Archive: Gripes
Well, Duh: Viacom Backs Off On YouTube Records
Not even two weeks after a federal court ruling that would have handed over gigabytes of data about the viewing habits of YouTube users to Viacom, that entertainment conglomerate decided to allow YouTube to strip out personal data from these records. Google subsidiary YouTube posted a note about this deal...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 15, 2008; 11:35 AM ET | Comments (8)
Defective Defaults: Where to Start on a New PC?
I wish I could credit my absence from this space yesterday to pure laziness. Instead, on my arrival in the office Monday, the computer on my desk refused to boot, with the only evidence of its demise two illuminated numbers on the front: "3" and "4." The Post's IT department...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 9, 2008; 10:28 AM ET | Comments (33)
Court Invites Viacom to Violate YouTube Viewers' Privacy
Not for the first time, a court ruling in a copyright-policy case has made privacy rights an afterthought. Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton ruled that Google had to hand over video-viewing records of its YouTube subsidiary to Viacom, which alleges that YouTube built a business on...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 7, 2008; 11:00 AM ET | Comments (36)
A Tech-Support Request: Map Out Phone Trees
I love as much as anybody to complain about tech support -- what else can I do about it most of the time? But for today, I'd like to talk about one way to make it better. I don't have in mind something crazy like, say, hiring people who actually...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 23, 2008; 01:00 PM ET | Comments (16)
A Couple of Tax-Prep Tidbits
Tax Day is now less than 20 days away--have you finished preparing your taxes? Yeah, me neither. I know I'm going to owe money to the Feds, and I'm also reluctant to dive back into this topic after this month's review. In the meantime, I am happy to exercise my...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 28, 2008; 10:23 AM ET | Comments (24)
The Taxing Task of Tax Prep
While you were reading Sunday's business section, did you catch my review of three tax-prep programs--TurboTax, TaxCut* and TaxAct? If so, you got to see the end product of the single worst part of my job. I try out a lot of products that, at best, make an unwanted task...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 10, 2008; 11:32 AM ET | Comments (17)
Password Pain Persists
When I logged on to my computer at work this morning, I was greeted by one of my least favorite prompts: Your current password will expire in 13 days. Would you like to change it now? As usual, I clicked the "No" button--wishing it read "Hell, no"--because I have to...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 3, 2008; 02:10 PM ET | Comments (50)
Following Up: a PayPal Payoff, an Evite Error
In any line of work, you have to hold companies to their pledges of future improvements. But it may be more important to do so in the field of technology, where people habitually claim that the next version of a program, an online service or a Web site will cure...
By Rob Pegoraro | December 18, 2007; 10:20 AM ET | Comments (4)
Bluetooth Blues
Yesterday's Help File looked into the difficulties involved in replacing the little USB receivers that most cordless mice use require to connect to computers. It concluded with this suggestion: One way to avoid this entire issue is to buy a computer with Bluetooth wireless built-in. With one of those machines,...
By Rob Pegoraro | October 15, 2007; 08:58 AM ET | Comments (14)
Where Did Your Tech-Support Call Go?
I want to stay on the subject of tech support today. Everybody likes to complain about it, and with good reason. You call for help--with your computer, your cell-phone service, your plane ticket--and you get into the same-old-same-old of hold music, useless suggestions from a script and an unwillingness to...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 31, 2007; 09:51 AM ET | Comments (14)
"Immediately"? Not So Fast...
Back in May, I wrote a post here about the annoyance of updating Sun Microsystems's Java software. It's smart enough to download and install new versions automatically, but it's too dense to remove old releases afterwards. At the time, a company spokeswoman assured me that this glitch would be fixed,...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 7, 2007; 11:01 AM ET | Comments (13)
Evite's Inertia
While I was trying out the iPhone, I made a pleasant discovery: I could finally use Evite outside my home and office. The popular event-planning site does not come in a mobile version readable on cell phones, but the iPhone's Safari browser could display the full-sized version. Then, though, I...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 6, 2007; 10:10 AM ET | Comments (9)
New iTunes, Almost the Same Installation Annoyances
I'm happy to have Apple's iTunes as the default music player on my Windows machines, but I'm not so thrilled about this program when I need to update it. It's not the 81.2-megabyte size of the latest such download that bothers me--although anybody on dial-up will need to leave their...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 13, 2007; 12:33 PM ET | Comments (29)
How Dumb Can a "Wizard" Get?
The BlackBerry Curve smartphone (warning, annoying animated intro) looks great, but the software inside it doesn't seem to be terribly bright. The trouble started when I first turned it on, and was greeted by a 13-screen "Setup Wizard" that warned me upfront that it would need "approximately 10 minutes" of...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 20, 2007; 10:06 AM ET | Comments (5)
Dumb Quote of the Day
I've written many times before about the fundamental absurdity of saying that intellectual property--creative works like books, movies, music, pictures and software--is the same as real, physical property. They're not: It says so right in the U.S. Constitution, and the laws of just about every country in the world make...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 15, 2007; 03:19 PM ET | Comments (22)
A Fix For One Java Annoyance?
One of the ongoing irritations of Windows computer maintenance is having to clean up after programs that won't behave themselves. And one of the foremost offenders in that category is Sun Microsystems' Java Runtime Environment software. Although it's smart enough to check for, download and install its own updates, it's...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 18, 2007; 10:18 AM ET | Comments (10)
Software Updates (Still) Need An Upgrade
A couple of weeks ago, my Help File column noted the arrival of a new, Microsoft Vista-ready version of the free OpenOffice productivity suite. OpenOffice has long one of my favored open-source applications, and I'm glad to see it's keeping up with the times. But updating a copy of OpenOffice...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 23, 2007; 12:22 PM ET | Comments (6)
Tax Follow-Up
On this rainy, windy Monday morning, we can all give thanks to the District of Columbia--since today is Emancipation Day, a legal holiday in D.C., we all get one more day to finish our taxes. And once again, I could use that extra time. As I wrote last month, my...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 16, 2007; 12:20 PM ET | Comments (9)
A Phone That Makes You Feel Powerless
When I tried out a batch of high-resolution camera phones a few weeks ago, I faced one unusual challenge--figuring out how to turn one of these models on and off. And the design of the Nokia N93 didn't flummox only me. It also had my wife baffled as well--and she...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 9, 2007; 08:32 AM ET | Comments (33)
Pet Peeve: Sharing-Proof Web Addresses
A few minutes ago, I was going to share a Web address with a reader--it was a tech-support article on Intuit's TurboTax site. But my browser window only showed the first part of this address. When I pasted it into an e-mail message, the following gobbledygook sprawled across the screen:...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 26, 2007; 05:00 PM ET | Comments (19)
More Tax Talk
Nobody's proved that a thousand monkeys typing away will reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but we know what 535 representatives and senators can concoct if left alone. And it's not pretty. It's not the amount of tax I owe that bothers me. It's how that's determined: We've allowed a fundamental...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 15, 2007; 08:24 AM ET | Comments (15)
Tech-Support Travails
I lost 40 minutes of my life to Hewlett-Packard's tech-support line earlier this afternoon, and it wasn't even the hold music (alternated with periods of total silence) that bugged me this time around. Instead, it was the gratuitous waste of time that constituted HP's screening system: First I spoke to...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 27, 2007; 12:49 PM ET | Comments (27)
When An Install Stalls
My friend Randy was thrilled when Sprint released a new ExpressCard for its Mobile Broadband service--finally, he could use that fast connection with his MacBook Pro laptop. After successfully coaxing a Sprint rep into giving him the new-customer discount (why do wireless carriers try to jerk around their best customers...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 24, 2007; 10:12 AM ET | Comments (10)
How Does Yahoo Spell "Spam"?
The spam filter allegedly protecting my Yahoo Mail account from unsolicited commercial e-mail rarely fails to amuse me with its periodic ineptitude. That is, while it does keep most of the junk out of my inbox, it still lets in some of the most obvious junk mail imaginable. (Not that...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 21, 2007; 06:00 AM ET | Comments (19)
