Poor service, but why do they want ads?
Yesterday I was ungratefully bitching about Lambdatest, an excellent emulator service that won't let you pay for the service you need. You can get it free, or you can pay way too much for more than you need.

Free is supposedly wonderful, but in fact it's terrible. Product, not customer.

Now I'm bitching about the opposite kind of mispricing, which is more serious.

Part of the current courseware project is a set of videos showing anatomical dissections. I dissected the videos into short pieces, with questions and quizzes interspersed in the usual courseware pattern. At first I had tried to do it the cheap way since I'm getting very little money from this work. I used FFMPEG to cut the pieces manually. FFMPEG is a crude tool, cutting only on keyframes, and the copy-editor didn't like the results. I respect this editor's judgment tremendously, so I looked for a non-cheap way to dissect the dissections. I remembered using Ulead (now Corel) on a much earlier courseware project, and purchased the latest.

(I wasn't listening to good old Emerson. Cheap is always more expensive in the end!)

Corel VideoStudio is a HUGE NEOCON MONSTER that invades and occupies the computer. It has all sorts of features that I'll never need or use. The installation was crude and coarse, failing with no error message. I tried using Corel's India help center, but they were slow to respond. Finally figured out the problem by reading error logs. Corel was sulking because it didn't like my display resolution setting. I set the resolution to max, Corel installed and ran. I finished the work, with a much cleaner result than FFMPEG.

Now that Corel is occupying a large part of my computer, you'd think it would at least be QUIET. That's supposedly why you PAY for software, to stop the annoying advertisements.

Nope. Being paid is not enough for Insatiable Neocon Corel. Several times a day it pops up HUGE ADS on my regular desktop, where they have the feel of serious warnings from the operating system.



I'll be glad when this project is done so I can uninstall this parasite.


= = = = =

Update 11/27: Project is done. Uninstalled the parasite immediately, ran CCleaner to rip out its roots, rebooted. Unshaving the yak was just as hard as shaving. The UNINSTALL required me to switch screen resolution. and during the reboot Windows had to run CHKDSK to clean up the file system that Ulead had messed with. Good riddance to a BAD program.

Next day: Computer still seemed to be running slow, so I looked at tasks and startup. Corel had turned ON Windows Update without asking permission. I'd shut off Update a long time ago because it's essentially malware. Removed Update from startup and rebooted. At least no DISKCHK this time.

Labels: From rights to duties

  ¶ 12:21 AM