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One of the best upgrades I’ve ever made to a computer is installing an SSD drive.

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The SSD drive is for purposes of booting so much faster then a conventional drive — taking my laptop about 4 seconds to boot into Linux with the XFCE window manager compared to 30 plus seconds with the traditional drive.

Applications load somewhat faster, but the real speed difference is when you are preforming operations that are highly disk intensive, such as loading a large database or processing many digital elevation models at once. Obviously, CPU intensive applications aren’t improved by SSD, so if something involves more processing then loading, the benefits will be smaller.

All together though, I’m much happier with the speed of my machine with the SSD drive installed. It’s well worth the $150 to be able to start and shutdown the machine quickly, and have more access to my files. Plus, I still have the old hard drive in the DVD drive bay, so I have ample space on my laptop for years to come.

I wonder why people are lionizing of now philanthropist Billy Gates

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Billy ripped off ProDOS and used monopolistic tactics to corner the Operating Systems Market with Microsoft Windows, a poorly designed bloated operating system that is widely used for praying on the elderly and disabled with spyware installed by telephone scammers. An operating system that is mostly about selling software and additional products. In many ways his career is no better then the J.D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

Billy Gates is no expert or voice of authority on climate change or vaccines. He’s not a scientist, even if he has given to some of his ill-gotten worth to worthwhile causes. But he’s hardly somebody to look up. You would be a lot better to listen to real scientists and important decision-makers then a computer geek and theft become monopolist who in his retirement turned to philanthropy. 

“What Should a Well-Informed Person Know About Computers?” — by Brian Kernighan

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Invited presentation at a meeting of the Old Guard of Summit NJ on January 5, 2021. Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and one of the original Unix pioneers at Bell Labs. Brian described his experiences teaching "Computers in Our World," a first year course designed to inform non-technical students how modern hardware, software and communications systems operate, and their ubiquitous role in today's world. It was a 45-minute version of his one-semester talk!

Some Early Machines by Tim Hunkin

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"Gladys, the burglar catcher: The Insomniac's friend: The disgusting Spectacle: The Barman: Goliath, the nut cracker: The Zoo: Air Raid: The Oracle: Medieval clock: The builder and his wife: Climax: The executive decision maker: The dancing record player: The automatic bag searcher."