thegeekchannel.com

For those of you that haven’t heard the news, or braved the beta program, Microsoft’s Live OneCare beta 2 program is about done.  After a variety of different frustrations - even when wanting Microsoft to have the single solution of OS and security - I have removed OneCare and resolved to go back to a combination of security tools that are less integrated and, in my opinion, work better.  Whether they protect my system better or not is almost irrelevant - it’s making sure that my system feel buggy that is most important to me.  OneCare didn’t offer that; with all the alerts I felt as though it was doing too little and I was doing too much.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files.  I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them.  I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix.  Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “<drive letter>:\<path>” /t /g administrators:F 

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

CTRL-C and CTRL-V have been around for a long time now - years in fact - and I believe that people have become accustomed to being able to take a piece of information that they’ve already entered and put it somewhere else without having to re-enter text.  From an input tool like that of the iPhone, this is a no-brainer, and I can’t believe that it’s not there already.  Hopefully the rumors will come true and Apple iPhone users will be copying and pasting happily sometime in the near future.

~geek

Is AppleTV the worst product of 2007?  My opinion - yes and no.  Yes, I think that the implementation is very un-Apple, because it’s not unique enough to compel Apple devotees to purchase one.  After all, most of these users already have a TiVo (or equivalent) and aren’t going to buy something just to watch iTunes content.  MTV, for the most part, already covers much of that market.

On the other hand, I think that there is promise here if Apple can get past where they are today and add content for television with the same success that they’ve managed to get musical content.  Imagine, if you will, you could go to AppleTV and buy first-run movies electronically instead of on DVD.  Perhaps, because you’re purchasing digital content you can even burn that out to a DVD and have the best of both worlds?  I believe that people are going this way and that some company will win the battle.  Perhaps it’s not too late for Apple, but they need to get moving and promoting with the same passion that they do their other products.

~geek