Fair point on the cracks, and I don't even have a virus checker here for anything M$. As far as the updates go, I mightn't even install them. I updated the last one and all they did was slow it down. This is there for the evil day when linux proves congenitally incapable of running something. Months have gone by, and I've been starting Windoze about every three months to update it, which just makes it dozier. I'm thinking I'll leave the install until I need it. Slackware's 64/32bit install of wine seems the best out there. Their use of /lib64 & /usr/lib64 lets 32 bit stuff coexist undisturbed in /lib & /usr/lib. If small minds insist on using things like silverlight, I've been going around them.

As for your handle - ReformedTechie - are you an ex-techie too? I was in Electronic Hardware as a techie. That whole line of work is just about dead now.

I was deep into sec and maint for a long time. I started building back in the days of the 'zines when Trash 80s were hot stuff. I was a MS T1 Enterprise Tech. I got calls for everything from a keyboard replacement to "We just lost China".

I used to build custom compiled, hardened, compartmentalized *nix OS'es for *fun*!

Then I triple broke my neck in a 75mph rollover wreck ~4 years ago and my priorities changed. The docs wanted $250K to rebuild it out of rubber and steel. I told them to shove it, went into the gym, ate ~2.5-3K hours of pain over ~18+ months and put it back together myself.

Now I'd rather spend 20 hours a week training, lifting and playing Kung Fu than hardening a kernel.

There's been a revival of physical computing, at least the fun aspects of it, in recent years centered in Wales. See the back issues of The Magpi if you haven't seen them already about that:

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/issues

Browse for parts or whole kits:

https://thepihut.com/

https://www.adafruit.com/

The Raspberry Pis are slightly more expensive than comparable boards because they reinvest so much money back into education, the main goal of their Foundation.

Thanks, but I can rarely force myself to read back issues of anything. By the time something's written, it's inclined to be out of date. Sad but true. My University degree course was out of date.

Isn't amazing how far degree programs lag the world; especially in light of what they charge!

It depends. That's what differentiates a good school from a rip-off. At least back a few decades, the top universities, used to be more than a few years ahead of *everyone* else in their best departments. That is their purpose. I'm not sure how many remain worldwide.

Even an otherwise crap school could do excellent teaching by keeping the lesson plans up to date. Unfortunately they don't look ahead more than one term at a time and won't pay to keep up. Instead they let vendors set the curriculums, lesson plans, and teaching methods. Thus you end up with classes teaching yesterday's technology today at tomorrow's prices.

My lot couldn't keep up to date. The lecturers couldn't teach stuff they didn't know themselves! They had 'retired' into lecturing because they had their phds. The cerebal cement was very much set.

I was in Electronic Hardware. Take my project, for example, on Opto Electronics. I did my research. For the pivotal 1st component, where the extremely small input was delivered, I used a High Electron Mobility Transistor (which was an up to date device). I had to explain that to lecturers who had never used one. But nobody would work with me on the project because I was running the pcb at 250Mhz. "Projects that run fast always run into trouble" was what I was told. Eventually it was taken on by a guy with no expertise in the field. "I took this on because I said to myself 'I'll Learn something here'" he said, "And I learned something all right." In fact he contributed 1%. The PCB I had designed gave no trouble, but every track route was carefully chosen, and every component carefully placed. I was used to draughting boards by hand - a skill that died in the 1980s. 250Mhz isn't much anyhow. There's Ghz running around every Motherboard.

I got an A for the design complexity and the HEMT, the skill on the PCB was unnoticed. I kept the College's embarrassing lack of facilities out of my final report. What was the point?

Just thinking: I started this thread about alternatives to zoom, hoping to hear about some linux server program people could log into. Now we (Myself included) have gone teetotally off the point, which I suppose is the general column. My University was probably the worst in the Western World. Even the IEEE jumped on the degree, stripped it of it's approval, and demanded they move it from a 5 year to a 4 year. So I did the 1st 2 years of a 5 year and came into year 3 to find out the last 3 years were compressed into two. They couldn't teach anything, just say it at us and move on to the next topic.