bunsen_h

My employer may be loaning me a new(er) laptop soon, to enable me to do some work from home.  By default, it will probably have Windows 10 installed, though my work will really need to be done in a Linux environment.  Our usual way of handling that is to work in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox.

How hard should I be pushing to get our people to chuck out the Win'10 OS and install Linux directly on the machine?  Or to use some earlier version of Windows, such as 7 or 8 or 8.1?  We've got site licenses for at least some of those.

Originally, Win'10 had a host of "features" that many people considered utterly unacceptable.  Freely sharing network passwords with everyone in one's Outlook contact list; automatic and irrevocable installation of OS upgrades; snooping on user activity and uploading the results to μsoft.  Push advertising.  More.  Some of these have been pulled back, some haven't, but I'm under the impression that I still don't want a Win'10 machine on my home network if I can help it.  Have I got that right?

I suppose that one option would be to make the machine dual-bootable, and simply never boot up the Win'10 side.
 

It's been suggested to me that I should "brush up on" my C++.  I've never learned that language, though I'm good with C.  I'm looking for recommendations for good books to learn C++ from, for someone who has plenty of computer experience and knows several languages but is inexperienced in object-oriented programming.  By way of background, I favour approaches which start with simple working examples and add details and complexity, as (for example) with Donald Knuth's T_EX manual.

Thanks for any suggestions.
 

I could have sworn that there was a scene in the Trek Classic episode "Obsession" in which we got to see people firing phasers into the vampire gas cloud as it was attacking guys in red shirts.  It turns out that this isn't the case.  I had to settle for a less dramatic image.

No, wait, it's "Green Tea & Echinoidea".  Um, "Green Tea and Echinacea".  Oh, no, I keep having to remind myself, it's really "Green Tea and Verbena".  The new scented hand soap that we've just started using in the washrooms at my workplace, that is.

Doesn't matter much, they're all stinky.  Or would be, I'm sure.

No, beable, "Green Tea and Telephone" probably wouldn't be much better.

"Don't know." Why do people have so much trouble saying those words?

Today, I brought some of the leftover lime squares in to work, and left them on the table in the lunch room. A few minutes later, I overheard one person asking another what was in them. "Apple," he replied.

Good grief. If that recipe has a fault, it's that it's got too much lime in it. I'm considering reducing the amount by a third, or maybe even a half. A couple of people have told me that the squares are tasty but too strongly-flavored for them to eat, beyond a tiny nibble. They couldn't possibly be mistaken for "apple" by anyone who'd tasted one.

At our company picnic on Wednesday, one person was passing around a bowl of spring rolls prepared by someone else, one of our new employees. I asked her what was in them, and she said, "Bean curd." I asked her what else, and she said, "They're bean curd." I decided to pass, since she obviously didn't know the contents. But when another vegetarian colleague asked her if the spring rolls were vegetarian, she assured her firmly, "Completely vegetarian!" Even though she didn't know.

I just don't get it. I don't enjoy admitting ignorance, but I'd much rather honestly admit ignorance than feign certainty and risk giving a completely wrong answer. (There's sometimes room for something like "I think probably [X] but I'm not totally sure" as well.)