When a company is in decline you can either wait until the company is completely broke and it can't misses payroll (or misses payments on its loans), or it can hit the big red button and get bought out by a company like Broadcom or Bending Spoons that cuts costs and sucks the marrow from the bones. While it sucks for the company to die like that, it's better than the alternative and nobody should have been caught off-guard. Unless you were specifically paid a retention bonus to see the transaction through, your resume should have been updated the day you heard about the transaction.

Private equity is different because private equity intends to on-sell the company within five years (they get five year loans, and refinancing will be hard after PE has damaged the company). PE comes in to a fundamentally sound company, makes bone-headed changes like cutting product quality, skims a bunch of cash off the top and then sells the company. Completely different from a grim reaper company like Broadcom or Bending Spoons.

The worst part of Workday is that they transmit your personal information to pretty much every other company out there. Ever notice that when you go to Docusign it knows all the e-mail addresses of your company employees? Have you ever gotten calls on your personal cell phone from vendors you have absolutely not given the number to? Have you noticed that you start getting very specific spam IMMEDIATELY after joining a new company and you haven't even updated your linkedin yet? The privacy violations are out of control and even when I've talked to the head of privacy at companies where this is happening, they admit they don't have control over it.

As far as managing HR files I don't give a shit one way or another. There's got to be some software to manage HR data and Workday works as well as anything else. But the way that they misuse the personal data of US employees is something that regulators need to crack down on hard.

Big endian support is dead. Power was always great for testing code, because you could get an old Mac off e-bay for $100 and make sure stuff worked right. Now the only Power architecture supported is little endian.

I mean, if you see computer programming as just a means to an end, that's fine, but if you see it as an art form (c.f., "The Art of Computer Programming," written by some guy) it's important to write portable code.

We have a non-truncatable currency system. An ideal coin system will have the following characteristics - that it is "countable" for any number, and that eliminating the smallest coin will always leave the remaining coin system countable. "Countable" means that that cashier's algorithm of pulling the largest coin less than the amount needed and then repeating with the next largest coin will produce the optimum number of coins. For example, with our current system, if you need to make 42 cents, you do a quarter (leaving 17 cents), then a dime, (leaving 7 cents), then a nickel and then two pennies. Our current system is only truncatable for the penny. If you only consider coin amounts which are multiples of 5 (since other ones become impossible after getting rid of the penny), our system minus the penny is clearly countable.

The problem is, consider getting rid of the nickel. Now try to make 30 cents. You pull a quarter, leaving 5 cents, oh shit you made a mistake. Back up, you should have done three dimes.

Microsoft deemed it such an important project that they gave it an arbitrary trademark. For the most part Microsoft doesn't do arbitrary or fanciful trademarks (they do descriptive marks like "Visual Basic"), it's just part of their brand strategy. The name itself was come up with by brand consultants, who are basically one category of worker that has been almost completely supplanted by chat GPT and no I am not kidding. The company says what they want the brand name to evoke, a long list of potential names is brainstormed (or chat GPT created), culled, checked for trademark issues then presented to management.

Steve Jobs always called software "apps." There's video from the 1990s of him using that awful word when talking about Mac software.

DOS 3.3 had a maximum partition size of 32MB. If you had an older computer which had a small hard drive or no hard drive, ok but even the IBM AT released in 1984 had a 20 megabyte hard drive. DOS 4.01 was sorely needed when it came out, though if you already had a DOS 3.3 install there was no reason to upgrade to 4.01.

Though I am shocked that they open sourced 4.00 which was notoriously buggy. 4.01 was the release that quickly followed that everyone had. MS-DOS 5 was marketed as an upgrade for existing users, it included DOSKEY (which included command line history), EDIT, QBASIC and a lot of other stuff that made DOS less awful to use. Think MS-DOS 5.0 also introduced online help for the various commands.

There are way more sources of topical humor these days. Same reason late night TV has pretty much died. It used to be that if you were working at a factory in Iowa, if you wanted topical yuk-yuks you had David Letterman and theonion.com. These days, as soon as a news story hits, it's posted on Reddit and the comment section immediately produces every possible joke and then uses crowd-powered intelligence to upvote the best jokes. That's on top of Tiktok and Youtube creators, who often have staffs of their own.

Plus with respect to The Onion specifically, nobody reads actual newspapers anymore, or magazines, so a medium that gets its humor from aping the styles of print doesn't hit hard. I wanted to buy a copy of The New Yorker the other day and I had to check ... a large grocery store (which had the sign and the rack for Magazines, but which had been stocked with children's books), Target (which had some books but only a few magazines, mainly celebrity gossip), a bookstore (whose clerk informed me that their lease was up in 3 weeks and they had stopped bringing in magazines), and finally a SECOND bookstore. Frankly I'm amazed that any print publication can remain in business.