We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.
A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.
Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...
Not entirely true. The "premium" channels (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Bravo, The Movie Channel, etc.) never had ads.
Then there were channels like Nickelodeon that originally had no ads, then added them in the mid 80's. I remember this distinctly because I was annoyed by it. My parents got cable in 1980 when it first came to our area.
Sage Accounting is prone to various connectivity gollywobbles between the server and workstations. The first troubleshooting recommendation is to turn off IPv6. About 75% of that time, the problem then goes away.
If the AI does spelling and grammar fixups, I'll root for the AI.
When I was in corporate IT, I got way too much internal email that looked like it had been pecked out by an autistic second-grader, with random spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Which wasn't as much of a problem as the chain-of-consciousness blather of jumbled words that often made no sense at all.
Some of those people were Ph.Ds in charge of multimillion-dollar subsidiaries and dozens or hundreds of employees, but they may have well have been trying to communicate by interpretive farting and tap-dancing.
I feel like this could have done without the ableist quip, however I also see this in my industry as well, especially among higher-ups. Funnily enough this was the topic of another discussion yesterday[0].
Back in the (early 1960s?) Isaac Asimov wrote a book on how to do arithmetic calculations in your head. He pointed out that someone who developed that skill could solve problems faster in their head than by reaching for a slide rule, and they wouldn't necessarily be limited to slide rule approximations. Engineers, accountants, etc. would be more productive by being able to do calculations without having to reach for a slide rule or pencil and paper.
[pause for 'slide rule' chuckle]
The same applies to "open calculator app and key the figures in," though. I'm not sure that "user interface" was a thing back when he wrote that, but that's what he was talking about.
That’s one reason the abacus hasn’t been completely replaced by calculators: some abacus users become able to calculate very quickly in their heads by visualizing the changing bead positions. In Japanese the skill is called 暗算 anzan, literally “dark calculation.”
I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only.
The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.
Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.
I understand the "everybody does it that way" aspect of the cloud, but the old way of subscribing to a dynamic DNS and hosting locally still works just fine and you have full control of things.
Later, once you have more traffic and/or paying customers, it would be worth looking into cloud hosting. And even then, you probably don't need as much horsepower as they're trying to sell.
A friend of mine is getting ready to retire after 30-odd years in IT. He has already tooled up and trained for his retirement profession: farrier; the guy who makes and installs horse shoes. It's more profitable than it used to be since few people do it any more, and farriers typically work on their own schedule.
The pool of tech jobs in my area was sparse, but the local employers were fully on board with the big-city "use them for a while and toss them out" system. So when times were good in IT, I bought a machine shop, and in between times of lucrative IT employment, I did short-run metalworking and engine rebuilding.
I'm mostly retired now, and my paying work involves maintenance on proprietary inventory and billing software written in a 1960s language in a dialect that became unsupported in the mid-1980s. And it runs in MS-DOS.
I've mostly set aside the languages and tools I used to use, and I'm learning Haiku's variant of C++ to write some native-mode Haiku application software.
A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.
Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...
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