To read this post please scroll down.

 

Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Windows 10 breaks computers

Why I use Linux, part 3,332,468: A consumer organization is calling for Microsoft to compensate people for the hardware damage caused by upgrades to Windows 10.

Microsoft needs to pay compensation to customers who have suffered after upgrading to its latest operating system, consumer watchdog Which? has urged. Since the US technology firm pushed out the new software last year, it has been flooded with complaints. Customers who moved to Windows 10 experienced a slew of issues, including printers, webcams, wifi cards and speakers no longer working with their PC. Instances of lost files and email accounts no longer syncing, and, most significantly, computer encountering such significant issues customers had to pay someone to repair it were not uncommon, Which? has reported.

The consumer group surveyed views on the upgrade from over 5,500 members in June this year. Of the 2,500 users who had been upgraded to Windows 10 from an older version of Windows, more than one in ten ended up rolling back to their previous version of the operating system.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • James Stephens

    And I am one of those people who is hired to fix problems after this so-called upgrade, often a time consuming process with a bill to match. My preferred fix is Linux. About a half hour to install update and configure nicely as opposed to a half day or more to fix Windows.

    Now to be fair, if you plan and go on the Internet and get all the needed drivers beforehand and have them available on removable media and in the machine at the time of upgrade things go relatively smoothly. Who does that. Certainly not those who had this upgrade foisted upon them.

    I’ve never, not once had a problem with a Linux update.

  • t-dub

    I also fix computers but only for friends. Well one of them upgraded to a new Windoze 10 machine from 7. The person they paid to do the migration left the printer and e-mail in a non functioning state. HP knows they have compatibility problems but will they fix them? No. I had to hack the registry to regain functionality. It took me 6 hours to clean up all of the problems the so called “professionals” left.

  • James Stephens

    Not unusual. Easily half the problems I deal with are botched attempts. HP and compatibility problems? Say it ain’t so! I think that did more to hurt the company then just about anything else, but that’s another story.

  • Localfluff

    I had to upgrade my laptop to Windows 10 recently because of software I have to use. The upgrade application said that my CPU, a very standard Intel, wasn’t compatible with W10. It turns out it is a well known bug, but without remedy from Microsoft. I had to download a torrent with a cracked W10 that could install from an image disk without that bugged upgrade software. That’s a promising start for a new friendship! :-)

  • Gealon

    Windows 10 breaking computers is no surprise, especially since Microsoft had to resort to forcing it on everyone… kind of like a certain health care bill… Anyway. They were very sneaky with some of the ways they force it on people, three or four separate updates to Windows 7 contained the W10 updater that if you so much as clicked on the “Find out more” link, it would start downloading W10. This is of course anecdotal, I avoided W10, 8 and Vista like the plague. Windows 98 and XP have always functioned quite well for me and I only tried, and surprisingly liked W7 because it supported the 64bit processor of the computer I was building.

    Needless to say, Microsoft has slid and continues to slide down hill, what with computers trying to be more like dumb phones. So much so have they descended that I’ve had automatic updates turned off almost since I started using W7. It doesn’t do to have your computer turning it’s self off when it wants to, just to install an update while you are in the middle of working on an important project. I wouldn’t go so far as to turn to Linux though, it has it’s own compatibility problems and not everyone wants to spend time configuring this, installing that and getting used to a new beast. We want it to work right out of the box and be something we are familiar and comfortable with. To that end, I will likely never abandon W7/XP/98, at least not until something like them comes along, but I fear in this world of dumb phones and snowflakes, that will never happen again.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *