I’ve noticed this trend in several marketing pushes, to state a value for goods given away for free. Now, the wording in the title (e.g. ‘A $10 value’) is mainly American, but it’s a pretty universal phenomenon. But I have to ask myself, how can this be so? Well, let’s pick a single example here, Click Facts advertise their free service as a ‘$150 value’, so, if it’s really got that value then somebody somewhere must be selling quite a few very similar services for that amount of hard currency (because, well, that’s pretty much the textbook definition of value, right?). An admittedly brief search of the web turned up exactly zero competitors for this service that were managing to charge serious cash for what they do. There really should be a law about this, let’s call it zero-bullshit and lobby for it in all elections from now on…

This is related to this quote by Michael Kay on the XML-DEV mailing list, on the subject of validation.

There is also scope for reasonableness checks to catch data input errors. But they belong as close to the user interface level as possible, not at the information management level.

Which is fine as far as it goes but the use of the term ‘user interface’ is misleading, I think, to most people (myself included) this implies ‘end user’ but this is not always the case. If, for example, you are writing a service (web- or otherwise) for external, or even only internal, use, then the ‘user interface’ is the service interface that you expose and it’s perfectly reasonable (in fact, I’d argue that it’s pretty much essential) to validate every message that your service receives.

According to this article by the BBC it seems that people are now suing Sony over their (admittedly appalling) tactic of infecting their customers PCs with shoddily written viruses. You have to ask yourself though, how many people are going to sign up for the class action if it means admitting to purchasing CDs by such great names as Celine Dion and Ricky Martin?

Ironically enough, following this link to a supposed article about buggy software yields the image below (as of 13:39 GMT+2):

“Thoughtwanker” via the BileBlog.