Item 1 Description of my Adventure into Acquiring Windows 7:
Windows 7 is out. Yay. Finally, microsoft is making up for the ill begotten ME 2... I mean Vista. It's supposed to run faster, leap over tall buildings, make you toast, and rearrange your sock drawer by color shape and wear. So I'm debating running out to my local software retailer and grab a copy. Scanning over the meager offerings that Wal-Mart and the like offer in their software section these days, I finally spy my target. Windows 7... Windows 7 Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, Klingon, NIV, Lego, Moosetracks... WTH???
Why, why do they need so many different versions? I know they like to rip off linux from time to time, but having a hundred different versions isn't one of the items I was really wanting ported. Why not save time and money on marketing and different labeling and lower the price of the Ultimate to a decent price, you'd probably sell more.
Lets examine the low end shall we? Windows 7 Starter. An appropriate name as it will basically just do what a boot disc does and START your computer. You probably have more functionality in your cell phone than this version of the OS. I mean who would ever want to run more than three applications at a time, only hackers that's who, and we don't want you using our OS you miscreant!!!!
Home Premium... with compiz/beryl... I mean Aero goodness. Yes I will pay the extra for that...
Now Professional looks a bit better than the other options, I can run in XP mode. Or... I can "upgrade" to XP Professional, decisions, decisions...
I could go on, by my caffeine is wearing out... Point to be taken I guess is most marketing departments, and I place blame for this hogwash squarely on their shoulders, should be shot. Hobbling your product to sell different versions is just silly.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Microsoft, again, Bill Gates, I'm sure Ballmer had something to do with this
Item 3 Suggested Course of Action:
And lo they did smaketh the marketers upside the head, and did scatter their pie-charts and shove their projections back from whence they came
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
No Love for the Crackers
Item 1 Description of the Annoying Script Kiddies and Black Hat Hackers that ruin my day:
Somewhere he's laughing at me. Across town, or across the world there is a kid sitting in front of his dad's computer that just cobbled together a jumble of codes he found on different websites designed to infect and reformat some poor bastards machine. Why is he laughing at me? For much like Paris Hilton's chihuahua, he gets to crap wherever he wants and I get to clean up the mess.
Now, I can almost understand the guys that hack for a living (and let me be clear I've no hate for the White Hats) at least there is some sort of payoff for the work they do, and a clear understandable motive, but the destruction for destruction's sake type of people just enrage me. I never though Chaotic Evil was a real world alignment.
Now to be sure, everyone with a computer at some point wants to be a hacker of some sort, being like Keanu Reeve... no, um, like that movie Hackers.... Oh God no, um, like Lain, no one will get that but anime geeks, but its still more respectable than the first two. Hell I even wanted to become a Certified Ethical Hacker at one point. Nothing would be more fun than testing people's security, actually to broaden that, its always fun to do something legally and get paid for it when anyone else without that position would go to jail. Now so far I haven't gone that route, but I also haven't gone rogue and started trying to knock down people's firewalls, steal their credit card numbers etc, etc. Unless you've got mafia ties and are making millions it just ain't worth it, and besides, if 80's action movies taught me anything, I'd be the guy that asked for his money and got paid in lead deposited locally.
If you have an interest in the good old days of hacking or phreaking, when it wasn't as nasty in my opinion as today, check out Kevin Mitnick, and Captain Crunch, sure they ripped off phones companies, and are not really heroes, but still kind of cool guys in a Robin Hood type way.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
... too many to list here
Item 3 Suggested Course of Action
Unplug the internet, now
Somewhere he's laughing at me. Across town, or across the world there is a kid sitting in front of his dad's computer that just cobbled together a jumble of codes he found on different websites designed to infect and reformat some poor bastards machine. Why is he laughing at me? For much like Paris Hilton's chihuahua, he gets to crap wherever he wants and I get to clean up the mess.
Now, I can almost understand the guys that hack for a living (and let me be clear I've no hate for the White Hats) at least there is some sort of payoff for the work they do, and a clear understandable motive, but the destruction for destruction's sake type of people just enrage me. I never though Chaotic Evil was a real world alignment.
Now to be sure, everyone with a computer at some point wants to be a hacker of some sort, being like Keanu Reeve... no, um, like that movie Hackers.... Oh God no, um, like Lain, no one will get that but anime geeks, but its still more respectable than the first two. Hell I even wanted to become a Certified Ethical Hacker at one point. Nothing would be more fun than testing people's security, actually to broaden that, its always fun to do something legally and get paid for it when anyone else without that position would go to jail. Now so far I haven't gone that route, but I also haven't gone rogue and started trying to knock down people's firewalls, steal their credit card numbers etc, etc. Unless you've got mafia ties and are making millions it just ain't worth it, and besides, if 80's action movies taught me anything, I'd be the guy that asked for his money and got paid in lead deposited locally.
If you have an interest in the good old days of hacking or phreaking, when it wasn't as nasty in my opinion as today, check out Kevin Mitnick, and Captain Crunch, sure they ripped off phones companies, and are not really heroes, but still kind of cool guys in a Robin Hood type way.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
... too many to list here
Item 3 Suggested Course of Action
Unplug the internet, now
Monday, February 8, 2010
End User Roundup Part 1
Item 1 Description of the type of End User's that drive me insane
This will be an ongoing work in progress.
The Overpowered Novice:
It pains me to see a $3000 machine in the hands of someone that uses their 33inch plasma screen only for reading their email.
The Wunderkind:
The kid that knows everything there is to know about computers, because his buddy in yahoo chat taught him "hacking." What DevilDDDawg666 didn't tell him is he only showed him how to open up every port in their firewall so he could access the wunderkind's dad's credit card transactions.
The ones that like to watch:
These are the people that insist on sitting and watching you work, no matter how many times you tell them that "This will be boring and take forever, see I wasn't even planning on sitting here while this thing does a full surface scan, why do you want to?" Yet they insist that they want to "learn." No, you're watching me to either make sure I don't mess anything up, which you won't be able to discern, or watching me to see how I do what I do, which probably won't apply to your next issue anyway.
The Save a Penny-o-matic:
"What?!?!?! Why am I paying you fifty dollars for something that just took ten minutes???"
Um, because you don't know how to do it? Strangely, businessmen that charge a hundred an hour for their own services (two hour minimum) seem to be the most notorious for this attitude.
The Box Slayer:
These are the people that no matter how many times you work on their machine, no matter what instructions you give them, no matter how many automated safeguards you put in their way, they will bring their machine back in within a week of you sending it out in worse and worse condition. After a while you are actually tempted to rig the thing to self destruct in the hopes that it can finally seek some rest, but the thought of another computer finding its way into the hands of this creature is more than you can bear.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Too many to list.
Item 3 Suggested Course of Action:
... if you don't smoke I guess demerol would work...
This will be an ongoing work in progress.
The Overpowered Novice:
It pains me to see a $3000 machine in the hands of someone that uses their 33inch plasma screen only for reading their email.
The Wunderkind:
The kid that knows everything there is to know about computers, because his buddy in yahoo chat taught him "hacking." What DevilDDDawg666 didn't tell him is he only showed him how to open up every port in their firewall so he could access the wunderkind's dad's credit card transactions.
The ones that like to watch:
These are the people that insist on sitting and watching you work, no matter how many times you tell them that "This will be boring and take forever, see I wasn't even planning on sitting here while this thing does a full surface scan, why do you want to?" Yet they insist that they want to "learn." No, you're watching me to either make sure I don't mess anything up, which you won't be able to discern, or watching me to see how I do what I do, which probably won't apply to your next issue anyway.
The Save a Penny-o-matic:
"What?!?!?! Why am I paying you fifty dollars for something that just took ten minutes???"
Um, because you don't know how to do it? Strangely, businessmen that charge a hundred an hour for their own services (two hour minimum) seem to be the most notorious for this attitude.
The Box Slayer:
These are the people that no matter how many times you work on their machine, no matter what instructions you give them, no matter how many automated safeguards you put in their way, they will bring their machine back in within a week of you sending it out in worse and worse condition. After a while you are actually tempted to rig the thing to self destruct in the hopes that it can finally seek some rest, but the thought of another computer finding its way into the hands of this creature is more than you can bear.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Too many to list.
Item 3 Suggested Course of Action:
... if you don't smoke I guess demerol would work...
Friday, February 5, 2010
I Will Compile No More Forever
Item 1 A description of my attempt at being, hardcore:
I'm a big linux fan. I love the concept of an open source environment, free software, stability and being able to tell Steve Ballmer to suck it.
I started to say linux geek in the first paragraph, but I'm not up to that level yet. I've been trying to develop my chops as I go I've tinkered with the Ubuntu spin offs, Debain, Fedora, Suse, etc etc, each had something different to like and dislike and in the end taught me something new. I have learned the most I think though from my foray into Gentoo Linux. I have learned that I hate compiling from source.
Techs judge themselves by their skills, I have seen a phenomena several times where two techs meet. Like the samurai of old, there is always a showdown. One, usually the older tech will try to ascertain the younger ones level, and decide from there if he is worthy of their time. It can be scary to outsiders, but it is the natural order of things, much like the alpha male in a dog pack. So we seek to better ourselves so that when we run into an old master, we are not left lying on the ground with the other guys teeth at our throat... that only happened once... and I swear never again...
So to test my mettle, I dove headfirst into the Gentoo minimal install.
The beginning wasn't so bad, I jumped in made my partitions, formatted them, I was feeling good, halfway giddy... oh poor naive me. The horrors started when I read the next bit of instruction on compiling the base. YAY, I'd never actually compiled anything before this was going to be great, I'll be all hacking and stuff, hardcore style yo.
One command. Pretty much one command starts the entire process... This is about the same experience as double clicking the setup.exe in windows... To be sure it looks cooler, with all the text streaming on the screen, makes you want to bring some geek chicks in and say "Hey, check this out, yeah, I'm not doing anything right now, but I put the command in to start it." Now yeah, I understand the guys that say they want to make everything from source, so they know exactly what is inside the program, but honestly WHO THE HELL WOULD READ ALL THAT CODE???? I might run a search for "fubar this guys box lolzers" but other than that, eh.
So the compile began and ran for a while... a while being about ten hours altogether. It was slightly late when I started so I had the bright idea, hey I'll let it run overnight. I awake refreshed the next morning, ok, that's a lie, I wake my cranky morning self, look at the screen and nearly punch it. Apparently at random intervals I have to input whether I want the system to use gl support, or version 123.1234 versus 123.1235 (now with flouride.) At this point I realize, I really am expected to sit in front of the machine for hours, watching text stream by until the computer decides it needs me... aw hell naw.
About twenty four hours later, due to work, etc, I finally get the base finished. Excited I look through the next steps, ok now compile the kernel... Alright that can't be too hard, once again, type in my ONE COMMAND, I am so hardcore, walk away for a bit and it should be done... I miss my naivete. So yeah at this point I end up waiting a few more hours, least they could do is put a built in youtube streamer so I can watch something while compiling, but nooooo.
So eventually, after having wasted way more time than I would have preferred, I finally get the system installed and reboot. I was honestly surprised at the speed of the boot, until I realized, I hadn't installed the xserver yet, and was running in cli only. I won't share my experiences with the xserver, lets just say I'd had enough and ended up reinstalling xubuntu. Bring on the simplicity, bring on the packages, knock me down a peg on the tech scale, but, I will compile no more forever.
Item 2 list of offenders:
Gentoo Linux
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
Um, I'm still liking that Steve Ballmer line, I'll go with that.
I'm a big linux fan. I love the concept of an open source environment, free software, stability and being able to tell Steve Ballmer to suck it.
I started to say linux geek in the first paragraph, but I'm not up to that level yet. I've been trying to develop my chops as I go I've tinkered with the Ubuntu spin offs, Debain, Fedora, Suse, etc etc, each had something different to like and dislike and in the end taught me something new. I have learned the most I think though from my foray into Gentoo Linux. I have learned that I hate compiling from source.
Techs judge themselves by their skills, I have seen a phenomena several times where two techs meet. Like the samurai of old, there is always a showdown. One, usually the older tech will try to ascertain the younger ones level, and decide from there if he is worthy of their time. It can be scary to outsiders, but it is the natural order of things, much like the alpha male in a dog pack. So we seek to better ourselves so that when we run into an old master, we are not left lying on the ground with the other guys teeth at our throat... that only happened once... and I swear never again...
So to test my mettle, I dove headfirst into the Gentoo minimal install.
The beginning wasn't so bad, I jumped in made my partitions, formatted them, I was feeling good, halfway giddy... oh poor naive me. The horrors started when I read the next bit of instruction on compiling the base. YAY, I'd never actually compiled anything before this was going to be great, I'll be all hacking and stuff, hardcore style yo.
One command. Pretty much one command starts the entire process... This is about the same experience as double clicking the setup.exe in windows... To be sure it looks cooler, with all the text streaming on the screen, makes you want to bring some geek chicks in and say "Hey, check this out, yeah, I'm not doing anything right now, but I put the command in to start it." Now yeah, I understand the guys that say they want to make everything from source, so they know exactly what is inside the program, but honestly WHO THE HELL WOULD READ ALL THAT CODE???? I might run a search for "fubar this guys box lolzers" but other than that, eh.
So the compile began and ran for a while... a while being about ten hours altogether. It was slightly late when I started so I had the bright idea, hey I'll let it run overnight. I awake refreshed the next morning, ok, that's a lie, I wake my cranky morning self, look at the screen and nearly punch it. Apparently at random intervals I have to input whether I want the system to use gl support, or version 123.1234 versus 123.1235 (now with flouride.) At this point I realize, I really am expected to sit in front of the machine for hours, watching text stream by until the computer decides it needs me... aw hell naw.
About twenty four hours later, due to work, etc, I finally get the base finished. Excited I look through the next steps, ok now compile the kernel... Alright that can't be too hard, once again, type in my ONE COMMAND, I am so hardcore, walk away for a bit and it should be done... I miss my naivete. So yeah at this point I end up waiting a few more hours, least they could do is put a built in youtube streamer so I can watch something while compiling, but nooooo.
So eventually, after having wasted way more time than I would have preferred, I finally get the system installed and reboot. I was honestly surprised at the speed of the boot, until I realized, I hadn't installed the xserver yet, and was running in cli only. I won't share my experiences with the xserver, lets just say I'd had enough and ended up reinstalling xubuntu. Bring on the simplicity, bring on the packages, knock me down a peg on the tech scale, but, I will compile no more forever.
Item 2 list of offenders:
Gentoo Linux
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
Um, I'm still liking that Steve Ballmer line, I'll go with that.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Vae Victus Vista
Item 1 Description of situation that makes you want to throw your laptop out the window:
Local only. If you have never seen this, give thanks to the Lord. It pops up at the most inopportune time. You've just gotten to the coffee shop, or you've ran into the house to try to pay your online bills, or check your latest viagra spam. You bring your trusted machine out of hibernate, open up your browser and... nothing.
You check your hard switch on your wireless, make sure its enabled in network connections, and then you notice the tiny icon in the lower right, the one that usually has the nice little globe on it, proclaiming that you, tiny mortal have access to the world and all its online treasures... but what's this? No globe. Confused you move your mouse slowly down to the tiny little monitors, and up pops the dreaded words, "Local Only."
You jump into your terminal, run ipconfig and watch as the uncanny number of network adapters (you can only see two physical on the dang thing) looking for answers. Yes you have a valid ip, yet nothing pings outside the local network. Cursing, you reboot, to no avail, you delete the wireless profile, nothing, you reload drivers, you do a rain dance, you sacrifice a chicken (by the way the coffee shop frowns on this) nothing. Finally you grab a patch cord and connect directly, crisis averted... or is it...
I have had this happen on secure networks, wide open ones, with every authentication you can think of. Somehow the problem has always fixed itself within a day or two, but I've had to hardwire several times. Strangely, I can run xubuntu on this same machine and never have a lick of trouble out of it.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Microsoft, specifically Vista, specifically wireless
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
I have read a few dozen articles on this, yet to find a solution, um, kick Bill Gates in the head
Item 4 Other thoughts:
Why do they fix what isn't broken? Why put all the network options in ten different places? From what I've heard windows 7 doesn't even have classic view in the control panel anymore????
Local only. If you have never seen this, give thanks to the Lord. It pops up at the most inopportune time. You've just gotten to the coffee shop, or you've ran into the house to try to pay your online bills, or check your latest viagra spam. You bring your trusted machine out of hibernate, open up your browser and... nothing.
You check your hard switch on your wireless, make sure its enabled in network connections, and then you notice the tiny icon in the lower right, the one that usually has the nice little globe on it, proclaiming that you, tiny mortal have access to the world and all its online treasures... but what's this? No globe. Confused you move your mouse slowly down to the tiny little monitors, and up pops the dreaded words, "Local Only."
You jump into your terminal, run ipconfig and watch as the uncanny number of network adapters (you can only see two physical on the dang thing) looking for answers. Yes you have a valid ip, yet nothing pings outside the local network. Cursing, you reboot, to no avail, you delete the wireless profile, nothing, you reload drivers, you do a rain dance, you sacrifice a chicken (by the way the coffee shop frowns on this) nothing. Finally you grab a patch cord and connect directly, crisis averted... or is it...
I have had this happen on secure networks, wide open ones, with every authentication you can think of. Somehow the problem has always fixed itself within a day or two, but I've had to hardwire several times. Strangely, I can run xubuntu on this same machine and never have a lick of trouble out of it.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Microsoft, specifically Vista, specifically wireless
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
I have read a few dozen articles on this, yet to find a solution, um, kick Bill Gates in the head
Item 4 Other thoughts:
Why do they fix what isn't broken? Why put all the network options in ten different places? From what I've heard windows 7 doesn't even have classic view in the control panel anymore????
The First Foray
Welcome to Digital Discontent.
I'm starting this blog to rant, essentially, about the little annoyances I run into on a daily basis as a computer tech. Consider it therapy perhaps.
Item 1 Description of Situation in which our Blood Pressure Rises:
You decide you want to grab a new shiny program, you navigate the sites half-assed attempt at a design. Halfway down the page, between ads for their $400 version that only differs from the free version by way of a talking dog that assists you, you finally find gold. A nice big beautiful download link... You click in anticipation, binary goodness is nearly yours.
You notice, as the download starts, that it finishes a bit too quickly. Sure you've got broadband, but that was just a little too fast, oh its only 800k, well maybe they're good at compression, or really good coders that don't waste space, who knows, you've got what you came for, mission accomplished!!!.
So you click the exe to install. A beautiful new interface comes up on your screen... and proceeds to start downloading the program you thought you just downloaded.
WTH
Who gets my size 13 steel toe to the head? WHY DO YOU THINK I NEED TO DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM TO DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM!!!!!! Just give me the whole thing at the beginning, sure I live in BFE, but I have about 6 meg down on my dsl connection, I can handle it, its ok. And to top it off, if the downloader actually has a speed indicator, its usually running at about 1/2 to 1/4 of the speed I can get from any other server.
In short, you're wasting my time, and throttling my download, unless you have some sort of resume option, or can speed up my download, just give me the dang setup file.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Avast, AVG, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
... I'd say boycott them, but I actually like Avast. And well, most of these are free.
I'm starting this blog to rant, essentially, about the little annoyances I run into on a daily basis as a computer tech. Consider it therapy perhaps.
Item 1 Description of Situation in which our Blood Pressure Rises:
You decide you want to grab a new shiny program, you navigate the sites half-assed attempt at a design. Halfway down the page, between ads for their $400 version that only differs from the free version by way of a talking dog that assists you, you finally find gold. A nice big beautiful download link... You click in anticipation, binary goodness is nearly yours.
You notice, as the download starts, that it finishes a bit too quickly. Sure you've got broadband, but that was just a little too fast, oh its only 800k, well maybe they're good at compression, or really good coders that don't waste space, who knows, you've got what you came for, mission accomplished!!!.
So you click the exe to install. A beautiful new interface comes up on your screen... and proceeds to start downloading the program you thought you just downloaded.
WTH
Who gets my size 13 steel toe to the head? WHY DO YOU THINK I NEED TO DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM TO DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM!!!!!! Just give me the whole thing at the beginning, sure I live in BFE, but I have about 6 meg down on my dsl connection, I can handle it, its ok. And to top it off, if the downloader actually has a speed indicator, its usually running at about 1/2 to 1/4 of the speed I can get from any other server.
In short, you're wasting my time, and throttling my download, unless you have some sort of resume option, or can speed up my download, just give me the dang setup file.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Avast, AVG, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
... I'd say boycott them, but I actually like Avast. And well, most of these are free.
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