I can't tell you how many times in the years before Y2K became the topic du jour I pointed out inappropriate use of two-character years (or other schemes which would have also have failed).
Indeed, in one organisation I worked for, back in the 80s, a new system was put together with its own internal date format. That was so limited it had to be changed because it ran out before the system it was used in had even gone live.
It only takes one exploit, especially if the user thinks he is safe.
I have worked on projects where they had to redesign the hardware before delivery because what they used to start with was obsolete by the time the project was nearing completion...
(even in 1989 2K byte 27 series EPROMS were getting scarce!)
True... I would find not being able to run most of my software more of a problem.
MM yes, especially if you had paid for it and the replacements were free.
That I could live with if the replacements were any cop.
In article , Adrian C writes
They tried and failed with Red Flag Linux:
almost certainly with a backdoor to the Chinese equivalent of the NSA.
In article , snipped-for-privacy@care2.com writes
Both Windows and Linux boxes at home, Linux at work (with Win7 running in a VM).
Bugger OS advocacy, I just use the right tool for the job.
To be fair, that applies to all such AV that offers 'totally free' versions (Avira and Avast, to name the only other two I'm aware of).
However, to put it in perspective, AVG Free's problem is they give you far too much (bloat). It (AVG) _used_ to be the best of the bunch until version 8 came along, bloating it beyond all usefulness[1] about
6 or 7 years back.A recent experience prior to that with Avast's s**te GUI when I temporarily used it to remove the stration C worm that had totally borked AVG led me to try Avira.
Avira free, unfortunately, popped up an almost full screen sized advert with a hard sell that looked indistinguishable from the scaremongering exhortations of fake AV malwares every time it did a virus signature database update. Luckily, a rather pissed off 'hacker' had worked out a recipe to totally eliminate this 'annoyance feature' and published it for all similarly annoyed users to use.
This, as far as the technically savvy were concerned, proved to be a totally counterproductive 'hard sell' tactic on the part of Avira since, it completely lost them any chance whatsoever at 'upselling' the 'full fat' product. Whether Avira even noticed or not, I don't know. In any case, when they _totally_ removed win2k support, I was rather glad to dump them.
When I gave Avast another shot, I was quite pleased to see that they'd given the "Goth" programmer who'd been responsible for the earlier dark and moody lookalike cryptic media player GUI the sack and finally employed 'someone with a clue' to create a useable interface that looked like an actual AV front end.
Better still, the very useful control over turning the 'protection' on and off at will (with the more useful than AVG's 'Johnny come lately' control options, offering disable for 10 minutes, 1 hour, until rebooted or until re-enabled manually (the misleadingly labelled "disable permanently" option).
It's a feature that comes into its own when you want the SpyBot and MBAM scans to run unmolested by a redundent monitoring by the AV 'protection' The 10 minutes option being ample to both update and 'quick' scan with MBAM and SpyBot on this win2k system (I'd have to select the 1 hour option on a winXP or worse setup and manually re-enable it afterward).
It's true that Avast has taken to more frequently popping up an advert box but at least, unlike Avira's crass hard sell window (and, afair, similar desktop blocking AVG window - correct me if I'm wrong though), it only occupies a small window bottom right of the screen as a system tray notification box which disappears anyway after, in my case, 5 or 7 seconds[2].
Since I've never ever gotten the voice anunciator feature to work in this particular win2k install (it works on two other win2k boxes ok), I don't know whether such ads utilise this feature to add to the 'annoyance factor'. If they do, I suspect they'd be mercifully brief and to the point. If you know otherwise, you can set me straight on this point.
[1] I've never been a fan of the "Fit and Forget" 'all in one' 'monoculture' 'man for all seasons' single vendor AV / security solution being peddled by the likes of McAfee, Norton and their 40 odd competitiors. I've found the optimum solution to be SpyBot S&D plus a nice lightweight free AV to keep the risk of malware attack minimised to an acceptly low level (MBAM is just a sanity checking utlity, second string to my bow item).I much prefer this two pronged attack on the issue of protection against malware threats over the 'all in one' fit and _forget_' type of solution. I refer to this scheme as being a "Dynamic Duo" of protection[3] since the analogy rather neatly describes the two components as 'Batman' and Robin' where 'Robin' is the freeby AV and SpyBot S&D is 'Batman'.
What happened to 'Robin' when AVG moved from ver 7.5 to ver 8.0 could best be described as 'Robin' replacing his 30Lb utlity belt with a
200Lb one. [2] The pop up warnings and information announcements can be reprogrammed from their default 20 second timeouts to much shorter ones so it's not too difficult to reduce the annoyance factor of the ads. It would be foolishness indeed to claim such pop ups as being a 'deal breaker' since all the other freebies do the same, only usually with a much greater annoyance factor. [3] I have another analogy to describe how AV has mutated over the years. It's called the "Magnificent Seven Thousand" effect. In the early days (before microsoft invented such convuluted windows OSen as win95 and up, the then current AV offerings were akin to the 'Magnificent Seven" protecting a 100 strong village.The first notable morphing of this 'protection' into the "Magnificent Seven Thousand" came with an early McAfee product a good 12 to 15 years ago[4], swiftly followed by Semantecs' sullying of the previously renowned Norton 'brand name' with other AV products scrambling onto this bandwagon of stifling protection which so sapped a "PC's will to Live".
I reckon, on this scale, Avast Free rates somewhere around the "Magnificent Seven hundred" mark (The PC always remaining as the "100 strong village" in these analogies).
[4] I was actually paid good money at the time by an estate agency to eradicate McAfee AV from a collection of four windows 98 PCs in one of their offices in order to make them responsive and usable once more. I think I installed F-Prot to give the PCs a modicum of protection. No SpyBot S&D though since it hadn't been 'invented' then.
Indeed, but advocacy for linux is the result of finding that it IS the right tool for the job.
I am now up to THREE cases of people sending out MS word docs that were unreadable by the majority of the recipients ON WINDOWS whereas Libre Office 4.x COULD read them and so I sent PDFs back to the original sender.
When Microsofts own software can't read its own products and free software CAN its rather a nail in the compatibility coffin.,.
This is very true. People use "compatibility" as a reason to stick with MS Office, yet when SWMBO had a job app a few years back, it was sent to her as a .DOC saved by one version of Word. She tried to open it using a different version of Word. It was unusable. IIRC the ~4 page form (lots of fields) had exploded to about 35 pages.
OpenOffice opened it just fine. Fill it in, PDF it, send it back.
'course, Open/LibreOffice vs MS Office isn't a Linux vs Windows thing.
No, but the fact of the matter is that if you ARE on Linbux unless you are doing something very advanced, yu are likely to get a better result than an XP user using office 98..
In message , Adrian writes
I've been finding that LibreOffice seems to work better now than OpenOffice at the Word decoding process. I don't know why - it has always been an emergency where family members have emailed documents to me for urgent printing because their office printer has failed.
The machine I leave lying around for the family to use runs Ubuntu, but we do keep finding things that I don't know how to make it do.
My current problem is how to advise someone who has a machine that runs XP and has been plagued with banners. She is a full-time live-in carer of someone else. She is only at her own house for 2, 2hour periods per week and during that time catches up with emails, web purchases etc. She also has a main family genealogy application that she believes only runs on XP.
My current thinking is to replace MSSE temporarily with Avast and then either bring a complete copy of her software here to test on later OS's or to get her to spend part of her 2 hours next week handing the problem to, say, PCWorld and get them to sell her something suitable. I really can't see any version of Linux being an option.
A properly set up XP machine would minimise the risk of that, of course. Clean it thoroughly, then tie it down - user using a "limited" account, etc.
Her version, p'raps. But that doesn't mean that's the only genealogy app or even the most recent version of that app.
However, there's at least one genealogy app out there which would refuse to run on XP unless the user had full admin permissions...
In article , The Natural Philosopher writes
All part of their plan to milk the Orifice cash cow for all they can get. "Oh, you can't read that file on Office 2003? You'll need to upgrade to the latest version". At a cost, of course. And forcing users into the cloud with Orifice 365, a not-so-subtle attempt to convert orifice from the licensing model to software-as-a-service (aka pay as you go).
This articles are an interesting analysis of M$'s attitude to end of life for XP and their future business strategy:
The second link is from last summer but still worth a read.
In article , Mike Tomlinson scribeth thus
Just give this one a try works very well and its free!...
Apart from the "downgrader" available for free from MS, that is.
Any quite a few do (shut down your firewall).
My opinion is that software firewalls only offer an illusion of protection, which is worse than none at all. Once they have bypassed or shutdown your firewall then you have already lost.
Although that and the dotcom bubble bursting harmed the IT industry for quite a time. Many companies decided to keep on using their old systems (irony) instead of developing new ones.
Until recently I still had to deal with protocols which transmitted the year still using only two digits! I don't know whether these protocols have been corrected even now.
LOL. From the resources it eats and the bugs unfixed you could easily label it malware.
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