R&D time – how do folks manage it? – similar to Google’s 20% research time – free form, scheduled, pros-con’s – approved projects…looking for suggestions.
<RANT>
The old rule of thumb was that a senior IT professional should be engaged in deliverables only 65% – 85% of the time (depending on budget and the intelligence of management). The “unproductive” time was when R&D occurred, along with training.
These days, most R&D I see happening is when it is built into a project plan (either through creative padding or selling the ROI in advance and within a short time frame).
What little R&D I do see happening between projects these days is structured by people too far removed the deliverable level. As such, the time lines are too aggressive and the focus towards mindless repetition of simple examples rather than understanding the technology by stretching it to see what it is capable and where else it will apply.
This will be considered a classic. It is relevant at least every three years… (Click the post title to see properly until I get around to customizing this blog more)
The point of this post is getting rid of that annoying incompatibility notice about Real every time an update is made to FireFox. But first, a rant…
I am not a fan of the Real Player to begin with. I certainly give it credit for being one of the early multimedia players. I also give them credit for being one of the first major abusers of the installation process, changing extension mappings without asking, installing itself as a service when it is only used occasionally, and being really obtuse in how to fix these problems afterward. When I did PC maintenance service (before the Geek Squad, which people keep reminding me that I thought of four years before they did) I routinely removed the RealPlayer service and was always thanked for speeding up the machine.
I even tried to give the Real Player a second chance when they bought the Napster name. That lasted about 2 minutes past the installation where it still did all the things that annoyed me about the their 1.0 version. The Real Player is not installed on my personal machine. I used to routinely uninstall it from my work machine until my current employer decided to build their compliance training application using it. Which brings me to my point.
After updating the excellent password manager I use (RoboForm), I was once again confronted with this annoying screen.
Real Extension Annoyance
My first shot in Google (remove incompatible firefox extension) got me pretty close to a solution with a Mozilla Support thread. The last entry in the thread did the trick for me. In case that link is dead, the entry was:
Ok, run the program “regedit” and goto “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMozillaFirefoxExtensions”
If there is nothing there try “HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMozillaFirefoxExtensions”
There you should see the extension… delete the registry entry.
That worked for me…
The first path worked for me, too, specifically the key {ABDE892B-13A8-4d1b-88E6-365A6E755758}, with the value of “C:Program FilesRealRealPlayerbrowserrecord”
