Posts by petef 200 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2010
I'm no Microsoft apologist but in my recent firing up of Windows 10 (22H2) I notice that Settings has stopped bugging me that my browser settings are sub-optimal. I forget the exact wording but the essence used to be that M$ thought that I should be using Edge instead of the preference I had set for Opera.
I'm referring to the top panel of Settings whose three remaining buttons are OneDrive, Windows Update and Rewards.
The computer in question is dual boot and spends most of its time in openSUSE Tumbleweed / KDE Plasma which I find to be an altogether more pleasurable experience.
For me the worst aspect of the ZX81 membrane keyboard was that your fingers moved a bit leading to you pushing at dead space and then being eaten by Rex. We mitigated that somewhat by taping things over the keys but that only improved the action marginally. As others have mentioned programs could come to an abrupt end when the 16 KiB (count 'em!) RAM pack perched on the back was breathed on.
Many years ago a colleague ask me to clear my files to free up space on their workstation. I duly removed my /home but left an entry in /etc/passwd so that I could still login but with a home of root. After I'd informed the owner they blindly followed a remove user script, part of which was a question that asked are you sure you want to remove the user's home? A box full of floppies was needed to reimage.
It is not always that obvious. I had a real instance of that happening some years ago (the resulting system restore involved fifteen 5¼" floppies). A colleague had asked me to release my storage on their machine. I deleted my home directory but then modified my home to be / so that I could still log in. I informed the machine owner that I had cleared my disk usage. Unfortunately they then opted to remove my user account. Part of that procedure was to remove the user's home directory. Tears ensued.
I raised an issue with Sun who at that stage had become the owner of Interactive UNIX. They declined to put protections in place. I wonder what became of them?
I agree that PCS offer a good route to Linux. Skipping Windows saves of the order of £100. But there is a difference between supplying a PC with LInux that is certified to have working drivers and a barebone delivery that is the end user's responsibility to manage.
Not all PCS machines are Clevo. I've been happy with that but my more recent Akstron purchase has had recurring problems.
I've had no problems with WhatsApp on Linux. It is one of the message integrations in Opera though I'm sure that there will be other implementations.
Outlook works fine in the browser, Teams less so the last few times I tried. Those, of course, are just for work.
I think of my program as a helper rather than a solver. For my word list I started with /usr/share/dict/american-english. There are some diacritics in there that need to be stripped. Be aware that there are 266 words in the 2315 canned wordle answers missing from that dict. I took pains to avoid looking at those, just counting them. A bigger dict derived from SCOWL was only missing one of the wordle answers.
This idea would get more traction if Facebook and co. see the benefits too rather than relying on regulation being forced upon them. Users marking up their own preferences should be more valuable than what algorithms alone can glean.
I cannot be alone in being hit with "targeted" messages in the vein of "you have just bought a washing machine, here are other washing machines that may interest you". Those are irritating and it would be commercially useful to improve.
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