ARothfusz
Almost 50 years old now, and still sending data.
What would I change about software development now to program like they did 50 years ago? I would program like they programmed 50 years ago: assume it has to work. Assume updates will be risky and expensive. Build in failsafes and watchdogs and redundancy. Be able to replicate the build every year for 50 years. Train people to know what the logs really mean, every year for 50 years. And launch it before the bike shedding can begin!
> In 1891, 29-year-old William Wrigley Jr. (1861–1932) came to Chicago from Philadelphia with $32 and the idea to start a business selling Wrigley's Scouring Soap.[14] Wrigley offered premiums as an incentive to buy his soap, such as baking powder. Later in his career, he switched to the baking powder business, in which he began offering two packages of chewing gum for each purchase of a can of baking powder. The popular premium, chewing gum, began to seem more promising, prompting another switch in product focus. Wrigley also became the majority owner of the Chicago Cubs in 1921.
You can use stereo pairs to calculate depth, and in this case, you only lose half your horizontal resolution (vs. losing significant horizontal and vertical resolution on the K lens)
How does this math make any sense?
With that, the total cost per wash is:
0.62p + 0.018p = 0.638p, or 0.87 US cent!
We know from earlier that Bob Cassettes costs 48p (67c) per wash.
Therefore, refilling it yourself is more than 75 times cheaper, resulting in a massive 98.7% cost saving compared to buying new!
* We changed business models so our customers became competitors. How many ways do you depend on your customers? Is it just sales, or is it marketing too? Will your new customers really be able to replace your old ones? What is the transition plan?
* We always delivered what we promised and sometimes more, but late. Our competitors under-delivered but always on time. How sensitive are your customers to features vs timelines? Have you separated your features so you can deliver _something_ on time? Or is it all-or-nothing?
* The parent company/major investor had a bad year and shut down our funding. They were so big, that had been unthinkable. How diverse are your funding sources?
* After shutting down, we stayed together trying to resell what we had developed. We found an apparently interested large company and really tried to get them to fund our continuation. They were just playing us along, trying to learn what we knew about the market, then they released a competitive product that was inferior to what we had in development before the shutdown. How much do you know that your investors don't? Are you sure you want to tell them?
* The parent company/major investor decided our project was actually really cool and decided to move management back to the mothership, where they were pretty clueless about our market. That killed morale in our office (because it wasn't our project anymore) and slowed down decision making immensely (mothership was overseas). How much do you know that your investors don't? Do they appreciate that?
* We gave away too much for free. The freetards complained the most and required the most customer support and education. Very few of them converted to paying customers. When will a customer be forced to decide if your product is right for them? Why will they leave your free plan? Is your free plan free for you?
* Those that did convert only stayed with us through the middle part of their growth cycle. Once they got big enough, they also had enough money to hire an internal team to perform our service for them, believing that this would cost no more and lead to more control. Are your customers going to grow with you and are you going to grow with them? How? Why won't they leave when they get big enough?
* We spent our balance sheet on lawsuits instead of marketing or product development, defending a feature customers liked but was not core to our business. Why are you in court instead of on shelves?
* We saw the coming trend to run application software in a browser, 20 years too early. We based our product on unproven technology which we had no ability to improve ourselves (included hardware and software), and our prices were not competitive with the current technology. Despite this, we did have positive press and some sales. What, exactly are you selling, and why would anyone buy it? Can you find a practical compromise between your big vision and what people want to buy now?
* We were one company with two orthogonal products. One product was easy to understand and visually attractive -- it got all the press. The other was invisible, extremely powerful, but hard to explain to a broad audience. This made the company feel unbalanced, with razzle-dazzle that didn't lead to sales of the more valuable product. How do your products support each other?
The field of view is, to me, very wide. I'm not trying to show it to an audience and it is more than enough to immerse me. It is also important to note that the field of view comes with parallax: you can really see around corners. It is not just a wide field of view on the same stereo pair.
Before _The Thoughts_, this paragraph in _The Notepad_ caught my eye:
> Honestly, I don’t consider the bad memory the younger generations have to be that big of a problem. True, we have to search for information all over again, but it might be a good thing. Information is so quick to change now. What you learned yesterday might have already become all wrong today, while bad memory has you find the latest, most accurate data every time.
I think this person _should_ worry a bit about this lack of memory, if it is a real phenomenon. If you're not updating the knowledge in your head, then how do you develop instincts about what to trust? There is a certain rate of change you should learn from experience, which you never notice if you have no memory. Some things you should expect to be different every day, and some things should not change very often, and if they do (or don't) change, they deserve more scrutiny. If you don't know the answer from yesterday or last week, you're stuck in a kind of neverending present and you're easy to deceive (a la _Memento_)
In my imaginary property model, the VCs make money regardless of whether the companies they back succeed, while the investors only win 1 out of 7 times, upon company successful exit. To the investors, it _looks_ like they've put a lot of money in the startups, but a significant portion of that goes back to property rental companies via salaries and office rentals. Which would be lower anywhere else, which is why I suspect the VCs are disincentivized to move companies elsewhere (or invest elsewhere). They make the most rent here.
But I don't actually know anything factual, like how many VC people privately hold heavy investments in bay area REITs. Even a well-intentioned (dedicated to making their client companies successful) VC would be a fool to not invest in REITs, now that the cycle is here, but after a few years of that and seeing where their money really comes from, I wonder if they can keep their good intentions.
If we're so outraged and thus there's a market for it, why didn't banks start offering their own credit cards with guarantees not to share your data with any third parties?
Also, why should it be risky for someone to know your name, address, and social security number? Yes, I agree it is risky, but it shouldn't be. Those things are not me. They're not even secrets. Knowing those things should not give you superpowers.
We've been doing those things for a few generations now, but they haven't led to public newspapers. I don't know why we would expect them to lead to public electronic social networks.
Even though your company has not raised money in while, they may (should?) have been filing 409A's which calculate the current value.
When the patent application failed, I decided to close the business. Without the IP, the more I built the market, the more likely someone else would come in to compete, and an established manufacturer could definitely beat me on price.
I learned a lot about how difficult marketing is (I come from a mathematics and software background) and how much footwork goes into sales. I also made some mistakes in the patent process I won't make again.
It sucked to give up, but was also a relief. I wasn't betting my future on it, so it wasn't a huge hurdle to make the call. No patent == no business.
I'll probably try again some day.
The fake social network with real fake ads!
I did field work to study horseshoe crabs' near-shore behavior as part of my master's work. Fortunately we weren't bleeding them.
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> A virus from a pond just 40 miles from his house apparently gave him a new lease on life—and gave a new meaning to the term “local medicine.”
That is, are phages for a specific bacterium more likely to be found local to the person infected? Would they have been even more likely to find the right phage if they had collected samples from the patient's neighborhood, family and friends? Nearby people who weren't infected?