In my defense, yesterday was a holiday so today's Monday for me. And I went drinking with a couple of professional drinkers over the weekend (note to self- don't do that again)
That's the thing, seee, if Walmart was the only one then I probably wouldn't shop there. But the stuff I see in WalMart is the same stuff I see everywhere else; same brands, etc. When I call my mortgage company I talk to someone with an accent so think I can't even understand him.
I do refuse to use the self-checkout in th egrocery store. Not like it's going to do any good, I used to refuse to use self-service at the gas station untill there was no such thing as full service.
If there was an alternative I'd use it. But it's buy a Matushushi at WalMart or buy the same brand somewhere else. Maytag is no longer made in the US; Zenith sold out to France years ago and no longer is made in the US. Fords are made in Canada. Everything is outsourced; I don't understand why the US hasn't gone broke already, as we don't make anything any more!
I'm not going to knock the wall down by butting my head against it.
Yesterday was a holiday and I don't do Monday's very well. An I went out drinking with a couple of professional drinkers over the weekend, BIG MISTAKE!
Er, the TRS-80 was out at the same time as the XT. Let me fix that for you:
You young whippersnappers with your new-fangled IBM-XP computers. Why, when I was a lad, we did business on a PDP. Model I no less. My dad wrote a program to analyze Rorschach test scores on it. And get this: he sold it to a friend back in, oh, '85 I think, who used it for book keeping at his home business for the next ten years. That's right, this guy was keeping his books on a fricken' PDP-1 in 1995
The funny thing is, there probably were people using PDPs in 1995!
Even funnier, it would probably run Linux. I'm not sure about a beowolf cluster of them though.
I used to post at Kuro5hin after my wife left, and wrote about bar hopping and chasing women. Most of my favorite bars had a younger clientelle, and I later found out that my young friends were reading my stuff, stories about themselves, and didn't realise I was the guy writing it even though my name was on it!
But since you don't go to bars, you're right, we likely don't know each other.
"Fortunate" isn't the word I'd use, more like "miraculous". I saw a trailer in that trailer park at 1st and Maple ripped completely in half, houses and businessc completely demolished. My thought walking through the neighborhood the next day was that if Bin Laden scould see the devestation he'd give up, as there's no way he could do so much damage.
I don't think so, I think they were all 7 digits, plus area code for long distance. You didn't use to have to put the country identifier (1 in the US), I suspect that back then you needed an operator to call out of the country.
This was almost half a centuty ago, things were pretty primitive back then.
I grew up with computers. Well, actually, computers grew up with me; I'm 5 years younger than ENIAC.
WalMart is widely recognized as an unscrupulous retailer who does the socio-economic equivalent of "strip mining" wherever they take root.
And that is unlike every other multinational corporation this century exactly how? I know of no socially consious corporations at all. Every single one from Sony to BP seems to be run by sociopaths who would steer a giant asteroid to the earth if it could somehow increase their personal fortunes. I don't see how WalMart is any different.
What I'd love to see, though, is how much previous computer experience all of those Walmart reviewers had -- for some, it seems like quite a bit.
In my experiences of trying to get people to use Linux instead of Windows (because I'm the nerd who has to fix thair spyware/virus laden machines) I've found that the less you know about Windows, the easier it is to learn Linux.
No, I'd say you were the ethnocentric prick who doesn't want anybody to even mention a store you don't have in your country. The fucking story is about WalMart you dumbass!
Did you read your own comment, you elitist prick? Mods, I am offended by this asshole's flamebait comment.
You say you don't shop at WalMart then trash the people you see in there. If you don't shop at walmart then why do you go in? To see us white trash rednecks and revel in your superiority? I guess you don't go to Osco's or Cub Foods or Mier's either, because they have even fewer cashiers and slower lines.
I don't like their business practices either, but those business practices come from being rich corporate whores with no consience just like every other evil damned corporation this century. Today's corporations are all headed by sociopaths. All of them. Where is your money invested, you yuppie scum?
I agree with your premise, but not your examples. The Apple example was right on; but microwave? That's just silly. DVD player? That's equally silly (despite the fact that your DVD player as well as your digital watch are computers). A DVD player that would only play Sony DVDs would indeed need a warning.
As to your car analogy, that's just stupid. They're both CARS, use the same gas, the same roads, and operate almost exactly the same.
See what happens when you comment at slashdot after midnight? Get some rest, dude! Good point, bad examples.
Linux (at least the versions I've used, Mandriva and Suse) has no trouble connecting to the internet with either DSL or cable, but the DSL and cable companies have a large problem with it.
That's one of the things I hate about Microsoft. "We don't support Linux"; I got that from both DSL (don't remember what phone compay, it's been a few years) and Insight Cable. But it turned out that Linux didn't NEED their support, as it "just worked".
Microsoft, otoh, needed their support but they were incapable of giving me any real support.
One morning I got up and turned the PC on to listen to tunes, and went to work. When I got home and turned it back on, no internet. The support people at Insight thought I had a bad ethernet port.
I was about to spend ten bucks on an ethernet card, but was annoyed that everytime I booted Windows it told me it had disabled the CD burning drivers for the software I'd already attempted unsucessfully to unbinstall, and just reinstalled Windows.
Suddenly the internet worked. Automatic Update had hosed my connection with a piece of shit ethernet driver. Seldom has any Linux distro failed me, but the cable and DSL companies won't support it.
Of course, if they sell enough of these WalMart mmachines they'll have to!
So how do I shut off the expanding menus? I hate that! The menu item I need is never the one that is visible. How do I shut that annoying, useless shit off? In all office apps?
Also, where in Word is the "reveal codes" feature we used to have with Word Perfect? Damn but I miss that.
Hell, I didn't even know that you could customise Word. It's not like there is any documentation, or that the "help" files aren't completely worthless. I miss the days when I'd get a two inch thick book with an application (I'm hyperlexic), now you get a 25 page booklet with your OS! WTF??
BTW, I've yet to meet someone who hates Microsoft Office (the "junk" as you call it, lol), as per your assertion.
Hi mr. coward, meet Uncle Steve. I truly HATE Microsoft office, and I'll tell you why.
I'm a geezer. I've been using office computers since the DOS days. Lotus, dBase II, Multimate. I decided I hated Office some time in the nineties.
I'd never hhad any trouble at all running any kind of software; all I needed was a book (and sometimes just the F1 key). We'd been using the Word Perfect Suite since we got the shiny new Zenith 486s, and my employer decided to change to Office.
I'd been using spreadsheets, and as there was a learning curve when we went from Lotus to Quattro I had them send me to an Excel class. It was only 3 days of training but was enough.
Two weeks later they upgraded to the next version of office, and I was completely in the dark again. Microsoft has a nasty habit of changing EVERYTHING. After playing with it (wasting my employer's time) for a week, it dawned on the that they had cloned Quattro - except that none of the Quattro files would run in Excel, unless I saved them in Excel format with Quattro. Same thing with the Word processing files - Word Perfect would read and write Word files (although not perfectly) but Word couldn't read the Word Perfect files.
So the first reason to absolutely HATE MS apps is the way they needlessly change them between releases (this includes their sorry assed OSes too).
The second reason to absolutely hate them is that they aren't compatible with ANYTHING, even earlier versions of teh same MS program!
Do you have any idea the hassle I had when my employer forced me to "upgrade" from Access 97 to Access 2000? The damned databases were automatically broken!
I hate MS for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is that I'm forced by my employer to use their badly designed, buggy shitware.
Excuse me, YOUR badly designed, buggy shitware, mr cowardly MS employee.
-mcgrew
PS- The parent was flamebait, and I bit. Dammit, that cowardly clueless MS employee/stockholder who doesn't actually have to use MS's shitware pissed me off. Don't worry, I have plenty of karma, mod me however you want.
Remember, these are typical Walmart customers here.
I resent that incredibly racist and elitist statement. I may not be the "typical" WalMart customer, but I do shop there. I would be a fool to spend fifty dollars for a pair of jeans elsewhere when I can get a pair of Wranglers at Wal Mart for $12. I would be a fool to pay $8 for a big bottle of Listerine at Osco's ehen I can get the same bottle for half the price at Wal Mart.
Is Wal Mart evil? Sure they are. ALL big corporations are evil. I'd rather spend ten bucks on a pair of sneakers made by child labor at WalMart than a pair of Nikes made by child labor at some high priced mall store.
BTW, your ignorance is showing. They're not going to need that AOL CD; the internet works out of the box on a Linux computer, unlike Windows.
You put me straight into geezer mode with that statement - This blows my mind. The IBM XP is a quarter of a century old, had a 5mhz clock speed (this box has a 1300mhz clock speed), had 64K of memory and a ten mb hard drive, and guess what? you could still do real work on it! Spreadsheets, word processors, statistics, databases; I used these things at work in 1987 (we also had a couple of 286s and the blindingly fast 386 at the time).
I bought one used, the one I bought for my home had a Hercules card so was capable of graphics. I bought some extra memory and a joystick port, installed them, and had a gaming machine.
Real work? Pshaw, when the 486 (capable of internet A/V, could sample and play CD quality WAV files) came out a computer like the Wal Mart Ubantu box was a supercomputer.
FYI, XP doesn't stand for "eXPerience". It's just an emoticon. -- SharpFang (651121)
I thought your sig was part of the comment until I hit "reply" it's so on-topic. IINM XP stands for "eXtra Pain". Every generation of Windows is a worse experience for the user. I've had XP installed for a couple of years and still can't find where they moved half the shit I knew where was in 98.
From the summary: "While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu". That is exactly what is wrong with Vista (besides the "moving stuff around thing"). How is making my computer slower considered an "upgrade"?
They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
The difference is that WE made the computers, and therefore WE know how they work. If you know how a computer works, you know it can't think.
Now, if you put me in a commercial flight simulator you could probably convince me that you'd flown me to Afghanistan, or even the moon if you could do something about that gravity thing. But a computer is only an abacus with two beads per wire, billions of wires, and mechanisms (nand gates, nor gates, shift circuits and the like) to manipulate the beads.
I would agree that, when robotics is advanced enough that you can't tell a humanoid robot from a human, you should grant it human rights until it is proven to be a robot. I'd hate to be confused with a robot!
The funny thing is what they were looking for was Chris, who was sitting on my toilet when they were looking around my garage. All they had to do was ask, which they did after looking around the garage.
If you're referring to the FBI/DEA/Local cops thing, they said they had every right to search me and my property "bacause that place is a known drug house." Not wanting to be a smartass to the cops (from the Monty Python sketch, "Blimey, whatever did I give to the Missus?") I didn't ask why, if they knew it was a drug house, they didn't just have a judge sign a warrant and search the house.
What was almost more disgusting than disrespecting my Constitutional rights was what the cops were talking about before they let us go - it was a Goddamned GAME to them. Apparently there were teams of cops in competetion to see who could bust the largest number of dopers.
I'm now firmly convinced that the USA is a police state.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, it was the XT.
In my defense, yesterday was a holiday so today's Monday for me. And I went drinking with a couple of professional drinkers over the weekend (note to self- don't do that again)
That's the thing, seee, if Walmart was the only one then I probably wouldn't shop there. But the stuff I see in WalMart is the same stuff I see everywhere else; same brands, etc. When I call my mortgage company I talk to someone with an accent so think I can't even understand him.
I do refuse to use the self-checkout in th egrocery store. Not like it's going to do any good, I used to refuse to use self-service at the gas station untill there was no such thing as full service.
If there was an alternative I'd use it. But it's buy a Matushushi at WalMart or buy the same brand somewhere else. Maytag is no longer made in the US; Zenith sold out to France years ago and no longer is made in the US. Fords are made in Canada. Everything is outsourced; I don't understand why the US hasn't gone broke already, as we don't make anything any more!
I'm not going to knock the wall down by butting my head against it.
Yesterday was a holiday and I don't do Monday's very well. An I went out drinking with a couple of professional drinkers over the weekend, BIG MISTAKE!
Even funnier, it would probably run Linux. I'm not sure about a beowolf cluster of them though.
Two words: "You're lazy".
I rarely agree with my government.
I used to post at Kuro5hin after my wife left, and wrote about bar hopping and chasing women. Most of my favorite bars had a younger clientelle, and I later found out that my young friends were reading my stuff, stories about themselves, and didn't realise I was the guy writing it even though my name was on it!
But since you don't go to bars, you're right, we likely don't know each other.
"Fortunate" isn't the word I'd use, more like "miraculous". I saw a trailer in that trailer park at 1st and Maple ripped completely in half, houses and businessc completely demolished. My thought walking through the neighborhood the next day was that if Bin Laden scould see the devestation he'd give up, as there's no way he could do so much damage.
I don't think so, I think they were all 7 digits, plus area code for long distance. You didn't use to have to put the country identifier (1 in the US), I suspect that back then you needed an operator to call out of the country.
This was almost half a centuty ago, things were pretty primitive back then.
I grew up with computers. Well, actually, computers grew up with me; I'm 5 years younger than ENIAC.
Please do not expect all of us to march in step.
Indeed, we're nerds. Don't expect any of us to march in step. If you see someone marching in step he probably doesn't belong here.
WalMart is widely recognized as an unscrupulous retailer who does the socio-economic equivalent of "strip mining" wherever they take root.
And that is unlike every other multinational corporation this century exactly how? I know of no socially consious corporations at all. Every single one from Sony to BP seems to be run by sociopaths who would steer a giant asteroid to the earth if it could somehow increase their personal fortunes. I don't see how WalMart is any different.
What I'd love to see, though, is how much previous computer experience all of those Walmart reviewers had -- for some, it seems like quite a bit.
In my experiences of trying to get people to use Linux instead of Windows (because I'm the nerd who has to fix thair spyware/virus laden machines) I've found that the less you know about Windows, the easier it is to learn Linux.
-mcgrew
No, I'd say you were the ethnocentric prick who doesn't want anybody to even mention a store you don't have in your country. The fucking story is about WalMart you dumbass!
Did you read your own comment, you elitist prick? Mods, I am offended by this asshole's flamebait comment.
You say you don't shop at WalMart then trash the people you see in there. If you don't shop at walmart then why do you go in? To see us white trash rednecks and revel in your superiority? I guess you don't go to Osco's or Cub Foods or Mier's either, because they have even fewer cashiers and slower lines.
I don't like their business practices either, but those business practices come from being rich corporate whores with no consience just like every other evil damned corporation this century. Today's corporations are all headed by sociopaths. All of them. Where is your money invested, you yuppie scum?
You have an alternative to WalMart?
-normal non-rich, non-yuppie, non-elitist
It's like your mother-in-law driving your new Porsche off a cliff, you mean?
Both are insured, where's the downside?
I agree with your premise, but not your examples. The Apple example was right on; but microwave? That's just silly. DVD player? That's equally silly (despite the fact that your DVD player as well as your digital watch are computers). A DVD player that would only play Sony DVDs would indeed need a warning.
As to your car analogy, that's just stupid. They're both CARS, use the same gas, the same roads, and operate almost exactly the same.
See what happens when you comment at slashdot after midnight? Get some rest, dude! Good point, bad examples.
-mcgrew
DSL and Cable are platform-agnostic
Linux (at least the versions I've used, Mandriva and Suse) has no trouble connecting to the internet with either DSL or cable, but the DSL and cable companies have a large problem with it.
That's one of the things I hate about Microsoft. "We don't support Linux"; I got that from both DSL (don't remember what phone compay, it's been a few years) and Insight Cable. But it turned out that Linux didn't NEED their support, as it "just worked".
Microsoft, otoh, needed their support but they were incapable of giving me any real support.
One morning I got up and turned the PC on to listen to tunes, and went to work. When I got home and turned it back on, no internet. The support people at Insight thought I had a bad ethernet port.
I was about to spend ten bucks on an ethernet card, but was annoyed that everytime I booted Windows it told me it had disabled the CD burning drivers for the software I'd already attempted unsucessfully to unbinstall, and just reinstalled Windows.
Suddenly the internet worked. Automatic Update had hosed my connection with a piece of shit ethernet driver. Seldom has any Linux distro failed me, but the cable and DSL companies won't support it.
Of course, if they sell enough of these WalMart mmachines they'll have to!
-mcgrew
So how do I shut off the expanding menus? I hate that! The menu item I need is never the one that is visible. How do I shut that annoying, useless shit off? In all office apps?
Also, where in Word is the "reveal codes" feature we used to have with Word Perfect? Damn but I miss that.
Hell, I didn't even know that you could customise Word. It's not like there is any documentation, or that the "help" files aren't completely worthless. I miss the days when I'd get a two inch thick book with an application (I'm hyperlexic), now you get a 25 page booklet with your OS! WTF??
-mcgrew
BTW, I've yet to meet someone who hates Microsoft Office (the "junk" as you call it, lol), as per your assertion.
Hi mr. coward, meet Uncle Steve. I truly HATE Microsoft office, and I'll tell you why.
I'm a geezer. I've been using office computers since the DOS days. Lotus, dBase II, Multimate. I decided I hated Office some time in the nineties.
I'd never hhad any trouble at all running any kind of software; all I needed was a book (and sometimes just the F1 key). We'd been using the Word Perfect Suite since we got the shiny new Zenith 486s, and my employer decided to change to Office.
I'd been using spreadsheets, and as there was a learning curve when we went from Lotus to Quattro I had them send me to an Excel class. It was only 3 days of training but was enough.
Two weeks later they upgraded to the next version of office, and I was completely in the dark again. Microsoft has a nasty habit of changing EVERYTHING. After playing with it (wasting my employer's time) for a week, it dawned on the that they had cloned Quattro - except that none of the Quattro files would run in Excel, unless I saved them in Excel format with Quattro. Same thing with the Word processing files - Word Perfect would read and write Word files (although not perfectly) but Word couldn't read the Word Perfect files.
So the first reason to absolutely HATE MS apps is the way they needlessly change them between releases (this includes their sorry assed OSes too).
The second reason to absolutely hate them is that they aren't compatible with ANYTHING, even earlier versions of teh same MS program!
Do you have any idea the hassle I had when my employer forced me to "upgrade" from Access 97 to Access 2000? The damned databases were automatically broken!
I hate MS for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is that I'm forced by my employer to use their badly designed, buggy shitware.
Excuse me, YOUR badly designed, buggy shitware, mr cowardly MS employee.
-mcgrew
PS- The parent was flamebait, and I bit. Dammit, that cowardly clueless MS employee/stockholder who doesn't actually have to use MS's shitware pissed me off. Don't worry, I have plenty of karma, mod me however you want.
Remember, these are typical Walmart customers here.
I resent that incredibly racist and elitist statement. I may not be the "typical" WalMart customer, but I do shop there. I would be a fool to spend fifty dollars for a pair of jeans elsewhere when I can get a pair of Wranglers at Wal Mart for $12. I would be a fool to pay $8 for a big bottle of Listerine at Osco's ehen I can get the same bottle for half the price at Wal Mart.
Is Wal Mart evil? Sure they are. ALL big corporations are evil. I'd rather spend ten bucks on a pair of sneakers made by child labor at WalMart than a pair of Nikes made by child labor at some high priced mall store.
BTW, your ignorance is showing. They're not going to need that AOL CD; the internet works out of the box on a Linux computer, unlike Windows.
-mcgrew
It's not a toy -- you can do real stuff with it.
You put me straight into geezer mode with that statement - This blows my mind. The IBM XP is a quarter of a century old, had a 5mhz clock speed (this box has a 1300mhz clock speed), had 64K of memory and a ten mb hard drive, and guess what? you could still do real work on it! Spreadsheets, word processors, statistics, databases; I used these things at work in 1987 (we also had a couple of 286s and the blindingly fast 386 at the time).
I bought one used, the one I bought for my home had a Hercules card so was capable of graphics. I bought some extra memory and a joystick port, installed them, and had a gaming machine.
Real work? Pshaw, when the 486 (capable of internet A/V, could sample and play CD quality WAV files) came out a computer like the Wal Mart Ubantu box was a supercomputer.
-mcgrew
FYI, XP doesn't stand for "eXPerience". It's just an emoticon. -- SharpFang (651121)
I thought your sig was part of the comment until I hit "reply" it's so on-topic. IINM XP stands for "eXtra Pain". Every generation of Windows is a worse experience for the user. I've had XP installed for a couple of years and still can't find where they moved half the shit I knew where was in 98.
From the summary: "While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu". That is exactly what is wrong with Vista (besides the "moving stuff around thing"). How is making my computer slower considered an "upgrade"?
-mcgrew
That was great, thank you for that!
They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
The difference is that WE made the computers, and therefore WE know how they work. If you know how a computer works, you know it can't think.
Now, if you put me in a commercial flight simulator you could probably convince me that you'd flown me to Afghanistan, or even the moon if you could do something about that gravity thing. But a computer is only an abacus with two beads per wire, billions of wires, and mechanisms (nand gates, nor gates, shift circuits and the like) to manipulate the beads.
I would agree that, when robotics is advanced enough that you can't tell a humanoid robot from a human, you should grant it human rights until it is proven to be a robot. I'd hate to be confused with a robot!
The funny thing is what they were looking for was Chris, who was sitting on my toilet when they were looking around my garage. All they had to do was ask, which they did after looking around the garage.
If you're referring to the FBI/DEA/Local cops thing, they said they had every right to search me and my property "bacause that place is a known drug house." Not wanting to be a smartass to the cops (from the Monty Python sketch, "Blimey, whatever did I give to the Missus?") I didn't ask why, if they knew it was a drug house, they didn't just have a judge sign a warrant and search the house.
What was almost more disgusting than disrespecting my Constitutional rights was what the cops were talking about before they let us go - it was a Goddamned GAME to them. Apparently there were teams of cops in competetion to see who could bust the largest number of dopers.
I'm now firmly convinced that the USA is a police state.
-mcgrew
Boy, am I in deep deep deep REALLY DEEP deep trouble!!! No wonder this happened!
-mcgrew
Must have been a Diebold. They don't need to be hacked!
-mcgrew
(flamebait, insightful, or funny? depends on how many mod points Diebold guys have)