We took the girls (and their cousins) to see the Easter Bunny at the mall today. I don't know, the girls seem to enjoy it and it's nice to have the pictures, but the prices... I'm sure it's reasonable it's just kind of galling to pay that much for pictures I could easily print out myself. It's kind of like paying someone to burn a CD for you.
Also, the CD they provide is technical laziness at its finest. It has a little VB6 app on it to display notices, popup/print HTML licenses, etc. Fine, whatever, if you need that kind of thing. It's also understandable to launch some kind of splash screen as an autorun on the CD - even to the point of running the program - though that's pushing it. But this CD actually runs a batch file for the autorun that installs a set of VB6 DLLs without permission. It's the very first thing it does, before asking you or displaying anything on the screen, that's what it does - as soon as you put the CD in.
I know, how can it run a program to ask you if you want to install the files without installing the necessary DLLs first? Lots of ways. Lots of easy, considerate ways that don't abuse the customer's trust. So what's the big deal? Well, despite the danger present when any program runs against your will, without you knowing, there's the possible fact that you may have newer versions of these DLLs that would be invalidated and overwritten by the older versions - breaking existing software. Or, in my case, since I do development in VB6 from time to time, it messes up my code libraries, causing duplicate registrations and, in general, making a mess of my development environment.
Or that was the scene at Christmastime, anyway. This time I had autorun firmly disabled.
Anyway, enjoy the bunny picture.
