261–270 of 468 posts
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VLC is open source. It would be trivial for a rebundler to remove that warning. If they are violating the license already, there seems to be no impediment to changing the code for personal gain.
VLC for Windows is hard to compile to be honest. But binary patching is doable, indeed.
Further, AFAIK his SocialCam is worth tons of money as well, mostly thanks to Facebook overspamming practices [3]
Truly surprised PG is not full time in spam business; he would make triple killing! :)
HN moderators: its OK to downvote if the truth feels uncomfortable to you.
EDIT: Since this is getting strongly upvoted; here are the links:
[1] http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...
[2] http://www.tnooz.com/2011/06/01/news/airbnb-admits-rogue-sal...
[3] http://www.pcmike.com/what-im-thinkin/beware-of-socialcam
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A lot of people these days are bashing Apple and Google for creating walled gardens with their app stores, but this is really the primary reason such walled gardens have taken off. They offer a mostly crapware-free experience. If Linux on the desktop were to get popular, I'd hate to imagine what might happen to the open source Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu repositories.
If Linux on the desktop were to get popular, I'd hate to imagine what might happen to the open source Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu repositories. Nothing. In case you haven't been paying attention, Debian repositories were "app stores" before there were app stores. The software goes through extensive vetting and rigorous testing; no, I'm not saying every line of code is inspected, but to claim that a Debian maintainer wou…
...through extensive vetting and rigorous testing...
Same goes for Debian; some of the more "fringe packages" (those of upstream projects that haven't been updated in a while) tended to rot (compilation option changes to dependencies that silently broke parts of the program), and packages from upstream projects that changed rapidly tended to have dependency issues.
I'd also like to point out that while Debian may have had "app stores" before anyone else so to speak. The implementation left much to be desired compared to today.
Today a user simply selects an application and it gets installed. There's no prompts about whether I want the 37 additional dependencies, no text-based prompts about the configuration of some obscure package, and certainly the presentation was sorely lacking.
So yes, Debian may have had the concept early on, but as usual, Apple made something only a geek could love into something usable by everyone.
I can speak quite a bit about this "industry": We (VLC) receive 1 of those offers per day. They are liars, shady business, IP violators and are downright dangerous. They have all those great offers for you, but they refuse to give any details as soon as you ask any question. More than half of them are "the biggest in the world" (sic). They lie about download numbers, about download size, about number of software actu…
You may be right about the industry as a whole, but I'm betting you're wrong about this particular instance based on what I know about PG and YC. When I was reading the original TC article, I was thinking that there is actually an incredible opportunity here to create a legitimate ad network that would allow desktop developers to monetize similarly to how it's done on the web - to basically become the DoubleClick of…
Tracking IP and even MAC addresses? Hello? Spyware is spyware.
Also: ads are ads. If your product does nothing respectable (as opposed to selling eyeballs to advertisers under false pretenses) that is worth paying for it to anyone, that's bad luck. It doesn't justify deliberately and systematically messing with the rational decision making process of people, and that others are already doing that is no justification either, nor that they have been doing it for so long.
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Because the assumed knowledge required to understand the procedure under Archlinux is vast compared to that under Windows. Here are the concepts you need to know in order to do the work under Archlinux: 0. How to load your terminal program 1. The command line 2. Permissions/root 3. Package managers in general 4. pacman in particular (what, it's not the game?) 5. Command line switches 6. Piping 7. grep 8. What "looks…
Your overall point is correct, but your "under Windows" example is oversimplified. The Windows user still needs to know: 1) What an "installer" is 2) Where on the filesystem it goes when it's downloaded 3) How to navigate to that location in Explorer 4) That double-clicking the installer runs it etc. Some of these are things that you can learn from general Windows usage, but then the same could be said of several of…
One of my grandparents usually just clicks "ok / next" "until the thing works". They don't understand any of the things you claim they do. And despite my best efforts to dissuade them from doing that sort of thing, they still do :-(
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Oh. Nice. "The ones I deem appropriate". No, actually I think every developer deserves compensation. But they should ask for it, set a price. The business model with ad-/crap-/bloatware is equivalent to these annoying people (I see more and more of them on the streets) that hand you a rose/card/small ~thing~ right away, shove it in your face and ask for 2/5/10 bucks after you accepted what was quite obviously a gift.…
I got hit by that "take this rose, I will pretend to be mute until you do" ~18 years ago in Boston and Detroit, and hadn't seen it since. I thought it faded away, but maybe it sweeps through in waves as new people move into the city.
> 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.
For instance, you can quite often uniquely identify a person given their date of birth, gender, and zip code, none of which are nearly as unique as a MAC address[1]. Even the combination of these factors results in [1] http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin...
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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.
Seriously. Take a look at the official site for the excellent open-source Windows graphics editor Paint.NET, for instance: http://www.getpaint.net/ Now tell me where you are supposed to click to download the actual application. It confuses me, and I'm an experienced user who knows to look out for these sorts of things. I have no idea how normal people ever find the damn thing. My question is: whose fault is this? Is…
Google should not allow ANY ads that contain a Download button, when the page has a link containing the text "Download." These ads can have no other purpose but to confuse users who are looking to download software. The problem is that Google makes money from these ads, and these ads have fantastic clickthrough rates. If they banned these types of ads, they'd make less money.
The author of Paint.NET is making good money every time a user mistakenly clicks on such an ad. This money also reduces his incentive to get rid of the confusing ad.
I get around this problem by running an ad-blocker, so I only see the one legitimate download link. But most users do not.
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The commenter purports to have a degree of technical expertise - they're running a VM and have some need for Partition Magic. Those features place the scenario many standard deviations from typical Windows user activities. 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 W…
> In short, a person looking for Partition Magic in 2013 is likely to suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome. I'm asking myself where I could have insulted you to provoke such a reaction.
Dunning-Kruger effects are the result of one believing that they have more expertise than the do. With regards to the Windows ecosystem, this seems to be the case.
One of the salient features of my experience with the Dunning-Kruger effect is that I don't recognize situations in which I am exemplifying it - and logic would dictate that I exemplify it more often than I am aware.
As a crapware vector, partition magic is akin to Nigerian spam. Those who seek it are the ideal targets just as those who respond to the Nigerian banker's uncle are ideal candidates. Both pursue something too good to be true.
I am not claiming that your experience isn't real. I am saying that its conclusion is not that of a Windows expert.