Having such large market share of streaming devices and leaving ad dollars on the table by being neutral would not be in the interest of ROKU shareholders.
I know about child soldiers. Obviously my attempt at humor was too subtle. You said "...sell rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines to children." Taken literally (which is what I was doing), you're saying that children are the ones who buy the weapons (where do kids get the money? Selling lemonade and pencils?). Joking aside, of course the reality is that children don't buy weapons. It's the scum adults who do and then supply the weapons to the kids.
As for media inciting violence, I partially agree. In the case of Rwanda, the radio stations' owners are responsible and should be held accountable. Facebook shouldn't be in the position to censor and decide who can and can't post (except obviously illegal things such as graphic violent imagery, child porn, etc.), nor should any government be a censor as well. When anybody can exercise mass communication for zero cost, is proving to be a challenge to our democratic institutions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press and I have no idea how the situation will play out.
"Youtube and all social media are exactly the equivalent of war profiteers, and are just a step above the arms traders that sell rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines to children."
Laying the hyperbole on rather thick, aren't you? I didn't know children have the cash to buy rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines. When I was I kid I couldn't scrape up enough cash to buy a BB gun, let alone an RPG or mine. Who do the kids use them on? School teachers? Other kids who called them ugly names? School district administrators?
I agree with Lady Gaga who said that social media is the toilet of the internet. As far as YouTube goes, I only partake of it as a consumer, not a participant or creator. Sure, there's a lot of conspiracy and extremist garbage on YouTube, but so what? I don't actively look for it, so I rarely encounter it.
Morale problems, especially for volunteers, aren't easy to solve. I wish the Clement and Mint developers all the best and this user certainly appreciates their work on making Mint the fine distro that it is.
After being a longtime Ubuntu user, the switch to the gawdawful Unity window manager repulsed me. For awhile I got by with Xubuntu, but once I discovered Linux Mint and Cinnamon, I switched immediately and never looked back. I still plan on sticking with Mint, and will upgrade my old 17.2 box to 19.1 sometime this month.
But having learned my lesson with Ubuntu, it's always good to have a fallback distro in mind just in case one's fav distro takes a turn for the worse. If I had to switch to a non-Mint distro, what would I choose in 2019? Probably Ubuntu MATE. It reminds me of the old GNOME 2 days, and now that MATE is 100% based on GNOME 3.x, it's a fine replacement for Cinnamon. There's growing interest in MX Linux (for what it's worth, its Distrowatch ranking is #2), but until MX includes Cinnamon or MATE as optional window managers, I won't consider it.
My god, what an original and insightful comment! I don't think anybody has ever thought of that before!
Okay, let's math shit up. NASA's 2018 budget is approximately $21.5B (0.49% of the Federal budget) and the number of Americans living below poverty is approximately 39.7 million. Assuming there's zero administrative costs as well as zero costs in printing and mailing checks, that works out to be approximately $541.56 annually per poor person. Yep, that's going to make HUGE difference in people's lives alright. Never mind the fact that $541.56 per year will only cover the costs of an annual checkup and one other doctor visit, scarcely cover a single semester's tuition at a community college, and won't even cover the cost of 1 month's apartment rent in non-coastal states.
And besides, it's not like NASA's $21.5B is just going into an incinerator. That money goes to NASA employees and contracting companies who also employ people. Those people in turn contribute to the economy every time they go shopping, buy a car, repair their homes, fund their kids' education, etc.
That's a good point. The majority of troublemakers are "lone wolves" but real security does need to protect against a team of 2-4 bad guys boarding the same plane. That's what happened on 9/11.
*Exacty* A loaded magazine is relatively harmless (no more dangerous than a notebook PC). A gun without a loaded magazine is relatively harmless (no more dangerous than a hardwood bat). Ammunition without a magazine or gun is harmless (well, I guess one could get hit in the eye with a hurled round, but that's about it). Only when all three are put together do you have something that's dangerous.
Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla of the digital graphics market. Whenever any application achieves dominance, it jacks its pricing up to as much as the market can bear. Remember Word Perfect? It used to be the dominant PC word processor (and was priced accordingly) until it lost out to Word as the world switched to Windows. When Word and the MS Office Suite achieved dominance, their pricing also pushed the limit of what the market can bear. You see where I'm going here.
Adobe and its graphics troika Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have dominated the industry for far, far too long and Adobe is in need of serious competition. Corel has been content enough with being a distant #2 that I don't think they'll ever aspire to push for the #1 spot (their pricing is better than Adobe, but is still too high for the solo graphic designer operating on a shoe-string). Fortunately, Serif's Affinity line with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (and the upcoming Affinity Publisher) may just have a clear shot at Adobe. Their pricing is insanely aggressive ($50 with free upgrades) and their feature sets gives you about 80% of what Adobe has. Because Serif is a UK company, I hope it can avoid getting bought out by Adobe when it becomes a perceived threat to Adobe's cash cows.
"Time theft" may be a bullshit term, but it's not my term. It's Wal-Mart's. An excerpt from Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America by Barbara Enrenreich:
"No "grazing" that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no "time theft." This last sends me drifting off in a sci-fi direction: And as the time thieves headed back to the year 3420, loaded with weekends and days off looted from the twenty-first century... Finally a question. The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wants to know, "What is time theft?" Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all. Theft of our time is not, however, an issue. There are stretches amounting to many minutes when all three of our trainers wander off, leaving us to sit there in silence or take the opportunity to squirm.
I'm not condoning employee theft, but I understand where they're coming from. With stagnant wages, it should be no surprise to anybody that more employees are committing petty larceny. But the bigger cost is "time theft" when non-smoking workers take smoke breaks too, long visits to the bathroom with a smart phone in the pocket, or the frequent extended lunch break. Employees with stagnant wages will seek just compensation one way or another.
From the article: "The company is promising that the reborn MX518 will have the same shape and feel as the original. The materials have been updated, and there’s a new “Nightfall” finish but, crucially, it’s still an MX518."
Let's hope the materials have gotten better. I have a 2004 MX510 but didn't start using it until around 2010 (it was lightly used and given to me around 2006). During those years of non-use, the rubberized parts of the mouse's surface turned to goo. I managed to wipe all the goo off using rubbing alcohol, exposing the underlying plastic, and have used the mouse ever since. Other than the rubber turning to goo, the mouse has held up well, but is certainly showing wear. Two of the five bottom teflon pads have either worn off or fallen off and most of the paint on the Logitech logo at the top has worn off. Overall, it's been one tough mouse.
As a dividend investor, I couldn't agree more. Want to profit off a company's profits? Buy their stocks. However, most of the CA based big tech companies don't pay dividends. Of the five FAANG (Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix Google) companies, only four are based in California and only Apple (APPL) pays a dividend (a paltry 1.7% at that). For everything else, the "buy low, sell high" strategy is the only option for investors.
Back in the 90s, many amateur web sites (I'm looking at YOU GeoCities) really were garish and suffered from their creators' poor sense of design and taste. But sites by professional web design studios looked pretty good (just more primitive JavaScript and almost no CSS at the time) despite severely optimizing their pages for 56K dial-up speeds, and were far better looking than this gaudy Captain Marvel parody of 90s web design sensibility. No 90s pro web designer in their right mind would have abused animated GIFs and fonts (Comic Sans??? WTF?) like this. Using just strictly HTML 3.0 and a sprinkle of basic JavaScript for mouse rollover effects, any web designer could make a tasteful Captain Marvel home page that would be well under 500K in total size.
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365 HARD for some time now. At microsoft.com, you have to do some digging to find anything about Office 2019, and even what you do find is scant. I only keep Microsoft Office around just in case I need 100% compatibility with a MS doc I've received or need to edit and send out. I'll probably buy Office 2019 some time this year, but it will probably be the final time I pay for an office suite. I prefer to use LibreOffice. Not only is the price right and the features meet and exceed all my needs, the UI is more intuitive and obvious.
THIS is why I always prefer physical media. When a movie or music album is literally in one's hands, they cannot take it away from you. Plus physical media can be easily loaned and borrowed between friends. When your media library is "in the cloud" on somebody's server, you don't really own the media. It's just available for you to lease or check out, not to own forever or to pass on to somebody else. When that service becomes defunct, so does your media library. Ooops! Physical media isn't without its problems (bit rot over time, physical damage, etc.), but I put more trust in a disc in my hand than in an account that could be shut down at any time.
This, other than nuclear war (accidental or otherwise), should give anybody cause to worry. If/when a massive CME impacts Earth, the effects upon our modern electronics dependent society would be devastating. Navigation, communications, weather, surveillance satellites would be knocked out. Any modern aircraft in the air at that moment would probably become seriously affected, electronic communications of all types would be severely disrupted, and a myriad of other electronics dependent infrastructures (electrical distribution grid, traffic signals, global financial systems, transportation/distribution of goods, etc) would be disrupted as well. In short, a massive CME could be worst natural disaster in human history.
I remember seeing the first wave of ads in magazines for the Mac in 1984, with the tagline "The computer for the rest of us." Being the snarky C64 user at the time, I liked to append "Who can afford it." to that tagline in my mind. With a decent Mac setup costing around $2,000 (in 1984 dollars!), it was insanely expensive and nobody in high school had one. It was certainly not aimed at lower middle class teen peons like me who could only afford a Commodore, Atari, Tandy, or TI home computer (hell, even CrApple 8-bit computers were crazy expensive compared to competing 8-bit machines at the time).
It wasn't until my first year of college in 1985-86 that I first encountered somebody with a Mac. Of course that somebody was a dorm roommate who proved to be a dick, and I was glad to part ways with him by the end of the school year.
It wasn't until 1994 that I bought a Mac, which was a refurbed Mac Color Classic. I only got it to learn how to use a Mac, as I was gunning for a job working in pre-press at a print shop. I found a different job (web development work) and then sold the Mac a couple years later. That was the only Mac I ever owned.
There are few times in one's life when one can take just one look at a new technology and immediately know that this it's a game changer and is the future. The debut of the Mac was one of those moments, as was the Web, and iPhone.
You're absolutely right, no "obsolete" technology ever really dies. Kerosene lanterns, muskets, and tintype cameras are still being used, but only as curiosities and not for day-to-day use in the 21st century. Similarly, 8-bit computing will never die as long as there are hobbyists and nostalgic techies who enjoy a simpler time or want to push old technology to its limits. But for common modern computing usage (such as web surfing, multimedia, graphic design, desktop publishing, video editing, servers, etc. ), a 16- or 8-bit CPU is extremely under-powered.
For desktop PCs, support for 32-bit has been winding down for some time now, so it's no surprise that mobile computing would do the same. It has taken me a couple years, but I've completely transitioned all of our home desktop and laptop PCs to 64-bit hardware and operating systems. The only 32-bit desktop PC I have is an old 80486-based system that runs Windows 3.1 just for nostalgia (my first PC). 32-bit has had a good long run, but everybody knew the age of 32-bit computing would eventually come to an end, just as the ages of 16- and 8-bit computing declined and ended. Someday, 64-bit will be obsolete as well.
In some ways, it is cooler in ways that I couldn't have imagined. By 1990 when I was 23, I knew at some point music and movie media would move beyond the optical disc, but I believed it would be in the form of cheap high capacity ROM chipped cartridges the size of a matchbook that would be bought in a store. I didn't think of data compression or high speed online distribution or streaming. I knew computer hardware and software would continue to get faster, cheaper, and better but I didn't envision tablets and smartphones arriving so soon.When I was caught up in the excitement of our digital utopia envisioned by magazines such as Mondo 2000 and the new Wired mag, I looked forward to our bright and glorious digital future.
But now, 25 years later, the digital age looks far more like Brazil/1984 than anything found in Disney's Tomorrowland. Privacy is practically dead, free speech is practically dead as one has to practice self-censorship to avoid wrathful social media mobs, hardware and software are rife with vulnerabilities, toxic mountains of obsolete hardware, ubiquitous surveillance thanks to better cameras and cheaper/greater storage capacity, identity theft via hacks of centralized financial and business databases, and a myriad of nuisances one could never have imagined (pop-up ads, spam, click bait, fake news, bots, phishing, etc.). It all makes me yearn for the days of 8- or 16-bit computing and BBSs. Things may have been slower and less convenient then, but it was also safer and saner.
I agree. I checked their balance sheet for 2017 on Yahoo Finance (ticker symbol "T") and their current ratio is almost 1:1 (current assets to current liabilities). That's not good. A reasonably healthy company should have a current ratio of 2:1 or better. Somebody at AT&T has been abusing the company credit card. Too bad it's the rank and file employees who will suffer the pain of managment's ineptitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Having such large market share of streaming devices and leaving ad dollars on the table by being neutral would not be in the interest of ROKU shareholders.
I know about child soldiers. Obviously my attempt at humor was too subtle. You said "...sell rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines to children." Taken literally (which is what I was doing), you're saying that children are the ones who buy the weapons (where do kids get the money? Selling lemonade and pencils?). Joking aside, of course the reality is that children don't buy weapons. It's the scum adults who do and then supply the weapons to the kids.
As for media inciting violence, I partially agree. In the case of Rwanda, the radio stations' owners are responsible and should be held accountable. Facebook shouldn't be in the position to censor and decide who can and can't post (except obviously illegal things such as graphic violent imagery, child porn, etc.), nor should any government be a censor as well. When anybody can exercise mass communication for zero cost, is proving to be a challenge to our democratic institutions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press and I have no idea how the situation will play out.
"Youtube and all social media are exactly the equivalent of war profiteers, and are just a step above the arms traders that sell rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines to children."
Laying the hyperbole on rather thick, aren't you? I didn't know children have the cash to buy rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines. When I was I kid I couldn't scrape up enough cash to buy a BB gun, let alone an RPG or mine. Who do the kids use them on? School teachers? Other kids who called them ugly names? School district administrators?
I agree with Lady Gaga who said that social media is the toilet of the internet. As far as YouTube goes, I only partake of it as a consumer, not a participant or creator. Sure, there's a lot of conspiracy and extremist garbage on YouTube, but so what? I don't actively look for it, so I rarely encounter it.
Morale problems, especially for volunteers, aren't easy to solve. I wish the Clement and Mint developers all the best and this user certainly appreciates their work on making Mint the fine distro that it is.
After being a longtime Ubuntu user, the switch to the gawdawful Unity window manager repulsed me. For awhile I got by with Xubuntu, but once I discovered Linux Mint and Cinnamon, I switched immediately and never looked back. I still plan on sticking with Mint, and will upgrade my old 17.2 box to 19.1 sometime this month.
But having learned my lesson with Ubuntu, it's always good to have a fallback distro in mind just in case one's fav distro takes a turn for the worse. If I had to switch to a non-Mint distro, what would I choose in 2019? Probably Ubuntu MATE. It reminds me of the old GNOME 2 days, and now that MATE is 100% based on GNOME 3.x, it's a fine replacement for Cinnamon. There's growing interest in MX Linux (for what it's worth, its Distrowatch ranking is #2), but until MX includes Cinnamon or MATE as optional window managers, I won't consider it.
I guess the end of the Long Boom) (1980-2020) is almost upon us.
Every day on /. there seems to be some new outrage about Facebook. And every day I'm delighted that I don't have a Facebook account.
My god, what an original and insightful comment! I don't think anybody has ever thought of that before!
Okay, let's math shit up. NASA's 2018 budget is approximately $21.5B (0.49% of the Federal budget) and the number of Americans living below poverty is approximately 39.7 million. Assuming there's zero administrative costs as well as zero costs in printing and mailing checks, that works out to be approximately $541.56 annually per poor person. Yep, that's going to make HUGE difference in people's lives alright. Never mind the fact that $541.56 per year will only cover the costs of an annual checkup and one other doctor visit, scarcely cover a single semester's tuition at a community college, and won't even cover the cost of 1 month's apartment rent in non-coastal states.
And besides, it's not like NASA's $21.5B is just going into an incinerator. That money goes to NASA employees and contracting companies who also employ people. Those people in turn contribute to the economy every time they go shopping, buy a car, repair their homes, fund their kids' education, etc.
That's a good point. The majority of troublemakers are "lone wolves" but real security does need to protect against a team of 2-4 bad guys boarding the same plane. That's what happened on 9/11.
*Exacty* A loaded magazine is relatively harmless (no more dangerous than a notebook PC). A gun without a loaded magazine is relatively harmless (no more dangerous than a hardwood bat). Ammunition without a magazine or gun is harmless (well, I guess one could get hit in the eye with a hurled round, but that's about it). Only when all three are put together do you have something that's dangerous.
Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla of the digital graphics market. Whenever any application achieves dominance, it jacks its pricing up to as much as the market can bear. Remember Word Perfect? It used to be the dominant PC word processor (and was priced accordingly) until it lost out to Word as the world switched to Windows. When Word and the MS Office Suite achieved dominance, their pricing also pushed the limit of what the market can bear. You see where I'm going here.
Adobe and its graphics troika Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have dominated the industry for far, far too long and Adobe is in need of serious competition. Corel has been content enough with being a distant #2 that I don't think they'll ever aspire to push for the #1 spot (their pricing is better than Adobe, but is still too high for the solo graphic designer operating on a shoe-string). Fortunately, Serif's Affinity line with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (and the upcoming Affinity Publisher) may just have a clear shot at Adobe. Their pricing is insanely aggressive ($50 with free upgrades) and their feature sets gives you about 80% of what Adobe has. Because Serif is a UK company, I hope it can avoid getting bought out by Adobe when it becomes a perceived threat to Adobe's cash cows.
..."Streisand Effect" in French? Le Effect de Streisand?
"Time theft" may be a bullshit term, but it's not my term. It's Wal-Mart's. An excerpt from Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America by Barbara Enrenreich:
"No "grazing" that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no "time theft." This last sends me drifting off in a sci-fi direction: And as the time thieves headed back to the year 3420, loaded with weekends and days off looted from the twenty-first century... Finally a question. The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wants to know, "What is time theft?" Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all. Theft of our time is not, however, an issue. There are stretches amounting to many minutes when all three of our trainers wander off, leaving us to sit there in silence or take the opportunity to squirm.
I'm not condoning employee theft, but I understand where they're coming from. With stagnant wages, it should be no surprise to anybody that more employees are committing petty larceny. But the bigger cost is "time theft" when non-smoking workers take smoke breaks too, long visits to the bathroom with a smart phone in the pocket, or the frequent extended lunch break. Employees with stagnant wages will seek just compensation one way or another.
The only people who can afford that are those who make millions on stocks while they sleep.
I only make about $1.20 per hour while I sleep. It's not millions, but I'm working on it!!
From the article:
"The company is promising that the reborn MX518 will have the same shape and feel as the original. The materials have been updated, and there’s a new “Nightfall” finish but, crucially, it’s still an MX518."
Let's hope the materials have gotten better. I have a 2004 MX510 but didn't start using it until around 2010 (it was lightly used and given to me around 2006). During those years of non-use, the rubberized parts of the mouse's surface turned to goo. I managed to wipe all the goo off using rubbing alcohol, exposing the underlying plastic, and have used the mouse ever since. Other than the rubber turning to goo, the mouse has held up well, but is certainly showing wear. Two of the five bottom teflon pads have either worn off or fallen off and most of the paint on the Logitech logo at the top has worn off. Overall, it's been one tough mouse.
As a dividend investor, I couldn't agree more. Want to profit off a company's profits? Buy their stocks. However, most of the CA based big tech companies don't pay dividends. Of the five FAANG (Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix Google) companies, only four are based in California and only Apple (APPL) pays a dividend (a paltry 1.7% at that). For everything else, the "buy low, sell high" strategy is the only option for investors.
Back in the 90s, many amateur web sites (I'm looking at YOU GeoCities) really were garish and suffered from their creators' poor sense of design and taste. But sites by professional web design studios looked pretty good (just more primitive JavaScript and almost no CSS at the time) despite severely optimizing their pages for 56K dial-up speeds, and were far better looking than this gaudy Captain Marvel parody of 90s web design sensibility. No 90s pro web designer in their right mind would have abused animated GIFs and fonts (Comic Sans??? WTF?) like this. Using just strictly HTML 3.0 and a sprinkle of basic JavaScript for mouse rollover effects, any web designer could make a tasteful Captain Marvel home page that would be well under 500K in total size.
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365 HARD for some time now. At microsoft.com, you have to do some digging to find anything about Office 2019, and even what you do find is scant. I only keep Microsoft Office around just in case I need 100% compatibility with a MS doc I've received or need to edit and send out. I'll probably buy Office 2019 some time this year, but it will probably be the final time I pay for an office suite. I prefer to use LibreOffice. Not only is the price right and the features meet and exceed all my needs, the UI is more intuitive and obvious.
THIS is why I always prefer physical media. When a movie or music album is literally in one's hands, they cannot take it away from you. Plus physical media can be easily loaned and borrowed between friends. When your media library is "in the cloud" on somebody's server, you don't really own the media. It's just available for you to lease or check out, not to own forever or to pass on to somebody else. When that service becomes defunct, so does your media library. Ooops! Physical media isn't without its problems (bit rot over time, physical damage, etc.), but I put more trust in a disc in my hand than in an account that could be shut down at any time.
This, other than nuclear war (accidental or otherwise), should give anybody cause to worry. If/when a massive CME impacts Earth, the effects upon our modern electronics dependent society would be devastating. Navigation, communications, weather, surveillance satellites would be knocked out. Any modern aircraft in the air at that moment would probably become seriously affected, electronic communications of all types would be severely disrupted, and a myriad of other electronics dependent infrastructures (electrical distribution grid, traffic signals, global financial systems, transportation/distribution of goods, etc) would be disrupted as well. In short, a massive CME could be worst natural disaster in human history.
I remember seeing the first wave of ads in magazines for the Mac in 1984, with the tagline "The computer for the rest of us." Being the snarky C64 user at the time, I liked to append "Who can afford it." to that tagline in my mind. With a decent Mac setup costing around $2,000 (in 1984 dollars!), it was insanely expensive and nobody in high school had one. It was certainly not aimed at lower middle class teen peons like me who could only afford a Commodore, Atari, Tandy, or TI home computer (hell, even CrApple 8-bit computers were crazy expensive compared to competing 8-bit machines at the time).
It wasn't until my first year of college in 1985-86 that I first encountered somebody with a Mac. Of course that somebody was a dorm roommate who proved to be a dick, and I was glad to part ways with him by the end of the school year.
It wasn't until 1994 that I bought a Mac, which was a refurbed Mac Color Classic. I only got it to learn how to use a Mac, as I was gunning for a job working in pre-press at a print shop. I found a different job (web development work) and then sold the Mac a couple years later. That was the only Mac I ever owned.
There are few times in one's life when one can take just one look at a new technology and immediately know that this it's a game changer and is the future. The debut of the Mac was one of those moments, as was the Web, and iPhone.
You're absolutely right, no "obsolete" technology ever really dies. Kerosene lanterns, muskets, and tintype cameras are still being used, but only as curiosities and not for day-to-day use in the 21st century. Similarly, 8-bit computing will never die as long as there are hobbyists and nostalgic techies who enjoy a simpler time or want to push old technology to its limits. But for common modern computing usage (such as web surfing, multimedia, graphic design, desktop publishing, video editing, servers, etc. ), a 16- or 8-bit CPU is extremely under-powered.
For desktop PCs, support for 32-bit has been winding down for some time now, so it's no surprise that mobile computing would do the same. It has taken me a couple years, but I've completely transitioned all of our home desktop and laptop PCs to 64-bit hardware and operating systems. The only 32-bit desktop PC I have is an old 80486-based system that runs Windows 3.1 just for nostalgia (my first PC). 32-bit has had a good long run, but everybody knew the age of 32-bit computing would eventually come to an end, just as the ages of 16- and 8-bit computing declined and ended. Someday, 64-bit will be obsolete as well.
In some ways, it is cooler in ways that I couldn't have imagined. By 1990 when I was 23, I knew at some point music and movie media would move beyond the optical disc, but I believed it would be in the form of cheap high capacity ROM chipped cartridges the size of a matchbook that would be bought in a store. I didn't think of data compression or high speed online distribution or streaming. I knew computer hardware and software would continue to get faster, cheaper, and better but I didn't envision tablets and smartphones arriving so soon.When I was caught up in the excitement of our digital utopia envisioned by magazines such as Mondo 2000 and the new Wired mag, I looked forward to our bright and glorious digital future.
But now, 25 years later, the digital age looks far more like Brazil/1984 than anything found in Disney's Tomorrowland. Privacy is practically dead, free speech is practically dead as one has to practice self-censorship to avoid wrathful social media mobs, hardware and software are rife with vulnerabilities, toxic mountains of obsolete hardware, ubiquitous surveillance thanks to better cameras and cheaper/greater storage capacity, identity theft via hacks of centralized financial and business databases, and a myriad of nuisances one could never have imagined (pop-up ads, spam, click bait, fake news, bots, phishing, etc.). It all makes me yearn for the days of 8- or 16-bit computing and BBSs. Things may have been slower and less convenient then, but it was also safer and saner.
I agree. I checked their balance sheet for 2017 on Yahoo Finance (ticker symbol "T") and their current ratio is almost 1:1 (current assets to current liabilities). That's not good. A reasonably healthy company should have a current ratio of 2:1 or better. Somebody at AT&T has been abusing the company credit card. Too bad it's the rank and file employees who will suffer the pain of managment's ineptitude.