Remember this was when electricity was primarily for lighting and many people had has fridges and ovens and no washing machine. If you're hot, you use a fan, so everyone knew that fans were for cooling (air conditioning wasn't really a thing). His manager didn't think that it would be possible to persuade people that fans just moved air, they didn't cool it.
The Earth will take it in the same way that it took the moon - it will enter Earth orbit. Starting from a lunar orbit, you need quite a lot of energy to move it into an orbit that intersects the Earth (or even intersects the atmosphere enough that eventually friction will decay the orbit into one that hits the Earth).
The orbit it starts into is the same one as the moon - quite circular and very far away from the Earth. You have two ways to get back to Earth from there. Either shed angular momentum and 'fall', or accelerate upwards or downwards to create an elliptical orbit that intersects Earth. The latter is typically more energy intensive.
Escaping the moon's gravity is the easy part. The moon is in a really high orbit. To get something from the moon to the Earth, you need to either lose enough of your angular momentum to fall (i.e. accelerate really hard back along the orbital path) or accelerate really hard towards the Earth so that you end up in a sharply elliptical orbit that intersects the surface. Both of these require a lot of energy and would also give the ground target a few days to prepare. You'd likely evacuate the target city and then send something up with a few nuclear weapons (might less mass than big rocks!) to eliminate the threat.
TL;DR: If it were easy for things from the moon to fall to Earth, the moon would have fallen down already.
I think Facebook dropped it at the same time they dropped the 'we won't harvest your data and sell everything you say to anyone with money' clause from the T&Cs.
Apple with the great choices right there! There is nothing you need firewire for on a freaking iPod... Transfering files works just fine with what was already available and common, USB, and for audio everyone used the minijack, so why was firewire necessary?
The iPod had a 5GB disk, quickly upgraded to 20GB. At the time, USB2 was nonexistent, so USB was limited to 11Mb/s, including protocol overhead (of which there was a lot). It would take an hour or two to fill the original iPod via USB 1.1, FireWire could fill the 20GB one in about 10-20 minutes. Once USB 2 was released, and widely adopted, Apple switched to that.
And USB did power too, so that wasn't an argument either
FireWire supported up to 40W of power. USB was limited to 2.5W (with many ports only providing 0.5W) at the time. Apple used a non-standard extension to get sufficient power over USB until it was finally standardised a couple of years ago.
If domain knowledge isn't needed, perhaps their role is just 'admin support' with a fancy name.
That's what a lot of management positions are. Their job is to ensure that the people working for them have the resources they need, that they understand externally imposed deadlines (or have a mechanism for communicating that some deadlines are unachievable before anything important depends on them), and ensuring that more senior managers don't get in the way of your team's way. The problem is the perception that anything with 'manager' in it is a senior position.
There's a bunch of research that shows for 'knowledge worker' applications, productivity peaks at 20 hours a week, plateaus until 40, and then drops off. This is particularly true for software development where it takes a few seconds to make a tired mistake and then a week to debug it. Above 80 hours a week, most people are actually doing a negative net amount of work: they're making so many mistakes that it eats more time fixing them than if they'd just taken the week off and accomplished nothing. If your fix for people working 80-hour weeks and introducing a load of bugs is to make them work 100-hour weeks to fix them, then you're on a path that leads to ever shipping a product.
Note that this is only true for sustained periods: brief bursts followed by time off can boost latency, but not improve throughput for workers.
WhatsApp at least had a business model. They were free for a year, then $1/year after that. The one year gave you time to lock yourself into the service and then the $1/year was so cheap that it didn't seem worth trying to switch to something else, but still a lot more than the costs of operating the service (they use Erlang on the server and their protocol is more efficient than Jabber. A single $20/month VPS running eJabberd will happily support well over 1000 clients, so their costs are probably well under 10/user/year for the server infrastructure and all of the development costs are amortised across a huge number of users).
Profitable companies have their cash cows and those are usually somewhat mature products
This also makes it very difficult to make an innovative change that disrupts that market. There's a story of some SGI engineers approaching their managers with a design for a cut-down version of SGI's graphics processor that they could make for a tenth the price of the workstation model and which would get almost half the performance. They said they could stick it on a PCI card and sell it to a few orders of magnitude more customers. Management said no, because it would cannibalise the workstation market: who'd buy an SGI workstation when you could get a commodity PC with a comparatively cheap expansion card and get similar ballpark performance? The engineers left and joined a new startup called nVidia. The managers were exactly right in one respect: Cheap GPUs did kill the proprietary graphics workstation market. They were wrong in assuming that if they didn't do something then no one else would.
Many of the successful large companies have, at least once, been willing to say 'well, most of our profit comes from here, but that's a market that someone is going to disrupt soon, we'd better do it before the competition' and launch a product that kills one of their revenue streams. IBM did this accidentally with the PC. Apple did this with the iPhone (remember when a huge chunk of their revenue came from the iPod? Now who would buy an iPod when any mobile phone works fine as a portable music player).
My grandfather worked at Belling and had the idea that you could make an oven that had a more even temperature by moving the air around. His manager killed the idea, saying that everyone knows that fans cool things and so they'd never be able to sell the idea of an oven with a fan inside. I wonder how many other people had the same idea before someone decided to try it and see if they could sell it.
Depends on where you want to put the adaptor. It's more convenient to keep them attached to the wire than to the phone. If you have some headphones, some speakers and maybe a car adaptor, then you probably want to have three of them and just leave them on the cables, rather than carry them with the phone and plug them into the cable when you use them. If they're $1-2, then that's an obvious thing to do. If they're $20, then they're probably more than the cost of the headphones for a lot of people.
Apple started off with the iPod doing FireWire. They moved to a 30-pin connector that could support analogue audio (later also composite video), FireWire, USB, serial (for simple button controllers that didn't want to have a full USB implementation), power, and a few other things. USB was not a replacement for this, so when they moved to a smaller connector they designed something that was. The rest of the smartphone industry never supported most of this functionality, so was happy with USB. Now USB-C supports pretty much everything that Lightning can do (in part because Apple has been involved in the standards process since the start) so they're moving to that.
The Pi Zero was intended to be a limited edition run to use up excess SoC stock. This was even announced publicly at the launch. I'm not sure where the vitriol comes from.
In the UK, there is now a legal cap of 4.5 times the annual salary for the loan amount, as part of the regulations brought in after the financial crash. 10 times really only makes sense if you are flipping houses and you and the bank are really confident that the market will keep going up, so you'll pay off the mortgage (plus interest) by selling the house at a higher rate. This works well until the market collapses...
The Pi Zero was cheap because Broadcom was inventory clearing and sold the Foundation the SoCs (which they'd stopped making) at a bargain-basement price. I don't know where they're getting the SoCs for this one, maybe they didn't use them all in the initial Pi Zero runs.
iPhones now come with eSIM (branded as Apple SIM), which alleviates a lot of the need for this: you can have an arbitrary number of software-defined SIMs installed and switch between them at will.
USB-C supports analogue audio with a passive adaptor, so if Apple supports this mode then iPhone users would be able to use old headphones with a generic (cheap) adaptor.
Huh? The iMac was the first mainstream computer to use USB for keyboard, mouse, and pretty much everything else and was the reason that most of the early USB peripherals had tasteless translucent plastic covers, so that they'd match the iMac. The most recent MacBooks and MacBook Pros have used USB-C for power and the MBP uses USB-C for everything. Apple and Google were both very active in the standardisation process for the connector.
What are you talking about? It's not middle management's decision about where to base their company and operations; that comes straight from senior management.
It's generally middle management's decision whether to hire people who will work remotely, whether to hire full-time employees or consultants, and so on.
How so? If you're an on-site consultant, you have to pay the living costs in that area, unless you're living in your car or something. If you're talking about being a remote consultant, then sure that works out great but how many people are able to get a gig like that?
I found no shortage of companies willing to have me work remotely, even back when I was starting out and had little reputation. I almost never worked for someone closer than 3 time zones and often for people 6+ time zones away (in both directions). I was cheaper than anyone living in SV, about the same price as people in the mid-west, and a lot more expensive than people in Russia, India, and China (I had a few contracts doing design work that would then be implemented by cheaper teams because of this).
Concussion covers a multitude of injuries. I've had a few, the worst when I was a child and decided to swing from some scaffolding that turned out to be less stable than I thought. I fell backwards and hit the back of my head on the corner of a doorstep (the concrete - the softer wooden step hadn't been installed yet). I spent the night in hospital, but was fine the following day. In the more mild instances, I've had a brief response check at the time and otherwise continued (though with a splitting headache).
A concussion just means that your head has been hit hard enough that your brain bounces off your skull. That can be fatal, or can be something that you shake off immediately, depending on the amount of force and the angle (and, presumably, how bouncy your brain is).
What about if you use that baseball bat to hit a baseball in a park, knowing that people are nearby, and are it hits one of those people and causes concussion. Your intention was to play baseball near some people, but you accidentally injured one. I suspect you'd get a milder sentence.
As long as populations increase and jobs are available the demand will continue to push prices up.
That's two conditions that could cause a pop. Number one: companies realise that there's a big advertising bubble and little ROI from online advertising. Companies like Google, Facebook, and so on that depend heavily on advertising revenue see a massive drop in customers and have to aggressively start trimming workforce. Sudden drop in bay area jobs and people have to pack up and move to somewhere where they can get a job and afford to live.
Number two: cost of living reaches a point where it's cheaper to open a new office somewhere cheaper than to expand you SV presence. Jobs don't leave the area, but new jobs appear elsewhere instead. Gradually the exciting tech developments move so that management also moves to the other areas and eventually the SV office becomes the satellite office where people who retire or leave aren't replaced.
Why is this a troll, he's exactly right. Significantly raising the median income has the effects that the grandparent is complaining about, but raising the minimum wage typically doesn't do that much. It does increase the costs of anything labour intensive, but we're already living in a world where the vast majority of things where labour costs are a significant fraction of the total price are luxury goods and services.
Of course, if you're willing to have employees that work remotely, then your talent pool is the entire world rather than one small geographical area. And somewhere like the Bay Area without the ability to hire remote workers also locks you out of a lot of talent: i.e. all of the ones able to do basic arithmetic and realise that they won't have any financial security if they move to the Bay Area and work for a company that has a 50+% chance of not existing in a year's time (i.e. any startup).
Slashdot Mirror
Remember this was when electricity was primarily for lighting and many people had has fridges and ovens and no washing machine. If you're hot, you use a fan, so everyone knew that fans were for cooling (air conditioning wasn't really a thing). His manager didn't think that it would be possible to persuade people that fans just moved air, they didn't cool it.
The Earth will take it in the same way that it took the moon - it will enter Earth orbit. Starting from a lunar orbit, you need quite a lot of energy to move it into an orbit that intersects the Earth (or even intersects the atmosphere enough that eventually friction will decay the orbit into one that hits the Earth).
The orbit it starts into is the same one as the moon - quite circular and very far away from the Earth. You have two ways to get back to Earth from there. Either shed angular momentum and 'fall', or accelerate upwards or downwards to create an elliptical orbit that intersects Earth. The latter is typically more energy intensive.
Escaping the moon's gravity is the easy part. The moon is in a really high orbit. To get something from the moon to the Earth, you need to either lose enough of your angular momentum to fall (i.e. accelerate really hard back along the orbital path) or accelerate really hard towards the Earth so that you end up in a sharply elliptical orbit that intersects the surface. Both of these require a lot of energy and would also give the ground target a few days to prepare. You'd likely evacuate the target city and then send something up with a few nuclear weapons (might less mass than big rocks!) to eliminate the threat.
TL;DR: If it were easy for things from the moon to fall to Earth, the moon would have fallen down already.
I think Facebook dropped it at the same time they dropped the 'we won't harvest your data and sell everything you say to anyone with money' clause from the T&Cs.
Apple with the great choices right there! There is nothing you need firewire for on a freaking iPod... Transfering files works just fine with what was already available and common, USB, and for audio everyone used the minijack, so why was firewire necessary?
The iPod had a 5GB disk, quickly upgraded to 20GB. At the time, USB2 was nonexistent, so USB was limited to 11Mb/s, including protocol overhead (of which there was a lot). It would take an hour or two to fill the original iPod via USB 1.1, FireWire could fill the 20GB one in about 10-20 minutes. Once USB 2 was released, and widely adopted, Apple switched to that.
And USB did power too, so that wasn't an argument either
FireWire supported up to 40W of power. USB was limited to 2.5W (with many ports only providing 0.5W) at the time. Apple used a non-standard extension to get sufficient power over USB until it was finally standardised a couple of years ago.
If domain knowledge isn't needed, perhaps their role is just 'admin support' with a fancy name.
That's what a lot of management positions are. Their job is to ensure that the people working for them have the resources they need, that they understand externally imposed deadlines (or have a mechanism for communicating that some deadlines are unachievable before anything important depends on them), and ensuring that more senior managers don't get in the way of your team's way. The problem is the perception that anything with 'manager' in it is a senior position.
There's a bunch of research that shows for 'knowledge worker' applications, productivity peaks at 20 hours a week, plateaus until 40, and then drops off. This is particularly true for software development where it takes a few seconds to make a tired mistake and then a week to debug it. Above 80 hours a week, most people are actually doing a negative net amount of work: they're making so many mistakes that it eats more time fixing them than if they'd just taken the week off and accomplished nothing. If your fix for people working 80-hour weeks and introducing a load of bugs is to make them work 100-hour weeks to fix them, then you're on a path that leads to ever shipping a product.
Note that this is only true for sustained periods: brief bursts followed by time off can boost latency, but not improve throughput for workers.
WhatsApp at least had a business model. They were free for a year, then $1/year after that. The one year gave you time to lock yourself into the service and then the $1/year was so cheap that it didn't seem worth trying to switch to something else, but still a lot more than the costs of operating the service (they use Erlang on the server and their protocol is more efficient than Jabber. A single $20/month VPS running eJabberd will happily support well over 1000 clients, so their costs are probably well under 10/user/year for the server infrastructure and all of the development costs are amortised across a huge number of users).
Profitable companies have their cash cows and those are usually somewhat mature products
This also makes it very difficult to make an innovative change that disrupts that market. There's a story of some SGI engineers approaching their managers with a design for a cut-down version of SGI's graphics processor that they could make for a tenth the price of the workstation model and which would get almost half the performance. They said they could stick it on a PCI card and sell it to a few orders of magnitude more customers. Management said no, because it would cannibalise the workstation market: who'd buy an SGI workstation when you could get a commodity PC with a comparatively cheap expansion card and get similar ballpark performance? The engineers left and joined a new startup called nVidia. The managers were exactly right in one respect: Cheap GPUs did kill the proprietary graphics workstation market. They were wrong in assuming that if they didn't do something then no one else would.
Many of the successful large companies have, at least once, been willing to say 'well, most of our profit comes from here, but that's a market that someone is going to disrupt soon, we'd better do it before the competition' and launch a product that kills one of their revenue streams. IBM did this accidentally with the PC. Apple did this with the iPhone (remember when a huge chunk of their revenue came from the iPod? Now who would buy an iPod when any mobile phone works fine as a portable music player).
My grandfather worked at Belling and had the idea that you could make an oven that had a more even temperature by moving the air around. His manager killed the idea, saying that everyone knows that fans cool things and so they'd never be able to sell the idea of an oven with a fan inside. I wonder how many other people had the same idea before someone decided to try it and see if they could sell it.
Depends on where you want to put the adaptor. It's more convenient to keep them attached to the wire than to the phone. If you have some headphones, some speakers and maybe a car adaptor, then you probably want to have three of them and just leave them on the cables, rather than carry them with the phone and plug them into the cable when you use them. If they're $1-2, then that's an obvious thing to do. If they're $20, then they're probably more than the cost of the headphones for a lot of people.
Apple started off with the iPod doing FireWire. They moved to a 30-pin connector that could support analogue audio (later also composite video), FireWire, USB, serial (for simple button controllers that didn't want to have a full USB implementation), power, and a few other things. USB was not a replacement for this, so when they moved to a smaller connector they designed something that was. The rest of the smartphone industry never supported most of this functionality, so was happy with USB. Now USB-C supports pretty much everything that Lightning can do (in part because Apple has been involved in the standards process since the start) so they're moving to that.
The Pi Zero was intended to be a limited edition run to use up excess SoC stock. This was even announced publicly at the launch. I'm not sure where the vitriol comes from.
In the UK, there is now a legal cap of 4.5 times the annual salary for the loan amount, as part of the regulations brought in after the financial crash. 10 times really only makes sense if you are flipping houses and you and the bank are really confident that the market will keep going up, so you'll pay off the mortgage (plus interest) by selling the house at a higher rate. This works well until the market collapses...
The Pi Zero was cheap because Broadcom was inventory clearing and sold the Foundation the SoCs (which they'd stopped making) at a bargain-basement price. I don't know where they're getting the SoCs for this one, maybe they didn't use them all in the initial Pi Zero runs.
3 - Dual SIM capability
iPhones now come with eSIM (branded as Apple SIM), which alleviates a lot of the need for this: you can have an arbitrary number of software-defined SIMs installed and switch between them at will.
USB-C supports analogue audio with a passive adaptor, so if Apple supports this mode then iPhone users would be able to use old headphones with a generic (cheap) adaptor.
Huh? The iMac was the first mainstream computer to use USB for keyboard, mouse, and pretty much everything else and was the reason that most of the early USB peripherals had tasteless translucent plastic covers, so that they'd match the iMac. The most recent MacBooks and MacBook Pros have used USB-C for power and the MBP uses USB-C for everything. Apple and Google were both very active in the standardisation process for the connector.
What are you talking about? It's not middle management's decision about where to base their company and operations; that comes straight from senior management.
It's generally middle management's decision whether to hire people who will work remotely, whether to hire full-time employees or consultants, and so on.
How so? If you're an on-site consultant, you have to pay the living costs in that area, unless you're living in your car or something. If you're talking about being a remote consultant, then sure that works out great but how many people are able to get a gig like that?
I found no shortage of companies willing to have me work remotely, even back when I was starting out and had little reputation. I almost never worked for someone closer than 3 time zones and often for people 6+ time zones away (in both directions). I was cheaper than anyone living in SV, about the same price as people in the mid-west, and a lot more expensive than people in Russia, India, and China (I had a few contracts doing design work that would then be implemented by cheaper teams because of this).
Concussion covers a multitude of injuries. I've had a few, the worst when I was a child and decided to swing from some scaffolding that turned out to be less stable than I thought. I fell backwards and hit the back of my head on the corner of a doorstep (the concrete - the softer wooden step hadn't been installed yet). I spent the night in hospital, but was fine the following day. In the more mild instances, I've had a brief response check at the time and otherwise continued (though with a splitting headache).
A concussion just means that your head has been hit hard enough that your brain bounces off your skull. That can be fatal, or can be something that you shake off immediately, depending on the amount of force and the angle (and, presumably, how bouncy your brain is).
What about if you use that baseball bat to hit a baseball in a park, knowing that people are nearby, and are it hits one of those people and causes concussion. Your intention was to play baseball near some people, but you accidentally injured one. I suspect you'd get a milder sentence.
As long as populations increase and jobs are available the demand will continue to push prices up.
That's two conditions that could cause a pop. Number one: companies realise that there's a big advertising bubble and little ROI from online advertising. Companies like Google, Facebook, and so on that depend heavily on advertising revenue see a massive drop in customers and have to aggressively start trimming workforce. Sudden drop in bay area jobs and people have to pack up and move to somewhere where they can get a job and afford to live.
Number two: cost of living reaches a point where it's cheaper to open a new office somewhere cheaper than to expand you SV presence. Jobs don't leave the area, but new jobs appear elsewhere instead. Gradually the exciting tech developments move so that management also moves to the other areas and eventually the SV office becomes the satellite office where people who retire or leave aren't replaced.
Why is this a troll, he's exactly right. Significantly raising the median income has the effects that the grandparent is complaining about, but raising the minimum wage typically doesn't do that much. It does increase the costs of anything labour intensive, but we're already living in a world where the vast majority of things where labour costs are a significant fraction of the total price are luxury goods and services.
Of course, if you're willing to have employees that work remotely, then your talent pool is the entire world rather than one small geographical area. And somewhere like the Bay Area without the ability to hire remote workers also locks you out of a lot of talent: i.e. all of the ones able to do basic arithmetic and realise that they won't have any financial security if they move to the Bay Area and work for a company that has a 50+% chance of not existing in a year's time (i.e. any startup).