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But... but... HP and Dell scored top marks from Greenpeace. Clearly the packaging was needed to protect the license papers which means you'd kill more tree for more paper if they are damaged.

[This also show that Greenpeace ranking is irrelevant]

HP has given me boxes that size for 4 screws in a plastic bag, wrapped in foam. Repeatedly.

bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."

It's not that THEY'RE dumb (which they are so very dumb) but rather they feel the need to dumb down everything for their audience.

I want to punch that Fox man in the face. And I feel so bad for Ken Christiansen (sp?). It seemed apparent he was not prepared to deal with such a moron.

If someone is dumb enough to leave the microphone connected on an intercept phone, they deserve to get caught.

Hard drive? That's obsolete. Everyone's using solid state these days.
 

Beat the shit out of the fucker.

Glad to see more and more companies moving away from GPL, understanding that it will only limit the potential adoption. As a highly respected registered member of the Slashdot community, I'm posting as AC as this post will very likely be modded troll.

NOT in order of annoyingness:

Quicktime - It's both a terrible media player and it is insanely unwilling to be removed. Apple's central design concept seems to be preventing the user from doing what he wants. If I delete qttask.exe, it means I don't want that file anymore, not that I want it to be resurrected. If I disable it in msconfig, it doesn't mean that the next time Quicktime runs I want it to get a new startup entry.

iTunes - ituneshelper.exe is about the same as qttask, and iTunes is even worse at playing music than Quicktime is at playing movies. It's the single most bloated piece of software I've ever used. The iTunes store is another reason to avoid it, not to use it. It also crashes way too much on a new MacBook Pro, and since I don't know what Apple compatible software is a good replacement for it, I can't just replace it for my friend as I would if he had Windows.

Apple Updater - Everyone I know just installed Safari. They didn't mean to.

Flash - Thank you, Flashblock, for making the internet useable again. Thank you, bad web designers, for sticking retarded flash "intro pages" on your sites so I can see that they've been blocked and then avoid your company on principal.

HP Printer Philosophy - Thanks to you, too, HP, for making a printer that needs an IP to be set via a web interface in order to access that same web interface. Thanks to my neighbor for having a parallel cable sitting around so I could access it in a more traditional way.

Windows Desktop - Why do you lose my icon placement every time your resolution changes? Luckily, there are countless little freeware apps to save icon positions.

Real Player - You basically invented the Apple "if you uninstall me but I will grow more powerful than you can possibly imagine" routine, so you get extra evil points for originality.

Logitech Mouse Drivers - My mouse drivers are now 100 megs. Finally they fixed the two year problem of needing to run them manually after booting (running on startup caused them to fail), but they still involve two separate taskbar icons and take up a ton of RAM.

Word - I know how to make you do what I want, but it took years to learn how to both stop your autoformatting and then put in the formatting I want. I hate the way you place images. I hate the way you resize my stuff after I've already locked it down.

Verizon Phone UI - My phone had a great UI and lots of nice capabilities when it was made. You removed bluetooth file transfers so I'd have to pay you to get photos off my phone, and you made the interface ugly. You removed the ability to vibrate and ring at the same time. I'm glad my phone was so easily hackable.

Flash (again, but bear with me) movie players - The only reason you exist is to keep me from saving video to my hard disk. Guess what. I can still do it. Meanwhile, you're slow, often not resizable without using a magnifying tool to manually zoom onto your little box, and you require me to enable flash.

I know how to fix or replace all of you, but you kill me every time I have to use a new PC and wade through your bloated code again.

holy_calamity writes "A material tough enough to scratch diamond that can be made without resorting to massive pressure has been developed at UCLA. A regular furnace and a zap of current is enough to meld boron with the metal rhenium."

MicroBarcode writes "Microsoft Corp. has finally found a taker for a colorful barcode technology the company shelved two years ago because it failed to catch on Microsoft said this week that the small square symbols, filled with red, green, yellow and black triangles, will appear on DVD and video game cases later this year, thanks to a licensing deal with the ISAN International Agency. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed."

Alexander Ufimtsev writes "CNews reports that the Russian Ministry of Information and Communication has come up with an ingenious plan to prevent Alexander Ponosov-like cases once and for all by purchasing a blanket software licenses for all schools in the country (English translation).

From the article:

The ministry has negotiated with major producers of software on the possibility of a single centralized procurement. According to the minister, as a result of discussions producers have agreed to the unique conditions of licensing for the school...

After studying the needs of regions, Ministry of Information and Communication formed the a unified list of software for school computers. This list includes operating system, office, graphical editors and antivirus software...

With this communist era plan looking very likely to be approved, soon we could be witnessing beginning of the end of open source movement in Russia."

nmb3000 writes "Apparently some schools and teachers in the United Kingdom are more concerned about offending their students than teaching them history. Specifically, schools are dropping subject such as the Holocaust to avoid "upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial." Other parts of history some schools are removing are the Crusades, and the conflict-filled history of the state of Israel. If "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", what does that mean for future generations who never learned of it?"

Intelopment writes "I'm trying to select a good content management system for a K-12 school website, and wanted to get suggestions. System should have the following properties:
— Idiot Proof (no HMTL skills exist at the school)
— The school staff needs to manage their own day-to-day content, although a knowledgable nerd (me) would be available for admin/setup/etc.
— Features can be limited, or quite rich, such as allowing teachers to define homework content for their students. (Optional)
— At a minimum, user managed content, but more user friendly than just a wiki.
— Willing to pay some money, but Open Source is important.
— Need the ability to provide surveys and feedback forms for parents.

I recall Apple having something like this in the past, but it doesn't seem to be available anymore."

Ed Albro writes "Matthew Newton, our Free Agent columnist at PC World, has a great column today on seven things you'll want to change (or at least consider changing) as soon as you start using Feisty Fawn. Some are as simple as making sure the Alt key works right, another gives you step-by-step instructions for turning on the impressive Beryl interface.
Here's an excerpt:
"Before you dive in too deeply, here are seven steps you can take right away to prevent common headaches and help yourself enjoy your new surroundings."

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130923-page,1-c, linux/article.html"