The French would understand.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/mon-petit-chou
Please go back to “my beloved.” Or just “girlfriend” is fine. “My Gobhi,” which you stick in practically every post, is so fucking annoying. Like you just must reference her being Indian every time you mention her.
Ah! C’est très romantique!
You are right. I didn’t mean to reduce her to an ethnic stereotype, other her, or reduce her from a human being into a single characteristic.
I will go back to my beloved.
AMEN! That’s what I’ve been trying to say as well.
They’re not trying to force you to upgrade simply to make more money; if they were really about that 100%, they’d be charging a LOT more for the OS in the first place.
They’re doing it because it costs them a significant amount of money to keep older OSes secure, and a significant amount of money to keep newer OSes compatible with older hardware. At some point, they just have to stop with both and make you upgrade, whether you like it or not, whether it still runs fine for you, or whatever.
I am still unpacking. I have-
2 Commodore 64’s (It may be more than that)
a Plus 4 (It looks a lot like a C-64. It came with pre-installed business software and the insides are very different)
I cannot remember the exact model of Texas Instruments computer I have.
An NCR tablet computer from the early 90’s. To get information from the hard drive to another computer you needed to plug in the doodad (that being the technical term) containing parallel and serial ports, attach a serial cable between the tablet and a desktop (one on which you had previously installed the software that came with the tablet) and swap files. The deluxe model came with a floppy drive. I don’t have the deluxe model.
Northstar Horizon- I can’t remember if I am a year older than this computer or the other way around. It is huge and heavy. My Dad and I used to play Adventure on it.
Here is a link to a Northstar in The Old Computer Museum.
They do not show the terminal that contained keyboard and screen.
The NCR tablet
Note- While the Video Game Kraken is generally worksafe and fascinating. Their front page now bears a small image from The Super Hornio Brothers 1 & 2. I was wondering what the heck it was doing on the site. Short version- Somebody made a hardcore film parody of the Mario Brothers (not interesting) and in order to surpress it, Nintendo bought the rights (Interesting indeed!)
ETA
I forget where the creator of Video Game Kraken is from. English is not his first language and there are occasional spelling and grammar errors. Based on his contribution to the public good, I really don’t care.
I haven’t grumped out loud about it yet, but I am one of the folks who doesn’t want to buy a new computer just so I can look at this (currently) free message board for financial reasons.
I work intermittently as a government contractor on natural resource management projects. That means I am unlikely to make any money any time soon. Most of my net worth is tied up in a retirement account that I’m too young to withdraw money from. I just sold a 2014 car for $16,000, and I have to make that last as long as I can.
I am fortunate, because my expenses are very low. I’ve got a paid for house, solar panels, and an ebike (my last big “fun” purchase – bought it in 2022 for about $1000). If I can’t read this message board, I will feel a bit sad, but it’s not worth a whole new computer for me, when I have a working desktop (bought around 2015) and a working laptop (refurbished and gifted to me by a loved one), and I can still use both of them for the things I need most, like GIMP and R.
Excuse me for being such a weirdo that you can’t imagine my life!
Been there, done that, too! I had a few years of learning vanishing trades, from letterpress printing to bridgetending, and now AI is coming for professoring. Where do I join General Ludd’s army?
I had an Amiga 1000 once. It came with my first “scanner”. It was a black and white tube-based security camera mounted on a rod over a platform. It had a rotating plate in front of the lens red/green/blue/clear color filters that you rotated manually and made three seperate screen grabs to create a color image. Also came with a color ribbon-based dot matrix printer.
I managed to enter the modern age when I learned Flash and got employment, but that fell by the wayside when it drained too much battery power and HTML5 came out. Took about 12 years for it to go obsolete, as opposed to centuries for the printing press.
It took me years to convince my brother to learn AutoCAD. Nobody’s going to hire landscape architects who use stone-age drawing pads. Adapt or starve.
You don’t need a whole new computer, just a modern browser on your old computer.
Doing that being subject of course to the various not-obvious hoops discussed in that other thread to get a modern browser onto an old computer (or OS).
Good bet the tech-averse stick to their existing machines more and longer than the tech-avid do. So as a general matter the folks most in need of defeating the natural obsolescences are the ones least able to do the defeating.
I wouldn’t necessarily say so. I’m an IT professional, and my computers tend to run for long periods of time because I have the know-how to keep them running properly and securely. Ok, I only bought my main machine last July and it is quite up-to-date, but I also have a ca. 10 year old laptop as a backup machine that flawlessly runs Win 11 and Chrome with the latest patches, because I know how to do that (as could everybody with minimal Google skills, though) and am not afraid to apply some tricks that delve deeper into the innards of Windows than most regular users are willing to do.
Sure, but the point is that you’re not trying to eke Win 7 along on a 15 year old machine because you feel like it’s “good enough” for what you want to do, and then complaining when Microsoft says that you have to upgrade.
You understand the necessity of patches, what technical debt is, and why an operating system publisher can’t indefinitely support all the ancient hardware that’s out there. Or why websites and application developers keep current with the user interfaces and various tools for website development and maintenance.
That’s what I’m getting at- there are absolutely good, valid reasons why computers are not fit to be used, and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with whether they power on and boot up. It’s like getting upset because the government says your Model T doesn’t meet emission standards, or that you can’t take it on the highway because it’s top speed is too low, and then railing at the government for not keeping speed limits or emissions requirements lower because your Model T still fires up and you want to drive it because it still runs.
Yes, sure, all of this, and security always is paramount for me when working with a computer, so I would never browse the internet with an obsolete and unpatched OS. And keeping an updated and patched Windows system secure is not very complicated, a decent free antivirus (Windows Defender already is ok and doesn’t nag you), an adblocker and a scriptblocker for your browser and some common sense not to fall for social engineering like phishing or other email or phone scams should be sufficient.
Agreed, it shouldn’t be a big deal.
What REALLY bugs me though is when Windows updates BREAK things.
Last Feb a major Win 11 update came in and completely broke my USB audio interface functionality.
Which is very important for me since I am a serious musician and songwriter.
And even though this seems to have been reported many times to Microsoft, they don’t seem to have made any attempt to fix it yet.
So far I have survived by reverting to an earlier version using system restore, and disabling new updates. But you can only disable for 5 weeks. So it looks as if I may be stuck in a cycle of setting a new restore point and disabling updates for another 5 weeks, rinse and repeat. Unless or until they fix their mess.
Reminds me to check: when is the next damned update going to force its way on to my system?
Have to set a restore point in time… 
I refuse to download new versions of Thunderbird, because I get really tired of pointless changes to the UI that keep getting thrown in. It’s like finding your bedroom wallpaper changing radically every couple of months and each new pattern is uglier than the last.
I want to use software that looks and works the same way until the day I die.
IMHO Part of it is that technology is progressing faster than it used to. How long between television broadcast networks and the switch to color? How long after that to stereo sound?
A thirty year old car kept in good condition is still a fine automobile. A thirty year old computer kept in good condition has no practical use.
I’m not sure how possible that is. Even printed books and newspapers change over time.