161–170 of 468 posts
Business-to-business services that are disliked by the public and involve any type of tracking or analytics aren't just class-action-lawsuit bait, they're ambitious-prosecutor bait. All they need is enough bad PR, which it looks like they're in the process of getting, to make the predators aware of the prey.
Judging from reactions here, they're not going to get much community support when the legal backlash inevitably happens, either.
Wow....I thought these kind of companies stay and operate from the darkest corners of the internet, just like those CPA networks where you get paid to SPAM the hell out of the internet. Frustrating that these are coming mainstream and Y Combinator has backed one of them.
Actually you would be surprised. The biggest advertiser in the CPA industry over the last few years closed their doors a couple of months ago. And now the EPC (earning's per click) are about 20% of what they used to be, so the majority of CPA networks are either going broke or shutting down for good. I imagine that the majority of them will be closing their doors this year as well which is kind of sad. As of now, not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your doubt is unfounded. http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/partition-magic-windo... Your research, poor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic And your characterization of the Windows ecosystem based upon your experience either ignorant, disingenuous, or blindly biased. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/apps
I suspect Partition Magic is intended merely as an example of the crapware-and-misleading-download-buttons trend. You can spot similar scamminess on (for example) http://getpaint.net/ and http://tortoisesvn.net/ .
More importantly, any person looking for Partition Magic in 2013 is likely to be an ideal candidate for crapware. They are performing system administrative tasks. They don't perform such tasks on Windows systems frequently. And they are ignorant of Partition Magic's demise as a product. To boot, they probably have an outdated skill set in regard to Windows.
Download aggregators started installing crapware five years ago. Any person concerned with crapware and who has recent experience avoids them if at all possible. In short, a person looking for Partition Magic in 2013 is likely to suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
The original claims depend upon a degree of sophistication which its author lacks.
The crapware situation on Windows is horrible. I'm a Mac/Linux user but from time to time I have to power up my Windows VM. A few days ago I wanted to install the Partition Magic trial on my Win XP VM. Having left Windows around 2005 I figured that typing "Partition Magic Win XP download" in Google would be helpful. I got a handful of "reputable" download sources like CNet and the like. I went there and was bombarded…
Agreed, a lot of the reasons that non technical users dislike Windows seem to be the result of these. It really takes control out of the users hands. We can see the origins of this becoming a problem on Ubuntu with Canonical adding stuff like the Amazon search and seemingly having no issue with bundleware as a means of monetisation. On the other hand I'm surprised this isn't more of an issue on the Mac, since Mac (es…
HOWEVER, Mac OS X has never had this problem, and before the app store there was nothing inherently harder about writing crapware that bundles whatever creepy garbage could be monetized.
So actually I really wonder why OS X and Linux never had this problem (to any major extent). Is it merely the awesomeness of single-digit market share? In that case, Ubuntu's safe but Apple better start worrying about it.
Personally I suspect it's more complicated than that, but my ideas are half-baked.
> Although the company claims it is all “non-personally identifiable data”, according to its website this surprisingly includes not only IP but the globally unique MAC addresses. Enough with the scare tactics. A Mac adress is not, in any way, globally unique.
Excuse me. As a rule, a MAC address is a decent approximation of globally unique, certainly good enough to identify a single computer for advertising purposes. If you have a MAC address and it's not globally unique, it's defective and out of spec. Which isn't to say duplicates never happen (ultra-cheap rip-off network cards, virtual machines, reprogramming your hardware manually, etc), but... there's a reason they go…
This is the reason why I don't understand that people say that Linux is for "technical" users while Windows is for regular consumers. In Linux it's easier to install something that in Windows. E.g. to install a CD to MP3 rip program, in Archlinux all you do is: # Search for some mp3 ripper program pacman -Ss mp3 | grep rip # Install one of them from the list that looked ok from the description pacman -S ripperx In Wi…
From my point of view, your comment describes exactly why Windows is easier. In the Linux example you're using the command line with commands folks don't know about ('pacman', 'grep') with flags they'd have to read about ('-S' and "How do you make that vertical line thing?"). Of course they'd also have to understand the output of those commands.
The Windows example is largely point and click (using tools people are already familiar with, e.g google, web-browsers etc)
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Yes, I've run afoul of the "download button" adverts before. I'm not surprised to see them on torrent sites etc, but it amazes me that some supposedly reputable download sites would allow such things.
CNet/Download.com is not reputable. It's malware distributor. The best rule of thumb is: if it looks shady, don't go there ever again. Another: every good program has an author, and this author has a valid, non-malware-installing link on his/her website.
The crapware situation on Windows is horrible. I'm a Mac/Linux user but from time to time I have to power up my Windows VM. A few days ago I wanted to install the Partition Magic trial on my Win XP VM. Having left Windows around 2005 I figured that typing "Partition Magic Win XP download" in Google would be helpful. I got a handful of "reputable" download sources like CNet and the like. I went there and was bombarded…
Agreed, a lot of the reasons that non technical users dislike Windows seem to be the result of these. It really takes control out of the users hands. We can see the origins of this becoming a problem on Ubuntu with Canonical adding stuff like the Amazon search and seemingly having no issue with bundleware as a means of monetisation. On the other hand I'm surprised this isn't more of an issue on the Mac, since Mac (es…
I presume that people using Macs tend to be 1) wary of downloading any programs from random websites and 2) wary of having to run something like an installer. The Mac App Store means that people will only do these things less going forward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of OS X apps are installed by dragging the app to /Applications, no installer involved, it may be one of the reasons.
Not familiar with the OSX installation procedure, but I assume that dragging the app into the folder runs some installer script? Are there perhaps restrictions on what can be done via these scripts that would require 2 distinct actions to install say a browser toolbar and application?
The crapware situation on Windows is horrible. I'm a Mac/Linux user but from time to time I have to power up my Windows VM. A few days ago I wanted to install the Partition Magic trial on my Win XP VM. Having left Windows around 2005 I figured that typing "Partition Magic Win XP download" in Google would be helpful. I got a handful of "reputable" download sources like CNet and the like. I went there and was bombarded…
I'll take this chance to recommend the following linux distributions to those non-sysadmins who are wondering which one they can try out: - Fedora 17 with Gnome. Out of the box it offers all kinds of installation options, like the one I always wanted and only found in Fedora (in my words): "Use all this but only this free space, and also encrypt it". The only downside is that out of the box it lacks some things every…