Those of us who are in our 40s now are part of Generation X. The other name for Generation X was "Baby Busters", meaning there was a sizable drop in the birth rate starting in 1965 (the first year of Generation X). So you probably aren't seeing very many of your age peers around simply because there are literally fewer of us. Plus, the Baby Boomers (mostly those who are 50+) are starting to retire, which would obviously explain why you don't see very many "grey hairs" around.

Plus, I'm fairly certain there's a good amount of ageism in the industry. I had absolutely no problem finding tech jobs when I was in my 20s, even though I didn't have a degree (only some college). But after I turned 30 (which happened to coincide with the dot-com bust), I couldn't find a job to save my life. Even years after the dot-com bust and things started to recover, I couldn't find work.

Now I freelance. I do what I like and I don't have to deal with people's personality defects on a daily basis. I don't make nearly as much as I did when I was in my 20s, but I'm still doing what I love and I get to hang on to my sanity. I just started a new contract with a tech start-up, and it's entirely possible I'm the oldest person doing work for that company. Most everyone else are 20-somethings.

There was also that silly little sticker that you had to put on your machine (or came pre-stuck if you bought your machine pre-installed). Do they not do that anymore?

Yeah, that's pretty typical. Microsoft's stuff is usually pretty brain-dead until it comes back to bite them in the ass. Then they layer on fix after fix after fix, making it bloated and slow by the time they get it right, if they ever do at all, usually to salvage a feature idea that was probably a really bad idea in the first place. I've seen it over and over again, and then people wonder why I dislike Microsoft products so much.

13 years. The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) requires that any online service that collects personal information lock out anybody who is under 13 years old unless their parent or guardian signs up for them. It's a well-intentioned law that attempts to substitute legislation for good parenting, and is ultimately a worthless law because any kid can enter a birth date that makes them over 13 years old. I had a niece who joined Facebook when she was 11 by simply saying she was two years older.

Oh, nothing, except the last time I tried to use it (which I'll admit was a while ago, back in Fedora 17), it tried to turn your computer into a friggin phone, which is STUPID! It was very clunky, VERY hard to use, and not intuitive at all. It seemed like the GNOME 3 team redesigned GNOME for the sake of redesigning GNOME, which is never a good motivation to do anything. Now, granted, this was a while ago, so GNOME 3 might be much better now. But my experience with GNOME 3 was SO bad, it scared me away from trying GNOME 3 again any time soon.

And, really, saying "GNOME 3 isn't nearly as bad as Unity" is kinda like saying "Getting poked in the eye isn't nearly as bad as getting smashed in the nards." I mean come on...

Nope, not gonna happen. AT&T already tried to acquire T-Mobile a few years back, and it was essentially blocked by the U.S. Government. AT&T already had to pay T-Mobile a small bundle for that fiasco. Oh sure, they have friendly people in the White House and the Congress now, so who knows. But I really doubt they'll try again any time soon, especially after they just gobbled up DirecTV.

It seems that there is no appetite to enforce the Sherman Act as of late.

Sure, the U.S. Government effectively stalled the acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T a few years ago. But more recently, if EVER there was a time to invoke the Sherman Act, it should have been when AT&T acquired DirecTV, especially since they already had their own subscription TV service (Uverse).

There was also the NBC/Universal acquisition by Comcast; they now own production, distribution and exhibition of a pretty big part of American media. They ended the ownership of movie theaters by movie studios for much the same thing about 70-odd years ago.

I wish they'd invoke the Sherman Act more than they do. But it isn't going to happen, especially with Republicans in charge of the White House and the Congress.

You know what, I'm not buying this. I've heard other people defend this "Music major as a Chief Security Officer." I understand that Music has many mathematical properties, and if she has a Masters in Music, she is likely very intelligent. I also have no doubt that she had quite the resume when it came to security and management; I'd suppose you'd have to have those things if you were a Chief Anything Officer at Equifax.

But you know what? Who cares?! The fact that she had both degrees (a Bachelors and a Masters) in Music tells me that she just wasn't that into this Chief Security/Information Officer stuff. Her first love was music, and that's great, but all of this computer stuff was just to pay the bills. I'm willing to wager there are plenty of undegreed I.T. people out there who would run circles around this person. This is a case of degree-snobbery. They wanted someone with a high-level degree in their Chief Security Officer role. It apparently didn't matter what degree it was, as long as it was a Masters in something.

So unless this person minored in something even remotely related to computers (like electrical engineering, mathematics, etc.), I'm simply not buying this argument that she had an impressive resume to go along with the pair of completely unrelated degrees that won her the job. It seems to me that her heart just wasn't into this job, and it finally showed. As a result, 143 million people are likely to have their credit lives (and by extension, their real lives) ruined forever by this. So you'll forgive me if I'm not quite as sympathetic to "the Music major". This is not about picking on the music major, this is about having the right people, with the right passion, in the right jobs in the right places. This person was, evidently, none of those.

I'm all for free markets. But every time I try to walk out of the market without paying for my stuff, they get very upset.

But why? In all the time I've been running MacOS on my business desktop and Linux on my servers, I have yet to see piece of binary software that wasn't available for both Linux and MacOS, both native. And in extreme cases, if I needed software to run on MacOS that was available on Linux, I could download the source and compile it so I can run it natively. But I have NEVER had to do that.

Okay, it's true that I have had very little recent experience with Windows. If it's true that Microsoft has adopted Ubuntu compatibility for Windows (and I have no reason to doubt you), then great! It seems Microsoft has finally realized that their all-GUI all the time philosophy is not a great solution for everybody.

But, again, I ask why? Aside from the fact that I have always been able to find the same software for both MacOS and Linux, the truth of the matter is I very rarely need to run the same software on my Mac than I do on my Linux servers. If I need to do something on the servers, I just login with ssh, run whatever program I need to run on the server, or change whatever configuration I need to change and reset the daemon afterward, all without having to clutter my Mac with any additional software. In Windows-world, you always needed some piece of client software to do those kinds of things (but perhaps this has changed?). In *nix world, all you need is some sort of terminal connection and a CLI, and it's been that way for decades.

You make great arguments for someone who was like me 15 years ago, starting a tech business but trying to decide what to run on their business desktop. But if Windows now has Ubuntu compatibility, then why not just run Ubuntu? I don't need to run Windows for anything. In fact, in almost 20 years, with the lone exception being games, I haven't run Windows for anything. And I've survived just fine all this time without having to use Visual Studio. I just don't see the need to fork out good money for something I have grown to distrust and dislike over the years (and I had a solid 10 years of in-depth experience with Windows before I finally decided I had enough). Also, Microsoft's handling of the Windows 10 roll-out and subsequent apparent spying on their user base has not inspired my confidence in suddenly becoming a Windows convert. I do not trust Microsoft's motives; I haven't for a long time and nothing they've done in the last 20 years has convinced me to change my mind.

When I started my web development and hosting business 15 years ago, I decided to go with Linux for my servers and MacOS for my business-related desktop. There were a few reasons for this decision, but here are the most important:
1. MacOS plays well with Linux. MacOS natively speaks the same protocols that Linux does, most importantly ssh.
2. I needed the ability to run commercial software that was not readily available on Linux, such as Quickbooks.
3. I can't STAND Windows! Windows had me cussing and swearing up a storm for a while before I started the business, and I saw absolutely no reason to subject myself to that nonsense, especially since MacOS would cover many the holes I needed covered from a commercial software standpoint (see points 1 & 2).

That was then. Nowadays, I find myself in agreement with Rick Beato. Apple hardware is increasingly becoming more about form over function. At least Apple hardware used to be about both; it looked good, but it also functioned well with at least some degree of serviceability and compatibility down the road (for their computers, anyway). Plus, I'm really finding that I don't need to rely on commercial software as much as I used to, and everything I need I can run on Linux. So I am currently using the last set of Apple computers I will probably ever buy. The next systems I buy for the business will be just like the systems I buy for me personally; the desktop will be something I assemble myself, and the notebook will be something well-built but relatively inexpensive that I will promptly see a Linux distro installed over what will likely be a Windows 10 pre-install.

But to say that Apple is the last platform a tech user should use is completely wrong, especially if you deal with the Linux world on a regular basis. I would say MacOS is essential if you're a tech user that needs some compatibility with commercial software but also works in the Linux world, and is FAR superior to Windows in that context.

Microsoft has ALWAYS done this! They so often opt to add the next cool feature rather than cleaning up the mess they made from the last major revision. This, in turn, makes Windows less usable over time, making it slower, bloated, more unstable and more prone to security hacks (which they frantically make a quick fix for, but then open who knows how many other security holes).

This makes people accept a user experience which is not what it should be. A user experience where they make inexplicable UI changes which are more annoying than helpful, especially if you've gotten used to what you were doing before.

A user experience where your computer eventually gets so slow it becomes unusable ("Oh, gee, I guess I need a new computer and the next revision of Microsoft Windows"; I don't think that's by accident).

A user experience where your computer crashes so bad, you need to reboot it to get it to work properly again. To be fair, as I understand it, those incidences are much less frequent nowadays. But having them shove automatic updates down your throat that you cannot reschedule, in order to avoid those types of crashes, is just as bad, if not worse than, the crashes themselves. I'd rather deal with a crash than that nonsense!

None of this happens on other operating systems! Well, except maybe for the inexplicable UI changes; Linux Gnome3 was pretty bad. But despite all that, people continue to use Windows because people often don't have a choice. So many specialty apps are available only for Windows because it is the #1 operating system, so people continue to buy Windows in order to use the apps they need for work or other activities. It's a vicious cycle that Microsoft takes advantage of. A declining user experience? That's standard operating procedure at Microsoft. It has been for decades now.

Oh, and "Cloud Clipboard"? That sounds scary! It sounds like a vector for people to accidentally put stuff out on the internet they either shouldn't or don't mean to so other people can go out and steal that information. That's another hallmark of Microsoft; inventing features that they think sound really cool and probably nobody asked for, but turn out to be really bad ideas.

This was my second computer. It had a great BASIC interpreter, with some really nice graphics and sound capabilities. (And a VAST improvement over the Intellivision ECS I was coming from.) By contrast, you had to use a series of PEEKs and POKEs to do the same things on a C-64. While it was mostly hardware compatible (it worked with all the serial port peripherals the other Commodore machines could use), it lacked a way to expand the hardware like you could on the C-64. There was no way to add a modem, for example (that I was able to find). Software-wise, it wasn't really compatible with anything, which was a shame.

I've read somewhere that the C-16 was supposed to be a replacement/upgrade to the VIC-20, but it didn't sell. The one I got my parents won at some condo presentation. It's a shame, too, because the C-16 had the makings for a great computer. But it's limited RAM and lack of compatibility really hurt it. I think I gave mine away to Goodwill as I was moving out of my parent's house. Nowadays, I'm regretting that decision.

I had one as my third computer. My grandfather worked for IBM, and they had a whole bunch of specials and discounts for employees when IBM discontinued the PCjr. He bought it for himself, but he also had a full-sized IBM PC on-loan from IBM for his work. So one day he loaned the PCjr to me. It never went back. I decided, after having it for a year, to buy it from him.

I spent a fortune expanding that thing. I bought a Racore expansion unit which gave it a second floppy drive, a full 640k of RAM and a parallel port. It also gave the PCjr DMA, which the PCjr did not have natively. But the apps that really required DMA would check to see if it was running on a PCjr and kick you out if you were, despite having DMA enabled. That was a bummer! I also put an NEC V20 in it, which gave it a nice performance boost. I beat the crap out of that thing (figuratively speaking), and it mostly kept up with what I put it through.

I wound up selling it to a second-hand computer store before a major move. I don't regret doing that, and lord knows I don't miss it's artificial limitations imposed by IBM because they didn't want to hurt PC sales. But that was a good computer if you could see past it's flaws.

The very first "computer" that I could program and that I owned outright was an Intellivision ECS. It came in two parts. First, was the Intellivision II game system, which my mother bought for me as a gift for graduating Jr. High school. Then, one day I was in KB Toys and saw this "Intellivision ECS". Then I saw the price (it was like $40) and nearly wet myself. I bought it and got it home.

It was terrible. It had 2k RAM, hookups for a cassette recorder, and that's about it. The keyboard wasn't great (the current crop of keyboards from Apple remind me of the Intellivision keyboard). It had a slot where you could plug in Intellivision games and either play the game itself, or go into the ECS and interrogate the graphics and sound on the cartridge and use them in your own programs. That was kinda cool, but with 2k, you really couldn't do much with it. Besides, those features were not very well documented and were confusing to use. It had a BASIC language, and the computer would colorize the lines of your program to signify that you entered it correctly, which was pretty cool. If something went wrong (either a syntax error or you ran out of memory, which happened to me a lot), it would color the whole thing grey. Also, all of the keywords were 4 characters. So instead of "PRINT", it was "PRIN". Instead of "GOSUB", it was "GOSU". But you could enter the complete keyword and it would just ignore the last character(s). Yes, it was a pretty horrible little machine, but it was mine, and I did have fun with it.

In the documentation, there were "redacted" parts talking about an expansion module with would give you 32k RAM and a printer port (if memory serves). All of that would have made for a far better computing experience. But they put stickers over those parts of the manual because they never did come out with such a thing. I limped along with that thing until I got my next computer, a Commodore C-16.

I worked for them for a few months in '89/'90. I HATED it! They treat their employees like crap! They expected us to sell but didn't really give us the latitude to make good sales, especially if we happened to work at a low-volume store. They would track to see if we got customers names and addresses, and if we didn't ask the question enough they would give us a hard time. I hated asking for that info because I felt like I was invading their privacy. It was also Russian roulette if, when we asked for the customer's name and address, we would get a hissy attitude or a reaction of delight, especially since those on the mailing list would be sent the Radio Shack catalog every year, which was much coveted among loyal customers. Oh, and there was a way to override the system if the system said the name and address was required (usually when issuing a refund), but it wasn't abundantly clear how to do that, so it was easy for most salespeople to miss that feature. But if they were saying it was required as part of a regular sale, they were probably lying in order to keep their bosses off their backs.

As an employer, Radio Shack sucks! But if you needed an odd electronic part, audio/video component or battery, it was a great place to go. In a way, it's a shame Radio Shack is apparently going away; it marks the end of an era. But given how the company was run over the years and how they treated the people who worked for them, it isn't a surprise, and I wont shed too many tears over their apparent demise.