geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: BucklingSpring on Sun, 16 June 2013, 10:54:48
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I have been around for a while. I saw the birth of the Internet, growing up strong and become what it is today.
I always liked shareware/freeware sites offering pretty much anything you can dream of. Simtel was a great source. This morning I asked myself what ever happened to it. Long story short Digital River who owned Simtel at the end, simply shut it down for lack of funding.
Everyone needs money
That's fine with me - but at what cost?
Once upon a time, not so far away, you could think of what you need, put some relevant keywords in a search engine and end up with what you want.
Imagine that You go on a specialized site click on the beeping- download button and by some sort of magic, you get the product you expect on your disk ready to install.
Today, clicking on the obvious download button is just going to hack you for a ride and bring you everywhere except where you want to be. My poor mother who likes browsing and install what she thinks she needs get slapped every times. Now she calls me way too often for help.
Links are obfuscated; you can't even see what's under anymore. Shareware sites have their own downloaders and installers to bring even more junk to you. You now download the downloader, install the shareware client downloader and it downloads the shareware installer that might have, if you are lucky, the program you are looking for.
After the years, I developed tricks to avoid getting caught. A good one was to find the product home page and get it from there.
This morning one of my product homepage dropped me to the sharks and sent me to a site with 30 download buttons of all colors and shapes.
Am I the only annoyed by the big DOWNLOAD button?
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apt-get install <whatever> <whatevernumbertwo> <somethingdifferentfromwhateveroneandtwo> <whateverwhateverwhatever>
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You worked with Tim Berners-Lee?
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Adblock and Ghostery might be a good start maybe if you're using firefox.
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your mom needs 4 apps
microsoft word
winrar
vlc
firefox
why does she need anything else.
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Is Tucows still around?
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Are there sites that doesn't endorse such nasty/ aggressive advertising practice?
I want to promote sharewares that use "fair" marketing techniques.
Is there an association of those?
One successor of my beloved Simtel was TuCows. So far they have managed to stay relatively clean as far as junk ads and other things to fool the user into a trap.
Are there sites that doesn
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You outtyped me :-)
Is Tucows still around?
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You want to give her a shout? Be my guest.
I recall my first attempt in mid 90's when she eared about Webshot and install it by herself.
Then she soon discovered streaming radios, choking her US Robotics 14.4 and wonder why.
And then... never ending story
your mom needs 4 apps
microsoft word
winrar
vlc
firefox
why does she need anything else.
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You worked with Tim Berners-Lee?
rather with leonard kleinrock. he said he saw the birth of the internet, not world wide web.
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I feel the same way that you do.
Downloading garbageware is not a bad price to pay for getting something for free, in the grand scheme of things. I am not really too upset about running Revo Uninstaller regularly to clear out the trash, and accept it as the "pound of flesh" that some people require as payment for whatever else they give me.
Most upsetting to me are the stealth parasites that are hard to find and remove, even when you know that they are there.
And worse, like horrible 2-year-olds, they never "clean up after themselves" and leave everything reset they wanted it !
"Google.com" has been my home page for at least a decade, without exception, but I have to reset it monthly, if not weekly, because somebody, somehow, sneaked in and messed with it. And if I had a nickel for every "toolbar" that I have wasted many minutes uninstalling, I could practically retire.
TV ads infuriate me, too, after having a DVR for a couple of years it is now extremely painful to watch something "live" and not be able to skip through commercials. Sometimes I deliberately do something else to kill 10 minutes just to create enough slack to get around having to watch the ads.
First world problems.
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Are there sites that doesn't endorse such nasty/ aggressive advertising practice?
I want to promote sharewares that use "fair" marketing techniques.
Is there an association of those?
One successor of my beloved Simtel was TuCows. So far they have managed to stay relatively clean as far as junk ads and other things to fool the user into a trap.
Are there sites that doesn
FileHippo is fairly neat and clean.
And no, you're not the only one annoyed with all the obvious fake download buttons. I never fall for them, but they still piss me off.
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Cnet's Download.com is quite useable IMO.
Here in Germany there's a bunch of computer magazines that host good freeware collections on their websites, namely heise.de, chip.de and computerbild.de . Maybe theres something like that in the US too.
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apt-get install <whatever> <whatevernumbertwo> <somethingdifferentfromwhateveroneandtwo> <whateverwhateverwhatever>
This, I switched to using linux exclusively after XP came out. Haven't looked back.
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@fohat.digs -> I have been a big fan of sandboxing pretty much anything new I try. VirtualBox is FREE and pretty decent. Not has hot as VMWare products, especially when it comes to 3D GPU emulation but for most standard apps... It's great. You can try first in a virtual environment to see how it goes and move to the real deal when confident.
I'm not familiar with Revo Uninstaller. Does it tracks/backups file changes (driver updates, etc) and registry changes?
Another trick - for sites that ask for email is using a provider that allows unlimited email aliases. With that you can create a one time use email without exposing your main email account to endless spam.
I like your suggestion... Maybe we should start a list of decent utility sites that are fairly clean.
TuCows
FileHippo
Cnet's Download.com
heise.de, chip.de and computerbild.de
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Gotta agree with the hunt-the-download-button. I suspect eventually you'll see litigation or ad networks get too annoyed by it, like the old banners which resembled a WinXP dialog box and looked especially hilarious on a Linux machine.
What I find annoying are the "download will be automatically triggered" pages because they frequently work badly, if at all, on mobile devices.
Honestly, I wonder if there's a potential niche for Steam to expand into. It's already got a reputation of "you can download stuff from it and it's going to be what you asked for"-- all they need is to stocking "ABC Trial Version" for free and "ABC Registered Version" as a paid download.
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Gotta agree with the hunt-the-download-button. I suspect eventually you'll see litigation or ad networks get too annoyed by it, like the old banners which resembled a WinXP dialog box and looked especially hilarious on a Linux machine.
What I find annoying are the "download will be automatically triggered" pages because they frequently work badly, if at all, on mobile devices.
Honestly, I wonder if there's a potential niche for Steam to expand into. It's already got a reputation of "you can download stuff from it and it's going to be what you asked for"-- all they need is to stocking "ABC Trial Version" for free and "ABC Registered Version" as a paid download.
Steam have started offering software, but so far it's mostly more expensive software, such as art software, budgeting software and some benchmarking software.
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Most of the time where I am looking for some odd free utility to accomplish something, for example I had a need for a cue splitter recently, I always check sourceforge first. The site is not utterly annoying to use, and the downloads are always exactly what you are expecting it to be. Whether the programs works as expected can sometimes be another matter, but I digress.
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Are there sites that doesn't endorse such nasty/ aggressive advertising practice?
I want to promote sharewares that use "fair" marketing techniques.
Is there an association of those?
One successor of my beloved Simtel was TuCows. So far they have managed to stay relatively clean as far as junk ads and other things to fool the user into a trap.
Are there sites that doesn
FileHippo is fairly neat and clean.
And no, you're not the only one annoyed with all the obvious fake download buttons. I never fall for them, but they still piss me off.
No custom installation options.
Here is one thing that pisses me off, everytime I update anything Adobe they ask me if I want to let the updater running all the time to check for updates and automatically install. Well I mever wanted auto-install the past 50 times now did I?
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even cnet download dot com, nearly forces you to use their installer. now the thing to do is NOT us the download button, but rather look at the download graphic button and "hunt" for the small font download link that says "download without installer" usually directly underneath the really big download graphic.
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even cnet download dot com, nearly forces you to use their installer. now the thing to do is NOT us the download button, but rather look at the download graphic button and "hunt" for the small font download link that says "download without installer" usually directly underneath the really big download graphic.
**** Cnet and their stupid adware.
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**** Cnet and their stupid adware.
Stupid adware - Hum... Is there any other kind of adware?
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**** Cnet and their stupid adware.
Stupid adware - Hum... Is there any other kind of adware?
Not really, I just wanted to express my anger by making sure everyone knows that it is STUPID.
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FileHippo is fairly neat and clean.
And no, you're not the only one annoyed with all the obvious fake download buttons. I never fall for them, but they still piss me off.
Except when they run an ad with a "download" on it.
Adblock Edge works for that though, but yeah, I use File Hippo all the time for work.
Here is one thing that pisses me off, everytime I update anything Adobe they ask me if I want to let the updater running all the time to check for updates and automatically install. Well I mever wanted auto-install the past 50 times now did I?
My problem is how rare the auto update even works even when you do want it to.
I swear it;s like it's programed to do exactly the opposite of what you want, which, considering it's Flash, that wouldn't surprise me.
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apt-get install <whatever> <whatevernumbertwo> <somethingdifferentfromwhateveroneandtwo> <whateverwhateverwhatever>
YUM!
for windows:
ninite.com
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apt-get install <whatever> <whatevernumbertwo> <somethingdifferentfromwhateveroneandtwo> <whateverwhateverwhatever>
YUM!
"homebrew" for me now.
zypper until the beginning of june.