we felt we needed to divvy up?

As I think about this now, though, I think it does make yet one more strong argument against DRM. It would have been a much bigger hassle if all of my purchased music, video content, or even digitally downloaded software titles were authorized for her use (and vice-versa), and then we had to concern ourselves with how that would be handled after going our separate ways. In our situation, there were a few instances where she had a user account for a paid MMORPG game or what-not, and I simply let her keep it, while cancelling any credit card attached to it for billing purposes. That made it her problem to pay for it herself, moving forward, or just opting to let the account go.

I don't know how amicable your particular divorce is, but I can tell you this much: In the long run, it'll make things go much more smoothly for both parties if you do the "right thing" in such situations as perhaps having a Dropbox account with some of HER data trapped in it. Back it up onto DVD-R or CD-R for her and give her those backups of her share of the content. Don't just wipe it, no matter how satisfying that idea is at the time. It's not worth starting an escalating battle over it, where she may well be able to delete some of YOUR info you're not even thinking about right now....

I'd ask if you can do an exchange for one with Windows 7 on it, since XP is getting pretty long in the tooth ....

Seriously though, it sounds like NewEgg is usually putting the used drives through some sort of diagnostic process, if they all had special partitions on them for the purpose. Maybe they simply need to train their bench techs to wipe the drives first, instead of making the assumption that creating the new partition is ensuring any old data on the drive becomes unreadable/inaccessible?

I met my partner on okcupid, after pretty much writing off the site as getting me nowhere. (Oddly enough, I could search and find a good 6-12 women on there in my age range, who lived near me, who I thought were interesting and appeared to share several common interests -- but every time I contacted one of them, I got no response.) I left my own ad up there though, basically forgetting about it, until I got one of those email notices that someone had "woo'd" me (kind of like a Facebook "poke"). I logged in to see what that was all about, and discovered we had a *lot* in common, but she lived in a different state. One thing led to another and here we are, still together after 3 years.

Even though before meeting her, my online dating experiences were more "bad" than "good"? I don't really have a problem with the concept at all. They've evolved from being perceived as "weird" or something you don't admit to using to a mainstream way to meet new people. I think you have to go into the online dating thing without any big expectations though. A lot of women tend to use them in sort of a "kid in a candy store" way, checking out all the photos and looking for only the ones they find really cute or sexy, and stroking their own egos as their mailboxes fill up with guys trying to contact them.

One of my good female friends amazed me when she showed me how much mail she'd get in just 1-2 days of posting a new ad on any of the dating sites... and that happened regardless of what she actually said in her description. A photo was all it took. In that environment, it's probably kind of difficult to keep a firm grip on reality, realizing 90% of those guys contacting you are just trying to hook up for a night, and you're not really THAT desirable to the general public....

As someone well over 30, I think I'm somewhat qualified to comment here.

The "nice guys finish last" thing is alive and well, and there's nothing about it that's a "cop out". Where you're correct is that as we get older, our priorities change (largely due to having more life experiences).

Most men AND women I know are working on "climbing that ladder" throughout their 20's and into their early 30's. They score that first "career job" after finishing school (or dropping out with it partially finished, as the case may be?) and start obtaining things such as their first new car or truck, perhaps a home of their own (or even stepping up from a small apartment unit to a rental house or townhouse apartment counts).... and sooner or later, they're considering obtaining a life partner too. Still working from the angle of "I've got nowhere to go from here but up!", they're concerned with their appearance to their peers, and with selecting a partner who has the best possible combination of looks, intelligence and personality/character.

When you're still in THAT stage of life? Yeah, dating is very competitive and you really can finish last in that area if you bring integrity and "character" to the table, but not much else. Without money and/or looks, you're short a couple of key items that help "sell" yourself vs. your competition.

Where things change, IMO, is somewhere between the mid 30's and 40's. By that time, many people already TRIED a marriage that ended badly. Others just matured a bit (or even simply let life wear them down a bit, to where they quit trying to impress -- and resigned themselves to just getting up each day, going to their 9-5 job, and keeping busy with whatever chores and tasks life demanded of them). All of a sudden, they're no longer focusing time and energy on searching for someone. They're just being themselves, and are actually in a better position to stumble across someone else like-minded who likes them for them.

BTW, I really think wealth serves as a huge barrier to one's self-awareness. Why do so many Hollywood celebs and pro sports athletes have relationship problems? Why do big-shot CEOs constantly get involved in sex scandals? When you have enough money, you're able to spend your way out of looking in the mirror and getting a true sense of who you are. Someone's always happy to stroke your ego, hoping for some sort of payoff. Doctors and surgeons will do all sorts of procedures to you, to make sure you physically appear younger than you really are. You can afford all the best/trendiest clothing items, vehicles, and everything else that distracts people from seeing who YOU are when they look at you. Every time you screw up in public, you can pay off someone to bail you back out of the situation.

I'd say it's ALSO a fact that the only products Honeywell has been offering consumers are basic, dumb thermostats or overpriced digital models with very basic functionality and a high price-tag that you're presumably supposed to pay to get that respected Honeywell name badge on the front.

If there are issues over some specifics, such as the particular control mechanism used, violating Honeywell patents? Then fine ... let them demand licensing fees for those items and move on. The fact Honeywell hasn't done this and instead, demands the product be pulled from the market and damages collected (before most people have even had the chance to BUY one!) speaks volumes about their true concerns here.

The Nest is almost impossible to think of as a "cheap knockoff" of anything Honeywell sells, consumer OR industrial. The Nest is designed very much along the same lines as the original Apple iPod ... meant to be very easy to use, with a simplified UI that encourages its use instead of intimidating a person into leaving it alone.

Your argument here sounds a bit like an architect who primarily designs skyscrapers (with a little bit of side work sketching up basic 1 bedroom shotgun shacks) claiming another architect designing elegant 2 story luxury homes must cease and desist, because he's clearly violated a number of design concepts used in those skyscrapers (and probably not so much in the shotgun shacks, but wants you to note he's familiar with those low-end products too).