How to Safely Install Programs

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Installing software safely and with minimal impact

by Leo Notemboom

May 26, 2013

I’d wager that the number one cause of system stability issues, disk space loss, unexpected behavior, and even malware is the software that we actually invite onto our machine.

I’m not talking about opening the accidental attachment. That’s bad when it happens, but it’s not as prevalent as what I’m discussing.

No, I’m talking about the stuff that we actually ask to download - the stuff we seek out.

I’m talking about the software that we explicitly and intentionally install on our computers.

Installing software safely is all about taking a few steps to minimize the impact of what we’re about to do to our machines.

Avoid it if you can

My number one recommendation for keeping your machine clear of cruft* is to think carefully before installing anything.

[Ed. Note: * Cruft is commonly used to refer to the mess left inside of software as it is revised and updated. Cruft is also occasionally used to refer simply to poor quality hardware or shoddily produced software, which might be referred to as “crufty”.]

I’m not really talking about updates. Those are things that you almost always want. I’m talking about new programs, add-ons, plugins, and other things that so often vie for our attention and play on our curiosity.

I’m also not saying to never install anything. That kind of defeats the purpose of having a general purpose computer or computing device.

What I am asking you to do is think about whether you really need whatever it is you’re considering installling. Is it something you’ll actually use or is this idle curiosity? Do you understand why someone or something is even suggesting that you install some random tool that you’ve never heard of? If you’re ever not sure, just wait until you find out more. You can always install something later if you find that you have a need and use for whatever it is.

But remember: a program that’s not installed can do you no harm.

Do your testing elsewhere

Sometimes, we just don’t really know if the software we’re looking at is something worthwhile. In fact, we won’t know until we actually try it out – perhaps it’s a trial version or it’s just a package that we’re installing, because we really need to play with it a bit before we decide to invest further.

As you might imagine, this happens to me all the time.

One approach to testing software safely is to use what you might call a “sacrificial machine” – one that you don’t really care about or isn’t particularly important.

If you don’t have a second physical machine available for that, one solid approach is to use a virtual machine. This is nothing more than a software simulation of PC that runs within a window on your desktop. I actually have several virtual machines that I’ve set up here on my main desktop machine: one each for Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8. When it’s running, it’s like having a completely separate PC except that it’s running on my single desktop.

Testing your software elsewhere allows you to avoid having any of the side effects of that software from appearing on the machine that you do care about – the one that you use every day. Once you determine that the software is indeed going to be useful, you can then install it “for real” on your main machine. That test or virtual machine can be left alone, reformatted, restored from a backup, or completely discarded depending on your own desires.

Of course, if you decide that the software is not what you had in mind, then you’ve come to that conclusion without putting your most important machine at risk.

Choose custom – always

As a way to be helpful and ensure that software is installed with the most appropriate set of optional components, many setup programs will offer you a default installation. Essentially, this is a set of decisions made for you that ideally install the application in a comfiguration that’s ready to go for the most people. It’s been a convenience and an easy way to get software installed quickly without needing to spend a lot of time understanding obscure details.

Unfortunately, in recent years, the default choice is very often the wrong choice.

As we’ve seen, many software vendors, particularly those whose products are free, are including in their default installations unrelated additions. More often than not, that comes in the form of an additional toolbar that will later appear in your web browser, but this “foistware“  (as it’s sometimes referred to) can actually run the range from the benign to the downright malicious.

A case where a (fairly reputable) software package actually tries to discourage the “Custom” installation path.

The only way to avoid it for many software installations is to select the Advanced or Custom option, if it’s offered during the setup process. That typically exposes all of the optional choices that you might have, including whether or not to accept the unrelated software that you probably really don’t need.

Un-check options you don’t need

Regardless of whether you needed to select Custom or Advanced to expose them, many software installers – particularly for larger packages – include an array of options that allow you to pick and choose what parts of the product you actually want to have installed on your machine.

Regardless of what type of package you’re installing, if there are options exposed, it’s worth having a look and seeing whether the additional components are indeed items that you need. If not, consider un-selecting them, so that they’re not installed. Not only does this reduce the amount of disk space that the install will take, but it typically also reduces the impact on system resources (like the registry) and reduces the number of components that may need to be updated in the future.

Opt out of unrelated options

As mentioned earlier, software packages will often include components that aren’t even a part of the software that you’re installing. Typically, this is a source of additional revenue for the software vendor, but in general, it simply adds confusion and unnecessary software to your machine.

Custom installation option revealing items actually unrelated to the software being installed.

The most common additional and unrelated items are things like toolbars or limited trials of more powerful paid versions of the free software that you’re installing. Unwanted changes aren’t always limited to software, but they will also often include unexpected changes to browser search engines and home pages.

Opt out. Just say no. Or, at least make it a decision on your part that you actually want whatever it is that’s being offered.

My guess is that saying no will keep your machine cleaner and your experience less frustrating.

Start when Windows starts isn’t always needed

Many programs install components that want to start running every time you reboot or log in to Windows.

In some cases, it’s the right thing to do. You want your anti-malware tools to always run without having to think about them, so having them start when Windows starts is a pretty clear choice.

At the other end of the spectrum are utilities that just don’t need to run right away, period, yet the installer (or rather, the developers who created the installer) feel that their program is just so important that it must run always and as soon as possible.

And of course, many programs are somewhere in the middle. If used often, it makes sense that they start automatically, but if used only occasionally, it might make more sense to free up the resources and speed up the boot time by only starting them when actually needed.

When you encounter a setup option relating to automatically starting, think twice. It’s very possible that you don’t need the program to do so, and as a result, you’ll end up with a slightly faster boot time, and more system resources like CPU and RAM available for the things that you really do want to run. (It’s sometimes worth reviewing the options or preferences for programs you already have installed that start automatically and turning it off for those for which it makes sense.)

Summary

I’ve presented a few recommendations when it comes to installing software to keep your machine running as clean and as fast as possible. 

Those are:

> Don’t install software unless you actually know you need it.

> When simply testing software for fit, try to do so on something other than your primary or most important machine.

> Always choose the “Custom” or “Advanced” installation path so as to see all available options.

> Uncheck options that you don’t want or need.

> Uncheck options that are actually unrelated to the software that you are installing.

> Think carefully about whether the software actually needs to start with Windows, if that’s an offered option.

http://askleo.com/installing-software-safely-and-with-minimal-impact/?awt_l=8FLnJ&awt_m=IhMSG_CwHZdfbL

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America – Obsessed with Celebrities

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Celebrating Inequality

by GEORGE PACKER

MAY 19, 2013

THE Roaring ’20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites, popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals — machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code: it’s inherently illicit. Fitzgerald intuited that, with the old restraining deities of the 19th century dead and his generation’s faith in man shaken by World War I, celebrities were the new household gods.

What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments, corporations, schools, the press — is falling.

The Depression that ended Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations.

One virtue of those hated things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing. Books like William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” and C. Wright Mills’s “White Collar” warned of the loss of individual identity, but those middle-class anxieties were possible only because of the great leveling. The “stars” continued to fascinate, especially with the arrival of TV, but they were not essential. Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Perry Como, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Paar, Doris Day and Dick Clark rose with Americans — not from them — and their successes and screw-ups were a sideshow, not the main event.

Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous. We have celebrity bankers (Jamie Dimon), computer engineers (Sergey Brin), real estate developers/conspiracy theorists (Donald J. Trump), media executives (Arianna Huffington), journalists (Anderson Cooper), mayors (Cory A. Booker), economists (Jeffrey D. Sachs), biologists (J. Craig Venter) and chefs (Mario Batali).

There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.

After all, if you are the institution, you don’t need to play by its rules. Mr. Zuckerberg’s foundation myth begins with a disciplinary proceeding at Harvard, which leads him to drop out and found a company whose motto is “Move fast and break things.” Jay-Z’s history as a crack dealer isn’t just a hard-luck story — it’s celebrated by fans (and not least himself) as an early sign of hustle and smarts. Martha Stewart’s jail time for perjury merely proved that her will to win was indomitable. These new celebrities are all more or less start-up entrepreneurs, and they live by the hacker’s code: ask forgiveness, not permission.

The obsession with celebrities goes far beyond supermarket tabloids, gossip Web sites and reality TV. It obliterates old distinctions between high and low culture, serious and trivial endeavors, profit making and philanthropy, leading to the phenomenon of being famous for being famous. An activist singer (Bono) is given a lucrative role in Facebook’s initial public offering. A patrician politician (Al Gore) becomes a plutocratic media executive and tech investor. One of America’s richest men (Michael R. Bloomberg) rules its largest city.

This jet-setting, Davos-attending crowd constitutes its own superclass, who hang out at the same TED talks, big-idea conferences and fund-raising galas, appear on the same talk shows, invest in one another’s projects, wear one another’s brand apparel, champion one another’s causes, marry and cheat on one another. “The New Digital Age,” the new guide to the future by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google, carries blurbs from such technology experts as Henry A. Kissinger and Tony Blair. The inevitable next step is for Kim Kardashian to sit on the board of a tech start-up, host a global-poverty-awareness event and write a book on behavioral neuroscience.

This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.

As mindless diversions from a sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role. But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/opinion/inequality-and-the-modern-culture-of-celebrity.html?pagewanted=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130520&pagewanted=all

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Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen (Chatroulette Version)

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A lip synch to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” – not your usual performance. Dual screens – watch the reactions on the left.

http://youtu.be/KAQhG59zqZc

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US Navy Launches Autonomous Combat Drone

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Pilotless Planes, Pacific Tensions

by Richard Parker

May 12, 2013

THIS week the Navy will launch an entirely autonomous combat drone — without a pilot on a joystick anywhere — off the deck of an aircraft carrier, the George H. W. Bush. The drone will then try to land aboard the same ship, a feat only a relatively few human pilots in the world can accomplish.

This exercise is the beginning of a new chapter in military history: autonomous drone warfare. But it is also an ominous turn in a potentially dangerous military rivalry now building between the United States and China.

The X-47B, a stealth plane nicknamed “the Robot” by Navy crews, is a big bird — 38 feet long, with a 62-foot wingspan — that flies at high subsonic speeds with a range of over 2,000 miles. But it is the technology inside the Robot that makes it a game-changer in East Asia. Its entirely computerized takeoff, flight and landing raise the possibility of dozens or hundreds of its successors engaged in combat at once.

It is also capable of withstanding radiation levels that would kill a human pilot and destroy a regular jet’s electronics: in addition to conventional bombs, successors to this test plane could be equipped to carry a high-power microwave, a device that emits a burst of radiation that would fry a tech-savvy enemy’s power grids, knocking out everything connected to it, including computer networks that connect satellites, ships and precision-guided missiles.

And these, of course, are among the key things China has invested in during its crash-course military modernization. While the United States Navy is launching an autonomous drone, the Chinese Navy is playing catch-up with piloted carrier flight. Last November the Chinese Navy landed a J-15 jet fighter on the deck of the Liaoning aircraft carrier, the country’s first carrier landing.

Though China still has miles to go in developing a carrier fleet to rival America’s, the landing demonstrates its ambitions. With nearly half a million sailors and fast approaching 1,000 vessels, its navy is by some measures already the second largest in the world.

With that new navy, Beijing seeks to project its power over a series of island chains far into the Pacific: the first extends southward from the Korean Peninsula, down the eastern shore of Taiwan, encircling the South China Sea, while the second runs southeast from Japan to the Bonin and Marshall Islands, encompassing both the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States territory, and Guam — the key American base in the western Pacific. Some unofficial Chinese military literature even refers to a third chain: the Hawaiian Islands.

To project this kind of power, China must rely not only on the quantity of its ships but also on the quality of its technology. Keeping the Americans half an ocean away requires the capability for long-range precision strikes — which, in turn, require the satellite reconnaissance, cyber warfare, encrypted communications and computer networks in which China has invested nearly $100 billion over the last decade.

Ideally for both countries, China’s efforts would create a new balance of power in the region. But to offset China’s numerical advantage and technological advances, the United States Navy is betting heavily on drones — not just the X-47B and its successors, but anti-submarine reconnaissance drones, long-range communications drones, even underwater drones. A single hunter-killer pairing of a Triton reconnaissance drone and a P-8A Poseidon piloted anti-submarine plane can sweep 2.7 million square miles of ocean in a single mission.

The arms race between the world’s largest navies undermines the likelihood of attaining a new balance of power, and raise the possibility of unintended collisions as the United States deploys hundreds, even thousands of drones and China scrambles for ways to counter the new challenge. And drones, because they are cheap and don’t need a human pilot, lower the bar for aggressive behavior on the part of America’s military leaders — as they will for China’s navy, as soon as it makes its own inevitable foray into drone capabilities (indeed, there were reports last week that China was preparing its own stealth drone for flight tests).

By themselves, naval rivalries do not start wars. During peacetime, in fact, naval operations are a form of diplomacy, which provide rivals with healthy displays of force that serve as deterrents to war. But they have to be enveloped in larger political relationships, too.

At present, the United States-China relationship is really just about economics. As long as that relationship remains vibrant, confrontation is in neither country’s interest. But should that slender reed snap, there is little in the way of a larger political relationship, let alone alliance, to take its place. The only thing between crisis and conflict, then, would be two ever larger, more dangerous navies, prepared to fight a breed of drone-centric war we don’t yet fully understand, and so are all the more likely to fall into.

Richard Parker, a journalist, is the author of the forthcoming book “Unblinking: Rise of the Modern Superdrones.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/opinion/drones-and-the-rivalry-between-the-us-and-china.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130513&_r=0

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Letterman & Dr. Phil on Gay Equality

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Gay-Friendly NFL Hall of Fame Coach Vince Lombardi

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Report: Vince Lombardi willingly accepted gay players on his team

Speculation has run rampant lately about how a gay NFL player would be received by teammates and coaches. The announcement made by NBA veteran Jason Collins has further fueled the ongoing debate. Some have offered words of support while others have condemned Collins for publicly revealing he is gay.

One man who apparently would have been okay with having a gay player on his team was former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. In fact, the legendary coach reportedly knowingly and willingly embraced gay players during a time in which the topic was even more controversial than it is today.

"My father was way ahead of his time,” Lombardi's daughter, Susan, told ESPN New York. “He was discriminated against as a dark-skinned Italian American when he was younger, when he felt he was passed up for coaching jobs that he deserved. He felt the pain of discrimination, and so he raised his family to accept everybody, no matter what color they were or whatever their sexual orientation was. I think it’s great what Jason Collins did, because it’s going to open a lot of doors for people. Without a doubt my father would’ve embraced him, and would’ve been very proud of him for coming out.”

Not only did Lombardi accept gay players on his team, but he also went above and beyond to ensure nobody else on the team messed with them. According to an excerpt from the Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered, author David Maraniss wrote that the late coach once told one of his assistants to work with a running back named Ray McDonald, who was previously arrested for having intercourse with another man in public, to help him make the team. Lombardi added, "And if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood, you'll be out of here before your ass hits the ground."

One thing important to note here is that Lombardi's brother Harold was gay. Harold Lombardi passed away in 2011 and left behind a surviving partner of 41 years. Vince Lombardi passed away in 1970 with knowledge of his brother's relationship with another man. [emphasis added]

So, if Lombardi and his players could embrace gay peers by adhering to the conservative standards of the 1960s, it isn't far-fetched to believe the same can be done in the 2010s.

http://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/msn/vince_lombardi_willingly_accepted_gay_players_on_his_team/13546436

Read a more detailed article about Vince Lombardi’s support of gay rights at ESPN NY: Lombardi: A champion of gay rights

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