h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why does a perfectly well-behaved computer decide to misbehave nanoseconds before that all important demonstration / presentation you have been working up to for your entire career?

And how come it takes you an inordinately long time to get the pesky thing up and running again?

It loves you & doesn't want you to leave it behind

;^)#

What a lovely idea - and I didn't think it cared.

This is classic confirmation bias.

Or nineties computer hardware.

Progress means that 20 years later we have the same issues, but now caused by poor Wifi / cloud connectivity.

I feel like a curmudgeon, but so far NOTHING has convinced me that having my access to my data dependent upon the speed and integrity of my internet connection is better.

Hard drives are CHEAP. I have a weekly local backup and a monthly offsite of ALL my data - photos, music, movies, documents, projects, code, everything. There's a stack of HDDs around and about that mean I can't lose my data... and anything I want is here, NOW, regardless of bandwidth throttling, wifi signal etc.

"Clouds" are for the birds.

I fully agree. My employer thinks differently.

Oh, don't get me wrong - I see the point if you're an employer, or even "just" someone who needs to collaborate with someone else who isn't always guaranteed to be in the same room. Cloud services are fantastic for working on the same document or project as someone else, and ensuring you have backups and whatnot of joint work.

But for MY data, that's by definition never going out of my house (my movies, my photos, my documents, my music) - why would I want to make my access to that contingent on something controlled by someone else?

What's a BSD?

It sounds a bit kinky in some strange way (mostly my warped mind probably)

Isn't that the predecessor of BSE?

Probably. I could tell you if I knew what either of them meant :D

BSE to me is Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis - aka mad cow disease. I'm not sure that works in the current context.

I was relating to that specific meaning (sort of, just following alphabethical order, actually)

The BSD here would be "Blue Screen of Death", I guess.

You don't want either of those.

Oh cripes, yes I recall the blue screen of death right enough. Does that still happen? I haven't used a PC for many years now - been forcibly converted to Macs since about 2005 for work purposes.

It has been a long time since my last BSD. Did have a black screen recently, the power supply died.

Well the spinning beachball of death is alive an well on MacOS, I suppose that's almost the equivalent.