It seems a terrible shame to throw away perfectly good old computers just because they won’t run a modern version of Windows. What we need is a Granny Linux, something that is safe from both malice at one end of the modem cable and bafflement at the other.
Two months ago I stopped using Opera — the smallest, once the fastest and often the best browser built to date. Opera had all the good ideas years before everyone else. It had tabbed browsing in 1997, and proper CSS support in the same year, long before there was any proper CSS to decode.
The most heroic figures of last week were the astronauts crawling around the edge of the space shuttle to repair the craft in which they must return to the Earth 400km below. It’s an extraordinary testament to the defeated and sunless mood that we seem to be in that this was treated everywhere as a defeat.