usually my local MICROCENTER has them in the locked glass cabinet, I peer in and I notice the price. "$99?!? Guess they better keep them locked up, then!" You can buy an entire used Core i7 personal computer for $99.
I may the only greybeard arund here who remembers (and has the screenshots to prove it), used to be from 2005--2008 when you would open a message in Gmail, all of the sponsored ads would show up over on the right-hand-side of your email message, and would all be related to keywords from the inside of the email.
Making it grotesquely blatant, how very much the Google computers were reading all your email.
At least now they conceal it a little better, by storing your keyword/interests in a giant permanent database, then bringing the advertisements up on other, non-Google pages!
Yeah, I quite liked the contextual ads and did go to Google many times just to look at the ads, ignoring the rest of the contents (not only for gmail, for search too).
When they started with the permanent database, the ads immediately got useless.
IIRC Google was clear about this even when they launched Gmail: they were doing it so they could read your emails and use that info to add to your ad profile.
I couldn't even *believe* at the time why anyone would sign up for that. Still can't believe it.
Eh, sort of. They released a statement to give that impression but the wording was fairly weasely. They likely stopped using email content for directly targeting ads in Gmail, but there's almost no chance email content isn't being used to target people in other contexts.
Why is there “almost no chance”? They said they won’t email for advertising purposes. There wasn’t much wiggle room with the way they phrased it. It’s possible that they outright lied, I guess.
“Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change”
I was a great UNIX/IRIX/Linux sysadmin. Fantastic. Until I got to a corporation with a structure so large that I wasn't even allowed near the VMware vSphere or the physical hardware itself ((servers locked in the basement)), I was only allowed to install RHEL from images onto other images and keep them patched with Satellite and Ansible. But, disconnected from the front end (vmware) and the real tangible back end (physical hardware), I found myself hating the work and I stopped doing it. I found it quite insulting, to be "just the LINUX guy" cog in the machine.
Then become the VMWare guy (or whatever tech you see coming at you to take over your world). This industry changes quickly, expecting to be a skilled sysadmin on the same platform for more than a decade is a career killer.
Yes: avoid OCULUS headsets and Facebook accounts, for precisely this reason. Trust me: HALF LIFE ALYX ain't worth Zuckerberg getting his fingernails on the inside of your scalp.
