When are the cell phone companies going to realize that most of us just want a simple voice communications device?...
Never. Because they simply don't want to.
Sadly, I used to work in IT at Verizon. It was... nauseating to see the attitudes and behavior of the marketing folks (who I essentially worked for, doing custom queries). Those attitudes were why I quit that field entirely.
I could go on for days with stories of their ineptitude. The thing that stood out the most was the corporate attitude that your average customer is scum. (Just look at their policies). I suppose if I wanted to present my experiences I'd blog it, but I'm one of those anachronistic weirdoes that doesn't.
As for me, I am sitting near a guy who rolled in around 10am, had a brief meeting with our boss, and hasn't done shit since then other than read some websites (not that I'm the paragon of productivity right now either, but...). And you're actually suggesting that he would "save time" measured in seconds per week with bigger, better, faster machines. Save time doing what, exactly?
Crap, you guys need to come over to the medical device industry.
Will this kill someone? Did this bug already kill someone? Could this configuration cause a mistreatment? Who's going to handle this escalated hot potato from Bobs Cancer Center... all while trying to get the next release out on schedule.
I do get to read/. from work once or twice a week. In the rare slow week that is.
/F
Yah, I know, at least we're not Air Traffic Controllers or some such.
What path is there for the it professional in later life? When you're 40, 50, 60 even 65-70 with retirement ages rising what do you do? There is only a finite space for manager/director roles so what do all the older people do??
There isn't much path. By the time you're ~40 you're supposed to be a VP of Engineering. Otherwise you must be a burned-out, expensive, useless old dud. There is very little room for "senior scientist" type roles.
As you've seen from many other posts, finding a stable job at 40+ is quite difficult. If you're lucky, sort of, you work in a highly specialized field where there is a small enough pool of experience that you might find a job based on the experience alone. (Google DICOM). "Lucky" to be employable. Unlucky because you can never escape the niche- and if the niche goes away, you're toast.
I will say that over the years I HAVE seen a lot of useless, burned out old duds. They do exist. So I'd advise planning in advance for it, ideally by retiring at 40;)
This would at least provide an incentive for people to sign up and start using the internet.
Then, you can show them Google, Wikipedia and Slashdot and they may never leave.
Show them Slashdot, and their minds may leave... for good.
/F
Maybe most people YOU know. "Most" people actually DON'T play games.
I can only think of one person I know who plays games, my next door neighbor. I mentally went through about 50 other people I know, not one of them plays games. Not even the college students I know (like my kids & their friends. Yes, I'm an old fogey). Heck, I remember the day when a "color display" meant you'd had an accident with a crayon;)
If you think about it, you and I both only know a tiny percentage of the total population. It's a natural tendency to assume that your or my tiny slice of life is representative of the whole world, but usually it's not even close. (I'm thankful for that quite often actually...) Anyhow it's difficult to make accurate projections of this sort.
I suspect this is a lot like bicycling - road racers and off-road mountain-bikers drive the technologies, but only a few percent race or ride their MTBs offroad.
It's great though that gaming has helped drive the technology behind video cards, we all benefit from it.
The bottom line, though, is that you're correct, this isn't the ultimate gaming machine. But there are MILLIONs of people out there for whom it is very well suited. I plan to buy one in the not too distant future. I have a 1.42GHz PPC Mini now. Why do I like it? More than anything... it's QUIET. But that Core Duo is attractive...
Your description is a little better than mine. "Single-board" is really funny, considering it really was a set of parts glued? nailed? to a piece of particle board.
I wouldn't call it "the" predecessor to the VIC-20... but "a" predecessor would be a good description.
The first home "PC" I *bought* was a VIC-20, though. Built myself a 3k expansion card, and built a serial board out of a 1488/1489, which hooked up to a 110baud modem. Wrote my own terminal emulation software for using with The Source and Compuserve...
Again, the "good old days".
/F
First one I owned was a KIM-1 = 6502 processor, a whopping 256 bytes of RAM. 1977 or so... Next one was designed and built myself (using an 8085), ROM monitor I wrote myself, serial terminal. *2K*! of RAM !! Ahhhh, the good old days...
I've used Freecycle extensively, mostly to get rid of what I had thought was "junk nobody could possibly want" and to get a few things. Frequently this was stuff I figured I couldn't sell on ebay.
The hard part is that of the maybe 30 Freecyclers I met up with, about 1/2 are unable to show up when they say they will, or say that they won't be showing up after all, etc. So there are a few possible downsides. Some folk just want to get stuff for free, etc. Often (20% of the time) you see items reposted because the recipient couldn't be bothered to show up. Another way to put this - you'll meet a different social stratum than you might be used to. I met some might fine folks... and a few I hope I never meet again. You don't have to meet folks personally, though - often you just put stuff on the porch and people come pick it up. I always felt creepy walking up to peoples houses and taking stuff... but that's the way some folks want it. It does take some time to wade through the postings/emails. Much of it is baby clothes, stuff that doesn't work, etc. Generally the approaches of the "giver-awayers" is "first one to pick it up gets it", "first email gets it", or "best sob story" gets it. It's up to the person doing the giving.
On the plus side - there really is one - a lot of stuff that might otherwise go into a landfill goes to some useful purpose.
Someone asked for a scanner - I had one that only worked under Win95. Turns out - that's what the lady had. Perfect fit. I had some old PCs and boxes and boxes of old PC parts, VL bus, ISA, etc. This guy who teaches kids how to work on computers took it all. What better way for them to learn when it doesn't matter if you blow the whole thing up.
I got this nice 7x7 L-shaped desk I use. I had to go to the donors house and disassemble it. It was like $1000 new, it cost me nothing.
Of course, you might be in a different kind of area than I am (St. Louis County)
If you're over 40, your resume isn't even looked at. I've seen it again and again, and recruiter friends of mine confirm this for me.
The conception seems to be that by the time you're that age you're either a burnout or a VP. There is no place in peoples minds for a Senior Scientist type programmer role. I believe that there is some truth to this - many 50 year olds are no longer so flexible or agile of mind - but it doesn't apply to all.
Which is too bad. I happen to be in a highly specialized field, so I have some value. But for a while when I was trying to find something one could call generic, people wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft phone call. (It wasn't just me, I knew others my age range that got the same kind of non-response).
This is really stupid on the part of recruiters - they miss a few nuggets because they won't even look. I ran a dev shop for 15 years, and I coded more than the 3-4 people working for me combined. Maybe it was that I new the system better...
Then I changed jobs, was put in charge of a group of 6 using perl & XML & Oracle. Guess what? I coded about the same as those 6 put together, with a much lower error/bug rate. BTW, coding perl was new to me then, I'd barely even heard of XML, and Oracle was someone who predicted things...
Am I egotistical? No, I know lots of folks smarter/better/faster than me. Some of them young whippersnappers are just damn brilliant. But I also know many who aren't as capable.
As others pointed out, there aren't that many older types. When I was fresh out of college (late 70's) there wasn't anyone I even knew outside of work who'd ever even seen a computer, or worked with them, etc. Radically different from today. Hell, my degrees are in physics!
I will admit, my ability to learn new things is slowing down. And there are some things I'm thinking I just won't pick up. Maybe I'm beggining to burn out...
It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper to put a few webcams and/or simple traffic counters on the road. What IDIOT would come up with this overcomplicated... oh, wait, this is Mizzourah. Nevermind.
/F
Americans don't want to store the nukular waste, and we don't want to build new, more efficient(nukularly) pebble bed reactors to replace the old ones. wtfbbq. We're dumb sometimes.
The general case is that the LATEST big drive is more expensive per byte, but once the bleeding edge is gone it evens out. For instance, you can still buy 20, 40G drives now but their cost per byte is somewhat higher than say a 160G drive./F
After two to three years making it so complex only you understand it, you can pretty much name your price!
I fire people for pulling crap like that. Count your blessings... while you can.
I'm the nicest boss in the world. Want extra time off, vacation all used up? No problem, don't tell anyone, you're a good guy.
F-over the company by trying stunts like you mentioned? C-ya.
Sorry, this is not a long term survival strategy. There's a guy at a place I just quit who's completely unemployable because of that sort of thing. And he's on the way out for doing it. Smart guy, but too many people around town know him and his habits. His next job will be at 7-11
I think 9 years is pretty light, considering that I think the death penalty is closer to optimal for this kind of behavior.
It's seriously sociopathic behavior, you see, which puts it in the same class as murder, etc.
Under CP/M there were about (1) mag tape drives? Actually we used mt all the time to read CT scanner data, but we always had custom apps to read from the drives.
CP/M was indeed rather stripped down, and it did borrow a lot of features from DEC.... lawsuit!!!
Not only CP/M-86, but MP/M, CPM, and even better- Concurrent CP/M-86 and Concurrent DOS, up through the late 80's. CDOS Multi-user multi-tasking operating system with a GUI (GEM) gasp!! (Only 1 GUI instance, a bazillion terminal sessions...)
It'd probably be a waste of time to extol the (relative) virtues of it all.
The arrogance of you snots who say GASP! DOS! ! Well, you're right, it IS relatively crappy. But the rapid spread of DOS played a HUGE role in the evolution of the snazzy widgets you have embedded in your... oh, wait, I'm trying to be positive and educational here.
Back in those days, maybe 2% of the population made their living in some fashion directly related to PCs. (Ummmm, what do most of you here NOW do for a living? Or still in school?) About.01% had a computer available at home.
And yeah, loads of us older folk don't know a fork from a thread, but there are a few who are completely current and yet still remember all the great old secret incantations...
Even better, today a 'geek' can make a living. In those days, most geeks had short lifespans because they were so seriously abused. (Clue: I was even weirder - a 6'2 geek who also played football. Jock-Nerd! Ack!)
Slashdot Mirror
Never. Because they simply don't want to.
Sadly, I used to work in IT at Verizon. It was... nauseating to see the attitudes and behavior of the marketing folks (who I essentially worked for, doing custom queries). Those attitudes were why I quit that field entirely.
I could go on for days with stories of their ineptitude. The thing that stood out the most was the corporate attitude that your average customer is scum. (Just look at their policies). I suppose if I wanted to present my experiences I'd blog it, but I'm one of those anachronistic weirdoes that doesn't.
Crap, you guys need to come over to the medical device industry.
/. from work once or twice a week. In the rare slow week that is.
/F
Will this kill someone? Did this bug already kill someone? Could this configuration cause a mistreatment? Who's going to handle this escalated hot potato from Bobs Cancer Center... all while trying to get the next release out on schedule.
I do get to read
Yah, I know, at least we're not Air Traffic Controllers or some such.
There isn't much path. By the time you're ~40 you're supposed to be a VP of Engineering. Otherwise you must be a burned-out, expensive, useless old dud. There is very little room for "senior scientist" type roles.
As you've seen from many other posts, finding a stable job at 40+ is quite difficult. If you're lucky, sort of, you work in a highly specialized field where there is a small enough pool of experience that you might find a job based on the experience alone. (Google DICOM). "Lucky" to be employable. Unlucky because you can never escape the niche- and if the niche goes away, you're toast.
I will say that over the years I HAVE seen a lot of useless, burned out old duds. They do exist. So I'd advise planning in advance for it, ideally by retiring at 40 ;)
This would at least provide an incentive for people to sign up and start using the internet.
/F
Then, you can show them Google, Wikipedia and Slashdot and they may never leave.
Show them Slashdot, and their minds may leave... for good.
Yup, this gives an entirely new meaning to the old challenge "Are you a man or a mouse?"
/F
Most people want to play games at home...
;)
/F
Maybe most people YOU know. "Most" people actually DON'T play games.
I can only think of one person I know who plays games, my next door neighbor. I mentally went through about 50 other people I know, not one of them plays games. Not even the college students I know (like my kids & their friends. Yes, I'm an old fogey). Heck, I remember the day when a "color display" meant you'd had an accident with a crayon
If you think about it, you and I both only know a tiny percentage of the total population. It's a natural tendency to assume that your or my tiny slice of life is representative of the whole world, but usually it's not even close. (I'm thankful for that quite often actually...) Anyhow it's difficult to make accurate projections of this sort.
I suspect this is a lot like bicycling - road racers and off-road mountain-bikers drive the technologies, but only a few percent race or ride their MTBs offroad.
It's great though that gaming has helped drive the technology behind video cards, we all benefit from it.
The bottom line, though, is that you're correct, this isn't the ultimate gaming machine. But there are MILLIONs of people out there for whom it is very well suited. I plan to buy one in the not too distant future. I have a 1.42GHz PPC Mini now. Why do I like it? More than anything... it's QUIET. But that Core Duo is attractive...
Your description is a little better than mine. "Single-board" is really funny, considering it really was a set of parts glued? nailed? to a piece of particle board.
/F
I wouldn't call it "the" predecessor to the VIC-20... but "a" predecessor would be a good description.
The first home "PC" I *bought* was a VIC-20, though. Built myself a 3k expansion card, and built a serial board out of a 1488/1489, which hooked up to a 110baud modem. Wrote my own terminal emulation software for using with The Source and Compuserve...
Again, the "good old days".
First one I owned was a KIM-1 = 6502 processor, a whopping 256 bytes of RAM. 1977 or so...
/F
Next one was designed and built myself (using an 8085), ROM monitor I wrote myself, serial terminal. *2K*! of RAM !! Ahhhh, the good old days...
Originally learned on an IBM 1620.
I've used Freecycle extensively, mostly to get rid of what I had thought was "junk nobody could possibly want" and to get a few things. Frequently this was stuff I figured I couldn't sell on ebay.
The hard part is that of the maybe 30 Freecyclers I met up with, about 1/2 are unable to show up when they say they will, or say that they won't be showing up after all, etc. So there are a few possible downsides. Some folk just want to get stuff for free, etc. Often (20% of the time) you see items reposted because the recipient couldn't be bothered to show up.
Another way to put this - you'll meet a different social stratum than you might be used to. I met some might fine folks... and a few I hope I never meet again. You don't have to meet folks personally, though - often you just put stuff on the porch and people come pick it up.
I always felt creepy walking up to peoples houses and taking stuff... but that's the way some folks want it.
It does take some time to wade through the postings/emails. Much of it is baby clothes, stuff that doesn't work, etc.
Generally the approaches of the "giver-awayers" is "first one to pick it up gets it", "first email gets it", or "best sob story" gets it. It's up to the person doing the giving.
On the plus side - there really is one - a lot of stuff that might otherwise go into a landfill goes to some useful purpose.
Someone asked for a scanner - I had one that only worked under Win95. Turns out - that's what the lady had. Perfect fit.
I had some old PCs and boxes and boxes of old PC parts, VL bus, ISA, etc. This guy who teaches kids how to work on computers took it all. What better way for them to learn when it doesn't matter if you blow the whole thing up.
I got this nice 7x7 L-shaped desk I use. I had to go to the donors house and disassemble it. It was like $1000 new, it cost me nothing.
Of course, you might be in a different kind of area than I am (St. Louis County)
Nah.
The conception seems to be that by the time you're that age you're either a burnout or a VP. There is no place in peoples minds for a Senior Scientist type programmer role. I believe that there is some truth to this - many 50 year olds are no longer so flexible or agile of mind - but it doesn't apply to all.
Which is too bad. I happen to be in a highly specialized field, so I have some value. But for a while when I was trying to find something one could call generic, people wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft phone call. (It wasn't just me, I knew others my age range that got the same kind of non-response).
This is really stupid on the part of recruiters - they miss a few nuggets because they won't even look. I ran a dev shop for 15 years, and I coded more than the 3-4 people working for me combined. Maybe it was that I new the system better...
Then I changed jobs, was put in charge of a group of 6 using perl & XML & Oracle. Guess what? I coded about the same as those 6 put together, with a much lower error/bug rate. BTW, coding perl was new to me then, I'd barely even heard of XML, and Oracle was someone who predicted things...
Am I egotistical? No, I know lots of folks smarter/better/faster than me. Some of them young whippersnappers are just damn brilliant. But I also know many who aren't as capable.
/Oldus Goatus
As others pointed out, there aren't that many older types. When I was fresh out of college (late 70's) there wasn't anyone I even knew outside of work who'd ever even seen a computer, or worked with them, etc. Radically different from today. Hell, my degrees are in physics!
I will admit, my ability to learn new things is slowing down. And there are some things I'm thinking I just won't pick up. Maybe I'm beggining to burn out...
Flatus Emeritus
It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper to put a few webcams and/or simple traffic counters on the road. What IDIOT would come up with this overcomplicated... oh, wait, this is Mizzourah. Nevermind.
/F
is that cell phones are the cause of much traffic. People on cell phones slow down or even get into accidents.
/F
I remember the good old days, before cell phones.....
No trafic jams!
Actually, I agree that it can contribute to traffic problems. I just have to be snide sometimes.
Anything comparable in size to Marvin's brain.
I must respectfully disagree.
We're dumb the vast majority of the time.
Fact is relative.
Does no one ever read far enough to learn that the real, CORRECT answer is 54? /F
No one remembers the Flintstones movie? This very concept was used as a terror-inspiring device.
Too bad, I thought this was +3 funny. Uh oh, I'm offtopic too...
The general case is that the LATEST big drive is more expensive per byte, but once the bleeding edge is gone it evens out. /F
For instance, you can still buy 20, 40G drives now but their cost per byte is somewhat higher than say a 160G drive.
I fire people for pulling crap like that. Count your blessings ... while you can.
I'm the nicest boss in the world. Want extra time off, vacation all used up? No problem, don't tell anyone, you're a good guy.
F-over the company by trying stunts like you mentioned? C-ya.
Sorry, this is not a long term survival strategy. There's a guy at a place I just quit who's completely unemployable because of that sort of thing. And he's on the way out for doing it. Smart guy, but too many people around town know him and his habits. His next job will be at 7-11
As in like the guy who claimed excess Twinkie consumption was the valid cause for him killing someone?
/F
I think 9 years is pretty light, considering that I think the death penalty is closer to optimal for this kind of behavior.
It's seriously sociopathic behavior, you see, which puts it in the same class as murder, etc.
Under CP/M there were about (1) mag tape drives?
Actually we used mt all the time to read CT scanner data, but we always had custom apps to read from the drives.
CP/M was indeed rather stripped down, and it did borrow a lot of features from DEC.... lawsuit!!!
A boatload of us, you young whippersnappers!!
... oh, wait, I'm trying to be positive and educational here.
.01% had a computer available at home.
Not only CP/M-86, but MP/M, CPM, and even better- Concurrent CP/M-86 and Concurrent DOS, up through the late 80's.
CDOS Multi-user multi-tasking operating system with a GUI (GEM) gasp!! (Only 1 GUI instance, a bazillion terminal sessions...)
It'd probably be a waste of time to extol the (relative) virtues of it all.
The arrogance of you snots who say GASP! DOS! ! Well, you're right, it IS relatively crappy. But the rapid spread of DOS played a HUGE role in the evolution of the snazzy widgets you have embedded in your
Back in those days, maybe 2% of the population made their living in some fashion directly related to PCs. (Ummmm, what do most of you here NOW do for a living? Or still in school?) About
And yeah, loads of us older folk don't know a fork from a thread, but there are a few who are completely current and yet still remember all the great old secret incantations...
Even better, today a 'geek' can make a living. In those days, most geeks had short lifespans because they were so seriously abused.
(Clue: I was even weirder - a 6'2 geek who also played football. Jock-Nerd! Ack!)
Q: What does pip b:=a:*.* do?
A: ?