Why would they do this? You read a headline like "RIAA war against college students" and it just seems so ridiculous you only kinda half-believe it. I mean, you all know about their tactics and what they're up to - and true, it is deplorable and grotesquely selfish and short-sighted for the betterment of all. But why a war on college students? College students - the people who are at the pinnacle of our nation's pride, those hard working fun loving kids, struggling to better themselves and who are the bright future of our nation and society. And besides that, they party their asses off and are enjoying what is the best period of their lives! God love 'em, college students! We do love 'em, and not only that, we remember how our college years were the best times of our lives too, and we care deeply that the fun and traditions of college life that we enjoyed be continued for future generations to come.
So, as a whole one of the most beloved groups of people in our country, our very future is in their hands, and these RIAA assholes want to war with them?! To knock them all down a peg and into submission?! What is wrong with these people? Who do they think they are?
And they are serious people. This is not a game. It is a sickness that exists in our society, only in this case showing it's ugly head on a much grander scale. The same kind of sickness that, on a smaller more individualized and private scale leads to child abuse and neglect. The sickness of the old and infirm who see the younger generations, not as human lives that should be nurtured and taught lessons, but rather as objects to be used and exploited.
Are we as a nation and society going to allow this? Never. These RIAA sons of bitches are going to pay for what they are doing. Even now they are dying off into slow extinction. This period we are in now, unfortunately for us to be witness to it, is their last ditch effort, like a cornered wild animal, to save themselves and their way of life at any cost, no matter how ugly.
But they can't win. Human nature and millions of years of evolution are against them.
The poster is presenting an idea that i hear a lot of. That IT skills are like a "skilled trade" Actually, IT skills cannot be categorized so easily by old models.
While there is some truth to "skilled trade" idea, IT skills also possess qualities that make them like the creative arts.
A person may go to a renowned music school like Julliard to become a great musician, or artist or dancer, but would you consider Juliard a Trade School? I don't think so.
True, IT/IS people don't get the respect they deserve. True, there is a misconception by PHBs and their ilk that, if THEY can use a computer and check their email and use things like Excel, then it must be simple and easy what all these IS people are doing.
I'll say this - I think people who become net/sys admins, programmers, dbas, etc. do it more for the love and enjoyment (not to mention the $$ to be made), and the respect they regard the most is that of their knowledgeable peers in the business, and not of those PHBs.
That being said, with lack of respect sometimes comes lack of $$. I would hate to see brilliant and talented people working there butts off for some company who doesn't pay them what they deserve because of these PHB misconceptions. But I say, as long as the $$ is right, who cares what they think!
Now I will quote Kurt Vonnegut, for I think this is apropos to this line of logic - "And I realized with chagrin that my agreeing to be boss had freed Frank to do what he wanted to do more than anything else, to do what his father had done: to receive honors and creature comforts while escaping human responsibilities. He was accomplishing this by going down a spiritual oubliette."
True, people quit generating their own power for their factories a long time ago, and electricity has become distributed from a single source. And maybe computing power will be too - I'm thinking of something like most of the business world having dumb terminals and connecting to the centralized "real" horsepower.
BUT.. Although the power itself has been centralized, the devices that make use of it have not. In other words - though electric power has been centralized, and for the most part remained unchanged for a long time, the devices that USE it have been changing and evolving at a rapid pace during this time. Think of all the DEVICES that run on electricity that have been created and improved upon over the years - from big machines in factories, to robotics, to consumer electronics, to the very IC itself!
What IT departments provide/manage/maintain/create are the things that USE the computing power, like the DEVICES in the above sentence.
The guy who wrote this book is an extreme example of the type of person I've seen a lot of - people who just don't *get* it. They try to understand things that they don't do and can't understand unless they actually do them. The sad part is they have no inkling as to their own incompetence. (This link comes to mind -> "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments -> http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf Someone should send this guy a copy!)
I seriously wonder if this guy actually believes what he writes, or if he's just posing an extreme point of view in order to ruffle feathers and draw attention and sell books.
You're missing the point entirely my friend. Don't you know? Science and logic alone cannot ever fully explain anything of real importance in this life.
I assert the opposite point of view. It's not a dream. It's real and all the logic and conventional wisdom that it flies in the face of will evaporate over time.
The open source model will beat and take prominence over the old methods. It's inevitable. It's a natural outgrowth of human evolution.
I had the same problem, i wanted the narrower keyboard so it would leave more room for making those deft mouse moves in Quake. I was looking for a good one for a long time but found it totally by accident. I was at Circuit City looking for something else entirely, when I happened to stroll through the console games area. There it was on the shelf, a tiny keyboard made by logitech for the Playstation 2. It has a standard usb cable and works perfectly on my pc. It even has the WIN key, which has a picture of the Logitech logo instead of the windows emblem, but it works the same in Windows. Here's the website: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details /CA/EN,CRID=2282,CONTENTID=6636
or do a google search on "logitech playstation keyboard". It's the first search result. The website or the box doesn't say anything about it working with a pc, but I can assure you it works 100% like any other keyboard on a pc. I've been using mine for about a year without a single problem. Plus it's cheap, ~$20, a lot cheaper than most of the previous suggestions. See: http://www.dealtime.com/xPC-Logitech_LOGITECH_9671 99_0100_USB_KEYBOARD_FOR_PS2 Give it a try, it's a real gem.
No you are not. Get out of college right away and quit wasting all that money. Go to ITT tech or get a certification such as MCSE. You will be working and making money a whole lot sooner.
Since when did the author of those ".. For Dummies" books become a biographer? Hahahaha.. right. Guess he must have read "Biography writing for Dummies" and thought he'd give it a go.
When I first played Doom 3 the flashlight thing bugged me to. But if you keep at it and stick with it you soon realize just how awesome that little feature is. Having to switch between gun and light was not put in just as an annoyance/difficulty. That's how the game was designed to be played, and it *rocks* like that.
The thing is, id tried something different, and challenged people in a new way with that feature. But unfortunately, with most lame-brained lazy people rather than accept the challenge their first reaction is to bitch and moan. And that duct tape so called "mod".. what a joke. You're missing the whole point if you use that.
I actually got a keyboard for playstation II, wasn't hard to find, I bought it at circuit city. It's made by logitech and they had it right there in the consoles section
Here's the thing though: I got it for my pc! Why? I wanted a very small keyboard so I would have more room to move my mouse around. Too often I would try to execute a quick 180 or something while playing quake and my mouse would hit the corner of the keyboard and mess me up. Not anymore, this keyboard is tiny compared to a normal one, and I like it like that.
You might wonder if a keyboard made for psII is compatible with a pc. I did too. But look, it had a normal USB connector, and it had all the keys of a normal pc keyboard (insert, home, page up, etc) plus it even had the "windows" key, only instead of a windows logo it had a Logitech logo. So I guessed it had to be compatible with a pc and it was. So now I'm wondering if you can't use a regular USB pc keyboard on a playstation. I don't even own a console but I'm just wondering. Obviously the psII has a USB connector, so why couldn't you plug a regular mouse or keyboard into it?
Anonymous Coward: Thank you for commenting on my post. I appreciate any kind of feedback when I am expressing my opinions. As well as receiving positive reinforcement from like-minded people, I also highly value dissenting opinions, as they challenge me, and force me to call upon my less-than-perfect ability to see things from a different perspective.
Now, let me ask you this: Do you like giving your money to, as you call it, "Bill G and his band of asshats?" Are you satisfied by giving your financial support to the makers of an OS that you positively HATE!?
No!? Well why not? Afterall, it's M$ that listens to you. It's M$ that knows what you want in terms of gaming and delivers.
Look at it this way - Apple knows people want a choice. And they know people want that choice to include gaming. But NEWS FLASH: Apple is not trying to be the next M$! That's been done. And done quite well I might add. No, Apple is trying to be Apple, doing things differently, the Apple way. THINK DIFFERENT!!
Honestly, if you hate M$ so much, then go ahead and ditch them. Just do it. Satisfy yourself with what limited games there are available on the Mac (I hear World of Warcraft runs great on the Mac) or get yourself a console. And quit supporting those asshats in Redmond. It's your call.
Apple would love to be taken seriously by more game manufacturers.
Sure they would. If the big gaming houses would release mac versions of all their big titles, at the same time as windows versions are released, that would probably mean more users and increased marketshare and revenue for Apple. But it's just never been a top priority with Apple to make this happen, and I don't see it being one anytime soon. It's just not what they're about.
But don't listen to me if you don't want to. It's just my opinion and I could be wrong.
Based on my experience, in your typical office environment, the web and instant messaging are responsible for around 95% of time wasted, and games would be around 0.2%.
Good point, I agree. That really made me stop and think because I was really looking at this from the point of view of what you do with a computer on your own time, at home during the evenings if you work a daytime office job.
Even though it may mean a huge increase in market share, I don't think Apple will ever want their computers to be known as "good gaming platforms".
Mac = time spent "productivly"
Windows = playing video games, downloading pr0n
Of course the two are not completely mutually exclusive, you can be productive on Windows and waste time on a Mac, but this is the general path of their evolution.
Windows evolution = appeal to the masses, give them what they want, get huge market share
Apple evolution = damn the popularity race and bottom line and stick to a specific vision, a vision of what computers can and should be in our lives
Of course I know you can get A LOT of good work done in Windows. It's just that, by windows trying to be a "jack of all trades" and Apple being more focused in one direction, I see Macs being used more and more for the things their focused on, and Windows being used more and more for the other things, the non-productive but fun things we all generally waste too much time on but couldn't live without.
I think Steve Jobs is great for letting his vision be his guide, but yet we're seeing Apple also be a bit more practical lately, by introducing low price-point macs (MacMini) and other marketing tactics (marketing/price/cost manipulation with the ipods) in order to increase the market share and bottom line. This is also a good thing, to find a balance between ideology and practical concerns, but in the end to keep the balance from tipping too far one way, I think they'll maintain the Mac image as a sophisticated computer for those who, at least sometimes, are serious about getting some actual work done, and they will continue to shy away from trying to be a big gaming platform.
So those of you thinking "man if I could just play all my cool l33t new games on Mac it would be perfect, I could totally switch!"... I think you should forget it. If you want gaming keep a pc or a console to go along with your Mac because that's not what a Mac is or will ever be about.
As a disclaimer, I'm a total Quake 3 Arena junkie and I'm not putting down gamers at all with this.;-D
This is a symptom of the overall personality of the Adobe software. You install it on your machine and it throws it's weight around like an 800 lb gorilla. It's disgusting the number of files folders and registry keys it creates. You'd think the the sole purpose in life of your computer was to be the home of this software. At least Adobe seems to think so.
Well, being that pdf is an open standard format, there are many many free implementations of readers, editors, converters etc. out there. For plain old viewing of pdfs I use and recommend Foxit pdfReader: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
It's very handy, fast, and not bloated.
I for one will never let adobe get its meat hooks into my computer again.
That would be great. I would like to help if I can. I signed up to your site with the same name as here (liveevil) Feel free to contact me thru the email address I used there.
Wow, I'm like you, only I don't have a website up. I've put a lot of effort recently into distilling dozens of freeware websites and hundreds of apps in order to find those that you don't have to install. I wish more freeware sites would put this info on the description page for the app but it seems this feature is only getting to be a big priority lately.
In order to do this we need to have a system to classify apps based on certain criteria. We need to decide on that criteria and come up with terminology to describe it. To start I came up with the name zip-stall or Zstall def: "zip-stall" - any app that is ditributed in an archive (usually a zip) that is installed simply by un-zipping it's contents into the desired directory and if desired creating an easily accessible shortcut to the.exe. If desired you can manually create file associations, or even better the app has a built-in control panel for creating/removing these associations.
I thought about using the term "small footprint" but that doesn't seem convey the information about the install method well enough. eg. an app could have a small executible size but it may still require an installer and mangle up the registry as well.
My main concern has been reducing bloat on my drive, in the registry, etc. And also the flotsam and jetsam left behind even when the app is un-installed. I like the term used in this article "ultraportable," but it adds additional criteria I haven't been concerned with before, specifically minimizing reads/writes in order not to wear out the flash memory too fast. So in other words an Ultraportable app would almost certainly be a zip-stall app, but not all zip-stalls would necessarily be ultraportable (optimized for flash storage)
There are other classifications possible too, like whether or not the app uses the registry or stores it's settings in an.ini file. Also even if it does come with an installer, the installer may not be necessary. Sometimes you can install the app, copy all it's files into a new zip archive (I've been calling these "fresh-zips" for lack of a better idea.. 'filename'.FZ.zip), then uninstall the app with it's normal uninstall utility, reboot, make sure all it's files and registry entries are cleaned out, then just use your freshly created archive to zip-stall it again and it works fine.
This is because sometimes installers do little more than create a directory and unzip the files to it. Things get more complicated when they do things like add DLLs to the system directory, and have to register those DLLs, and so on. (If someone could point me in the direction of some info about what all can occur during installation using an installer that would be a big help) Of course using an installer adds the program to the ARP list, which I think in the registry is under ARPCache, Uninstall, and one other registry key, but if you can unistall just by deleting the app's folder then you don't need to use add/remove programs.
How lucky for me to come across your site now leftyfb! I'll definitley visit and share the list of apps I've found so far.
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Why would they do this? You read a headline like "RIAA war against college students" and it just seems so ridiculous you only kinda half-believe it. I mean, you all know about their tactics and what they're up to - and true, it is deplorable and grotesquely selfish and short-sighted for the betterment of all. But why a war on college students? College students - the people who are at the pinnacle of our nation's pride, those hard working fun loving kids, struggling to better themselves and who are the bright future of our nation and society. And besides that, they party their asses off and are enjoying what is the best period of their lives! God love 'em, college students! We do love 'em, and not only that, we remember how our college years were the best times of our lives too, and we care deeply that the fun and traditions of college life that we enjoyed be continued for future generations to come.
So, as a whole one of the most beloved groups of people in our country, our very future is in their hands, and these RIAA assholes want to war with them?! To knock them all down a peg and into submission?! What is wrong with these people? Who do they think they are?
And they are serious people. This is not a game. It is a sickness that exists in our society, only in this case showing it's ugly head on a much grander scale. The same kind of sickness that, on a smaller more individualized and private scale leads to child abuse and neglect. The sickness of the old and infirm who see the younger generations, not as human lives that should be nurtured and taught lessons, but rather as objects to be used and exploited.
Are we as a nation and society going to allow this? Never. These RIAA sons of bitches are going to pay for what they are doing. Even now they are dying off into slow extinction. This period we are in now, unfortunately for us to be witness to it, is their last ditch effort, like a cornered wild animal, to save themselves and their way of life at any cost, no matter how ugly.
But they can't win. Human nature and millions of years of evolution are against them.
college students > rich media kingpins
The poster is presenting an idea that i hear a lot of. That IT skills are like a "skilled trade" Actually, IT skills cannot be categorized so easily by old models.
While there is some truth to "skilled trade" idea, IT skills also possess qualities that make them like the creative arts.
A person may go to a renowned music school like Julliard to become a great musician, or artist or dancer, but would you consider Juliard a Trade School? I don't think so.
True, IT/IS people don't get the respect they deserve. True, there is a misconception by PHBs and their ilk that, if THEY can use a computer and check their email and use things like Excel, then it must be simple and easy what all these IS people are doing.
I'll say this - I think people who become net/sys admins, programmers, dbas, etc. do it more for the love and enjoyment (not to mention the $$ to be made), and the respect they regard the most is that of their knowledgeable peers in the business, and not of those PHBs.
That being said, with lack of respect sometimes comes lack of $$. I would hate to see brilliant and talented people working there butts off for some company who doesn't pay them what they deserve because of these PHB misconceptions. But I say, as long as the $$ is right, who cares what they think!
Now I will quote Kurt Vonnegut, for I think this is apropos to this line of logic -
"And I realized with chagrin that my agreeing to be boss had freed Frank to do what he wanted to do more than anything else, to do what his father had done: to receive honors and creature comforts while escaping human responsibilities. He was accomplishing this by going down a spiritual oubliette."
Right on dude!
True, people quit generating their own power for their factories a long time ago, and electricity has become distributed from a single source. And maybe computing power will be too - I'm thinking of something like most of the business world having dumb terminals and connecting to the centralized "real" horsepower.
BUT.. Although the power itself has been centralized, the devices that make use of it have not. In other words - though electric power has been centralized, and for the most part remained unchanged for a long time, the devices that USE it have been changing and evolving at a rapid pace during this time. Think of all the DEVICES that run on electricity that have been created and improved upon over the years - from big machines in factories, to robotics, to consumer electronics, to the very IC itself!
What IT departments provide/manage/maintain/create are the things that USE the computing power, like the DEVICES in the above sentence.
The guy who wrote this book is an extreme example of the type of person I've seen a lot of - people who just don't *get* it. They try to understand things that they don't do and can't understand unless they actually do them. The sad part is they have no inkling as to their own incompetence. (This link comes to mind -> "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments -> http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf Someone should send this guy a copy!)
I seriously wonder if this guy actually believes what he writes, or if he's just posing an extreme point of view in order to ruffle feathers and draw attention and sell books.
You're missing the point entirely my friend. Don't you know? Science and logic alone cannot ever fully explain anything of real importance in this life.
I assert the opposite point of view. It's not a dream. It's real and all the logic and conventional wisdom that it flies in the face of will evaporate over time.
The open source model will beat and take prominence over the old methods. It's inevitable. It's a natural outgrowth of human evolution.
I had the same problem, i wanted the narrower keyboard so it would leave more room for making those deft mouse moves in Quake. I was looking for a good one for a long time but found it totally by accident. I was at Circuit City looking for something else entirely, when I happened to stroll through the console games area. There it was on the shelf, a tiny keyboard made by logitech for the Playstation 2. It has a standard usb cable and works perfectly on my pc. It even has the WIN key, which has a picture of the Logitech logo instead of the windows emblem, but it works the same in Windows. Here's the website: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details /CA/EN,CRID=2282,CONTENTID=6636
or do a google search on "logitech playstation keyboard". It's the first search result. The website or the box doesn't say anything about it working with a pc, but I can assure you it works 100% like any other keyboard on a pc. I've been using mine for about a year without a single problem. Plus it's cheap, ~$20, a lot cheaper than most of the previous suggestions. See: http://www.dealtime.com/xPC-Logitech_LOGITECH_9671 99_0100_USB_KEYBOARD_FOR_PS2 Give it a try, it's a real gem.
No you are not. Get out of college right away and quit wasting all that money. Go to ITT tech or get a certification such as MCSE. You will be working and making money a whole lot sooner.
"BS and MS degrees are meant to lean more towards the vocational side, whereas a Ph. D is all about the scientific/research aspect of the subject."
That's about the most ridiculous thing i have ever heard.
Since when did the author of those ".. For Dummies" books become a biographer? Hahahaha.. right. Guess he must have read "Biography writing for Dummies" and thought he'd give it a go.
Win + D is reversible. Hit it once to show desktop, then again to bring everything back. Win + M is not reversible, it just minimizes all the windows.
When I first played Doom 3 the flashlight thing bugged me to. But if you keep at it and stick with it you soon realize just how awesome that little feature is. Having to switch between gun and light was not put in just as an annoyance/difficulty. That's how the game was designed to be played, and it *rocks* like that.
The thing is, id tried something different, and challenged people in a new way with that feature. But unfortunately, with most lame-brained lazy people rather than accept the challenge their first reaction is to bitch and moan. And that duct tape so called "mod".. what a joke. You're missing the whole point if you use that.
I actually got a keyboard for playstation II, wasn't hard to find, I bought it at circuit city. It's made by logitech and they had it right there in the consoles section
Here's the thing though: I got it for my pc! Why? I wanted a very small keyboard so I would have more room to move my mouse around. Too often I would try to execute a quick 180 or something while playing quake and my mouse would hit the corner of the keyboard and mess me up. Not anymore, this keyboard is tiny compared to a normal one, and I like it like that.You might wonder if a keyboard made for psII is compatible with a pc. I did too. But look, it had a normal USB connector, and it had all the keys of a normal pc keyboard (insert, home, page up, etc) plus it even had the "windows" key, only instead of a windows logo it had a Logitech logo. So I guessed it had to be compatible with a pc and it was. So now I'm wondering if you can't use a regular USB pc keyboard on a playstation. I don't even own a console but I'm just wondering. Obviously the psII has a USB connector, so why couldn't you plug a regular mouse or keyboard into it?
Anonymous Coward: Thank you for commenting on my post. I appreciate any kind of feedback when I am expressing my opinions. As well as receiving positive reinforcement from like-minded people, I also highly value dissenting opinions, as they challenge me, and force me to call upon my less-than-perfect ability to see things from a different perspective.
Now, let me ask you this: Do you like giving your money to, as you call it, "Bill G and his band of asshats?" Are you satisfied by giving your financial support to the makers of an OS that you positively HATE!?
No!? Well why not? Afterall, it's M$ that listens to you. It's M$ that knows what you want in terms of gaming and delivers.
Look at it this way - Apple knows people want a choice. And they know people want that choice to include gaming. But NEWS FLASH: Apple is not trying to be the next M$! That's been done. And done quite well I might add. No, Apple is trying to be Apple, doing things differently, the Apple way. THINK DIFFERENT!!
Honestly, if you hate M$ so much, then go ahead and ditch them. Just do it. Satisfy yourself with what limited games there are available on the Mac (I hear World of Warcraft runs great on the Mac) or get yourself a console. And quit supporting those asshats in Redmond. It's your call.
Sure they would. If the big gaming houses would release mac versions of all their big titles, at the same time as windows versions are released, that would probably mean more users and increased marketshare and revenue for Apple. But it's just never been a top priority with Apple to make this happen, and I don't see it being one anytime soon. It's just not what they're about.
But don't listen to me if you don't want to. It's just my opinion and I could be wrong.
Good point, I agree. That really made me stop and think because I was really looking at this from the point of view of what you do with a computer on your own time, at home during the evenings if you work a daytime office job.
Even though it may mean a huge increase in market share, I don't think Apple will ever want their computers to be known as "good gaming platforms".
Mac = time spent "productivly"
Windows = playing video games, downloading pr0n
Of course the two are not completely mutually exclusive, you can be productive on Windows and waste time on a Mac, but this is the general path of their evolution.
Windows evolution = appeal to the masses, give them what they want, get huge market share
Apple evolution = damn the popularity race and bottom line and stick to a specific vision, a vision of what computers can and should be in our lives
Of course I know you can get A LOT of good work done in Windows. It's just that, by windows trying to be a "jack of all trades" and Apple being more focused in one direction, I see Macs being used more and more for the things their focused on, and Windows being used more and more for the other things, the non-productive but fun things we all generally waste too much time on but couldn't live without.
I think Steve Jobs is great for letting his vision be his guide, but yet we're seeing Apple also be a bit more practical lately, by introducing low price-point macs (MacMini) and other marketing tactics (marketing/price/cost manipulation with the ipods) in order to increase the market share and bottom line. This is also a good thing, to find a balance between ideology and practical concerns, but in the end to keep the balance from tipping too far one way, I think they'll maintain the Mac image as a sophisticated computer for those who, at least sometimes, are serious about getting some actual work done, and they will continue to shy away from trying to be a big gaming platform.
So those of you thinking "man if I could just play all my cool l33t new games on Mac it would be perfect, I could totally switch!"... I think you should forget it. If you want gaming keep a pc or a console to go along with your Mac because that's not what a Mac is or will ever be about.
As a disclaimer, I'm a total Quake 3 Arena junkie and I'm not putting down gamers at all with this. ;-D
This is a symptom of the overall personality of the Adobe software. You install it on your machine and it throws it's weight around like an 800 lb gorilla. It's disgusting the number of files folders and registry keys it creates. You'd think the the sole purpose in life of your computer was to be the home of this software. At least Adobe seems to think so. Well, being that pdf is an open standard format, there are many many free implementations of readers, editors, converters etc. out there. For plain old viewing of pdfs I use and recommend Foxit pdfReader: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php It's very handy, fast, and not bloated. I for one will never let adobe get its meat hooks into my computer again.
That would be great. I would like to help if I can. I signed up to your site with the same name as here (liveevil) Feel free to contact me thru the email address I used there.
Wow, I'm like you, only I don't have a website up. I've put a lot of effort recently into distilling dozens of freeware websites and hundreds of apps in order to find those that you don't have to install. I wish more freeware sites would put this info on the description page for the app but it seems this feature is only getting to be a big priority lately.
.exe. If desired you can manually create file associations, or even better the app has a built-in control panel for creating/removing these associations.
.ini file. Also even if it does come with an installer, the installer may not be necessary. Sometimes you can install the app, copy all it's files into a new zip archive (I've been calling these "fresh-zips" for lack of a better idea.. 'filename'.FZ.zip), then uninstall the app with it's normal uninstall utility, reboot, make sure all it's files and registry entries are cleaned out, then just use your freshly created archive to zip-stall it again and it works fine.
In order to do this we need to have a system to classify apps based on certain criteria. We need to decide on that criteria and come up with terminology to describe it. To start I came up with the name zip-stall or Zstall
def: "zip-stall" - any app that is ditributed in an archive (usually a zip) that is installed simply by un-zipping it's contents into the desired directory and if desired creating an easily accessible shortcut to the
I thought about using the term "small footprint" but that doesn't seem convey the information about the install method well enough. eg. an app could have a small executible size but it may still require an installer and mangle up the registry as well.
My main concern has been reducing bloat on my drive, in the registry, etc. And also the flotsam and jetsam left behind even when the app is un-installed. I like the term used in this article "ultraportable," but it adds additional criteria I haven't been concerned with before, specifically minimizing reads/writes in order not to wear out the flash memory too fast. So in other words an Ultraportable app would almost certainly be a zip-stall app, but not all zip-stalls would necessarily be ultraportable (optimized for flash storage)
There are other classifications possible too, like whether or not the app uses the registry or stores it's settings in an
This is because sometimes installers do little more than create a directory and unzip the files to it. Things get more complicated when they do things like add DLLs to the system directory, and have to register those DLLs, and so on. (If someone could point me in the direction of some info about what all can occur during installation using an installer that would be a big help) Of course using an installer adds the program to the ARP list, which I think in the registry is under ARPCache, Uninstall, and one other registry key, but if you can unistall just by deleting the app's folder then you don't need to use add/remove programs.
How lucky for me to come across your site now leftyfb! I'll definitley visit and share the list of apps I've found so far.
...What's funny is that we may have even infected Mars with our own bacteria ...
What's funny about this?
Downloading music/movies/whatever is NOT stealing. It should not be considered a crime by our legal system.