zoetmb

eightzero said:

My first thought on seeing this was that is FB analyzing the content, compiling information about the attendees, and using it to target ads and any other future use they will dream up to monetize. 

Maybe  it's because I'm not the target demographic, but I don't see that many ads on Facebook and the ones I do see are largely harmless, mainly people selling bags, wallets and belts and I just skip over them in any case.   

Scrolling down FB right now and I see an add for Dimlits, which is an adhesive backed film for reducing the brightness of LED lights on devices; BeltBro, a belt that uses only two belt loops; a personalized bar necklace from Oak & Luna; a phono preamp from Bellari Audio (ok, that one probably is targeted at me); TapRM, which seems to be a beer or something; The Atlantic magazine; the Vermont Country Store; "Stop Republicans", The Lincon Project; "Tracks of the New York City Subway" book; Phil Araballo for Congress; Allbirds (shoes); Wayfair; B&H Photo; Popov Leather and a few others. 

Now that's more ads than  I expected, but I guess I don't notice them because I usually just scroll right past.   All of these were properly identified as "Sponsored".   I don't see what the big deal is - just like commercial radio, TV or newspapers, that's their financial model.   Would you pay for a FB without ads?   I wouldn't.   I might pay a small fee for a FB that collected no personal data.   They know little about me anyway - I lied when I gave them the little bit of data necessary when I signed up. 

I suppose anything is possible, but I simply don't get what they can analyze out of a talking head aside from gender and possibly age.  They can't even tell if you're in an apartment or house.   They would know who your "friends" are, but they already know that. 

cpsro said:

Only 50?!  Even if it wasn't FB, I'd still avoid this if my meetings had any potential to go beyond 50 participants, either now or later. Why leave anyone out or have to reorganize everyone around another service that can handle the load?

As a former executive at three major companies as well as an independent consultant to others, I can guarantee you that any meeting with anywhere near that number of people will be an unproductive and useless meeting (as opposed to a presentation where the "audience" doesn't need to be seen).  

That's actually not expensive for what car manufacturers charge for car radios and audio systems, which are incredible rip-offs.    The problem in most of today's cars is that the audio system is frequently tied in with the HVAC system and it's not a standard mount, making it almost impossible to efficiently switch out the radio.   I miss the days of DIN-sized mounts and standard DIN connectors.   I wish car manufacturers would return to that or the equivalent. 

Dan Bricklin later developed the "Dan Bricklin Demo Program" for MS-DOS.   It was a really terrific program that enabled one to mock up screens and produce demos using layered screens and "go to" programming based upon a keystroke.    I remember wishing he would develop a similar program for Mac and Windows when those came about.  

It enabled me to design screens exactly as I wanted them to appear and then send them to the programmers.   It really cut down a lot of back and forth with the programmers. I also created demos for the customers.  

I was managing the recording studios at a large publisher when the head of the Science department came to me and asked if I could make copies of some cassettes he had.  I had high-speed duplicators, so I said, "sure", but then looked at the cassettes and they had this big square notch in the back and I had never seen that before.  He explained that they were data cassettes for microcomputers and that we had a computer room of which I had previously been unaware.   I told him I didn't know if my high-speed duplicators were going to work because I didn't know what frequencies were being laid down, so he gave me the keys to the computer room.

We had an Apple ][, a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I and four Commodore machines:  an 8032, 8064, 4032, 4064, where the first two digits represented the number of columns and the second two represented the memory in Kilobytes.   That 8064 seemed more advanced than the Tandy or the Apple because it was 80 column and had more memory than the base Apple machine.  

The data cassettes were only for the TRS-80.  I read the manual, figured out how to load them and looked at the source code.  I had heard of Basic, but had never seen it before, but had previously studied Fortran.   So I pretty much understood the code.   I brought the programming manuals home to study them.   But the TRS-80 was horrible as it had keyboard bounce.    But then I looked at the Apple manuals and thought that at least from a documentation standpoint, they did a much better job, so the Apple ][ became my machine of choice.  And shortly after that the floppy drives were purchased and we didn't have to use cassettes on any of the machines anymore. 

I got more and more involved and eventually became Director of Software Development.  It was amazing what people used to do with so little disk storage space and so little memory.   I remember that someone came out with a notch cutter, so you could write to the backside of a floppy, even though that side wasn't certified.  

We developed a classroom test scoring and evaluation program and when we did the second version, the developer told me it was going to require three floppy drives and an extra 16KB of memory and I freaked out.   We compromised on the drives by making the third drive optional and we wound up including the memory board in the software price.

Apple was great in those days.  They had "Evangelists" who were trying to get software developers and publishers to issue software for the Apple ][, so they'd seed you with machines and let you buy others for half price.   The Apple II+ was an especially good machine and it had those 8 slots that people developed all kinds of cards for.  As an educational publisher, we issued over 60 software titles.   I got hold of an Apple IIe some years go, but couldn't make it work.   I've still got a bunch of Apple II software and a "lab" board.    I think it was the Iic that had a little switch that enabled one to change the keyboard from QWERTY to DVORAK.   It's too bad that never took off.

I don't remember any of those Apple II machines ever experiencing any hardware problems.   Some years later, when the Commodore 64 came out, they would break so often, we used to pile them up against the wall.   We must have had 30-40 broken machines and we finally just decided not to produce anything for it, although it was primarily a home computer anyway and we were producing for schools.