HOW OLD are you?
 

On Oct 2, 12:10 am, "Brenda Ann" wrote:

Sure there were. I was using web based forums at least as far back as 1983,
with my Commodore 64 and a 300 baud acoustic modem [....]

No, you're wrong. There was no Web in 1983. Usenet existed in 1983,
but the Web was not invented until 1990, and it was not practical
until Mosaic in 1992. I called attention specifically to the Web
because the growth of Web-based forums is the reason Usenet has fallen
into disuse.

HOW OLD are you?
 

Phil Kane wrote:
On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:24:02 -0700, wrote:

I've worked in sales, but I tried to avoid lying. For example when I
was in college I worked for Sears. They instructed me to "sell
extended warranties" I complied, but I also told the customers that I
thought it was un-necessary.

Recently I had an expensive Nikon camera damaged by being knocked off
a table to a concrete floor. Had I not had an extended warranty
policy (read: insurance) the repairs would have cost me almost half of
what the camera cost, because they had to send to Japan for major
repair parts to rebuild it. ..........


Well there are exceptions to every rule, and your hyper-expensive
camera is that exception.

But in the case of a GE Refrigerator or a Sony stereo, an extended
warranty would be a waste. These items are so cheap & readily
available that, should they fail, you can easily take the ~$100 from
the "extended warranty" (which I the salesman told you not to buy),
and use it as downpayment to buy a new fridge or stereo.

The thing is: Most appliances DON'T fail. They follow a mortality
curve:

- HIGH - birth mortality (as a result of manufacturing flaws) -
covered for FREE by the manufacturer
- LOW - middle-of-life - virtually no failures.
- HIGH - geriatric mortality - around 15-20 years - the parts are old
& die - which is NOT covered by extended warranties, because these are
only 5-7 years in length.



The reason why Sears pushes salespeople to sell "extended warranties"
is because that's where the money's at. 99% of customers have no
problem whatsoever (or if they do, it's covered by the manufacturer's
FREE warranty, not sears), and thus Sears gets to pocket the money as
almost-100% profit. ----- Want to get rich? Sell insurance on
brand-new products, and make sure it expires at around 5 years, that
way you won't have to pay out, other than a few dollars here & there.



I bought an extended warranty for my Dodge Avenger. You know how many
times I used it?
- zero
- and when the Avenger eventually started failing (10 years), the
warranty was expired.
- and thus I wasted $700 for nothing.

I'll never do that again.



Similarly, I had a hard disk die a few days after the extended
warranty period expired, and CompUSA was good enough to "stretch" the
expiration date and give me a new one at no cost.

Yeah. But. You probably could have bought a brand-new hard drive,
same size, for the same amount of $$$ or just slightly more expensive,
as the extended warranty cost.

I just bought a 300 gig drive for only $70. They are dirt cheap
Cheaper than buying the crummy service plan.



I believe in extended warranties.

I don't. Everything I buy seems to last forever. If I bought
"extended warranties" I would just be wasting my money (see the
Avenger example), since I would never use them.

HOW OLD are you?
 

"David Kaye" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Oct 2, 12:10 am, "Brenda Ann" wrote:

Sure there were. I was using web based forums at least as far back as
1983,
with my Commodore 64 and a 300 baud acoustic modem [....]

No, you're wrong. There was no Web in 1983. Usenet existed in 1983,
but the Web was not invented until 1990, and it was not practical
until Mosaic in 1992. I called attention specifically to the Web
because the growth of Web-based forums is the reason Usenet has fallen
into disuse.

Not this time cowboy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

"
The first TCP/IP-wide area network was made operational by January 1, 1983
when all hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older NCP
protocols to TCP/IP. In 1985, the United States' National Science Foundation
(NSF) commissioned the construction of a university 56 kilobit/second
network backbone using computers called "fuzzballs" by their inventor, David
Mills. The following year, NSF sponsored the development of a higher speed
1.5 megabit/second backbone that become the NSFNet. A key decision to use
the DARPA TCP/IP protocols was made by Dennis Jennings, then in charge of
the Supercomputer program at NSF."

HOW OLD are you?
 

Brenda Ann wrote:
"David Kaye" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Oct 2, 12:10 am, "Brenda Ann" wrote:

Sure there were. I was using web based forums at least as far back as
1983,
with my Commodore 64 and a 300 baud acoustic modem [....]

No, you're wrong. There was no Web in 1983. Usenet existed in 1983,
but the Web was not invented until 1990, and it was not practical
until Mosaic in 1992. I called attention specifically to the Web
because the growth of Web-based forums is the reason Usenet has fallen
into disuse.

Not this time cowboy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
"first TCP/IP-wide area network was made operational by January 1983"


Bzzz.

We're not discussing the internet (which has been around a long, long
time). We're discussing the World Wide Web, which sits inside
browsers called Mosaic, Netscape, Explorer, Firefox, Safari, et
al..... and uses hyperlinks to jump from one server to another server.

THAT was not invented until circa 1992, and did not "boom" until
around 1995 when Mosaic/Netscape hit Windows and Macintosh machines,
and lots of users started experimenting with it for the first time.

The WWW did not exist in the 1980s.
We've told you this several times.
Please try to listen.



If you still are not convinced, try to imagine stepping into a time
machine, and carrying your modern-day PC back to 1990, and signing-up
with an Internet Provider. Would your web browser work?

No.

It absolutely would not work, because web-servers did not exist back
then. The WWW had not been invented yet.

HOW OLD are you?
 

SFTV_troy wrote:


Phil Kane wrote:
That's not electrical engineering, that's computer science.


And thus you make yourself sound like an idiot.

(rolls eyes)

Oh, THIS should be good...

HOW OLD are you?
 

"Brenda Ann" wrote:


Not this time cowboy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

"
The first TCP/IP-wide area network was made operational by January 1, 1983
when all hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older NCP
protocols to TCP/IP. In 1985, the United States' National Science Foundation
(NSF) commissioned the construction of a university 56 kilobit/second
network backbone using computers called "fuzzballs" by their inventor, David
Mills. The following year, NSF sponsored the development of a higher speed
1.5 megabit/second backbone that become the NSFNet. A key decision to use
the DARPA TCP/IP protocols was made by Dennis Jennings, then in charge of
the Supercomputer program at NSF."


That's TCP/IP. Hate to side with these guys, but they're right this
time. The World Wide Web and HTTP were invented in 1990 by Tim
Berners-Lee.

--
Eric F. Richards,
"It's the Din of iBiquity." -- Frank Dresser

HOW OLD are you?
 

"Brenda Ann" wrote in message

"David Kaye" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Oct 1, 8:47 am, (G) wrote:

On these newsgroups, I get the impression the young
people do not use, or do not like to use USENET.
Perhaps they are somewhere else. It was not like this10 to 15 years ago.
And, there is a
lot of frustrated old people around here.

10 to 15 years ago there weren't Web-based forums. In
fact, 15 years ago there wasn't a Web as we know it. Google Groups may
have been the salvation of Usenet.

Sure there were. I was using web based forums at least
as far back as 1983, with my Commodore 64 and a 300 baud
acoustic modem (even the crude graphics of the era took
forever to load.

Usenet?

There were other networks of BBSs in those days.

There was no pracical, widely usable web in the 1980s.

This is typical of histories of the web:

http://www.w3.org/History.html

From it, the web seems to date back to the early 1990s, maybe 1992 or 1993.

The bad old days of CompuSlave et al
when net time was charged by the minute (about two
dollars IIRC).

Been there, done that.

Even then, the forums were very popular,
taking over the job that was mostly done by BBS's.

The trouble with local BBSs was the lack of traffic.

There were national and regional BBSs like ExecPC that addressed that
problem.

HOW OLD are you?
 

"David Kaye" wrote in message
oups.com
On Oct 2, 12:10 am, "Brenda Ann"
wrote:

Sure there were. I was using web based forums at least
as far back as 1983, with my Commodore 64 and a 300 baud
acoustic modem [....]

No, you're wrong. There was no Web in 1983. Usenet
existed in 1983, but the Web was not invented until 1990,
and it was not practical until Mosaic in 1992. I called
attention specifically to the Web because the growth of
Web-based forums is the reason Usenet has fallen into
disuse.

Agreed.

HOW OLD are you?
 

"Eric F. Richards" wrote in message

"Brenda Ann" wrote:


Not this time cowboy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

"
The first TCP/IP-wide area network was made operational
by January 1, 1983 when all hosts on the ARPANET were
switched over from the older NCP protocols to TCP/IP. In
1985, the United States' National Science Foundation
(NSF) commissioned the construction of a university 56
kilobit/second network backbone using computers called
"fuzzballs" by their inventor, David Mills. The
following year, NSF sponsored the development of a
higher speed
1.5 megabit/second backbone that become the NSFNet. A
key decision to use the DARPA TCP/IP protocols was made
by Dennis Jennings, then in charge of the Supercomputer
program at NSF."


That's TCP/IP. Hate to side with these guys, but they're
right this time. The World Wide Web and HTTP were
invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee.

Agreed.

HOW OLD are you?
 

It's True,,,,, the older you get, the younger you are.
cuhulin