C:\PROGRAM
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Well, we all knew that some programs do a terrible job at coping with spaces in filenames, but I never knew Windows did this sanity check on startup:
"There is a file or folder on your computer called 'C:\PROGRAM' which could cause certain applications to not function properly. Renaming it to 'C:\PROGRAM1' would solve this problem. Would you like to rename it now?"
So, who's the culprit?
For those of you not familiar with the logo, that's Foxit PDF viewer. It's even digitally signed by them. This program really has become severely bloated over the last year, and I don't like its Windows 8/Office 2013 UI either.
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I agree that Foxit is getting severely bloated, but I've never seen it install to C:\Program before.
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@LoremIpsumDolorSitAmet said:
I never knew Windows did this sanity check on startup:
Like many things Windows, that sanity check is a half-arsed workaround for one special case of the trouble caused by a fundamentally stupid design decision. See the paragraph beginning "The lpApplicationName parameter can be NULL" in the documentation for CreateProcess.
And yeah, the gloss went off Foxit Reader at about version 3. I cut the school back over to Adobe Reader when X came out, because although it's from Adobe and therefore mind-bogglingly bloated, at least X and XI start reasonably fast. Fewer compatibility surprises than Foxit with forms and whatnot, and the Adobe product's print speed leaves Foxit's in the dust. Pity; Foxit really was the least irritating Windows PDF reader for quite some years, but blew it.
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I never liked FoxIt reader, because despite launching much faster than Adobe Reader, it was always much slower rendering complex pages. Since I usually start a program once, and then keep it in the background, those few seconds at startup mattered much less to me than the ability to quickly scroll through document. I did replace Adobe Reader with PDF-Xchange a few years ago though.
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@ender said:
I did replace Adobe Reader with PDF-Xchange a few years ago though.
How's it's print speed, and have you had any odd issues with PDF forms? I might give it a whirl, because Adobe Reader XI is a shit of a thing to make Just Work; on first run it insists on fartarsing about with voice reader settings and turning off font anti-aliasing, despite my best efforts with its installer configuration tool.
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@flabdablet said:
And yeah, the gloss went off Foxit Reader at about version 3. I cut the school back over to Adobe Reader when X came out, because although it's from Adobe and therefore mind-bogglingly bloated, at least X and XI start reasonably fast. Fewer compatibility surprises than Foxit with forms and whatnot, and the Adobe product's print speed leaves Foxit's in the dust. Pity; Foxit really was the least irritating Windows PDF reader for quite some years, but blew it.
Google Chrome has a pretty good PDF viewer built in. If you use Chrome for web browsing anyway, it saves you from having to install an extra program for PDFs. You'll have to manually associate it with the .PDF file extension; the rest "just works".
Allegedly Firefox has something similar, although I haven't tried it.
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@sdfsfsdewsergt said:
Allegedly Firefox has something similar, although I haven't tried it.
It's pretty good, though you can't, for example, drag-pan. It's essentially a web page.
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I've had to nobble Firefox's inbuilt pdfjs viewer at the school, because explaining why PDF printing was suddenly failing so completely horribly was too hard. But Mozilla being Mozilla, when you flip the about:config option that disables the pdfjs previewer, Firefox doesn't restore the preferences its updater overwrote to make its own shitty previewer the default in the first place. So now I have to explain why every time somebody tries to view a PDF with the school web browser it offers to download it instead. And yes, this behaviour is trivial to fix in the Options->Applications menu, but most of my users are completely incapable of finding that menu unaided and will in any case forget where it is five minutes after using it. Also, plugin-related options are apparently not implemented using prefs.js/about:config and I have yet to find a programmatic way to set them that I can just apply at logon time. If Chrome were not even less discoverable, more fucked in the head by default, and easier to set options for programatically, I'd consider switching to that. IE is still not an option because there is still no ad blocker available for it that's anywhere near as competent as Adblock Plus. Browsers: Feh.
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@sdfsfsdewsergt said:
@flabdablet said:
And yeah, the gloss went off Foxit Reader at about version 3. I cut the school back over to Adobe Reader when X came out, because although it's from Adobe and therefore mind-bogglingly bloated, at least X and XI start reasonably fast. Fewer compatibility surprises than Foxit with forms and whatnot, and the Adobe product's print speed leaves Foxit's in the dust. Pity; Foxit really was the least irritating Windows PDF reader for quite some years, but blew it.
Google Chrome has a pretty good PDF viewer built in. If you use Chrome for web browsing anyway, it saves you from having to install an extra program for PDFs. You'll have to manually associate it with the .PDF file extension; the rest "just works".
Allegedly Firefox has something similar, although I haven't tried it.
Looks like they've integrated the PDF Viewer (formerly PDF.JS) extension into Firefox. I still had the extension, and after removing it and telling Firefox to preview PDFs rather than save them, the built-in one still didn't work until I exited and restarted Firefox, but it's working now.
It handles most PDFs just fine, although the font rendering doesn't look quite the same as (or as pretty as) Adobe's. Strangely, the zoom level isn't the same as Adobe Reader's (on my system, but my text size setting is 100%)... it's smaller at 100% than Adobe Reader. Rendering speed seems to have improved quite a bit, and it doesn't lag too much when scrolling. Print quality used to be godawful (it was converting every page to a bitmap), but it looks like now they've managed to have it output the original PostScript, or something reasonably close to it (however, printing a secured PDF to a PDF printer gave the PDF printer fits and crashed its PostScript parser on the 20th page or so; printing it to Windows 7's Fax print driver worked; I'd try printing it out for real but I don't want to waste the paper). It doesn't support forms.
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@flabdablet said:
IE is still not an option because there is still no ad blocker available for it that's anywhere near as competent as Adblock Plus. Browsers: Feh.
What? AdBlock Plus is available for IE.
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@heterodox said:
@flabdablet said:
IE is still not an option because there is still no ad blocker available for it that's anywhere near as competent as Adblock Plus. Browsers: Feh.
What? AdBlock Plus is available for IE.Maybe he means AdBlock Plus isn't as competent as itsefl!
Or maybe he's repeating decades-old misinformation he got from Slashdot.
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@blakeyrat said:
Or maybe he's repeating decades-old misinformation he got from Slashdot.
If it's decades old information, wouldn't that be recent information in the realm of Slashdot?
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@ender said:
I never liked FoxIt reader, because despite launching much faster than Adobe Reader, it was always much slower rendering complex pages. Since I usually start a program once, and then keep it in the background, those few seconds at startup mattered much less to me than the ability to quickly scroll through document. I did replace Adobe Reader with PDF-Xchange a few years ago though.
I use pdf.js (the Firefox built-in one), my Mom and grandparents use Evince, and my sister uses SumatraPDF.
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@heterodox said:
AwRiGHT! Teach me not to pay attention. When did that happen? Last I heard, that was a "we're not going to do that, don't ask for it" item. Anyway, in it goes! Thanks!@flabdablet said:
IE is still not an option because there is still no ad blocker available for it that's anywhere near as competent as Adblock Plus. Browsers: Feh.
What? AdBlock Plus is available for IE.
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It takes 14 milliseconds to type "hey is AdBlock available in IE?" into Google, and people are still too lazy to do that shit.
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
EDIT: I TYPOED DEFAULT AS DEFEAT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAADSADHHAGFsahg jkztgh7hnjytgh
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@blakeyrat said:
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
Does the IE version not default to "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" like the Firefox and Chrome versions do?
As for the implied point that simply choosing to avoid inviting advertising into my life and that of the kids whose school network I run makes me a "sociopathic asshole": that's exactly the kind of warped opinion I'd expect from somebody morally bankrupt enough to choose to make their money in an industry as ruthlessly, pathologically and parasitically self-serving as advertising, and is therefore every bit as worthless, wrong, backasswards and ignorable as every other thing that has ever come out of that industry.
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I have no interest in being bombarded by a nonstop stream of bullshit that is, at best, annoying, and at wurst, criminally fraudulent. If that makes me a patholgical asshole, I'm OK with that.
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@cheapie said:
@ender said:
I never liked FoxIt reader, because despite launching much faster than Adobe Reader, it was always much slower rendering complex pages. Since I usually start a program once, and then keep it in the background, those few seconds at startup mattered much less to me than the ability to quickly scroll through document. I did replace Adobe Reader with PDF-Xchange a few years ago though.
I use pdf.js (the Firefox built-in one), my Mom and grandparents use Evince, and my sister uses SumatraPDF.
I use SumatraPDF whenever I only need viewing capabilties, which is probably 99% of my use case.
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@blakeyrat said:
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
I put Flash loading on "ask" in Firefox.
Am I a sociopath?
Answer:
Well, yes, but not for that reason.
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@Buttembly Coder said:
@cheapie said:
@ender said:
I never liked FoxIt reader, because despite launching much faster than Adobe Reader, it was always much slower rendering complex pages. Since I usually start a program once, and then keep it in the background, those few seconds at startup mattered much less to me than the ability to quickly scroll through document. I did replace Adobe Reader with PDF-Xchange a few years ago though.
I use pdf.js (the Firefox built-in one), my Mom and grandparents use Evince, and my sister uses SumatraPDF.
I use SumatraPDF whenever I only need viewing capabilties, which is probably 99% of my use case.
Another one: Nitro PDF Reader. It acts as a PDF printer too, and has a few more nice features like the ability to "sign" a PDF using a scanned signature. It's pretty unbloated and reasonably fast too, and therefore my current choice.
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@flabdablet said:
How's it's print speed, and have you had any odd issues with PDF forms?
I only have to print PDFs very rarely, and when I do, it's usually only a single page or two, so I can't judge it's speed. I haven't had any problems with the few form PDFs I encountered.
@flabdablet said:on first run it insists on fartarsing about with voice reader settings and turning off font anti-aliasing, despite my best efforts with its installer configuration tool.
I've seen that at clients, and I'd really really like to know what triggers that, and how to disable it (the wizard it presents seems to only offer options that let you enable all or some of the features, but not none of them).
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@rootkit said:
@Buttembly Coder said:
I use SumatraPDF whenever I only need viewing capabilties, which is probably 99% of my use case.
Another one: Nitro PDF Reader. It acts as a PDF printer too, and has a few more nice features like the ability to "sign" a PDF using a scanned signature. It's pretty unbloated and reasonably fast too, and therefore my current choice.
Sumatra is the only pdf viewer I know that works reasonably well when
writing documents in TeX (ie, it doesn't lock the pdf, refreshs
automatically, and supports reverse search). I haven't tried Nitro, though.
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@derari said:
@rootkit said:
@Buttembly Coder said:
I use SumatraPDF whenever I only need viewing capabilties, which is probably 99% of my use case.
Another one: Nitro PDF Reader. It acts as a PDF printer too, and has a few more nice features like the ability to "sign" a PDF using a scanned signature. It's pretty unbloated and reasonably fast too, and therefore my current choice.
Sumatra is the only pdf viewer I know that works reasonably well when
writing documents in TeX (ie, it doesn't lock the pdf, refreshs
automatically, and supports reverse search). I haven't tried Nitro, though.True dat.
I'd swear I once had another PDF viewer configured just like that, but I couldn't remember which one if my life depended on it. Fortunately it doesn't, so I'll be moving on.
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@dhromed said:
If advertisers want to use Flash in their ads, it's their own damn fault.I put Flash loading on "ask" in Firefox.
Am I a sociopath?
I probably shouldn't say the same about javascript, but a lot of malicious scripts come through poorly screened ad banners, which isn't an incentive to whitelist ad providers on NoScript...
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@blakeyrat said:
It takes 14 milliseconds to type "hey is AdBlock available in IE?" into Google, and people are still too lazy to do that shit.
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
EDIT: I TYPOED DEFAULT AS DEFEAT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAADSADHHAGFsahg jkztgh7hnjytgh
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@flabdablet said:
@LoremIpsumDolorSitAmet said:
I never knew Windows did this sanity check on startup:
Like many things Windows, that sanity check is a half-arsed workaround for one special case of the trouble caused by a fundamentally stupid design decision. See the paragraph beginning "The lpApplicationName parameter can be NULL" in the documentation for CreateProcess.
And yeah, the gloss went off Foxit Reader at about version 3. I cut the school back over to Adobe Reader when X came out, because although it's from Adobe and therefore mind-bogglingly bloated, at least X and XI start reasonably fast. Fewer compatibility surprises than Foxit with forms and whatnot, and the Adobe product's print speed leaves Foxit's in the dust. Pity; Foxit really was the least irritating Windows PDF reader for quite some years, but blew it.
As I recall, CreateProcess() was the 32-bit equivalent for WinExec. As I understand it in those situations they tend to make the new function at least nominally compatible with the function it replaces; eg in this case a WinExec() could be replaced with a CreateProcess without breaking up the actual command line. I'd almost agree this was not the best approach, but in reality if they had done the opposite (required the executable name and the parameter as separate arguments, instead of optionally allowing the Application to be null and have the program to execute as part of the parameters) than we would just be faced with similar problems from applications that try to launch the old way and can't seem to find that elusive "C:\blah\blah\blah.exe -switch" file.
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@El_Heffe said:
Filed under: Chrome fail
I get the same results you do from Chrome. My guess is Ben only searches the forums and Google has learned this and only returns results from TDWTF now.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@El_Heffe said:
Filed under: Chrome fail
I get the same results you do from Chrome. My guess is Ben only searches the forums and Google has learned this and only returns results from TDWTF now.
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@blakeyrat said:
It takes 14 milliseconds to type "hey is AdBlock available in IE?" into Google, and people are still too lazy to do that shit.
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
EDIT: I TYPOED DEFAULT AS DEFEAT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAADSADHHAGFsahg jkztgh7hnjytgh
Well, while Adblock Plus allows some non-intrusive ads, the competitor Adblock (not Plus) actually raised money from the community to put out ads themselves. Which one is worse is I guess for the reader to decide. I went with Adblock Plus, because even if it's a default setting, you can quite easily disable it. Also, when using an ad blocker to make sure you don't see those very obnoxious ads or protect you from malware, allowing non-intrusive ads is quite okay, since they've been selected to be (you guessed it) non-intrusive. So you may protect yourself, while still granting some web sites their ad revenue. I feel that's much more acceptable than what Adblock did.
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So is TRWTF that an angry mob hasn't yet hunted down Foxit Reader's "devs" and burned them at the stake for fucking up paths on Windows?
@DrakeSmith said:
@blakeyrat said:
Or maybe he's repeating decades-old misinformation he got from Slashdot.
If it's decades old information, wouldn't that be recent information in the realm of Slashdot?ZING!
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I've uninstalled Foxit now and have tried Nitro PDF for a bit. It makes me weep... because it reminded me of how nice the Office 2010 UI used to look compared to the whitewash I have to work with now. Also, QuickSign is a nice simple solution to a problem I, and many others, face every so often, so I can see that being useful too.
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@ender said:
I've seen that at clients, and I'd really really like to know what triggers that, and how to disable it
This happens if anything's hooked into Active Accessibility for any reason. Examples include obvious assistive technologies like JAWS, nonobvious things like Windows Speech Recognition, Cortana, and NaturallySpeaking (for voice commands), and esoteric things like "that one high school kid's app we threw in with our print driver that clicks buttons for you and decided SendKeys was too unreliable".
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@pbean said:
Well, while Adblock Plus allows some non-intrusive ads, the competitor Adblock (not Plus) actually raised money from the community to put out ads themselves.
Learning is fun. I didn't know there was an AdBlock extension for Chrome. Or that there were that many extensions called AdBlock:
@AdBlock (for Chrome) FAQ said:
Long ago, there was a Firefox add-on called Adblock. Later, a different group created a different Firefox add-on and adopted the name Adblock Plus.
<p>When Google Chrome came along, Michael Gundlach...made AdBlock for Chrome...</p> <p>Since then, Adblock Plus (now run by the company Eyeo) haschanged its mind and made a Chrome extension, too, and AdBlock (now run
by Betafish, Inc) has expanded to also work in Safari and Opera.- https://getadblock.com/adblock-is-not-adblock-plus
So AdBlock (Chrome) people looked at the marketplace, saw that there were already TWO well-known extensions named AdBlock and in order to prevent market confusion, named their extension AdBlock. Given that intentional decision, I have much less sympathy for them for catching some of the shit rolling downhill from AdBlock Plus.
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@Lorne Kates said:
So AdBlock (Chrome) people looked at the marketplace, saw that there were already TWO well-known extensions named AdBlock and in order to prevent market confusion, named their extension AdBlock. Given that intentional decision, I have much less sympathy for them for catching some of the shit rolling downhill from AdBlock Plus.
They should sue to protect their intellectual property!
Oh wait..
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@blakeyrat said:
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
Sorry, I tried using the web without adblocker last week or so. Simply, it just didn't work. I sooner ragequit than get anything done.
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@topspin said:
@blakeyrat said:
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
Sorry, I tried using the web without adblocker last week or so. Simply, it just didn't work. I sooner ragequit than get anything done.
I'm always kind of amazed when people make comments like this. Sure, ads can sometimes irritate me, but "I just can't use the web if there are ads" sounds like something a crazy person would say.
I'm not trying to be a dick here, but it sounds like you suffer from crippling OCD. Can you also not eat blueberries that have skin on them or leave a room without flipping the light switch on and off exactly 17 times?
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@morbiuswilters said:
I'm always kind of amazed when people make comments like this. Sure, ads can sometimes irritate me, but "I just can't use the web if there are ads" sounds like something a crazy person would say.
Ads can turn SFW pages into NSFW pages. That generally matches the "can't use" clause.
@morbiuswilters said:I'm not trying to be a dick here, but it sounds like you suffer from crippling OCD.
I'm not trying to try not to be a dick here, but that has nothing to do with OCD. But this isn't a forum for factual accuracy, so whatever.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I'm always kind of amazed when people make comments like this. Sure, ads can sometimes irritate me, but "I just can't use the web if there are ads" sounds like something a crazy person would say.
I'm not trying to be a dick here, but it sounds like you suffer from crippling OCD. Can you also not eat blueberries that have skin on them or leave a room without flipping the light switch on and off exactly 17 times?
Nope, it was just that one single page opened no less than 4 popups (which I usually have disabled AND set "new windows as tabs", both of which had no effect), and overlays over overlays. And every click on an X to dismiss an overlay to get at the content caused another popup, and sometimes redirecting to leave the original site. So I had to go back, close all the popups AGAIN and remove the overlays with the site inspector instead of clicking the X.
Granted, it wasn't the most "serious" website (no, not porn), but it was perfectly usable with Adblock.
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@Buttembly Coder said:
Ads can turn SFW pages into NSFW pages. That generally matches the "can't use" clause.
Bullshit. Unless you're already on an explicit page or a warez site, you aren't going to get adult ads.
@Buttembly Coder said:
I'm not trying to try not to be a dick here, but that has nothing to do with OCD.
It didn't sound like he was in any way externally prevented from surfing the web with ads. It was all some crazy problem in his head. Hence, OCD.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@topspin said:
@blakeyrat said:
In any case, unless AdBlock Plus changes their default settings, you'd only use it if you were a sociopathic asshole anyway.
Sorry, I tried using the web without adblocker last week or so. Simply, it just didn't work. I sooner ragequit than get anything done.
I'm always kind of amazed when people make comments like this. Sure, ads can sometimes irritate me, but "I just can't use the web if there are ads" sounds like something a crazy person would say.
I'm not trying to be a dick here, but it sounds like you suffer from crippling OCD. Can you also not eat blueberries that have skin on them or leave a room without flipping the light switch on and off exactly 17 times?
I'm fine with text ads and unobtrusive image ads (that is, not the flashing "YOU WINNED A CAR" ones) but anything that either looks like content (download buttons styled to look like the site you're downloading things from) or distracts from content shouldn't be an ad.
Similarly, if I'm watching a video on a website and before I can watch the 1 minute video clip I need to watch a 30 second ad (or worse, multiple 30 second ads (or worse, the same 30 second ad multiple times)) I'm either going to go somewhere else to watch it or block ads.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Buttembly Coder said:
Ads can turn SFW pages into NSFW pages. That generally matches the "can't use" clause.
Bullshit. Unless you're already on an explicit page or a warez site, you aren't going to get adult ads.
I've gotten them on otherwise SFW comics, but I don't read those at work so it's not a huge concern. Plus most of those turn out to be things that were slipped into the ad network that gets removed when the network finds out they aren't what is supposed to be there.
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@morbiuswilters said:
It didn't sound like he was in any way externally prevented from surfing the web with ads. It was all some crazy problem in his head. Hence, OCD.
How is that OCD, though? I see no obsessive subject, and no ritual to relieve it.
@morbiuswilters said:Bullshit. Unless you're already on an explicit page or a warez site, you aren't going to get adult ads.
I'll be quite satisfied with a screenshot of every SFW website, and every ad that can show on it, if you want.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Buttembly Coder said:
Ads can turn SFW pages into NSFW pages. That generally matches the "can't use" clause.
Bullshit. Unless you're already on an explicit page or a warez site, you aren't going to get adult ads.
Just adult "turn off your ad blocker" ad stand-ins. ()Which I had no idea that's what it was trying to convey to me, the animation wasn't playing.)
I block ads because they're a delivery vector for malware.
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@Ben L. said:
Similarly, if I'm watching a video on a website and before I can watch the 1 minute video clip I need to watch a 30 second ad (or worse, multiple 30 second ads (or worse, the same 30 second ad multiple times)) I'm either going to go somewhere else to watch it or block ads.
What I love about video ads is it's possible to make them effectively unblock-able.
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@Buttembly Coder said:
How is that OCD, though? I see no obsessive subject, and no ritual to relieve it.
Do I really gots to explain this? The obsession is with a "pure" web-browsing experience.
@Buttembly Coder said:
I'll be quite satisfied with a screenshot of every SFW website, and every ad that can show on it, if you want.
No, you provide a screenshot of a truly SFW site with NSFW ads. Admittedly, once-in-a-blue-moon a NSFW ad might accidentally be served, but show me where it happens predictably.
Anyway, the one-in-a-billion NSFW ads that slips through is not a legitimate reason. You're far more likely to accidentally click a NSFW link or visit a hacked site. It's just a bullshit rationalization for your sociopathic, kleptomaniacal behavior.
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@joe.edwards said:
I block ads because they're a delivery vector for malware.
Bullshit. We've had this same fucking argument thousand times now. Sure, ads can very, very rarely be a vector for malware for unpatched systems, just like any fucking site on the Internet. Do you not read blogs because Wordpress installs end up hacked and distributing malware? Do you never download any executables because they might be compromised?
Of course not. You only decide malware is too risky when it conveniently lines up with your prejudices.
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@morbiuswilters said:
It's just a bullshit rationalization for your sociopathic, kleptomaniacal behavior.
Oh, is it time for ad blockers to try to justify their behavior again already?! I wonder if anyone will come up with a single argument that is even remotely novel.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Buttembly Coder said:
Did you actually read topspin's description of the website? Ok, "the web didn't work" was an exaggeration; it was just one web site. But that site was undeniably utterly, completely, horribly broken without the ad blocker. That was not OCD on topspin's part (assuming his description of the site's behavior was accurate).How is that OCD, though? I see no obsessive subject, and no ritual to relieve it.
Do I really gots to explain this? The obsession is with a "pure" web-browsing experience.
