The casino up the road, Mardi Gras, must be losing money again. They’ve started picking on people who jog or walk around their parking lot, although that generally happens in the vast spaces where no cars are ever parked. It will add a quarter mile to my commute if the ban cross-lot bicycling. They even have a new rule that you can’t sell to the vendors at the flea market. (That’s a dumb rule, since you are not selling to the customers and that is what the table fee is all about.)
I mean, I didn’t miss today altogether, I bicycled up to Borders (which took an hour). Coffee and cookie, four bucks of bingo money. Speaking of cookies, have you heard of flash cookies? They are malicious computer code that behaves like cookies, except they aren’t. I won’t go into detail but you need to regularly get rid of any flash cookies on your computer. Tomorrow I’ll investigate software that has a good reputation, name “Cookienator”. Return for a review in the future. (Cookienator has since become a standard. You should be using it.)
[Author's note 2016-02-22: use this link Cookienator to download and install the add-on. Avoid the Softpedia link if you encounter that. There is another site, I think, masquerading as Softpedia, causing reports of malicious code. When configuring Cookienator, set the interval for 1 day. You should always use anti-cookie software when dealing with Google. Like I said back in 2001.]
Speaking further, this time about reputation surveys, guess who comes in at an all-time low? Hewlett-Packard. My eyebrow raised when I saw that the reasons I loathe HP were not even part of the criteria. I dislike HP for manipulating your computers registry by installing 800+ files while claiming it is just the printer driver. They also intentionally flood the market with 600+ printers and 800+ cartridges at any moment. HP will arbitrarily quit selling, without warning, the cartridges to a printer they put on sale last month.
That eyebrow lowered when I read how HP is planning to respond. They have no intention of mending their ways. Instead, in a 1980 corporate fashion, they’ve committed millions to shining up their image. Bone-head tactics like hiring more people to answer their help desk phones “in five minutes instead of thirty-five”. HP should be asking themselves “why do we need a help desk when Apple doesn’t?”
Apple, incidentally, was at the supreme top of every criteria as by far the best computer company in the world. I was equally surprised to learn that Brother, another detested printer manufacturer, shared top spot with Apple for printers. Brother sucks and will never be forgiven for the feature that stops all printing when any one cartridge goes dry. That, Brother, is despicable. As I said, the survey didn’t use the same criteria as I do, instead gauging things like how easy it was to take out of the shipping carton. Duh.
I recently complained about how no virus software seems to prevent new viruses. That is a Catch-22, I realize, because if that could happen, it would not be a new virus, right? Wrong. All viruses must, at some coding level, have common behavior. I’ve already mentioned one—altering your system registry without asking permission. The point is, today I found out the term for a virus that is too new to have an anti-virus definition. It is called a “zero day” attack. (An infection that spreads before the anti-virus definition has a chance to reach the public.)
Trivia. Catch-22 does not derive from the number of an article in some army manual, as portrayed in the movie. It is from an ancient tale about a fisherman who refused to call it a day until he caught 22 fish. Thus, unwittingly providing a business model for the Hewlett-Packard corporation.
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