WaPo on “extended warranties”:

Warranty Week, an industry publication, last year estimated that of the $15 billion in premiums charged consumers in 2004, $7.5 billion went straight into the pockets of the stores that sell warranties as their cut.

Of the remaining $7.5 billion, the publication estimated that $3 billion was paid in claims by the insurance companies that back the plans. On the other hand, according to the Insurance Information Institute in 2004, the U.S. auto insurance industry paid out $66 in claims for every $100 in premiums.

Neither Circuit City nor Best Buy discloses how much of its bottom line comes from extended warranty sales. But analysts have estimated that at least 50 percent and in some lean years 100 percent of profits at the electronics retailers come from extended warranty sales.

Not being a big fan of saying “no,” the extended warranty phase of any purchase is one of my least favorite. Telling the clerk I don’t care to give out my phone number and zip code is a distant second, even places where the clerks have demonstrated a peculiar discomfort being told no. (Why should they care, right?)

For big-ticket items I depend on for work, like a laptop, manufacturer extensions make some sense, since they usually seem to involve priority handling from the manufacturer. Applecare service, for instance, has always been exemplary. I’ve received Apple service jobs back within 72 hours of dropping them off, even when the machine has had to leave the state. Same with an on-site warranty I got with my old Dell laptop, once I battled through the hellish level one support.

The in-store, third party warranty fulfillment houses, though, just seem like a bad deal premised on the idea that you’re buying a product you fully expect to break sooner than makes economic sense. The one time I caved and bought an extended warranty, I learned a lot about how these places work:

I bought a Minolta Maxxum 5 35mm SLR and a fairly inexpensive 300mm utility zoom to go with it. I paid for the extended warranty, which tacked another 15 or 20 percent on the price of the whole kit, and considered that good insurance for accidental drops or whatnot. A very short time later (but outside the 30 day window the store offered for returning defective goods by about a week), the zoom lens stopped working. I took it back to the store and asked for a replacement. The clerk wouldn’t replace it because when you’ve got an extended warranty, the product has to go to the warranty service to be inspected and “repaired or replaced at their option.” The kicker is that the warranty service in this case reserved the right to take up to six weeks to do that. Despite the fact that I demonstrated to the manager’s satisfaction that the lens simply didn’t work no matter what camera he connected it to in the store, since the extended warranty was provided by a third party, he was powerless to circumvent the process. So the camera I bought for vacation, which was coming up in two weeks, was useless and would remain so unless I bought yet another lens, the prospect of which shifted the manager’s mood from pitiless warranty lawyer to oily sales dude with neck-breaking alacrity.

So the next time someone offered me an extended warranty, I was already in a bad mood about them. I was talking to a clerk in an office store who sold me a new computer desk. We were waiting for my order to be rolled up. He asked if I wanted to bolt on an extended warranty because he happened to have the exact same model of desk and felt it only fair to tell me that while it did hold his computer and books adequately, it was prone to breaking for no good reason.

“They’re nice desks, but some of the screws and stuff are kinda shoddy and they just fall apart, so you probably want to have the warranty so we can fix that right up once it breaks.”

It was a masterful piece of upsell. You come in, buy the desk advertised as on sale, then you learn you can either purchase a warranty plan for an added 25 percent, or you can ask the clerk who just told you the desk sucks too badly to be taken home uninsured which he’d recommend instead among the many more expensive desks.

I gambled that the clerk was probably an idiot. His pitch was delivered in the halting, stuttering cadence of a stupid person who’s trying to learn to become a weasel, stamp out any remaining conscience that might be impairing that process, and perhaps frame his words carefully enough that any passing manager who’s also troubled by some sort of vestigial shame over working for a company that’s turned humble office accessories into an opportunity for a hard sell wouldn’t be able to take enough umbrage to intervene.

I took the desk home with no extended warranty, and it lasted as long as it needed to. The only problem I had with it was all the time I spent wondering if it’d someday collapse because the clerk wasn’t lying about shoddy screws.

South Park Studio lets you make your own South Park-style portraits. I’m kinda over South Park, especially in the wake of ManBearPig. (When is scaring the bejeebers out of people about phantom bogey-men uncool? When you’re not South Park’s writers trying to convince people that Al Gore is out to traumatize your children with fictional threats, evidently.) But it’s a neat-o effect. Al made a set for our family:

She really scored with “purple scarf and overalls” for herself.

(via OLMuffin, where anticipation for the arrival of a new little one is running high.)

Dear NPR,

Please make Steve Inskeep stop talking in italics.

Your friend,

Mike

Symantec says Vista will “reduce consumer choice”:

Paden’s beef is with the new Windows Security Center, an update to the control panel that made its first appearance with Windows XP’s Service Pack 2. He claims that the interface comes with default programs to handle virus protection, a software firewall, and a spyware scanner, and that the user can install replacements for these applications but not access them through the security center program.

At least as of Windows Vista RC1, some of his claims are true, but not all of them. A clean install of Vista does come with a firewall (based on an enhanced version of the Windows XP SP2 firewall) and anti-spyware courtesy of Windows Defender, but does not come with any anti-virus software (the Security Center complains about this via an orange shield with an exclamation point in the taskbar notification area, and urges the user to install a third-party AV program). The default Windows Vista “Welcome Center” contains an icon to subscribe to Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare, which includes AV support, but the icon is not visible from the Security Center. As far as the firewall and anti-spyware applications go, the Security Center doesn’t appear to have any easily-accessible way to swap out these programs for third-party equivalents. Indeed, the firewall panel even warns that “Two or more firewalls running at the same time can conflict with each other.”

Paden believes that the presence of this control panel will confuse people who want to install third-party security products. “It would be like trying to drive a car with two dashboards. This is going to cause a great deal of consumer confusion,” Paden said in a statement.

Read that last as “we’re gonna hook less n00bs.”

They’re not going to lose many customers who know what they’re doing anyhow. They’re just going to lose first crack at newbies who get wind of the Horrors of the Internets and compliantly click on the first solution that presents itself.

The thing is, we’ve all been damning Microsoft for not taking a hand to the security of its products for all these years, so I’m not going to complain about that happening now. People have been building pointy-clicky basic firewalls on Linux for seven or eight years now. A basic firewall should be part of any system that presumes to present itself on the ‘net. If anything, and considering how much a part of the Windows experience viruses are, it’s criminal that there’s not a default basic antivirus program, too.

If we’re losing “consumer choice” in the name of systems that come up from a basic install in a more secure posture, I’d suggest Symantec et al forego the lucrative and easy pickings of the newbie terror market and go after organizations where they can sell licenses to knowledgeable IT staff who’ll see the difference between their product and “whatever comes on Windows.”

Or, you know, find a new business model that doesn’t involve banking on failure.

Everyone with an ounce of foresight knew that some day Microsoft would have to clean up its own house. These companies were happy to profit from Microsoft’s dominance, and the worst of them have created products that deliberately confuse and frighten inexperienced users with willfully obscured boundaries between random informational popups and actual threat warnings just to remind people that the software is operating. It was a business model for hyenas and vultures to begin with. Now that their short-sightedness is catching up to them, it’s hard to feel much pity.

Jim Henley:

My personal domestic politics analyst insisted to me tonight that the Democrats are still going to win one or both houses of Congress this year. I disbelieve her, but even if she is right, all it means is that a Democratic Party that has already ceded the principle that “our security depends on hiding people away and torturing them” will take power. That party will not have the self-confidence or ambition to spend political capital undoing what it allowed this week to be done. That party will be able to provide a nice living for its officials, and to a tidy business in fundraising and maybe push marginal tax rates up or raise the gas mileage requirements on new cars – in a country whose official policy is that “our security depends on hiding people away and torturing them.” It will not be a party that opposes anything worth opposing. It will not be a party that can sustain majority support for an alternate philosophy of governance. In important ways it will hardly even count as a second party. And that’s the pleasant scenario.

There is, as they say, a lot of ruin in a nation. I expect the yoke of our weirdly Brezhnevite future to fall relatively mildly on most necks for quite awhile, including mine.

“Brezhnevite” resonated, because Leonid was in power when mom decided I was old enough to get Communism explained to me. I can tell you exactly two of her talking points:

1. You stand in line a lot for poor selection, and your shoes will never fit.

2. There’s only one political party.

Open-Source Guru Joins Freespire:

As motivated as he seems, it will be difficult for Mr. Raymond and Freespire to justify the porting of proprietary technologies to open source. Open-source purists such as Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the widely used GNU Public License, are philosophically against combining proprietary code with open-source software.

“The biggest problem in the world of free software is the tendency to introduce non-free programs in the GNU operating system, which defeats the purpose,” Mr. Stallman said in a recent interview with Red Herring. “What’s the point of making freedom more popular by making it not fully free anymore?”

The only way he would support it, he said, would be if it was a step toward making the software free, but he doesn’t realistically see that happening.

“I understand sometimes if you’re fighting against injustice you have to go through intermediate states that are palatable, but I’m not sure it will get to that result, and certainly media companies hope that it never will,” said Mr. Stallman.

Two points:

1. That didn’t take long. I guess a job offer is an “interesting email conversation,” indeed.

2. Getting proprietary software onto Linux desktops is. not. hard. It’s been going on for about as long as there’s been a Linux stable enough to write apps for. Nothing Stallman or anyone else is going to say is going to slow down that process, and nothing Stallman or anyone else is going to say is going to make it any easier or any harder to write a plugin for a proprietary codec.

Like I didn’t get to last time, the underlying message of these articles, and the narrative Raymond and his acolytes have promulgated, is that you’ve got “realists” who’d love to run whatever the best software is, even if it’s proprietary; and you’ve got the “purists” who are trying to keep the realists down.

If the “realists” are enough of a market to warrant marketing licensed proprietary codecs or anything else that’s not GPL-compatible, then someone will sell stuff to them. What Stallman or anyone else says is irrelevant.

Evidently the Firefox logo isn’t so much a picture of a flaming fox encircling the globe as it is a cartoon depiction of the open source world gnawing off its own tail.

The Motley Fool’s take on Nintendo’s chances with the Wii seems to boil down to “obese children without a lot of spending money will save Nintendo, plus my XBox 360 was broken.”

Who to believe? A Nintendo-playing analyst or a lightbulb-chewing blog geek?

Well, among other things, I help out with Jupitermedia’s webcasts. Up to now, help meant “assist the people presenting the webcasts and come up with ideas for webcasts,” but my responsibilities have expanded to include the occasional co-presentation. So if you ever wondered what I sound like when armed with Powerpoint slides and a burning passion to explain server virtualization, tomorrow’s webcast will satisfy … nay … SLAKE! your curiosity. Plus it’s free.

Sony’s Reader a step foward:

The Reader would be a perfect companion for the avid book reader, but for a few things.

First of all, navigation is fairly clumsy. You can’t just enter the page number and jump to the page, nor can you enter a word or phrase to search for, as you can when reading a book on a PC. To get around, there are 10 buttons that will each take you a 10th of the way through text. You can also jump to chapter starts, or return to bookmarks. Still, this is very much a one-way device, designed for reading a book straight through from cover to cover.

This lack of interactivity is partly because the screen is slow to change, since it takes time for the pigments to move through the capsules. It takes about a second to display a new page. That means no scrolling through pages, and no note-taking on the screen — imagine having to wait a second for each letter you write to appear.

Secondly, and less importantly, the Reader handles PDFs poorly. It doesn’t allow you to zoom in on them, so if they’re formatted for standard 8.5-inch-by-11-inch pages, the text will be illegibly small.

Thirdly, the Reader doesn’t have a built-in light source, unlike PCs and personal digital assistants. A small clip-on light of the kind sold for books should work well, though.

Because of these drawbacks, it’s hard to see the Reader as something that will bust the e-book market open. But it deserves a much better reception than the generally small LCD-based devices that hit the market a couple of years ago, some of which are already discontinued.

O.k. A usable e-book reader that’s not tied to an expensive PDA is definitely on my list of things I’d love to have some day. I even thought about one while I was traveling last week.

I’ve been wanting a good ebook reader since the day I brought home a fire sale Palm Pilot Personal, made it talk to my Linux box and commenced download of as many free books as I could find. I staggered through “The Time Machine” on that horrible, pea-green display before giving up in disgust. A year or so and a Handspring Visor later, I tried again and gave up again. Then again with a Palm M130 and a Palm TX.

The dedicated readers have looked pretty interesting, but spendy, and I remember reading about the ink tech driving Sony’s latest and thinking it sounded promising, but this is what they came up with? No search, no note-taking, slow, displays PDFs poorly and with no zoom, and no backlight option at all? Yet it “deserves a much better reception than the generally small LCD-based devices that hit the market a couple of years ago?”

It sounds like a frustrating exercise in eye strain and clumsy UI.

I bet I’ll be able to use my ideal ebook reader about the time I can put my flying car on autopilot.