Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

No way this isn’t struck down. It’s got to just be a political signaling play.

When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.

There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.

If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.

It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.

There’s a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.

Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.

This Wired article is an interesting read, well worth the time.

I wish we could see into the head of Stockton Rush a little bit more. The job of all entrepreneurs is to a large degree knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, as well as figuring out which rules you can break. Usually the lives of passengers and yourself is not on the line, though and that’s why so many of the highly competent engineers left his team.

A lot of his decision making seemed money driven. He got quotations for testing services but declined because of the cost. Salvaging the old titanium rings from the old busted hull to use on the new hull was a risky choice but new ones were surely very expensive. Perhaps a much larger budget would have led to a more committed team of experts and the resources to test things to a higher degree of confidence.

As this article points out, OceanGate just never came up with a design that was good enough for the job at hand.

But what can you say. The ocean floor is littered with countless dreams.

Of all the billionaires who do exist Bill and Melinda would probably agree with you. Bill has been pretty clear that he always played the game to win but he’s also stated he intends to give it all away and he’s openly recruiting other billionaires to give it all away as well.

I suppose evil billionaires could give it away to make the world a worse plCe, say by developing something like sharks with lasers on their heads, But again in these guys case they’re giving it away to help eliminate malaria around the world.

If all billionaires were like Bill and the Melinda I suppose the world would be a significantly better place.

These old stodgy dudes have two things going for them that young guys don’t (yet) have - a lifetime of building a support network of donors and mastery at playing “the game”.

They should retire at 60 and pass along their donors and skills to a few proteges, but recently they cling until the very last breath.

There must be bots trolling GitHub for API keys, crypto secret keys, and other such valuable data