Computer madness
Aug. 18th, 2009 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienModern computers are amazing in the things they can do. Some things, though, make me wonder what (if anything) the programmers were thinking. These are just a few examples from the last few days; the computers in my life are a mixture of Linux and Windows (XP and Vista) with Cygwin on top, and my active files move around a lot.
The way Vista handles file permissions is ... different. As far as I can tell, it's completely unnecessary to have such an arcane system of permissions on a single-user home machine, and it results in nonsense like most of the files on my external mobile drives showing up as read-only if the drive is plugged into a Vista machine that isn't the one that wrote them in the first place. (Given the way I use those drives, this happens a lot.) Files that were originally written by a non-vista (let alone a non-Windows) machine will probably show up as non-writable under vista, "owned" by random number strings. I can fix the permissions one file at a time, but why should I have to? Maybe 7 will be saner about this, but I'm not holding my breath.
It turns out that Symantec's website either can't process credit card transactions with Firefox, or requires Flash to do it. Not that they tell you this up front; that would be too easy. No, the problem only becomes apparent after going through the whole process, when it turns around and claims the card number is invalid. This strikes me as both stupid and really user-unfriendly, and made the process of renewing my mother's antivirus subscription way more traumatic than it needed to be.
The Windows CD-burning wizard has the option to close itself when it's done. For some reason, Norton Internet Security 2009 interprets this as an unauthorized access (medium threat level) and blocks it.
The way Vista handles file permissions is ... different. As far as I can tell, it's completely unnecessary to have such an arcane system of permissions on a single-user home machine, and it results in nonsense like most of the files on my external mobile drives showing up as read-only if the drive is plugged into a Vista machine that isn't the one that wrote them in the first place. (Given the way I use those drives, this happens a lot.) Files that were originally written by a non-vista (let alone a non-Windows) machine will probably show up as non-writable under vista, "owned" by random number strings. I can fix the permissions one file at a time, but why should I have to? Maybe 7 will be saner about this, but I'm not holding my breath.
It turns out that Symantec's website either can't process credit card transactions with Firefox, or requires Flash to do it. Not that they tell you this up front; that would be too easy. No, the problem only becomes apparent after going through the whole process, when it turns around and claims the card number is invalid. This strikes me as both stupid and really user-unfriendly, and made the process of renewing my mother's antivirus subscription way more traumatic than it needed to be.
The Windows CD-burning wizard has the option to close itself when it's done. For some reason, Norton Internet Security 2009 interprets this as an unauthorized access (medium threat level) and blocks it.
