dont consider the days of inflated prices, wasteful spending and endless accounting shenanigans and lies the glory days. And don't think AOL didn't do it. HealthSouth/Freddie Mac are the tip of a putrid iceberg. We don't even know how much thievery happened back then, but it wasn't honest and we are paying for it now and will be for a long time to come.
Re:Back in the days
by
thynk
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
BAH! You yourself was spoiled! I remember hooking up to a BBS at 300baud, and my first AOL experience was on a 1200baud modem. And this was HIGH tech stuff! I remember using my 720k 5.25" floppy to store ALL my programs on, and looking at the BIG 8" floppies that fit the machine in the corner, thinking - wow - if they are that much bigger, I wonder how much more data they hold.
When we got the "new" IBM-AT (286, 40Meg drive, 640k ram) - I remember saying "This is all the computing power I will ever need". Then I went to college, and they had HPUX green screen machines, where the best pr0n you could find was dirty stories, or images for the NEW Xterm machines - AND you had to find a way get it past the schools filters, and then keep it hidden from the school admins, AND you only had 4 meg on your account, so you could never keep more than a few files active at once. NO one at our school had heard of HTTP or Mozillia, mosiac or anything of the sort, tho I understand it had been out for a year or so.
Yesterdays internet sucked too, you just didn't realize it.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
The Good 'Ol AOL Usenet Days
by
Nom+du+Keyboard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ah yes, the good 'ol days of A$$hole$ On-Line, when the first thing to set up in one's Usenet kill file was all postings from AOL accounts.
Truthfully, the quality of posts from AOL accounts more than anything else kept me away from their service.
-- "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Re:Glory Holes?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And what is wrong about that? The way you describe the church ("virulently anti-gay") conjures up a negative image, damning them from the start.
Look, people have a right to believe that homesexuality is wrong. Christians believe homosexuality is a sin, just like having sex with anyone other than your wife is a sin, just like lying is a sin.
Re:Glory days
by
Smidge204
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think you missed the intent of the parent post, and the original Hiroshima analogy was rather appropriate...
It's not so much that AOL made the internet popular (as in a lot of people use it), it's that it made it 'popular' (as in the hip and trendy thing to do). This created a whole (and by now, several) internet-aware but still functionally illiterate people.
Specifically: "netspeak"
Now, if you're not typing in your native language, even some severe deviations in grammar and spelling are forgivable. Personally speaking, if I can understand what you're trying to say then that's good enough. This also applies to native speakers who make the occasional "topy" and spelling error (expecting everyone to run their text through spell and grammar check every time just isn't reasonable!)
However, since the internet became "popular" you have an entire culture of people who can't use punctuation like commas and periods, proper capitalization, can't (or won't?) use full words, (Though some "alternative spelings" are commonly acceptable - I can't see, for example, how "u" is a suitable replacement for "you"...), can't be bothered to proofread what they type (even a quick glance), and at worst can't even form coherent thoughts.
So it's not that there are more people are using the internet - that's a very good thing - it's that far too many of them can't understand why they get kicked out of chatrooms and forums for typing "hi a/s/l plz how r u k 10x lololol!!!1! u r gay ass i h4><0r j00"
=Smidge= "I really like it when a site calls it a 'Message Board' instead of 'Forum'. 'Forum' suggests some semblence of order, respect and maturity." -braedan51
Re:Glory days
by
LucidityZero
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not so much that AOL made the internet popular (as in a lot of people use it), it's that it made it 'popular' (as in the hip and trendy thing to do). This created a whole (and by now, several) internet-aware but still functionally illiterate people.
This is another thing to upsets me. People that get so very upset about any sort of evolution of language.
Last time I checked, the point of language was to convey thoughts. Does it really make any difference what so ever how this is accomplished if it's accomplished?
Reminds me a lot of those people that used to bitch about the Millenium thing. "No, no! That's not 2000! It's 2001! See, like, there was no year zero and..."
Yeah, yeah. Shut up.
Point is does it make any difference if I spell it "u" our "you"? You still know what I mean.
Does it make any difference if I wanted to party New Year's Eve 2000 instead of 2001? None at all, really.
People have to remember that although facts obviously matter, it is the intention and meaning behind someone's actions that actually count.
I don't personally do this, but if I use "u" instead of "you", you damn well know what I mean. Therefore, I am accomplishing what language was intended to do: convey thought. If anything, I would be a more efficient person if I always used "u" instead of "you".
Are we as geeks going to help stop progression by becomming so stuck in our roots that we have to automatically dismiss anything that is different...
Isn't that exactly what many of us spent our youth rebelling against in the first place...?
Slashdot Mirror
Which are always nice for homebrew DVDs...
AOL needs to back off on the marketing. I think everyone knows who they are by now.
dont consider the days of inflated prices, wasteful spending and endless accounting shenanigans and lies the glory days. And don't think AOL didn't do it. HealthSouth/Freddie Mac are the tip of a putrid iceberg. We don't even know how much thievery happened back then, but it wasn't honest and we are paying for it now and will be for a long time to come.
Kids these days are spoiled. Back in the good 'ol days when we all had 14.4 modems and we had to walk fifty miles in snow and ice just to pick it up. If we wanted to talk on the phone, tough luck!
BAH! You yourself was spoiled! I remember hooking up to a BBS at 300baud, and my first AOL experience was on a 1200baud modem. And this was HIGH tech stuff! I remember using my 720k 5.25" floppy to store ALL my programs on, and looking at the BIG 8" floppies that fit the machine in the corner, thinking - wow - if they are that much bigger, I wonder how much more data they hold.
When we got the "new" IBM-AT (286, 40Meg drive, 640k ram) - I remember saying "This is all the computing power I will ever need". Then I went to college, and they had HPUX green screen machines, where the best pr0n you could find was dirty stories, or images for the NEW Xterm machines - AND you had to find a way get it past the schools filters, and then keep it hidden from the school admins, AND you only had 4 meg on your account, so you could never keep more than a few files active at once. NO one at our school had heard of HTTP or Mozillia, mosiac or anything of the sort, tho I understand it had been out for a year or so.
Yesterdays internet sucked too, you just didn't realize it.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Truthfully, the quality of posts from AOL accounts more than anything else kept me away from their service.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And what is wrong about that? The way you describe the church ("virulently anti-gay") conjures up a negative image, damning them from the start.
Look, people have a right to believe that homesexuality is wrong. Christians believe homosexuality is a sin, just like having sex with anyone other than your wife is a sin, just like lying is a sin.
I think you missed the intent of the parent post, and the original Hiroshima analogy was rather appropriate...
It's not so much that AOL made the internet popular (as in a lot of people use it), it's that it made it 'popular' (as in the hip and trendy thing to do). This created a whole (and by now, several) internet-aware but still functionally illiterate people.
Specifically: "netspeak"
Now, if you're not typing in your native language, even some severe deviations in grammar and spelling are forgivable. Personally speaking, if I can understand what you're trying to say then that's good enough. This also applies to native speakers who make the occasional "topy" and spelling error (expecting everyone to run their text through spell and grammar check every time just isn't reasonable!)
However, since the internet became "popular" you have an entire culture of people who can't use punctuation like commas and periods, proper capitalization, can't (or won't?) use full words, (Though some "alternative spelings" are commonly acceptable - I can't see, for example, how "u" is a suitable replacement for "you"...), can't be bothered to proofread what they type (even a quick glance), and at worst can't even form coherent thoughts.
So it's not that there are more people are using the internet - that's a very good thing - it's that far too many of them can't understand why they get kicked out of chatrooms and forums for typing "hi a/s/l plz how r u k 10x lololol!!!1! u r gay ass i h4><0r j00"
=Smidge=
"I really like it when a site calls it a 'Message Board' instead of 'Forum'. 'Forum' suggests some semblence of order, respect and maturity." -braedan51
This is another thing to upsets me. People that get so very upset about any sort of evolution of language.
Last time I checked, the point of language was to convey thoughts. Does it really make any difference what so ever how this is accomplished if it's accomplished?
Reminds me a lot of those people that used to bitch about the Millenium thing. "No, no! That's not 2000! It's 2001! See, like, there was no year zero and..."
Yeah, yeah. Shut up.
Point is does it make any difference if I spell it "u" our "you"? You still know what I mean.
Does it make any difference if I wanted to party New Year's Eve 2000 instead of 2001? None at all, really.
People have to remember that although facts obviously matter, it is the intention and meaning behind someone's actions that actually count.
I don't personally do this, but if I use "u" instead of "you", you damn well know what I mean. Therefore, I am accomplishing what language was intended to do: convey thought. If anything, I would be a more efficient person if I always used "u" instead of "you".
Are we as geeks going to help stop progression by becomming so stuck in our roots that we have to automatically dismiss anything that is different...
Isn't that exactly what many of us spent our youth rebelling against in the first place...?
Sig.i>