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Margaret Bassett

Starting with 1932, what's not to like about presidential compaigns? ... and a proud member for 3 years 12 weeks

Margaret Bassett, 506 Maryville Towers, retired from teaching computer science. From Wyoming to Iowa to DC and New York to Chicago area, I finally lit in East Tennessee almost 30 years ago.

My Latest Post:

Happy 8th Year of New Millennium!

Where is the bridge to somewhere? And is it virtual or real? Good solid bridges with long histories are those you can look at, ride over, and find on the road atlas. How about the bridge to the 21st Century? On December 31, 1999 things seemed a little precarious. Those prone to superstition, aided and abetted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, could reel off numbers to prove that we were coming to the jumping-off place. Those threatened by computers needed technical reassurance. Techies explained how memory deprived early computers were. Back when some computers had only 2k, meaning 2048 bits of memory, every bit counted. A bit is one binary digit, which is either off or on in the computer. To use space by putting “19" on the front of the year was wasteful. It could be patched, however. And river locks would work, plumbing would function, hospital ORs would have lights. There were plenty of old programmers to code the fixes. We trainees from the 60s knew about such things. I have a friend who hooked up with an outsourcing firm in Washington D.C. and worked for nearly two years in the offices of WorldCom. The division of the company which had once been MCI was important to the government for communications. Things worked out for everyone except for Bernie Ebbers who didn’t know how to keep books.


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Twitter and Facebook are for...

MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it's simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

From Sharecropping the long tail

— Nick Carr

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