You can only get two: 1) Schedule, 2) quality, 3) quantity. So if your client / manager insists on you keeping the schedule you figured out months ago before full information, either quality will have to suffer or you'll have to cut features. There's no other way.
This doesn't necessarily work as well in practice as it sounds like it should.
Faced with the above, a lot of managers will say 'screw the quality, we have to ship all the features on time, we can patch later.' The problem is that when the manager says that, he's thinking in terms of, well of course all the features will still work except maybe in a few 1% edge cases. But in practice to achieve drastic schedule cuts by sacrificing quality, you often end up with code that only works in a few 1% edge cases and fails in 99% of cases. At this stage the manager will get angry and accuse you of trolling or gross negligence.
So I wouldn't actually use the 'pick two' theory; it's too likely to go horribly wrong.
"You could have easily downloaded our product/music/movie for free. But you went out of your way to pay us for it. Thank you. In return, we'll punish you by putting restrictions on you that you wouldn't have had if you didn't bother to pay for our content."
A logic that sadly only makes sense to out-of-touch executives: "Hey, since we can't get people stealing our stuff, lets punish people paying for it instead".
The reality is a little more nuanced. Basically, there are software people (people like you and me) who convince the execs that they can increase sales by reducing copyright infringement; all it takes is a little DRM they claim. Whether this is due to malice or incompetence is unknown, but one thing is for sure: we should start shunning these people. I don't care how good the money was, DRM creators deserve to be publicly named and shamed, or in the case of incompetence (believing that DRM will work), educated.
Of course, this is a supply side solution to a demand driven issue; but so is DRM :) I'm not sure how to reduce the demand for DRM, because the sad truth is that with enough demand, there will always be some idiot/huckster willing to implement it.
The reality is even more nuanced. Execs see people pirating their stuff and believe that those are truly lost sales. (and maybe some % of them are) They believe that if they can make it unpalatable/difficult enough to pirate music/movies etc... they will return to the halcyon when everything was good and they were making money hand over fist.
In truth, more people are turning away from traditional media than ever before as choices have expanded more and more. They deplore this as well, but in some cases the genie is out of the bottle (we are never going back to the days of 3-4 networks where power and profit margins were greatest), so the best they can hope to accomplish is to own all the networks and control the stores. They are winning.
I have DMCA, record companies and movie studios that make me feel like a criminal despite having paid full price. I hate them with a passion. HATE THEM!
However, in this case I can totally see Motorola's argument. Not sure in your case, but most people don't pay full price for their phones, they buy it subsidized. The reason you're locked on AT&T (in your example) is that you buy a highly subsidized device in exchange for staying with them for x years. That's precisely why I buy unlocked phones and never sign contracts. But if you signed a contract then you should honour that contract.
Irrelevant, the phone should not be in question. If you break the contract, you will pay the contract breakage fee, the phone is not even considered. It doesn't have anything to do with the contract, it's just yet another way for the company to lock down the slaves.
Unlocking a phone doesn't end your cell phone contract, and subsidized phones come with an early termination fee if you choose to end your contract early.
I accidentally upvoted you without reading your entire post. Here's an honorary downvote:
-1
Anyway, your argument is again moot, because it doesn't matter if the phone is subsidized. You signed a contract to pay off the phone over the course of 2 years through the carrier. When you buy a car, financed, does the dealer say "We're not going to let you change the timing of the engine! You didn't pay us in full, so you can't do what you want to!"
No, they DO let you do what you want to, because that is your car. Not theirs. It's off their hands. Why should it be any different for mobile devices? Also, say you buy a locked phone off-contract, full price -- but it's still locked to AT&T, and you do use AT&T for one year, but then want to switch to T-Mobile. You've paid off the phone. AT&T agrees, and they don't charge you any early termination fees. Then, you want to unlock it to use it on T-Mobile, but wait! You can't, because the DMCA doesn't let you.
I had many similar run-ins with immigration when I worked for Microsoft in the Redmond area (brown guy with a beard, likes to travel the world [sometimes taking trips as short as one weekend]). I've missed more than my share of flights (at one time my name was in the do-not-fly list because it partially matched the name of someone they wanted).
Final straw came when one time I was returning from an international trip with my x-wife and kids when the immigration officer decided she didn't qualify to accompany me (we were married at the time).
"No big deal, she'll just fly back to Canada" (we're Canadians).
We were told she couldn't do that, she had to be deported to the country she came from.
"But sir, we just had a single entry visa and cannot re-enter".
"That's not my problem, the law is the law. You need to be deported back to countryX".
"But sir, we have no ties to countryX. We dont have visa to countryX. We have a Canadian passport, if you dont want to admit us then let us just turn around and go to Canada".
"Oh y'all can come in, but she can't".
So I ask for a supervisor and he refused (I later learned he wasn't allowed to do that). Had us sit there for many hours with cranky kids after a transatlantic flight and then said:
"You can take her now (take her??) but I'll hold on to her passport. She can come before the judge in 30 days with the document and collect her passport or she'll be deported to countryX".
I had to unnecessarily waste time and money hiring a lawyer to figure out what the heck went wrong. She showed up 30 days later with our lawyer and the judge couldn't figure out why she was there. Gave us the passport. My x-wife dropped me home, told me to pack up and drove up to Toronto the same day. Even though I was about to get my green card (everything including labour cert was done) I told my employer to halt the process and moved back. For next few years I continued to work for US companies but remotely from Canada and pulled in close to $1 million in salary and stocks over the years that IRS wasn't able to tax at all. Canadian economy (not the American economy) benefited from my well over average spending over these years.
I can wrap my mind around "your name is similar to xyz we are looking for [even though xyz was a different ethnicity with a different age, height and everything]. But for me this made me realize how vulnerable non-citizens are when it comes to US immigration and border patrol. To this day I have no idea what ticked that guy off to single us out like that but I decided I did not want to live in a country where I had such little rights. I am well educated, make a lot of charitable contributions and spend a lot of time volunteering in the local community. Everything the US used to benefit from but now Canada does.
I don't either especially since I am not even bitter about the experience. I am just confused.
The irony is that since then I've crossed the border 12+ times a year and the experience is always pleasant (now I enter as a Canadian citizen for either vacation or a short business trip). One would think they'd have preferred me when I paid taxes there (and by the virtue of being on visa, they knew a lot more about me).
As a US citizen, I, on the other hand, am extremely bitter and angry about these kinds of offenses. It makes me sick to my stomach and I really do believe every day is one day closer to me becoming an expat.
Some of your countrymen - and women - do just that. I have the privilege of knowing a few of those and they are doing quite well outside of their native habitats.
American go-getter attitude abroad seems to be a winning combination.
But an expat where? These immigration policies have an aspect of retaliation. Other countries often mirror draconian policies seen elsewhere. I am concerned that all this can only lead to one inevitable conclusion: extremely locked down borders with only the very rich allowed to migrate. The UK is actively working on this now, though so far they do allow EU and commonwealth members in more readily.
Even Singapore has been raising the bar for entry lately. We may see in our lifetimes a world where one can only easily migrate to third-world countries.
That is - for want of a better word - an astounding piece of legislation. What's next, a deal with the hereafter? I figure that the only thing this will effectively accomplish is that a lot of American expats will go all the way and will ditch the American nationality and that a lot of people in the United States will be denied access to services. Brilliant move, the world-stage equivalent of the schoolyard bully mentality.
I agree with SoftwareMaven and jacquesm. Sounds like an awful experience, and you're cool about it.
I'm confused as well: which path in the system should be credited as most wrong? The intersection of you being Canadian, brown, and in a better profession than customs agents seems rife with opportunities for them to F you over.
Hell, I'm a white guy and despite this privilege I ass-kiss too much whenever I travel because they can decide to do the same to me. Not nearly as likely, but since we gave up our rights to opaque government security services, who knows. Not to be US-bashing, I do the same when I have gone international.
I have a white board right above my monitor. I write a daily "to do" list there and check off items as they get done. Items that do not get done in one day get moved to the next day. I try not to let the list get too long (I know I need to do 100 things, but if I can only do 3 today then my to do list only contains 3). It keeps me sane and focused.
In the past I tried something similar to scrum (have a master list of everything I needed to do). But since I do have a day job and other responsibilities, I found that seeing a massive list got too overwhelming. Now I focus only on what I can get done now, not worrying about the pile of things waiting to be done.
