Posts by Harmless Drudge

No problems here

I detest this website (FB) and this company, principally because of its scumbag ethics. I deleted WhatsApp the day they bought it as I knew their assurances they wouldn't use user data were not to be trusted. Surprise.... I was right and they duly got a slap on the wrist from the EU (would be a much bigger one now, post GDPR). People I know, including my wife, just can't give it up. It's a vicious circle. A usage tax on services with near monopoly status might help regulate their use and mitigate some of the adverse social effects, but Facebook looks to me like a clear case for considering public ownership and (distributed) governance -- or v tough regulation as a utility. Uncle Sam will never do the needful under a Republican controlled govt, and maybe never.

Recently I discovered that my choice of new phone, if I bought one now, would be Chinese or Chinese. This was a bit of a penny drop moment. It followed my adding Aliexpress to my list of places to check prices on, and a few other such indicators (not just things one reads about in the Economist). Which leads me to suspect that the Facebook replacement may well be Chinese.

RIP

I was in grad school in the US in the early 80s and got sucked in to the world of microcomputers in the heyday of CP/M. This is indeed a nostalgic read. I hadn't heard Bill Godbout's name in years. At the end of my student days I camped for a few weeks in the attic of a friend, a pipe-smoking professor with an electronic engineering background. I can still remember his enthusiasm for his S100 bus home-brew stuff in that attic and mentions of "Bill" as he pointed his pipe at things that warmed the cockles of his heart (8 inch floppy drives among others). (Works of both Bill Morrow and Bill Godbout represented in that attic).

The chromebook on which I'm writing this was hardly unimaginable then but I never wondered how long it would take; I was happy to, among other things, submit the first word processed dissertation in my dept., and, of course have fun. I just asked my Amazon Alexa who Bill Godbout was. She had no idea but had told me earlier in response to a morning greeting that it was Mickey Mouse's birthday. /eyerollemojigoeshere

Customer since 2002. I have my backup MX pointed to Tuffmail with everything copied to Fastmail. This works for me and has guaranteed continuity twice. Once during a DNS problem at my then university about 10 years ago when I needed something time-critical from my inbox, and again during this outage.

Happy that FM is again an employee-owed company. It's responsive, ethical and good value. Also transparent. Highly recommended.

No problems here

I bought a laptop with Windows 10 on it recently (upgraded from Windows 8.1). I sacrificed a 16Gb USB memory stick for a recovery disk and made an image backup and wiped it and replaced it with my currently preferred Linux (Mint).

I simply have no reason to use Windows 10. I run Windows 7 on an older laptop for a few things I don't have open source alternatives for yet, but nothing really all that important. Most things run under WINE. I don't even need Play On Linux. I'll virtualise at some point.

Windows, it was a good innings. BYE.

No problems here

I took the precaution of doing a clean install. Had no problems at all.