Since when has Microsoft being late to a party ever been reason enough for them not to crash it anyway?
Microsoft's business model, in case you haven't been reading for the past few years, is to have not only their finger in every single pie, but to cut off all the other fingers already there. This is they how and why of the windows monopoly.
This is about 1000 years earlier than the assumed birth of cities in ancient Iraq.
According to Sources:
The age of 5000 years has been verified by the finding of a 750MHz Athlon, which we all know is ancient by now.
The city was actually sunk by angry gods because, inspite of building wonderous temples, the inhabitants fooled around with creating restrictive copyright laws.
The decendents of all survivors live in Wooster, Ohio.
The Co$ claims it's the work of rampant Thetans and you really, really, really should believe them and send them lots of money.
Most of the worlds missing left socks were found inside the sunken temples.
No claims have yet been issued by Ankh-Morpork or Klatch, but armies and navies are quietly being assembled.
Through exhaustive research, i.e. I've totally made up.
Sure... it's all fun and games until someone's hometown gets sunk.
Exactly. I'm sitting here in California, dreading the day that the Big One hits and all the land east of the San Andreas Fault slides off into the Atlantic.
Insightful comment, but can you leave out the regional patriotism, or shall i say, hatriotism?
Hatriotism? What is that?
I suppose this is a bit offtopic, but I can't help but notice some of the anti-NY rhetoric on/. There IS a world in New York apart from your vanilla-flavored corporate idiocy. In fact, you've just slandered an entire hacker community. [mrbrklyn.com] And did libertarian Greenwich Village just disappear off the map?
Yeah, it's pretty much off topic, but that never seems to stop anyone. The anti-NY rhetoric is your predisposition, you might ask yourself if the Rev. Al has had too much of an affect on your level of sensitivity. As for your assumption of Idiocy, slander and the relevence of The Village, you're probably very NY-centric and wouldn't understand the following joke:
Q: Why do people from Maine to Hawaii watch the evening news?
A: To see what's happening in New York
Wherever a media outlet's headquarters, they've all got their eyes and ears in NYC, after that it seems to be Washington, LA and then pretty much everywhere else. Probably doesn't seem that obvious a slant when you're from one of those places, but you might question why people who live 3000+ miles away, don't know who the local mayors are, but the media has made readily available all the dig on who's mayor of NYC and what he's just done or said, coast to coast.
One year ago I bid on something from a seller in Hong Kong, I had received items from the seller before, but this time they had taken the money and run, from me and many other bidders.
After an article about the antique dealer in Michigan taking money and running, I saw the same item I had bid on appear again on ebay. I notified eBay, PayPal (whom I'd paid through) and finally used address information from previous transactions to notify the Hong Kong Police.
Cut to the chase, after the weasel was hauled in and questioned I am awaiting the item in question to be mailed by registered letter. I have an inspector to correspond with should it not appear.
Sometimes there is justice, but I've found it relies on not just a little bit of luck and sweat.
There's an unwritten agreement among advertising agencies that they don't get into slinging mud like political campaigns do, i.e. child pornographers prefer Pepsi to Coke.
Nothing stops people from having such an opinion or media (short of threatening their own ad revenue stream) from exploring such ideas. When we as private citizens speculate, or even assert, we're now hearing that corporate america and cretins with a lack of moral and/or ethical fibre (lowercase 'a' used intentionally) sue people to shut them up.
If you want to see something, you will. It's called 'predisposition'.
Chatrooms, in the news over the past years, have also been a haven for:
People sharing interest in pretty much everything you can find in alt.* and rec.*
Pedophiles
People meeting each other legitimately and socially
Terrorist plots
The future of Slashdot
It's just another red herring for the media, the biggest news for the New Yahk media is a big drought in Delaware, so guess what they dig up to shock Mr. and Mrs. Average American. Big wh00p.
Un*x Admin: "What happen ?"
Secretary: "We get signal."
Un*x Admin: "Main screen turn on."
RH: "How are you gentlemen !!"
RH: "We like all your base belong to us."
RH: "You are on the way to obsolescence."
Un*x Admin: "What you say !!"
RH: "We give you chance to survive make your time."
Un*x Admin: "Send out PO for great justice."
Microsoft made some very big blunders with the Xbox, especially internationally. For instance, they didn't re-think their controller
(already large for US hands) before releasing in Japan. The result was that they had a lot of angry small-handed customers for whom the
system was almost unplayable. Talk about a rookie mistake.
The best joystick I ever had was an Amiga. IIRC they sold these to finance development of the chipset. It was tiny, fit comfortably in the hand and required very small movement, which made it great for really picky games. It was simple enough, too that I could take it apart and clean it when it got flaky.
I actually worked at the Xbox-unleashed launch "party" in NYC, a weekend long game tourny/media happening at a swankish club.
Sleeping with enemy, I know, but I needed the cash. It was the most forced/fake hooplah event I've ever been at
You need to visit a Consumer Electronics Show then. That's where the 180 Olde Snayk Ohl is served.
Once again there's the lesson that someone with zilch-nada experience cannot expect success overnight, if at all, by barging into an established and competitive market. Sony's success wasn't immediate, either. If M$ wants to succeed then they must adopt the long view.
So, will they decide it's not working and pull-out and leave those X-Box owners dangling (I.e. future Slashdot article titles,
"Linux on the X-Box a Review of Distributions","New Life For Your Old XBox - Cheap Firewall", and the inevitable Jon Katz feature lamenting how we are not all playing our fathers' video game consoles anymore)
Re:Wireless Monitor? Not happening...
on
Wireless Monitors?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.
Please enlighten us. One Cable TV Channel, running 60, 30 frame/s? What resolution would you give the best Cable TV, anything like 800x600? I'm sure it requires a bit more than 6 MHz for a steady stream of 'worst case' frame to frame. His math is crude, but it's hardly worth dwelling on. You'd still like some kind of scrambling so the neighbors and spooks can't track what you're doing, right?
Power of a transmitter could be very low, but you'd want to be sure your OC'd CPU doesn't leak noise from your modded PC case and interfer, so a bit of extra power might be called for. When it comes down to it, you should probably be running at least in the GHz range. Maybe at that power and frequency you could nuke some houseflies...
Seems Mr. AntiOpurt doesn't even bother to read the articles before submitting. That's certainly a one-up on the editors who don't bother to check or posters who don't read either.
A wireless LCD monitor would certainly be welcome, but wireless keyboard and a Gyration Gyromouse are a bit more of a priority, as they're input devices which means you pretty much have to.aha. tangle.aha. with them.
Any good recommendations on a real quality wireless keyboard are welcome.
like asking for bloatware if you ask me. Like somebody once said, a tool should do one thing and do that one thing well.
I dunno, just my thought.
Well, notice how it starts as thoughts on the perfect email CLIENT and then drifts very rapidly to PIM (personal information manager?) which is effectively different like comparing a VW Beetle to a Mercedes SUV. Many of us only need the Beetle, while others just can't function without 4WD, plush seats, surround sound and a large fuel bill.
As for PIM, eh, I jot important stuff on little scraps of paper and it works pretty good, besides not requiring batteries, but email is a necessity, as it's actual communication. Being able to read email, organize it and send new email or replies is about all I want. Spellchecking and other stuff simply becomes the replacement for brain atrophy.
"I just got the latest and greatest PocketPC with Outlook and all sorts of great tools to keep track of everything for me!"
"Do you know where your shoes are?"
"Um, let me see if I can bring that up,.. uh search this.. link to that.. Oh, dear, I can't seem to find them!"
"They're on your feet."
This reminds me a ton of when Homer was hired by his brother to design the ultimate car, the "car of the common man".
Ugh.:-)
You have to admit, it certainly had some nice features. Problem was, and I think pretty much everyone can agree, just because features seem like good ideas on individual merits, putting them all together is another matter, often a disaster. Which seems to be the goal of soMe gIant software Company (who shall Remain nameless tO avoid the Same Old Flame Thing about bashing too often on/.)
Homer's car does remind me of Outlook. Some good ideas, but not necessarily (or even remotely) elegant in execution.
I can't imagine anyone but the stereotypical PHB loving feature bloat in Exchange/Outlook. But what completely is beyond me is much of the design of their email clients. Clearly designed by optimists who never expected anything harmful (already well established by the time Gates & Co. discovered the Internet) to come through. Most annoying though, as with all Windows products from Microsoft is playing the game of "Find the Hidden Option" There are ways to customize, but for some inexplicable reason (Disinterested monopoly?) options/switches/settings are often buried, like an afterthought, in the least obvious places. Addressing is a nightmare, too. Obviously, in their dictionary, 'Innovation' has nothing to do with designing a better mousetrap.
There's many other aggrevations, I could go on, but in the interest of not eating a burned breakfast I'll leave it with on last thing.
If you decide to build your own custom email client, think about what features would be nice and how to make them easily accessible. Rather than "Gawd so and so does this so I'll just do it contrary."
I've been using The Bat! for a couple years on my home laptop and it's a smart, simple mail client obviously designed by people who want the most (and least, in the case of spam) out of their email.
As I am sure the Mozilla team will write a specific patch to disable this slimeware the second it is reported happening on a
mozilla install.
Konq would do the same I'm sure...
Thanks to the sh!tty practices of many advertisers and web designers, I'm just itching to get my new system together, running Linux, et al.
In the recent (or not so recent in some cases) past, here are things that piss me off and motivate me away from closed source (alleged) systems:
Page refresh/redirects, trapping etc. I will disable this first, if it's not an option I'll make it one and contribute. Most hated and abused feature of any page.
Bloat. (*cought* Tom's *cough* Hardware *cough*) Pages are getting bigger and bigger and on a 56K modem I just close the window at some point, their insistance upon saying it all in one page failed. Dunno what to do if anything, probably just maintain a list of anti-bookmarks (i.e. warn me if I'm heading toward one of these wastes of time) Maybe even notify what's being fed in from where and disable on the fly.
Javascript Bloat. Yeah, it's not just a little, it's pages absolutely loaded with it, but I need it on for some pages, so being able to enable/disable per browser window would be nice. Some people write it so badly it crashes on a regular basis or brings up an empty page in Netscape and IE
Pop-up/unders. These will not happen, period. I'm fed up with mopping this fecal matter off my desktop.
Flash On/Off, like other features, too much is a bad thing, but some people just don't get the clue.
Malformed html. Man. If you cruise eBay, you see this a lot. People buy some piece of crap auction authoring tool and it mangles the page. I usually email people about this, but they're 99% of the time clueless about what to do. (i.e. point it out to the hack who sold it to you and get some cust support)
For all the bitching and whining I hear about Slashdot, it's about the least offensive site I visit all day. I hope it stays that way.
With the U.S. foisting it's values, culture and, worse, laws on other nations, it's only fair that a company from another country come here and shoot down one of ours (and more power to them!)
You can bet your ass that Hillary Rosen and her crew and Jack Valenti and his crew will do everything short of murder to get that
machine and all related technology banned.
More like they'd explain why it's already banned under DMCA and prevent them from being imported.
Their shared sorce program is a weak attempt, not at opening up, but increasing market share in one area where they're lacking. Yeah, that's a real open source attitude: present some code to the public to get more money.
It's not a weak attempt to look like Open Source, it's subterfuge, Microsoft teaming up with Unisys (who should actually watch their back, seriously, M$ has a long tradition as a backstabber when it suits them) with their We Have The Way Out marketing program should make it quite clear they're aiming at not just Unix servers, but Linux servers which are highly popular.
Microsoft is painted into a corner, without actually being a 'solutions' company they have to have some sort of product, which means they have to protect the source to anything they 'innovate' Embracing Open Source wouldn't fit their business model, period. They'd have to sprout a new arm which provides service, and though that would provide further opportunity to extend their apparent favorite hobby, recent remarks about the evils and shortcomings of GPL, Linux, Open Source, et al, would be a considerable about-face and require some explaining to maintain credibility.
A word so misused and overused it makes me want to vomit everytime I see it.
Embrace, extend and cut-off the air supply of the real innovator(s).
Backstabbing their business partners and stealing their livelihood as they lay bleeding on Wall Street.
More commonly in their tongue known as bending the truth into a pretzel or outright lying.
Among gullible PHB's the world over.
You left out 'IANAL' when it comes to interpreting the law -and- proof that that spare capacity has value upto or exceding $5,000 (which when you get down to it can be a bit tricky to really establish a value on)
As for without your opinion, how about looking over whatever license or installment agreement you just happened to click through quick just to get it up and running... Though they may not hold much water, it's another bit up the hill for you and your actual lawyer to run, when you go to prosecute.
This reminds me of something my dad once told me regarding his school lunch as a boy. Just because kids like spaghetti,
and kids like peanut butter, doesn't mean they'll like spaghetti and peanut butter.
This is a bit more like taking a bite out of an apple and then seeing half a worm left it in.
Which is better...something that reports back your habits, or something that uses spare cycle time for something constructive?
From the article:
Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin
Bermeister says computers or
Internet connections won't be used
without their owners' permission.
But the company will nevertheless
have access to millions of
computers at once, almost as
easily as turning on a light switch.
"Everybody will get turned on in
more or less a simultaneous
fashion," Bermeister said. "This
will be an opt-in program...We're
trying to create a secure network
based on end-user relationships."
(emphasis mine)
How many of the installers actually read the agreement and what would you bet the software installs pre-opt-in? I'd like to see what anyone who has installed it has to say to describe this bit of up-front opting in. If it's buried in the end user agreement, then it's about as good as something Dr. Evil would dream up.
I'm currently fed up with what I'll call sneakware, that's pre-installed software on my 2 yr old laptop which has woken up and installed software and changed default settings. I caught Adobe Photo Deluxe changing itself when I went to edit some photos. I can't even figure out how to stop it, short of yanking the phone cord out of the modem when it goes to connect to websites. Bastards. Worst of it is that I actually need to use the software from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's business model, in case you haven't been reading for the past few years, is to have not only their finger in every single pie, but to cut off all the other fingers already there. This is they how and why of the windows monopoly.
Pray they don't get into bio-engineering.
According to Sources:
The age of 5000 years has been verified by the finding of a 750MHz Athlon, which we all know is ancient by now.
The city was actually sunk by angry gods because, inspite of building wonderous temples, the inhabitants fooled around with creating restrictive copyright laws.
The decendents of all survivors live in Wooster, Ohio.
The Co$ claims it's the work of rampant Thetans and you really, really, really should believe them and send them lots of money.
Most of the worlds missing left socks were found inside the sunken temples.
No claims have yet been issued by Ankh-Morpork or Klatch, but armies and navies are quietly being assembled.
Through exhaustive research, i.e. I've totally made up.
Exactly. I'm sitting here in California, dreading the day that the Big One hits and all the land east of the San Andreas Fault slides off into the Atlantic.
Hatriotism? What is that?
I suppose this is a bit offtopic, but I can't help but notice some of the anti-NY rhetoric on /. There IS a world in New York apart from your vanilla-flavored corporate idiocy. In fact, you've just slandered an entire hacker community. [mrbrklyn.com] And did libertarian Greenwich Village just disappear off the map?
Yeah, it's pretty much off topic, but that never seems to stop anyone. The anti-NY rhetoric is your predisposition, you might ask yourself if the Rev. Al has had too much of an affect on your level of sensitivity. As for your assumption of Idiocy, slander and the relevence of The Village, you're probably very NY-centric and wouldn't understand the following joke:
Wherever a media outlet's headquarters, they've all got their eyes and ears in NYC, after that it seems to be Washington, LA and then pretty much everywhere else. Probably doesn't seem that obvious a slant when you're from one of those places, but you might question why people who live 3000+ miles away, don't know who the local mayors are, but the media has made readily available all the dig on who's mayor of NYC and what he's just done or said, coast to coast.
One year ago I bid on something from a seller in Hong Kong, I had received items from the seller before, but this time they had taken the money and run, from me and many other bidders.
After an article about the antique dealer in Michigan taking money and running, I saw the same item I had bid on appear again on ebay. I notified eBay, PayPal (whom I'd paid through) and finally used address information from previous transactions to notify the Hong Kong Police.
Cut to the chase, after the weasel was hauled in and questioned I am awaiting the item in question to be mailed by registered letter. I have an inspector to correspond with should it not appear.
Sometimes there is justice, but I've found it relies on not just a little bit of luck and sweat.
Nothing stops people from having such an opinion or media (short of threatening their own ad revenue stream) from exploring such ideas. When we as private citizens speculate, or even assert, we're now hearing that corporate america and cretins with a lack of moral and/or ethical fibre (lowercase 'a' used intentionally) sue people to shut them up.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of subpoenas...
Chatrooms, in the news over the past years, have also been a haven for:
People sharing interest in pretty much everything you can find in alt.* and rec.*
Pedophiles
People meeting each other legitimately and socially
Terrorist plots
The future of Slashdot
It's just another red herring for the media, the biggest news for the New Yahk media is a big drought in Delaware, so guess what they dig up to shock Mr. and Mrs. Average American. Big wh00p.
Un*x Admin: "What happen ?"
Secretary: "We get signal."
Un*x Admin: "Main screen turn on."
RH: "How are you gentlemen !!"
RH: "We like all your base belong to us."
RH: "You are on the way to obsolescence."
Un*x Admin: "What you say !!"
RH: "We give you chance to survive make your time."
Un*x Admin: "Send out PO for great justice."
The best joystick I ever had was an Amiga. IIRC they sold these to finance development of the chipset. It was tiny, fit comfortably in the hand and required very small movement, which made it great for really picky games. It was simple enough, too that I could take it apart and clean it when it got flaky.
I actually worked at the Xbox-unleashed launch "party" in NYC, a weekend long game tourny/media happening at a swankish club. Sleeping with enemy, I know, but I needed the cash. It was the most forced/fake hooplah event I've ever been at
You need to visit a Consumer Electronics Show then. That's where the 180 Olde Snayk Ohl is served.
So, will they decide it's not working and pull-out and leave those X-Box owners dangling (I.e. future Slashdot article titles, "Linux on the X-Box a Review of Distributions","New Life For Your Old XBox - Cheap Firewall", and the inevitable Jon Katz feature lamenting how we are not all playing our fathers' video game consoles anymore)
Please enlighten us. One Cable TV Channel, running 60, 30 frame/s? What resolution would you give the best Cable TV, anything like 800x600? I'm sure it requires a bit more than 6 MHz for a steady stream of 'worst case' frame to frame. His math is crude, but it's hardly worth dwelling on. You'd still like some kind of scrambling so the neighbors and spooks can't track what you're doing, right?
Power of a transmitter could be very low, but you'd want to be sure your OC'd CPU doesn't leak noise from your modded PC case and interfer, so a bit of extra power might be called for. When it comes down to it, you should probably be running at least in the GHz range. Maybe at that power and frequency you could nuke some houseflies...
I saw Citrix down in the listing of features and that's all I needed to know.
A wireless LCD monitor would certainly be welcome, but wireless keyboard and a Gyration Gyromouse are a bit more of a priority, as they're input devices which means you pretty much have to .aha. tangle .aha. with them.
Any good recommendations on a real quality wireless keyboard are welcome.
I dunno, just my thought.
Well, notice how it starts as thoughts on the perfect email CLIENT and then drifts very rapidly to PIM (personal information manager?) which is effectively different like comparing a VW Beetle to a Mercedes SUV. Many of us only need the Beetle, while others just can't function without 4WD, plush seats, surround sound and a large fuel bill.
As for PIM, eh, I jot important stuff on little scraps of paper and it works pretty good, besides not requiring batteries, but email is a necessity, as it's actual communication. Being able to read email, organize it and send new email or replies is about all I want. Spellchecking and other stuff simply becomes the replacement for brain atrophy.
"I just got the latest and greatest PocketPC with Outlook and all sorts of great tools to keep track of everything for me!" .. uh search this .. link to that .. Oh, dear, I can't seem to find them!"
"Do you know where your shoes are?"
"Um, let me see if I can bring that up,
"They're on your feet."
You have to admit, it certainly had some nice features. Problem was, and I think pretty much everyone can agree, just because features seem like good ideas on individual merits, putting them all together is another matter, often a disaster. Which seems to be the goal of soMe gIant software Company (who shall Remain nameless tO avoid the Same Old Flame Thing about bashing too often on /.)
Homer's car does remind me of Outlook. Some good ideas, but not necessarily (or even remotely) elegant in execution.
I can't imagine anyone but the stereotypical PHB loving feature bloat in Exchange/Outlook. But what completely is beyond me is much of the design of their email clients. Clearly designed by optimists who never expected anything harmful (already well established by the time Gates & Co. discovered the Internet) to come through. Most annoying though, as with all Windows products from Microsoft is playing the game of "Find the Hidden Option" There are ways to customize, but for some inexplicable reason (Disinterested monopoly?) options/switches/settings are often buried, like an afterthought, in the least obvious places. Addressing is a nightmare, too. Obviously, in their dictionary, 'Innovation' has nothing to do with designing a better mousetrap.
There's many other aggrevations, I could go on, but in the interest of not eating a burned breakfast I'll leave it with on last thing.
If you decide to build your own custom email client, think about what features would be nice and how to make them easily accessible. Rather than "Gawd so and so does this so I'll just do it contrary."
I've been using The Bat! for a couple years on my home laptop and it's a smart, simple mail client obviously designed by people who want the most (and least, in the case of spam) out of their email.
Konq would do the same I'm sure...
Thanks to the sh!tty practices of many advertisers and web designers, I'm just itching to get my new system together, running Linux, et al.
In the recent (or not so recent in some cases) past, here are things that piss me off and motivate me away from closed source (alleged) systems:
Page refresh/redirects, trapping etc. I will disable this first, if it's not an option I'll make it one and contribute. Most hated and abused feature of any page.
Bloat. (*cought* Tom's *cough* Hardware *cough*) Pages are getting bigger and bigger and on a 56K modem I just close the window at some point, their insistance upon saying it all in one page failed. Dunno what to do if anything, probably just maintain a list of anti-bookmarks (i.e. warn me if I'm heading toward one of these wastes of time) Maybe even notify what's being fed in from where and disable on the fly.
Javascript Bloat. Yeah, it's not just a little, it's pages absolutely loaded with it, but I need it on for some pages, so being able to enable/disable per browser window would be nice. Some people write it so badly it crashes on a regular basis or brings up an empty page in Netscape and IE
Pop-up/unders. These will not happen, period. I'm fed up with mopping this fecal matter off my desktop.
Flash On/Off, like other features, too much is a bad thing, but some people just don't get the clue.
Malformed html. Man. If you cruise eBay, you see this a lot. People buy some piece of crap auction authoring tool and it mangles the page. I usually email people about this, but they're 99% of the time clueless about what to do. (i.e. point it out to the hack who sold it to you and get some cust support)
For all the bitching and whining I hear about Slashdot, it's about the least offensive site I visit all day. I hope it stays that way.
With the U.S. foisting it's values, culture and, worse, laws on other nations, it's only fair that a company from another country come here and shoot down one of ours (and more power to them!)
You can bet your ass that Hillary Rosen and her crew and Jack Valenti and his crew will do everything short of murder to get that machine and all related technology banned.
More like they'd explain why it's already banned under DMCA and prevent them from being imported.
It's not a weak attempt to look like Open Source, it's subterfuge, Microsoft teaming up with Unisys (who should actually watch their back, seriously, M$ has a long tradition as a backstabber when it suits them) with their We Have The Way Out marketing program should make it quite clear they're aiming at not just Unix servers, but Linux servers which are highly popular.
Microsoft is painted into a corner, without actually being a 'solutions' company they have to have some sort of product, which means they have to protect the source to anything they 'innovate' Embracing Open Source wouldn't fit their business model, period. They'd have to sprout a new arm which provides service, and though that would provide further opportunity to extend their apparent favorite hobby, recent remarks about the evils and shortcomings of GPL, Linux, Open Source, et al, would be a considerable about-face and require some explaining to maintain credibility.
A word so misused and overused it makes me want to vomit everytime I see it.
Embrace, extend and cut-off the air supply of the real innovator(s).
Backstabbing their business partners and stealing their livelihood as they lay bleeding on Wall Street.
More commonly in their tongue known as bending the truth into a pretzel or outright lying.
Among gullible PHB's the world over.
As for without your opinion, how about looking over whatever license or installment agreement you just happened to click through quick just to get it up and running... Though they may not hold much water, it's another bit up the hill for you and your actual lawyer to run, when you go to prosecute.
This is a bit more like taking a bite out of an apple and then seeing half a worm left it in.
How many of the installers actually read the agreement and what would you bet the software installs pre-opt-in? I'd like to see what anyone who has installed it has to say to describe this bit of up-front opting in. If it's buried in the end user agreement, then it's about as good as something Dr. Evil would dream up.
I'm currently fed up with what I'll call sneakware, that's pre-installed software on my 2 yr old laptop which has woken up and installed software and changed default settings. I caught Adobe Photo Deluxe changing itself when I went to edit some photos. I can't even figure out how to stop it, short of yanking the phone cord out of the modem when it goes to connect to websites. Bastards. Worst of it is that I actually need to use the software from time to time.
To rip, mix and burn their customers...