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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • yeah in europe (obviosly it varies a lot cross-country and rural/urban) but lots of places with high safety standards , and high emissions taxes. Still lots of small cars around .
    Mostly due to parking in big-dense-cities though probably.

    US does come out badly on deaths per billion pax-km: 8 ish vs 3-5 for most euro countries

    So on the face of it small cars dont sem to correlate - but these data look a bit hodge podge, so not sure to read too much into it without knowing the underlying sources.

    Other factors like the “stroad” thing might be an issue.
    And a lot of European municipalities give the elderly free public transport, and have ok bus service, so many doddery old coots have a viable option.

    I remember that southpark episode about senior drivers, with the jaws music . . .
    Maybe not as funny when you look at that US death rate. To quoe Father Maxi: “No god needs complex irony and subtle farcical twists that seem macabre to you and me, all that we can hope for is that god got his laughs . . .”



  • +1 to this.

    You can reduce likelihood of any known risk with a preventative measure, in this case the permissions and ownership structure. That is good.

    Backup does not reduce likelihood of risk.

    It does something more wide-reaching, it mitigates against the bad outcome of loss (from most causes).So it defends from many unknown risks as well as known ones, and unexpected failure of preventative measures. It sort of protects you from your own ignorance and complacency.

    Shit - i’m off to do some more work on backup.sh.



  • Sorry i wasn’t clear about my point - I’m pretty sure I could get windows to play a dvd if i really wanted to.
    But all i needed to do was prove that the dvd drive wasnt broken, and a live linux mint usb did that in 3 extremely “complicated” minutes.

    My actual question was more like:
    " how come - if windows is so simple and so much easier to use and set up for normal users - she couldn’t do something she’d been accustomed to doing for years."

    The windows software centre or whatever it is was not keen to offer VLC, didn’t seem to mention it, but it was very keen to tell her she could buy the film from MS store or something affilliated.

    anyway, it’s ok, i think the next dude has given some interesting info.



  • yeah I paid a lot for an apple laptop in 2008. (more than the hardware was worth - but the form factor was good)
    It was okay, and osx was ok for most stuff for a few years .

    But they cut support for updates well within 10 years and the version I was stuck on eventually just got too far behind on security updates and couldn’t even get firefox updates and stuff.
    So they forced me back tolinux full time - thankfully dual bootng macos+linux was really easy on the old x86 ones.

    It seems you have to keep shipping them big buckets of dollars every 5 years or so - fuck that.
    I’d much rather just give the odd bit of pay-what-you-can/ tip jar to a few linux projects than chuck out perfectly good hardware every few years.


  • There’s always tinycorelinux for hardcore minimalists.
    I can’t say about package support either - i’ve not used it enough, but theres a “dcore” extension that lets you acess debian repos.

    I’ve installed it on a potato easily enough - and I did find it to be astonishing for how small it is.

    But I don’t use it day to day, or much at all, so i’m not going to endorse it.
    It’s not necessarily the most user friendly. and some people might cal the gui slightly dated - persnally i did like that.

    So this is just make you aware of one of the lightest distros I know of (that is sort of usable out of the box)
    Recommended: spec is 128mb ram and pentium2. min spec 46mb ram (maybe thats without the gui desktop environment)

    It’s possibly a bit lighter than antix - for some reason i never quite got on with either antix or mx - not sure why.