As you mention, you used big iron at 13. That is definitely not the masses nor is it personal computing. Sure, there was an elite few in the 70s but it wasn't until the very end of the 70s early 80s that real personal computing was starting to be adopted by the masses.
Of course, my anecdotal evidence will not be the same as everyone else, especially since I grew up in a very small, rural town in the Midwest. I only know of one Boomer that had an Apple that she used for her work at a community college. Her son, my best friend, used it a lot and a few of my friends had Commodore 64s and 128s. I wanted one so bad but my parents (Boomers) thought they were too expensive and just toys with no real use. That was pretty much the consensus as I perceived it. Although, like I said, some of my friends did have these expensive toys.
I ended up mowing yards and getting a TRS-80 around 84 that I bought at a yard sale. A year later I turned 16, started driving, got a job and didn't have any time for computers.
But, (again, based on my anecdotal evidence) When I started college in '89 (took a year off first) almost nobody had personal computers. Nowadays nobody would think twice about needing a PC while attending college. But, it didn't take me long to see that going to the campus computer lab just didn't cut it. I got a credit card, took my tax refund check and got a PC. I told my campus buddies about the virtues of not having to go to the computer lab and they started buying PCs as well. I added a modem and pretty soon was big into the BBSes.
After getting out of college I had a couple of POS cars not worth much but it was more important to me to upgrade my PC, etc. to the point that there were a lot of people from my generation working crap jobs, putting significant interest into computing even though we couldn't really afford it very well just because it was important to us. Without with, I seriously doubt all of our parents and grandmas would have jumped onto the PC bandwagon.
Sure, there were ubergeeks building PCs out of old alarm clocks or some people with access to ARPNET and such but they were not the masses. Sure, without them the next wave of computer enthusiasts couldn't have existed, but from what I've seen, nobody could claim that Boomers, en mass, adopted personal computing before the Busters/GenXers/whatever did. And I doubt they ever would have. Besides, who the fuck would have been their tech support?
Almost anything that has been built in history, great and small, can excite a few, but until it is adopted by the masses it is nothing.
Of course, computers used to fill entire rooms and governments and businesses adopted them but as I see it, my generation (usually referred to as Generation X) made up a large portion of the early adopters of personal computers and computing devices. We were the first people to buy or build computers that cost more than the car that we drove or would cost several months of our lame salaries to purchase.
We were not the ultra-geeks that dropped out of college to build computer hardware and software, but we were the people, or better yet, the market that helped to allow these garage based businesses to grow into solid, large companies.
When we told our parents (Boomers) of the virtues of personal computers we were mocked, laughed at, or just ignored for a decade or two before these "PC things" caught on.
Why do you say Book was quoting Mal? I don't remember that ever being implied.
We can't know for sure if Book was actually quoting the Captain or not although Simon immediately replies that the preacher is quoting the Captain. We can't know if it's an actual quote or if it just sounds like something the Captain would say. I opt for the former instead of the latter as the doctor could have heard Mal say it before.
If you've got money to burn, buy MS Office. If you are a tightwad, download Open Office. If you are somewhere in between, download Open Office, use it, and if you decide you aren't happy with it, buy MS Office. If you still aren't happy, I can't help you. You'll probably never be happy.
The best part about this comment is the fact that the STP nuclear plant in south Texas is well-known for its gator-infested cooling pool. It's imperative that more of this mineral be found to prevent these gators from mutating.
Thank you for mentioning iTunes Player as a bloated piece of... software. I burn my own CDs to disk and used to really like iTunes but the most recent version kept stuttering and skipping during playback. I guess to Apple all their online store B.S. is more important than actual playback in a music player. It's too bad because it used to be a sleek player. And the podcast subscription ability was very nice.
Although the player I use now is still (probably) bloated compared to other players, it will function fairly well and almost never stutters during playback.
I was thinking about what I might do in a similar situation. I believe after reading about this case that in the future I would do the following for the easiest solution without having to give in to abuse of authority:
In the future I would tell the store security employee asking to see my receipt that, no, he cannot see my receipt except in the form of a return of merchandise for a FULL refund. Then he or his manager could decide just how much seeing my receipt is worth to them.
The company I used to work for would hire a consultant then put them in a similar situation as you then assign me to "work with" the consultant on the project that was in limbo. Of course I would let the consultant have some "free time" to "work on issues" but mainly we did just shoot the shit, occasionally have a task to work on or if I got called to put out a fire the consultant would help me work on the problem. I did learn a lot and although it wasn't part of the project, and there was a lot of downtime, it was very valuable to me.
BTW I was one of the first employees to get a dual-monitor setup (a long story) but I will say that it really helps to make a person look busy. People would always comment on that. I always had Outlook running in a window and several terminal emulators running in the other. I continued to use virtual desktop even after getting the dual-monitor setup as it makes for a really good boss key. Easy to toggle between the virtual desktop with the email and terminal emulators to the web browser, etc. in another.
If the punishment was truly cruel and unusual the judge would have sentenced him to use Gentoo. His sentence would be over before Gentoo finished compiling.
I don't buy that. I used to live in a small town with a Wal-Mart. I didn't buy music from them. This was back before we could order online. We would either drive for an hour to the nearest city to buy music and/or join a record club to get them mail-order.
I truly believe that the people who buy music at Wal-Mart would just as soon have a censored CD to save a few bucks instead of paying a little more for a few songs with cuss words in them.
Government and businesses love to stretch their rights and power unless called on it. If they get away with expanded rights/powers long enough they tend to become real or legitimate.
I agree with the parent and the parent's parent. Good admins need to be able to code. It helps in automation (which makes the boss happy) but it also allows you to automate your workload. So, any educational path that leads to becoming a better coder is going to be very valuable to you, your company and your lusers.
I have a small retail business and I see a lot of people having the wrong assumptions of how these things work.
The following is a more realistic depiction of your scenario which might clear up some confusion of why the new ruling is helpful to manufacturers:
Let's say there are a dozen distributors buying product X for us. They buy X at $80 then sell it to the retailers for $90. There are 100 retailers which then sell product X for $100.
Then Wal-Mart talks to us about buying it. But, since they are going to buy even more product X than the dozen distributors combined they demand that we well it to them at $75. They, in turn, turn around and sell it for $91. They have negotiated a lower price and although passed along savings to the customer they have also created a larger product margin than any other retailer.
Meanwhile the other 100 retailers lose business to Wal-Mart because they cannot compete with the $91 (which is a mere $1 more than what they are paying for the product. They go out of business, customers have less access to the product now that only Wal-Mart sells it.
Being the only (or largest) retailer of product X they demand to buy it for much less since their demand has gone up (no other competition). You cannot manufacture and sell it at a profit for less than $75 so you cut back on the quality, sell it to Wal-Mart for $70 and they in turn drop the price by $2 so now the price is $89. And so on...
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, the accountants probably know that there is no money to pay themselves. So, why work?
As you mention, you used big iron at 13. That is definitely not the masses nor is it personal computing. Sure, there was an elite few in the 70s but it wasn't until the very end of the 70s early 80s that real personal computing was starting to be adopted by the masses.
Of course, my anecdotal evidence will not be the same as everyone else, especially since I grew up in a very small, rural town in the Midwest. I only know of one Boomer that had an Apple that she used for her work at a community college. Her son, my best friend, used it a lot and a few of my friends had Commodore 64s and 128s. I wanted one so bad but my parents (Boomers) thought they were too expensive and just toys with no real use. That was pretty much the consensus as I perceived it. Although, like I said, some of my friends did have these expensive toys.
I ended up mowing yards and getting a TRS-80 around 84 that I bought at a yard sale. A year later I turned 16, started driving, got a job and didn't have any time for computers.
But, (again, based on my anecdotal evidence) When I started college in '89 (took a year off first) almost nobody had personal computers. Nowadays nobody would think twice about needing a PC while attending college. But, it didn't take me long to see that going to the campus computer lab just didn't cut it. I got a credit card, took my tax refund check and got a PC. I told my campus buddies about the virtues of not having to go to the computer lab and they started buying PCs as well. I added a modem and pretty soon was big into the BBSes.
After getting out of college I had a couple of POS cars not worth much but it was more important to me to upgrade my PC, etc. to the point that there were a lot of people from my generation working crap jobs, putting significant interest into computing even though we couldn't really afford it very well just because it was important to us. Without with, I seriously doubt all of our parents and grandmas would have jumped onto the PC bandwagon.
Sure, there were ubergeeks building PCs out of old alarm clocks or some people with access to ARPNET and such but they were not the masses. Sure, without them the next wave of computer enthusiasts couldn't have existed, but from what I've seen, nobody could claim that Boomers, en mass, adopted personal computing before the Busters/GenXers/whatever did. And I doubt they ever would have. Besides, who the fuck would have been their tech support?
Almost anything that has been built in history, great and small, can excite a few, but until it is adopted by the masses it is nothing.
Of course, computers used to fill entire rooms and governments and businesses adopted them but as I see it, my generation (usually referred to as Generation X) made up a large portion of the early adopters of personal computers and computing devices. We were the first people to buy or build computers that cost more than the car that we drove or would cost several months of our lame salaries to purchase.
We were not the ultra-geeks that dropped out of college to build computer hardware and software, but we were the people, or better yet, the market that helped to allow these garage based businesses to grow into solid, large companies.
When we told our parents (Boomers) of the virtues of personal computers we were mocked, laughed at, or just ignored for a decade or two before these "PC things" caught on.
Isn't Adli a grocery store? WTF is it doing selling PCs? If you buy a PC at the grocery store you deserve to get infected. IMHO
I'm pretty sure that the episode is "Ariel". Near the beginning.
Why do you say Book was quoting Mal? I don't remember that ever being implied.
We can't know for sure if Book was actually quoting the Captain or not although Simon immediately replies that the preacher is quoting the Captain. We can't know if it's an actual quote or if it just sounds like something the Captain would say. I opt for the former instead of the latter as the doctor could have heard Mal say it before.
If you've got money to burn, buy MS Office. If you are a tightwad, download Open Office. If you are somewhere in between, download Open Office, use it, and if you decide you aren't happy with it, buy MS Office. If you still aren't happy, I can't help you. You'll probably never be happy.
Windows servers are like rabbits. Those two will keep multiplying and soon they will outnumber the penguins yet again.
I just installed it and will be trying it out. Muchas gracias.
Thank you for mentioning iTunes Player as a bloated piece of ... software. I burn my own CDs to disk and used to really like iTunes but the most recent version kept stuttering and skipping during playback. I guess to Apple all their online store B.S. is more important than actual playback in a music player. It's too bad because it used to be a sleek player. And the podcast subscription ability was very nice.
Although the player I use now is still (probably) bloated compared to other players, it will function fairly well and almost never stutters during playback.
I was thinking about what I might do in a similar situation. I believe after reading about this case that in the future I would do the following for the easiest solution without having to give in to abuse of authority:
In the future I would tell the store security employee asking to see my receipt that, no, he cannot see my receipt except in the form of a return of merchandise for a FULL refund. Then he or his manager could decide just how much seeing my receipt is worth to them.
The company I used to work for would hire a consultant then put them in a similar situation as you then assign me to "work with" the consultant on the project that was in limbo. Of course I would let the consultant have some "free time" to "work on issues" but mainly we did just shoot the shit, occasionally have a task to work on or if I got called to put out a fire the consultant would help me work on the problem. I did learn a lot and although it wasn't part of the project, and there was a lot of downtime, it was very valuable to me.
BTW I was one of the first employees to get a dual-monitor setup (a long story) but I will say that it really helps to make a person look busy. People would always comment on that. I always had Outlook running in a window and several terminal emulators running in the other. I continued to use virtual desktop even after getting the dual-monitor setup as it makes for a really good boss key. Easy to toggle between the virtual desktop with the email and terminal emulators to the web browser, etc. in another.
I agree.
A good manager = a good buffer.
If you have buffer overflow there will be a heap of unwanted behavior from your employees.
Maybe they just think that cow hide boxes look cool.
The Data Retention committee of Project Mayhem is working on this - but you didn't hear that from me.
I don't buy that. I used to live in a small town with a Wal-Mart. I didn't buy music from them. This was back before we could order online. We would either drive for an hour to the nearest city to buy music and/or join a record club to get them mail-order.
I truly believe that the people who buy music at Wal-Mart would just as soon have a censored CD to save a few bucks instead of paying a little more for a few songs with cuss words in them.
Government and businesses love to stretch their rights and power unless called on it. If they get away with expanded rights/powers long enough they tend to become real or legitimate.
Hey, maybe the American auto manufacturers will adopt Win-ICE for you. (FORD - Fix Or Reboot Daily).
Damn, I wish that I had mod points. :-)
I agree with the parent and the parent's parent. Good admins need to be able to code. It helps in automation (which makes the boss happy) but it also allows you to automate your workload. So, any educational path that leads to becoming a better coder is going to be very valuable to you, your company and your lusers.
Perhaps the company placing the ads of a rival should be sued for false advertising.
Wouldn't the laser give away the soldiers position?
I have a small retail business and I see a lot of people having the wrong assumptions of how these things work.
The following is a more realistic depiction of your scenario which might clear up some confusion of why the new ruling is helpful to manufacturers:
Let's say there are a dozen distributors buying product X for us. They buy X at $80 then sell it to the retailers for $90. There are 100 retailers which then sell product X for $100.
Then Wal-Mart talks to us about buying it. But, since they are going to buy even more product X than the dozen distributors combined they demand that we well it to them at $75. They, in turn, turn around and sell it for $91. They have negotiated a lower price and although passed along savings to the customer they have also created a larger product margin than any other retailer.
Meanwhile the other 100 retailers lose business to Wal-Mart because they cannot compete with the $91 (which is a mere $1 more than what they are paying for the product. They go out of business, customers have less access to the product now that only Wal-Mart sells it.
Being the only (or largest) retailer of product X they demand to buy it for much less since their demand has gone up (no other competition). You cannot manufacture and sell it at a profit for less than $75 so you cut back on the quality, sell it to Wal-Mart for $70 and they in turn drop the price by $2 so now the price is $89. And so on...