I wonder how many of these same people buy Sony products despite not just one, but an entire string of blatantly anti-consumer decisions
I haven't bought anything Sony since the rootkit.
Or Microsoft, which has a very long history of not just anti-consumer, but crushing the PC industry and suberting entire standards bodies.
Likewise, I have done my best to avoid giving Microsoft even a single dime -- although in practice, that's pretty much impossible to achieve, thanks to their continuing evil practices (such as demanding royalties from Android phone manufacturers).
Everything you say is correct if what Lenovo did was just commit an innocent error. I don't think that's what they did. I think what they did was overtly malicious, and the only suitable response is to never do business with them again.
While much of what you say contains truth, I think you are too quick to discount overall company culture. If the processes in one part of the company can get so lax without management correcting it, it's more likely that the same problem exists in every other part of the company as well.
Even if the only part of Lenovo that sucked was the group that decided that the malware was acceptable, that still means the company as a whole can't be trusted -- since from the outside of the company, there's no way to know what groups suck and what groups don't.
However, the reason that I will never again purchase anything made by Lenovo is more basic than that: their official response to Superfish was either that they were outright lying or that they were seriously incompetent. Either way, they proved to be a company that you can't trust -- even if there are groups within the company that are trustworthy.
The only way this practice will stop is if users stop demanding every damn thing for free and actually come off their wallets and pay for the damn software.
It is up to the cheap-ass customer to decide whether that is through incessant ad revenue or a one-time charge.
Wrong. I am very happy to pay software I use and enjoy, but most of the time I don't have that option. You can't blame this sort of thing on people being unwilling to pay when there is no option to pay at all, or paying doesn't get you a version of the software that is free of ads and tracking.
My point was basically that the fact that Java is still a big thing is ample evidence that Sun does indeed "exist in [at least one] way that is meaningful."
And I disagree. The product that Sun created clearly still exists in a meaningful way -- but that's the product, not the company. The company no longer exists. What I hear you saying is that if I buy a coffee maker from a company and the company goes out of business, the company actually still exists because the coffee maker still exists.
Products and the companies that make them are different things.
You have to screw around in about:config to get the same effect.
In all fairness, if you want a decent experience in Firefox you have to change a number of other things in about:config anyway (since Mozilla has apparently decided that they don't want anyone to be able to improve the settings in a way that is actually convenient). As long as you're there, changing one more thing isn't that big of a deal.
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be.
I don't know if it always will be, but it's certainly a piece of crap, I agree, and getting crappier with each release. The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier. Although, admittedly, each browser has its own unique flavor of crappy.
Polaroid and Indian Motorcycles are defunct. That some other company picked up the names and started producing products under those names doesn't change that (even if the products are identical to what was originally produced). The original company is long gone regardless, so it's defunct.
Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?"
Since always. When one company acquires another, the acquired company ceases to exist in any way that is meaningful for their customers. It is just becomes a brand used by the company that did the acquiring.
My theory is that every release of Firefox that has come out for a few years now has been worse than the one before it. Their switch to rapid release has just made the situation worse. And the mobile version of Firefox is horrendous and borderline unusable.
for the rest of the world, file extensions are meaningless, they'd rather see the MS Excel icon on Excel Docs than have to remember what file extensions will open into an Excel doc.
Judging by the countless times that I've had to do tech support for people who get into trouble because they can't see the extension, and the expressions of surprise and joy that I hear when I set their machine to show them, I think that file extensions are far from meaningless for the ordinary user.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding. The idea is that the first x bytes of every file (usually 4) contains a code saying what the file type is. It's the same concept as a file extension, but in the file itself rather than in the filename. In this scheme, there is never a need to read more than the first few bytes to determine what the file actually is.
I think the idea, at least for Windows, is that extensions are a legacy thing, and are still supported because they are the basis for determining file type. BUT, the reasoning is likely that they can be hidden from the user and only show the user the actual file type.
And that reasoning is completely wrong. As an example of how broken the idea is, there are numerous installation packages that include both an "installme.exe" and an "installme.msi", where the.exe is what you run to install. Without showing file extensions, both of these files look like exectuables and it's completely opaque which one you need to run. Admittedly, this is a result of a terrible installer design -- but the OS shouldn't make things worse by hiding critical information.
Because something system-level with access to run the file (presumably) has to apply regexp's to almost it's entire contents to correctly determine the type of it (e.g. is it a ZIP or is it a JAR with the same compression?).
No, it would only have to examine the first few bytes.
I never understood why Windows hides file extensions by default. Doing so makes Windows much more difficult to use. Changing that setting is literally the first thing I do with Windows. Hiding file extensions was one of the worst decisions made for Windows.
I think that's not as outrageous because that fact isn't exactly a secret. Everyone knows that they're signing up for that when they use iTunes. People who find it outrageous simply don't use iTunes in the first place.
They don't? Good for them. But they already lost all of my trust when they instigated the NymWars in the first place. It was one of the first examples of how little Google cares about its users.
Hey kids! Old guy here dropping in just to let you know that contrary to what AC claims, you'll still like sex and music even when you're over fifty. You just won't be staying up late to enjoy them.
Indeed, except even the "won't be staying up late" is going to far. I stay up late often to enjoy them. Sometimes all night. Here's a secret that might surprise the younger set: sex (and music) is much better at this age than when younger. A friend of mine summed it up nicely: "I really savor and enjoy sex a lot more now that it isn't the constant fucking emergency that it is when you're young."
I don't understand why people are mystified that this upset so many people. Playlists and music collections are personal, and so it's an intrusion to have someone else come in and unilaterally modify them. They should have asked permission.
It has nothing to do with the specific music involved, although U2's comments about this did make me dislike U2 as a business entity.
Personally, the U2 thing demonstrated to me that I can't trust iTunes (and therefore Apple) very much, and so it is a good reason to avoid purchasing devices that need to use it. Whether or not people actually listened to the songs does not measure whether or not this was a good thing for Apple to do.
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I wonder how many of these same people buy Sony products despite not just one, but an entire string of blatantly anti-consumer decisions
I haven't bought anything Sony since the rootkit.
Or Microsoft, which has a very long history of not just anti-consumer, but crushing the PC industry and suberting entire standards bodies.
Likewise, I have done my best to avoid giving Microsoft even a single dime -- although in practice, that's pretty much impossible to achieve, thanks to their continuing evil practices (such as demanding royalties from Android phone manufacturers).
And between the US and China, I would prefer to be spied on by China. They have less of an ability to harm me.
Everything you say is correct if what Lenovo did was just commit an innocent error. I don't think that's what they did. I think what they did was overtly malicious, and the only suitable response is to never do business with them again.
While much of what you say contains truth, I think you are too quick to discount overall company culture. If the processes in one part of the company can get so lax without management correcting it, it's more likely that the same problem exists in every other part of the company as well.
Even if the only part of Lenovo that sucked was the group that decided that the malware was acceptable, that still means the company as a whole can't be trusted -- since from the outside of the company, there's no way to know what groups suck and what groups don't.
However, the reason that I will never again purchase anything made by Lenovo is more basic than that: their official response to Superfish was either that they were outright lying or that they were seriously incompetent. Either way, they proved to be a company that you can't trust -- even if there are groups within the company that are trustworthy.
The only way this practice will stop is if users stop demanding every damn thing for free and actually come off their wallets and pay for the damn software.
It is up to the cheap-ass customer to decide whether that is through incessant ad revenue or a one-time charge.
Wrong. I am very happy to pay software I use and enjoy, but most of the time I don't have that option. You can't blame this sort of thing on people being unwilling to pay when there is no option to pay at all, or paying doesn't get you a version of the software that is free of ads and tracking.
Or, even better, just don't use uTorrent.
I understand. I think perhaps where we differ is that I see a pretty huge difference between a company and a brand.
Java good, Unix good, XML DIAF!!!
That's a matter of opinion. As a developer that has been using Java for years now, my opinion is that Java is simply awful.
My point was basically that the fact that Java is still a big thing is ample evidence that Sun does indeed "exist in [at least one] way that is meaningful."
And I disagree. The product that Sun created clearly still exists in a meaningful way -- but that's the product, not the company. The company no longer exists. What I hear you saying is that if I buy a coffee maker from a company and the company goes out of business, the company actually still exists because the coffee maker still exists.
Products and the companies that make them are different things.
You have to screw around in about:config to get the same effect.
In all fairness, if you want a decent experience in Firefox you have to change a number of other things in about:config anyway (since Mozilla has apparently decided that they don't want anyone to be able to improve the settings in a way that is actually convenient). As long as you're there, changing one more thing isn't that big of a deal.
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be.
I don't know if it always will be, but it's certainly a piece of crap, I agree, and getting crappier with each release. The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier. Although, admittedly, each browser has its own unique flavor of crappy.
We might be getting tripped up on nomenclature.
Polaroid and Indian Motorcycles are defunct. That some other company picked up the names and started producing products under those names doesn't change that (even if the products are identical to what was originally produced). The original company is long gone regardless, so it's defunct.
Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?"
Since always. When one company acquires another, the acquired company ceases to exist in any way that is meaningful for their customers. It is just becomes a brand used by the company that did the acquiring.
My theory is that every release of Firefox that has come out for a few years now has been worse than the one before it. Their switch to rapid release has just made the situation worse. And the mobile version of Firefox is horrendous and borderline unusable.
for the rest of the world, file extensions are meaningless, they'd rather see the MS Excel icon on Excel Docs than have to remember what file extensions will open into an Excel doc.
Judging by the countless times that I've had to do tech support for people who get into trouble because they can't see the extension, and the expressions of surprise and joy that I hear when I set their machine to show them, I think that file extensions are far from meaningless for the ordinary user.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding. The idea is that the first x bytes of every file (usually 4) contains a code saying what the file type is. It's the same concept as a file extension, but in the file itself rather than in the filename. In this scheme, there is never a need to read more than the first few bytes to determine what the file actually is.
Those are an artifact of 1980s DOS times
They're actually an artifact of CP/M (remember, DOS is half CP/M, half Unix).
I think the idea, at least for Windows, is that extensions are a legacy thing, and are still supported because they are the basis for determining file type. BUT, the reasoning is likely that they can be hidden from the user and only show the user the actual file type.
And that reasoning is completely wrong. As an example of how broken the idea is, there are numerous installation packages that include both an "installme.exe" and an "installme.msi", where the .exe is what you run to install. Without showing file extensions, both of these files look like exectuables and it's completely opaque which one you need to run. Admittedly, this is a result of a terrible installer design -- but the OS shouldn't make things worse by hiding critical information.
Because something system-level with access to run the file (presumably) has to apply regexp's to almost it's entire contents to correctly determine the type of it (e.g. is it a ZIP or is it a JAR with the same compression?).
No, it would only have to examine the first few bytes.
I never understood why Windows hides file extensions by default. Doing so makes Windows much more difficult to use. Changing that setting is literally the first thing I do with Windows. Hiding file extensions was one of the worst decisions made for Windows.
I think that's not as outrageous because that fact isn't exactly a secret. Everyone knows that they're signing up for that when they use iTunes. People who find it outrageous simply don't use iTunes in the first place.
They don't? Good for them. But they already lost all of my trust when they instigated the NymWars in the first place. It was one of the first examples of how little Google cares about its users.
Hey kids! Old guy here dropping in just to let you know that contrary to what AC claims, you'll still like sex and music even when you're over fifty. You just won't be staying up late to enjoy them.
Indeed, except even the "won't be staying up late" is going to far. I stay up late often to enjoy them. Sometimes all night. Here's a secret that might surprise the younger set: sex (and music) is much better at this age than when younger. A friend of mine summed it up nicely: "I really savor and enjoy sex a lot more now that it isn't the constant fucking emergency that it is when you're young."
I don't understand why people are mystified that this upset so many people. Playlists and music collections are personal, and so it's an intrusion to have someone else come in and unilaterally modify them. They should have asked permission.
It has nothing to do with the specific music involved, although U2's comments about this did make me dislike U2 as a business entity.
Personally, the U2 thing demonstrated to me that I can't trust iTunes (and therefore Apple) very much, and so it is a good reason to avoid purchasing devices that need to use it. Whether or not people actually listened to the songs does not measure whether or not this was a good thing for Apple to do.