Doug's Mailbag: Patch Pain, Death of Net Neutrality?
One reader conveys his joy of tackling new patches from Microsoft:
I recently applied the MS "malicious .LNK vulnerability" patch. After the obligatory reboot, my sound was gone.
Advice from the 'Net: "nothing wrong with the patch -- you just have old sound drivers, so go update them."
My take: There was nothing wrong with my sound drivers before the patch -- sound drivers aren't like bread that can go stale or grow moldy -- why update what wasn't spoiled? The update just disabled them.
And sure enough, after uninstalling that update, my sound was back, good as new.
Still, all in all, that was nothing as compared with the time I was offered a video driver update that -- you guessed it -- knocked out my video completely. Rebooting after that one gave me a black screen with not even a hint of a fluorescent glow at the edges. (Thank goodness for [F8] after a forced shut-down, and Last Known Good Configuration).
- Fred
Here are some of your thoughts on Google's new plan for the future of the Web:
QWest already does this -- They control your speed by reducing your
priority -- only the commercial or highest paying customers get fast
service.
-Gene
My mother, a very non-technical individual, had this to say this afternoon about Google and the current direction of the Federal government of the United States of America (individual states seem to still understand our underlying principles) relating to all three Google topics presented in your article: 'You know, the methods Google and our federal government bear striking resemblance to a previous regime that conducted themselves under the same guise of for the good of the people....'
I am a first generation German-American.
This should not only be enough to scare all freedom-loving Americans about the federal Reich, but the corporations being empowered and emboldened by this Reich (it lost the title of administration several laws ago).
-Anonymous
This is not good. We now know where Barack Obama received his money, from big business like oil, telecommunications, etc. He did not receive any money from individuals.
Google would dictate on how much a customer would pay monthly.
-John
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/18/2010 at 1:18 PM