Steve Ballmer Acting Retarded

[Aaron Drake]

I don't know how many of you have seen these before, but I just came across these clips of Steve Ballmer (of Microsoft fame) acting *incredibly* stupid. Check 'em out if you haven't already: http://jokke.dk/media/balmer.html

Warning: you need QuickTime, but IMO it's worth it to see these. :-P

[Michael Kennedy]

I'm not sure anything is worth installing QuickTime for.  Does the latest QuickTime still do the startup thing?  The older versions used to run "QTtask" that was a pain in the ass to completely disable.  No more QT for me now.  :)

If you run accross mpegs of the videos I'd be interested in checking them out (although I have a vague feeling that I've seen them before somehow).  :)

[Guest]

I doubt you've seen the music video.  It's pretty funny.

Except for the fact that I can't get "developers, developers, developers, developers" out of my head now.

--Beanie

[Guest]

That's funny it took me a few minutes to disable this task as well.  You can disable it in the settings menu in the Quicktime player.  However, their settings dialog could a use a little HCI work.  It has a dropdown box at the top that changes what setting is displayed on main dialog.  You have to scroll through all 15 settings before you can find the disable option which is in "Browser Plug-in" of all places.   I recently started using iTunes and its interface is much better than Quicktime's.  Although, I had to lookup how to get my music to work on more than one computer.

BTW. If you don't want to put quicktime on your computer it is in the CS labs, so you can watch videos there.

[Stiffler]

Mek2600 - I use this plug-in for QuickTime stuff: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1049831315. It is called "QuickTime Alternative". Now you can view all the quicktime stuff.

Jon

[Michael Kennedy]

Yeah, I have that but the browser plugin part doesnt seem to work too well.  I couldnt get the videos to play and it didn't let me download them so I could watch it normally.

I also ran into that QT Alternative when I download Kazaa Lite a long while back.  Great app.

[Aaron Drake]

Here are some mpegs I found: http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html.

Except for the fact that I can't get "developers, developers, developers, developers" out of my head now.

LOL, I know what you mean.  I can't get that song out of my head now either. :roll: It's pretty funny though... kinda reminds me of Strong Bad's techno song "The System Is Down".  

The best part was where he goes "I've got four words for you: Developers, developers, developers, developers." Such a clever editing job... :-D

Geez Ballmer sweats a lot. :-o  :-P  

[Michael Kennedy]

Yeah, but I'm quite sure that the bad HCI was by design.  Also, I'm not 100% sure that you've disabled all of the QT junk.  It used to be in older versions that even after you disabled it inside the app you'd still have to disable it in the registry as well.  I dont remember right off where the startup stuff is in the registry, but a Google search should help you find it if you care.

I'm not sure if that's still the case (is 6 the newest version cause i've not used past 5, I think), but it used to something that cuased great cursing on this side of my keyboard.

[Michael Kennedy]

Wow, I just happened to run into this on /. a minute ago.  This is a damn funny flash video making fun of Ballmer.

http://www.macboy.com/cartoons/ballmer/ballmersipod.swf



*deep sigh* I want an iPOD

[Aaron Drake]

Yeah, I saw that video earlier today.  In fact, that was how I stumbled upon the other ones I mentioned.  I guess they are relatively old now, but this was the first time I had encountered them.

[R. Andrew Lamonica]

Startup in the Reg. is usually located in

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

but it can be in

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

as long as it keeps putting it self back before each reboot (a virus trick).

However, the best way to see things that run at startup is to run the "msconfig" utility.  It comes with Windows (98, XP, and I think 2000 and ME too) and it is in the path so you can run it from the start menu.  If you look in the "Startup" tab you can see most all the user-mode programs that run at startup.  Including those in the common and alternative Startup Menus, the registry and system files.  

It is important to note that all these programs that run at startup are not constantly running on your machine.  If you disable quicktime's "always on" features it still runs qttask once at startup, but it does not continue to run.  There is lots of other software that does this as well.  If you have an NVidia Video card the Windows Drivers come with some neat tricks, but these tricks have to be applied at startup so niwz.exe runs and then goes away.