A bit of housekeeping, and a rant

I have disabled anonymous comments. Henceforth, those who wish to comment will need to do one of those "word identification" bits.

I do not like doing this, but neither do I like dealing with the increasing stream of anonymous and obviously computer-generated spam.

Sigh.

This morning, I read with delight about Linus Torvald's award for developing Linux, and followed up with the Wikipedia article on Raspberry Pi, a little computer that sells for $25, mentioned in the BBC news story. Part of the motivation behind Raspberry Pi was the fact that fewer young people who enter computer science courses at university have any hardware-tinkering background or any real programming experience, as they often did in the 1980's and 90's. Nowadays, they have maybe done some web design and that's about it. Perhaps a cheap little computer that is nothing but an open circuit board without a case, monitor, or keyboard could tempt young geeks-to-be in better directions.

But more has changed than the hardware. There was a sense of geeky innocence about computers and especially the internet back in the early days. I have tried to write about my experiences of it here, the first post in the Music Box. But nowadays, the internet is not a safe place, nor is it even particularly enjoyable (most especially, I despise Facebook).

Big Brother is watching; anything you say or write or post, or the record of your visit to any website, can and will be used against you. And if that weren't bad enough, everyone wants to sell you something or scam you.

It is too much like Real Life.