wayne

I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.

patio11 wrote an in-depth post about how the Southern Poverty Law Center abused their ownership of a list that every payment processor used to decide which hates groups to de-bank: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-ba...

Yet he did still launch Vision Pro.

If you search for them on LinkedIn, it's a small team of ~5 outside of Silicon Valley (Austin, Spain, Norway). I'm sure they're doing quite well but even if they were doing just ok it doesn't have to make billions for everyone to do ok.

I enjoyed this program a lot as a kid. It had a very strange interface I found inefficient but the documents you could create were animated and fun.

Sounds like Microsoft had enough confidence in the interface after this to proceed with Bob and Clippy (Clippit): https://www.howtogeek.com/723648/did-you-know-microsoft-made...

It might be a fad, but the current trend in US public aviation is increasing premium cabins and premium revenue: https://simpleflying.com/why-us-carriers-doubling-down-premi...

This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.

It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.

I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.

Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)

Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ms-moving-hotmail-to-win2000-s...

https://jimbojones.livejournal.com/23143.html

We're well past 2016, but Stratechery had an opinion that Dropbox focused too much on infrastructure projects like this and would have had more success focused on improving product/market fit.

"That's why I actually find this announcement really disappointing. Apparently Dropbox has been devoting significant resources for at least two years to a project that will no doubt have a positive impact on the bottom line but a minimal impact on the top line. It's all well-and-good (and honestly impressive) to announce 500 million registered users, but the reluctance to disclose both active users and especially the number (and size) of its business customers speaks even more loudly. How might have the product and company evolved if the company had continued to rely on AWS and devoted its resources to fixing its product-market fit problem?"

https://stratechery.com/2016/dropbox-leaves-aws-should-ups-a...

Very different from the airline industry which still honors lifetime flight and lounge passes sold decades ago.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/20/mark-cuban-bought-an-america...

The immediate catalyst was the EU, but this is likely what Apple wanted all along by launching ATT and running all its PR about privacy. Users pay instead of advertisers, and Apple gets its 30%.

I interned on Encarta one summer shortly before the fall, and 11 years ago I wrote a Quora answer about why I think it failed, which amusingly still gets upvotes: https://qr.ae/pK2pGA

The article touches a little on flight costs, but as someone who'd love to visit sometime and never has, it annoys me how flights to Guam work. Given its location most airlines don't fly direct from the mainland, so many flights to Guam are from Asia. But, you can't buy a ticket from the US with a layover in Japan from JAL or with a layover in Korea from Korean Air because any flight with a US origin to a US destination can only be sold by a US carrier. That eliminates all Asian competition and the US airlines get a monopoly even though they barely fly there and many of these flights are codeshares being operated by Asian airlines!

Berkshire's history pre-Warren isn't that noteworthy:

Berkshire is known to be one of Warren Buffett's worst investments. The Berkshire textile company agreed to sell to Warren, but broke its word and raised its asking price at the 11th hour, which pissed Warren off, so he paid more than he should have to get control of the company to get back at them, even knowing that textiles were a declining industry given offshoring. Warren eventually had to shut everything down and lost a bunch of money. Warren calls it one of his biggest investment mistakes and kept the Berkshire name for his overall investment vehicle to remind himself about that blunder, so it's a little silly to think of the modern Berkshire as a continuation of the original Berkshire.

More: https://www.cnbc.com/2010/10/18/cnbc-transcript-warren-buffe...

Even more in the book "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life".

Isn't Facebook API access what led directly to Cambridge Analytica?

It's possible the sketchiness is caused by a restaurant's competitors (writing negative reviews, falsely flagging positive reviews, spamming) rather than Yelp proper.

Facebook's North America revenue is around $50 a quarter per user ("ARPU"), which is ~$15/month. You'd have to charge quite a bit to clear that, given most users won't pay. (Plus 30% to pay for App Store fees.)

Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.

Not sure if it's the case with Shopify, but at big companies I've seen agreements with regulatory bodies and court legal holds that require the company certify that it's retained every scrap of employee data so that it's available for discovery later. The company can try to do this by uploading the entire contents of the laptop/phone to the cloud periodically, but they still don't retain 100% unless they do it once more at the very end and then hand the blank device back to the former employee. With layoffs involving thousands of partially-remote employees, that may not be logistically feasible and cheaper to just buy everyone a new device.

You mean 4? The second kid's name was used for MaxDB, which is used in the SAP world. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius

I've often heard Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore cited as an example.

As usual, there's a Wikipedia article listing some others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship

Examples: (1) One reason SVB did well is it understood startups. If your startup just raised a large round and needed a small loan, you were more than good for the money, but most banks would scoff because your business didn't have a long record of profits. (2) The "simple" thing of having a no-fee, no-minimum checking account with a convenient ATM you can use without fees is something we can take for granted in larger metro ares; in many places your local regional bank may be your only choice.

While not trivial, the problem of remembering to free everything is slightly simpler when you don't have to worry about exceptions.

I have computer-literate parents and grew up in the PC era, so as a child I typed my elementary school assignments in vi. Accidentally using :X, encrypting one of my school papers, and having to completely rewrite it, was one of the slightly-traumatizing moments in my childhood.

FWIW, I switched to :wq for a while but I'm back to using :x instead of :wq. I'm just very careful now. :)

I went as a kid and remember it as one of the most fun moments of my life. I remember being able to do whatever I wanted. I was binge-reading some weeks, playing with fun toys with other kids other weeks, or just laying outside on the grass. This was preschool though.

Deployment becomes more annoying and the APIs aren't as intuitive, but all the Excel/Office VBA APIs are accessible via COM so you can use any language that works with COM (e.g. Python): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/excel-com-add-ins-...

It's especially easy to access via any .NET language. I've written a few plugins in C#: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/t...

I had one of these in college and it's probably still in storage somewhere. I couldn't afford a full laptop to put Linux/BSD on, and this was an affordable device to try installing NetBSD onto. Though I succeeded with NetBSD, memory was at such a premium on the CF card that it seemed silly not to just use the OS on the ROM that didn't use up any storage.

I mostly used it to run "Pocket Word" to take notes in class and ActiveSync to sync it to my PC. Plus it had enough memory to fit _one_ MP3 which I could use play over and over. Most people at the time thought I had an actual Thinkpad.