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What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

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Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#361

Post by klibertp »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #333
larrik wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion time: I've had a Mac Mini for 3 years, and I still haven't found any Apple-made desktop software I would call "decent". I've had only iPhones since the 3G came out, too, so I'm not just an anti-fanboy.

That's not an unpopular opinion -- I know a fair number of Mac users and I don't think I know any of them who are devoted fans of Apple's application (rather than system) software. I've been using Macs more or less full time since 1999; over those 15 years some of their applications have been pretty good, subjectively speaking, but in general Apple is pretty frustrating in this regard. They'll come up with a neat app…

> I don't think I know any of them who are devoted fans of Apple's application (rather than system) software.

I fail to see the difference between OSX and Windows then. Legacy Win32 APIs probably are still there, somewhere, but they've built a fairly solid system on top of that. PowerShell is one major argument in favour of Windows platform: it really makes resource management and scripting (and remote administration) quite nice. Meanwhile, for practically anything other than core system services (and sometimes for those too...) you need to install 3rd party applications.

It's exactly the same on Mac OS: I had to install Spectacle just to make the system support the most obvious shortcuts for positioning and resizing windows. Homebrew/mac ports are nice and I know of no Windows equivalent, but I think they target very specific kind of users and are rather limited in usefulness.

In any case: I'm a Linux user, have been using FreeBSD on the desktop before that for years, worked on Windows earlier, and now I'm being forced to use a Mac for iOS development. I see no real difference between OSX and Windows7/8 in terms of OS capabilities: out of the box they're both rather weak (for my purposes, anyway). With some tinkering and 3rd party applications both can be made into workable systems - but the tinkering is both harder and more limited than what's possible on Linux.

Other than mentioned homebrew and some degree of POSIX-compliance which makes compiling many *nix programs natively under Mac OS possible, what makes it nowadays better than Windows (I mean core OS functionality)?

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#362

Post by shampine »

basch wrote: post #321
shampine wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget TDSSKiller and Norton Power Eraser. Super useful tools for checking MBRs.

ive found malwarebytes rootkit detection to be roughly as effective as tdsskiller. it's not enabled by default, or you can download it as a separate product. mcafee has one too. rootkit buster has never detected a thing in my experience. i still run it first just to see if it ever will. https://www.malwarebytes.org/antirootkit/

I'm not familiar with Malwarebytes Antirootkit, but TDSSKiller from Kaspersky searches for 1 single rootkit, TDSS, and performs a removal. I haven't done this type of work in a while but 3-4 years ago it was the defacto tool of choice for dealing with MBR infections.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#363

Post by grkvlt »

grkvlt wrote: post #354
weavie wrote: post #11

I regularly get called by people complaining that their computer no longer works. Pretty much every time it turns out that their machine is loaded with crapware. It amazes me how people just put up with random browser windows popping up and having to search via some random search engine that has been imposed on them. At the minute I just have to put up with spending a few hours removing the worst offenders and then r…

> It amazes me how people just put up with [...] having to search via some random search engine that has been imposed on them Yes, exactly. It's as though your yellow pages phone book had its pages replaced with green paper, the entries were all written in comic sans and all of the entries just gave the same phone number for Dominos Pizza. And yet, you continue to use it to try and look things up, stopping occasional…

I expect it's down to a 'computers do inexplicable things all the time that I will never understand, so i better just put up with it or something worse might happen' mentality, which we (as IT professionals) can do something about. Computers should be as obvious, understandable and predictable as physical objects.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#364

Post by Retra »

forgottenpass wrote: post #319
danielweber wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whose fault exactly is it? People who think that software should be free, as in beer. Developers have to be paid. When people paid for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward. But now people think that software should be free as in beer, which means it comes with ad software or "sponsored software" that in turns sells ads, or spies on everything you do, or something to pay the bills.

Developers have to be paid. When people paid for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward. There are plenty of services I pay for that sell data about me and/or show me advertizements. So this is an appealing story, but it only works until someone decides "I could get paid, AND sell the user to advertizes/data harvesters." It's always easy to make now-impossible scenarios into appealing hypo…

Exactly.

Hey look:  -> "App store... (3 new)"

Pretty sure I bought this laptop. ($2000) But there sits an advertisement, right in my GUI. Yes, this one is pretty harmless, but it is still there.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#365

Post by Retra »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #99
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

> Because when the product is free the real product is YOU. I disagree with this conclusion. Also, I have a related issue with some of the opinions I hear e.g. on HN that confuse me. Many a person says in defense of ads - "but surely authors have to support themselves, otherwise there'd be no site/software", "TANSTAAFL", etc. But this seems to me to be in disagreement with observable reality. What I see is a strong a…

I've always considered the assertion that quality content is only created if there is financial reward to be a flagrant lie. Expectations of ads fully supporting websites are relatively new even to the world wide web, let alone the internet. 10 years ago, you might at best hope that your ads would offset a bit of the websites hosting costs. The really good content is put up by people who are in it because they care a…

I think there are probably far more people who will create crap content for financial reward than there are people who will create quality content for donations.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#367

Post by username223 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #168
username223 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every sane piece of Mac software: download a big disk image (dmg), mount it, copy the application folder to /Applications. To uninstall, drag it to the trash. Adobe software: download a tiny disk image, launch the hideous Adobe installer program, give it root, have it download and install God-knows-what to God-knows-where. To uninstall, open a terminal and go medieval on everything with a name containing "Adobe", "Ma…

Adobe creates the most user-hostile software that is not pure malware. I have always had a problem with adobe, and I used to say it was because 'they specialize in non-standards', but I think you have a much better point. It just feels like you're getting screwed every time you see that A.

> 'they specialize in non-standards'

I think you have the nub of it here. I first learned to loathe Adobe almost 20 years ago, with Acrobat for X11. Every other X11 program would spawn a new process and a new window when you typed "program ... &" in your xterm, but "acroread ... &" would talk to the One True Acroread Ur-process instead. This, of course, caused all sorts of unpleasant and non-standard behavior when opening and closing PDF files. Not to mention that the interface was a bloated nightmare compared to xdvi and ghostview.

Then they bought Macromedia and Flash, with its ability to create non-standard horrors on the web. It was like watching the formation of a black hole of abusive software, and I still wait for AOL and RealPlayer to be sucked in by Adobe's evil gravitational pull.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#368

Post by GhotiFish »

duaneb wrote: post #285
jarcane wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. For all that people handwring about "Won't somebody please think of our ad revenue!", I consider installing some kind of adblocker more or less a standard safety measure for the web. A huge volume of browser-vectored malware comes from bad ad clicks, and even I've made a mistake or two in the past clicking on bogus download buttons and the like. µBlock is especially good for this as some of the lists have addit…

And it's not like people with ad blockers would lead to ROI, anyway.

people defending ad blockers tend to say this, but that's not true. As much effort in advertisement is about validating your product as it is about selling it. No one buys a BMW from an online ad, but yet here it is! http://i.imgur.com/QCDc2gl.png

Well it's not there to sell cars so much as it is to say to the public "BMW are valid cars"

So just having the advertisement get seen is what's important to them. At least that's my understanding. Evaluate the argument for yourself: http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y695/el...

It's also another reason I filter ad's. I'm afraid they will manipulate the way I think.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#369

Post by _lce0 »

DownGoat wrote: post #324
_lce0 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to re-install windows to my family like once a year, but then I refused to doing it anymore but I offered to install ubuntu on their machines. It's being like 4 years so far and they hardly need any maintenance from me. IMOE the main issue are software-suites Cad and 3D : my dad is really used to windows, and learning the linux environment was an easy step for him. He could never do the switch to open source c…

In my experience Blizzard games has worked fine with wine. Did you try running the games with wine?

we did, but the performance wasn't good enough for playing. even modern games played better than older ones.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#370

Post by username223 »

_lce0 wrote: post #284
username223 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every sane piece of Mac software: download a big disk image (dmg), mount it, copy the application folder to /Applications. To uninstall, drag it to the trash. Adobe software: download a tiny disk image, launch the hideous Adobe installer program, give it root, have it download and install God-knows-what to God-knows-where. To uninstall, open a terminal and go medieval on everything with a name containing "Adobe", "Ma…

Whenever you install Chrome (not sure if other Google product that does the same), you got GoogleUpdate as .. - startup trigger - firefox addon (!!) - scheduled task And it's not Google alone, big players are the worst malware distributors as part of they _own_ products Stallman was ALWAYS right.

Ah, GoogleUpdate... Trying out Chrome gave me the unfortunate opportunity to learn about launchctl(1), Apple's version of cron(8). I haven't used Apple software on Windows in awhile, or vice versa, but I bet both are similarly awful. I didn't know about the Firefox addon, but that's a clever little extra bit of evil.
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