::: This, just in: (No names) "I think FF is all messed up...I think the whole internet is all messed up." / Response: "I think you are correct - on all counts."/ Ask me how fed up I am with the whole damned thing. It's "as if" everybody jumped on the same bandwagon: steroids or smoking wacky tacky. Very tacky, imho./ It seems to all have begun with Windows 7. At least that's where I first began to notice steroids inhabiting my computer. I feel like Leonard Cohen: (song) The Future: ...there's a crack in everything.../ Would you believe me if I told you that, other than business people, not a single personal friend of mine even owns a computer and does not want to own a computer? Some work with them all day long and thus have no desire whatsoever to come home to yet another computer, others hate the whole idea of them and wouldn't have one if it fell into their laps like Manna from Heaven? Call them cave dwellers, un-cool, not "with it", whichever insult one chooses, I think they are all onto something - smart friends! / I have very happy, well-adjusted, productive, sane, family and friends. Twenty years of experience convinces me of such. / As quaint as it may sound, I do miss Windows XP. The last time Microsoft actually had an operating system that was serviceable and made any sort of common sense. I'm being very kind at that./ StumbleUpon - how would you like to hear me scream? Despicable, imho. Just what I "need" - "60,000 Marketers" reading every click of my keyboard and mouse and giving me the hard sell to whatever evil products they want to brainwash me into purchasing. I am not conflicted, I am adamant. I'll fry in Hell before somebody tries to sell me anything I neither want nor need. / StumbleUpon's Empire is not the only culprit. I saw it coming when they installed Facebook and Twitter within their system. (No thanks, if I wanted them, I'd go to the source, not the underlings.) / Facebook and Twitter are ubiquitous and my blood pressure skyrockets every time I even see those two everywhere. Zuckerberg has only one ambition in life: to take over the world. That is is his self-stated mission in life. That kid is as predatory an animal as any American Bald Eagle. He never even heard of "Ethics". Gates or Jobs he is not. Make no mistake. / No. It's not your "imagination", dear Correspondent. / ::: This just in my email - something I subscribe to - though it is aimed at IT Pros.: / Among the browsers: Firefox endangered By Kathleen Atkins / In the wild landscape, foxes stay alert not only for their own next meals but also to avoid becoming a morsel for a bigger set of teeth./ In the tech landscape, Firefox might be endangered because it failed to follow either of those imperatives - according to growing number of blog and press reports.../ Surprisingly, Firefox seems to have both lost its primary life support and gotten itself entangled with a very big predator... etc etc etc.../ ::: So what do I do? CHROME. Uh huh. Been there before, and said to heck with it. Installed Chrome's latest foray into the browser wars. Somebody had asked me what I thought about Chrome. Said, I hadn't seen it in years, so couldn't give any opinion, one way or the other. Then this week...Chrome...oye vey. Thought I'd have a look at it. / Google is Google is Google is Google. Google everything. All the time. Pernicious. / I opined, to my friend, that in my decades of using computers and software that my favourite web browser had been - I stress "had been" - was the AVANT browser. Little known, by comparison, it was the fastest browser of them all. Lite weight, no bloat and not built on the Windows architecture. Whoopie! My kind of application. Well, welcome to the New World - I had another look at it last week, while doing Chrome - sigh. Sigh is enough, says it all. / Here's what I so intensely dislike about computer O/S and software today: the manner in which literally everything takes over my computer and instead of working for me, I am working for it. "It" being whatever poison chosen. Fed Up./ In the days of MS Windows '95 I used to have a tag line: / "This computer works for Microsoft." / I spend more hours in the day doing routine maintenance of my computer, trying to stay one step ahead of the Techno Wizards, than I do actually enjoying what I really want to do with my computer - which then at times I am tempted to put in the yard and tack a sign on a tree behind it: "PLEASE! Come and steal this computer." / My Sad Goat's Fillosofy is simple: / "IF I can't learn something in a maximum half hour, I don't have the patience for steep learning curves left to do it. Colour it gone. Next..." :::