Sometimes I'd rather that my money and brainspace goes only to the companies whose products I wish to use. I don't want a million me-too widget bandwagon jumpers getting a few cents when I have no choice in the matter and no interest in their products. But I guess that's advertising... At least I can still turn off my TV in the middle of an advertisement.
The Yahoo! toolbar used to come with Java, did they change that recently?? Also, I never saw anything come in with a Reader auto-update, so I wonder if you're downloading via the website.
Someone needs to write a very simple, no-frills application that removes crapware. Not malware, just crapware. You know, similar to Spybot, or whatever. Or perhaps write something that intercepts the installers, and pretends like they succeeded. Then someone can write a GPO to push it onto domain members at corporations, and another program to auto-download the latest crapware signatures, and we'll have a lot less work... imagine installing it on that notoriously computer-illiterate family member's computer!
Voiding the occasional warranty is all part of being a power user!
It only affects you negatively if you (A) need repairs and/or (B) paid extra for the warranty... The device doesn't disable itself if you void the warranty. You just lose a benefit that doesn't amount to insurance, but could be useful if the product proves defective.
Some stores' and credit cards' extended warranties supercede the manufacturers' warranties anyway, so you should be okay. Not that I condone buying additional warranties for reasons like this... It doesn't seem ethical. I guess you have to balance reasonable with legal these days:(
Your Honor, the client's defense crumbles in light of this new evidence. He clearly enjoys seeing photographs of lewd nature. If he did not, why would he have set the cookie on Wikipedia that allowed them to be viewed on his screen?
(totally ignoring the possibility that maybe the guy blocked images of dismemberment while viewing an article about war one time, and didn't block other things because they weren't onscreen)
It's a little chilling. I would prefer to be forced to view all images, rather than being allowed to ignore things while reading a compilation of facts,
Indeed, when there are a bunch of a.b.c releases, the server I play on is largely unusable during the entire flurry of updates due to client/server version incompatibilities. I like frequent updates, but I don't like being unable to play.
Keeping a lawn is akin to gardening. Perhaps the research is part of his enjoyment: The pursuit of finding a better, faster way to do it. Maybe it tweaks his inner geek to do the math, and find a new theorem. Could it also follow that he may discover some new mathematical theorem in this pursuit? At any rate, he'll be more educated after doing the research.
If you apply the same question to a different hobby, you get this: If you enjoy playing a game, why look for the most efficient strategy?
As long as they say it supports some flavor of VBA, they will have to make sure they support legacy VBA, because people buying the products usually don't know the difference. Too many companies have built their management upon legacy VBA products. So, if MS only partially removes support, they will break things subtly and people will argue to no end about "well MY macros work just fine, so YOU must be bad at it". It's a better idea to migrate completely to something else.
It's true.. *sob*.. so true... *sniffle* I have so many repressed memories of some horrible, horrible things... well, repressed until I read your message....
It's hard to tell which is worse:
* The Excel monsters ("help, my 200 MB spreadsheet got corrupted and it's the only copy of all of my customer invoices and contacts and accounts! I spent all that time making hundreds of macros, get it back!")
* The Access monsters ("can you help me figure out a way around this 2GB size limit? I have employees waiting for this to be fixed so they can do their jobs")
* The Powerpoint monsters ("can you make this auto-run whenever someone puts the CD in? we have to give everyone a friendly screen to click and launch the various programs and web sites")
Office suites (from any manufacturer) should come with a free bullet.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 1
Hmm. I can construe a few scenarios in which SD channels look better than they did before, when displayed on an HDTV.
1. If you had a really cheap, crappy set that gave you ~240 lines of vertical resolution, instead of the full 480i. 2. If you're tuning them in digitally over the air or via cable, you won't get the wavy lines or snow that happened with analog signal interference. Although, digital noise is (IMO) a lot worse - you get blocks eating your picture and the sound cuts out. Personally, I would prefer snow on that one. 3. Upgrading to a nice flat panel with good color and sharpness, from an old CRT television set. You know the kind - they had the tint/color knobs on the front! Yeah, some people are still using those.
Overall you have a good point, but there are cases where people aren't totally insane when they say their SD programming looks better.
I'd like to see cable TV companies do something more akin to video-on-demand to the television set, so I can get more bandwidth for my video stream and lose less high-frequency information to compression. It's kinda pointless when you have "HD" and everything looks like line art because of some extreme compression.
You'd first have to remove anything that would get broken very easily, and depressurize the station, so it didn't contribute to the mess if something were to go poorly.
Then you'd need to maneuver it all over the place over a fairly long time, because that "shell" is... forgive the expression... astronomically large. Think about the volume of that space you want to clean up, and compare to the volume of the space station. That's an awfully small broom for an awfully big place. Car analogy? Okay. It's kind of like trying to clean a four-lane highway using that little tiny broom that comes with a dustpan, complete with traffic whooshing past.
So...logistically, it's a nightmare, but it could possibly be done if you really worked hard at it.
The news keeps rehashing this story because it's sexy as heck, and gets lots of attention. Got a new angle on it? Republish as if it were a brand new news item and profit from the new attention and uproar. Advertisers love it, too.
That being said, I'd be a lot more okay with this if there was actually a stated reason for it, because then I could know whether I should do something about my wifi's visibility...
Eh, the worst that could happen is that people ridicule and troll you your whole life, for trying to be a decent human being to the other people around you. I'll take it.
You hit the nail almost on the head. I work in IT, and I see a lot of dumb stuff happen because people trust their computers to magically keep them safe.
AV software usually has features that plug some of the holes - like blocking IRC communication, or preventing execution of attachments, or things in temp folders, or things on network shares. You have to configure it right. That's not a skill most users are going to have, unfortunately. The overhead of doing all this can be pretty intense sometimes, too, which makes people say "forget it, I'll take my chances so I can get more work done."
There's also something to be said about configuring your OS right. Most people are totally unaware of group policy (on Windows) and wouldn't know what most of those settings do. But if you set it up right, it prevents a large amount of malware from working, straight up. The same goes for updates. People get really lazy with those - Conficker spread more AFTER the update that closed the hole was released. It's still out there, too.
Things happen because people happen. It's not really doable to educate everyone, since we all know we'll take shortcuts when we see them.
You wonder why these things aren't optimized for security by default, but I think the answer is that they set them to something that strikes a balance between compatibility with the most software, and the current security environment upon release. Maybe it would be a lot better if Microsoft were to update group policy to meet the current trends via Windows Update... I'd almost support silent updates, if it wouldn't cause such a backlash.
I guess that's why infosec staff is so useful, right?
It's more like this, although it may tread into slightly blasphemous territory by being written like this:
God has a good old time livin' it up with the angels. Then one day Lucifer, a great leader of angels, gets dissatisfied with his position and jealous and decides he wants to be like God. A whole bunch of angels follow him. God isn't pleased and decides to kick them all out of His presence.
Meanwhile, God creates the universe and a man for companionship, and then a woman to keep the man company, in a perfect walled garden where they can do basically whatever.
God decides it's pointless to force people to love Him, and gives them the choice - opt out by way of partaking of an Apple product. (Oh, I went there.)
At some point right around here is when Satan gets kicked out of heaven and winds up near the people. Satan comes in with the latest iGoodVsEvil and sends out some brilliant spam. Eve goes for it first and opens that totally_awesome_knowledge.doc.exe attachment. Adam goes "Hey, whatcha got there?" and opens the same attachment. God is displeased by the choice, but decides to let us deal with the consequences rather than nuking everything from orbit. Now we've each gotta opt back in and get our redemption.
Fast forward a few thousand years and a few close calls where our debauchery almost cost us our existence. Those ancient people really partied hard sometimes and did stuff that's illegal in most civilized cultures today, and man did they do a lot of dumb stuff. Up until Jesus' existence, people had to play by the rules. And there were quite a few which were mostly to keep people alive and relatively disease-free, and some of them still hold up scientifically - you know, like you can get trichinosis from eating undercooked pork, or how the Black Plague spread by not properly disposing of fecal matter or washing bedclothes or quarantining the sick, that kind of stuff. Things that we have medicine and technology for now, that we didn't then.
You also had to pay up on your anti-malware subscription every once in a while (price: goats, sheep, etc) so it wouldn't run out. That malware was pretty bad news - the payload executes when you die, and it's real bad.
But then, God decided we really needed something better. He manifested His son Jesus to live among us for about thirty years, who bought us all an infinite subscription by being executed as the ultimate sacrifice. Ka-ching, paid for in full! We've still gotta realize there's a problem and opt into the subscription and stop logging in as root in our lives, otherwise we don't get it. Hey, now we don't have to sacrifice animals!
And you know what, people still don't want it, and would prefer to take their chances with malware because living on the outside is more fun for a little while. But it catches up with you eventually, as anyone who surfs around the shadier parts of the 'Net as root all the time can tell you. But man, once you opt in, that's some powerful stuff and it comes with a great benefit of being allowed into the presence of God when you're kickin' up gold dust.
I dunno if that tweaks your geek the way it should, but that's a lot more accurate.
You and the parent poster have some very true points. Your project manager could be the most effective PM ever, but management could say "We want to meet about this [inconsequential thing] before proceeding [for the sake of our monthly justification to upper management that our employment is not pointless]. Oh, by the way, some of us are going to be on vacation until next month, so we need to wait until next month." Happens all the time.
Indeed, non-verbal cues are important. Verbal cues that cannot be translated into text are possibly just as important. For example: It's nearly impossible to convey sarcasm or dry humor in a way that doesn't make you look like a total jerk to a great many readers. Yes, there is a special punctuation mark that works for that, but my keyboard doesn't have an interrobang key and very few readers would know what that is!
I think there's an additional root to the problem. It appears that people would much rather be offended by something they read on the Internet, than attempt a second interpretation.
Then there's the contingent of people who prefer to assume anyone they disagree with is far less intelligent than they.
We've got to break these habits and spread good-naturedness if we're ever going to get back to civility on the Internet. Alas, I fear it's a Sisyphean task.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I'd rather that my money and brainspace goes only to the companies whose products I wish to use. I don't want a million me-too widget bandwagon jumpers getting a few cents when I have no choice in the matter and no interest in their products. But I guess that's advertising... At least I can still turn off my TV in the middle of an advertisement.
The Yahoo! toolbar used to come with Java, did they change that recently?? Also, I never saw anything come in with a Reader auto-update, so I wonder if you're downloading via the website.
Someone needs to write a very simple, no-frills application that removes crapware. Not malware, just crapware. You know, similar to Spybot, or whatever. Or perhaps write something that intercepts the installers, and pretends like they succeeded. Then someone can write a GPO to push it onto domain members at corporations, and another program to auto-download the latest crapware signatures, and we'll have a lot less work... imagine installing it on that notoriously computer-illiterate family member's computer!
Voiding the occasional warranty is all part of being a power user!
It only affects you negatively if you (A) need repairs and/or (B) paid extra for the warranty... The device doesn't disable itself if you void the warranty. You just lose a benefit that doesn't amount to insurance, but could be useful if the product proves defective.
Some stores' and credit cards' extended warranties supercede the manufacturers' warranties anyway, so you should be okay. Not that I condone buying additional warranties for reasons like this... It doesn't seem ethical. I guess you have to balance reasonable with legal these days :(
Good thing, until lawyers take it this far:
Your Honor, the client's defense crumbles in light of this new evidence. He clearly enjoys seeing photographs of lewd nature. If he did not, why would he have set the cookie on Wikipedia that allowed them to be viewed on his screen?
(totally ignoring the possibility that maybe the guy blocked images of dismemberment while viewing an article about war one time, and didn't block other things because they weren't onscreen)
It's a little chilling. I would prefer to be forced to view all images, rather than being allowed to ignore things while reading a compilation of facts,
Right before they finish building this project...
"Project cancelled."
"Incan civilization completes wonder: Asteroid Defense Satellite"
Or maybe it would be more appropriate for SMAC instead of Civ...
Indeed, when there are a bunch of a.b.c releases, the server I play on is largely unusable during the entire flurry of updates due to client/server version incompatibilities. I like frequent updates, but I don't like being unable to play.
BTW, Thanks for working on Bukkit.
I am tremendously entertained by the possibility of this (A) happening and (B) being legally binding.
Game on!
The victim mentality doesn't mix well with any kind of gambling.
You "profit from a venture" if it works in your advantage.
You "fall for a scam" if it doesn't work out in your advantage.
Indeed it does need a hack.
This looks like a job for the NEON folks. Anyone remember zPrime?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/ibm_countersues_neon/
I wonder how soon such a utility will arise for the new generation.
Keeping a lawn is akin to gardening. Perhaps the research is part of his enjoyment: The pursuit of finding a better, faster way to do it. Maybe it tweaks his inner geek to do the math, and find a new theorem. Could it also follow that he may discover some new mathematical theorem in this pursuit? At any rate, he'll be more educated after doing the research.
If you apply the same question to a different hobby, you get this: If you enjoy playing a game, why look for the most efficient strategy?
Pretty fun topic to think about, I think!
As long as they say it supports some flavor of VBA, they will have to make sure they support legacy VBA, because people buying the products usually don't know the difference. Too many companies have built their management upon legacy VBA products. So, if MS only partially removes support, they will break things subtly and people will argue to no end about "well MY macros work just fine, so YOU must be bad at it". It's a better idea to migrate completely to something else.
It's true.. *sob*.. so true... *sniffle* I have so many repressed memories of some horrible, horrible things... well, repressed until I read your message....
It's hard to tell which is worse:
* The Excel monsters ("help, my 200 MB spreadsheet got corrupted and it's the only copy of all of my customer invoices and contacts and accounts! I spent all that time making hundreds of macros, get it back!")
* The Access monsters ("can you help me figure out a way around this 2GB size limit? I have employees waiting for this to be fixed so they can do their jobs")
* The Powerpoint monsters ("can you make this auto-run whenever someone puts the CD in? we have to give everyone a friendly screen to click and launch the various programs and web sites")
Office suites (from any manufacturer) should come with a free bullet.
Hmm. I can construe a few scenarios in which SD channels look better than they did before, when displayed on an HDTV.
1. If you had a really cheap, crappy set that gave you ~240 lines of vertical resolution, instead of the full 480i.
2. If you're tuning them in digitally over the air or via cable, you won't get the wavy lines or snow that happened with analog signal interference. Although, digital noise is (IMO) a lot worse - you get blocks eating your picture and the sound cuts out. Personally, I would prefer snow on that one.
3. Upgrading to a nice flat panel with good color and sharpness, from an old CRT television set. You know the kind - they had the tint/color knobs on the front! Yeah, some people are still using those.
Overall you have a good point, but there are cases where people aren't totally insane when they say their SD programming looks better.
I'd like to see cable TV companies do something more akin to video-on-demand to the television set, so I can get more bandwidth for my video stream and lose less high-frequency information to compression. It's kinda pointless when you have "HD" and everything looks like line art because of some extreme compression.
yup
That's an interesting idea.
You'd first have to remove anything that would get broken very easily, and depressurize the station, so it didn't contribute to the mess if something were to go poorly.
Then you'd need to maneuver it all over the place over a fairly long time, because that "shell" is... forgive the expression... astronomically large. Think about the volume of that space you want to clean up, and compare to the volume of the space station. That's an awfully small broom for an awfully big place. Car analogy? Okay. It's kind of like trying to clean a four-lane highway using that little tiny broom that comes with a dustpan, complete with traffic whooshing past.
So...logistically, it's a nightmare, but it could possibly be done if you really worked hard at it.
For a good example of what it looks like when sub-par animation is used to tell a decent story, check out the movie Hoodwinked.
The news keeps rehashing this story because it's sexy as heck, and gets lots of attention. Got a new angle on it? Republish as if it were a brand new news item and profit from the new attention and uproar. Advertisers love it, too.
That being said, I'd be a lot more okay with this if there was actually a stated reason for it, because then I could know whether I should do something about my wifi's visibility...
I guess? As long as the point is something pro-Christianity I don't mind :)
Eh, the worst that could happen is that people ridicule and troll you your whole life, for trying to be a decent human being to the other people around you. I'll take it.
You hit the nail almost on the head. I work in IT, and I see a lot of dumb stuff happen because people trust their computers to magically keep them safe.
AV software usually has features that plug some of the holes - like blocking IRC communication, or preventing execution of attachments, or things in temp folders, or things on network shares. You have to configure it right. That's not a skill most users are going to have, unfortunately. The overhead of doing all this can be pretty intense sometimes, too, which makes people say "forget it, I'll take my chances so I can get more work done."
There's also something to be said about configuring your OS right. Most people are totally unaware of group policy (on Windows) and wouldn't know what most of those settings do. But if you set it up right, it prevents a large amount of malware from working, straight up. The same goes for updates. People get really lazy with those - Conficker spread more AFTER the update that closed the hole was released. It's still out there, too.
Things happen because people happen. It's not really doable to educate everyone, since we all know we'll take shortcuts when we see them.
You wonder why these things aren't optimized for security by default, but I think the answer is that they set them to something that strikes a balance between compatibility with the most software, and the current security environment upon release. Maybe it would be a lot better if Microsoft were to update group policy to meet the current trends via Windows Update... I'd almost support silent updates, if it wouldn't cause such a backlash.
I guess that's why infosec staff is so useful, right?
It's more like this, although it may tread into slightly blasphemous territory by being written like this:
God has a good old time livin' it up with the angels. Then one day Lucifer, a great leader of angels, gets dissatisfied with his position and jealous and decides he wants to be like God. A whole bunch of angels follow him. God isn't pleased and decides to kick them all out of His presence.
Meanwhile, God creates the universe and a man for companionship, and then a woman to keep the man company, in a perfect walled garden where they can do basically whatever.
God decides it's pointless to force people to love Him, and gives them the choice - opt out by way of partaking of an Apple product. (Oh, I went there.)
At some point right around here is when Satan gets kicked out of heaven and winds up near the people. Satan comes in with the latest iGoodVsEvil and sends out some brilliant spam. Eve goes for it first and opens that totally_awesome_knowledge.doc.exe attachment. Adam goes "Hey, whatcha got there?" and opens the same attachment. God is displeased by the choice, but decides to let us deal with the consequences rather than nuking everything from orbit. Now we've each gotta opt back in and get our redemption.
Fast forward a few thousand years and a few close calls where our debauchery almost cost us our existence. Those ancient people really partied hard sometimes and did stuff that's illegal in most civilized cultures today, and man did they do a lot of dumb stuff. Up until Jesus' existence, people had to play by the rules. And there were quite a few which were mostly to keep people alive and relatively disease-free, and some of them still hold up scientifically - you know, like you can get trichinosis from eating undercooked pork, or how the Black Plague spread by not properly disposing of fecal matter or washing bedclothes or quarantining the sick, that kind of stuff. Things that we have medicine and technology for now, that we didn't then.
You also had to pay up on your anti-malware subscription every once in a while (price: goats, sheep, etc) so it wouldn't run out. That malware was pretty bad news - the payload executes when you die, and it's real bad.
But then, God decided we really needed something better. He manifested His son Jesus to live among us for about thirty years, who bought us all an infinite subscription by being executed as the ultimate sacrifice. Ka-ching, paid for in full! We've still gotta realize there's a problem and opt into the subscription and stop logging in as root in our lives, otherwise we don't get it. Hey, now we don't have to sacrifice animals!
And you know what, people still don't want it, and would prefer to take their chances with malware because living on the outside is more fun for a little while. But it catches up with you eventually, as anyone who surfs around the shadier parts of the 'Net as root all the time can tell you. But man, once you opt in, that's some powerful stuff and it comes with a great benefit of being allowed into the presence of God when you're kickin' up gold dust.
I dunno if that tweaks your geek the way it should, but that's a lot more accurate.
Ahhhh, that's the one I was thinking of. Yes, thank you!
You and the parent poster have some very true points. Your project manager could be the most effective PM ever, but management could say "We want to meet about this [inconsequential thing] before proceeding [for the sake of our monthly justification to upper management that our employment is not pointless]. Oh, by the way, some of us are going to be on vacation until next month, so we need to wait until next month." Happens all the time.
Indeed, non-verbal cues are important. Verbal cues that cannot be translated into text are possibly just as important. For example: It's nearly impossible to convey sarcasm or dry humor in a way that doesn't make you look like a total jerk to a great many readers. Yes, there is a special punctuation mark that works for that, but my keyboard doesn't have an interrobang key and very few readers would know what that is!
I think there's an additional root to the problem. It appears that people would much rather be offended by something they read on the Internet, than attempt a second interpretation.
Then there's the contingent of people who prefer to assume anyone they disagree with is far less intelligent than they.
We've got to break these habits and spread good-naturedness if we're ever going to get back to civility on the Internet. Alas, I fear it's a Sisyphean task.
Aw, that's a shame! If you were my neighbor, I'd totally buy you some new lilies.