I don't know about mobile platforms, but certainly on the PC arena, judging by the features and tricks in recent AV-suite releases, vendors have to been running out of oxygen in their world. Lately I have been repairing more consumer machines due to AV suites going rogue than I have for actual viruses ( AFP/randsom-ware had a burst of popularity recently ).

These days I just go with Microsoft Security Essentials and leave it at that. The clients still feel protected, they're not out of pocket, and at least it's not as likely to go utterly insane and take out the system and then refuse to be uninstalled cleanly.

All I use and recommend now as well. Previously good AV suites have become pointlessly (for the consumer) bloated and I'm having a higher occurence of machines being bought in with faults explicitly attributable to the AV suites.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I have to say that MSE does tend to do an acceptable job given that inevitably all AV suites let stuff slip past.

Thanks for putting the right term to this jarring experience - sincerely appreciated. I knew it was more than just plain aesthetics that made me express such disdain towards the full screen start menu effect.

"People who suffer mental illness should just get the f*ck over it."

I used to be like you. Sincerely hoping you get through life without finding out first hand how wrong your statement is.

One day I was just stressed, it's life, keep strong, get over it, the next I was a man grasping for a chance for the rational mind to regain control. I'd love nothing more than to just get the f*ck over it.

Agreed. I was trying to change the Annex type my connection is on to trade some of my down speed for a lot more up ( drop to about 10,000 down but 1,800 up ), but thus far I've been told that Telstra backhaul won't let me switch ( subsequently I can't get Dodo to switch ).

Sorry to hear about the copper situation in your GF's location. If the coalition gets in (which likely they will) I'll see you in 12 years again perhaps when we finally get FTTH on the cards again :(

We already have FTTN for most of the places around here, and most places even have 12,000/800 or so on ADSL2+, so the coalitions vision of the NBN is just what we essentially have but they get to forfil their promised delivery of "12Mbps" to most locations ( for the record, I'm in a rural zone on ADSL2+ on Dodo[Telstra backhaul] ), it's just a case of waiting a couple of years to push the price down a bit more ($69/mth here) and get more people migrated off ADSL over to ADSL2+.

The rediculous thing is that the maintanence costs on the FTTN/Copper system that we already have will consume more than the FTTH within a couple of years regardless. Sadly, I don't have much hope of FTTH being sufficiently entrenched by the time September comes along, and thus like the the 90's, we'll again be left in the dark-ages of delivery.

Because if you want the money to flow back to the "masses" you better find something interesting for those "rich bastards" to spend it on, rather than having it stagnate in some bank account. Money is most effective when it is in use, lubricating the economy engine.

If B&N want to improve their chances of success in the online/eBook market, they really need to sort out their PubIt side of matters. Currently unless you're in the US, or have gone through the extensive red-tape to obtain a US business cred, you are not permitted to get on board with directly publishing via PubIt. Conversely, Amazon and Kobo both allow international publishers to work directly through them.

While small publishers outside of the "Big 6" don't contribute a lot financially, as individuals there are however many many thousands of us, and a lot of our potential readers do have Nook units.

TLDR; B&N (PubIt) needs to be open for international publishers.

The 3GS still is one of the best ergonomic phones from Apple and so far as repairability goes it's miles ahead over the 4, 4S and the 5. About the biggest complaint with the 3GS is that the battery is indeed burried under the PCB and it's a bit of a bother to remove (7 screws) unless you know what you're doing, with a lot of people destroying the case or breaking the gold contacts because they thought they knew better and ham-fisted it.

Getting one myself. Not a lot of change out of $1000 when shipped ( cheaper if you're in the US ~$500 ), but certainly well worth the investment none the less.

I've tried different brands of CFL ( generic, GE, Philips, Nelson ) , many sizes as well (including a monster 65W unit) and the failure rate is high compared to the proposed life on the boxes. Initially I think it was that I had them in enclosed diffuser bulbs and I dare say with the way our Summer weather is here it killed the first batch through overheating of the electronics in the CFL bases. However, after ensuring they all had good cooling (even bare bulbs) there were still plenty of failures, so I'm just thinking that overall it would seem that CFL drivers aren't yet up to scratch, or at least the manufactures are cutting corners on the components.

I've switched to the faux-traditional-halogen replacement bulbs and they seem to be doing a lot better. Looking forward to converting to LEDs soon.

The fact that "professionals" are using Word ( or similar ) for their work for quality output betrays the lack of their sanity in the first place. 20 years ago Microsoft-Word was a joke of a tool for legitimately professional publishing tasks, a Fisher-Price mallet in a world of steel hammers. Back then it was LaTeX, Quark or some other probably-insanely-obscure DTP system, even WP5.1, but over the years people have forgotten how it was (probably with good reason though, none of them were all that fun and easy to use and never came with cheesy clipart). As a publisher, I still find ms-doc files to be inconsistent a lot of the time (especially from some writers) and almost always needs to be fixed up by selecting the text, copying in to a fresh file with a very strict style and manually reworking it; as opposed to LaTeX (hand generated or via LyX) where you can generate print-ready novels consistently without all the screwing around.

It would seem we've traded the steeper learning curve for substandard results and since it's been happening long enough now, it has become the 'professional way'.

Now get off my lawn!

Indeed. Most systems that come in here with N360, McAfee, even AVG now (try removing that sucker, it's really persistent unless everything is perfect!) are a mess in terms of performance and hijacking the browser search fields and forcibly reinstating excessive services and apps in the startup.

Clear it all away and install MSE, sure the client possibly will get infected in the future but I've found regardless of what they have had installed they invariably get infected, may as well go with the AV system that doesn't choke the system to death nor constantly shove itself in your face while you're trying to get work done. The client still "feels" protected and their system doesn't suffer profoundly.

Not initially, because people go blind when confronted with the unfamiliar and cannot see a damned thing despite it being "right there, in front of you!". Sure, once you see and know it, it's dead easy.

I repair a lot of different phones, but I have to say the 3GS is a nice beast overall - anyhow, the point of this post is, if at some point you get that battery replaced in your 3GS, be aware that you might run in to a few hiccups with it shutting down at 60~30% capacity and then going into an endless reboot. If that happens you can break out of it using instructions at this location - http://ctpc.biz/iphone3gs-battery-fix.html - oh and try get the APN: 616-0435 battery.