>> Hmm, yes... Just recently T-Mobile seem to have sent me quite a few 
>> text messages about various "hey, if you spent a certain amount of 
>> money in a certain way, we'll give you some free stuff that you can 
>> only use under certain conditions" type of offers.
> 
> Luckily for me I guess they realise that sending those sorts of messages 
> to people on business tarifs is pointless :-)

It seems business people get all the best stuff, yes.

It's like Norton Antivirus. Install that, and watch your PC slow to a 
crawl. It now takes 20 minutes to boot up, and every time it does you 
can a dozen popup windows telling you that your virus definitions are 
out of date and you haven't run a full scan yet this week, yadda yadda yack.

I mean, seriously, the actual malware might be less of a problem than 
this product!

Now try installing Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition. (Which, by the 
way, you can only purchase in license units of 50 or more. And it's 
*steep*.) Once it's installed, you would never know it's there. By 
default there isn't even an icon in the notification area. The only clue 
it's even there is an entry on the start menu and in add/remove 
programs. There is no noticable affect on system performance, except for 
extremely file-intensive operations. (That's file-intensive, not 
I/O-intensive. Working on 10GB files is no problem; just don't try 
opening and closing 50,000 files per second.)

I guess they figured business customers will switch to an less annoying 
product unless they make it really minimal.

Another nice thing is that you can control it centrally; set whether end 
users can control any of the settings, decide when it should update, 
when (if at all) it should do full scans, etc.

Similarly, my company has just started using something called WUS. It 
seems to allow you to centrally control which Microsoft updates get 
installed, and on which computers. Guy in America presses a button, all 
my PCs lock up for 4 hours, and when they finish they all have service 
pack 3 now. Pretty mental, really.

> When I was living in the UK I got a message from Vodafone telling me 
> that I should sign up "for free" to their "passport" service, which 
> meant while abroad I got cheaper calls or something.  Anyway I thought 
> why not if it's free, so I phoned up to activiate the service (as it 
> instructed you to do so) and was told I needed to upgrade my account 
> first (obviously this new tarif cost twice my current tarif).  After a 
> few back-and-to arguments about how this wasn't actually free for me I 
> hung up :-)

Hmm. So it's "free" if you spend lots more money first?

Yeah, nice try. ;-)

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