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i was thinking the same thing. the exclamation "success!" seemed in the same category.

i know the OP posited windows as a requirement,
but there's also a hybrid approach.

my primary goal was to protect my mom from serious financial fraud - ie bank account stuff.

mom uses windows for photoshop & other SW that won't go on a tablet,
and also makes heavy use of some windows-only apps which keep her away from OSX.

so, i got her a tiny HP laptop and put Linux (mint) on it,
with the strict instructions that all banking is done on the Linux machine,
and *only* banking is done on the Linux machine. no shopping, no surfing.

shopping i figure is fine on the windows machine: the credit card is secured against fraud,
and shopping itself is risk enough that it doesn't belong on the banking machine.

I suspect she's not actually following this advice, because she hasn't asked for help w/ the Linux box,
but that's probably also a failing on my part for not following up.

thanks to the article author for conveniently providing a link to a definition of 'raconteur'.
that was super helpful.
ditto the link to the wikipedia page for Canasta.
both links are totally cogent and i never would have found that info myself.

lots of good suggestions here, including maybe getting a different dorm.
i think i recall there being a 'quiet' dorm at UCSC. ("live here if your main interest in being at college is .. academics", i guess)

but mostly the suggestions seem to be either Block The Sound or Drown The Sound In Noise.

i'd highly recommend going for the former before the latter, for the kinda obvious reason of hearing damage.
i'm not an expert, but my tinnitus gives me a gut feeling that chronic exposure to even background-level noise can't be good for the cilia.

should have included - yes.

many wifi routers i've encountered can provide two networks, each of which can have QOS limits on it.
what i haven't seen tho is a router which can make one network lower priority than the other.

ie, i want to have the primary always get 100% when it needs it,
but if the primary is only using up 10%, give the remaining 90% to the secondary.

any equipment recommends ?

no: i chose to omit licensing. you're choosing to interpret it within the permission framework. congratulations.
also i think i made it clear that my omission was made intentionally rather than out of ignorance, so screw you.

like most of us i've self-published a bunch of crap in the past fifteen years or so,
ranging from music CDs in actual stores to numerous personal software components,
and i've intentionally kept them bare of any licensing information for two reasons:

1. as a small protest against the permission culture.
2. i feel that incorporating the permission culture into the creative work cheapens the work.

when folks have re-purposed my work (that i know of), they've always asked first and have always offered to include attribution.

look at the amount of advertising for products completely unrelated to computing (mobile or otherwise) which choose to position the product being sold within the frame of an iPhone. it's a nearly ubiquitous advertising technique. this, imo, indicates that the iPhone has become popularly synonymous with "value". a few years ago this role was filled by laptops: if i was selling diapers, i'd show a smart-looking housewife viewing my product on a laptop. now it's iPhones. so what's happening is that UI designers are trying to convince you that their UI has Value by making it invoke iOS. my $0.02.

perhaps this whole interview is a red herring attempting to get apple competitors to go ahead and sink resources into lousy products.

i switched over to OSX a few years ago,
but before that i also stuck with the older Jasc (6 sounds right) version in favour of the more recent and overweight Corel versions.
iirc the older version was awesome for basic editing, but occasionally there would be specific more modern thing i'd want, and would fire up the corel version.

i agree.

i used the latest version about five months ago.
i couldn't figure out how to move the camera,
but three clicks turned my simple cube into a smoke simulation!
(not kidding on either point)

i am not a pro by any means, but my issues with GIMP are all UI.
it has all the features i could want, but using them is such a hassle.
there may be something to tibit's comment that it's not a worse UI, just a different UI, but i disagree.
i find myself forced to spend way more time in UI management than the commercial apps, which i think is an objective measure.

indeed.

even for semi-serious non-professional uses i find GIMP to have a horrible UI. it's sort of like Blender.
honestly i'd rather work out an ImageMagick script to do what i want than do it in gimp. at least then it's reusable and command-line.

i do prop PaintShop Pro and Pixelmator for being solid products an order of magnitude or so cheaper than Photoshop.
altho pixelmator has swallowed a bit too much of the Apple cool-aid around stamping out "Save As", imo.