Computers are A Devolutionary Scam

[TerryinMD]

Talking about trolling.... /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif

You sly dog you.... /w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif

Very interesting stuff... I agree about the major corporations only delivering object code (we called them binary releases). When this first became a reality in the mid to late 80's for CDC, our sales force had a heck of a time selling the newer operating systems to its customers. Especially, the Government! I was one of the poor program/system analysts that had the please of maintaining customer modified operating systems. Oy.... what a mess to upgrade to a new version. One of the reasons I got out of support and programming!! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Another issue with the binary releases was that the need for on-site support began to decrease, because the customer base could support the systems themselves. From a company sales and support standpoint, it removed revenue from the salesmen and the support managers. This was a very contentious issue and they would refuse to sell the newer OSes because they knew they would lose bonuses and commissions./w3tcompact/icons/eyes.gif

Terry

 

[glennmac]

Bill, no, no, I wasn't toying. Often I exaggerate points to make them and fence with people, but there is always something serious underlying even my most sarcastic remarks. I really do feel computers have devolved in a sense, and I really didnt know (or forgot) the terms kernel, code space, data space, stack and some of the others. I appreciated your patient explanation. Gee, I had forgotten about the color coding on the towers.............John, no chance to go back. I essentially got downsized out 10 years later with tens of thousands of others when times got bad. Then, I was head lawyer for the semiconducter division in Fishkill, NY, a facility which dropped from 11k employees to 4K in 18 months and which everone thought was going to fold or be sold. (A few years later it prospered in the economic boom for which Bill Clinton was solely responsible.) Moreover, I was never a company man. In business terms, I was great at pure research, product development and sales. I was awful at manufacturing (repetitive legal tasks), administration, managing employees, and, in particular, being managed. I also wasn't much of a "team player". It's not in my nature--plus I was always of the opinion that much of the so-called team playing were really exercises in risk sharing, risk avoidance, and the compromising of excellence into mediocrity. Worse, I said so. ..........Mike, many were responsible for ultimate OCO decision. I was just the first, and lowest-level, lawyer to argue that there were good legal reasons to do so. Re deleting files, IBM once had a lawsuit where we agreed, as part of a settlement, that we would destroy a certain large file we had kept on the opponent. We delivered the tape to the judge with sworn affidavits that it was the only copy in existence and that we had completely overwritten it with binary zeroes. The judge didnt understand or trust that. He made us literally burn the tape in a can behind the courthouse.

 

[Buck]

glenn,

Maybe you ought to branch this thread out into a series of threads reflecting a computer science bachelors degree curriculum. I get a headache reading it anymore.

Buck

 

[TWINKLE_TOES]

<font color=blue>This post is long-winded even for me. Don’t read it.</font color=blue>

Sorry Glenn, I read it twice /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif Very interesting, did the real Mr. Glennmac just stand up?
Al

 

[glennmac]

More devolution.........Spent half an hour on the phone with M$ technical support re my Powerpoint problems. I migrated Windows 98 Powerpoint presentations to Mac Powerpoint OSX and finally got them to open. But all the animations are slowed WAY DOWN to the point of being absolutely unpresentable. I was hoping this $4000+ investment would SPEED UP my 333 mhz PII presentations. Oh no, says M$, THIS IS NORMAL. (That's called justified shouting.) It's a "known issue" that M$ and ScamApple are working on........Great, now Word and Powerpoint are both degraded, the latter to the point of unusability...........Buck, there's a well known preventative to those headaches of yours. Whenever you see my name ........ don't click.

 

[Buck]

Glenn,

I just clicked. Didn't get to read your message in full. Can't finish my post 'cause I'm feeling sick.

Buc k

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Glenn...

Q. What did Bill Gates' wife say to him on their wedding night?



A. "Now I know why you named your company Microsoft!"...

 

[Buck]

John,

Your post will prove that information can travel faster than the speed of light.

Buck

 

[glennmac]

Speaking of sex and the single geek, why, seriously, are there a lot more soft-women in the industry than hard-women.

 

[Egon]

Glen,

Institutions of higher knowledge should all have a compulsory " Corporate Family 101 " so those expressive inovative few would have another spare in which to drink coffee and confer with coed's.

Egon