Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get the cool without the damp today. ADDED- 54F and 90%RH this morning. Fall is here.
Yesterday was certainly nice. It was a bit overcast for part of the day, but the sun did peek out.
I got seeds in the ground in the remainder of the raised beds. I put turnips, beets, and quick growing radishes in the beds. I’ve still got the window boxes to do, but I feel better now with something in the ground. The peas are coming up, and I think the beans might be too.
Beyond that it was little things knocked off the list. Washed two down jackets I picked up for the kids. Like new condition, real down, traditional makers, and I used a technical down wash on them. I’m running them in the dryer on the ‘no heat’ cycle until dry. Just in time for cooler weather!
Moved some more stuff to the auction pile. Looked through the current auction, which finally lists some of the stuff I dropped off last month. Maybe I can drop off this stack soon. I put back one of my UHF antennas, and moved another wire antenna. Not super high on the list, but I was up on the roof to look at the chimney cap. I’m not going to be changing that out for new. The repair guy mortared it in place. I’ll leave it until we need to have the chimney cleaned to worry about access. At least the cap won’t blow away ever again.
Had a real nice dinner with a new recipe. I talked about it in yesterday’s comments. Usually my ‘go to’ book is an older copy of “Joy of Cooking”. If you only have room for one food prep reference book, I think that should be it. It will answer any questions, provide delicious recipes from simple and basic ingredients, and it’s funny besides. Add a couple of other category cookbooks, preferably older or put together by a church lady, and you are pretty well covered. I’ve got a couple of wild game books, the Fanny Farmer book, a bread book, some specialty books like on chinese cooking or low carb, and several ‘church lady’ books. Those are great for regional favorites, simple and hearty meals, and classic ‘church social’ dishes. I’ve done posts or comments on recipe books before to cover the other ones I consider essential from a ‘prepping’ standpoint. Search should find them.
We finished the night with a little campfire in the fire ring in front of the house. We made s’mores and watched the flames for a while. I’ve got a mexican pottery bowl half filled with sand that is perfect for a little fire made from twigs in the yard. Just what you need for a dozen s’mores.
Later today I’m making a scrap run with a couple dozen dead batteries. Then I’ll head out for a couple of auction pickups. If I have time, I’ll stop at my buddy’s store and drop off some mold killer/disinfectant/odor killer. He got some water in the house during the big rain. And of course, all the backlogged tasks are still there too. Maybe I’ll get some of them knocked off.
I’ll try. And I’ll keep stacking.
n
“‘In fact, 700,000 ballots in Texas could swing the entire state to the dum-bro-crats.’
That was approximately Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 in Texas.”
What an amazing coincidence !
Abbott’s margin was 900,000 in 2018 running against a loon candidate. 700,000 could arguably also give them the US Senate race, which is arguably more important long term to turning Texas
It does make me wonder why they don’t seem to be trying very hard with “Doors”.
Of course, Texas Republicans have done a lot of damage to themselves chasing Ann Richards ghost in the last Legislature session rather than putting a lid on the Progs in San Antonio and Austin/Travis County. Now the Williamson County Sheriff has been indicted on shaky grounds about evidence tampering on a two year old case a month out from the election with nary a peep from the Governor.
Somehow I ended up on a phone list as a democrat in Texas. I’ve been getting texts about elections for a couple of years now, and the funny thing is they are addressed to my wife. Someone conflated my phone number (which is a southern california prefix) with my wife’s name. Anyway, I got a text yesterday with the classic “women and children affected most” theme. Seems that one of our candidates would outlaw ‘flaring’ of gas byproducts during oil extraction because it fills the air with “toxins” that are “damaging to children and pregnant women.” So I texted back the question, “what about men? Are they not affected by the toxins?” and as usual, got no actual response.
The whole thing encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with the democrats at this time.
– they have bad data about people – I’m not my wife, neither of us support the democratic party
-they think meddling in how a very technical business operates is within their purview
-their idea is technically un- feasible, those byproducts need to be dealt with.
-they’re using the same tired tactics from decades ago
-Still using fear rather than facts
-when questioned they ignore, repeat the party line, or disengage
It’s the equivalent of the sidewalk preacher shouting at passersby.
and it’s probably even LESS effective.
n
It’s always about the women and children. Bring up technical issues of which the general public has little, or no, knowledge, and make it sound really bad. Democrats would claim Dihydrogen Monoxide is going to kill us all if they thought it would get votes.
I’ve been getting emails from top Dumbos for a month and a half. WTF, over? They are usually worded like the “Nigerian Prince” scam. I think they are targeting older people to con them into a donation. “Just a $1 to $5 donation will save the World.” The Dumbos are harvesting data somehow and are clueless where it comes from. Maybe they hired that Steele “Dossier” guy to do it.
You or your wife, or most likely both, have also voted by mail in California for Biden and a straight Dem slate.
I have a second phone number that I have *never* given to anyone. I have called out using that number with caller ID blocked. Yet I still receive phone calls on that number. I just let it ring and never answer.
I also have an email that I have never given out to anyone. I have never used that email address. I just got it and parked it. Yet I get emails to that address. I can only guess the ISP that hosts the email sold the list for a profit.
It’s always about the women and children. Bring up technical issues of which the general public has little, or no, knowledge, and make it sound really bad. Democrats would claim Dihydrogen Monoxide is going to kill us all if they thought it would get votes.
The swing voters in this election are the suburban women living the top 6-7% income bracket lifestyles in the suburbs of DC and the tech hubs. Generally inclined to vote Dem so as to not make waves with friends, they’d vote for Trump in a heartbeat if they thought their lifestyle was threatened.
We have a lot of women like that around where I live … in the suburbs of the Austin tech hub! “Yay gay marriage and weed legalization … but *We* worked hard for what we have.”
For now, the prevailing thinking is “Orange man bad. My friends who still have BETO bumper stickers say so.”
I somehow ended up on the dems email list. Of course, the emails are addressed to my mom.
Prepping – Last week I ordered another of the Augason farms 30 day meal buckets from big river. Yeah, it’s not a true 30 days worth of food, but it is a good amount, and will be a nice supplement to existing stores if it’s really needed. I have 2 now, and plan to get one more next month.
My Apple Watch, series 4, is nearing the end of the AppleCare+ (two years). I have contacted Apple about the significant scratch on the screen. I asked for the watch to be repaired. $69.00 plus tax. If they do as they did last time on my Apple Watch, series 2, the screen is not replaced, the entire watch is replaced. Thus new screen and new battery. Should be good for another two years. At that point I will opt to replace completely with the Apple Watch series 8 in 2022. Apple is sending a box for shipment rather than a store visit which is my preferred method as I really don’t want to be visiting a mall.
I ignored my normal four year cycle on replacement from the series 2 to the series 4. I wanted the ECG and especially the fall detection. An extra layer of protection at my age that seemed a worthwhile upgrade. The main change in the series 6 is the O2 sensor and sleep tracking. The O2 sensor is OK, sleep tracking is not. May be better by the time the series 8 is released (if Apple keeps on yearly cycle).
The Apple Watch is impressive, even though I’m an Android guy. Isn’t the problem with sleep tracking that you need to recharge the watch every day, which you would usually do while asleep?
My Apple Watch, series 4, is nearing the end of the AppleCare+ (two years). I have contacted Apple about the significant scratch on the screen. I asked for the watch to be repaired. $69.00 plus tax. If they do as they did last time on my Apple Watch, series 2, the screen is not replaced, the entire watch is replaced.
My wife’s Apple Watch was two years out of warranty when the battery swelled as I wore it sleeping one night while on call at work. I took it to the Apple store, asking just to have the battery replaced and display reattached, but they gave me a new watch of the same model.
The battery is a hot button issue. Essentially the cell exploded while I slept, but the stored power is so small that I didn’t notice until I woke up the next morning and found the display hanging off the watch by the ribbon cable.
My daily wear watch is a $100 Casio Edifice that keeps awesome time and was built to the 10/10/10 standard — 10 years of battery (solar charging), 10 bars of pressure resistance, 10 m drop resistance.
Supposedly the watch can charge in an hour and it will last 24 hours. Charge before going to sleep and it should be good.
My CPAP machine tracks my sleep much better than a watch. It can detect REM sleep and other sleep patterns. All from how I am breathing. Amazing.
Apple generally does that for any device that suffers a battery issue such as swelling. Apparently it is cheaper to just give the customer a new device rather than suffer litigation. Batteries have caused major issues, fires and personal harm. There is more energy in that little battery than a person would realize and can cause significant burns.
It would have cost you almost as much as new device to replace the battery and reattach the screen. There is also the issue of nasty chemical residue left behind. I doubt your watch was repairable.
I have a Samsung Gear Fit2 Pro. Although it can last through almost three days, my usual routine is put it on the charger when I wake up each morning. By the time I am done with breakfast, the battery is back up to 100%. It is usually still above 60% when I go to bed, and still above 50% when I wake up.
Samsung seems to have discontinued that form factor, sad to say. I like it a lot, and will miss it when I have to find something else.
I don’t use a smart watch or fitness tracker, but I do wear a watch. I feel naked leaving the house without one on. That’s quite a change from when I never wore one, thinking that my skytel pager, or phone, or vehicle clock would be good enough.
I especially like wearing a watch now, as I can see the time without touching my phone at all.
n
(today I’m wearing a swiss quartz in a dive watch style by H3. I alternate that with a vintage g-shock, and a timex quartz in a classic military issue style on a nato band. I’ve got others that are more ‘dress up’ watches than daily drivers.)
I wear a basic Casio G-Shock watch. The simple one that looks like it came straight out of the ‘80s. I can’t have anything with Bluetooth at work, so a basic watch it is.
I do have a fitbit watch, but I only use it on my runs.
I wear a basic Casio G-Shock watch. The simple one that looks like it came straight out of the ‘80s. I can’t have anything with Bluetooth at work, so a basic watch it is.
One of the 80s G-Shock watches is certified by NASA for the space station, the model in the commercials where it was strapped to a hockey puck and smacked around.
The others are two Omega watches, “Moon” and “Mars” Speedmasters, and, strangely, a Microsoft/Timex DataLink.
I wear the Garmin fenix 5X Plus: https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/603229
Flexibility: Connects to GPSr devices and phone, has GPS and maps, plays stored music on bluetooth speakers, plenty of physical body stuff, and more than I want to write more about here.
I wear an L. L. Bean Adults’ Katahdin 42mm Field Watch analog watch because all I need is something that tells me the time.
Yeah, I am something of a Luddite. So sue me! 😉
I won’t tolerate anything on my hands or wrists, so no watch for me.
Similarly, I don’t like anything on my legs or feet. No pants for me!
(The “anything on my hands” thing is mostly from machine work and martial arts, wherein rings and watches can lose you a hand or slice up someone’s face. The “anything on my legs” thing is just personal preference but it gives me an excuse to run around with no pants so I run with it, so to speak.)
I have paid zero federal income taxes for the last four years. Even though I make more now than I did when I was working. While working it was difficult to avoid the taxes due to a salary. With no salary I can now take advantage of the loop holes.
Not loopholes but intentional tax policy designed to promote investment. Rich and those who want to be, can structure income away from salary into intrest and dividends which are taxed at a lower rate to promote investments. If you want more of something you tax it less.
My concern are the politicians who are too stupid to arrange their finances to reduce the tax load. Paying g a higher rate of taxes tells me you hire bad advice.
“The Bidens Used S Corps To Avoid Paying Hundreds of Thousands in Payroll Taxes”
https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-used-s-corps-avoid-paying-hundreds-thousands-payroll-taxes/
“Of the nearly $13.3 million the couple took in primarily through speaking fees and book royalties during the 2017 and 2018 tax years, they claimed just $750,000 in income.”
“The other 94 percent of the money passed through the corporations as a direct distribution to the Bidens, preventing it from being subject to the 15.3 percent combined Social Security and Medicare tax rate, according to CNBC.”
Oh yeah, they got some good tax advice.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Prepping – Last week I ordered another of the Augason farms 30 day meal buckets from big river. Yeah, it’s not a true 30 days worth of food, but it is a good amount, and will be a nice supplement to existing stores if it’s really needed. I have 2 now, and plan to get one more next month.
Like this ?
https://www.amazon.com/Augason-Farms-5-20091-Emergency-Servings/dp/B071KPGLBK/?tag=ttgnet-20
I have a lot of this stuff in #10 cans and a few heavy duty plastic 5 gallon buckets. The only problem is when you open it, you have to use it in a year or less. And I bought extra chicken from Sams Club for supplementing it.
“BREAKING: Joe Biden’s Campaign Requests Breaks EVERY 30 MINUTES during Tonight’s First Debate — VIDEO”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/breaking-joe-bidens-campaign-requests-breaks-every-30-minutes-tonights-first-debate/
Sleepy Joe needs to take a couple of naps during the debate so they can reprogram him !
Incontinence. He will probably wear *two* Depends during the debate. And tRump continues to troll Plugs. Now tRump wants to have their ears checked for transmitters. LOL! And earlier tRump wanted drug tests. Double LOL! Master troll since the Plugs campaign won’t respond to either request making them default cheaters.
@mediumwave, that watch is almost exactly like my timex, but swiss, and probably 3x better built. Check out a black and grey stripe nato band…
n
Yes sir.
I have three Citizen Eco analog watches that I like a lot. I even have synced the time on two *Atomic* watches with an app since I usually can’t receive the signal.
Mostly I wear my Apple Watch 5. For foofoo events I wear my Breitling Airwolf. An expensive gift from MrsAtoz.
@mediumwave, that watch is almost exactly like my timex, but swiss, and probably 3x better built. Check out a black and grey stripe nato band…
After the original leather band wore out I replaced it with a black nato band.
In some ways, I’m very old-scho0l. 😀
I won’t tolerate anything on my hands or wrists, so no watch for me.
Similarly, I don’t like anything on my legs or feet. No pants for me!
(The “anything on my hands” thing is mostly from machine work and martial arts, wherein rings and watches can lose you a hand or slice up someone’s face. The “anything on my legs” thing is just personal preference but it gives me an excuse to run around with no pants so I run with it, so to speak.)
One of my fellow Aggie engineers was sliding down a vertical ladder between the boiler firing rows on a boiler in Dallas and his Aggie ring caught on a burr on the ladder. Peeled his ring finger skin off like the skin off a grape. After about a dozen infections he elected to have the finger amputated. We all stopped wearing rings in the plants.
The 1980s safety culture in our plants was fairly slack. Just a hard hat was required. No safety lines, no nothing. I once walked a 2×12 for about 10 ft across the top inside of a boiler about 120 ft off the ground. It bowed about six inches in the middle for me, I did not walk it back across after lunch.
“Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond”
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/28/eric_raymond_linux_beats_windows_prediction/
and
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764
“Open-source software advocate Eric S Raymond has penned an argument that the triumph of Linux on the desktop is imminent because Microsoft will soon tire of Windows.”
“Raymond’s argument, posted to his blog late last week, kicked off with some frank admiration for Windows Subsystem For Linux, the tech that lets Linux binaries run under Windows. He noted that Microsoft is making kernel contributions just to improve WSL.”
I disagree with ESR as some Windows applications need extreme performance. But, he could be right.
“Raymond’s argument, posted to his blog late last week, kicked off with some frank admiration for Windows Subsystem For Linux, the tech that lets Linux binaries run under Windows. He noted that Microsoft is making kernel contributions just to improve WSL.”
I disagree with ESR as some Windows applications need extreme performance. But, he could be right.
Microsoft isn’t going to walk away from 15+ years of WHQL effort on device drivers for x86 and x86_64. Linux is severely lacking in terms of driver support for anything beyond commodity hardware.
Plus, the NT kernel isn’t terrible. It is the cr*p layered on top that causes problems for Microsoft and their customers. My guess is that they’ll follow Apple onto custom ARM hardware with part of the Surface line — WinRT 2.0 but with an emulation layer for x86_64 binaries and Win32.
Unless it will work for the folks with VCR’s still flashing 12:00, it will never happen. Linux either works or takes cryptic commands that make little sense (GREP?) with obscure arguments only known by propeller heads. For severe issues recompiling the kernel is not an option. Linux/Unix was not designed for the casual user.
Windows is dominant because for the most part it just works. With all manner of hardware. Apple just works, but only with their expensive hardware. Apple has put a nice graphical interface on top of a Unix system. Apple either works or is impossible to figure out. Linux is not to that point and cannot with the current defragmented development.
He can be a real handful when confused.
I suspect I am a real handful all the time whether confused or not… I think it is called assertive.
Sadly, once you see one of the breakdowns, you will immediately recognize the big difference between confusion and assertion. Assertion still has reason behind it, confusion does not. Alzheimers is a freaking disaster.
Unless it will work for the folks with VCR’s still flashing 12:00, it will never happen. Linux either works or takes cryptic commands that make little sense (GREP?) with obscure arguments only known by propeller heads. For severe issues recompiling the kernel is not an option. Linux/Unix was not designed for the casual user.
I love grep and use it extensively in code searches. My particular version of grep is Win32 and written in assembly language so it can parse a hundred source files a second. I have begged the author to put it into the public domain or let me do it but he does not want to.
http://www.tasoft.com/toolkit.html
And every person using a non Apple smart phone is running Linux. Apple smart phones are running a highly modified version of FreeBSD.
This is one of those classics every kitchen should have. Though, they’ve had some failed attempts to revise it over the years. So, you have to be careful which edition you get. I got the 75th Anniversary Edition and it’s great, but the editions out just before it received poor reviews.
This is a good cookbook:
https://archive.org/details/americwomanscook00delirich
It’s the 1939 edition. I have the 1947 edition, I don’t know what is different.
Second trip out in a row with the Solara where I passed a broken down late model German car. Today it was a BMW X3 grocery getter with hazards on stuck in the left turn lane near the Home Depot/Kohl’s/H-Mart complex located a few minutes from my house.
Amost forgot because I don’t often wear this Wrangler pocket watch: https://poshmark.com/listing/Wrangler-pocket-watch-with-date-5f458bd767bd91605314b929
Unless it will work for the folks with VCR’s still flashing 12:00, it will never happen. Linux either works or takes cryptic commands that make little sense (GREP?) with obscure arguments only known by propeller heads. For severe issues recompiling the kernel is not an option. Linux/Unix was not designed for the casual user.
Casual user? We have Senior development staff members mystified by many of the command line tools and shell scripting, long time GUI-only Windows developers hired on the basis that we can “Train Linux” and, heck, even if we can’t, there’s VS Code.
Just this morning on our check-in call we had one guy, twenty years in the industry, who was either clueless or feigning ignorance about searching mass quantities of plain text log files for missing transactions with unique ID numbers.
The secret is to bang the rocks together.
And every person using a non Apple smart phone is running Linux. Apple smart phones are running a highly modified version of FreeBSD.
OS X has a lot of cribbed BSD licensed utilities, including the shell, but iOS is basically the same proprietary kernel with Apple’s walled garden on top.
Ironically, key Linux pieces are currently owned by Apple, including the LLVM/Clang compiler, essential to making Rust and Go work, and CUPS, the standard Linux printer utility package.
Desktop Linux was touted as the next big thing for years but never materialized. It’s been at ~2% market share for the last 20 years. I think Linux proponents have finally accepted it will never be widely adopted (at least not with desktop environments like KDE and Gnome that have dominated desktop Linux forever). It’s fun for enthusiasts, but the average Joe was never going to embrace it.
I suppose it makes sense that the only way Linux can grow in the desktop world is as the kernel under a Windows desktop environment (i.e. seamless to that “average Joe” user who will still see it as Windows).
Tell me that after you’ve installed “stock” Windows on a laptop or a desktop with unusual hardware, then gone through the grind of finding the correct drivers and then giving up and trying to find something that works well enough. Windows “just works” because the manufacturers customize the installation for the hardware.
I’ve had good luck installing Linux on a clean hard drive inserted into any old computer that someone handed me because the drive died or Windows wouldn’t boot any more. (Generally the current Ubuntu LTS, but previously Xandros or others.) Less so with installing Windows from a non-customized Microsoft Win 7 or 8 disk. Oh, Windows would install and somewhat, but the touch pad or the networking might be flaky or it couldn’t go into Sleep mode or it couldn’t find the Wifi printer. I haven’t tried this with Win 10; that’s allegedly better.
“Sen. John Kennedy to Stabenow: ‘Sell Crazy Somewhere Else, We’re All Stocked Up Here’”
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/sen-john-kennedy-stabenow-sell-crazy-somewhere-else-were-all
“(CNSNews.com) – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), asked to react to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-Mich.) claim that Judge Amy Coney Barrett will be a vote against Obamacare, told “Fox News Sunday” that the Democrats think the Supreme Court should be a mini Congress, “politicians without robes” who “don’t even need to hear cases.”
Heh. Just about all of DC is certifiably crazy given the fact that they vote for dum-bro-crats 98% of the time.
You’re a propeller head.
What I am referring are the withered masses who can barely grasp right clicking on a object. Or realizing that can do minor file manipulation, renaming, deleting within the Save dialog box.
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – Stimulating Debate”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-stimulating-debate/
“Some are speculating that Biden may be using Drugs to get to appear vibrant during debates. Trump asks for a drug test. Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.”
Yeek !
That is crucial to getting Linux to the masses. Insulating the user from the text interface and making the interface intuitive. Linux is not intuitive. It was designed to be quick and run with limited resources. Nothing like the gobs of memory and bazillion CPU cycles. The graphical interface is demanding on resources. All the graphical front-ends have their quirks. I still find Android and IOS a mystery at times.
Getting adoption on the desktop is more problematic. Boatloads of different configurations. Getting external components to work. Making it reasonable user friendly (Windows is not, but has the advantage of being well known) is the challenge and making it work in the varied environment is even tougher. Just look at the forums about making printers and scanners work Linux. Sure someone can change some command line command, but not the average user. Linux is not to that point. Phones are a very controlled environment.
The real gurus know which rocks. I can bang rocks, but have no idea which is the correct rock.
That is not done for Linux. That is a problem. Linux has been left to the tinkerers. I used to be one. But no longer have any interest. I want to purchase a system that works out of the box. With my printers, my scanners, my cameras.
I still do not have a Lightroom or Photoshop equivalent for Linux. There are some programs that are close, but not full implementations. There is no Quicken for Linux. Mint, hrrrmmphh, I don’t want my critical financial data in someone’s cloud. (The version of Mint I tried, there may be others).
Ah, Microsoft. Wanted another mouse for my Surface laptop to keep in the bag rather than taking the mouse from my desk.
Two mice on the MS website, one the Microsoft Mobile Mouse for $29.95, the other the Microsoft Surface Mouse for $34.95. I bought the cheaper mouse. Both are identical except for their name under the Bluetooth settings. $5 more for a Surface mouse when the Mobile mouse is identical. Well, at least in shape and function.
Windows “just works” because the manufacturers customize the installation for the hardware
Most of the big manufacturers are pumping out tweaked Intel or AMD reference designs with embedded graphics anymore, including Apple. Linux actually runs quite well on most of those, including my ThinkPad T470 and a ~ 2017 Inspiron 3000 4 GB I use on the road which became too wimpy to run Windows 10 Home for my daughter.
Windows just works because, starting about 20 years ago, Microsoft decided to throw its weight around to solve the problem of buggy device drivers, and, since the introduction of Windows 10, requires WHQL “blessed” drivers which have been through their testing process.
That’s the past. They don’t care anymore. My Win10 laptop took 12 hours to do an update on Wednesday. Twelve hours, in the middle of a work week.
MS, for example, wants to get rid of the Control Panel. With all of their networking and browser issues, releasing updates with hundreds of vulnerabilities, you’d think they’d have something better to do with their money and manpower than mess up something that’s been around for years. Apparently not.
Apples new security features mean that the driver for my second monitor will not work, if I update to the current version of OSX. GIMP can no longer edit and save files…
You just can’t trust MS or Apple not to eff things up, if there is even the minutest chance of profit in it for them.
I more or less agree with ESR, had much the same thoughts years ago.
People talked about it a lot when Apple made the move away from the old OS.
Amen. Mother gave me a copy on my 18th bday (1979) and I compared it to subsequent “low fat” versions. They suck.
Olde cookbooks are fun. I have Mrs Beeton’s _All About Cookery_ circa 1901 and enjoy it. Made Plum Pudding from it once and have done so ever since.
The whole Linux thing? I had an XP box that I dual booted with Ubuntu. Worked great in Ubuntu… for what I wanted… SlimServer and worked for a bit of web surfing with whatever the browser was.
Then a nearby lighting strike. Zapped the on-board NIC. Ubuntu? Able to see a 3Com NIC card? Nope. XP had no problem. And I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure it out….. back when “high-speed” Internet was at 256KB here.
All the above to say that when this PC dies, I ain’t going to Win10. If I can keep Win7, cool.
What with doing the MCSE stuff, I got a lot of beta stuff from Microsoft. this was in the days of WinMe sucked, Win98SE was great… and the beta for Win5 was so nice. Then came NT.
Good times.
Apples new security features mean that the driver for my second monitor will not work, if I update to the current version of OSX. GIMP can no longer edit and save files…
I haven’t had a problem with GIMP and Catalina, but my MacBook Pro is old, the last 15″ which came with a SuperDrive, and I don’t run an SSD with their weird new filesystem.
Amost forgot because I don’t often wear this Wrangler pocket watch:
https://poshmark.com/listing/Wrangler-pocket-watch-with-date-5f458bd767bd91605314b929
Channeling my inner Millennial, Hey, where are the numbers of the time ? What is that round stuff ?
Channeling my inner Millennial, Hey, where are the numbers of the time ? What is that round stuff ?
Go to an anime convention and you’ll see at least one vendor on the show floor with modern pocket watches.
That is, if there are any anime or other geek interest conventions left to see next year. Or vendors. Everything we planned to attend got cancelled and continues to get canceled into early 2021.
The irony is that most of the fans will line up to vote for Plugs and continue the kabuki. Biden is promising mandatory national masking in the commercials running locally.
“Voter fraud is already happening: Democrat ballot harvesting found in THIRD district”
https://noqreport.com/2020/09/29/voter-fraud-is-already-happening-democrat-ballot-harvesting-found-in-third-district/
“There were three stories just in the last few days that point to Democrats trying to steal the election through ballot harvesting. The first did not get much national press because it wasn’t about a crime. Technically, it was as Democrats are using their majority in North Carolina’s election board to preemptively allow criminal activity, but the end result was allowances for ballot harvesting. That seems like a crime, but nobody’s going to jail over it.”
“The second is the most ballyhooed of them all so far. Project Veritas and their excellent undercover operatives uncovered a scam to use illegal ballot harvesting to steal elections in Minneapolis on behalf of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. This is, without a doubt, a clear-cut crime. Will Omar be connected to it directly? We’ll see.”
“The third was a story from Patrick Howley at the National File. In it, he reported about ballot harvesting accusations made by former law enforcement officers in Texas who are now private investigators. They have sworn that illegal ballot harvesting is taking place there as well.”
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Thrice is enemy action.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Eric does not predict, he just states what he wants to see: Linux in every desktop and without any proprietary code in it.
Next year for sure…
“Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond”
Eric does not predict, he just states what he wants to see: Linux in every desktop and without any proprietary code in it.
Next year for sure…
I have Linux-only laptops and desktop for specific uses. I also have a Mac and a ThinkPad running Windows 10. My primary desktop is a Windows 7 machine.
I run a phone with as little proprietary code as possible as an experiment, but, at the end of the day, the experience leaves much to be desired. The convenience of the Apple Walled Garden outweighs the drawbacks for me, but everyone needs to make that decision for themselves.
ESR is a bit of a zealot.
“Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond”
With all the joys that emulation brings…
I think it, or something like it, will happen. But, being MS, it will be horrible, horrible, horrible…
We are all running Minix right now anyway, if we are running on Intel or Amd.
I’m actually in the throes of setting up a linux only laptop.
I want to run a Jupyter notebook for a project, but don’t trust the install not to mess up my OS X and Win10 boxes – too many versions of python and such.
So, probably an Mx-linux bistro on an old Inspiron.
My other old linux laptops died of old age and the P4 Sage/Octave box is buried deep in storage…
“Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond”
Eric does not predict, he just states what he wants to see: Linux in every desktop and without any proprietary code in it.
Next year for sure…
Actually, all Win32 programs on Windows x64 get executed using WOW64, Windows on Windows. The WOW64 emulation layer has already been written, all it needs is a new target, Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64
The real question here is which Linux Window Manager will WOL64, Windows on Linux 64, target itself to ? How many Linux Window Managers are there now ? Looks like about a 100 to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers
From a friend:
“I understand that the Biden campaign is demanding a break every 30 minutes.
Should he be elected we will just have to hope that no crisis lasting more than 29 minutes occurs for the next four years.”
I think it is more likely that Trump is going to scare the crap out of Biden.
ESR’s subtext was that MS didn’t want to be in the OS maintenance business. So they probably don’t want to be in the WM maintenance business either.
I’d guess they’d pick one of the popular managers. Gnome, KDE, Xfce, something like that.
They’ll likely keep a presence funded enough to sway the technical end to suit themselves, like the big dogs did with systemd for booting and configuration, but it will be less of a money sink than the current effort.
A friend of mine did the port of Mac OS from PowerPC to Intel chips. He did the basics himself as a side project. He is bummed because with the transition to ARM, the last of his code in MacOS/OS X will likely be gone.
https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1
You guys are like the carriage makers arguing about whether to use oak now that all the hickory got used up, or ash….
“Getting adoption on the desktop is more problematic. Boatloads of different configurations. ”
–we use desktops. Juanita Chaquita uses a phone or a tablet. There won’t be ‘desktops’ outside of businesses (running a restricted suite, and likely as thin clients), and hard core creators like engineering or video (and those tools are all available on linux.) Every movie you see in the theaters went thru a linux workstation and render farm.
“Getting external components to work. Making it reasonable user friendly (Windows is not, but has the advantage of being well known) is the challenge and making it work in the varied environment is even tougher. Just look at the forums about making printers and scanners work Linux. ”
–see above for why that is, MS bullied everyone into make a driver that works. BUT there still aren’t automatically new drivers for each new OS, and I’ve got piles of hardware that doesn’t work with various flavors of windows. Windows in the wild is as varied in OS, installed drivers and “helpers” like java or VB or .net or codec packs, and patch level as linux. There’s just more of them, they mostly look similar, and more people have experience with them. Besides, MS doesn’t provide the drivers, the hardware manf’s do. They could provide linux drivers and some do.
–Almost no one uses a scanner anymore, they use an app on the phone. It’s like fax machines being replaced with pcs, then efax services, and now outside banking and real estate (only because of legal reasons) they are gone.
“Sure someone can change some command line command, but not the average user. Linux is not to that point. Phones are a very controlled environment. ”
–the Average user is going to be using a phone, or a tablet, or possibly a smart tv.
–the desktop is going to become an increasingly specialized beast, either barely there hardware, or crushing power for gamers or creators.
–I can use my phone for most things, (not as well as I personally would like but I’m not most people) and if I need a big screen, I can ‘toss’ my screen to my tv, or a projector. I can swipe, pinch, and otherwise manipulate my phone/tablet, the voice recognition is VERY good.
–the average user has still been trained by several versions of some sort of UI. I can barely make apple do any thing as I haven’t evolved with the UI. I HATE the win10 tiles UI with a burning passion. They broke all the conventions they’d locked in for the last decade or two. The windows style guide did more to make computers easier to use than any other thing, but it also froze UI design for 20 years.
Windows will be just another crappy new UI running on top of something else, whether that be the giant cluster flock of the winOS or linux really doesn’t matter. “Windows” as an OS is a tottering pile of crap barely working. I can see my whole screen redraw during some operations. Plug in a MOUSE and the OS has to spend a minute installing drivers. A MOUSE. The flat ‘desktop’ metaphor is rapidly going out of date too. There are whole generations now that don’t recognize a filing cabinet or know what you would do with one. There are whole generations now whose main interactions with bigger screens and “desktop pcs” are thru highly detailed rendered 3d gaming environments. They can mentally map dungeons, whole pretend worlds, game level maps, and all in three dimensions, and rendered in 3D. The UI experience will evolve at some point. I’d love to see a UI rendered in a game engine, from the ground up designed as a virtual environment you move thru not a flat desktop and office.
you can thank MS and the style guide for NOT having anything like that.
n
Hey, I resemble that…
Everyone knows that American Chestnut is the way to go!
But whatever happens, in the end it will be computers writing code for computers, and the “programmers” will be like the chess players and go players are today: gazing at the machines outputs in bewilderment, trying to grok stuff beyond their comprehension.
There’s a Kindle edition for two bucks. It’s the 1939 edition. I just bought it. Looks excellent.
Windows will be just another crappy new UI running on top of something else, whether that be the giant cluster flock of the winOS or linux really doesn’t matter.
I believe it was Marc Andreesen’s line on “Computer Chronicles” predicting Windows becoming “just a poorly maintained set of device drivers” which inspired Gates to turn the company’s focus to the Internet in the mid-90s after one of the infamous “reading weeks”.
I think we’re going to learn the truth about those reading weeks real soon.
We hit Amazon Go in the Pru Plaza complex in Chicago multiple times during our stay last Spring. The checkout system was so hit or miss that the store had at least one employee for every shopper, monitoring the shrink as it happened. So much for labor savings.
https://apnews.com/article/biometrics-washington-archive-seattle-35d5d7b9a500124f75fac3a8f4dad189
The checkout was never accurate, but it was usually in our favor, missing a drink or a snack item charge when I got back to the room and checked my email receipt.
Even before the mistakes, prices were lower than the other convenience stores, and the staff members were very polite.
The real question here is which Linux Window Manager will WOL64, Windows on Linux 64, target itself to ?
ESR’s subtext was that MS didn’t want to be in the OS maintenance business. So they probably don’t want to be in the WM maintenance business either.
I’d guess they’d pick one of the popular managers. Gnome, KDE, Xfce, something like that.
They’ll likely keep a presence funded enough to sway the technical end to suit themselves, like the big dogs did with systemd for booting and configuration, but it will be less of a money sink than the current effort.
My son thinks that MS is going to create their own Linux Window Manager called Windows and open source it. It will look like Windows, act like Windows, and run Win32 or Win64 apps transparently on Linux. Then Microsoft will be out of the OS (operating system) and WM (window manager) business.
Amost forgot because I don’t often wear this Wrangler pocket watch:
https://poshmark.com/listing/Wrangler-pocket-watch-with-date-5f458bd767bd91605314b929
The advantage of a wristwatch is that it’s much easier to unobtrusively sneak a peek at the time under the table during a boring meeting than it is with a pocket watch. 😀
The advantage of a pocket watch is you can make a production out of it and draw everyone’s attention to your cool watch!
WRT older cookbooks, I’m a fan. That’s why I recommend the older Joy of Cooking. I do not need to be constantly admonished with quack ‘science’ and whatever the healthy food fad o the day is. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Dietary cholesterol intake has no impact on blood cholesterol. Unless you are hypertensive, your body NEEDS salt.*
n
*and everyone knows menthol cigarettes will sooth a sore throat.
But whatever happens, in the end it will be computers writing code for computers, and the “programmers” will be like the chess players and go players are today: gazing at the machines outputs in bewilderment, trying to grok stuff beyond their comprehension.
AI will never generate good software. You will get some weird exotic crap from an AI box trying to figure out how to add 2 plus 2 and get 5.
Windows will be just another crappy new UI running on top of something else, whether that be the giant cluster flock of the winOS or linux really doesn’t matter. “Windows” as an OS is a tottering pile of crap barely working. I can see my whole screen redraw during some operations. Plug in a MOUSE and the OS has to spend a minute installing drivers. A MOUSE. The flat ‘desktop’ metaphor is rapidly going out of date too. There are whole generations now that don’t recognize a filing cabinet or know what you would do with one. There are whole generations now whose main interactions with bigger screens and “desktop pcs” are thru highly detailed rendered 3d gaming environments. They can mentally map dungeons, whole pretend worlds, game level maps, and all in three dimensions, and rendered in 3D. The UI experience will evolve at some point. I’d love to see a UI rendered in a game engine, from the ground up designed as a virtual environment you move thru not a flat desktop and office.
Thanks for telling me that I am old.
Some of the oil and gas reservoir engineering software now looks like a 3D game. It is funky. I have not seen it other than pictures but I have heard about it.
There aren’t any desktops on business systems. Not as standard. Laptops took over desktops ages ago and with the COVID pandemic and W@H, the few serious businesses that had desktops must have scrambled to replace those.
In part. The DDKs provide templates and code that are implemented by many manufacturers as-is. MS did a lot of work over several OS iterations to standardize device drivers.
Careful what you wish for… Tiles came in version 8, were just a bit more stable in 8.1 and are almost a non-thing in Win10. The real benefit of tiles was with Windows Phone. I miss those. Never used tiles in Windows and I had Win 8, 8.1 and have 10.
Those core changes takes years to be implemented and stabilized. And in between you get jarring contrasts between products that use the old and products that struggle to use the new. I am happy with Win10 as it is.
I agree on an MS-Linux and that they may Opensource it. And it will look like Windows across various platforms and chipsets. I disagree with the final statement. They have to control the full stack.
Yeh, well FLASHLIGHTS lost their appeal.
Plus our experiences are different. I remember when I got a CD drive for a computer. Windows 3.1 running on DOS (I think). The drivers for the CD drive were located on the CD provided with the drive, for which DOS could not read. I remember with Windows 95 network drivers were needed to use an Ethernet card. One had to have another PC that could access the internet to get the drivers. Sneaker net. If no other PC was available, no Ethernet.
With W10 I have never bare metaled a system that did not completely install properly including all drivers.
I do. Not for documents but for pictures and transparencies. No phone camera can work properly with images.
Meanwhile, there is a new FLASHLIGHT I want. Keyword, want, not need.
–Almost no one uses a scanner anymore, they use an app on the phone. It’s like fax machines being replaced with pcs, then efax services, and now outside banking and real estate (only because of legal reasons) they are gone.
I used the scanner on my HP MFC printer at the house the other day to scan the old photos for my father-in-law’s funeral. About 40 pictures, the oldest picture was from 1934. The funeral director had a TV with an HDMI port that I plugged my laptop into. Then I opened the first picture in Windows 10 on my laptop, right clicked, and selected picture show. I was amazed how many pictures I was in even though I had only known him for 40 of his 87 years. I got lots of praise from the audience even though we were mostly all related.
If you want pictures displayed at your funeral, I would scan them now and create a funeral folder with those pictures in it.
There won’t be ‘desktops’ outside of businesses
There aren’t any desktops on business systems. Not as standard. Laptops took over desktops ages ago and with the COVID pandemic and W@H, the few serious businesses that had desktops must have scrambled to replace those.
I was able to keep my business open during this mess even though we are “essential” and also since we are seven people rattling around a 5,300 ft2 office building. We distance just by being at our desks and computers.
We just do not use laptops other than a demo machine. We need more horsepower and those laptops are very expensive. My travel laptop that I never take anymore is just an ASUS I3 Zenbook that weighs two lbs and is still too big.
My son thinks that MS is going to create their own Linux Window Manager called Windows and open source it. It will look like Windows, act like Windows, and run Win32 or Win64 apps transparently on Linux. Then Microsoft will be out of the OS (operating system) and WM (window manager) business.
I agree on an MS-Linux and that they may Opensource it. And it will look like Windows across various platforms and chipsets. I disagree with the final statement. They have to control the full stack.
Oh, we think that they will have a small staff adding and fixing stuff in the Windows Window Manager on Linux. But, they will not have many people working on it so they will open source it to get more eyes on problem areas. 1/3rd of Microsoft’s current revenue is Azure and is a serious growth market for them. Microsoft has a huge direct to business sales force and they love to sell Azure.
MS-Linux will definitely be open sourced as they move the Win32 and Win64 functions from Windows on Linux to the Linux API directly. That is what sparked the article from ESR, he noticed that MS is putting Win32 and Win64 functions into the Linux kernel already.
Biden just called Trump a clown to his face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofkPfm3tFxo&feature=emb_logo
You use a scanner, and I have a flatbed, but as mentioned, we are OLD. My wife routinely uses her app where she would have used a scanner. My camera app on my phone offers to scan the text in any picture I take of a page of text… it also offers to go to any links in the image, or follow any QR codes. The app de-skews, white balances, coverts to text, and saves somewhere you can then send it somewhere else.
kids’ teachers have them taking pictures of their hand written work and uploading it.
Dedicated scanners will make sense for some things, like digitizing pix. I loaned out a slide scanner last month to do that very thing. My buddy had to install it on his winXP machine, as that was the last DRIVER available for the NIB, NOS slide scanner. But he had an XP machine, as I do, for similar reasons (vinyl cutter).
There will always be use cases for keeping special purpose gear around, and having people who can use it. But most people now would say “I don’t have a scanner, can’t I just use my app and send it to you?”
n
Yup, I knew it. Biden has been faking his dementia. Biden is not stuttering, he is looking at the camera, his words are measured and concise.
And Trump is totally ignoring Chris Wallace as I expected.
“Plus our experiences are different. I remember when I got a CD drive for a computer. Windows 3.1 running on DOS (I think).”
–I remember soldering a 1024bit chip to the main board of my TRS-80 to get lower case letters to display 🙂 And writing keyboard macros for the DG or VAX at school. And seeing what could go wrong with a printout to high speed green bar paper in the glass room…….. man that paper came out FAST!
We are computer, and especially PC, hobbyists and early adopters. We had to know about computers to keep them (or get them) in condition to do other work with them. Now people just do the work, without having to work the computer first.
Assuming civilization doesn’t collapse, we’ll see a huge change in paradigm in the next 10 years.
n
My son thinks that MS is going to create their own Linux Window Manager called Windows and open source it. It will look like Windows, act like Windows, and run Win32 or Win64 apps transparently on Linux. Then Microsoft will be out of the OS (operating system) and WM (window manager) business.
Doing that correctly would mean taking on replacing Systemd and Wayland, both currently held by IBM via the Red Hat acquisition — not simple.
Get the intern working on verifying that your GUI runs under Wine on CentOS 8 in the mean time.
“Biden has been faking his dementia.”
–biden got some good drugs, lots of sleep, and breaks every 30 minutes. Probably a full volume transfusion too.
n
About a year ago I did that for person that was still alive. They wanted to choose the pictures for the slideshow that were significant to them and not rely on someone else. Seemed reasonable to me.
I render video on my desktop, slideshows with motion and transitions. Did a 5 minute show on my desktop, took 3 minutes to render. Did the same show on my Surface laptop and it took 30 minutes. Video, and image modification, are very CPU intensive.
Thanks bud. I have some years on you. I am probably second oldest here with Slim outpacing me by a slim margin (pun intended).
I go back further than that. Heathkit H-89 that I heavily modified. Replaced the CPU from a Z80 to Z80A. Maxed out the memory to 64K. Reprogrammed the boot rom to map out the 16K of ROM to use 16K of ram by changing the onboard addressing. This allowed me to run CP/M. Modified the interface between the logic board and the display board to increase the speed to 19,200 bps. Had to increase the power supply wattage and install a fan in the case because of increased heat of everything.
Back then it was both fun and frustrating. I no longer have the desire to build my own system and prefer a stock system. A good system from Dell or HP is more than adequate for my needs.
I have heard that since I started in IT. Every few years. Paperless, self programming computers, AI, etc. The chips have gotten smaller and faster. The progress has been amazing but still hampered by the human interface.
It is simply amazing that my iPhone 11 has more computing power than what was used to put a man on the moon. All the computers including the rooms full of big iron. I probably have more storage on my phone than NASA had in total in 1969.
Where will we be 10 years from now? I don’t know. I feel the human interface has to change to encompass the next big leap in computer technology. Storage densities will continue to increase, speeds will increase, display technology will improve. But the human interface will remain, mouse, touch, keyboard. Of course I could be completely wrong, and dead, when it arrives.
“Joe Biden Refuses to Answer Whether or Not He’ll Pack the Court: ‘Would You Shut Up, Man?'”
https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/09/29/joe-biden-refuses-to-answer-whether-or-not-hell-pack-the-court-would-you-shut-up-man-n986352
Biden is a joke. Just his Green Technology that will create millions of jobs (his estimate) at the cost of millions of dollars per job (my estimate) will destroy what economy that we have left after the COVID-19 nightmare that Trump has dealt with. $100 trillion dollars over ten years is the Trump estimate of the cost. Just take all the California problems and run them all over the USA.
I think the shift to touch and phones was significant. It also proved that people would use small screens which was anathema at the time.
all that processing power will result in more ‘guessing of intent’ on the part of the software, kinda like “did you mean to search for xxx” in google. The google suggestions in the search bar are good enough that I’m convinced they use additional context from my computer or online history. Their suggestion is usually only one or two down the list. It’s a bit scary actually, especially when I’m searching something esoteric or a bit unsavory.
n
“keep yapping man”
ffs
n
I am guessing you have never watched my wife using a phone. She touches places she doesn’t intend, fails to recognize where to touch. It may seem intuitive to you and I but others fall short. Young adults and students tend to do better and therein may be the future 10 years.
I think that is going to get less useful over time as people become more concerned about privacy and the targeting, especially advertising, that is being used on people. Or maybe the people I mentioned above don’t care about privacy.
“keep yapping man”
ffs
n
???
I am not sure but I think that at one point Biden accused Trump of killing off 10% of the Blacks in the USA by using the COVID-19 on them. It was hard to understand when all three of them were yelling at each other. I would buy that 1% of the Blacks in the USA died this year as that is the general death rate in the USA. But not 10%, no way !
And Biden could not keep his sons straight, Hunter and Beau. Trump only talked about Hunter and Biden thought he was attacking Beau. That was sad. To me, it was obvious that Biden was an old man living in the past 47 years that he ran the swamp (DC).
It also proved that people would use small screens which was anathema at the time
I am guessing you have never watched my wife using a phone. She touches places she doesn’t intend, fails to recognize where to touch. It may seem intuitive to you and I but others fall short. Young adults and students tend to do better and therein may be the future 10 years.
My 79 year old mother cannot use a smart phone. My 82 year old dad dials the number and hands the phone to her. Whereas my 24 year old nephew could send 2 or 3 dozen texts a minute when he was 15. My brother freaked out when just his middle son sent 5,000+ texts one month.
Plugs has always been a bully and a thug. Remember his VP debate with Ryan, he just laughed in his face, didn’t answer questions, and talked over him. And 47 years leeching on the American teat got us what? Both sides will declare victory tomorrow. Plugs continues his 6 person rallies while tRump talks to thousands. The Dumbos will lie, cheat, steal and break every voter law to get rid of ORANGE MAN BAD.
President tRump’s reelection inauguration will finally put a stake through the hearts of: Cankles, BJ, Plugs, Comrade Bernie, Stretch and a bunch of other barnacles in the Swamp.
President tRump’s reelection inauguration will finally put a stake through the hearts of: Cankles, BJ, Plugs, Comrade Bernie, Stretch and a bunch of other barnacles in the Swamp.
I hope so. I am really worried about all of these fake absentee ballots floating around the place.
“keep yapping man”
ffs
n
???
–Biden to trump during one of the exchanges.
n
“I am guessing you have never watched my wife using a phone. She touches places she doesn’t intend, fails to recognize where to touch. It may seem intuitive to you and I but others fall short. Young adults and students tend to do better and therein may be the future 10 years.”
–again, we’re old. Until I got my last phone I avoided most of it. Now I have learned to see some of the benefits and also learned some of the way to use it. My kids tried to swipe the menu on the tv when they were 2….
We grew up (professionally at least) thru the whole evolution of pcs and phones. The kids and young adults today had it from an existing starting point. They LEARNED the icon for “save” but don’t recognize it as a disc. Lots of other things are there that they just learned as ‘what’s there’ without knowing why. They assume touch interfaces, they assume they can just talk to things. That’s pretty different from where we were.
n
“keep yapping man”
ffs
n
???
–Biden to trump during one of the exchanges.
Gotcha. I could not hear most of their exchanges since they were talking over each other constantly. And Chris Wallace was yelling “please, please, please”. It was funny and a tragedy.
It is 59 F outside at 11pm. That is amazing for the Houston area in September. I don’t remember September ending this code ever but I am sure that it has happened before.
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/richmond?cm_ven=localwx_10day
59f here at the beltway too. Chilly!
Well, that debate was … interesting.
There better be a yuge margin of victory. If it’s not big enough to exceed the practical limits of cheating, things will be much worse than I thought.
HOly cr@p it’s gonna get ugly.
n
Scenario 1: Trump wins big enough to overcome the cheating and is declared the winner. Communists riot in the big US cities. Civil war begins.
Scenario 2: There’s enough cheating to make it look like Biden won. Americans refuse to accept that result. Civil war begins.
Scenario 3: Fraud is so blatant that election results are not certified in enough states that neither party gets 270 electoral college votes. The decision is thrown to the House of Representatives. No matter the decision, one side refuses to accept the result. Civil war begins.
Stack food and ammunition. Prepare an alternate location. Get ready to get your hands dirty.
But the average user – 75% or more of the overall user community – is NOT going to have unusual hardware. If they are not buying it pre-installed (your point on customized installation) then they are building their own box with standard off-the-shelf components (what I do). Either way they will have something for which the drivers are readily available and so Windows just works for all of them. If you have unusual hardware, it will be a hassle for any operating system you want to install, and I bet an even bigger hassle for Linux because that driver might not exist. For some years, I tried to keep a Linux computer going at home (heck, OS/2 as well), but it became “work” to do so. Windows does not require that level of commitment or effort. What I need is a working computer and for all it’s flaws, Windows does that just fine.