I never did believe the world is 6000 years old, and in fact the "6000 year old universe" is not a tenet of Christianity and is obviously false. I have never met a single person who believed that, but I've met a whole lot of ignorant athiests who are certain that Christians do, despite being told otherwise repeatedly.
For what it's worth, I *have* met people who believe this. I grew up in the American Bible Belt, and spend some time on a financial web site with a large Evangelical following, and there are biblical literalists out there who insist this is true. However, I also know this is not true of ALL (or even most) Christians, and the ongoing meme about this in every single Slashdot science thread is most certainly: -1, Overrated. Still, these people do exist, your not having met them doesn't change that, and their insistence in this belief despite the obvious falseness of it is part of what gets the atheists all riled up.
I will listen to and consider all evidence and welcome critiques of what I believe. I known full well my limitations as a finite creature and do not know every side of any argument and have positioned myself to accept possible changes in my beliefs or worldviews in accordance with the availble data.
Too bad that's a little long to slap on a button or T-shirt. It's a worthy motto.
This is correct. I asked a question a while back, and had no warning when the article was actually approved and posted. By the time I noticed (just a few hours later) I tried replying and adding with details, but by that point it didn't seem like my follow-ups were noticed.
You've been described as a 'militant atheist', but do you consider yourself to be certainly atheist or rather technically agnostic, in the same sense that Bertrand Russell described himself as in his essay "Am I Atheist or Agnostic?"
This is an interesting question, and in my experience there's a whole lot of individual variation in terms of what people will define as an atheist or agnostic. I've heard people say what amounts to, "You're only an atheist if you can say you KNOW there's no God, and anything less is really agnosticism," while I've heard other people who lump most lack of belief into atheism and equate agnosticism with being wishy-washy and on the fence (like the old joke, I'll either win the lottery tomorrow or I won't, so the odds are 50-50; some see agnostics as basically being able to go either way). You can have a whole conversation just clearing up definitions before getting into the nitty-gritty of figuring out where someone actually falls on the spectrum.
Frankly, I think the obsession over when "life begins" is a bit of a red herring. From a legal perspective, determining if a fetus has rights, and what rights it may have, can be decided in a number of ways, many of which don't need to have anything to do with whether "life has begun." We could base the cutoff on an apparent size or weight, or a developmental feature, or whether the fetus could survive without life support -- all potentially subjective and possibly moving targets as medical science improves. But I don't think anyone really knows when life begins, either. I bet we couldn't get most people to agree on what the phrase "life begins" really even means. It's all guesses and philosophy, and the law might as well recognize that as it simply picks a boundary that undoubtedly both arbitrary and wrong, but is still useful as a consistent guideline.
I, for one, wouldn't want to outlaw abortion. I think it should be allowed but with both parents sterilized at the same time. I've known people who used abortion as birth control. I though it was weird at the time, and now I think it's revolting.
What would you say about my parents, who were trying to have a baby but chose to abort when genetic testing determined something was so badly wrong the fetus probably wouldn't make it to term, though there was a chance it might have made it a few months after birth before inevitably dying? Should they have also been force sterilized, and prevented from having future children? Should they have been forced to go through with the pregnancy and bankrupted by the medical bills?
I learned an interesting lesson when my 6th grade teacher had us try to determine whether bleach was an acid or a base by applying it to litmus paper which promptly got bleached white.
Then I learned a valuable lesson when that same teacher for some crazy lesson sniffed the bottle of bleach (to see if it was still good?) and nearly passed out.
One year of high-school chemistry is completely useless for someone who is going to be a chemist. It can, however, provide just enough introduction to the elements to make someone barely conversant in the subject in case they want or need to understand a little bit about how that aspect of the world works. It also provides the opportunity for someone to discover whether they have enough interest in the subject to pursue it further - part of surveying that range of subjects to see what you like. You can't know you don't like it until you've tried it once.
I'd say you had a lousy and restrictive high school. I had at least a couple of elective slots every year, and multiple choices by junior and senior year. I did have a similar set of 3 science, 3 math, 4 English, 3 history setup that you did, along with a handful of other requirements, but that's just 4 slots per day, and we had 8 periods per day for classes (well, 6-7 classes was typical, with 1-2 open study periods). I worked in 4 years of journalism, extra elective math, additional science, speech, 3 years of foreign language (optional in my case), and some extra literature. I definitely had choices, and there were a lot of classes I was moderately interested in but never got to try.
A number of my classmates were able to do exactly what you say and focus on non-college career tracks. We had a number of automotive/mechanical options, some business stuff, some CAD classes (at the time considered more technical than academic), and as a rural-ish school also had a number of farming-related classes. I know some kids actually left school for a couple of hours of work-study apprenticeships in their fields.
Maybe my school was unusually flexible, I don't know, that's the only point of reference I have. I've always assumed everyone else had roughly similar options.
I have no mod points, so wanted to say this is an exceptionally straightforward and sensible explanation. I tend to end up with a very similar analysis when I try to work through the issues. I was disappointed there aren't any rebuttals, because I'm bad at arguing with myself, and I'd like to hear counter-arguments to determine their merits.
Some of us aren't happy doing just one thing, whatever that thing is. I've got a handful of hobbies, and in a perfect day (or week) I'd spend a little time on all of them. I've got a job that covers a couple of them (and have had freelance jobs after hours that touched on one or two more). But doing that same thing for 40 hours, and having those hours exclude other fun things, doesn't make for a perfect scenario. If I had to spend 60-80 hours doing one thing, I'd be exhausted, no matter how fun that thing was.
I know for some people there's one real passion, and it's easy to identify and focus on that passion. For many others -- most people, even? -- variety is key to enjoyment, and you rarely get that variety by spending 40 or 60 hours at work. Even the best job comes with limitations, and those always chafe. Plus even a theoretically fun job tends to come with lousy aspects: grunt work, office obligations, difficult coworkers, etc. It's easy enough to start with a seed of something you do really like, and still end up only being happy about work part of the time, but being convinced that's still better than you'll find most other places.
Are you sure about that? I haven't sold anything through them, but I thought I understood the 65% was only applied at the low end - books under $2 or $3, and that it was 35% for everything above that point. I don't ever remember hearing about another transition higher up the price scale.
My system makes a little sense, because there's some fixed costs that need to be made up for on really cheap items, hence the higher percentage for really cheap items. A pricing scheme like you cite wouldn't have any real rational purpose at all, other than profiting from confused sellers.
When one of my cats died suddenly (I know, not quite the same thing) I snuck her name into part of a computer game I was working on. I had just put in a hospital (superheroes need healing, after all) so I called it the Elsie C. Attus (i.e., Elsie the cat) Memorial Hospital. Not sure if any of the players ever knew why it had that name, but even five years later I'm still glad when I see it. That's just for a pet - hope you get the same feeling with whatever you dedicate to your grandmother.
My first guess would be the like recommendations are based on what other people you know like - I know I've seen "you should like bacon" prompts next to "the following friends of yours like bacon," etc. However, I wouldn't put it past some of those recommendations being paid advertisements, either - wouldn't even call that a tinfoil hat theory, just basic marketing.
Bad form replying to my own post, but another likely big development is in medicine. Tricorder-like functions and smart apps that turn your smartphone or home computer into a basic medical advisor as a first pass at getting medical advice and monitoring your general health (heck, include monitoring of sleep, exercise, and food intake) and there could be some tremendous gains in the management of personal well-being. The big issues there being of course privacy concerns - where there's data, there's data leaks and big brother and corporate meddling that we'd want to be careful of.
A third bet is genetics, with genome mapping, personalized analysis, customized medical treatments, etc.
You're getting a lot of flak in the responses, but I think looking back in a handful of decades this is going to seem more right than many of the other answers. The way I see it, the last three "next big things" were: 1) build mechanical assistants, i.e. computers; 2) make them smaller and affordable; and 3) connect them. Much of what has been dramatically revolutionized about life over the last few decades has been fallout from those three things, none of which sounds all that crazy in retrospect, but none of those things seemed nearly as big going in as they do now. The consequences far over-reached the apparent usefulness when the inventions were made.
The self-driving car is likely to be another one of those things which, once it's fully realized, has far more dramatic changes than the ability to "text on your way to work" as one detractor commented above. I'm not just talking about reduced traffic congestion and decreased mortality rates, though I think those are the main reasons we're looking into it now, but really dramatic stuff. We'll have kids being able to get places quickly, easily, and safely without requiring parental intervention. There'll be another chance for custom home delivery of groceries - that kind of flopped in the early days of the internet, but when coupled with automated drivers and efficient delivery routes I could see it working. A fully redesigned family-size car that's more like a living room on wheels would completely change the long-distance travel experience, and the ability for these computerized cars to link up into giant trains for long-distance interstate rides might do some very nice things for fuel efficiency.
Those are just some starting guesses, and I'd bet some even crazier things come from self-driving cars before a few decades are out.
Compared to that, things like unlimited energy and teleportation are science fiction - easy to name, but far too distant in the future to be candidates for any of the next several generations of "next big things."
Linux gamers intentionally pay more to skew the average, in order to encourage more developers to make more Linux games. (Including, I understand, a few five-figure donators who *really* pushed up the average.) There's no such incentive to encourage Linux-friendly eBooks.
While kind of cute, it's dangerous to play games where customer money is involved. Much safer to just assume anything non-numeric is a typo than to build in a minor calculator for people to play with and then deal with a bunch of chargebacks from people who made math mistakes or actually did have a typo.
Cursive: meh. I stopped using it when I realized I couldn't read my own notes, and I was basically just as fast (and much more legible) with normal printing. If I'm going to write more than a few lines, I'd rather be typing anyway. Other than my signature, I don't use it at all.
Born in 1975. My small rural elementary school didn't have any computers at all, but when I moved to a small town at the beginning of 4th grade the new school had a computer lab full of Apple ]['s. We didn't use them much, but got a little training in Logo every year, and maybe a couple of other introductions. I remember really loving Logo and wishing I had more of it, while mostly being frustrated that I couldn't type fast enough.
I liked the computers enough I started staying in at recess to play Carmen Sandiego, at least as often as the teacher would let me. I guess maybe we used the labs on some bad-weather recesses, too. Probably how I learned to play the games in the first place.
Junior high had some computers but again exposure was limited. My social studies class led us through playing a game based on competition and cooperation between two superpowers over finding and using two different types of oil - can't remember the name, but I liked it enough I finagled a way to stay after school and play it a few times. We also did a few things in math class, including a couple of games, though a lot of that was in a club after school - both extracurricular and voluntary. My other exposure was in Journalism in the 8th grade, where we had a lone Macintosh that we used to assemble the school newspaper. The advisor did most of it, but I picked up a few things.
By high school (1989-1993) computers were around more, but still not real prevalent. There was never any mandatory official training. I did take an optional typing class, which I sometimes say was the most useful thing I got out of high school. Even after the class I was still typing a pretty lousy 25-30 WPM, but I had picked up enough skills so when I really started typing regularly in college (email, online chat) I finally got it down. This class had older computers that had the wide and actually floppy discs, rather than the hard-case floppies in prevalence at the time. I know we did use computer labs here and there, but with one exception I can't remember any of the exercises or uses.
The one exception was again the journalism room, which had a set of six Macintosh computers (early model, booted from external hard drives, black and white 9-inch screens) and one networked printer. Again we used it for newspaper and yearbook paste-up, writing the docs in Microsoft Word and then importing into PageMaker for layout. In down time I also spent quite a bit of free time on those computers, mostly playing games but also exploring system settings, and somehow became the de-facto tech support. I also loved the art program (Paint? I feel like that's not the right name), doing a lot of art for fun and becoming the local info-graphics expert. Nearly all of this was voluntary and for fun, but convinced me I was a computer guy.
By college computers were everywhere, but again I can't recall any official formal or basic training. It was mostly expected we already knew a little, or we'd pick up what we needed from friends. We had fairly early access to email in 1993 - less than 10% of my high-school classmates got it at their schools by default, though by graduation in 1997 I think more than half were online. The college had a VAX system for email with computers scattered freely in every dorm and class building. I picked a science major and was given access to a UNIX system there. My intro C++ class was actually taught on Macs, but Programming 102 was on a UNIX system. Dunno why they did it that way. Papers were expected to be typed, and we had a mix of Mac and Windows labs, though I think we were much heavier on the Mac side. Even as late as 1997 we didn't use PowerPoint for presentations, but instead mocked up the designs in whatever program we had (Word?) and printed them onto overhead slides. Most training was one-off assignments for class, including a fractal calculation done for calculus using Excel, a few Physics experiments here and there, and some FORTRAN taught along with an optional Physics and Computing course. Of course
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Not just permanently scarred. If I remember correctly some of the babies died.
I never did believe the world is 6000 years old, and in fact the "6000 year old universe" is not a tenet of Christianity and is obviously false. I have never met a single person who believed that, but I've met a whole lot of ignorant athiests who are certain that Christians do, despite being told otherwise repeatedly.
For what it's worth, I *have* met people who believe this. I grew up in the American Bible Belt, and spend some time on a financial web site with a large Evangelical following, and there are biblical literalists out there who insist this is true. However, I also know this is not true of ALL (or even most) Christians, and the ongoing meme about this in every single Slashdot science thread is most certainly: -1, Overrated. Still, these people do exist, your not having met them doesn't change that, and their insistence in this belief despite the obvious falseness of it is part of what gets the atheists all riled up.
I will listen to and consider all evidence and welcome critiques of what I believe. I known full well my limitations as a finite creature and do not know every side of any argument and have positioned myself to accept possible changes in my beliefs or worldviews in accordance with the availble data.
Too bad that's a little long to slap on a button or T-shirt. It's a worthy motto.
This is correct. I asked a question a while back, and had no warning when the article was actually approved and posted. By the time I noticed (just a few hours later) I tried replying and adding with details, but by that point it didn't seem like my follow-ups were noticed.
You've been described as a 'militant atheist', but do you consider yourself to be certainly atheist or rather technically agnostic, in the same sense that Bertrand Russell described himself as in his essay "Am I Atheist or Agnostic?"
This is an interesting question, and in my experience there's a whole lot of individual variation in terms of what people will define as an atheist or agnostic. I've heard people say what amounts to, "You're only an atheist if you can say you KNOW there's no God, and anything less is really agnosticism," while I've heard other people who lump most lack of belief into atheism and equate agnosticism with being wishy-washy and on the fence (like the old joke, I'll either win the lottery tomorrow or I won't, so the odds are 50-50; some see agnostics as basically being able to go either way). You can have a whole conversation just clearing up definitions before getting into the nitty-gritty of figuring out where someone actually falls on the spectrum.
Frankly, I think the obsession over when "life begins" is a bit of a red herring. From a legal perspective, determining if a fetus has rights, and what rights it may have, can be decided in a number of ways, many of which don't need to have anything to do with whether "life has begun." We could base the cutoff on an apparent size or weight, or a developmental feature, or whether the fetus could survive without life support -- all potentially subjective and possibly moving targets as medical science improves. But I don't think anyone really knows when life begins, either. I bet we couldn't get most people to agree on what the phrase "life begins" really even means. It's all guesses and philosophy, and the law might as well recognize that as it simply picks a boundary that undoubtedly both arbitrary and wrong, but is still useful as a consistent guideline.
I, for one, wouldn't want to outlaw abortion. I think it should be allowed but with both parents sterilized at the same time. I've known people who used abortion as birth control. I though it was weird at the time, and now I think it's revolting.
What would you say about my parents, who were trying to have a baby but chose to abort when genetic testing determined something was so badly wrong the fetus probably wouldn't make it to term, though there was a chance it might have made it a few months after birth before inevitably dying? Should they have also been force sterilized, and prevented from having future children? Should they have been forced to go through with the pregnancy and bankrupted by the medical bills?
I learned an interesting lesson when my 6th grade teacher had us try to determine whether bleach was an acid or a base by applying it to litmus paper which promptly got bleached white.
Then I learned a valuable lesson when that same teacher for some crazy lesson sniffed the bottle of bleach (to see if it was still good?) and nearly passed out.
One year of high-school chemistry is completely useless for someone who is going to be a chemist. It can, however, provide just enough introduction to the elements to make someone barely conversant in the subject in case they want or need to understand a little bit about how that aspect of the world works. It also provides the opportunity for someone to discover whether they have enough interest in the subject to pursue it further - part of surveying that range of subjects to see what you like. You can't know you don't like it until you've tried it once.
I'd say you had a lousy and restrictive high school. I had at least a couple of elective slots every year, and multiple choices by junior and senior year. I did have a similar set of 3 science, 3 math, 4 English, 3 history setup that you did, along with a handful of other requirements, but that's just 4 slots per day, and we had 8 periods per day for classes (well, 6-7 classes was typical, with 1-2 open study periods). I worked in 4 years of journalism, extra elective math, additional science, speech, 3 years of foreign language (optional in my case), and some extra literature. I definitely had choices, and there were a lot of classes I was moderately interested in but never got to try.
A number of my classmates were able to do exactly what you say and focus on non-college career tracks. We had a number of automotive/mechanical options, some business stuff, some CAD classes (at the time considered more technical than academic), and as a rural-ish school also had a number of farming-related classes. I know some kids actually left school for a couple of hours of work-study apprenticeships in their fields.
Maybe my school was unusually flexible, I don't know, that's the only point of reference I have. I've always assumed everyone else had roughly similar options.
I have no mod points, so wanted to say this is an exceptionally straightforward and sensible explanation. I tend to end up with a very similar analysis when I try to work through the issues. I was disappointed there aren't any rebuttals, because I'm bad at arguing with myself, and I'd like to hear counter-arguments to determine their merits.
Some of us aren't happy doing just one thing, whatever that thing is. I've got a handful of hobbies, and in a perfect day (or week) I'd spend a little time on all of them. I've got a job that covers a couple of them (and have had freelance jobs after hours that touched on one or two more). But doing that same thing for 40 hours, and having those hours exclude other fun things, doesn't make for a perfect scenario. If I had to spend 60-80 hours doing one thing, I'd be exhausted, no matter how fun that thing was.
I know for some people there's one real passion, and it's easy to identify and focus on that passion. For many others -- most people, even? -- variety is key to enjoyment, and you rarely get that variety by spending 40 or 60 hours at work. Even the best job comes with limitations, and those always chafe. Plus even a theoretically fun job tends to come with lousy aspects: grunt work, office obligations, difficult coworkers, etc. It's easy enough to start with a seed of something you do really like, and still end up only being happy about work part of the time, but being convinced that's still better than you'll find most other places.
Are you sure about that? I haven't sold anything through them, but I thought I understood the 65% was only applied at the low end - books under $2 or $3, and that it was 35% for everything above that point. I don't ever remember hearing about another transition higher up the price scale.
My system makes a little sense, because there's some fixed costs that need to be made up for on really cheap items, hence the higher percentage for really cheap items. A pricing scheme like you cite wouldn't have any real rational purpose at all, other than profiting from confused sellers.
When one of my cats died suddenly (I know, not quite the same thing) I snuck her name into part of a computer game I was working on. I had just put in a hospital (superheroes need healing, after all) so I called it the Elsie C. Attus (i.e., Elsie the cat) Memorial Hospital. Not sure if any of the players ever knew why it had that name, but even five years later I'm still glad when I see it. That's just for a pet - hope you get the same feeling with whatever you dedicate to your grandmother.
People would just mis-use it as the 'loath' button all the time.
My first guess would be the like recommendations are based on what other people you know like - I know I've seen "you should like bacon" prompts next to "the following friends of yours like bacon," etc. However, I wouldn't put it past some of those recommendations being paid advertisements, either - wouldn't even call that a tinfoil hat theory, just basic marketing.
Bad form replying to my own post, but another likely big development is in medicine. Tricorder-like functions and smart apps that turn your smartphone or home computer into a basic medical advisor as a first pass at getting medical advice and monitoring your general health (heck, include monitoring of sleep, exercise, and food intake) and there could be some tremendous gains in the management of personal well-being. The big issues there being of course privacy concerns - where there's data, there's data leaks and big brother and corporate meddling that we'd want to be careful of.
A third bet is genetics, with genome mapping, personalized analysis, customized medical treatments, etc.
You're getting a lot of flak in the responses, but I think looking back in a handful of decades this is going to seem more right than many of the other answers. The way I see it, the last three "next big things" were: 1) build mechanical assistants, i.e. computers; 2) make them smaller and affordable; and 3) connect them. Much of what has been dramatically revolutionized about life over the last few decades has been fallout from those three things, none of which sounds all that crazy in retrospect, but none of those things seemed nearly as big going in as they do now. The consequences far over-reached the apparent usefulness when the inventions were made.
The self-driving car is likely to be another one of those things which, once it's fully realized, has far more dramatic changes than the ability to "text on your way to work" as one detractor commented above. I'm not just talking about reduced traffic congestion and decreased mortality rates, though I think those are the main reasons we're looking into it now, but really dramatic stuff. We'll have kids being able to get places quickly, easily, and safely without requiring parental intervention. There'll be another chance for custom home delivery of groceries - that kind of flopped in the early days of the internet, but when coupled with automated drivers and efficient delivery routes I could see it working. A fully redesigned family-size car that's more like a living room on wheels would completely change the long-distance travel experience, and the ability for these computerized cars to link up into giant trains for long-distance interstate rides might do some very nice things for fuel efficiency.
Those are just some starting guesses, and I'd bet some even crazier things come from self-driving cars before a few decades are out.
Compared to that, things like unlimited energy and teleportation are science fiction - easy to name, but far too distant in the future to be candidates for any of the next several generations of "next big things."
No, not at all. It tells us the relative velocity of the red- and blue-shifted object compared to our own velocity, but it's only a comparison.
Linux gamers intentionally pay more to skew the average, in order to encourage more developers to make more Linux games. (Including, I understand, a few five-figure donators who *really* pushed up the average.) There's no such incentive to encourage Linux-friendly eBooks.
While kind of cute, it's dangerous to play games where customer money is involved. Much safer to just assume anything non-numeric is a typo than to build in a minor calculator for people to play with and then deal with a bunch of chargebacks from people who made math mistakes or actually did have a typo.
Seriously, this is the most insightful thing I've read on slashdot.
Cursive: meh. I stopped using it when I realized I couldn't read my own notes, and I was basically just as fast (and much more legible) with normal printing. If I'm going to write more than a few lines, I'd rather be typing anyway. Other than my signature, I don't use it at all.
Born in 1975. My small rural elementary school didn't have any computers at all, but when I moved to a small town at the beginning of 4th grade the new school had a computer lab full of Apple ]['s. We didn't use them much, but got a little training in Logo every year, and maybe a couple of other introductions. I remember really loving Logo and wishing I had more of it, while mostly being frustrated that I couldn't type fast enough.
I liked the computers enough I started staying in at recess to play Carmen Sandiego, at least as often as the teacher would let me. I guess maybe we used the labs on some bad-weather recesses, too. Probably how I learned to play the games in the first place.
Junior high had some computers but again exposure was limited. My social studies class led us through playing a game based on competition and cooperation between two superpowers over finding and using two different types of oil - can't remember the name, but I liked it enough I finagled a way to stay after school and play it a few times. We also did a few things in math class, including a couple of games, though a lot of that was in a club after school - both extracurricular and voluntary. My other exposure was in Journalism in the 8th grade, where we had a lone Macintosh that we used to assemble the school newspaper. The advisor did most of it, but I picked up a few things.
By high school (1989-1993) computers were around more, but still not real prevalent. There was never any mandatory official training. I did take an optional typing class, which I sometimes say was the most useful thing I got out of high school. Even after the class I was still typing a pretty lousy 25-30 WPM, but I had picked up enough skills so when I really started typing regularly in college (email, online chat) I finally got it down. This class had older computers that had the wide and actually floppy discs, rather than the hard-case floppies in prevalence at the time. I know we did use computer labs here and there, but with one exception I can't remember any of the exercises or uses.
The one exception was again the journalism room, which had a set of six Macintosh computers (early model, booted from external hard drives, black and white 9-inch screens) and one networked printer. Again we used it for newspaper and yearbook paste-up, writing the docs in Microsoft Word and then importing into PageMaker for layout. In down time I also spent quite a bit of free time on those computers, mostly playing games but also exploring system settings, and somehow became the de-facto tech support. I also loved the art program (Paint? I feel like that's not the right name), doing a lot of art for fun and becoming the local info-graphics expert. Nearly all of this was voluntary and for fun, but convinced me I was a computer guy.
By college computers were everywhere, but again I can't recall any official formal or basic training. It was mostly expected we already knew a little, or we'd pick up what we needed from friends. We had fairly early access to email in 1993 - less than 10% of my high-school classmates got it at their schools by default, though by graduation in 1997 I think more than half were online. The college had a VAX system for email with computers scattered freely in every dorm and class building. I picked a science major and was given access to a UNIX system there. My intro C++ class was actually taught on Macs, but Programming 102 was on a UNIX system. Dunno why they did it that way. Papers were expected to be typed, and we had a mix of Mac and Windows labs, though I think we were much heavier on the Mac side. Even as late as 1997 we didn't use PowerPoint for presentations, but instead mocked up the designs in whatever program we had (Word?) and printed them onto overhead slides. Most training was one-off assignments for class, including a fractal calculation done for calculus using Excel, a few Physics experiments here and there, and some FORTRAN taught along with an optional Physics and Computing course. Of course
Topic 1: The Tao of Bow
Topic 2: Does he wag his tail, or does his tail wag him?
Topic 3: Is it dinnertime, and what does it mean to ask, 'Is it dinnertime?'