Slashdot Mirror

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-115
http://www.novahq.net/forum/archive/index.php?t-6237.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hfcFa8VOHQ

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-121

As many slashdotters know Windows is a virus : http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-115.

Teach them to boot up a linux CD and reformat the whole thing, this is virus erradication!

Didn't they do a similar thing with a .net addon?

Oh yes, they did.

Tick tick tick tick whir whir (30% done) tick tick tick tick tick tick whir whir (56% done) Tick tick tick tick whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir (99%) whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir Not ready reading drive A:. Abort, Retry, Ignore

Die floppies so I can piss on your grave.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-122

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article08-600

Note that Oracle (nee Sun) is also doing this with a Java extension.

During the Trojan War, the people of Troy were said to have installed dancing horses, which came pre-infected with the special forces of Greece.

Damn autorun feature. Allows an Trojan horse to automatically install special forces.

Nowadays, users install dancing bunnies, which come pre-infected with viruses and worms and other sorts of malware.

Smileys used to be big hit. I guess that bunnies are more infectious now. TweakUI seems to be able to prevent user form installing unwanted software ( any software ), however it can't prevent form unintentional infection while surfing script loaded web pages.

That's right, the entire Vista failure was all me. I told Microsoft if they didn't give me 100 million dollars I would run around the entire Internet making millions of accounts, posing as folks in all walks of life having Vista problems, just to destroy them. Should have paid me,huh?

But seriously, it ain't like I'm the only one. In fact if you look up Vista horribly slow you'll see that Yahoo finds 2,580,000 hits for that phrase, and for Vista crashes? A whopping 52,700,000. That should tell you there is trouble in your paradise. So maybe instead of accusing someone of spreading FUD, maybe you might think about those figures. Unless you do think I managed to write all those web pages by myself, in which case Microsoft better give me my money or I will do the same to Win7. MWAHAHAHA!

Is it really true that you have to edit the registry to turn off autorun? There isn't any clicky? Amazing.
No it's not true. There are lots of ways to do it. The registry editor is just installed by default and pretty simple if you already know how to use it. TweakUI is a free addon Microsoft Powertoy that's worth having and gives you some control back.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018
http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/ht/autorun.htm

Hmm,

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-200

Are there any users who won't have to activate their copies of Windows XP?
Yes:
1. If you purchase a new computer with Windows XP pre-installed, it will most likely come pre-activated. The only problem then is if you attempt a major upgrade.
2. The version of Windows XP Professional sold with a large corporate site-license doesn't contain the activation code. If you're using that version, you'll never have to activate it.

I.e. corporate users don't need to activate, neither do people that buy machines with XP preinstalled. The only people who need to activate are people that install it themselves.

I switched, from Windows to Linux and OS X, because MS wants to treat it's users like criminals. That's what Activation is all about. It's one thing to require a product key to use software the first tyme but it's totally different to then require the user to allow the software to contact the mothership or to call the company to have it activated as well as require all the spyware crap.

I call dual monitor setups unusual because the majority of people don't know and don't care. Salespeople use whatever the hell is on their desk when they sit down. If there wasn't a second monitor on their desk provided by the company, they wouldn't have missed it. You're absolutely right that they didn't adjust the resolution, but it's because they don't know how, so it's not like Windows is somehow easier than Linux for them in this regard.

You can decry my penchant for embellishment in my offhand Slashdot post all you want, but I asked you to point out where in my little table-of-installs I did such a thing. As far as I can tell, I didn't.

Windows tells me to reboot after an update. Fine, I understand why. Never said it shouldn't. Ubuntu does that too. But I can tell Ubuntu to piss off if I'm in the middle of something and dont' want to restart right now. Windows will nag me about it every ten minutes, or worse, just do it for me if I'm not there to tell it to go away. Many a morning I've woken up to discover my machine had rebooted overnight because Windows wanted to update. No, that's cool, the number-crunching and downloading I was doing overnight didn't matter anyway!

I suppose you get pissed off when your car beeps at you to tell you that you've left your keys in teh ignition or the lights on.

I think those are things that I should be made aware of. I don't need to be told how to take a tour of XP, or that I can safely unplug hardware with this icon. I don't need a multitude of applications all running their own little updaters and having to tell me about it. I don't need to be told that the firewall is turned off after I just turned it off, or that UAC is disabled after I just disabled it. I could go on and on like this. None of it is information that should be brought to my attention.

In the end, if you're going to stick to your stance that little things popping up all the time to notify you of this or that doesn't bother you, I can't change your mind. I personally find it infuriating -- and echoing your earlier sentiment, a quick look through the internet's many forums will show that many others do, too. There are entire websites devoted to the topic of Windows annoyances from a UI standpoint.

But don't act like my position of "I don't want popups and balloon thingers and notifications and the rest" is somehow ludicrous and unique. It's completely reasonable to want an OS that stays out of my face. So again, if you want to show me where my horrendous exaggerations were in the original link, I'm listening.

Users love it. Lots of other systems do this MacOS, Amiga and all consoles have autorun so it makes sense. Security is about finding the right balance of useability and Security as the more you lock it down the less usable a system becomes. Don't get me wrong good design can help ie programs writing to user folders instead of being hard coded c:\EtcEtc\

Also there is a way to turn it off through the windows UI. http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018/

Here is an explanation why it is a bug

I'd use it to read http://annoyances.org/. I'd go around editing the registry and fixing common annoyances. Hopefully, Microsoft would realize what they need to fix.

Windows has always used a Heisenburg unmount strategy (i.e. you don't know whether the drive is unmounted until you try accessing it).

Yes, and the 'doze also freezes the whole frickin' desktop for a painful few seconds any time a new CD is 'detected' until it is identified and explorer has a chance to fiddle with it. It's one of the really annoying things about the 'doze. I have looked long and hard for any way of disabling this auto-mount 'feature' but it seems to be a bug deeply planted in explorer. I suppose a whole manual 'mount' mechanism would have to replace it.

What is so bad about Vista when running on modern hardware?

Activaton, WGA and Spyware. Because of these three items MS insisted on I have switched from Windows to Linux for a server and OS X on the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on. I don't like it when a company treats me like a criminal when I buy a product from them!!!

Your criticism rings hollow. Over the years, "average" users have had to learn all sorts of difficult workarounds to use with Windows when things didn't work 100% the way Microsoft intended. In my experience with computer-phobes, switching them to Linux has resulted in less "help my computer isn't working" phone calls than leaving them with Windows does.

He's not reviewing "Linux" - he's reviewing a Dell laptop. A poorly configured one at that.

No computer seller should have released a machine with the kinds of problems he describes. The crashing Volume Control - that doesn't happen on my machine and I didn't have to tinker at all.

And as far as the touchpad issue is concerned- if the pad doesn't work for an average user, they should have either configured it themselves, or pulled it. Instead, Dell released a defective, user-unfriendly product.

He does ignore the amazing collection of software (including MP3 players), which is easily accessible through the graphical front-ends of the apt packaging system. Windows doesn't provide a decent MP3 player in my opinion (I wouldn't use the included spyware player), and it's harder to obtain one there.

Linux isn't perfect. Neither is Windows. It has lots of little problems like those mentioned, and they're being taken care of as they come to light. Microsoft has a whole bookshelf dedicated to these. How on earth could he think Microsoft is superior?

If Mossberg understood Free Software, he'd know that Dell could easily provide the support he claims is absent because developers aren't "bound" to users, as he puts it. Well guess what- neither is Windows. Just read your EULA.

I don't know how Ubunghole can be gaining "marketshare". The only people moving to Ubunghole are people switching to the latest distro.

Then, once Ubunghole looses that "new distro smell", they will simply move on to something else.

Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, was able to install software without requiring the user to move around files manually and edit config files. Windows 95, unlike modern Lunix, would just work.

That ONLY applies to Windows 2000. All the rest is either an available dialog, or TweakUI (as well as the shift key). Plus in W2K's favour one can download and click on a reg file So really it is easier than your FUD would suggest.

From the "market leader" in OS and business application software.

I don't like:
1) predatory, monopolistic business practices -- it shouldn't have had to get to the antitrust lawsuit stage for people in the company to realize that what they were doing was not only unethical, but illegal. It damaged/damages the whole industry, and they still skirt the line. It's obvious quite a few (and often bad) products are deployed purely to undercut the competition.

2) Their OS and applications are generally okay, but sometimes unnecessary features are *amazingly* annoying and misguided. This is practically a hallmark of MS products, and it is all the more astonishing because they are supposed to have some huge "user lab" to screen the product usability before release. Examples:
A) "Personalized menus" -- brilliant! Too many menu options? Let's hide half of them and make the user guess where the rest are. Hello? It's a sign you need to reorganize the program, not obfuscate it.
B) "Autocorrect" and "Autoformat" -- that's great for your average memo. For everything else? It does more damage than good, especially for anything technical, and for novice users who don't know how to turn it off, it is EXTREMELY frustrating for them to type something over and over and have the program spontaneously alter what they typed. It is features like this that *sound* good on paper, but unless they work perfectly (and software isn't *that* smart), they are annoying and hinder people's work instead of help it.
C) Two words: Clippy Sucks. Okay, I'm in my post-clippy stage now, because I've learned not to install the "Office Assistant" at all, but for millions of other users, the HATRED directed at Clippy and his allies is just amazing. It shouldn't take, what, 3 versions of Office for MS to realize this "feature" wasn't helpful.
D) the default Windows XP theme -- who came up with this? A recent hire from Fisher-Price? Thank goodness for "Classic" mode in win 2k and win XP. I know MS wants to show off their latest toys, but why does almost every default have to be a stupid one?
E) There are many more examples. Don't believe me? There are whole books written in the "Windows ... Annoyances" series. The whole MS approach to software is like running a marathon, doing a decent job, and then tripping on the finish line. To think of the wasted development effort put into some of these useless "features". Word, in its default state, is a *mess*. You have to spend 5 minutes turning things off to make it usable. That's bad design.

3) the constant attempts to rope users and developers into proprietary, Windows-only, potentially dead-end solutions, to the point they introduce incompatibilities into "standards" that break other software, or discourage interoperability (e.g., all those stupid "features" and "bugs" in IE). Why do they do this? What possible excuse is there? They *say* they want the opposite, but everything they do is obviously trying to back people into a situation of complete dependency on the "microsoft way" of doing things.

4) Product activation. Sure, it's bad enough to have it on an application, but to have it on the OS such that the whole system becomes non-functional? That's nuts, and apparently it is only going to be worse in Vista. I'm not a pirate. I know MS has a piracy problem, but treating their customers this way isn't the solution. It's as if they DON'T WANT customers to use their newer products. Well, I won't be. It's why I run win 2k and office 2k on my personal machine. I see no compelling reason to upgrade, and activation discourages me from doing so.

So, I don't "hate" Microsoft, I just think they are doing a shoddy job for the vast amount of money they have to throw at the problem. It's a challenging problem, but, sheesh, other companies seem to do a better job with less resources (e.g., Apple, and many open-source projects do some things better, and those products have almost none of th

Nice timing.

I've been using Mapquest since it came out. It's really pretty good. I tried it a few days ago and it's been web 2.0'ized and no longer works on my W98 box.

Stop laughing, all I want windows to do is launch Opera and SSH and nothing more, and on a dial up line out here in the (dialup only) countryside it makes more sense than XP that can't update itself fast enough before getting trashed.

Mapquest will no longer show me a map as their Web 2.0 nonsense doesn't work in the latest Opera (it should) or last weeks IE. Thanks guys.

Other annoyances: goons that insist a "go" or "submit" button be a graphic. I just wasted some drustrating minutes doing the stupid annual address verification thing for some clients domains. I sit there waiting for the graphic for the "go" button to show up. Come on baby, you can do it, any day now, nice ads, uh huh, yeah come on OH there it is! Click.

Twits.

I swear the web is a lot less usable than it was 5 years aho. Everybody wants to be as slick as Google which is fine, but don't break your app in trying (and failing) to achive that.

In 1983 I mentioned to our European head of marketing I'd just improved the floppy formatting program; we worked for a computer manufacturor.

"How?" says he.

"I took out the verification step".

"You fucking moron. People don't care how fast, people care it actually WORKED".

Oh, good point.

This is a point needs to be written on a cluebat and hammered home to all those Dilberteque managers throught the kingdom. Pretty is nice, but working is better. At least make it a frigging option.

But don't do it like google - you can selete "plain html" (instead of web 2.0) in gmail, which works, but try to manage any options and you're told "this doesn't work in plain html". Hello?

The problem as I see it is the developers and their bosses are technodweebs but those pesky things out there we call "users" have decepid crifty old technology. But they are our customers. They in a large part, occupy the part of the ecosystem that have direct control over our paychecks. And not only are they dumb as a bag of hammers, but they have computers salvaged from the Spanish American war. That's why I like to assume their technology when developing stuff, just as I liked to used to prefer to develop from a floppy way back when before hard drives were ubiquitous: I wanna be able to count disk accesses and I want it to be small.

Know they customer. Know (exactly!) what your program is doing.

Mapquest fails this test.

You're missing some good ones!

With MS-Windows you don't need to know any hacks. There are books about MS-Windows but they aren't about hacks.

BTW, doesn't your browser do spell checking? The one I use, in a standard Ubuntu installation without any hacks, shows your "oridinary" in red, it's easy to find typos that way.

Ah - so if "Ubuntu Hacks" gives a bad impression, what do you think of "Windows Annoyances" available from all good booksellers?

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

There's a full set of instructions for getting rid of Clippy here at annoyances.org.

Oh you don't want one of those. They are very expensive. Forced upgrades every year. I mean haven't you seen http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-132 ????

Just turn off autorun!
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018

How to permanantly turn off CD Autorun on Windows.

Anyway, Windows XP tries to defrag your HD when it is idle, which could be bad.

Just hold the shift key when you pop in the cd. Or better yet, disable the windows autorun "feature".

Whoever thought that running unverified code from a cd automatically without warning the user was a good idea should be shot.

Turn off autorun.

I read both your posts, and I must say I agree with you.

For the last three years my laptop has been running GNU/Linux, despite most colleagues using Microsoft Windows XP. I don't tell them I run GNU/Linux. They send me documents created using Microsoft Office XP, I read or edit them using OpenOffice, and send them Microsoft Office formatet documents in return. Sometimes reading fails, but surprisingly seldom. I remember getting into problems like that much more often when I was using Microsoft Office 95 and somebody sent me an MS Office 97 or 2000 or XP document.

Another thing that is or was very difficult to find out on Windows was the size of a directory. If you are short on hard drive space, this is very annoying. You had to mark a folder in the standard Windows Explorer file manager, hit ALT+Return, and then it would find out how large that single folder was. Now multiply that with the number of games, "handy utilities" and what not. Sigh...

I'm sure some people will have trouble understanding how something as simple as ALT+Return can be considered "hard", but if I break it down into steps, you may be able to understand:

a. you must want more hard drive space
b. you must consider what to remove that will give the maximum benefit, yet keep as much useful stuff as possible.
c. you must learn that there is something called a file manager and how to start it.
d. you must learn to expand a filetree by hitting a pluss-sign next to a folder.
e. you will discover that folder size is not given.
f. you must find out how to get the folder size. There are two ways.
g. you must hit delete, and be told that removing this program may affect your system state.

Actually point g. is interesting. Windows will warn you, GNU/Linux will not warn you, yet none of them does the obvious - start a deinstallation program.

If you really want a laugh, just head over to http://www.annoyances.org/. Yes, there are stupid problems for GNU/Linux users, but this site shows that this is true for Microsoft Windows users.

You know what pissed me off about the home/professional thing?

Before XP, every edition of Windows that sold on a laptop/desktop for home use had support for logon's to NT domains.

Now, I'm not a Windows admin, and refuse to use MS products, so I don't know why this was the case, but in order to enable internet access at my sister's college she had to log onto an NT domain.

Thinking that XP was similar to 2000, or 98SE, or 95, for that matter, I pointed out where I thought the option should be.

She said it wasn't there, that only the top half of the dialog looked like what I was describing. I didn't believe her; sure enough, when I got my hands on her laptop, it *wasn't* there. A little bit of investigation on http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article10-002 revealed that XP home didn't support NT domain logins.

I was *not* happy, and neither was she. Of course, she went to her local drug ... ahem, Microsoft dealer, the local school bookstore, where they were selling educational copies of XP pro for $3.

I found it appaling that the 'latest' and 'greatest' Windows didn't support features that came standard with older Windows.

Try http://annoyances.org/ or http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm. I was going to send you to Blackviper.com, but his site appears to be down.

Set the registry key to ignore "out of space" warnings for that drive....

What registry key is that?

Annoyances.org has a page about this, but I know there is a way to specify this on a per-drive basis. I don't know for sure, but TweakUI might help. I did search my registry for my "s: (swap) drive" just to be 100% sure, but came up with a bunch of results for "Neverwinter Nights: subtopic" so I just gave up after about 20 results. I know I have it set up on my system just for that one drive. Sorry.

I agree!

Several years ago my mother wanted a computer. She uses a Windows box at work, of course, but I and my brothers are all Mac people. I told her that she could buy a PC if she wanted, but if something went wrong I wouldn't know how to help her. At the time that was true. Since them I'm (un)fortunate enough to know something about Win-PC's.

She bought an iMac and has never had any real problems.

My girlfriend on the other hand bought a Compaq running Windows XP. Every time I hear her complaining about some "annoyance" I scratch my head and wonder why 90% of the computing world puts up with this crap.

That reminds me of this old gag about problems upgrading GirlFriend and conflicts with DrinkingBuddies 1.0.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-002

(Riker) "Good God captain! Those are humans floating straight toward the Borg ship with no life support suits ! How can they survive the tortures of deep space ?!"

(Data) "I don't believe that those are humans sir, if you will look closer I believe you will see that they are carrying something recognized by twenty-first century man as doe skin leather briefcases, and wearing Armani suits"

(Riker and Picard together horrified) "Lawyers !!"

(Geordi) "It can't be. All the Lawyers were rounded up and sent hurtling into the sun in 2017 during the Great Awakening."

disabling autorun on XP its embarrassingly simple to do, and claiming that it requires a registry hack just shows that your knowledge of windows doesn't even extend to the most absolute basics - so what the hell are you doing making claims about it's functionality when you don't even know how to use it?

It's pretty arrogant for you to assume that everyone in the world is running Windows XP. At my place of employment, most of our computers are running Windows 2000 (with a couple of Win 98 pcs left over). The solution for win2k (posted here) is far from the "embarrassingly simple" task that you make it out to be. As for downloading a tweaking utility: why should I download an untrusted utility that makes registry edits in order to secure a windows pc? Does that really make sense to you?

Oh, and speaking of kludgy fixes, the windows 2000 fix causes you to have to hit F5 to refresh the explorer window when you change CDs.

Alternately, you could download and install TweakUI for whatever version of Windows you're running and disable autorun from there. It's safer than going directly into the registry, and easy enough that even a common joe can do it.

Edit the registry to disable autorun??? You're out of your gourd! The answer to this (and many other Windows "features") is TweakUI It installs a new control panel icon that lets you enable/disable almost all of the automatic stuff that Windows can do.

You can also disable autorun in other versions of Windows. See annoyances.org for the method for particular version.

You can do this with Tweak-UI. More info here

You can do this with Tweak-UI. More info here

How do these disks work in real CD players? And if the CD player can hear the audio track, why can't my ripping software just record it? Does the WMA even enter into the picture?

Actually no, It creates a data file of some kind somewhere in your local application data folder. Sometimes it scans every media file referenced by this file.
Can't find it at the moment, (work pc) but this link might be related.
Delete this and things will improve.

WMP9 is uninstallable...

The quick launch tray may get a little use from some people, but most 'regular users' I see are just confused by it. It doesn't confuse me, personally, but I have no use for it either. But all the other crap... and no you can't 'turn it off' in all cases. 'Active Desktop' for instance, can still cause crashes after you supposedly turn it off. If you grab TweakUI and a few other utilities, you can turn most of it off, but it's still in there, and can cause crashes, as well as slowing things down. Try WinXP on your oldest, slowest computer, sleek it down as much as you can, and then time how long it takes to open an explorer window. Then install 98lite with the 95 explorer and try it again. The difference is positively breathtaking. Hell, run the same experiment with stock 98SE and 'sleek' 98SElite, it's still very noticeable even there. And in that case the difference is entirely in the explorer.exe version.

But speed and resources aside, I've never had any trouble getting my 98lite 'sleek' machine to display explorer windows the way I want them. When I occasionally have to use a WinXP box it never wants to do that for me, and it appears I am not alone, and it sounds like it takes black magic to accomplish sometimes from the replies to that thread. And even if you do get the default set, some folders won't follow them without more black magic. Now I'm sure if I were motivated enough to take the time, I could probably find all the right invocations and get that thing to behave somewhat usably, but why should I when my method works better, faster, with less fuss? Not to mention allows me to avoid giving MS any more of my money.