Otaku, Cedric's weblog

You could just give in and go to Trillian instead :-)
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/

Doesn't iTunes have a way of turning this off? ie: "Check for iTunes upgrades automatically"

hi cedric,

"The arrogance of the authors of these programs is absolutely baffling, and they should know by now that you don't get mindshare by forcing products down users' throats."

I agree that most commercial vendors (including your examples) are arrogant. But there are some(Firefox) open source software that does the same too; AND I'm not sure that these OSS developers are arrogant -- so I'm thinking
"Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence"

BR,
~A

I am irritated by piggyback products. Again Yahoo comes to mind. No, I don't want to install the yahoo Internet toolbar with acrobat, flash, shockwave, or messenger. And please stop asking. Yahoo is on the top of several of my irritation lists.

Sun Java (j2sdk) - jusched.exe is installed automatically into the system startup without any option to disable that behavior.

Yahoo IM latest version borders on spyware. If you haven't upgraded yet, you are lucky. You will save a lot of heartburn by not upgrading.
Check http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/yahoo-venturing-into-adware-stay-away-from-yahoo-instant-messenger/

There is a way to disable the update mechanism of j2sdk:
Just go to Control Panel/Java; there you'll find the option.

There is a way to disable the automatic update mechanism in j2sdk.
Just go to "Control Panel/Java"; there you'll find the option.

AcroPDF has a good executable called Acrobat Speed Up that disables a whole bunch of plugins in Reader, so they don't load them on every start-up. The link is at:

http://www.acropdf.com/pdfsu.exe

from www.acropdf.com

It also claims to be able to disable the automatic updates feature.

The thing that *really* gets my goat about Acrobat Reader is that V7 shows you flashy ads all the time in the top-right corner of the screen. There doesn't seem to be any way to turn that off.

But then, I don't normally get bugged by these problems since I use Preview.app on the Mac ;-)

MusicMatch has to be up there, too (now owned by Y!... guess we can see why :D).

I've refused to install it on my new machine, but I remember it nagging me CONSTANTLY.

For networked products I think it makes sense to automatically upgrade as there could be bugs they want to patch that expose you to security risks.

In the case of Yahoo Messenger though, don't by any means go through with the so called "upgrade". The "Yahoo Messenger with Voice" is by far the buggiest piece of cr*p I've seen in a long time. Also, once you "upgraded" the older version just isn't available anymore so there's no way of going back to a working version.

I've almost completely stopped using Yahoo Messenger on Windows because of this screw up. I supposed they must've knee-jerked when Google came out with their IM client and rushed the whole thing through QA. A good lesson in what happens when the marketing/technology balance becomes scewed too much.

I have to totally disagree with what you're staying about Acrobat Reader (or is it Acrobat Reader.app on the Mac. btw...isnt it annoying when Mac users refer to Mac applications as somthing.app? its like always calling Windows apps something.exe). Things got worse up until version 6. Version 7 is lightyears better than 6. They significantly sped things up on the 7 update.

Yahoo Messenger - why even use it? Switch away as fast as you possibly can. Proprietary log format? No thanks, I'll take text or HTML format thank you very much. GAIM for Windows is now pretty stable, and that's what I use. There's Trillian of course, if you like that better.

Acrobat Reader - yeah, pretty annoying. Version 6.0 started to have ads in corner that constantly change to get your attention, WTF? I have neglected to switch to 7.0 to find out what kind of abomination they have created. BTW, you can remove many of the plugins which you don't use (by manually deleting the plugin files) and it loads *much* quicker. Haven't tried that in recent versions, though. Why don't they provide that as an option? Fortunately in Linux there are some decent alternatives (e.g. Evince), but what alternative PDF readers exist for Windows?

iTunes - Overrated music player to begin with, there are better choices out there. I always thought Winamp 5.x was much better. They have an upgrade nag, but there is an option to turn it off. If you are using Linux, there is Amarok which is great (also heard Winamp 5.x works fine under WINE). I use iTunes when I use my Mac (which happens mainly when I'm doing music recording), and I'm constantly underwhelmed by it. Apparently you can get Amarok to work through Fink, but haven't tried that yet.

Heh, I gave up on iTunes since I stumbled upon Anapod (www.anapod.com), anyways. I still miss the nice genre-artist-album filters, but control over what and when to copy makes up for that.

links are broken !! spyware ? :-)

http://www.beust.com/aop-thread.html

switch to gnu/linux ...

There's always XML Spy of course. "Click here right now to buy our Enterprise Edition! Click within 3 seconds or we'll just debit your credit card!" I'm making it up a little, but it reminds me of Dogbert's "no-click shopping" invention.

Regarding iTunes: for the life of me, I still cannot understand why people agree to paying high prices for compressed music with all sorts of ridiculous DRM strings attached, while for pretty much the same price, they can get their music on CD or even hybrid SACD. Speaking of iTunes peeves: the underlying conceptual schema is utterly flawed for organizing classical music properly!

Those ads and the "phone home" "feature" build into most shareware (not all)/commercial products drives me nuts. The situation is way worse in the Windows ecosystem, which is one of the reason I use Un*x OSes.

That and the fact that I like absolute control. By default, any network traffic is rejected. Plain and simple. Then I add rules allowing certain users/applications to access *some* network ressources.

As for Acrobat Reader, I use it. And I don't get any ads. I use Acrobat Reader to *read* PDF files only (seems pretty logical uh?) since years. Now I'm using version 7.0. The application doesn't have the right to emit network traffic and all the "plugins" are turned off (it's as simple as removing files from a repertory, I did it when version 7.0 came out, a long time ago, so I don't remember exactly but Google is your friend).

No ads. Now I may miss some kinky functionality (I'm sure that some .pdf files are using JavaScript in some very creative way ;) but I don't have any ads and I can read (and print) every pdf document I ever needed fine.

This may not be working for all programs, but it works darn well for me.

For example, when working on a plugin for a certain (commercial) Java IDE (some time ago, that IDE has a better plugin development support now), I could go into complicated hack or simply launch two instances of the IDE simultaneously. The second IDE refused to launch "you cannot launch two instances simultaneously on this system".

Really? I'm in control. I removed the rule allowing the user account launching the second IDE instance to emit any kind of traffic. That's it. One (stateful firewall) line fix.

The point is: as a developer, it's not the OS that should decide what you're allowed to do, it's not the applications that should decide either. It's you.

Ads, just say no.
Phone home, just say no.
OS where you have no control over your system, just say... well, you decide.

That said, I have a computer running Windows here, for playing a game from a company called Blizzard... And the firewall is allowing that Windows computer to emit and receive traffic on *one* port.

:)

There is a simple solution to upgrade negs. BLOCKING the access to the update server with a firewall. I did it to Yahoo Messenge with success and many others.

Umm... about Yahoo... it doesn't FORCE you to install it, it just gives you that little window endlessly... but what if they didn't. Would your lazy ass do it? Probably not. Basically anyone without Yahoo voice and with analog yahoo sucks balls because they don't have any of the new features... it's for your own good so stop being such a prick, damn. It's FREE. -.-

You can stop Yahoo! Messenger from displaying the pop-up upgrade reminder relatively easily.

Go into c:\program files\yahoo!\messenger and rename the file 'yupdater.exe' to something else (like '_updater.exe') and Messenger, being unable to find the file, won't be able to run the pop-up.

You can stop Yahoo! Messenger from displaying the pop-up upgrade reminder relatively easily.

Go into c:\program files\yahoo!\messenger and rename the file 'yupdater.exe' to something else (like '_updater.exe') and Messenger, being unable to find the file, won't be able to run the pop-up.

@ Angsuman Chakraborty and others, you can go back to other versions of Yahoo IM if you dont like their latest offering. I hate their new buggy, flash filled version, so I went back to 7.0.2.120, and disabled their updater as mentioned above. Life is great again.
http://filehippo.com/download_yahoo_messenger/ - Download older versions on the right in the green area.

BTW, Gaim is great, but it lacks important features like stealth settings etc.

The Quicktime Nagger is bad, too. Here's how I fixed mine.

1.Navigate to c:\program files\apple software update\SoftwareUpdate.exe

2. Rename SoftwareUpdate.exe to SoftwareUpdate.sucks (or any ending other than .exe)

problem solved. -- E.J.