Brexit, for once some facts.

[Zlatan]

Industrial levels of bribery here we come. In a perverse way this tory government probably couldn't believe its luck when opportunities like covid and war came along as ways to justify expense, Bury dodgy dealing..

MPs World wide are an embarrassment to humanity. Ours and their kin, like Macron, Biden, etc etc are terrible.(ok there is the occasional exception but at moment he/she escapes my memory,, apart from the obvious Zelenskyy) but these look like positively public spirited servants at side of those on display from Russia, North Korea etc. Putin has his rival poisoned, then imprisoned on trumped up charges with puppet Court officials calling for Navalny's sentence to be extended. How did world get so bad in choosing its leaders. Blair is mouthing off today, Corbyn lost his voice but Trump in full swing.
Time for a new World order. Which country has good leaders? There by choice of society and on merit. And for gawds sake Flecc don't mention China.
Ukraine has demonstrated a great deal about both the evilness of some and the humanity in others. Its also clearly pointed out we are all poorly led and governed.
With good leadership of all countries this would, could, never happen.

 

[flecc]

And for gawds sake Flecc don't mention China.

. Shades of Basil Fawlty:

"Don't mention the war".

Instead I'll mention Bhutan with this link on how to lead a country

What Bhutan Can Teach Us About Happiness And Compassionate Leadership
.

 

[flecc]

With good leadership of all countries this would, could, never happen.

Good leadership doesn't build a large stash in a tax haven, so it's no contest what we get instead.
.

 

[Zlatan]

New world order Bhutan style.

 

[flecc]

Astonishing:

"Since the beginning of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Indian government, and large segments of the Indian public, have firmly been on Putin’s side. Hashtags like #IStandWithPutin and #istandwithrussia trended on Indian social media, and the Indian government demonstrated – perhaps most notably by refusing to support UN resolutions condemning the invasion – that it is not willing to jeopardise its strong ties with Russia over Putin’s actions in Ukraine.

India’s approach to the situation in Ukraine is hardly surprising or atypical. Since the establishment of diplomatic ties following India’s independence in 1947, relations between Moscow and New Delhi have been shaped by a “high degree of political and strategic trust”. Across the years, Russia and India routinely took similar stances and supported each other on contentious international issues."

Why is India standing with Putin’s Russia?

No one should be surprised that India chose to support Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

www.aljazeera.com

Little wonder Putin isn't budging, with the two largest nations having nearly a third of the world's population backing him.
.

 

[Woosh]

Little wonder Putin isn't budging, with the two largest nations having nearly a third of the world's population backing him.

let's see how long their support will last. I'd give it a month.
I was fully expecting Putin to annex Donetsk and Luhansk and somehow a track of land to link up with Crimea but not sending missiles into civilian housing blocks, not in 2022.
Bush's shock and awe hitting Baghdad don't compare.
Some of the satellite pictures of what the Russian army has done to Ukrainian cities are absolutely shocking.

 

[flecc]

let's see how long their support will last. I'd give it a month.

I'm very surprised at India supporting this war in any way at all. I've long known India's close ties with Russia and they did defy the USA in buying the Russian surface to air missile system in October, but I didn't think India or its public would go this far.

Let's hope you are right, otherwise this will blow a huge hole in the sanctions with these two being oil importers.
.

 

[guerney]

Had loads of problems with some top end Lenovo laptops. Specifically when used with Lenovo USB-C docks. Had to completely wipe and re-install using a special download of the installer. Even then kept having issues.

Windows 10 and USB docks can be a nightmare, as the OS selects the wrong (or bad) driver (or updates) and makes it impossible to roll back... or if it's a powered USB dock, it can prevent the computer starting up in the first place if there's a dicky connection or connector/cable, or cause it to crash while in operation with that bad connection (like one of mine - a waggle of the USB cable connecting the PC to the powered USB hub enables it to boot, otherwise it looks like a dead [or faulty with weird intermittent problems] PC lol). Firewalls can block ports, Comodo provides better control and protection than Defender IMHO... I hate Win 10, and will never downgrade from Win 7 to 10. Win 11 looks even worse, now that soon to be phased out Win 10 looks slightly less of a titanic set of blunders.

GRC | Never10

Never10 - Disable Windows 10 Automatic Upgrade

www.grc.com

I'll run Win7 in a VM within Linux, or use Wine or Crossover for important old programs:

Discover how easy it is to run Windows apps on Mac and Linux with CrossOver.

Don’t buy a Windows license, don’t reboot or use a virtual machine until you try CrossOver for Mac and Linux. Download a free 14 day trial now and get your Windows apps running on Mac and Linux.

www.codeweavers.com

...and Windows 7 Pro will be my final Microsoft OS.

 

[guerney]

Mine is a T 450.. and that is the one I upgraded the screen on. I also swopped out the HDD for an SSD. The internal construction is about the neatest I have seen on a consumer electronics product. The only thing comparable was the original IBM PS2/ 50., for precision plastics moulding.

The other nice thing about older Thinkpads is that there's room for more than one hard drive - I don't think SSDs are there yet in terms of reliability, at least not for me. I've got several, but not as data drives - on the rare occasions that I actually install one in one of my PCs, it's for the OS or swap file only. For storage I avoid anything Seagate - in comparison to many other brands, I've had to return Seagate drives far more often than any other. For mechanical drives, I use Western Digital Black only and they work for decades. It's so much harder recovering data from a borked SSD than from a mechanical hard drive, for which there are more options in the event of failure. When an SSD fails, your valuable data is pretty much scr*wed. But I do like the fast read speed of SSDs, and their power efficiency - before SSDs arrived I installed a minimal Windows XP onto a CF card, and used that instead of a hard drive (IDE to CF converter cable) in my Toshiba PII 266 laptop of the time, and gained a very useful 50% greater battery life.

 

[oyster]

The other nice thing about older Thinkpads is that there's room for more than one hard drive - I don't think SSDs are there yet in terms of reliability, at least not for me.

My current working processes and kit mean that I have next to nothing to lose if a machine breaks.

Regular backups. All real data in the cloud. Two similar enough machines to be able to start on one and swap to the other.

Loss of an SSD, if compounded by lack of a backup, would only be a nuisance.

Partner has two old/very old Macs with SSDs - both at least seven years old. Both SSDs still fine.

I had an original iPad until last year - and it was running just fine.

 

[flecc]

...and Windows 7 Pro will be my final Microsoft OS.

Ditto, I'll never adopt W10 or W11.

I only have SSDs for everything though, system, storage and even for backup where I use three drives for triple security of data and system backup. One is an SSD, the primary backup; a second is a large Kingston flash drive and the third a WD hard drive.

The only one that ever let me down was the WD hard drive!
.

 

[oyster]

Ditto, I'll never adopt W10 or W11.

I only have SSDs for everything though, system, storage and even for backup where I use three drives for triple security of data and system backup. One is an SSD, the primary backup; a second is a large Kingston flash drive and the third a WD hard drive.

The only one that ever let me down was the WD hard drive!
.

My only spinning drives are ones that have not been replaced in years. One 3.5" and a few physically small external drives.

I stuck to Windows 2000 for years after XP came out. In my view, it was a very solid and usable platform.

But I do not prefer 7. And certainly hated all the 8 releases with a vengeance. 10 has been pretty OK for me, but I see little reason to go to 11 - especially as one of my PCs cannot run 11, and I'd rather keep them on the same release.

Just swapped back to my Surface for a few days (from MacBook Pro). I hadn't realised quite how much I had been converted to macOS. It was surprisingly annoying.

 

[flecc]

Just swapped back to my Surface for a few days (from MacBook Pro). I hadn't realised quite how much I had been converted to macOS. It was surprisingly annoying.

No multiple computers here, I've only ever maintained a second computer as a backup in case of failure of my desktop when I need to be online for essentials like banking.

For years that backup was an ancient Dell XPS, a huge beast of a laptop that I'd got second hand cheaply. With an over 18" screen and illuminated keyboard, it had coloured LEDS all around the screen edges and an illuminated lid outer face, four speaker sound system plus lots of gimmicky features. An enormous weight for a laptop, it was an environmental nightmare that looked like an addition to Blackpool's illuminations.

Since I never suffered a desktop failure it never had to be use in earnest before it gave up the ghost one day when checking it. Running XP and no later drivers available I finally scrapped it.

Its replacement is an old Dell Lattitude D630 bought cheaply. The previous owner was dependent on a computer shop for repairs and they'd put W10 on it which I don't like much but I've tweaked it to make it more convenient.

The weird thing about that many years old Lattitude though is that it looks as though it has never been used. There isn't a trace of a mark or wear on it anywhere, it could just have been unpacked from its box after purchase new. And I haven't had to use it either since still no desktop failure!
,

 

[Woosh]

any of you run VMs?

 

[oyster]

any of you run VMs?

I have done. But not at present.

Indeed, I'd like to run a Windows VM on a Mac. But there are barriers to doing so on Apple Silicon.

I did run a Windows VM under Parallels, which worked extremely well. But licence/support and cost issues all ganged up to make it not currently viable other than as a test. It was pretty amazing to be able, on a bottom of range Mac mini, run Windows 11 and apps. Performance was perfectly acceptable (just 8 GB physical RAM).

 

[guerney]

VMs are wonderful software development testbeds. I ran Mac OS Lion in VMware on a low specced i3 Acer laptop some years ago - it was slow, but with the new extensions on newer and more powerful CPUs, running Windows 7 Pro in a VM within Linux would likely be very usable, increasingly so over time and even newer CPUs. VirtualBox, VMware and QEMU

QEMU

www.qemu.org

...are all good, but they need tinkering with. I can't wait for the open-source (largely) Windows 2000 styled ReactOS to (finally!) reach version 1.0

Front Page

ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows

reactos.org

ReactOS - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If it's any good and gets widely used, Microsoft will kill ReactOS.

 

[guerney]

My only spinning drives are ones that have not been replaced in years. One 3.5" and a few physically small external drives.

I stuck to Windows 2000 for years after XP came out. In my view, it was a very solid and usable platform.

But I do not prefer 7. And certainly hated all the 8 releases with a vengeance. 10 has been pretty OK for me, but I see little reason to go to 11 - especially as one of my PCs cannot run 11, and I'd rather keep them on the same release.

Just swapped back to my Surface for a few days (from MacBook Pro). I hadn't realised quite how much I had been converted to macOS. It was surprisingly annoying.

I resisted moving from 2000 to XP for years, 2000 was brilliant. I won't be using SSDs (yet) at a higher price per MB, for lower reliability and even greater cost per MB for cloud storage, which makes my vaulable data even less secure by replicating it multiple times all over the internet, thereby providing multiple targets for hackers, as oppsed to just the one version on my own regularly backed up computer. One of the stated aims of Microsoft for 11, was to make an OS which "Gets out of the way" - I fail to see how they can do that, when they release such infuriating trash on such a regular basis. But they're so gorged with our money, that they will not change.

 

[Woosh]

If it's any good and gets widely used, Microsoft will kill ReactOS.

what is the point? in the scheme of things, the cost of the OS is so low that OSes are chosen for their features rather than low cost. So why re-invent the old Windows 2000?

 

[Woosh]

If it's any good and gets widely used, Microsoft will kill ReactOS.

that reminds me of the early years when IBM tried to sue Phoenix and AMI for infringing their IBM PC BIOS copyrights. Both Phoenix and AMI use clean room reverse engineering to avoid these disputes.

 

[guerney]

what is the point? in the scheme of things, the cost of the OS is so low that OSes are chosen for their features rather than low cost. So why re-invent the old Windows 2000?

There are a number of machine tools in very advanced manufacturing with a probable lifetime use of 40+ years, costing many thousands of times the price of the (sometimes embedded) Windows OS running their control systems... operators buy up old but properly licenced Windows XP machines just to have spares to substitute when their original XP machine dies - React OS would solve this problem. On the desktop, a less spyware ridden Windows capable of supporting most modern hardware and software, would be welcomed by many. Microsoft even deployed Windows 10 style telemetry spyware into some of the latter Windows 7 Pro updates, which I've removed from my safely stored away version, which I'll be using for years, in real or virtual.