If it's that much trouble, it's not too far away to say that "it can't be done".
I might also add that anything I've ever needed support for in Linux required me to look it up and cut/paste it into a terminal. Steps like the one's I gave above are SOP in Linux. I mean that it is "a pain" by Windows standards, for typical end-users of Windows.
I am defining "a pain" as my clients do: You need to open up the console. Most of them have never seen the console!
So long as you have modest search engine skills, these steps should be no problem for most readers of Slashdot.
No. In this case there are very straight forward, but not readily available, remedies. That's why I put in the links. All you'd need is Google to find that stuff, though.
I prevent both IE7 and 8 from installing, on request, by using the blocking kits provided by MS to block Automatic Update from installing them.
Then I was foolish enough to try them on my own machine, to see what they did, and uninstalled them without a hitch. No need to do anything painful like a reinstall of the OS.
It's only a pain to an end-user. One whose C: drive is still hidden from them and they're afraid to click "show the contents of this folder." Any reasonably skilled operator can fix it up in 5 minutes with the right Knowledge Base articles. It's finding the right Knowledge Base articles/tools that is the pain. There are toolkits for everything readily Googled. Both for blocking the update in the registry, and for uninstalling when there's no item listed in "Add or Remove Programs."
They're non-obvious is all.
As a technician, if someone said give me back IE7, or IE6 even, I could do it in minutes, and would prefer to do so in some cases because IE7 messes up large URL shortcut icons and IE8 slows down certain aspects (launching folder shortcuts from the desktop, for instance) of an older machine. I've never done IE8 all the way back to IE6 through IE7. I'm guessing that can't be done.
Everything else is pretty easy for me. A pain if you've never looked up all the KB articles.
BTW, I can't stand to use any version of IE for anything but Windows/Office Update, and have a dual-boot into Debian when I want to get any real work done. I just maintain this crap, I don't actually like it.;^)
-- Toro
Posting from Firefox, in Windows XP because he was gaming earlier.
generally does the trick. IE7 has a similar spuninst folder and executable, if you wanted to roll it back to IE6. It's a very clean uninstall, too, in both cases.
Then you track down a copy of the IE7 full install. The link still works as I type this.
It's a pain, but you can do it. I would recommend Firefox, but I wouldn't tell someone who specifically asks me how to get IE7 back that it "can't be done." That would be untrue.
Fantastic Four wasn't creative? Spiderman? We're still making movies about these stories, talking about how being a teenager is a bit like having out-of-control powers that come with daunting responsibilities, and parodying them on the Venture Brothers to boot.
I don't want to hand wave at your suggestion, because all the comics of the day certainly borrowed heavily from one another and are trite by any contemporary standards, but they were the dime store philosophy of a generation. If you don't like what the current crop of leaders in the U.S. are up to, we could certainly blame it in part on the broad strokes philosophies and "ethics" espoused by comic books of that era.
The rhyme scheme and number of lines specified in a sonnet format stifled Shakespeare's artistry, the Comics Code killed all creativity and relevance in the comics industry, and censoring the word "hell" from the title of the South Park movie kept Trey and Matt from making the title to "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut" obscene and graphic.
Reality fail. The only thing that can effectively censor actual artists is medication.;^)
Back in the day, we had this thing called GameShark and it was just about the only way some people could win Contra or, more to the point, Bayou Billy. No one but Rain Man could beat Bayou Billy without a cheat. GameShark was a product gamers paid good money for.
Problem is, it is a hack, and Nintendo is using the Wii as an online distribution system, among other things, and hacks are right out. They just got their butts handed to them in a sling over flash carts on the DS, and that means they can't abide any third party products designed to hack the system.
So all they're doing is providing the product themselves so they can keep control of the platform. They're satisfying an historically proven market demand. They're finding a way to deliver more difficult games, knowing full well that some of the original Nintendo games were sometimes more fun with cheats enabled.
Now does someone want to tell me that only casual gamers bought GameSharks? Or are we looking at the past, with all the cheat codes we used to pass around when games got too tough, with peril-sensitive stone black colored sunglasses?
Yes, I can imagine that, but what does the medical insurance industry have to do with the limitation of freedom?;^)
Too glib, I know. Let's get serious.
Where to begin? It is a common fact that might makes right, even though we don't wish it to be so, and right now individuals do not have enough might to even keep themselves healthy in light of a variety of mighty groups, often run by individuals shielded from liability and perfectly willing and able to start-up another corrupt company, who willingly mislead them and/or frustrate collection on benefits they have paid for. When the 'bad guys' do get their comeuppance, the lawyers, in their own groups, make the bulk of the profits.
Occasionally, a few outlier individuals will win the lottery, but it's really one they didn't want to play in the first place, at the cost of their health, and a meaningful settlement is only marginally more likely than winning the 'Lotto.' Most never see court because no legal group sees enough profit in taking the case.
Any mitigating factor against unjustified, unbalanced collective action curtailing individual liberty, which includes governmental, corporate, legal defense funds, and basically any large group of people who can tell an individual to go pound sand against his just rights to pursue his own happiness is a strike against tyranny. The difference between a functional government and the other groups and would-be tyrants is that governmental tyrants answer to all the people, not just those with money.
And no, I don't think the US government is functional right now, so if you're argument is don't give them any more power because they have demonstrated that they don't know what to do with it, I'm with you.
But "freedom?" Really?
'Anarchy' is your viable option. It's not what I would call freedom. Even the founders did not call for freedom. They called for liberty. What you hold up as freedom always ends up as might makes right, which is tyranny.
We need a functional government to preserve liberty.
I am the father of two girls. Just wanted to make that very clear. I think one of them is quite brilliant with mathematics, in fact, and she routinely outperforms her male peers. Top of her class.
Be that as it may, we appear to have one study here, and the rating on "gender equality" by the WEF, to which it is correlated, is a politically derived statistic at best, absolute chauvinist political posturing at worst.
What this indicates is we need to have many many more studies, until we can see repeatable results or a pattern, based on hard statistics, not political ones, before we start calling some very intelligent people who work in the field, most with an excellent grasp of statistics, perpetuators of "myth" and "stereotype."
And anecdotal stuff about who gets sent to the Math Olympiad doesn't imply they performed well at the math Olympiad, or that they belonged there. It implies that the countries were more willing to send women. Period.
Did they do well? That's the real question, the only question which addresses aptitude, and it is not answered.
I want to believe in gender equality as much as anyone else, perhaps more, but this article is shot through with correlative holes and shoddy thinking. It is bad science and political spin.
I am fully willing to believe that this is because mainstream journalism cannot competently cover science. Is there a more scientifically minded article covering this paper?
There is no excuse for universal wiretapping and data collection except to crush those who trust you with their privacy. That is, it only works on your own people. Any non-trusting person, with great concerns for privacy, can evade such blanket searches by any variety of measures.
I think we need to use 'historically authentic' or 'genuine' here. Or perhaps 'low fidelity?' It looks about as 'realistic' as any colored blob being chased by other colored blobs in an abstract maze-based collection game.
I do not think the word means what you think it means.
Wouldn't the ability to collect biometric information require a fairly potent piece of spyware to be loaded on the client system? How would a user, or even a security professional, easily tell the difference between a keylogger that reads our actual strokes, and one that is just timing the key presses?
Sounds like a kernel mode device that would have be part of the input drivers. It's an attack surface, IMO. I would think it's safer to have an separate input device for biometric authentication only than attempt to biometric metadata from highly sensitive input devs like keyboards and mice.
I did enjoy the 'honeypot field' example (in TFA). I suspect it is probably easily defeated, unfortunately. If the field is hidden on the page, can't we write a bot to detect that physical fact, or any source code (javascript?) that hides it. How do you obfuscate something like that without serving it with the page?
Sounds to me like CAPTCHA still wins. Oh well, I didn't expect much.;^)
If it is a non-warranty repair, OTOH, then perhaps we need more third party service shops to show Nintendo the error of its ways. I should hope simple competition for repair work would put an end to this sort of shenanigans.
Otherwise, the parent poses an interesting and relevant question. Mods please click the link and *read* the page.
(If mods are Nintendo fanboys or shills modding parent down, I hope you get burned in meta-moderation.)
Slashdot Mirror
If it's that much trouble, it's not too far away to say that "it can't be done".
I might also add that anything I've ever needed support for in Linux required me to look it up and cut/paste it into a terminal. Steps like the one's I gave above are SOP in Linux. I mean that it is "a pain" by Windows standards, for typical end-users of Windows.
I am defining "a pain" as my clients do: You need to open up the console. Most of them have never seen the console!
So long as you have modest search engine skills, these steps should be no problem for most readers of Slashdot.
--
Toro
No. In this case there are very straight forward, but not readily available, remedies. That's why I put in the links. All you'd need is Google to find that stuff, though.
I prevent both IE7 and 8 from installing, on request, by using the blocking kits provided by MS to block Automatic Update from installing them.
Then I was foolish enough to try them on my own machine, to see what they did, and uninstalled them without a hitch. No need to do anything painful like a reinstall of the OS.
It's only a pain to an end-user. One whose C: drive is still hidden from them and they're afraid to click "show the contents of this folder." Any reasonably skilled operator can fix it up in 5 minutes with the right Knowledge Base articles. It's finding the right Knowledge Base articles/tools that is the pain. There are toolkits for everything readily Googled. Both for blocking the update in the registry, and for uninstalling when there's no item listed in "Add or Remove Programs."
They're non-obvious is all.
As a technician, if someone said give me back IE7, or IE6 even, I could do it in minutes, and would prefer to do so in some cases because IE7 messes up large URL shortcut icons and IE8 slows down certain aspects (launching folder shortcuts from the desktop, for instance) of an older machine. I've never done IE8 all the way back to IE6 through IE7. I'm guessing that can't be done.
Everything else is pretty easy for me. A pain if you've never looked up all the KB articles.
BTW, I can't stand to use any version of IE for anything but Windows/Office Update, and have a dual-boot into Debian when I want to get any real work done. I just maintain this crap, I don't actually like it. ;^)
--
Toro
Posting from Firefox, in Windows XP because he was gaming earlier.
Ya. Ya zey vill, von't zey? ;^P
There's a blocking tool for that, or you can just set Automatic Updates to "notify" and then ignore it and check "never show me this again."
I don't recommend anybody set Automatic Updates to automatically download.
Here's the blocking tool.
I tell them that "they can't, but they can use Firefox instead".
You can switch back by uninstalling it, as detailed here.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700/#altsteps
That is...
%windir%\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe
generally does the trick. IE7 has a similar spuninst folder and executable, if you wanted to roll it back to IE6. It's a very clean uninstall, too, in both cases.
Then you track down a copy of the IE7 full install. The link still works as I type this.
It's a pain, but you can do it. I would recommend Firefox, but I wouldn't tell someone who specifically asks me how to get IE7 back that it "can't be done." That would be untrue.
Did someone say "pirating?" ;^)
"That's the second biggest telcom satellite I've ever seen!"
(Now all we need is to send up the shuttle for the Q-tip docking maneuver.)
--
Toro
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." -V.I. Lenin
Let's prove him wrong, eh?
--
Toro
Wow! Only three groups of humans. Then we have only one question left to answer:
Which group do we put on the B-Ark?
--
Toro
(My apologies to the late Adams-Douglas-Adams and his estate.)
Exactly, so the only concern would be criminal charges.
--
Toro
I assume this means the mothership is now on final approach, and we don't want those scientists causing a panic.
I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords. Advanced warning is only useful if you are against them. Join us.
--
Toro
Oh man, I had forgotten the Genie entirely! Thank you for reminding me.
Fantastic Four wasn't creative? Spiderman? We're still making movies about these stories, talking about how being a teenager is a bit like having out-of-control powers that come with daunting responsibilities, and parodying them on the Venture Brothers to boot.
I don't want to hand wave at your suggestion, because all the comics of the day certainly borrowed heavily from one another and are trite by any contemporary standards, but they were the dime store philosophy of a generation. If you don't like what the current crop of leaders in the U.S. are up to, we could certainly blame it in part on the broad strokes philosophies and "ethics" espoused by comic books of that era.
--
Toro
This just in...
The rhyme scheme and number of lines specified in a sonnet format stifled Shakespeare's artistry, the Comics Code killed all creativity and relevance in the comics industry, and censoring the word "hell" from the title of the South Park movie kept Trey and Matt from making the title to "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut" obscene and graphic.
Reality fail. The only thing that can effectively censor actual artists is medication. ;^)
--
Toro
People round here have some short memories.
Back in the day, we had this thing called GameShark and it was just about the only way some people could win Contra or, more to the point, Bayou Billy. No one but Rain Man could beat Bayou Billy without a cheat. GameShark was a product gamers paid good money for.
Problem is, it is a hack, and Nintendo is using the Wii as an online distribution system, among other things, and hacks are right out. They just got their butts handed to them in a sling over flash carts on the DS, and that means they can't abide any third party products designed to hack the system.
So all they're doing is providing the product themselves so they can keep control of the platform. They're satisfying an historically proven market demand. They're finding a way to deliver more difficult games, knowing full well that some of the original Nintendo games were sometimes more fun with cheats enabled.
Now does someone want to tell me that only casual gamers bought GameSharks? Or are we looking at the past, with all the cheat codes we used to pass around when games got too tough, with peril-sensitive stone black colored sunglasses?
Yikes.
--
Toro
Yes, I can imagine that, but what does the medical insurance industry have to do with the limitation of freedom? ;^)
Too glib, I know. Let's get serious.
Where to begin? It is a common fact that might makes right, even though we don't wish it to be so, and right now individuals do not have enough might to even keep themselves healthy in light of a variety of mighty groups, often run by individuals shielded from liability and perfectly willing and able to start-up another corrupt company, who willingly mislead them and/or frustrate collection on benefits they have paid for. When the 'bad guys' do get their comeuppance, the lawyers, in their own groups, make the bulk of the profits.
Occasionally, a few outlier individuals will win the lottery, but it's really one they didn't want to play in the first place, at the cost of their health, and a meaningful settlement is only marginally more likely than winning the 'Lotto.' Most never see court because no legal group sees enough profit in taking the case.
Any mitigating factor against unjustified, unbalanced collective action curtailing individual liberty, which includes governmental, corporate, legal defense funds, and basically any large group of people who can tell an individual to go pound sand against his just rights to pursue his own happiness is a strike against tyranny. The difference between a functional government and the other groups and would-be tyrants is that governmental tyrants answer to all the people, not just those with money.
And no, I don't think the US government is functional right now, so if you're argument is don't give them any more power because they have demonstrated that they don't know what to do with it, I'm with you.
But "freedom?" Really?
'Anarchy' is your viable option. It's not what I would call freedom. Even the founders did not call for freedom. They called for liberty. What you hold up as freedom always ends up as might makes right, which is tyranny.
We need a functional government to preserve liberty.
--
Toro
The law: this is the thing that really deserves this tag.
Defective by design, my friends. You have no privacy from the powerful.
--
Toro
I am the father of two girls. Just wanted to make that very clear. I think one of them is quite brilliant with mathematics, in fact, and she routinely outperforms her male peers. Top of her class.
Be that as it may, we appear to have one study here, and the rating on "gender equality" by the WEF, to which it is correlated, is a politically derived statistic at best, absolute chauvinist political posturing at worst.
What this indicates is we need to have many many more studies, until we can see repeatable results or a pattern, based on hard statistics, not political ones, before we start calling some very intelligent people who work in the field, most with an excellent grasp of statistics, perpetuators of "myth" and "stereotype."
And anecdotal stuff about who gets sent to the Math Olympiad doesn't imply they performed well at the math Olympiad, or that they belonged there. It implies that the countries were more willing to send women. Period.
Did they do well? That's the real question, the only question which addresses aptitude, and it is not answered.
I want to believe in gender equality as much as anyone else, perhaps more, but this article is shot through with correlative holes and shoddy thinking. It is bad science and political spin.
I am fully willing to believe that this is because mainstream journalism cannot competently cover science. Is there a more scientifically minded article covering this paper?
--
Toro
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
And apparently, in their filing, Microsoft thinks that any sufficiently obvious idea is indistinguishable from innovation.
--
Toro
Give me an "F!"
Give me a "T!"
Give me a "C!"
What's that spell?
FSCK TELEMARKETING CALLS.
Those replies are BOTH lines from the Simpsons, you silly man.
Nice 747 impression, though. ;^)
1984 called, it want's its brother back.
There is no excuse for universal wiretapping and data collection except to crush those who trust you with their privacy. That is, it only works on your own people. Any non-trusting person, with great concerns for privacy, can evade such blanket searches by any variety of measures.
It's called hiding in plain sight, and it works.
--
Toro
I think we need to use 'historically authentic' or 'genuine' here. Or perhaps 'low fidelity?' It looks about as 'realistic' as any colored blob being chased by other colored blobs in an abstract maze-based collection game.
I do not think the word means what you think it means.
--
Toro
Deus Ex was not a documentary. NATO forces will arrive soon to control the situation, not UN forces.
--
Toro
Wouldn't the ability to collect biometric information require a fairly potent piece of spyware to be loaded on the client system? How would a user, or even a security professional, easily tell the difference between a keylogger that reads our actual strokes, and one that is just timing the key presses?
Sounds like a kernel mode device that would have be part of the input drivers. It's an attack surface, IMO. I would think it's safer to have an separate input device for biometric authentication only than attempt to biometric metadata from highly sensitive input devs like keyboards and mice.
I did enjoy the 'honeypot field' example (in TFA). I suspect it is probably easily defeated, unfortunately. If the field is hidden on the page, can't we write a bot to detect that physical fact, or any source code (javascript?) that hides it. How do you obfuscate something like that without serving it with the page?
Sounds to me like CAPTCHA still wins. Oh well, I didn't expect much. ;^)
--
Toro
If it is a non-warranty repair, OTOH, then perhaps we need more third party service shops to show Nintendo the error of its ways. I should hope simple competition for repair work would put an end to this sort of shenanigans.
Otherwise, the parent poses an interesting and relevant question. Mods please click the link and *read* the page.
(If mods are Nintendo fanboys or shills modding parent down, I hope you get burned in meta-moderation.)
--
Toro