I seem to have struck a nerve with some people here so I am sorry for that.
Yes I have a lot of hard drives but I have been buying the cheapest drives I can. All my hardware is old or from surplus. I only run them when I want to transfer something. In short, I haven't spent as much as some may think and yes, I think being charged $354+ a year for something I already own is ridiculous. If IXS want's to charge for their software then they can do that and it would be perfectly reasonable but that is NOT what they are doing. In reality, they would be charging me to "rent" the software and only for an extra feature and some convenience at the price of about 3 new drives a year.
Again, lots of software is sold this way. Many companies have discovered that their business models fail if they cannot guarantee a revenue stream to continue to pay their people, and in fact, the failure to charge people on an ongoing basis has actively led to evil issues.
In particular, for years, IoT devices such as home NAT gateways ("routers"), IP cameras, smart televisions, smartphones, etc., have been sold as abandonware -- long lifetime devices which may see firmware updates for a handful of years, or even just a few months, or maybe not even at all. This is a massive problem in the industry, and it comes from an economic model where the company selling the device is under intense pressure to sell an inexpensive device (probably compromising quality in the process), and then once the sale is made, there is no additional revenue to cover a much more expensive phase of the device's lifecycle: keeping the firmware patched, secure, and distributed to devices already in the field. While the initial software design might have involved a dozen developers over the period of a year, the need for ongoing support really needs you to retain maybe two or three people capable of touching all aspects of that device's firmware, because you never really know where what portions of the firmware a CVE or other security notification will involve. But that's not what happens.
Anyways, lots of things are sold on an annual basis, and are better for it. Many games require a subscription, which keeps the company invested and cranking out updates. Quicken spun off from Intuit a few years ago and moved to a subscription model, which guaranteed them a revenue stream that has allowed them to succed. Hell, even the Cisco phones in the office here are $20/each per year for ongoing support and software licensing.
This is as asinine as Bidens plan to charge people a tax for every mile they drive. I find it insulting that they would charge people every year based on the amount of something they already own rather then a flat rate based on their use case.
Really? Seems sensible from a certain point of view. I've got a truck in the driveway that saw about 200 miles driven in the last year during the pandemic. I would hate to pay a flat rate just to have a vehicle sitting in the driveway, which, ironically, is what the Republicans around here have enacted for hybrid vehicles.
We already pay for roads in a lot of areas with taxes on gasoline, which used to scale pretty well as it translated fairly well to miles driven, but now with electric vehicles, that's a bit of a problem, which is why governments have been looking for ways to fund roads through something other than a gas tax. You can think it "asinine", but the world is changing, and the construction workers who build roads need to be paid.
While I am little-l libertarian, I see huge value to our society in having modern infrastructure systems. Transportation, water, energy, communications, etc. We're seeing what thinking small about these issues gets us -- the tragedies in Texas a month ago because most power vendors chose not to winterize was totally avoidable. Telecom vendors managed to derail the mid-90's plan to bring high speed communications to the entire country, and have been dragging their feet for a quarter of a century on the issue. Finding ways to pay for better infrastructure is going to be challenging, but history shows that it pays off. I don't expect that it has to be done the way my politics would prefer, and I'm even adult enough to understand the fallacies of the "libertarian model" for these things in practice; all that needs to happen is that we need to come to agreement on some viable way forward.
Charging people a tax for every mile they drive would seem to me to be exactly in line with so-called "user fees" that Republicans used to be so fond of.
Paying that much+ every year to rent software is crazy. I buy all my games and have a little more than 150 games in my library and the total amount of money I paid for all my games is less then the yearly cost IXS wants to charge me for that extra feature and convenience. Again, I am a home user and am not running a business.
You paid two and a half bucks per game? For what games?
