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2 episodes with WordStar
2 episodes with WordStar
3 episodes with WordStar
2 episodes with WordStar
2 episodes with WordStar
2 episodes with WordStar
2 episodes with WordStar
Commodore buys Amiga Jack Tramiel declares war on competition Nintendo announces US NES launch plans These stories and many more on this episode of the VGNRTM! This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in August 1984. As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events. Alex Smith of They Create Worlds is our cohost. Check out his podcast here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/ and order his book here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/book Get us on your mobile device: Android: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on Mastodon @videogamenewsroomtimemachine@oldbytes.space Or twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: If you don't see all the links, find them here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121143199 7 Minutes in Heaven: Sabrewulf Video Version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121098237 https://www.mobygames.com/game/14732/sabre-wulf/ Corrections: July 1984 Ep - https://www.patreon.com/posts/july-1994-116535754 Ethan's fine site The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Pong https://gamehistory.org/atari-2600-tarzan/ https://www.giantbomb.com/photon-the-ultimate-game-on-planet-earth/3030-39589/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron https://archive.org/details/book_video_games/page/n77/mode/2up 1974: Atari sells Japanese manufacturing to Namco https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-24.pdf pg. 49 Basketball a hit Cashbox august 3 1974 https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-04.pdf pg. 43 Clean Sweep 1 player https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-10.pdf pg. 50 Track 10 adds oil slick https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-17.pdf pg. 46 https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/2351 Gene Lipken joins Atari https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-24.pdf pg. 49 Medal Games are spreading Game Machine August 10, 1974 pg. 7 Cali SC rules in favor of pinball Cashbox Aug 10 1974 https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-10.pdf pg. 48 Coinop on the Price is Right Cashbox august 3 1974 https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-04.pdf pg. 43 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_Is_Right 13 year olds simulate life on computer Two Youths Turn Computers on to 'Life', Hardford Courant, 11 Aug 1974, Page 3 http://www.rearden.com/people.php 1984: Silicon Valley proves resilient Gloom in the Valley . . . But a Silver Lining, Too, U.S. News & World Report, August 20, 1984, Section: Pg. 38, Byline: By JOANNE DAVIDSON Warner second quarter losses are massive Warner Communications reports huge loss, United Press International, August 2, 1984, Thursday, BC cycle Jack slashes prices Atari's Tramiel Gets Tough With Price Cuts, ADWEEK, August 13, 1984, Eastern Edition,Byline: By Gail Belsky Computer Entertainer Vol. 3 Number 5 pg. 1 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater Commodore to buy Amiga Commodore Deal With Amiga Set,The New York Times, August 17, 1984, Friday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 3, Column 6; Financial Desk Atari sues Amiga ATARI HEAD SUES ALLY THAT DEFECTED TO RIVAL, The New York Times, August 21, 1984, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 1; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER https://www.tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/1984/0822.html Atari to introduce 16 and 32 bit systems Atari To Sell More-Powerful Computers, The Associated Press, August 27, 1984, Monday, AM cycle, Section: Business News, Byline: By STEVE WILSTEIN, Jack declares war on competition Computer Entertainer Vol. 3 Number 5 pg. 1 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater Jack can't collect Tramiel Reported Seeking $50 Million in Lieu of Atari Debts, The Associated Press, August 31, 1984, Friday, PM cycle, Section: Business News Imagine Megagames up for auction https://archive.org/details/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_034_1984-08_EMAP_Publishing_GB/page/n23/mode/2up Coleco unveils new marketing ploy Coleco will offer scholarships to some computer purchasers, United Press International, August 22, 1984, Wednesday, BC cycle, Section: Financial Advertising;At Coleco, The Adam Is Reborn, The New York Times, August 13, 1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 8, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By Pamela G. Hollie https://youtu.be/tklBAzg_cgw?si=rDW-RNgtAqd_7QHl VCRs and Action Figures muscle video games out of retail The Video Revolution, Newsweek, August 6, 1984 UNITED STATES EDITION, Section: BUSINESS; Pg. 50 Media Room, The Associated Press, August 12, 1984, Sunday, BC cycle Video killed the Video Game Star FROM PAC-MAN TO GI JOE, Forbes, August 13, 1984, Section: MONEY AND INVESTMENTS; The Columnists; Psychology & Investing; Pg. 138, Byline: By Srully Blotnick; Toys sales boom, United Press International, August 21, 1984, Tuesday, BC cycle, Section: Financial Playthings, August 1984. Video Game tie-ins come of age Allan Carr keeps bubbling to the top in a heady world, The San Diego Union-Tribune,August 12, 1984 Sunday, Section: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. E-2, Byline: David Elliott, Movie Critic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak_%26_Dagger_%28video_game%29 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087065/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088395/?ref_=nm_flmg_knf_t_4 ACTIVISION; To develop and market software based on Ghostbusters motion picture, Business Wire, August 28, 1984, Tuesday Gregory Fischbach Part 1 - Activision - Acclaim - https://www.patreon.com/posts/46578120 https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-09/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.mobygames.com/company/6665/dktronics/ https://archive.org/details/OnlineTodayV03N08/page/n9/mode/2up https://www.mobygames.com/game/40828/paul-mccartneys-give-my-regards-to-broad-street/ Jay Balakrishnan - HESWare, Radical, Dynamics, Solid State Software - https://www.patreon.com/posts/jay-balakrishnan-103071267 Nintendo sees coinop sales plummet Nintendo anticipates greater sales, profit, The Japan Economic Journal, August 28, 1984, Section: SECURITIES; Pg. 16 Atari sells distributorship Replay, August 1984, pg. 3 Coin-op computers a bust Campus coin-op computers crash; Good product ahead of its time, United Press International, August 29, 1984, Wednesday, BC cycle, Section: Financial, Byline: By J.B. BLOSSER 3rd parties scrap releases Computer Entertainer Vol. 3 Number 5 pg. 11 IBM tries to save the PCJr I.B.M. RAISES DIVIDEND, OFFERS A FREE KEYBOARD, The New York Times, August 1, 1984, Wednesday, Late City , Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 1; Financial Desk, Byline: By STUART DIAMOND https://www.ebay.com/itm/335702730148 https://archive.org/details/pcjr-magazine-1984-volume-1/PCjr%20Magazine%20-%20198410%20-%20Volume%201%20Number%209/page/58/mode/2up?view=theater&q=512 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue59/review_lotus_123.php MICROPRO; Greets enhanced PCjr with WordStar, Business Wire, August 13, 1984, Monday IBM announces AT I.B.M.'S. NEW POWERHOUSE A T ;TWICE AS FAST AS OLD PC'S, The New York Times, August 15, 1984, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n9/mode/2up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M24 SHORTAGE OF SEMICONDUCTORS EASES, The New York Times, August 27, 1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n11/mode/2up IBM and EC reach agreement WEEK IN BUSINESS;BEST WEEK EVER ON WALL STREET, The New York Times, August 5, 1984, Sunday, Late City , Final Edition, Section: Section 3; Page 14, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By Nathaniel C. Nash IBM announces new business strategy for Europe I.B.M.'S NEW ROLE IN EUROPE, The New York Times, August 13, 1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 4; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER MSX to miss XMAS https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-02/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-02/page/n2/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-09/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theater Amstrad pricing very competitive https://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-034/page/n125/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-034/page/n119/mode/1up?view=theater Sinclair launches Speccy bundle https://archive.org/details/home-computer-weekly-magazine-new/HomeComputerWeekly-074/ https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-02/mode/1up?view=theater https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/20540/ZX-Spectrum/Spectrum_Six_Pack_ZX-Spectrum_48K_version Sinclair plans stock flotation https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-09/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater Sinclair wants to get into chip manufacturing https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-16/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-23/page/n2/mode/1up?view=theater Sinclair earnings miss expectations https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-23/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater Dragon goes to Espana! Spanish take over failed Dragon computer maker, Financial Times (London,England), August 15, 1984, Wednesday, Section: SECTION I; Pg. 12, Byline: BY CHARLES BATCHELOR IN LONDON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64#Product_history https://www.amazon.es/Cinco-Duros-HISTORIA-VIDEOJUEGO-ESPA%C3%91A/dp/8410031469 https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episode-755-the-phone-at-the-end-of-the-world Macintosh software still scarce https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n243/mode/2up Michael Dornbrook Part 1 - Infocom - https://www.patreon.com/posts/44335732 MIDI comes to micros https://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-034/page/n125/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-16/mode/2up Pioneer launchees interactive laser disc https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_1984-08/page/n11/mode/2up Byte profiles 6502 successor https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n129/mode/2up Great space race budget breaks records https://archive.org/details/home-computer-weekly-magazine-new/HomeComputerWeekly-077/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/190868/the-great-space-race/ Lord British given credit for Questron https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_4.4/page/n30/mode/1up?view=theater Joel Billings - SSI - https://www.patreon.com/posts/36827469 US games flood UK https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-23/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Gold Virgin goes for quality https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/mode/1up?view=theater Domark launches with big contest https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/page/n26/mode/1up?view=theater Sexy Games get activists in a tissy https://archive.org/details/home-computer-weekly-magazine-new/HomeComputerWeekly-076/mode/2up Computer adoption in schools still slow Stumbling into the computer age, Forbes, August 13, 1984, Section: INDUSTRIES; Pg. 35, Byline: By Kathleen R. Wiegner Computers find their purpose Road Warrior' rides again, Computerworld, August 13, 1984, Section: EDITORIAL; LECHT ON SCIENCE; Pg. 47, Byline: By Charles P. Lecht NABU gets software subsidiary "Sets Up Software Subsidiary; WHEELER SAYS HE MISSES 'BULLY PULPIT' BUT ENJOYS PRIVATE INDUSTRY, Communications Daily, August 20, 1984, Monday, Section: Vol. 4, No. 162; Pg. 5" Tech support goes online Telephone hot lines for software problems, Financial Times (London,England), August 29, 1984, Wednesday, Section: SECTION I; Technology; Professional Personal Computing; Pg. 5, Byline: PHILIP MANCHESTER WH Smith profits surge on computer sales RESULTS DUE NEXT WEEK, Financial Times (London,England), August 18, 1984, Saturday, Section: SECTION I; UK Companies; Pg. 17 Radio Shack loses ground TANDY'S SHIFTING SALES STRATEGY, The New York Times, August 19, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section 3; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk, Length: 2350 words, Byline: By PETER W. BARNES Drug Store Chain sues Mattel Drug Chain Sues Mattel For Alleged Discrimination Against Retailer, The Associated Press, August 3, 1984, Friday, BC cycle, No Headline In Original, United Press International, August 3, 1984, Friday, BC cycle, Section: Financial, Length: 188 words, Dateline: SYRACUSE, N.Y. Data Age sues Mr. T HE PITIES THE FOOL, United Press International, August 20, 1984, Monday, BC cycle, Section: Domestic News, Byline: By FRANK SANELLO, United Press International Pirates go pro https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.olx.pt/d/anuncio/jogos-spectrum-verso-portuguesa-de-coleccionador-da-microbaite-etc-IDICESX.html TVs adapt to the new media landscape HOME VIDEO; TV SETS: NEW FUNCTIONS, NEW FORMS, The New York Times, August 12, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section 2; Page 24, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk, Byline: By HANS FANTEL Executives get high-tech The all-electronic Executive, Financial Times (London,England), August 4, 1984, Saturday, Section: SECTION I; The Information Revolution; Pg. 12, Byline: By Alan Cane Touch screen system used for tourists Touch computer for tourists boon to advertisers, promoters, United Press International, August 19, 1984, Sunday, BC cycle, Section: Financial, Byline: By JOHN J. SANKO Army introduces joystick controlled rocket Technology Today: Fiber-optic guided missiles -- ultimate video game, United Press International, August 20, 1984, Monday, BC cycle, Section: Domestic News, Byline: By WILLIAM HARWOOD, Gaming Jesus shall bare the mark No Headline In Original, United Press International, August 9, 1984, Thursday, AM cycle, Section: Domestic News Compu-Cruise to set sail https://archive.org/details/HomeComputerMagazine_Vol4_03_1984_Aug/page/n25/mode/2up Recommended Links: The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Gaming Alexandria: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/ They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/ Retro Asylum: http://retroasylum.com/category/all-posts/ Retro Game Squad: http://retrogamesquad.libsyn.com/ Playthrough Podcast: https://playthroughpod.com/ Retromags.com: https://www.retromags.com/ Games That Weren't - https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/ Sound Effects by Ethan Johnson of History of How We Play. Copyright Karl Kuras
Lords: * John * Erica Topics: * Golden owl pre-post-mortem * https://goldenowlhunt.com/ * Twin update: one year later * Notepad has support for alternative line endings now * Goodnight Moon (And/or Goodnight Dune?) * https://www.firstcry.com/intelli/articles/goodnight-moon-nursery-rhyme/ Microtopics: * The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord. * What goes on the lords-only channel. * The first rule of being a lord. * It's the end of the show somewhere in the world. * Frog Fractions Royalty. * Topic Lords Con East. * Choosing pairs of lords. * What lords have been on the show least recently. * Mystery with a B. * Responsibility to the lords. * ARG goings-on. * Maze of Games. * Rubber hose ARG solving * Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck. * The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France. * The History of the Owl Stuff. * Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl. * The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved. * It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. * Going and burying a duck * Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back. * Looking through the Heart of France. * Another cursed treasure hunt in the can. * Ancient alternatives to zip files. * Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly. * Telling twins apart using phrenology. * Twin identification strategies. * Let me see your flecks! * Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons. * Platypodes. * Jock twin/nerd twin. * Having children as a way to practice solving problems together. * Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.) * Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night. * Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol. * How to teach babies to sleep. * Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it. * A good selection of kid-friendly music. * A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes. * How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed. * Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV. * Just show me the byte order marker! * Adding tabs to Notepad. * Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar. * What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect. * Loading CSV files into R. * Accidentally updating Excel. * The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems. * Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow. * Why JWZ is no longer rich. * Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line. * Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces. * How Unity handles upgrades and versioning. * The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon. * Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon. * When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died. * The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things. * The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre. * Goodnight Dune. * Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune. * Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died." * Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics. * Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques. * Floating in the No-Room.
Panelists: Paul Hagstrom (hosting) and Carrington Vanston Topic: 1978 In 1978, we got WordStar and LaserDisc. Not VisiCalc. Topic/Feedback links: Retro Computing News: Vintage Computer(-related) commercials: Retro Computing Gift Idea: Auction Picks: A2Stream file: Feedback/Discussion: Intro / Closing Song: Back to Oz by John XShow audio files hosted by CyberEars Listen/Download:
Jeremy Au explored the evolution of technology marketing and how marketers have adapted to communicate complex innovations effectively. He began by referencing sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke's 1974 “crazy” prediction about how their room-sized computers would eventually shrink to the size of briefcases and that people would eventually be able to work from anywhere in the world. Early software marketers like WordStar focused on explaining and promoting “groundbreaking” features, such as moving text blocks—capabilities that were previously unimaginable with typewriters. Jeremy emphasized that while technology continues to advance, the core human desires for status, security, and convenience remain unchanged. Companies like Apple, with products like the augmented reality Vision Pro and Apple Watch, and Dyson have mastered the art of blending functionality with premium status to appeal to early adopters and affluent consumers. He concluded by noting that despite the shifting landscape of technology -from floppy disks to cryptocurrency and AI companions - the fundamental marketing strategy endures: simplify the message and prioritize solving immediate consumer needs, a timeless approach evident in both historic and modern claims of achieving 10x disruptive improvements vs. the pain of the status quo. Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/arthur-clarke-1974-prediction Nonton, dengar atau baca wawasan lengkapnya di https://www.bravesea.com/blog/arthur-clarke-1974-prediction-id 观看、收听或阅读全文，请访问 https://www.bravesea.com/blog/arthur-clarke-1974-prediction-cn Xem, nghe hoặc đọc toàn bộ thông tin chi tiết tại https://www.bravesea.com/blog/arthur-clarke-1974-prediction-vn Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea English: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Bahasa Indonesia: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Chinese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Vietnamese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Learn more about Nika.eco! Reach out to info@nika.eco if you are a geospatial data scientist or climate researcher who is interested to partner on a pilot or research opportunities
For this podcast, I'm joined by Sven Johannsen, Frank McPherson, & Don Sorcinelli. We discussed: MobileViews 522 carpool techie-oke podcast recorded using wireless lavalier microphones Insta360 Studio gained AI reframing/editing feature (see sample here) WordStar 7.0 rereleased (free) by author Robert J. Sawyer Google deprecating Manifest V2 for Google Chrome. Impact on ad-blockers Made by Google 2024 product announcements
Wordstar still exists, Google Pixel, AI movies? A little mini?
Nagyon súlyos nulladik napi hiba van az Android magjában Android Portál 2024-08-08 08:38:35 Mobiltech Android Linux Az Android biztonsági frissítései ebben a hónapban 46 sebezhetőséget javítanak, beleértve egy magas súlyosságú távoli kódfuttatási (RCE) hibát, amelyet célzott támadásokban kihasználtak. A nulladik napi sebezhetőséget CVE-2024-36971 néven követik nyomon, és egy használat utáni felszabadítási (UAF) gyengeség a Linux kernel hálózati útvonalkezelésébe Végünk, ha az Atlanti-óceán meridián körforgása összeomlik PlanetZ 2024-08-08 07:49:39 Tudomány Az új kutatások szerint az AMOC 2037 és 2064 között összeomolhat. Az AMOC alapvető fontosságú az északi félteke éghajlatának szabályozásában. Összeomlása komoly éghajlati és ökológiai következményekkel járna világszerte. Az összeomlás elkerülése érdekében kulcsfontosságú az üvegházhatású gázok kibocsátásának csökkentése és a fenntartható technológi Ingyenes lett a WordStar 7, a DOS legnépszerűbb szövegszerkesztője ITBusiness 2024-08-08 06:16:14 Mobiltech Kanada Windows A WordPerfect előtt a WordStar volt a legnépszerűbb szövegszerkesztő. A DOS rendszerre készült utolsó verzió egy rajongó, Robert J. Sawyer által azonban újra elérhetővé vált. Sawyer, a kanadai sci-fi író a WordStar 7.0d verziót csomagolta össze néhány hasznos eszközzel, beleértve a modern Windows rendszeren futtatható DOS emulátorokat, így most bár Hatalmas kandelábert terveznek a Holdra Rakéta 2024-08-08 08:36:05 Tudomány Mesébe illő terv, de a százméteres utcalámpa nem csak megvilágítaná a holdi éjszakát, de számtalan egyéb funkciója is lenne. Sziget Fesztivál: Tatabánya méretű hálózati kapacitással készül a Yettel a zökkenőmentes mobilozásra Digital Hungary 2024-08-08 11:13:00 Mobiltech Fesztiválok Tatabánya Sziget Fesztivál Yettel Szerdán elkezdődött a Sziget Fesztivál, Európa egyik legnagyobb könnyűzenei és kulturális rendezvénye, amely évente több százezer látogatót vonz. Az ilyen nagy horderejű események a mobilhálózat erősítését is igénylik, hogy az képes legyen kiszolgálni a hirtelen megnövekedett használatot a területen. Hogyan készül egy mobilszolgáltató egy időszakos A vállalati munkaállomások többségén megragadt a Windows 10 Bitport 2024-08-08 09:43:00 Infotech Windows Már csak 470 napjuk marad a cégeknek, hogy Windows 11-re váltsanak, mert 2025. október 14-én megszűnik az operációs rendszer támogatása. Pumped Gabo metaverzumos kísérlete nagy ígéretekkel indult, de végül kirántotta a szőnyeget a befektetők alól Telex 2024-08-08 05:01:20 Tudomány Befektető Pumped Gabo Előzetesen Magyarország legelső igazán nagyszabású NFT-projektjeként hivatkoztak a Pumped G-re, de a beígért dolgok egy része állítólag meg sem valósult, egy másik részük már nem elérhető, az alkotók pedig felszívódtak. Okosabb és drágább is lett a Google Chromecast utódja Player 2024-08-08 09:00:44 Infotech Generáció Google Böngésző Chrome A Google tévéokosító eszközének új generációja, a Chromecast utódjának tekinthető Streamer többet tud az elődjénél, és ennek meg is kérik az árát. A vártnál is nagyobb bukást lett a Humane AI Pin 24.hu 2024-08-08 13:58:04 Infotech Mesterséges intelligencia Már többet váltanak vissza, mint amennyit vásárolnak a Humane mesterséges intelligencia által vezérelt kitűzőjéből. A világ legősibb naptárát fedezhették fel Liner 2024-08-08 07:20:59 Tudomány A szakemberek azon a véleményen vannak, hogy a faragványok a világ legkorábbi, ún. luniszoláris naptárát alkotják. Humanoid robotpincér csapolt italokat egy amerikai stadionbárban okosipar.hu 2024-08-08 07:03:16 Infotech Cégvilág USA Mesterséges intelligencia Robot Stadion Texas Baseball A mesterséges intelligencia (AI) vezérelte szervizrobotokra specializálódott nevadai Richtech Robotics a napokban hivatalosan is bemutatta ADAM fantázianevet viselő vendéglátó robotját a Texas Rangers Major League Baseball stadionjában – írta a Robotics & Automation News. Az egyedülálló AI-képességekkel és finom, emberi mozgáshoz hasonló mozdulatok A kínaiak kifejlesztettek egy intelligens robotcápát Gyártástrend 2024-08-08 10:50:27 Tudomány Kína Robot Cápa Az öt méter hosszú, 350 kilogrammos robothal figyelemre méltó pontossággal tudja leutánozni egy valódi cápa mozgását. Hetente kétszer indítanak járatokat az űrbe a Virgin Galactic új űrrepülőgépével Rakéta 2024-08-08 12:00:13 Tudomány Közlekedés Világűr Űrállomás Unity Míg a VSS Unity-t körülbelül havonta egyszer tudták használni, addig a Delta-osztályú űrrepülőgépek már hetente többször is szállíthatnak utasokat az űrbe. A Virgin Galactic egy globális hálózat kiépítését tervezi a világ számos pontján található űrállomások bevonásával. A további adásainkat keresd a podcast.hirstart.hu oldalunkon.
Nagyon súlyos nulladik napi hiba van az Android magjában Android Portál 2024-08-08 08:38:35 Mobiltech Android Linux Az Android biztonsági frissítései ebben a hónapban 46 sebezhetőséget javítanak, beleértve egy magas súlyosságú távoli kódfuttatási (RCE) hibát, amelyet célzott támadásokban kihasználtak. A nulladik napi sebezhetőséget CVE-2024-36971 néven követik nyomon, és egy használat utáni felszabadítási (UAF) gyengeség a Linux kernel hálózati útvonalkezelésébe Végünk, ha az Atlanti-óceán meridián körforgása összeomlik PlanetZ 2024-08-08 07:49:39 Tudomány Az új kutatások szerint az AMOC 2037 és 2064 között összeomolhat. Az AMOC alapvető fontosságú az északi félteke éghajlatának szabályozásában. Összeomlása komoly éghajlati és ökológiai következményekkel járna világszerte. Az összeomlás elkerülése érdekében kulcsfontosságú az üvegházhatású gázok kibocsátásának csökkentése és a fenntartható technológi Ingyenes lett a WordStar 7, a DOS legnépszerűbb szövegszerkesztője ITBusiness 2024-08-08 06:16:14 Mobiltech Kanada Windows A WordPerfect előtt a WordStar volt a legnépszerűbb szövegszerkesztő. A DOS rendszerre készült utolsó verzió egy rajongó, Robert J. Sawyer által azonban újra elérhetővé vált. Sawyer, a kanadai sci-fi író a WordStar 7.0d verziót csomagolta össze néhány hasznos eszközzel, beleértve a modern Windows rendszeren futtatható DOS emulátorokat, így most bár Hatalmas kandelábert terveznek a Holdra Rakéta 2024-08-08 08:36:05 Tudomány Mesébe illő terv, de a százméteres utcalámpa nem csak megvilágítaná a holdi éjszakát, de számtalan egyéb funkciója is lenne. Sziget Fesztivál: Tatabánya méretű hálózati kapacitással készül a Yettel a zökkenőmentes mobilozásra Digital Hungary 2024-08-08 11:13:00 Mobiltech Fesztiválok Tatabánya Sziget Fesztivál Yettel Szerdán elkezdődött a Sziget Fesztivál, Európa egyik legnagyobb könnyűzenei és kulturális rendezvénye, amely évente több százezer látogatót vonz. Az ilyen nagy horderejű események a mobilhálózat erősítését is igénylik, hogy az képes legyen kiszolgálni a hirtelen megnövekedett használatot a területen. Hogyan készül egy mobilszolgáltató egy időszakos A vállalati munkaállomások többségén megragadt a Windows 10 Bitport 2024-08-08 09:43:00 Infotech Windows Már csak 470 napjuk marad a cégeknek, hogy Windows 11-re váltsanak, mert 2025. október 14-én megszűnik az operációs rendszer támogatása. Pumped Gabo metaverzumos kísérlete nagy ígéretekkel indult, de végül kirántotta a szőnyeget a befektetők alól Telex 2024-08-08 05:01:20 Tudomány Befektető Pumped Gabo Előzetesen Magyarország legelső igazán nagyszabású NFT-projektjeként hivatkoztak a Pumped G-re, de a beígért dolgok egy része állítólag meg sem valósult, egy másik részük már nem elérhető, az alkotók pedig felszívódtak. Okosabb és drágább is lett a Google Chromecast utódja Player 2024-08-08 09:00:44 Infotech Generáció Google Böngésző Chrome A Google tévéokosító eszközének új generációja, a Chromecast utódjának tekinthető Streamer többet tud az elődjénél, és ennek meg is kérik az árát. A vártnál is nagyobb bukást lett a Humane AI Pin 24.hu 2024-08-08 13:58:04 Infotech Mesterséges intelligencia Már többet váltanak vissza, mint amennyit vásárolnak a Humane mesterséges intelligencia által vezérelt kitűzőjéből. A világ legősibb naptárát fedezhették fel Liner 2024-08-08 07:20:59 Tudomány A szakemberek azon a véleményen vannak, hogy a faragványok a világ legkorábbi, ún. luniszoláris naptárát alkotják. Humanoid robotpincér csapolt italokat egy amerikai stadionbárban okosipar.hu 2024-08-08 07:03:16 Infotech Cégvilág USA Mesterséges intelligencia Robot Stadion Texas Baseball A mesterséges intelligencia (AI) vezérelte szervizrobotokra specializálódott nevadai Richtech Robotics a napokban hivatalosan is bemutatta ADAM fantázianevet viselő vendéglátó robotját a Texas Rangers Major League Baseball stadionjában – írta a Robotics & Automation News. Az egyedülálló AI-képességekkel és finom, emberi mozgáshoz hasonló mozdulatok A kínaiak kifejlesztettek egy intelligens robotcápát Gyártástrend 2024-08-08 10:50:27 Tudomány Kína Robot Cápa Az öt méter hosszú, 350 kilogrammos robothal figyelemre méltó pontossággal tudja leutánozni egy valódi cápa mozgását. Hetente kétszer indítanak járatokat az űrbe a Virgin Galactic új űrrepülőgépével Rakéta 2024-08-08 12:00:13 Tudomány Közlekedés Világűr Űrállomás Unity Míg a VSS Unity-t körülbelül havonta egyszer tudták használni, addig a Delta-osztályú űrrepülőgépek már hetente többször is szállíthatnak utasokat az űrbe. A Virgin Galactic egy globális hálózat kiépítését tervezi a világ számos pontján található űrállomások bevonásával. A további adásainkat keresd a podcast.hirstart.hu oldalunkon.
It's the last Windows Weekly in the TWiT Eastside Studio! The Week D mystery continues in this episode. And Windows Insider has had a relatively quiet week. Intel is in trouble, with stock price dropping over 25 percent! WordStar is back, but the big news here is the documentation archive. Also, Paul thinks the improved Reader mode in Firefox 129 is pretty sweet. Windows 11 Last week, Microsoft issued Week D update for 22H2/23H2 late Last week, Microsoft issued 24H2 build to the Release Preview channel but nothing for Week D. Paul speculated this would replace the Weed D update, head to stable in August Since then, Microsoft quietly issued Week D update for 24H2 one week late (on last day of July) Speculation was correct: These are all the same thing, with the same new features, most CFRs Microsoft's release schedule gets even more chaotic. It's been missing the Week D Tuesday release schedule more often than not in recent months BIG update to the Microsoft Store in Canary and Dev today Hardware Snapdragon X is a huge leap forward for the PC, but Apple/MacBook Air still have big advantages AMD's new chips are getting rave reviews Intel is on track for Lunar Lake in September Intel earnings crater, with layoffs, cost reductions Stock price drop second worst in corporate history Intel extends Core processor Gen 13/14 warranty by 2 years (PC bundles only) Core processor warranty is extended to retail sales Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 for Business available for preorder Microsoft 365 The new Outlook is now generally available and the Microsoft community celebrates in the streets Antitrust/Corporate Google found guilty of abusing its Search monopoly Big point: Google's revenue share deals with Apple, etc. Could this kill Mozilla? Microsoft and Bing come up over 500 times (!) in the ruling. Obsessed much? Apple would like to have its antitrust case dismissed. Good luck with that Context: The paradox of antitrust Thanks to Manifest V3, ad- and tracker- blocking in Chrome is going to get less effective Microsoft: We are STILL serious about security. No, really Arm revenues up 39 percent to $939 million Qualcomm up 11 precent to $9.4 billion Apple up 4.9 percent to 85.8 billion in revenues Amazon up 10 percent to $148 billion Xbox Microsoft promises over 50 playable games at Gamerscom this month in Germany, ahead of IFA Valorant is a free-to-play shooter now available on Xbox Series X|S Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, more comes to Xbox Game Pass Sony sold 2.4 million PS5s in the quarter, total at 61.7 million Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, total at 143.42 million Tips and Picks Tip of the week: You can experience WordStar for MS-DOS again App pick of the week: Web browser updates RunAs Radio this week: Optimizing Cloud Recovery Costs with Natalie Serebryakova Brown liquor pick of the week: Legent Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: 1password.com/windowsweekly
It's the last Windows Weekly in the TWiT Eastside Studio! The Week D mystery continues in this episode. And Windows Insider has had a relatively quiet week. Intel is in trouble, with stock price dropping over 25 percent! WordStar is back, but the big news here is the documentation archive. Also, Paul thinks the improved Reader mode in Firefox 129 is pretty sweet. Windows 11 Last week, Microsoft issued Week D update for 22H2/23H2 late Last week, Microsoft issued 24H2 build to the Release Preview channel but nothing for Week D. Paul speculated this would replace the Weed D update, head to stable in August Since then, Microsoft quietly issued Week D update for 24H2 one week late (on last day of July) Speculation was correct: These are all the same thing, with the same new features, most CFRs Microsoft's release schedule gets even more chaotic. It's been missing the Week D Tuesday release schedule more often than not in recent months BIG update to the Microsoft Store in Canary and Dev today Hardware Snapdragon X is a huge leap forward for the PC, but Apple/MacBook Air still have big advantages AMD's new chips are getting rave reviews Intel is on track for Lunar Lake in September Intel earnings crater, with layoffs, cost reductions Stock price drop second worst in corporate history Intel extends Core processor Gen 13/14 warranty by 2 years (PC bundles only) Core processor warranty is extended to retail sales Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 for Business available for preorder Microsoft 365 The new Outlook is now generally available and the Microsoft community celebrates in the streets Antitrust/Corporate Google found guilty of abusing its Search monopoly Big point: Google's revenue share deals with Apple, etc. Could this kill Mozilla? Microsoft and Bing come up over 500 times (!) in the ruling. Obsessed much? Apple would like to have its antitrust case dismissed. Good luck with that Context: The paradox of antitrust Thanks to Manifest V3, ad- and tracker- blocking in Chrome is going to get less effective Microsoft: We are STILL serious about security. No, really Arm revenues up 39 percent to $939 million Qualcomm up 11 precent to $9.4 billion Apple up 4.9 percent to 85.8 billion in revenues Amazon up 10 percent to $148 billion Xbox Microsoft promises over 50 playable games at Gamerscom this month in Germany, ahead of IFA Valorant is a free-to-play shooter now available on Xbox Series X|S Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, more comes to Xbox Game Pass Sony sold 2.4 million PS5s in the quarter, total at 61.7 million Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, total at 143.42 million Tips and Picks Tip of the week: You can experience WordStar for MS-DOS again App pick of the week: Web browser updates RunAs Radio this week: Optimizing Cloud Recovery Costs with Natalie Serebryakova Brown liquor pick of the week: Legent Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: 1password.com/windowsweekly
It's the last Windows Weekly in the TWiT Eastside Studio! The Week D mystery continues in this episode. And Windows Insider has had a relatively quiet week. Intel is in trouble, with stock price dropping over 25 percent! WordStar is back, but the big news here is the documentation archive. Also, Paul thinks the improved Reader mode in Firefox 129 is pretty sweet. Windows 11 Last week, Microsoft issued Week D update for 22H2/23H2 late Last week, Microsoft issued 24H2 build to the Release Preview channel but nothing for Week D. Paul speculated this would replace the Weed D update, head to stable in August Since then, Microsoft quietly issued Week D update for 24H2 one week late (on last day of July) Speculation was correct: These are all the same thing, with the same new features, most CFRs Microsoft's release schedule gets even more chaotic. It's been missing the Week D Tuesday release schedule more often than not in recent months BIG update to the Microsoft Store in Canary and Dev today Hardware Snapdragon X is a huge leap forward for the PC, but Apple/MacBook Air still have big advantages AMD's new chips are getting rave reviews Intel is on track for Lunar Lake in September Intel earnings crater, with layoffs, cost reductions Stock price drop second worst in corporate history Intel extends Core processor Gen 13/14 warranty by 2 years (PC bundles only) Core processor warranty is extended to retail sales Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 for Business available for preorder Microsoft 365 The new Outlook is now generally available and the Microsoft community celebrates in the streets Antitrust/Corporate Google found guilty of abusing its Search monopoly Big point: Google's revenue share deals with Apple, etc. Could this kill Mozilla? Microsoft and Bing come up over 500 times (!) in the ruling. Obsessed much? Apple would like to have its antitrust case dismissed. Good luck with that Context: The paradox of antitrust Thanks to Manifest V3, ad- and tracker- blocking in Chrome is going to get less effective Microsoft: We are STILL serious about security. No, really Arm revenues up 39 percent to $939 million Qualcomm up 11 precent to $9.4 billion Apple up 4.9 percent to 85.8 billion in revenues Amazon up 10 percent to $148 billion Xbox Microsoft promises over 50 playable games at Gamerscom this month in Germany, ahead of IFA Valorant is a free-to-play shooter now available on Xbox Series X|S Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, more comes to Xbox Game Pass Sony sold 2.4 million PS5s in the quarter, total at 61.7 million Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, total at 143.42 million Tips and Picks Tip of the week: You can experience WordStar for MS-DOS again App pick of the week: Web browser updates RunAs Radio this week: Optimizing Cloud Recovery Costs with Natalie Serebryakova Brown liquor pick of the week: Legent Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: 1password.com/windowsweekly
It's the last Windows Weekly in the TWiT Eastside Studio! The Week D mystery continues in this episode. And Windows Insider has had a relatively quiet week. Intel is in trouble, with stock price dropping over 25 percent! WordStar is back, but the big news here is the documentation archive. Also, Paul thinks the improved Reader mode in Firefox 129 is pretty sweet. Windows 11 Last week, Microsoft issued Week D update for 22H2/23H2 late Last week, Microsoft issued 24H2 build to the Release Preview channel but nothing for Week D. Paul speculated this would replace the Weed D update, head to stable in August Since then, Microsoft quietly issued Week D update for 24H2 one week late (on last day of July) Speculation was correct: These are all the same thing, with the same new features, most CFRs Microsoft's release schedule gets even more chaotic. It's been missing the Week D Tuesday release schedule more often than not in recent months BIG update to the Microsoft Store in Canary and Dev today Hardware Snapdragon X is a huge leap forward for the PC, but Apple/MacBook Air still have big advantages AMD's new chips are getting rave reviews Intel is on track for Lunar Lake in September Intel earnings crater, with layoffs, cost reductions Stock price drop second worst in corporate history Intel extends Core processor Gen 13/14 warranty by 2 years (PC bundles only) Core processor warranty is extended to retail sales Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 for Business available for preorder Microsoft 365 The new Outlook is now generally available and the Microsoft community celebrates in the streets Antitrust/Corporate Google found guilty of abusing its Search monopoly Big point: Google's revenue share deals with Apple, etc. Could this kill Mozilla? Microsoft and Bing come up over 500 times (!) in the ruling. Obsessed much? Apple would like to have its antitrust case dismissed. Good luck with that Context: The paradox of antitrust Thanks to Manifest V3, ad- and tracker- blocking in Chrome is going to get less effective Microsoft: We are STILL serious about security. No, really Arm revenues up 39 percent to $939 million Qualcomm up 11 precent to $9.4 billion Apple up 4.9 percent to 85.8 billion in revenues Amazon up 10 percent to $148 billion Xbox Microsoft promises over 50 playable games at Gamerscom this month in Germany, ahead of IFA Valorant is a free-to-play shooter now available on Xbox Series X|S Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, more comes to Xbox Game Pass Sony sold 2.4 million PS5s in the quarter, total at 61.7 million Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, total at 143.42 million Tips and Picks Tip of the week: You can experience WordStar for MS-DOS again App pick of the week: Web browser updates RunAs Radio this week: Optimizing Cloud Recovery Costs with Natalie Serebryakova Brown liquor pick of the week: Legent Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: 1password.com/windowsweekly
It's the last Windows Weekly in the TWiT Eastside Studio! The Week D mystery continues in this episode. And Windows Insider has had a relatively quiet week. Intel is in trouble, with stock price dropping over 25 percent! WordStar is back, but the big news here is the documentation archive. Also, Paul thinks the improved Reader mode in Firefox 129 is pretty sweet. Windows 11 Last week, Microsoft issued Week D update for 22H2/23H2 late Last week, Microsoft issued 24H2 build to the Release Preview channel but nothing for Week D. Paul speculated this would replace the Weed D update, head to stable in August Since then, Microsoft quietly issued Week D update for 24H2 one week late (on last day of July) Speculation was correct: These are all the same thing, with the same new features, most CFRs Microsoft's release schedule gets even more chaotic. It's been missing the Week D Tuesday release schedule more often than not in recent months BIG update to the Microsoft Store in Canary and Dev today Hardware Snapdragon X is a huge leap forward for the PC, but Apple/MacBook Air still have big advantages AMD's new chips are getting rave reviews Intel is on track for Lunar Lake in September Intel earnings crater, with layoffs, cost reductions Stock price drop second worst in corporate history Intel extends Core processor Gen 13/14 warranty by 2 years (PC bundles only) Core processor warranty is extended to retail sales Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 for Business available for preorder Microsoft 365 The new Outlook is now generally available and the Microsoft community celebrates in the streets Antitrust/Corporate Google found guilty of abusing its Search monopoly Big point: Google's revenue share deals with Apple, etc. Could this kill Mozilla? Microsoft and Bing come up over 500 times (!) in the ruling. Obsessed much? Apple would like to have its antitrust case dismissed. Good luck with that Context: The paradox of antitrust Thanks to Manifest V3, ad- and tracker- blocking in Chrome is going to get less effective Microsoft: We are STILL serious about security. No, really Arm revenues up 39 percent to $939 million Qualcomm up 11 precent to $9.4 billion Apple up 4.9 percent to 85.8 billion in revenues Amazon up 10 percent to $148 billion Xbox Microsoft promises over 50 playable games at Gamerscom this month in Germany, ahead of IFA Valorant is a free-to-play shooter now available on Xbox Series X|S Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, more comes to Xbox Game Pass Sony sold 2.4 million PS5s in the quarter, total at 61.7 million Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, total at 143.42 million Tips and Picks Tip of the week: You can experience WordStar for MS-DOS again App pick of the week: Web browser updates RunAs Radio this week: Optimizing Cloud Recovery Costs with Natalie Serebryakova Brown liquor pick of the week: Legent Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: 1password.com/windowsweekly
It's the last Windows Weekly in the TWiT Eastside Studio! The Week D mystery continues in this episode. And Windows Insider has had a relatively quiet week. Intel is in trouble, with stock price dropping over 25 percent! WordStar is back, but the big news here is the documentation archive. Also, Paul thinks the improved Reader mode in Firefox 129 is pretty sweet. Windows 11 Last week, Microsoft issued Week D update for 22H2/23H2 late Last week, Microsoft issued 24H2 build to the Release Preview channel but nothing for Week D. Paul speculated this would replace the Weed D update, head to stable in August Since then, Microsoft quietly issued Week D update for 24H2 one week late (on last day of July) Speculation was correct: These are all the same thing, with the same new features, most CFRs Microsoft's release schedule gets even more chaotic. It's been missing the Week D Tuesday release schedule more often than not in recent months BIG update to the Microsoft Store in Canary and Dev today Hardware Snapdragon X is a huge leap forward for the PC, but Apple/MacBook Air still have big advantages AMD's new chips are getting rave reviews Intel is on track for Lunar Lake in September Intel earnings crater, with layoffs, cost reductions Stock price drop second worst in corporate history Intel extends Core processor Gen 13/14 warranty by 2 years (PC bundles only) Core processor warranty is extended to retail sales Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 for Business available for preorder Microsoft 365 The new Outlook is now generally available and the Microsoft community celebrates in the streets Antitrust/Corporate Google found guilty of abusing its Search monopoly Big point: Google's revenue share deals with Apple, etc. Could this kill Mozilla? Microsoft and Bing come up over 500 times (!) in the ruling. Obsessed much? Apple would like to have its antitrust case dismissed. Good luck with that Context: The paradox of antitrust Thanks to Manifest V3, ad- and tracker- blocking in Chrome is going to get less effective Microsoft: We are STILL serious about security. No, really Arm revenues up 39 percent to $939 million Qualcomm up 11 precent to $9.4 billion Apple up 4.9 percent to 85.8 billion in revenues Amazon up 10 percent to $148 billion Xbox Microsoft promises over 50 playable games at Gamerscom this month in Germany, ahead of IFA Valorant is a free-to-play shooter now available on Xbox Series X|S Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, more comes to Xbox Game Pass Sony sold 2.4 million PS5s in the quarter, total at 61.7 million Nintendo sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, total at 143.42 million Tips and Picks Tip of the week: You can experience WordStar for MS-DOS again App pick of the week: Web browser updates RunAs Radio this week: Optimizing Cloud Recovery Costs with Natalie Serebryakova Brown liquor pick of the week: Legent Bourbon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsor: 1password.com/windowsweekly
In Content Moderation Cases, Supreme Court Says 'Try Again' – But Makes It Clear Moderation Deserves First Amendment Protections In The NetChoice Cases, Alito And His Buddies Are Wrong, But Even If They Were Right It May Not Matter, And That's Largely Good News Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more Threads turns 1 Meta's Oversight Board, a model for the internet, is in limbo. Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board The White House will host a conference for social media creators Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers llama.ttf Bruce Bastian, BYU alum-turned-tech pioneer and equality advocate, dies at 76 Microsoft says it's okay to steal content published on the web Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened Perplexity's grand theft AI Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI Tim Wu Is Out Of Control Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch This week's news on human cells 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate Google Keep now lets you use two accounts side-by-side in split screen the NYC Dept of Transportation Instagram Calculus Advice Poem The Material Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
In Content Moderation Cases, Supreme Court Says 'Try Again' – But Makes It Clear Moderation Deserves First Amendment Protections In The NetChoice Cases, Alito And His Buddies Are Wrong, But Even If They Were Right It May Not Matter, And That's Largely Good News Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more Threads turns 1 Meta's Oversight Board, a model for the internet, is in limbo. Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board The White House will host a conference for social media creators Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers llama.ttf Bruce Bastian, BYU alum-turned-tech pioneer and equality advocate, dies at 76 Microsoft says it's okay to steal content published on the web Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened Perplexity's grand theft AI Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI Tim Wu Is Out Of Control Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch This week's news on human cells 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate Google Keep now lets you use two accounts side-by-side in split screen the NYC Dept of Transportation Instagram Calculus Advice Poem The Material Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
In Content Moderation Cases, Supreme Court Says 'Try Again' – But Makes It Clear Moderation Deserves First Amendment Protections In The NetChoice Cases, Alito And His Buddies Are Wrong, But Even If They Were Right It May Not Matter, And That's Largely Good News Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more Threads turns 1 Meta's Oversight Board, a model for the internet, is in limbo. Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board The White House will host a conference for social media creators Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers llama.ttf Bruce Bastian, BYU alum-turned-tech pioneer and equality advocate, dies at 76 Microsoft says it's okay to steal content published on the web Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened Perplexity's grand theft AI Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI Tim Wu Is Out Of Control Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch This week's news on human cells 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate Google Keep now lets you use two accounts side-by-side in split screen the NYC Dept of Transportation Instagram Calculus Advice Poem The Material Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
In Content Moderation Cases, Supreme Court Says 'Try Again' – But Makes It Clear Moderation Deserves First Amendment Protections In The NetChoice Cases, Alito And His Buddies Are Wrong, But Even If They Were Right It May Not Matter, And That's Largely Good News Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more Threads turns 1 Meta's Oversight Board, a model for the internet, is in limbo. Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board The White House will host a conference for social media creators Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers llama.ttf Bruce Bastian, BYU alum-turned-tech pioneer and equality advocate, dies at 76 Microsoft says it's okay to steal content published on the web Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened Perplexity's grand theft AI Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI Tim Wu Is Out Of Control Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch This week's news on human cells 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate Google Keep now lets you use two accounts side-by-side in split screen the NYC Dept of Transportation Instagram Calculus Advice Poem The Material Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
In Content Moderation Cases, Supreme Court Says 'Try Again' – But Makes It Clear Moderation Deserves First Amendment Protections In The NetChoice Cases, Alito And His Buddies Are Wrong, But Even If They Were Right It May Not Matter, And That's Largely Good News Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more Threads turns 1 Meta's Oversight Board, a model for the internet, is in limbo. Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board The White House will host a conference for social media creators Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers llama.ttf Bruce Bastian, BYU alum-turned-tech pioneer and equality advocate, dies at 76 Microsoft says it's okay to steal content published on the web Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened Perplexity's grand theft AI Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI Tim Wu Is Out Of Control Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch This week's news on human cells 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate Google Keep now lets you use two accounts side-by-side in split screen the NYC Dept of Transportation Instagram Calculus Advice Poem The Material Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
In Content Moderation Cases, Supreme Court Says 'Try Again' – But Makes It Clear Moderation Deserves First Amendment Protections In The NetChoice Cases, Alito And His Buddies Are Wrong, But Even If They Were Right It May Not Matter, And That's Largely Good News Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more Threads turns 1 Meta's Oversight Board, a model for the internet, is in limbo. Why We Filed A Comment With Facebook's Oversight Board The White House will host a conference for social media creators Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers llama.ttf Bruce Bastian, BYU alum-turned-tech pioneer and equality advocate, dies at 76 Microsoft says it's okay to steal content published on the web Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard — Alibaba runs the board as major US competitors have worsened Perplexity's grand theft AI Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI Tim Wu Is Out Of Control Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch This week's news on human cells 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate Google Keep now lets you use two accounts side-by-side in split screen the NYC Dept of Transportation Instagram Calculus Advice Poem The Material Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Cathy Gellis Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Mark Todes has a fascinating story to tell. The South African technologist and entrepreneur is TechCentral's guest in the final episode of season 1 of the popular TCS Legends podcast. Todes, who is perhaps best known for helping fight Telkom's attempts in the 1990s to extend its telecommunications monopoly to the internet, has a storied career that began in the mid-1970s in the pre-PC era of mainframes and minicomputers. In this episode of TCS Legends, Todes tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod about the founding of Compustat with his long-time business partner Mendel Karpul and how they went on to develop a word processor called GhostWriter (the name of which Microsoft later tried to wrestle away from them). In the show, Todes chats about: • How he and Karpul got their start selling a bureau-based accounting solution for pharmacies – and how they got their first big break. The solution was developed in Fortran using punch cards and ran on a minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation; • Their development of Survey 2000, a cadastral land surveying system – their first product for personal computers (developed by Hewlett-Packard, prior to the launch of the original IBM PC); • The development of GhostWriter, which became an early DOS-based competitor to the likes of MultiMate, WordStar and WordPerfect. • The launch of Internet Africa, a pioneering South African internet service provider that was later sold to Datatec (and later to Naspers); • The early days of the internet industry in South Africa, the formation of the Internet Service Providers' Association and the existential fight with Telkom over whether the telecommunications operator's government-sanctioned monopoly included the provision of internet services; • Working with Naspers, Mweb and the late Antonie Roux; • The launch of Korbitec (and its later sale to Naspers); and • How he and Karpul became early pioneers in the CD-ROM business. There's much more than this to Todes's story, making him one of the true legends of South Africa's technology industry. Don't miss this concluding episode of season 1 of TCS Legends. The series will return for season 2 in 2025. TechCentral
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with screenwriter and author Neal Marshall Stevens about his new book on horror, “A Sense of Dread (Getting Under The Skin of Horror Screenwriting).”LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Neal's book at Michael Wiese Productions: https://mwp.com/product-author/neal-marshall-stevens/Neal on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139605/Brian Forrest's Blog: https://toothpickings.medium.com/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastNeal Stevens Transcript JOHN: Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you? NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.) But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart. The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure. JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story. NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones. They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn't have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me. BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “ NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in. And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement. BRIAN: Do you still have some of them? NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore. BRIAN: I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work? NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows. JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling. NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far. JOHN: Did you make it that far? NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then. JOHN: That's brutal. NEAL: Yeah. JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you? NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room. And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters. And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monstersand our other projects?” And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters. And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror. BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't? NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand. Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well. BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you? NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror. Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked. JOHN: Why do you think that is with you? NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal. It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through the ringer, watching that opening. And after that opening, the movie was never that violent again. He never showed anything like that again.And you didn't have to, because you—having seen that opening scene, you were—you were so blown out of your seats. You said, “I'm watching a movie where anything could happen to anyone.” And that was a kind of really intelligent and that kind of thoughtful use of violence is what George Romero was always able to do. It was understanding how graphic images can affect the psychology of the viewer. JOHN: Do you think it's also that with Romero's films, they're actually about something, whereas a slasher film is really just about a body count, but with Romero, he always had another thing going. NEAL: Well, of course, I mean, no movie that isn't about anything is ever going to really, from my perspective, be worth watching. But I mean, even a movie like Hostel, which is exceptionally violent and harrowing, is certainly about something. And I think Eli Roth's movies, which get a really bad rap, are very much about something. He's got something to say with his depictions of violence and his images. Not necessarily to my taste. I certainly wouldn't say that he's not, he's making movies that are certainly about something. He's not a dumb filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination. JOHN: So, you work on Monsters, and then what happens? NEAL: I worked on Monsters. I worked there for around six years, and then they were acquired by a big studio, and they were shut down. And so, I was out of work. I'd known a woman named Debbie Dion from Full Moon. I figured, well, I'll give that a shot. I'll call her up and see, maybe I could write for a Full Moon. And so, I gave her a shot. I, you know, reintroduced myself and said, you know, “I'm looking to see if I could get some job, maybe writing features for Full Moon Entertainment, Charlie Band's company.” And they said, “Well, we pay around $3,000 for a feature.” And I said, “Well, I got paid more than that for writing an episode of Monsters. That doesn't seem like such a good deal.” And then my unemployment insurance ran out. BRIAN: Suddenly it's a very good deal. NEAL: Sounds like suddenly a very good deal. But, you know, I made it very clear that money buys one draft, and if you want to rewrite, you got to pay me again, because I knew what development was like, where they just expect draft after draft after draft, and I'd say, “I can't do that, that doesn't make any sense.” And also, having worked for Monsters, I had learned to write really fast. I could write a pass on a Monsters episode in two days, so I knew that I could write fast, because these were 80-page scripts. And so, I started writing for Full Moon, and over the course of like the next few years, I wrote something like... 50 or 60 features for Charlie Band. And a lot of them got made, because they're not wasting money on movies that don't get made. Tons of them got made. And in the midst of doing that, I was, you know, whenever I got a break writing a full movie, I would write spec scripts, you know, in the hopes I could sell something of my own that wasn't for $3,000. I didn't have an agent at that point. I didn't have a manager at that point. And so, I'm not really good making cold calls to people. It's not my thing. I just like to sit, write my scripts. I'd come home one day, and I saw my wife was on the phone having this long conversation with someone. When she was done, I said, “Well, who was that?” “Oh yeah. I called up to order something.” I said, “So she's really good at getting on the phone and talking to people and calling them.” And so, I convinced her to be my manager. So, she agreed. She changed, you know, she went out under her maiden name. She managed to get an option on a science fiction script that I'd written that, I mean, it was ultimately bought. It was never made. And then I decided, you know what? Horror is really my bread and butter writing for Charlie Band. But I don't really have a horror spec. And most of what was out those days in horror didn't really scare me that much. I should really write a script that would scare me. So, I wrote a script called Deader, which I thought had all the stuff in it that I thought was really scary. And Judy went out with that script, sent it to a bunch of people, sent it to some folks at Stan Winston's company, as they had a development deal. The producer that she talked to really liked it, asked if he could sort of slip it to some people. He did, he sent it to someone, a producer at Dimension, it's based in New York, and he really liked it. And they showed it to Bob Weinstein. Bob Weinstein called us on Sunday. Am I half awake? Talk to Judy. Because they didn't know that Judy was my wife. He said, “This is the best goddamn script I've read. I'm like three quarters away. Come in on Monday and we'll talk about it.” So, we came in on Monday and they bought the script. And of course, at that point, it sort of went all over town. And for a very short period of time, it was like the flavor of the month and everyone loved me. And I got myself an agent and got myself like three pictures. And as I was a really big, big to-do. From that, I also got 13 Ghosts. I had like a really big opinion of myself after, after that sale. JOHN: Has that been tempered since then? NEAL: I kind of got the opinion that like, wow, selling scripts is easy. People wanted to hire me because that script was super hot and was all over town. I learned subsequently there are flavors in writers, and I was like that flavor of the month. That fades and then you have to really do a lot more work to get things sold. That was a hard lesson to learn. But I've managed to keep working over the years. I've written many scripts, sold some, and it's been a decent career. BRIAN: I was just wondering, you were having all the success writing screenplays, when did you decide to make a jump to writing a book? NEAL: Over the last five or six years, I've been teaching. A woman that I knew from NYU, actually, Dorothy Rumpolsky had been instrumental in starting a screenwriting program at David Lynch Institute for Cinematic Studies. And she realized at one point that she had a number of students who wanted to work in a horror. She remembered me back from NYU many years ago. So, she got in touch with me and wanted to know if I was interested in mentoring those students. And I said, absolutely. I done some other online teaching at other places. And so, the way it works is, you fly out for an opening few days where you meet the students. And then you fly back to where you come from. They go back to where they come from. And it's all done remotely, the mentoring. And so, I've been doing that now for five or six years. And during that kind of get together, you meet a bunch of guest lecturers and other teachers, other mentors. And a number of those people had written books for Michael Wiese productions. And, in the course of chatting, they suggested, well, you, you know, “You have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of horror and horror cinema. That might be a good book for Michael Wiese. Give them a call and see if you can come up with a pitch and an interesting take on it.” And so I did, and I called them and they responded. And so we were off to the races. JOHN: The book is really, maybe delightful is the wrong word, but it's a captivating book because as you read through it—you have outlined breaking down our different types of fears—you can immediately in your mind go, “Oh, that's what that movie was doing. Oh, that was that. That's what was happening there.” What was your research process like? NEAL: I think that the research kind of developed over the decades as I studied what made movies scary and what was working, not only in the movies that I was watching, but in the movies that I was writing. I mean, in the same way that when you work as a screenwriter, it becomes almost second nature to try to figure out what was working and what wasn't. Talking to fellow filmmakers and screenwriters, you have to say, “How many times do you watch a movie?” And a lot of times I will watch a movie 8, 10, 20 times. And there's a process that works when you watch a movie that many times, where you say “Certain things will work every time you watch a movie.”In the same way that you can watch a comedy and you can laugh every single time as certain things comes up. And other times, you start seeing the nuts and bolts and say, “Well, this is always working and here they're just connecting stuff.” And you start saying, “Ah, I get it. I see what they're doing. I see how they're taking this piece that works and this other piece that works and they couldn't quite, they kind of, they found some connective tissue to stick it together. I see exactly what they're doing.” And you start understanding—whether you're watching a comedy or you're watching a drama or you're watching a scary movie—they knew exactly how to make this thing scary. And this is how they're doing it. And they understood exactly how to make this thing scary. And it's like, ah, this is what they're using. Whether it is a spider crawling on someone, that's always going to work. Or, “Oh, I see, this is just a jump scare.” And the jump scare is, I understand, that's just, because a big bang, a loud noise, a hand reaching in from, that's just, that's always going to work. It's going to work no matter what. It's just a kind of placeholder scare, because they couldn't think of anything better. And there are movies where it's just jump scares. And you can always use a jump scare. You can sneak up on a cat and jab it and it'll jump. It's an instinctive response. And if a movie is just relying on jump scares, you know it's because they don't have anything better. They haven't got any deeper than just having the phone ring and they turn up the soundtrack. You can always get an audience to jump by putting a loud sound on the soundtrack. JOHN: Is there an example you can think of though, where there is a jump scare that you think is a genuinely good, effective jump scare? NEAL: I can think of a movie that has two really excellent jump scares. John Carpenter's The Thing. When the doctor's giving the electric shock to the guy's chest, and the chest opens and slams shut on his hand. Didn't expect it.That's a super great jump scare. It is perfectly integrated into that scene. Everyone jumps, but it's also a brilliant continuation of that scene. Second jump scare, when MacReady is testing everyone's blood. And saying, “We're going to do you next,” puts the needle in, and that thing jumps out of the Petri dish.Fantastic jump scare. We didn't see it coming. Everyone jumps. And it's again, it's perfectly integrated into that scene. So, two brilliant jump scares in what's already an incredibly brilliant movie. BRIAN: I remember watching the commentary on Jaws and Spielberg said he got greedy with his jump scares. He had the moment towards the end of the film, you remember that Jaws comes out of the water while it's being chummed. And he said he got this great reaction from the audience, and he wanted one more. And he went back, and he added in the scene earlier where the corpse face comes through the hole. And he said he never got the audience to react as well to the shark after he added in that corpse face coming through the hole of the ship. And I wondered, do you think there's a point of diminishing returns with jump scares in one movie? NEAL: I think there absolutely is. I mean—and I have no end of admiration for Jaws. I think it may be one of the most brilliant movies ever, and it certainly has stood the test of time. JOHN: So, we've each come armed with some movies here that I thought it would be fun to talk about them with you, so that you could sort of delve into the different types of fear that are outlined in the book and we'll just sort ofcheckerboard back and forth here. I'm going to start with one of my favorite sense of dread movies, and that's Don't Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, directed by Nick Roeg which I saw way too young. First R rated movie I saw. I remember I knew that it was supposed to be really scary, and I went with my older brother, and we were standing in line and the seven o'clock show was letting out. And I said to my brother, “Well, it can't be that scary. They're not saying anything.” Not realizing that they had all been stunned into silence about the last five minutes of that movie. So, what are your thoughts on Don't Look Now and where does that fit? NEAL: When I talk about the sense of dread, which is what my book is about, it's the notion of those aspects of our lives that we think of as safe and secure and dependable and sacred being suddenly or unexpectedly penetrated by the unknown or the unnatural, the unexpected. And you have to say, well, what are the things that we depend on? We depend on our homes. We depend on our families. And so that relationship of parent and child, what violates that? And the loss of a child, loss is already wrenching. And so, this sense of parents having lost a child, but then this notion that, well, maybe not, maybe the child is still out there somewhere, is so deeply disturbing. And so this weird, this quest, this pursuit in them. And meanwhile, in the background, you have the sense of a killer, of killings going on. This really disturbing notion of the woman's half decayed body being pulled out of the water is just as an image is—and again, the notion of human body being reduced to mere flesh—it's deeply disturbing. And nakedness, coupled with decay, it's deeply disturbing. And all of this sort of happening in the background. We don't quite know how these pieces connect. The notion that the search for the child and the notion that there's a killer on the loose. We know, because the nature of cinematic storytelling is telling us that somehow these things are going to connect, because, I mean, in the real world, there are countless thousands of things drifting around that don't necessarily hook up. But we know that one thing is going to collide with another. And so, there's this growing sense of profound unease, because we know, somehow, this child in this Red Riding Hood cape is wandering around, it's like, is this the child? Is the child going to become embroiled in this? But what we don't, certainly don't expect is the ending that confronts us in the finale, which is so incredibly, the reversal is so terrifying and so hits us in the face of that sense of innocence—revealed in such a terrifying way—is the essence of dread. Where we expect to find innocence, we find a nightmare. JOHN: What's great about what Nick Roeg did there was—if you read Daphne du Maurier's short story—he basically shot the last paragraph of that short story. Cinematically, he figured out the way that she's laying out what's going on with Donald Sutherland's character at that moment. He figured out a way to make it cinematic. So, like you say, all the pieces suddenly fall into place in those last few seconds. And, like you said, we've been brought to this place, we had no idea that that's where it was going to turn. Neal, tell me about Enemy from Space, and what you like about that. NEAL: Enemy from Space is the second of the three Quatermass movie, adaptations of the serial. It's in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and all these other movies about human beings who are being invaded and infested by alien forces. In this case, over the past few years—but in the context of the story—there have been rains of these tiny little meteorites. Anyone who finds them, they crack open and what's inside infests human beings. And you can find these tiny little burn marks, these V shaped marks on them. And the parasites take them over and make them into these kind of human slaves. And the premise is they serve this larger being, this kind of group entity, and they proceed to start building these atmosphere plants, with the goal ultimately to turn the earth into a colony for these beings that come from outer space. But the notion of these human beings, they have infiltrated our government, infiltrated our community, and they gradually take people over, scary enough. And they have built this enormous plant that looks, he says, this looks just like this proposed lunar base with these giant atmospheric domes. A group of people managed to infiltrate one of these bases and he looks inside, manages to get close enough to look inside one of these domes and inside are the parasites. When they're released, they grow together into this thing that looks like a giant blob. That's what it looks like outside of the human hosts. And a bunch of these guys are trapped inside of the atmosphere of plant. And they realize this thing, they can't survive outside the human body. They need methane to breathe, because that's what their home planet is like. “What we need to do is we need to pump oxygen into this dome to kill this thing. That'll destroy it.” And voices come over to say, “Look, this guy's crazy. There's nothing inside this dome. You send some representatives over, we'll show you anything you want.” And Quatermass says, “You're crazy if you go over there, you're going to be infected. You're going to be taken over.” But they managed to divide, they send the guys over and Quatermass is pleading with them, “Listen, they're going to get on this speaker. They're going to tell you that everything is fine, but you can't listen. Don't listen to them, whatever you say.” And then they hear this sound. This hideous sound of screaming coming down the pipes, the pipes that they've been sending oxygen down to the dome. They say, “What the hell is that? What's going on?” And then they look, they see the pressure has gone way up. There's something wrong. And the pipe is burst, the pipe that's sending oxygen to this dome. And they say, “What is it? What's happened?” And they look and something is dripping down through the pipe. And they say, “What is it?” It's blood. They took the guys that they sent, and they pushed them into the pipe. They say those pipes have been blocked with human pulp in order to keep the oxygen from coming into the dome. That is one of the most, again, all you see is just these drops of blood coming out of the cracked pipe, but that has resonated as one of the most terrifying moments from any movie that I saw, again, as a little kid. I've seen the movie recently and it's still incredibly terrifying. And again, the architecture of this web of pipes, the cold black and white architecture, is horrifyingly chilling. And the notion of human beings being reduced to mere flesh, being used as material for blocking a pipe. And the pipe's only like, it's like this big. So, you can imagine this person shoved into a pipe is hideous. JOHN: It is available on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it after that. Brian, do you want to ask about folk horror? BRIAN: Actually, I was going to jump ahead just because of what Neal was just talking about. I thought this would dovetail nicely into a question I had about a fear of contagion. And you can wrap body horror into this. Movies like The Thing or 28 Days Later, or probably The Quatermas Experiment as well. How does that fear of our own bodies being infected or watching another body change or be infected in unnatural ways? How does that—I don't want to use the word appeal—but how does that appeal to our sense of dread? NEAL: Well, I think you also have to run back to one of the most common— whether it's psychological or physiological—which is obsessive compulsive disorder. You say, well, what exactly is obsessive compulsive disorder? We have built in grooming behaviors, whether it's cleaning our hands, we clean our skin. That's wired into us. And when you turn the dial up too far, that turns into obsessive compulsive, obsessive hand cleaning or scratching, itching, hair pulling, all that stuff. It's wired in behavior, in the same way that dogs will scratch, we will scratch. And so, all of that, we react to it in the same way that if you see a spot of dirt on someone's forehead, it's almost impossible to “Clean that thing off. Get rid of that thing.” I mean, we're built in a certain way to respond to distortions, infections, invasions, in the same way that if someone's eye is cocked to one side, we react to it. Someone's face is distorted. We react to it negatively. We have to work not to respond to it. It may be a bug, but it may be a feature, because we are built to respond to a diseased or distorted members of our community. It's a survival trait. And so, in some ways, horror movies respond to that. Distorted human beings, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Igor or anyone else who are distorted, deformed, limbless creatures—Freaks—are employed in horror movies in a variety of different ways. BRIAN: And it's a very different thing from seeing an arm chopped off versus seeing an arm with three hands that are all operating. Both of them is something happening to your body that you might revolt towards, but it's a very different reaction though, right? NEAL: It is, but it's—in a sense—it's all variations of the same thing. There's a central human norm, and that which varies from the human norm beyond a certain point triggers a reaction that says, “That's not the way it's supposed to be.” And it's just, eyes are too close together, eyes are too far apart, eyes are too big, or there's an extra one. There's one missing. We recoil from it. We recoil from something that is too different, too far off the norm. And of course, in strictly social terms, you can say, but why, why should we? We shouldn't really respond in that way to others who are too different. But we do respond that way, and it comes with the programming in a very real degree. JOHN: How does that connect, then, to another movie on your list, The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932? NEAL: I think it's central to that list. The notion of the difference between that which is human and that which is animal. And Moreau, who experiments with making animals into human beings, but not really. And the sort of terrifying revelation when our hero and the woman—who we know to be an animal woman, but she looks fundamentally human—escape out into the woods and come across the animal person village. And the realization to what extent Moreau has been experimenting. It's not just tens or dozens. The animal people just come flooding out of the woods. And it's just hundreds. And the extent and the depth and the kind of nightmarish quality, they're all different. They're all horrible. And it's just like, what has Moreau been doing? He experiments with these animals, gets them to a certain state, and then he just discards them and moves on to something else. This utterly careless, sadistic god of this army of nightmares. And you sort of see when they do their, you know, “Are we not men?” And you just see row upon row upon row of these hideous nightmare faces. And you just say, “My God, what has this guy been doing for years? Just making these monsters.” JOHN: It's a classically creepy movie. I do want to ask you about the classic ghost story movie, The Haunting, and what that says about our fears. If you can, maybe tie that into Ghostwatch, because there's a similar sort of thing going on there. NEAL: They're both intriguing. They both are opening us up to this notion of unseen nightmare forces, especially the original Haunting, which shows us nothing. All you ever see: Doorknob turning. A face that may or may not be in the wall. This horribly loud banging on the door. A moment where someone thinks that her hand is being held, but there's no one there. It is simply this notion of a house that is born bad, but never really fully explained. Again, you have this idea of the world itself that should be well behaved, that should be governed by comprehensible natural laws. But there's something deeper and darker and incapable of truly being understood, nevermind being controlled. And if you just prod it a little bit too much, you're going to open it up to forces that are utterly destructive and utterly malevolent. And in both of these cases, you have this man of science and his team that are going to find out. “We're going to find out for sure whether there really are ghosts, whether there really is a supernatural, whether it really is life after death. We're going to nail this down for science.” Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. These are things that are, that are not meant to be explored, not meant to be examined. Go back. BRIAN: I'm reminded of Van Helsing's sign off on the original Dracula, where he said, “Just remember, there really are such things in this world.” NEAL: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the same thing is true in some ways on a much more terrifying scale with Ghostwatch, where it's just, it's this kind of, “It's all just fun and Halloween, we're going to explore this. It's the most haunted house in Britain.” And it's broadcasters whose faces everyone knew at the time, and they were playing themselves. Going to this haunted house where you had these poltergeist phenomena. And we're all going to, “We're going to do it live and call in with your own experiences about being haunted.” And it all just goes so horribly wrong. JOHN: Now, Neal, I just watched that for the first time this week. Heard about it for years. I had no idea that those were real broadcasters. I thought they were really good actors. But to someone in Britain watching that, those are faces they saw all the time? NEAL: Yeah. Those are real broadcasters. They had their own shows. They were real, the real deal. JOHN: Wow. I highly recommend renting it because—it'll test your patience a little tiny bit, because it is quite banal for quite a while, as they lead you into it. But now this new bit of information that these are all faces that that audience who saw it, quote unquote, live that night, it's as terrifying as I imagined the Orson Welles' War the Worlds would have been. Because it seems very real. NEAL: And apparently the way they did it, is that there was a number you could call in. And if you called in that number, they would tell you, it's like, “Don't worry, this is all just a show.” But so many people were calling in, they couldn't get through. BRIAN: This really is War of the Worlds. NEAL: So, they never were able to get to that message that would tell them, don't worry, it's all just a show. So apparently it panicked the nation, because part of the premise was at a certain point, the ghost that was haunting the house got into the show. And so, the studio itself became haunted. It was really spectacularly well done. JOHN: It is. It's great. Let's just sort of wrap up here real quick with Neal, if you have any advice for beginning screenwriter about how to best create a really powerful and effective horror screenplay, any little tips. NEAL: Well, first of all, and I touched on this before, jump scares don't work on the page. You need the loud bang. You need the hand reaching in from the side. You describe that and it doesn't work. So, you have to rely on creating that sense of dread. And while writing screenplays, you have to keep things tight. The concept, the idea—in the same way comedy screenplays have to be funny—scary screenplays have to be scary. It has to be scary on the page. If it's not scary on the page, you're not going to sell the screenplay. And that's the fundamental trick. You got to make it scary on the page. JOHN: Excellent advice. All right, let's just quickly, each one of us, tell our listeners a recent favorite horror film that you've seen in the last couple years.I'll start with you, Brian. BRIAN: Just last night, I saw Haunting in Venice. And it worked because I had seen the other Kenneth Branagh/Agatha Christie adaptations, and I was very familiar with, and you know, you already know generally that kind of detective whodunit story: it's going to be very, you know, using logic and rationality.And when they had this episode that was sort of a one off—sort of a departure from that usual way that mysteries are solved—it was very effective. I think if I'd seen it without having already watched a bunch of Agatha Christie adaptations, I would have said, “Oh, that's an okay Halloween movie.” But having seen those other ones, it was an excellent Halloween movie. JOHN: Excellent. That's on my list. The movie I would recommend, which really surprised me, my wife literally dragged me to it because it was a French film called Final Cut, which is a French remake of a Japanese film called One Cut of the Dead. At about the 30-minute mark, I was ready to walk out, and I thought, why are we watching this? And then they took us on a ride for the next hour that, it's a really good ride. It's called Final Cut. BRIAN: And this is not to be confused with the Robin Williams Final Cut from... ? JOHN: Not to be confused with that, no. Or if you can go back to the original and watch the Japanese version. But what's great about the French version is they are literally remaking the Japanese version, to the point where they've made all the characters have Japanese names. Which the French people struggle with enormously. It's a highly effective film. Neal, how about you? Take us home. NEAL: Okay. It's not a new movie, but I just saw it very recently. It is a Chilean stop motion animated film called The Wolf House. It describes the adventures of a young Chilean woman who escapes from a repressive German colony and ends up in this bizarre house in which she blends into the walls. She's escaped with two pigs who grow up with her in this house, but again, nothing, no way in which I describe it is going to convey to you how deeply disturbing and chilling this movie is. It really is quite indescribably bizarre and disturbing and just well worth your time to watch. It's not quite like any other movie I've ever seen.
TechByter Worldwide (formerly Technology Corner) with Bill Blinn
The main article is really three short pieces: One about PowerToys Run, a quick and easy way to start an application or launch a search; the next about the now limited “unlimited” hosting plan from Bluehost; and finally a fond farewell to WordPad. In Short Circuits: Living like it's 1983. If you loved WordStar, you can now install WordTsar and try to remember some of the obscure key sequences that made things happen. • If you've ever read either a privacy policy or a website's terms of service, you're in the minority. A service is available to show the important points without requiring the consumption of many pages of legalese. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Burning CDs and DVDs was a big thing in 2003, but few of today's computers have optical disc readers, to say nothing of burners. It was a short era.
Multitasking on the Macintosh evolves beyond Switcher. MultiFinder review by Bruce Webster, Macworld, April 1988. Commentary by Jerry Borrell, Macworld, January 1988. Correction: Declaring an application's memory requirements through a SIZE -1 resource began in the days of Switcher. (source: MacTech Spring 1989) Charismatic IBM evangelist David Barnes selling OS/2 Steve Jobs-style at a 1993 meeting of the HAL-PC Users Group. David's presentation is in the second half of the meeting. Memory prices were a hot topic in computer magazines during the DRAM crisis of 1988-1989. CE Software's DiskTop: helping you fake multitasking since 1986. Rick Chapman's “In Search Of Stupidity” covers the fall of dBase, Borland, OS/2, WordStar, and other things people under the age of 50 have never heard of. Steve Crutchfield of BeamWars fame has (in the year 2023–I am not making this up) backported Mac OS 8's relative dates feature to System 6! Download “Today's The Day” from Macintosh Garden. (discussion, Let's Play BeamWars) “Damn!” is a registered trademark of 65scribe.
Wir berichten aus Unterpindhart und reden über unsere unterschiedliche Computeraffinität.
An airhacks.fm conversation with Ken Fogel (@omniprof) about: Digi-Comp I 3bit computer by Admin Scientific, programming with small pieces of plastic, a course in fortran, a service person in a mail room working 20mins a day, borrowing 5000 dollars and buying Apple II for 2000 dollars in 1980, buying a floppy disk drive for 700 dollars, starting with AppleSoft Basic by Microsoft, learning assembly language to improve performance, presentation at the university to introduce Apple computer, controlling a water filtration system with Apple II, writing conversion for word processors in PL 1, WordPerfect, IBM MultiMate, WordStar, starting at the University to teach COBOL, teaching project courses, good bye Cobol in 2000, starting with Java in 1999, replacing the mainframe with Java, Java 1.4 was the most amazing thing, developer works and alpha works websites, IBM's Jikes compiler, a short history of .net, $10k for Cobol, Oracles JDeveloper, Borland JBuilder, Sun Java Workshop and Sun Java Studio, From JDeveloper to Eclipse, From Eclipse to NetBeans, Netbeans just works, a message from Geertjan Wielenga, the invitation to JavaOne, JavaOne - the geeks heaven, NetBeans Days and DOScon in Montreal, the jChampions conference, Visual Studio Code is written in typescript, Visual Basic had the most amazing switch case, Java 17 and the new switch case, the executive JCP member, learn to program Java by Springer, writing all the code in main method, writing a Java book, Ken Fogel on twitter: @omniprof
SLAP. What is this episode all about? You guessed it, SLAPS. Would you hit your sweet sweet Me-Maw for 10 grand? I'm not gonna tell you what Conner said, but lets just say you aren't going to like it. The Oscars were wild, and while we didn't watch them we caught the highlights on WordStar and discussed them as two professional comedians ourselves.
I wrote this essay 12 years ago. And there are a lot of things that I used to believe that I don’t believe anymore. But the substance of this essay has become more and more true for me with each passing year. Longhand has become the most productive way for me to write. And in the increasing noise and hysteria of our digital age, it has become, for me, a blessing. Once again I find myself about 50,000 words into a substantial work. And now more than ever, I feel that my best drafts are written with a pen and paper. So here it is again, my Defense of Writing Longhand. I like technology. A lot. But I'm not too sure how technology feels about me. It may be my faithful friend and boon companion — then again, it may just be pretending to be my friend so it can date my sister. Especially when it comes to writing.I'm writing a book. And for all the romance and immensity that phrase can contain, writing a book is also simply a production process. I am in the process of assembling 75,000 to 100,000 words. And, after writing 50,000 of them, I've become convinced that the first draft is the hardest part. Hemingway famously said that the first draft of everything is s**t. For what it's worth, I agree. So, my question, becomes: What's the easiest way to get through the hardest part.And to my surprise, the easiest way turns out to be writing longhand. Not printing, mind you, but composing with a long, flowing, and delightfully irregular script that fills the page like a river of words. I sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and a thousand words roll out in a flash. And not only does it often take less time than typing, I think I write better longhand.Now realize, I am not a hunt and peck typist. I type very fast. And when I type on one of those thin little laptop keyboards that have about 3 millimeters of travel, my typing speed approaches the absurd—like Glenn Gould, the wonderfully talented and eccentric pianist who remanufactured his piano, shortening the action on his keys so that he could play Bach faster. Beautiful, yet a little insane.But there is obviously more to writing than typing. What I'm really doing is composing. Composition requires focus. It is, like most acts of creation, monotasking. And as much as I love technology, it drives us to distraction.A pen and paper has but one functionality. It captures the marks I make so that they can be referred to at a later time. It doesn't ring, it doesn't bother me with an incoming chat or IM. It never asks me to plug it in so it can get more power. It doesn't crash, it never needs an upgrade, and it is unlikely that someone will snatch my pad and bolt from a coffee shop with it when I turn my back.Sure paper is perishable. But it is predictably perishable. Data turns to noise in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Like hard drive crashes. And if an IT person tells you that there is a way to archive a digital file, not touch it for 500 years, and guarantee that it will remain usable—that person is lying to you. If you think I'm wrong, I'll email you some WordStar and AppleWorks documents just as soon as I can figure out how to get them off my five and a quarter inch floppies.But I can go the National Archives right now and read a copy of the Magna Carta that was handwritten 793 years ago. No format or version issues here. (It's fitting for this essay that Magna Carta literally means "Great Paper".)But, to paraphrase Emerson, all of this is small account compared to what lies within us. And that is the struggle to organize and communicate our thoughts clearly with the beautiful, yet horribly imprecise instrument of language. And it is in this struggle, I believe, that the beauty and power of writing longhand is discovered.In a way, the problem with writing is the same problem of hitting a golf ball. Both the page and the ball just sit there. And when you write you have (theoretically) a lifetime to rewrite it until you get it right.But all that time is simply a field day for the critical part of your brain. Just the time it needs to jump in and muck everything up. This part of the brain needs something to criticize. After all, that's its job. But the critical function is not creative. Be critical about anything. No matter how absurd you are being, you will find ammo to support you. Try running Hamlet through a Microsoft Grammar check. Try running Hamlet and leaving all the scenes in.The point is, there's no possible way to get it right if you don't first get it down. And as much as I know this—I mean know it in my bones, as a carpenter knows his measuring tape—it still doesn't help.The critical part of my brain is telling me, right now, that this sentence is horrible. That the entire device of anthropomorphizing the critcal side of my nature in this essay is a bad idea. And that I just misspelled critical. And I shouldn't have started two sentences in a row with "and".But when I write longhand, the experience is different. I think it is because that critical part of my brain is busy picking apart my handwriting (which truly is horrible) instead of my prose. It tells me that my handwriting is atrocious. And it gets the satisfaction of being right. But who cares? While it's busy with that, the words are just rushing out. And they're not henpecked or second-guessed before they've had time to cool. They exist in a flawed, but pure state. This kind of prose has a feral power that seems to be lacking from the things I type. Maybe that's not it; maybe it's just harder to get my head in that effortless writing space when I use a keyboard. But whatever the case is, writing longhand makes it easier for me to reach a writer's high.And if you're still not sold on the idea that writing longhand might help you write better, consider this: Until the 20th century, books were written by hand. I would argue that the best writing in history was composed by hand. The entire process is much easier now. But, would you like to argue that the increase in the power of our technology has led to a corresponding increase in the quality of our writing? Not me. I'm too busy scribing away. Get full access to Patrick E. McLean at patrickemclean.substack.com/subscribe
Once again, we're walking the moonlit path of dreams and discussing The Sandman. In this episode, we're talking about the fifth and sixth volumes: A Game of You and Fables & Reflections. ----more---- Mike: I don't think I'm getting a birthday present. I am relatively certain that they want to fire me out of a cannon into the sun Jessika: Hello. And welcome to Ten cent takes the podcast where we cause whiplash from rapid time leaps, one issue at a time. My name is Jessica Frasier and I'm joined by my cohost, the curious collector, Mike Thompson. Mike: Man, my collection has been growing by leaps And bounds lately. Yeah. COVID has not been kind to my closet free space. Jessika: Oh, well, and you recently gave me my first short box, So thing. So Mike: I'm not sorry. Jessika: no, don't be, I needed a place for the, my, I looked over at my, at my bookshelf one day and went, oh no, I have a lot of single issues that are just kind of sitting on a shelf. Mike: you know, you're a collector when you just have the random piles of single issues hanging out, Jessika: I just have random piles of trade paperbacks. And just like, my counter is literally covered. Not only do I have every one of the Sandman series, just like chilling on my counter. I got, um, moon girl and, uh, um, devil devil dinosaur, and that's just chilling. So I've just got all this stuff, like all over. Mike: Yeah, it's a, it's insidious. It takes over. your life. One issue at a time. Jessika: Well, what better way to fill a tiny house shaped like a pirate ship than with comics. Mike: Hm. Fair. Jessika: If you haven't listened before the purpose of our podcast is to study comic books in ways that are both fun and informative. We want to look at their coolest weirdness and silliest moments, as well as examine how they're woven into the larger fabric of pop culture and history. This episode, we are returning to our book club and we will be looking at volumes five and six of the Sandman series. If you haven't checked out the first couple episodes of the series, I highly recommend you go back and take a lesson. It's episodes 15 and 17. Mike: Yeah. And we're covering two volumes at a time. Jessika: Yes, we are. So 15 was one and two and 17 was three and four. So you're joining us for five and six. So welcome aboard. Mike: Welcome to the deep end of the pool children. you don't get an inner tube and we don't have any water wings. Sorry. Jessika: There's absolutely no lifeguard on duty. We are not responsible Dulce at this time. Mike: If You are enjoying our podcast, please go ahead and rate and review on whatever platform you're listening on. If that's an option it's especially helpful. If you can rate us on apple podcasts, there's a lot of discoverability, , or if you have overcast, you can always do a star for the episode and that'll push promotion as well. Or if you're a comic fan and you're liking what we're talking about, and you've got some friends who you think would actually enjoy it? as Well, please let them know any little bit helps. We really appreciate all of you who are spending your time with us. Jessika Audio: We also want to support other podcasts that we really like in this space. So this week spotlight is on the last comic shop podcast. Here's a quick review of what to expect from them. If you want us to feature your show, go ahead and drop us off. Jessika: before we leave into our main main topic, Mike, what is one cool thing you've read or watched? Mike: I was on hooplah the other day and I came across a new series by Jeff Lemire, who is the guy who wrote Sweet Tooth along with a bunch of other excellent. But it's called Gideon Falls and they have the first five volumes on there. it's a really interesting series. It starts off feeling kind of like a horror supernatural thriller involving a Catholic priest who comes to this town and he's very quickly wrapped up in nefarious things going on and it's really creepy. And then there's a B- story involving a guy who is in this kind of weird dystopian, urban environment, far away from the small town of Gideon falls. as the story continues, it morphs from being a, , supernatural horror murder mystery into a bit more science fiction and mad science while still keeping those original vibes. , and also there's a lot of personal tragedy involved with the main characters. That's really cool to read too, which I mean, that's what Jeff Lemire does is he writes these things that just, they make you a lot of times feel like you need to watch Schindler's list for a pick me up. They're excellent, but they are brutal at times. so after I read that, I then proceeded to read through the, what if omnibus that they had on hooplah and I needed something a little bit lighter to cleanse by. Jessika: That's very relatable. Definitely been in that situation myself. Mike: but what about you? Jessika: Well, I have, I recently purchased the book herding cats, which is a black and white anthology comic by Sarah Anderson Mike: like this is the woman who did hyperbole and a half, right? Jessika: yes. Yeah. And also the one that I've spoken about before fangs. Mike: Yeah. The love story between the vampire and the werewolf. Jessika: Aha. Aha. Mike: Yes, I listen. Jessika: you do, you're very good, probably multiple times because we record and then edit and relisten relisten. And this style of comic is definitely way different than the fangs one. , it's more of a simple design and it's just, it's a really fun time to begin with. I highly recommend her stuff to begin with. So hurting is a part of her Sarah scribbles collection. And if you've seen some of those strips floating around online, they're pretty cute. each page of the book is showing like a small relatable instance about daily. And it's definitely a mood booster. If you're looking for a different palette cleanser, this is definitely it, it kept me giggling the whole way through. And despite it's title, it's definitely not a whole book of cat Comics. I promise. Cause I'm not necessarily a cat person per se. I mean, they're fine, but I'm, I'm not a cat person, but you will see some in there. Mike: I'm more of a cat person than you are Jessika: You've truly are you are with your little dog cat. Mike: the Duchess Sprocket fonts adipose. Jessika: Oh goodness. The names we give our pets. I swear. I think the most fun part about this book though, is that there's also a section at the back. , and it has advice to young artists and it's complete with Comics to go with the advice, which is super cute. Mike: Oh, that's awesome. That's really cute. Jessika: Yeah. That's really sweet. All right. Now onto the meat of our episode, this one's going to be a chunker buckle up everyone. So volume five of the Sandman series is titled a game of you and was published in 1991 and 92 it's composed of issues. 32 through 37 of the Sandman series and was written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Sean McManus. Colleen Duran, Brian Talbot and Stan. We begin our tail in somewhere called the land and voices stadium may needed to find help and that the lane was in great peril and that they were waiting for the person, destined, to save them. Ultimately, one of the voices states their decision to go find the person that is supposed to save them. Meanwhile, Barbie, which was a surprise for me to see her again, is a woken by her neighbor, Wanda. And it's revealed that even though she sleeps, Barbie is unable to dream. Mike: And we should note who Barbie and Wanda are, because the last time that we saw them was in the doll's house and Barbie at the time had been married to a yuppie named Ken who, when the dream, the vortex, was that what it was the dream for techs. Jessika: Yeah, it was the dream vortex caused by Rosewall. Mike: Yeah. So when the dream vortex hit and. Ripping everybody's dreams into one another. There's this weird kind of overlap. Ken and Barbie had some sort of a fight. We don't know exactly what about, but it was basically, I think it was tied to the fact that Ken was, he was an eighties, yuppy, Wallstreet, wannabe, and his fantasies involved, things that Barbie found kind of testable. And then Wanda was the landlord, right? Jessika: No, actually that was a different person, but, um, Wanda. Yeah, Wanda's a new, person and she's in the new place. The Barbie moves to, Mike: Okay. Like I totally read that wrong. I have spent, I've spent decades thinking that Wanda was the same person as, Jessika: I Mike: uh, Jessika: name now, Mike: yeah. Jessika: but he was, he was queer in the sense that he was like cross-dressing, but not necessarily like, he wasn't necessarily trans from my understanding. Mike: Yeah. but the other thing is that on the back of the book, I think they sit there and they refer to the drag queen. for, for this volume, Jessika: oh, well that's just rude. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: That's just transphobic. Mike: yeah. Hold on. Let's, let's take a look at this now. Jessika: Well, I am going to yell about the transphobia, so we'll , just wrap it up now. We'll get started here. Mike: Yeah, so it's literally the promo text on the back is taken apartment house, add in a drag queen, a lesbian couple, some talking animals, talking severed, head, a confused heroine and a deadly Kuku. So I don't think that's on Neil Gaiman. I think that's more DC comics than anything else, Jessika: I agree. That was whoever was writing the cover script. Mike: but that is something that, because I read that description, I thought it was the landlord Hal from doll's house, because Hal was someone who clearly was like tight with Barbie and also had a drag persona? Jessika: there was a one-off statement about how pal gave her be addressed to the landlord for this place where she moved to New York. Mike: I missed that. Okay. Jessika: It's again, one of those, you know, I'm glad I could catch something you didn't. Cause it's usually the other way round. Mike: Yeah. No,, but honestly between that and, the, uh, the promo text on the back, I thought that one had moved on from her assigned gender and was now living in her actual identity. But that was clearly not the case. And that was a little confusing to me. But the other thing is that, you know, the art style had changed. And so I wasn't sure if it was just a new artist rendering an old character. So on me. Jessika: that's caught me a few times though, where I'm like, wait, the art's a little bit different. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Am I like, is this the same character? And I had to kind of suss out who the character was , which is fine. It was easy enough, Mike: That's kind of shocking that they sit there and still identify Wanda as a drag queen. Like these days Jessika: yeah. Mike: anniversary book. Jessika: Yeah. That was very disappointing to me. didn't realize that. And that just Mike: Not great. Jessika: Neil, that one probably wasn't Neal. Awesome. It was God dammit. Mike: I doubt it was like, I don't, that, reeks of marketing . Jessika: Well, there are absolutely people who write the, the covers and whatevers. Mike: yeah. Jessika: So Barbie is living once again, an eclectic type living situation, but has moved to New York. Like we were saying beside Wanda, her neighbors include a lesbian couple named Hazel and Foxglove and a seemingly square bear of a young woman named Thessaly and a middle-aged man named George, who seems to keep to himself for the most part. Barbie also gets very creative with her makeup for the day, painting a black and white checkerboard onto half of her face. And Wanda has decided that spite their lack of money, they should go shopping and at Tiffany's even, Mike: Yeah, I really liked Arby's makeup because it felt very much like what you see on Tech-Talk these days, which is all optical illusions and cool stuff like that. So, Neil Gaiman, oddly prescient, or the 1990s. Jessika: He's doing us good right now. So we quickly cut to the dream realm where Dream is talking with Matthew, the Raven and his son, something happening in a far part of the dream realm, that there was some sort of transition. We zip back to Barbie and Wanda who are on the subway. A woman approaches them for change and Wanda brushes her off. While Barbie throws a of quarters in her cup, the woman becomes very upset when she sees that she is sharing the subway car with a puppy and starts yelling and panicking saying that she doesn't like dogs. The dogs scare her and she exits the car. The first available stop then up the stairs and out of the subway onto the main road, still yelling about not liking dogs. She is immediately face to face with what looks like a giant yellow dog with a large mustache that had to be bigger than a bus. This thing was huge. Mike: Yes, Jessika: And it didn't even really look like a dog, but that was probably the closest approximation to what you could call it, Mike: it's kind of this weird amalgamation between a Saint Bernard and a lion. Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to say it. Mike: as we learn we have seen him before in Barbie's very kind of like Alison Wonderland meets Lord of the rings dreams that she was having before the events of adult's house. Jessika: Yes. And we will definitely be talking about those Mike: No. Jessika: and the woman upon seeing this huge dog what's herself and then faints meanwhile, Wanda and Barbie have made it to their stop and go forward breakfast prior to their shopping spree. After being asked about the subject, Barbie explains that she hasn't been able to dream after a weird night back where she used to live. And after that point, things fell apart with her relationship with Ken, she said she stopped communicating with him anymore and they weren't really being intimate. And then Ken found another woman and was like bringing the other woman over, even though Barbie was there. It was super wack. Mike: Yeah, And I mean, I dunno, good for her for, knowing right out of that situation. Jessika: Yeah, exactly. She didn't deserve that. Mike: No, Jessika: So pan back to giant dog thing who is looking super rough, it. Mike: uh, Jessika: He's still trying to complete his quest, even though he's limping along, the police are trying to cordon off the area and Barbie and Wanda are passing along that same way. Barbie recognizes her friend calls him by name Martin. And as he's trying to make his way towards her, the police fire on him from multiple angles, he falls in a heap to Barbie's feet and tells her that she needs to go back. The land needs her and gives her the serpentine, which appears to be a large pink stone in an ornate fitting on a necklace, one a pulls away as Martin dies from his injuries. She gets Barbie home and helps her into her apartment. And Barbie realizes that the necklace was from her dreams. And then her whole room fills with blackbirds who turn white, which was, that was a wild thing. And outside the door, George seems very interested in the situation and tries to ask Wanda, but she just brushes him off. Mike: Right. And it's , kind of creepy, like his demeanor is that he seems like that weird sorta infatuated in cell who's uncomfortably interested in one of his neighbors. Jessika: yeah, he's like at the door with his head down. He's like post Barbie. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: I wish you could see me, everyone. Cause I'm just like girl. then he goes and grabs a whole ass Raven and puts it in his mouth and swallows it whole and grinning the whole time and mentioned the. Mike: Yeah, by that point in time, it's not surprising that he is off in a creepy, supernatural way. there've been enough weird little hints about them throughout the issue. Jessika: Yeah. He's just kind of a lurking most of the time, which is very strange. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: There's a whole lot of other apartment drama, of course. And , Hazel was taken advantage of while drunk and is now pregnant, but hasn't told her partner Fox glove. she's also pretty naive about how reproduction works in the first place, which is super depressing. Like she didn't know basic things. Mike: It felt like she was written to be unbelievably dumb about this one topic, even though she's in a queer relationship in New York, she works as a chef. And when we're first introduced to her, she seems very no bullshit because when we first meet her, it's Wanda trying to get milked for Barbie and Hazel is like, kind of. Antagonistic towards Wanda. And you're not sure if it's because she's possibly transphobic or if she's just not a morning person, because they let Wanda come in and grab some milk and it just seems like they're kind of cranky people who are not thrilled to be woken up in the morning. Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. Mike: But then like later on, she has these moments that are just, literally unbelievably naive and I don't think her character was written like she should have been. I don't know. I, I'm curious if, when they do an audio book of this, if they ever get around to it, how Gaiman's going to rewrite her. Jessika: Yeah. Same as I, I just think, yeah, there was a lot missing from this character. Just didn't feel like you said believable as a character, just in all of these different pieces to her. So Barbie is still waking out a bit about her experience and with the birds and everything else, and Martin 10 bones, all that stuff, and tries to decompress while watching TV. And she starts drifting in and out of sleep. And by extension in and out of the dream realm, Nuala actually does show up again. I know we had said prior that we weren't sure if she does, but she does, Mike: yeah. And new Allah was the ferry who had been given to Dream as a gift in volume four without her consent, by the way, it was kind of like surprise you now serve the dream Lord, Jessika: Yeah. You're not coming home with me. Sorry. This is now your problem. Ugh. Mike: which, I mean like, admittedly, we all kind of wish that we could do that with our siblings at one point or another, Jessika: well, Mike: I mean, Jessika: my brother doesn't listen to this anymore, so it's fine. Oh goodness. So Nuala does show up and she tries to warn Barbie. That shit is about to get complicated at which point Barbie does fall asleep and passes into the dream. cut to creepy George, who is cutting himself open. He pulls open his chest, exposing his ribs, where a bunch of blackbirds had evidently been waiting and subsequently fly out of him. The other members of the apartment complex start having weird and awful dreams and the birds visit each sleeping individually individual thusly catches the bird, trying to harass her and with a glance at ignites in her hand, which affects George. This is the first real glimpse of the idea that thusly may not be the quiet innocuous individual that she first seemed to be. And she then goes to see George at his apartment wielding a kitchen knife. Mike: Yeah, I thought that was really cool. And the thing is, is that that's actually a really good example of kind of game and doing , some misdirection because he doesn't drop any hints about her. All you get the idea of is that she's extremely straight-laced and kind of nebbish for lack of a better term. Jessika: Yeah, Mike: yeah, and then she just busts out powers and she's really not featured much before this either, which was kinda. Jessika: yeah, And back in the. Barbie is having to reacclimate herself to her own dream character as she has only the fleeting memories of the night she spent there. And everybody in the building starts to awaken and the birds disappear. They're all shaken after their nightmares. And one by one thusly visits, the apartments of the other residents starting with Hazel and Fox glove followed by Wanda. Leslie already knew the Barbie was in trouble and Wanda used her spare key to get into Barbie's apartment at Besley's urging and Barbie was out hold still in the dream room. Leslie asked Wanda to carry Barbie to George's apartment since Wanda was quote unquote the strongest and then Hazel who I'm sorry, is just dumber than a rock points to Wanda's genitals and says, Hey, you have a thingy, which firstly, take a step back, captain obvious. And secondly, so the fuck what? Mike: Yeah. And it goes back to that thing that we were talking about with Hazelwood. It's like, she is suddenly this very, almost childlike person, even though she is a grown ass adult and a queer relationship in New York city. Like, I dunno, it's, it's not great. It feels. Very clumsy. Jessika: It sure did. And I think childlike is, is probably the best way to put it because it did feel that way. Like she was seeing something for the first time and it's like, girl, Mike: it's like you're pregnant. This isn't the first time you seen one Jessika: seriously, Mike: anyway. Jessika: goodness. The party, Firenze, Georges gross poster size picture of Barbie that he has framed up on his wall Mike: Yup. Jessika: and is informed that Thessaly has killed George and he is in the bathtub. So Wanda's freaked out by all of this. Of course, I would also be very freaked out at this. not going to lie to you. Mike: Also we need to, we need to Go back. for a second and it's not that George is dead and in the bathtub it's oh no. George is in the bathtub and they go, oh, is he taking a shower? It's weird that he's taking a shower at 2:00 AM. And she's like, no, no, no, no. I killed him. And his body is in the bathtub and that's when the freaking out happens. Jessika: Yeah, Mike: I thought that was great. I loved it. Jessika: I did too. Cause definitely left the door open to George's house and everyone's like, George. Hello. Mike: Yeah. No. Jessika: Oh, of course one is freaked out and she says that she's going to leave and she physically cannot. As if by magic, Leslie also says that she is going to get George to talk and starts the disgusting process of doing so she has to remove his eyes, his face skin, and his tongue, this, she actually bid out, which was fucking as fuck. Mike: Yeah, after it looks like she's kissing his skinless face. Jessika: Uh, yeah, was horrifying and nails these to the wall and then tells George that it's time to come back and horrifyingly. He does come back and WordStar coming from the face nail to the wall and it's gross. So thusly starts to interrogate him about his plans and he begins to tell the group the CU. Wanda is disgusted and runs to the bathroom where she vomits and the rest of the group seemingly is surprisingly calm about the whole thing. I don't know that I would be personally, so Thessaly who is now out for revenge against the cuckoo for, you know, trying to fuck with her in her sleep states that she needs some menstrual blood and asks Fox glove. And when she asks, why she has to with Besley reveals that she has not been straight in a long time, And that Hazel is pregnant, which they definitely do not have time to deal with at the moment. But hill was obviously shocked and upset by the news. And Wanda is told that she can't go onto the next part of their journey because she needs to watch Barbie. But there seems to be an underlying reason after conversing with a being that seemed to be made of light stating that she needs to seek entry into the dream realm. Mike: Oh so it's actually, um, it's the threefold goddess who the fates basically who keep on showing up throughout. So it's, it's that, mother maiden crone, who normally, when we see them, it's, they're different phases, but they're all kind of part of the same amorphous black shape. So , depending on the artist, it's like, one being, but with like, you know, the three different identities at the same time, but it's also the. Jessika: Yeah. And I didn't get that. It was those three again, so thank you for, Mike: That's something I caught, like on my second or third read through Jessika: Okay. Well, I feel better about a thumb. Mike: it's. I mean, it's a fleeting moment. They only show up for like a page maybe. Jessika: Yeah, yeah. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: meanwhile, on the street, our friend, the I don't like dogs, lady is pointing out to a passer-by that the moon is acting strange, that it had disappeared from the sky. He states that it must be an eclipse, but she says that it just left. It was not like it gradually blacked out like normal eclipse. So Wanda watches us the three women walk into the light and disappear out of the room and the moon reappears in the sky for our friend on the street, Wanda starts questioning her womanhood because she vomited during the interrogation that somehow has makes her less of a woman. But I would argue that I would do the same. That whole situation was so gnarly. Mike: Yeah. it's very pagan ritually. it feels like, old school kind of like druidic, I'm sure that someone's going to get mad at me for saying this, but , it's very pagan, a cult. I don't know the rituals, but it feels like a lot of those things that you read about and fantasy novels that are set in, like our theory and times. Jessika: Totally. So the head then starts talking to. back in the dream realm, RB and company are making their way to their destination and have some near misses and find some other dead friends along the way the land has suffered since she has been gone, they talk about the cuckoo and how the bird lays its eggs and the nest of others. And once hatch, the young cuckoos push out the other eggs or young of the bird who initially built the nest while also fesses up to Morpheus about having warned Barbie. But he agrees that she did the right thing, princess, Barbara, and party, get to their destination, the sea and send, lose the parrot to get help. Mike: Yeah. And at this point there's only one other companion left. Who's like a, like an aardvark or an anteater. Oh, is it okay? That was some Jessika: It's a rat. It's like a, yeah, some rodent where it like Mike: and a trench Jessika: a order. Yeah. It looks like a reporter of a pie. Mike: Yeah. And, as their journey has been going on, it's kind of like, , the group of friends in the horror movie who are slowly getting picked off one by one. and the one That always gets me is the monkey. And I can't remember his name. But he would scout ahead and then he didn't come back and Barbie at one point asks if they think that he's okay and one of them just goes no, and then they go and find his body and it's like, Hmm. Hmm. Jessika: Yeah. That was really. And back at the apartment, this was a very web flashy, one where it's very back and forth. Uh, back at the apartment, Wanda is talking to George's face and she asks him why she was left behind. He says it's because she's a man stating that the moon Magic that was used can only be used by biological women, which yikes. No, no, no, no, I don't. I don't like that one bed. And George also offhandedly states that they should be concerned about the weather. So back in the dream realm, Luiz has betrayed Barbie and brings armed guards to their hiding place on the lift. And they also killed the last remaining member of the party. So Barbie is dragged away by the guards and then is paraded through the town into a small pink house. Mike: Which is the house that she grew up. Jessika: It is, yeah. It turns out to be a replica of her childhood home. she is also confronted by someone who appears to be her as a child, which is strange. child Barbie starts explaining that she had basically possessed her dreams and was taking over. Barbie becomes more and more visibly weak from being , in the house and around the young doppelganger. Ann Young Barbie leaves the house with her entourage of large dark plaid guards. Mike: While dragging older Barbie with her. Jessika: Yeah. So back in New York things have started to get wild. A hurricane that had just left, turned around and heads back into town. The women walk a path of Moonlight to the dream realm where thusly fesses up that she's been around a pretty long time and starts in on her plan for revenge. I would not want to cross this lady. It did not take much for her to get pissed off enough to want to kill people. Mike: I mean, I found it pretty relatable. Jessika: So they run across one of Barbie's failed companions who tells them that the cuckoo Barbie Mike: Well, they come across the body and then facily resurrects them in a similar manager that she did to George. Jessika: Correct. Mike: Yeah. And that's how they're able to get him to talk. Jessika: So during the walk Fox glove and Hazel discuss their future and Fox glove decides to raise the child as theirs and they make up in a sense. in New York, the storm is raging. George is making terrible transphobic jokes from the wall and the woman outside has been caught in the storm. So one helps a woman get inside out of the storm, in the dream realm, young Barbie, as an acting and plan, and has gone out to the most ancient point of the land. The higher gram that's land her two companions start making their way over, but are met by young Barbie who points them over to the threat quote, unquote, stating that lose is the cuckoo and loses a parrot. I might add. So the fact that she's saying the para did it is actually kind of a good assumption to make a Kuku. Fastly goes over confirms with the bird that she is in fact, the cuckoo and strangles her and snaps her neck. when Hazel asks why she did it, she says that the bird had to be taught a lesson. The lesson was that you don't get a second chance, which yeah. Mike: Yeah, Nestle is, uh, the epitome of don't fuck around. Jessika: yeah. found out. then young Barbie explains to Barbie and the others that the time has come to do what she had been brought here for. Back in New York are I don't like dogs. Friend is named Maisie and she is rightfully creeped out by George's face on the wall siding, bad vibes, which agreed more transphobic questions on some stories from Maisie about another trans family member she had, . It was just bad news bears. Barbie does a, she is told by young Barbie back in the dream realm and slams the porpoise teen into the large stone HIRA gram. And there's a great explosion at which point it's revealed the young Barbie is actually the cuckoo and that her goal, the whole time had been to get Barbie, to destroy the Portland teen and the high program. And then the cuckoo wouldn't be held in the land any longer breaking the spell and the land would subsequently be destroyed. So the necklace also disappears right off of Barbie's sleeping chest back in. Morphine's appears and Stacy, he created the land and puts Barbie back in control of her own mind as she had been Bewitched by the cuckoo and all of the characters of the land start filing past, ending with one dark haired and scarred woman in white, who clearly had history with dream, like every other fucking woman in here. So vessel, he tries to claim the life of the cuckoo. But dream is like, Nope. And states that he's displeased, that she's caused some major shit. Mike: Yeah, he was. If I remember, right. Dream was upset that she had trespassed into the dream realm without his permission. Jessika: Correct? Yeah. Mike: And it's also implied that her getting the goddess to grant her and foxglove and Hazel passage to the dream realm resulted in the hurricane. Jessika: Oh no, that was absolutely implied. Yeah. The implication was that if you pull the moon out of the sky, you're going to fuck with the tides. Yeah. Yeah. so we turn again to New York where that storm is even fiercer than before. And then there is an explosion of weather from outside and the world starts to. In the dream realm, dream states that he owes Barbie a boon and also reveals that Rose Walker, from , our doll's house volume had partially caused this mess. During that fateful night of converging dreams. Barbie asks that she and the other three women get back safe and sound, and they are sent back and we end volume five with a funeral Wanda's funeral. Barbie was pulled from the wreckage and was able to recover, but Wanda amazi did not make it. The funeral was similarly depressing and not just because Wanda had passed away, but because they were using Wanda's dead name and it cut her hair and had put her in men's clothing. And she was buried by her family who clearly had no idea who she really was nor cared to listen to find out. And even the headstone had her dead name listed. So Barbie took out a bright shade of lipstick and wrote Wanda on the headstone Barbie dreams that she sees Wanda with a smiling pale woman wearing black. And she finally seems happy. Mike: do we ever find out where the funeral is being held? It's just, it's implied that it's vaguely south Midwest. Jessika: She had to travel. And it did kind of seem in the south. I don't know that we got an exact location. Mike: Yeah. It was, it. was somewhere, very God-fearing and intolerance of people that are the least bit different. Jessika: Yeah. Well, what were your overall impressions of this story and who are your favorite least very characters or events of the fifth? Mike: Uh, you know, this volume is a really, it's an interesting change of pace because up until now, we've gotten stories where even if dream wasn't the main character, he played a really prominent role in the narrative, even if he was sitting in the background and this time around, he really doesn't show up a lot. And when he does, it's kind of just a bookend, the story. It's funny because whenever I talk about something that Neil Gaiman wrote and I'm like, oh, it's not my favorite thing. It's still better than 95% of things that I've read. this is not one of my favorite Sandman stories. Part of it is just because it's, it does provide that, that whiplash that you get where we're pivoting back and forth between the dream realm and New York. And there is a clumsiness too, to a lot of the characters, like we've already talked about Hazel. I feel like new Haven was trying to provide a narrative where someone who is trans is human, because he has several scenes with Wanda where Wanda talks about it and is very adamant that she is a woman and the story, the narrative doesn't judge or mocker for that. But , as you said, George is gross and transphobic, which makes sense. And, Maisie that the homeless lady is kinder. but you know, there, there is still that moment of are you a man or a woman? and then she relates the story about her grandson. it's not explained if he was just very femininely gay or if he was trans. Um, but she sounds like she was supportive of him, but then , he got killed during some sort of hotel hookup, which, I mean, that was a real risk with gay culture. Like, you know, especially during that time. I think it's one of the Columbia, your stories of the overall Sandman series. I don't think it's bad, but viewed through a 20, 21 lens, I think he could stand some revision. I don't know. I, my, my opinion is pretty much my opinion, I think, has the least value in, in any conversation about gender identity, because I'm a CIS white guy. Back on track, uh, did it, did it, uh, you know, I, I did actually really enjoy how we got to see some of the characters from the doll's house return, especially Barbie. it's really frustrating that I kept on thinking that we had seen Wanda in the doll's house. And it turns out that that was some misleading copy. That kind of made me think that like, oh, sorry. I liked how we got to see more of a strange fairies hill of a dream from that book and how it was spun out into a larger story that had a bunch of twists and turns. I don't know if I had a least favorite character, honestly, like, yeah, the Kuku is a hateful character, but I also thought it was kind of interesting that, that she was trying to kill Barbie so that she could exist. And then I don't think the cuckoo shows up again. I think the cuckoo just like bounces after this, when she flies off. I for some reason, like, I remember when I thought the KUKA was going to come back and be an even bigger batter nastier villain, but I don't think that happens. I could be wrong. It's been awhile, but I don't think it does. I thought was a really great character. Like we already talked about how, the way that they actually reveal that there's a lot more to where character and also how she is just straight out of Fox all the way through the story. and then, I guess, I guess my least favorite character is Hazel's character and it's not because of anything that was really wrong with her role in the story. It was just, she was very clumsily writ. Jessika: Yeah, Mike: like I said, I think she just comes across as dumb at the most convenient and unbelievable times. It's just, it's too coincidental where at one point she's asking about like, oh, well, don't, you have to kill a rabbit to like, what, what was it like she was asking about like to perform an abortion or, or Jessika: see if you're pregnant. Cause that Mike: yeah. Like, come on, okay. Jessika: Yeah, actual most ridiculous thing. I know. Mike: , I don't know. Like, do you agree to disagree? Like, I feel like I might be reading too much into this just with my own thoughts, but Jessika: Oh no I was, I was pretty disappointed in how this whole thing was written. I'm not gonna lie to you. I was disappointed in the transphobia. Let's start there. Mike: yeah. Jessika: It just felt like the entire volume, it may have been done with the intention of bringing to light some of the challenges that trans women face like deadnaming or of constantly being told that genitalia is what makes one, a woman or the idea that to do trans correctly, you need to get surgery or the blatant violence against trans people. But I don't think enough was done to highlight someone doing the right thing and giving example of allowing someone to just live their life genuinely. And Barbie is a good example of a somewhat decent advocate, but I wish that the lesbians in the building had done more to be open or even just not completely stupid about the situation. It just felt really TERF-y Mike: Yeah. Jessika: Which, you know, to, to explain for any of you who don't know a turf as it's trans exclusionary, radical feminist, which is just a way to say you don't want trans women in your fucking woman club for some fucking odd reason. Mike: Yeah, And I mean, back in 1991, when this was written, that wasn't really a thing like, gender queerness, wasn't really a known thing. It was your transsexual like, did you ever see the movie soap dish with Sally field and Whoopi Goldberg and Elizabeth shoe and Kevin Klein? Jessika: No. Mike: It's a really funny movie up until the last 10 minutes, uh, where it's, it's about the cast of a soap opera and how the behind the scenes stuff is even more ridiculous than what's going on in the soap opera. It's great. But then the last 10 minutes or so it's revealed that the villain who's been pulling everyone's puppet strings, , she's , publicly humiliated by being outed on live television as a trans woman. And that's the punchline. in, 1991, This was considered wildly funny. this is an example of how our views have changed in the past 30 years. for the better where we can look at this and say, this is, this is not great. Jessika: Yeah. I mean, it's still happening though. And that's it, it's still a very real problem within the, you know, the LGBTQ plus community. Mike: a hundred percent. Jessika: Yeah. It's just in the end, I felt like there were no lessons learned by the people who had been the most transphobic. Mike: Yeah, I mean, cause George, we knew was going to be terrible. , and then Hazel and Fox glove, there was no. resolution on that because by the time that they get back, Wanda's dead. Jessika: Yeah. Yup. And which that also felt refrigerators. Like you're going to kill off the one trans person, like okay. Mike: Yeah. And there's the, the happy ending of, we see Wanda perfect. And in this amazing dress with death, waving goodbye to say farewell to Barbie, which is it's. I mean it's Jessika: But she, but my problem with that is she looks a little bit different. Like she looks more feminine and she looks more in it's. That's not necessarily what, and I mean, I'm not trans, so I can't speak to this experience, but to me ha, having known people and talk to their experience, that's not necessarily what they want. They don't want to be a totally different person. They just want to be them genuinely. Mike: Yeah. I mean, I certainly can't speak for people who are trans or gender fluid, or, or anything in that realm. Like that is well outside my wheelhouse. I can just say, I agree with you. It feels achy. Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and yeah, since, no real lessons , were learned. I mean, maybe that's the real message that people don't fucking learn. And if so, thank you. That's goddamn. Depressing. Mike: Yeah. The one nice moment was when Barbie wrote Wanda's name on her tombstone and the bright lipstick, that was nice because you know, it was loud and it was flamboyant and it was very much everything about Wanda's personality, but it was really dissatisfying as an ending. Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Did you have a favorite art moment in this volume? Mike: I'm not sure that I had a favorite art moment, but I was really affected every time one of Barbie's friends died or where she found their bodies. like it, it genuinely made me sad. You know, I've already talked about how, when they found per natto, the monkeys corpse and how it was really sad, but Martin 10 bones and his expression right before the cop shot him, because he just looked, it was that look of, oh, I found my friend , and I've got the message, but like, it, uh, it reminded me of the time that I'd take my dog into the vet to put them down. Jessika: Mm. Hmm. Mike: you know, and that's, it's, it's that moment where you, uh, when you're holding the dog and it's like, oh, everything's okay. And then they give him the shot and he gives you this look just fucking rips you apart every time. So not really, uh, not really a favorite moment, but definitely in effecting one. Jessika: Oh, you're trying to get me go on to, Mike: Yeah. Um, I dunno. What about you? Jessika: well, I really enjoyed how they did the color and line work and the moon. Mike: Yeah, those were cool. Jessika: Yeah, it was neat to see how they use the negative space and implied shapes using lions. And it also made me feel like I was a part of the scene. There was almost like I had to shield my own eyes from the full white pages. Mike: Yeah. that was, that was neat. Jessika: any final thoughts about this volume before we move on? Mike: like I said, it's not really my favorite. I keep thinking about Hazel and Fox glove. And it's interesting because like Fox glove was, , the girlfriend of the woman who put out her own eyes with the forks or , the, the skewers and the diner, Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. I figured you were going to bring that up. I was, I was like, how can I condense this crazy story? Mike: Yeah. And so that, I, that was kind of a neat throwback because I remember Fox glove is like a very, it's like a throwaway name or something like that. And then I think her name is Julie shows up in the jacket that she was wearing and her eyes , are not visible during the nightmares when everyone's being plagued by the Cuckoo's Binion's. I will say that moment where Hazel and Fox glove are first in the dreaming and Fox lava sitting there and basically screaming at Hazel about getting pregnant and it feels like it's going to get real ugly. And she's like, when we get back, I'm gonna , call you all sorts of names and tell you how dumb you are and do you know how much it's going to cost for us to raise a baby. and she's like, we're going to have to buy one of those stupid expensive books to name the kid. And I was like, oh, Okay. , and then they're holding hands by the end of that page. And it's, it's sweet. that story continues actually in a couple of mini series about death, that, that game in road. And they're really good. they've got their own sense of tragedy and everything, but they're, they're solid, I don't know, it's not my favorite , but it does a lot of things that are really interesting. And I also think that it leads to some really cool stuff down the road. Jessika: Let's move on to volume six, Mike: Okay. Jessika: titled fables . And flections. This was originally published in single magazine form as the Sandman 29 through 31 38 through 40 50 Sandman special one and vertigo preview one between 1991 and 1993. So very much a true compilation written by Neil Gaiman illustrated by Brian Talbot, Stan wool, Craig Russell, Sean McManus, Jon Watkiss, Jill Thompson, Duncan Eagleson and Kent Williams. And this was very much a, an anthology of a bunch of different stories that didn't necessarily tie together as a, an overarching plot like previous volume did. Mike: Yeah. it's very much like dream country just with about double the cost. Jessika: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. The first story is fear of falling. A musical theater writer and director who is wanting to give up right before his show. While sleeping. He is visited by Morpheus who ends up inspiring him to take the leap of courage. It took to finish his project to completion. Next up was destined mirrors, three Septembers and a January the story of the emperor of the United States. Here's the scene. San Francisco, 1859. Dream is drawn into a contest with his siblings, desire to spare and delirium, to see who could push a man to his death, each trying different tactics to try to lure him into one of those emotions. When Morpheus entered the scene, he basically just gave the man his exact dream. He wanted to be king and Morpheus stated that he was the emperor of the USA. He starts making proclamations about his claim to the throne and starts gaining popularity and the charity of the town around him. And he actually becomes famous for being the emperor and is even sought after, by tourists, visiting San Francisco. He has called crazy at times, but does not fall prey to madness desires, unable to tempt him as he already has everything he dreams of and despair was never in the picture. After his dreams came true. He was truly content and dream had won the contest death swoops in looking stylish as ever and leads. Mike: Yeah. And emperor Norton is actually someone who really existed in San Francisco. Like he's a part of our local history and Jessika: I didn't know that. Mike: yeah, no he's emperor, Joshua Norton, the imaginary emperor. he's a really cool part of San Francisco lore and I highly recommend, , reading up on him if he ever get the chance. he's one of my favorite stories about the city that. I grew up in. Jessika: Oh, I'm definitely gonna look into that now. Cause I mean, I love just a Stone's throw away and I can't believe I've never heard that before. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: The next story is mirrors Thermador said in England in 1794 with Morpheus, just swooping into the home of Johanna Constantine. And I'm sure that name sounds familiar in the middle of the nights and I'm not going to lie. It was really creepy when he was just like Nabu, all your people are asleep, just you and I. Sugar was like big. Nope. Mike: Yeah. Jessika: And then he's like, Hey, I have this super dangerous mission. UN she's all, but what's in it for me. And apparently she just believes in vague promises and agrees to help with him and with his family matter that he needs a mortal to intercede in. And it. Then it is post the French revolution. The reign of terror is in full swing and Johannah gets caught sneaking through the town late at night with a decapitated head in a bag, you know, casual Mike: who hasn't been out on a Saturday night with a human head and their satchel come on. Jessika: Mr. Al of late God. Once you got my bag, nothing you'd be interested in. So She ultimately gets picked up by the law sands head and as kept as a prisoner under a further threat, if she does not tell them where the head is, this whole thing about like her spreading superstitions or some bullshit. Mike: , Yeah, because robes Pierre was all about reason and eliminating superstition and religion. If I remember my high school history, Jessika: you are correct. Is that whole logic piece, which he was just going off about. So she dreams a little dream and visits, Morpheus and reveals that the head is Morpheus, a son Orpheus, so Joe had a basically says, this is your fight, but I'm in the ring little hope over here, Hugh the extra creep factor where the law rightfully figures out that she probably hit the head with all the other heads and go tell her to fetch the one they're looking for. Johanna gets the head, props it up, covers her ears. And tells Orpheus to sing. It drives the map, puts them in a trance unclear, but she is able to get away and get Orpheus to a little island paradise where he has previously been. We also come to find out that Morpheus is quite the absentee parent. , it was so sad. There was this part where Orpheus asks Johannah basically does this mean he cares about me and she's like, dunno. Mike: Yeah, it's a, anyone that's grown up with with strained relationships to their parents, like can just feel that gut. Jessika: Yeah. The fourth story is convergence. The hunt. So we find ourselves this time in a story within a story. Uh, grandfather tells his begrudging granddaughter, a tale about a man named Vaseline who becomes obsessed with finding a Duke's daughter based on a measure painting that was given to him by a Romani peddler, as he goes off in search of this woman, he has never met. He first encounters, the Romani peddler that had given him the miniature she is dead on the forest path, that he just swoops her bag of items and moves off through the forest. He meets several characters along the way, including Baba Yaga and a tall slender librarian, each particularly interested in one of the stolen items. He was peddling one night while hunting a dearest his target is taken out by a woman of the forest who factors into the story a little bit later upon reaching the Duke's mansion. He is led to a dungeon to rot, but is saved by the tall librarian who really, really, really wanted that book because it turns out the book is from the dream realm and Morpheus would be very, very, displeased. Should it not be returned? Mike: We've met the librarian before in passing, he's Lucy in the librarian of the dream realm. Like he's the first one that Morpheus basically reintroduces himself to once he gets back to the dream realm preludes and Nocturnes, but like he doesn't show up a lot. , it's one of those things where he's kind of like a central figure to the dreaming, but he doesn't show up a lot in the stories. , I don't remember. I think he may have appeared in passing in season of the mists. I can't remember, but anyway, sorry. His name is Lucien. Like that's, That's all I was trying to, right? Jessika: So in exchange for the book, Morpheus takes Vasily to the woman's room, but when he gets there, vastly simply looks at her and gives her the necklace back saying this belongs to you later on in his life. He runs back into the woman who took down the deer while there are both in Wolf form. And at the end of the story, the granddaughter assumes that her grandfather has made up the story to assuage her from dating her current boyfriend. But an ending comment, lets the reader know that the story may have some truth after all. Mike: that was one of my favorite closing modes. I I'm not gonna lie. Jessika: It was sweet. So our next tale distant mirrors. focuses on Julius. Caesar's next of Ken Augustus, who after a dream decides that he must live one day in the life of a beggar. So he calls upon an actor who happens to be a , little person to assist him in getting into the role for the day and show him the ropes. They start by making artificial boils on their faces and arms. They dress and rags and take to the streets in a dream, he was approached by Morpheus who knew about his troubled past being brutalized by the man. He looked up to the man, a whole empire looked up to, there was also this whole situation with there being two different futures. Augustus had read the prophecies, edited some destroyed others so that that overall people wouldn't know what was truly predicted. And so that he could make his own course of choosing by being a baker one day a year, he was not being watched by Julius and the other gods and therefore could plan without them watching after Augustus's death, the actor who had accompanied him that day wrote the story of his day with the emperor. However, the harsh details of Augustus's life remained a mystery that he himself took to. Next up. We once again, go back in time with convergence. Soft places. If you don't have whiplash yet, just wait. You will get it by the end of this episode. But this time we go to see Marco polo who was lost in the desert and having the most odd dream. He runs into a person who says his cellmate is named Marco polo and they that run into our buddy Fiddler's green or Gilbert, who we saw in the doll's house who tries to impart a lesson on Marco polo. Marco thinks that he is going to be stuck in the dreaming, but when he emerges, he is back with his father and was only a few hundred feet away from the party upon waking Marco forgets the dream. He was just a part of the Seventh story is the song of Orpheus we again, meet Orpheus this time, his head is still firmly attached to his neck and he is going to be married that day. His friend, is also at the wedding along with Morpheus and all of Morpheus as sibling. The bride reminds, era status of his long dead wife. And during the wedding, he requests a private meeting with Eurydice fading, a need for assistance. He states his intention to rape her and goes to grab her, but she needs him and runs off where she steps on and is bitten by a poisonous snake and dies right there. Orpheus realizes that she is no longer around and panics asking if something has happened to her grieving, the loss of his bride Orpheus seeks help from berserk his father than his aunt death, demanding that she bring her back death states that she cannot, that Euridice is any underworld now, and that he is unable to go and come back as he is a mortal after more prompting, she does state that she is able to just not collect him basically. And he would survive coming back from the underworld, but she also tells him that this is not what he wants and that he should go home. Or if he is however, it does the exact opposite and begins his journey to the gate death had described. So he makes his way to the underworld where he's buried across the river sticks and makes his way past Cerberus the three headed dog and through the endless amount of people in the underworld, he gets to Hades and Persephone who asked him for a song. And he asks for his wife back and plays a haunting melody that brings the underworld to a halt. Hades states that he could have his wife back, but that she will follow him as a shadow up and out of the underworld. The one rule was that he could not look behind him before he reached the exit of the underworld, or she would go back down. He made it almost all the way there, but started doubting thinking that he was the butt of Hades, this joke. But when he turned around, he saw Eurydice just before she was dragged back into the other world. Orpheus broke the surface alone and screamed understanding that he had just bought his only chance to have his bride back. Time-lapse Orpheus as many years older and living in solitude, he is visited by his mother, Kelly OB, who had a falling out with Morpheus after he would not assist Orpheus with his quest to bring back your IDC is not interested in talking with her, but she wants him. The picante are on their way and that he should leave as soon as possible. So she disappears and soon after the forest breaks out and cries, a crowd of naked women covered in wine and blood are running right towards him and ask that he take part in their rituals of sex, wine, and eating raw flesh. He states that he cannot participate as his heart belongs to someone else. And they basically say, yeah, we weren't asking. And they literally rip him apart. And eventually decapitate him, sending his head, flying into a river. He, of course can't die. So he's just stuck, literally rolling on a river. Mike: Yeah. It's very much the stories that Orpheus is known for. Everybody knows him from the story of him and URI dicey, but, surprise. There is actually a major part of Greek mythology where he gets ripped apart by boxes, insane followers and yeah. You're I find you don't want to take part in the ritual. we're going to turn you into one of the ritual supplies and just eat. Yeah, Jessika: Yeah, pretty much. So Orpheus the head washes a shore and Morpheus comes to see him. He wants to say, goodbye has arranged for Orpheus to be taken care of, but says the he'll never see Orpheus again. His life is his own next is convergence parliament of Rooks.. We visit Daniel and Hippolyta again, she puts Daniel down to nap and he wanders into the dream realm where he goes to the house of secrets and is with Matthew Eve and Abel Eve tells the story of Adam's three wives and Abel after Kane interrupts of course tells a very optimistic and happy version of their story, where everybody got along after all. And after all was said and done, Hippolyta has no idea that Daniel has gone anywhere while he was napping. Mike: we keep getting hints dropped about Daniel and it's gonna play out in a very big way later on. Jessika: I'm excited. So our last story distant mirrors, Ramadan is about the king of Baghdad, who has everything. Anyone could want ruling over a prosperous city. However, something still feels wrong to him. So he goes down into the secret depths of the palace where numerous wonders were kept. You procures a ball, which holds multitudes of basically like bad vibe entities. He summons Morpheus stating that he would break the ball, therefore releasing all of the bad vibes if Morpheus didn't appear. And when he actually follows through and drops the ball, Morpheus catches, it takes it and asks, why have you summoned me in, what the fuck do you want? The king wanted to trade control of his city in order to ensure that it was going to last forever. Morpheus agreed, but in true Morpheus fashion, he put the city in a jar and left the man to be the king of a city in shambles. So Mike overall impressions of a story, favorite characters or. Mike: Yeah. like I said, this one is a lot like dream country and there's one more volume later on where we get the one-shot stories to provide us with breathers, , , from the overall narrative. They were printed, as they were in, in various orders, but then DC collected them into the different volumes in ways. That makes more sense. but it's interesting because in this case we got a collection of stories without another prolonged round of like soul crushing horror and dark fantasy. I think the anthology volumes actually do a lot to move Sandman from the realm of horror and more into the realm of fantasy, because a lot of the times the individual stories aren't as dark or, as, as brutal. like a lot of times they're a little bit more philosophical or meditative, but I liked them a lot, but I mean, I only own, two issues of Sandman like individual. and one of them is issue number eight, which is the first appearance of death. And the other one is issue 31, which is the one that features three Septembers in a January. The story about . I love that story about Norden. I think that one's great. We already talked about how he was a real person and, he is this really interesting character out of history who is both the epitome , of kind of the magic of a dream and also what you can achieve even when you're faced with a ton of tragedy, because he was actually almost, I think he was basically completely wiped out due to a bad rice shipment and he did die penniless. And at the same time, San Francisco fucking loved him. Like they kept standing, box tickets for him at the symphony on opening night He was arrested once by an officer and the judge actually did immediately dismiss him when he was brought before him. And basically said like, , as an emperor, he is never declared war. He's never tried to invade anyone. He hasn't done terrible things. Other emperors should be like him. And I loved, how desire tried to tempt him with the ghost of a, dead snake oil salesman and the other bit where it turns out he had, like a Chinese information network, , where it turns out that the Chinese populace of San Francisco, which was hugely prevalent at the time, because of the gold rush and. Other things. , I loved the idea that he actually did have , this amazing fantastical life that was already fantastical, but then there were even more elements of fantasy woven into it. and then the other one is, , the parliament of ropes. It's , the story of Cain and Abel and Eve, you know, the purlin or Rooks hits me in a personal way because the bit we're able tells the story about him and Kane and, it's what this person who, who just idolized his brother wanted from the relationship, even though they do have their own strange in certain ways loving relationship, but also Cain murders able on a regular basis throughout the series. And it made me think about, how I stopped talking to my brother a number of years ago, but I still think about him a lot. And I wish that things were different between us, like. I often wonder what things would have been like if we had wound up being slightly different people and I construct those fantasies in my head still sometimes, but yeah. honestly I like this a lot better than I like that. I like the previous volume, because it gives me a lot more to think about, um, I don't know. How do you feel about it? Jessika: Yeah, I, you know, it's funny as I actually really liked the story of Joshua, the emperor of the United States, Mike: Yeah. Jessika: I really like how they kept the narrative bag, leaving the reader wavering between believing that he really had been successful in his reign as the legitimate emperor of the U S or if he was just some sweet old man who was really well-liked well-respected and generally taken care of by this town of other really eccentric. Mike: Yeah. And it turns out the truth is a little bit of both. Jessika: Yeah, Yeah, I guess so. I mean, he did get out of, out of a core thing, huh? Mike: Well, and when he died, basically, he was going to be put in a Popper's grave. And I believe like the merchants association basically paid for a really Swank funeral and of people came to the viewing like, you know, but thousands of people turned out for. Jessika: what I'm going to research this so sweet. Mike: Hmm, Jessika: Yeah. I thought it was really wholesome that he was just so content to have the title of emperor. He didn't have some weird power trip about colonizing or being otherwise oppressive. I would say that that was genuinely refreshing to see him just so content to be valued and validated. Oh shit. That's all I want, Mike: that's all, any of us want. Also, I liked that he hung out with mark Twain and the story, and I don't know if he and mark Twain were friends in real life, but mark Twain was a reporter in San Francisco. after he got run out of the state of Nevada, Jessika: maybe we'll have to specifically look at up. Well, did you have a favorite art moment in this volume? Mike: I had to, I really liked the art of the hunt, which is the story of the grandfather. Cause it felt really like, it felt really scratchy and you're kind of reminded me of those old European crosshatched wood prints. And then that actually makes sense because I realized it was inked by this guy named Vince Locke. And he's this guy who he actually illustrated a bunch of tabletop role-playing games for white Wolf games in the 1990s. And then he also created the comic that the movie, a history of violence was based off of. If you remember that. Jessika: I do. Mike: but like, I always really liked his style. Like I thought it was really cool and really unique. He's done a lot of other cool stuff as well. He had a comic series called dead world that was a zombie apocalypse kind of comic. If I remember right , well, before the walking dead ever came along like, you know, 30 years. , and then there's the whole issue of Ramadan, which is the story set in Baghdad. so Ramadan was illustrated by P Craig Russell and Russell was a, the first openly gay comic creator. and he's still working today in his art style. It's just, it's one of the most fucking beautiful things you'll ever see. And it's really adaptable into a bunch o
The way Shishir Mehrotra sees it, digital documents haven't really changed in 50 years. Since the days of WordStar, Harvard Graphics and VisiCalc, the basic idea of what makes up a document, presentation and spreadsheet haven't really changed. Until now.Now, thanks to companies like Coda — where Mehrotra is founder and CEO — along with Notion, Quip and others, that's starting to change. These companies are building tools that can do multiple things in a single space, that are designed both for creating and for sharing, and that turn documents from “a piece of paper on a screen” into something much more powerful. And to hear Mehrotra tell it, documents are headed toward a future that looks more like an operating system than a Word file.Mehrotra joined the Source Code podcast to talk about Coda's recent announcements, the two-year project to rebuild its core technology, Coda's future as a platform, and why he thinks documents can be much more than just documents going forward.For more on the topics covered in this episode:Shishir Mehrotra on TwitterCodaCoda's GalleryCoda's next move: Building an app store for getting stuff doneThe Power of Reset: Arianna Huffington's secret to de-stress and unite teamsFor all the links and stories, head to Source Code's homepage.
The Osborne Effect isn't an episode about Spider-Man that covers turning green or orange and throwing bombs off little hoverboards. Instead it's about the impact of The Osborne 1 computer on the history of computers. Although many might find discussing the Green Goblin or Hobgoblin much more interesting. The Osborne 1 has an important place in the history of computing because when it was released in 1981, it was the first portable computer that found commercial success. Before the Osborne, there were portable teletype machines for sure, but computers were just starting to get small enough that a fully functional machine could be taken on an airplane. It ran 2.2 of the CP/M operating system and came with a pretty substantial bundle of software. Keep in mind, there weren't internal hard drives in machines like this yet but instead CP/M was a set of floppies. It came with MBASIC from Microsoft, dBASE II from Ashton-Tate, the WordStar word processor, SuperCalc for spreadsheets, the Grammatik grammar checker, the Adventure game, early ledger tools from PeachTree Software, and tons of other software. By bundling so many titles, they created a climate where other vendors did the same thing, like Kaypro. After all, nothing breeds competitors like the commercial success of a given vendor. The Osborne was before flat panel screens so had a built-in CRT screen. This and the power supply and the heavy case meant it weighed almost 25 pounds and came in at just shy of $1,800. Imagine two disk drives with a 5 inch screen in the middle. The keyboard, complete with a full 10-key pad, was built into a cover that could be pulled off and used to interface with the computer. The whole thing could fit under a seat on an airplane. Airplane seats were quite a bit larger than they are today back then! We think of this as a luggable rather than a portable because of that and because computers didn't have batteries yet. Instead it pulled up to 37 watts of power. All that in a 20 inch wide case that stood 9 inches tall. The two people most commonly associated with the Osborne are Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein. Osborne got his PhD from the University of Delaware in 1968 and went to work in chemicals before he moved to the Bay Area and started writing books about computers and started a company called Osborne and Associates to write computer books. He sold that to McGraw-Hill in 1979. By then he'd been hanging around the Homebrew Computer Club for a few years and there were some pretty wild ideas floating around. He saw Jobs and Wozniak demo the Apple I and watched their rise. Founders and engineers from Cromemco, IMSAI, Tiny BASIC, and Atari were also involved there - mostly before any of those products were built. So with the money from McGraw-Hill and sales of some of his books like An Introduction To Microcomputers, he set about thinking through what he could build. Lee Felsenstein was another guy from that group who'd gotten his degree in Computer Science at Berkeley before co-creating Community Memory, a project to build an early bulletin board system on top of a SDS 940 timesharing mainframe with links to terminals like a Teletype Model 33 sitting at Leopold's Records in Berkeley. That had started up back in 1973 when Doug Englebart donated his machine from The Mother of All Demos and eventually moved to minicomputers as those became more available. Having seen the world go from a mainframe the size of a few refrigerators to minicomputers and then to early microcomputers like the Altair, when a hardware hacker like Felsenstein paired up with someone with a little seed money like Osborne, magic was bound to happen. The design was similar to the NoteTaker that Alan Kay had built at Xerox in the 70s - but hacked together from parts they could find. Like 5 inch Fujitsu floppy drives. They made 10 prototypes with metal cases and quickly moved to injection molded plastic cases, taking them to the 1981 West Coast Computer Faire and getting a ton of interest immediately. Some thought the screen was a bit too small but at the time the price justified the software alone. By the end of 1981 they'd had months where they did a million dollars in sales and they fired up the assembly line. People bought modems to hook to the RS-232 compatible serial port and printers to hook to the parallel port. Even external displays. Sales were great. They were selling over 10,000 computers a month and Osborne was lining up more software vendors, offering stock in the Osborne Computer Corporation. By 1983 they were preparing to go public and developing a new line of computers, one of which was the Osborne Executive. That machine would come with more memory, a slightly larger screen, an expansion slot and of course more software using sweetheart licensing deals that accompanied stock in the company to keep the per-unit cost down. He also announced the Vixen - same chipset but lighter and cheaper. Only issue is this created a problem, which we now call the Osborne Effect. People didn't want the Osborne 1 any more. Seeing something new was on the way, people cancelled their orders in order to wait for the Executive. Sales disappeared almost overnight. At the time, computer dealers pushed a lot of hardware and the dealers didn't want to have all that stock of an outdated model. Revenue disappeared and this came at a terrible time. The market was changing. IBM showed up with a PC, Apple had the Lisa and were starting to talk about the Mac. KayPro had come along as a fierce competitor. Other companies had clued in on the software bundling idea. The Compaq portable wasn't far away. The company ended up cancelling the IPO and instead filing for bankruptcy. They tried to raise money to build a luggable or portable IBM clone - and if they had done so maybe they'd be what Compaq is today - a part of HP. The Osborne 1 was cannibalized by the Osborne Executive that never actually shipped. Other companies would learn the same lesson as the Osborne Effect throughout history. And yet the Osborne opened our minds to this weird idea of having machines we could take with us on airplanes. Even if they were a bit heavy and had pretty small screens. And while the timing of announcements is only one aspect of the downfall of the company, the Osborne Effect is a good reminder to be deliberate about how we talk about future products. Especially for hardware but we also have to be careful not to sell features that don't exist yet in software.
Paulo Milliet Roque inaugura a Brasoft em 1984. Seu carro-chefe: o WordStar, um processador de texto localizado para o português, amplamente adotado por empresas no Brasil. Em meio a uma inflação descontrolada, que infernizava a vida dos brasileiros, a população elege um novo presidente pela primeira vez em 30 anos, sem imaginar que, poucos dias após sua posse, ele confiscaria suas economias. Junto a esse imbróglio, a Brasoft se prepara para lançar a primeira linha de jogos licenciados para PC no Brasil — e, com isso, inaugurar um novo mercado. Esse episódio conta com a participação de: Cristina Zuccolo, ex-executiva da Brasoft Henrique Olifiers, co-fundador da Bossa Studios, desenvolvedora de games localizada em Londres Lucia Garcia, economista do Departamento Intersindical de Estatísticas e Estudos Socioeconômicos (DIEESE) Renato Degiovani, criador de Amazônia, primeiro jogo comercial brasileiro para computador, e ex-editor da revista Micro Sistemas Silvia Bassi, jornalista, ex-editora do caderno de Informática da Folha de São Paulo e co-fundadora do The Shift Paulo Roque, fundador da Brasoft Leonel Penna Franca, ex-executivo da Brasoft Rosa Arrais, ex-assessora de imprensa da Brasoft Entre em contato conosco através do email primeirocontato@b9.com.br. Primeiro Contato é uma co-produção B9 e Overloadr Idealização, produção, roteiro e apresentação: Henrique Sampaio Edição e sonorização: Mariana Leão com apoio de Angie Lopez Trilha sonora original: Casemiro Azevedo Trilha sonora adicional: Matheus Leston, Windows 96, Eis e do artista alemão Felix Kubin. Músicas adicionais de Epidemic Sound. A bateria de escola de samba é do Alceu Maia. Esse episódio contou com materiais da TV Globo. Agradecimento especial à Beatriz Fiorotto. Produção Executiva: Carlos Merigo, Ju Wallauer e Cris Bartis Coordenação: Alexandre Potascheff Identidade Visual: Henrique Sampaio Coordenação digital: Agê Barros, Pedro Strazza, Luzi Santana e Mattheus Guimarães Marketing: Luzi Santana Atendimento e Negócios: Rachel Casmala, Camila Mazza, Greyce Lidiane e Telma Zenaro Time Overloadr: Henrique Sampaio, Caio Teixeira e Heitor de PaolaApoie o Overloadr: https://www.overloadr.com.br/ajudeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Shishir is as ahead of the technology curve as it gets, some of his ideas have revolutionized the way that tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and YouTube operate. Now, he's innovating again as the founder and CEO of Coda-an amazing integrated system that centers around creating Docs that are as powerful and actionable as Apps. He's also one of the most down to Earth human beings we've ever had the pleasure of sitting down with! References in this episode: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer SNL Skit Steven Sinofsky's book-Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution Coda Doc-No Code, Just a Coda Doc: How Squared Away Saves a Thousand Hours and $100K a Year Coda Doc-Rituals for Hypergrowth: An Inside Look at How Youtube Scaled Episode Timeline: 2:20 - Shishir's data path intersects with Rob's and the stories abound, Shishir passes on working for Google before it was Google 15:25 - Shishir has a random idea about advertising that eventually forms into some common advertising practices, Google woos Shishir back, and he ends up running YouTube! 27:25 - The value of a Computer Science degree is....debatable, an interesting definition and example of AI, and Nouns VS Verbs in naming products and features 41:00 - How Coda was formed and the amazing innovation that Coda is-it makes a doc as powerful as an app, and the importance of integration Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Shishir Mehrotra, and let me tell you, Shishir is a ringer of a guest. We met back at Microsoft in the 2000s where he was already entrusted with some pretty amazing responsibilities and was doing very, very well in those roles. About the same time that I left Microsoft to start P3, Shishir left Microsoft to go ... Oh, that's right ... Run YouTube. And he was at the helm of YouTube during what he calls the hyper-growth years where YouTube really exploded and became the thing that we know it is today. During this conversation, I discovered that it certainly sounds like he invented something about YouTube that we absolutely take for granted today and has been seen by billions, used probably billions of times per day. That wasn't enough for him, so he left YouTube after a number of years and started a new company called Coda. Rob Collie (00:00:55): And Coda is an incredibly ambitious product. You could say that in some sense, it's aimed at being a Microsoft Office replacement, but even that isn't quite right. It's in a little bit different niche than that. And, of course, we explored that in our conversation. We talk about his billion dollar mistake, quite possibly, literally, billion dollar mistake, not many people can make those. I was thrilled to discover that he and I have basically exactly the same philosophy about nouns and verbs in software. We talk about the antiquated notion that a computer science degree is somehow super important in product management roles, even at software companies. And just, in general, I couldn't get enough of it. He was super gracious to give us his time for this show, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. So, let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:42): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. Announcer (00:01:48): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:02:11): Welcome to the show. Shishir Mehrotra, how are you today? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:15): Oh, I'm great. Rob Collie (00:02:16): Are you coming to us from Silicon Valley? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:17): I am. Well, south of California. Been in my house and in this spot for about the last year. Rob Collie (00:02:23): When did we meet? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:24): You were working on Excel and I think at the time I was working on WinFS, the early days of Microsoft. Rob Collie (00:02:31): Oh, WinFS. Just completely unexpected sidelight. It was like 1998 or maybe 1999, we're in a review with Jim [Allchin 00:02:42] and all of his lieutenants. And the whole point of this meeting is to assassinate the technology I was working on. This was an arranged hit on MSI ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:54): [crosstalk 00:02:54]. On MSI. Rob Collie (00:02:55): ... On the Windows Installer, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:56): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:02:57): And there are factions in this room that have had their knives, they've been sharpening them and they've arranged this moment so they can kill us. And, at one point, one of the complaints about us was our heavy use of the registry. Just poisoning the registry. Do you remember a guy named Rob [Short 00:03:15]? Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:15): Yeah, of course. Rob Collie (00:03:16): I really liked Rob Short. I thought he was awesome. He was a tough guy, but also really fair and funny and friendly at the same time. And he's been sitting in this meeting for hours because he has to, and he's just totally tuned out. Of course he would be, right? It's not about him. And then, this mention of the registry as an attack on us comes up and Jim Allchin immediately whirls around to Rob and goes, "Now you see, this is what I'm talking about. Our storage system is such a piece of shit." And he starts ripping it to Rob and Rob's having to wake up from his trance. It's like suddenly the guns can swing so fast in those meetings. Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:55): I mean, that was a use case that Bill and Jim and so on all tried to push on WinFS, but it was one we actively resisted. It's a hard one. Rob Collie (00:04:02): It is. The worst thing in the world is to have state stored in multiple places that have to go together with each other. Right? That just turns out to be one of the hardest problems. Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:11): It's such a critical element of the operating system. And you end up with all sorts of other issues of what can run on what and ... Rob Collie (00:04:17): And it's funny. The registry was basically my introduction to the entire Win32 platform. When I was running the installer, that's all I knew about. I knew about the type library registrations and the registry. I knew it in class IDs. And I could follow those things. I could follow that rabbit's trail from one place to another without ever really understanding what a class ID was. Right? It was just the registration of an object, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:40): Right. Rob Collie (00:04:40): I didn't learn that until years later. So funny. But then we crossed paths again. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:45): SQL. Rob Collie (00:04:46): I remember how it happened. Ariel [Nets 00:04:49] came into my office and said, "Hey, there's someone important who's going to need some information from you." And I go, "Okay." And he said something like, "He's a real rising star here, so make sure you give him everything he needs." And I'm like, "Okay." Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:05): I don't think I know this half of the story. Okay. Rob Collie (00:05:09): And I think you were somehow involved with the potential acquisition that was going on at the time. Is that true? Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:14): You talking about in-memory BI? Rob Collie (00:05:16): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:16): Yeah. I was at the time ... Maybe for your listeners. So, my history, after WinFS folded and collapsed, and you can talk about that if you'd like, I ended up being unexpectedly merged into the SQL Server division. I ended up running what Microsoft called the program management team or SQL Server. And it was super interesting for me because I was never really a database guy. Everything I had worked on to that point was fairly end user-centered, infrastructure in the background. And I was surrounded by these people that really love databases. Actually, as a side note, I fell in love with databases because of Paul Flessner. Paul was on his way out. He was retiring that year and he had one last ... At the time we used to call them strategy days so that Bill and Steve and so on would post this annual review. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:01): And Paul Flessner, he decided this was going to be his last hurrah strategy, "I'm going to tell these people exactly what I think." He's in the middle of preparing for this and WinFS is folding up and he says, "While you're figuring out what you're going to do next, why don't you come help me write the strategy days presentation?" And he was really drawn to the idea of someone that actually wasn't in his organization doing it because I could speak my mind about whatever and I had no bias walking into it. And probably from his perspective, I would write whatever the hell he wanted and make it sound good. This guy, he's a database legend. He drove the Sybase acquisition that turned into SQL Server. And so, he had a list of ideas for how to think about the database market that many of which were pretty ascetical. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:44): And he spoke in very plain language when he's ... Actually, interestingly, he's retired. [inaudible 00:06:48] his woodworking. That's his thing. He builds chairs and tables are amazing. You can go buy them. As opposed to many techie database guys, he speaks in very plain language. Rob Collie (00:06:55): I love that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:56): And you just walk through like, "Here's how to think about the different workloads and here's what's happening in the industry and here's what's happening in data warehousing." Which wasn't really a term at the time and data warehousing was just emerging. And then, at the end of that process, we had a pretty successful strategy days and he said, "Why don't you run the PM team and help my new guy?" Ted Kummert came in to go and run SQL Server after Paul. And that's how I ended up in that spot. And as part of that, I ended up covering a lot of ... One of Paul's last statement was, "Data warehousing is not the same thing. Go do something different." And that's where people like Ariel and Amir and so on, that whole division, Tom ... And there was a bunch of people running that at that time ... Came into play. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:34): And then they had this idea that ... There's a lot of different things to know about SQL Server. SQL Server is not actually well-built for data warehouse and so most databases are not. And at the time, the raining wisdom was you needed a completely different architecture for business intelligence, which I guess we called OLAP back then. I don't know if that term is still used. Rob Collie (00:07:54): Yeah. Oh, we still do. We just hide it. It's a dirty word. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:57): Yeah. For the geeky folks out there, and the key difference being that instead of storing things row by row, you store things column by column and you also precalculate aggregate. So, you have some sense of what, I guess, nowadays called the cube. These things are likely to be great for, "We're going to precalculate the sum of orders for customers by region or whatever it might be." And then, Ariel and his brother Amir had this idea and they said, "Hey, we've got this strategic advantage at Microsoft, which is we own the front end and the backend of this architecture. On the backend, we need to be able to scale better and we need to move to column storage and do all this fancy stuff with cubes. But if you ask anybody where all of their analysis actually gets done, what do they say? Shishir Mehrotra (00:08:38): There's 1,000 reporting tools out there but everybody lives in Excel. And so, they said, "What if we were to find a creative way to pull these together? And I think at the time you were running this part of the Excel platform. And so, I was sent in to go figure out how to make this pitch. I mean, these guys really wanted to do an acquisition space and so on. And I was sent in to try to make the pitch. And, actually, the insight there was interesting. Amir came up with this chart, which I'm not really sure where it came from but he basically went and looked at the size of cubes of OLAP instances across a wide set of customers, including all of Microsoft. He pulled all of these different ones and he figured out that the biggest cube at Microsoft was this thing called MS Sales. Shishir Mehrotra (00:09:20): It was all the customer data from Microsoft if you remember well. And he said, "If you compress this down with column storage, I'm going to get the numbers wrong." But it fit inside tens of megabytes of storage, which was previously much, much larger if you did as row storage. And he said, "This is so small that it can fit in memory on a client, which was unheard of. Usually, the whole idea behind these systems was you have to query a server. The server is really big. At that time, a lot of systems go up and scaled out. There's often very big hardware back there as well. And he said, "Hey, I bet we could move to a model where the primary way that people do this analysis actually happens in that place where they actually want to do their work in Excel. So, I think that's where the other half of that conversation from my side was coming from. Rob Collie (00:10:06): Yeah. So, like you said, with Paul Flessner bringing you into right part of the strategy days stuff, Amir was, at that point in time, still using me in the same way. I had come over from the Excel world and so he was trotting me out every time he wanted someone to talk about Excel in a way that he couldn't be criticized. I was just almost the unfrozen caveman lawyer from Saturday Night Live, this Forrest Gump figure, "Listen, I don't know much, but I do know Excel and I know the people." You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:32): Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:10:33): Usually, because on the SQL side of the house, you couldn't argue with me about Excel. If I go back to the Excel world, they'd all argue with me but on the sequel side, I was unquestioned. So, Ariel was right, he said, "This guy is a mover and shaker. He's going places." And then, an eye blink later, you're at YouTube. When did you end up at YouTube? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:53): So, there's a personal story arc that goes along with this. I started a company out of school called [Sintrata 00:10:58]. It was an early version of what became AWS, Azure, so on, to utility computing. There's a whole generation company that started back in that '99, 2000 period. All of us were seven to 10 years too early. There was no virtualization, no containers and none of the underlying technology that actually made the cloud take off existed yet. As that was wrapping up is how I got to Microsoft but in that period, Sintrata was funded by this famous venture firm called Kleiner Perkins. Shishir Mehrotra (00:11:23): My primary investor was a [inaudible 00:11:24]. [inaudible 00:11:25] as Sintrata was wrapping up, he had suggested, "Why don't you go join another client or company?" And I said, "Which one?" And he said, "Well, you can look at all of them but the one that's really hot right now is these two Stanford guys are creating this new search engines called Google. Might want to check it out." And so this is back in 2002. And so, went over and spent some time with Larry and Sergey. And at the time, they hadn't hired a single outside product manager. And so, they wanted me to come in and start the product management team there. And, interestingly, I turned them down. My wife likes to call my billion dollar mistake. And instead I got drawn to Microsoft. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:01): As I got drawn to Microsoft, it's related to this story because I had an old boss of mine, I was an intern at Microsoft when I was in college, and he was starting this new thing called Gideon that was in the Office team actually. And the project would turn Office into a front end for business applications. So, it's had a lot of relevance to what ended up happening in that space. Rob Collie (00:12:18): Who was running Gideon? Who was that? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:20): Satya was our skip-level boss and this was much, much earlier in his career. And the guy actually running the project was a guy named John [Lacada 00:12:27]. I think he's gone now. I don't know where he is. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:12:29): I worked with John quite a bit over the years [crosstalk 00:12:32]. And this is how you know Danny Simmons. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:34): That's right. Danny was part of that team. Rob Collie (00:12:36): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:36): Yeah. Danny was on that team. I ended up working with Danny multiple times. Mike Hewitt was the one who was my intern manager who pulled me over to the project. Actually, as a fun version of fate or whatever, Mike now works at Coda. [crosstalk 00:12:48]- Rob Collie (00:12:48): Does he really? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:49): Yeah, he's an engineer here. He's great. He lives in Idaho. Once we really started hiring distributed, I finally managed to pull him into Coda. So, I turned on Google in that period and they didn't let up. Basically, every year they would call and say, "Hey, we got something down here for you." Gideon actually didn't have a very positive outcome. I showed up to work on this thing and nine months later, Sinofsky killed it. Given the priorities Office had at the time, it made reasonable sense, but it was my first education of big company politics and that's how I ended up working at WinFS. Rob Collie (00:13:20): Sinofsky has delivered many such educations of big company politics. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:24): Yes. Yes. For sure. For sure. Rob Collie (00:13:26): One of his primary contributions. Yes. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:27): So, are you reading his history of Microsoft [inaudible 00:13:30]? Rob Collie (00:13:30): I haven't been but now I will be. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:32): Oh, you should. It's good. Steve and I didn't always see eye to eye on everything, but his sense of history is really good. I don't know how the hell he remembered so much stuff, but he's basically publishing a new thing every few days, I think, maybe every week, and it's really good. Rob Collie (00:13:44): I both loved Stephen and was terrified of him at the same time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:48): It's common. Rob Collie (00:13:49): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:50): So, I'm working on SQL Server, but the reason all that matters is I was committed to Seattle. I had convinced my, at the time, fiance now wife, to move up to Seattle. She's a physician. So, she was doing her residency at Children's Seattle. And I convinced her to stay and do her fellowship and that all ran out. So, my clock ran out on Seattle. Said, "All right, now we're ready to move." And we had presumed we were going to move to the Bay area. So, it was just implied at the time, if you're going to be a techie, you got to move down to the Bay Area at some point. And I thought I was going to start another company. I was ready to do it again but Jonathan Rosenberg, the guy at Google who ended up running product there, he called me, he said, "Oh, if you're thinking about coming back, why don't you just come meet a few people?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:14:28): And I said, "No, I've been doing the big company thing for a while. I don't think I want to do that anymore." And he said, "No, no, no, no. Google is not that big a company." This is 2007, 2008. And he said, "Google is not that big of a company. Come just meet a few people and nothing else and have some good conversations." And so, I went down, met a bunch of people and this was Larry and Sergey but also Vic Gundotra was there then and Andy Rubin had just joined. And there was a bunch of ... That era of Google was being formed. And I end up, at the end of the day, in Jonathan's office and I tell him, "That was really entertaining, but it feels like a big company. I don't think this is for me." Jonathan's a pretty crass person. I won't use the same language he used but he said, "Oh, that's really effing stupid." Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:06): And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, look, and I'll just give you a really simple reason. All those people, they probably talk to you about Android and Chrome and all this other stuff but what they forget is that, at the heart, Google sells advertising and all the money in advertising goes to television. And nobody even watches those stupid ads." This may sound dumb, but maybe not to this group. I didn't know that. For me, I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life. And the idea that all of the money and advertising goes to television was news to me. And I got on a plane after work back to Seattle. I do a lot of my thinking on planes for weird reasons. You may be the same. I don't know. Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:40): But I get on the plane, I take out this little sheet of paper and this was a week after the Super Bowl, February of 2008, the Giants had just beaten the Pats in this epic Super Bowl. And I take out the sheet of paper, I write at the top, how come advertising doesn't feel like a Super Bowl every day? And the basic thing I was thinking about was we had our friends over for Super Bowl and while we're watching the game, the ad would come on, if somebody missed it, I would have to rewind for people to watch the ad again. It's like, "Oh, people actually like the ads in this one day of the year. What's different?" And so, I take out this sheet of paper, I end up writing this little position paper on what I think is wrong with advertising, without knowing really anything about advertising. Get home, it's pretty late. My wife's not up to tell me it was all stupid. Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:19): And then I wake up the next morning and I write to Jonathan. I say, "Hey, look, I really enjoyed the time. I don't think Google's for me, but I had some thoughts on something you said that stuck with me about why advertising sucks. And I'm sure you guys are already thinking about it, but I'm happy to send it to you if you'd like." And he's pretty early morning guy and so he read it and said, "Actually, nobody's thinking about this. Maybe you should come and I'll give you a small team and you can start running this." There were three ideas in the paper but the most simple one was how come ads don't have a skip button on them? And then, if you skip the ad, why don't you make it so that if you skip the ad, the advertiser doesn't pay? Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:50): You change all the incentives of advertising so that if the ads aren't good, then nobody gets paid if the ads are going to get better. And we're going to reset the balance and that's why it's going to feel like Super Bowl every day. He was like, "There's a lot of reward and be creative on the Super Bowl." So, J.R. convinced me. He's like, "Come down. Run this project." When I tell the story, it sounds eerily similar to how I ended up at Microsoft, like, "Oh, come run this small project." And it was this group of people, again, that misunderstood what ... This project was at the time called Mosaic. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:19): It became a product called Google TV. Chromecast, Google TV, Google Home, all comes out of that same group now. So, I showed up to work on that and very quickly in that process realized that this had actually very poor corporate sponsorship as well. In this case, Larry and Sergey thought this product was really, really dumb. I should have known as I was going through the interview process. And so, I told J.R. and I was excited about the project and I said, "Hey, maybe I should talk to Larry and Sergey about that, a bunch of ideas and other stuff if I met them." He's like, "Oh yeah, they're traveling this week." I was like, "Really? Okay." And every time I asked, he was avoiding me talking to them about the project. But, anyway, so I show up to work on that and it's very long story out, but this paper leads to me working on this project. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:57): And then, just, basically, we decided to merge the project into YouTube. And back in 2008, to a very side door, end up initially running the monetization team and eventually running the rest of the team for YouTube and then spending six years there and growing that business, which was ... At the time, when I joined YouTube, it was the weird stepchild of Google. It was generally thought of as the first bad acquisition that Google made. Until then we had this string of amazing acquisitions led to Maps and Android and all this stuff. YouTube was a weird one, right? It was the, we lost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It was dogs on skateboards. We had a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Rob Collie (00:18:35): Mark Cuban famously said it's never going to go anywhere. Shishir Mehrotra (00:18:38): I have very fun stories with Mark Cuban. It was two years after I left YouTube where he finally wrote me and said, "Actually, I think you might've been right." He was quite convinced we were wrong about it. But, anyway, so I ended up working on YouTube. I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life, knew nothing about video and an infrastructure guy in the previous career, and ended up working on YouTube for six years. Rob Collie (00:19:02): It's a really interesting thing, right? Sometimes not knowing a lot about an industry or a topic is actually fantastic because you don't bring all the baggage and all the preconceptions. Of course, you can't just go all in on that. If you never know anything about anything, you're just someone wandering around the world with a loud voice. And so, getting the right balance between knowing what you should know and not knowing the things that will throw you off, if we could get that mix right at all times in our lives, we'd be in great shape, but it's tricky, isn't it? Shishir Mehrotra (00:19:32): You've roughly described my career. Almost every job I took was in a space I knew nothing about. And it's a very positive interpretation of this person who has to learn every piece of this. But yeah, I think a beginner's eye allows you to look at a space a little bit differently and it certainly worked out at YouTube. And we were walking the trends of the video industry in every way, how we thought about content, how we thought about monetization, and what is good content? What is not good content? Our views on these things were diametrically opposite of every assumption that had been made by every experienced person in that industry. I think we turned out to be more right than wrong. Rob Collie (00:20:07): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Now, a few things jumped out at me from that story. First of all, if we think about it with the perfection of hindsight, the clarity of hindsight, basically, Google ran this really sick reverse auction for your services where they like, "If you come here now we'll pay you a billion dollars." And you're like, "Hmm, no." Right? And then- Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:30): It wasn't obvious that it was going to be a billion dollars. Rob Collie (00:20:30): I know. Then they call you back a year later and they say, "Okay. Fine. How about 100 million?" And you're like, "Hmm, no." And they finally got it down low enough for you to take the job. I've never met anybody who has a story where you can even joke about a billion dollar mistake. So, I'll never have the opportunity to recruit you, but if I did, now I know how. Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:56): [crosstalk 00:20:56] blowing your offer. That's right. That's right. Rob Collie (00:20:59): And it's got to include the words, just come run this small, little team. Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:03): Yeah. Yeah. I get drawn to projects. I don't get drawn to the rest of it. So far it's worked out okay. But yeah, I get drawn to ideas. I mean, this is really only the fourth company I've ever worked for yet every transition was drawn by some idea that I couldn't stop thinking about. Rob Collie (00:21:17): That idea or position statement, is that in some way, at the beginning, the origin story of the skip button for ads? Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:27): Oh yeah. I mean, the skip button for ads it's now called TrueView. Back to your point on beginner's mind. So, I show up, I've got this idea around the skip button and actually it makes more sense for YouTube than it does for this Google TV thing that we were working on. So, there's totally reasonable outcome. I show up and my first meeting with the sales team, I'm maybe six weeks in, the head of sales, Susie, she says, "Can you come give a talk to sales team and just tell a little bit about your vision for YouTube." And we had a nice ... And I said, "Look, I don't think this is a good idea. I don't know anything about this part of the industry. So, I'm going to make a fool of myself." And she's, "No, no, no. You have got all these great ideas and they're fresh and different and why don't you come talk to them?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:04): And I go talk about a bunch of different ideas, and I talk about this one about skip buttons on ads. And one of the salespeople, who I've since become very good friends with, she raises her hand and she says, "Wait, I don't understand. Do you want none of us to make any money?" They thought this was the dumbest idea on the planet. You put a skip button on ads, people are going to hit the skip button. It's like that's what obviously is going to happen. And, basically, the entire sales force rejected this idea. And it took me three years to ship that feature because every person in the sales force thought it was such a dumb idea. I would get told, "You can come talk at the sales conference, but you're not allowed to talk about your stupid skip button idea. You have to talk about everything else." Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:43): And what turned out was ... This is actually another fun story in great product managers. I don't know if you still think of yourself as a PM, but I consider you to be a really strong product manager as well. But this is a story about a guy, Lane Shackleton, who actually now runs product at Coda. So, Lane was a sales guy. He was actually our primary sales guy at YouTube. And he really wanted to be a PM. And at the time, we had this really stupid policy where you weren't allowed to be a product manager at Google unless you had a CS degree. It was just part of the early, early viewpoint the founders had. Rob Collie (00:23:17): So relevant. Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:21): Right. So, you commiserate with this a lot. So, Lane comes to me and says, "I want to be a PM. How do I do it?" And I said, "Hey, look, I mean, I love you and I think you could do a great job but I've got this policy. And I got to make a really strong case if I'm going to get over the policy." And he said, "How about I just do it on the side? Do it as a trial run." He gave me an idea. I said, "Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll let you try to be a PM, but you have to do it in your 20% time. And not in your 80-20% time, but you got to do a great job of your sales job and then you do this part. And the second criteria is you take whatever project I give you." Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:52): And he said, "All right, deal. What's the project?" I said, "Okay, I want you to work on this thing called skippable ads." And I said, "Look, the sales team thinks it's really dumb because the way that the division work, the engineering leader was like, "I'm not allocating stuff that the sales team thinks is dumb. And so, I can give you one engineer who is a new grad and that's it." But I have a playbook for you. I think you need to go and you just go talk to the AdWords team and get this thing out of the buying experience and then work on this with the analytics and figure just these couple pieces out. And we'll be able to ship this thing and we'll slowly build up the business. It'll be fine." Shishir Mehrotra (00:24:23): And so, he goes away and he comes back a couple of weeks later for his update. And I said, "Oh, how's it going? Did you talk to the AdWords team?" And he said, "No, actually, I decided that's not the problem here." And I said, "What do you mean? That was your job. Go talk to those different people." And he says, "Well, I've been thinking about it and I think the real problem here is the name is wrong." I was like, "The name? What are you talking about? We'll name this thing later. This is not that important." And he says, "No, no, I think the problem is that skippable ad is a value proposition to an end user but who buys advertising? The advertiser buys advertising. Skippable is actually a really poor value proposition to the advertiser. Why would I want my ad to be skipped? Right? And so, the reason you're hearing so much negative reaction if people don't understand why it's helpful to the advertiser." Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:06): And so then he came up with this idea and said, "Why don't we name it TrueView?" And I'm skipping a whole bunch of parts in the story, but we call it TrueView. That's what the ad for one is actually called. You have no idea what ads are called, right? Oh, there's ads on Google. Nobody knows [crosstalk 00:25:18] from AdWord. Rob Collie (00:25:18): Yeah. It's not a feature. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:19): But what's a sponsored story? And you don't know any of that stuff. You just know it's an ad. And he said, "So, let's focus on the advertising." Came up with this name TrueView. And the idea is very simple is you only pay per true views. You don't pay for the junk, you only pay for the real ones. Right? And all of a sudden this thing went from being, I'm not allowed to talk about it at sales conferences to the number one thing on the entire sales force [inaudible 00:25:42] all of Google. Beyond anything the average team was working on. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:45): And it was such a simple idea. And, by the way, the way the math works is very simple, it's most people do skip the ad. It's about 80% skip rates on those ads. So, four out of five times you see an ad, you probably have a skip button, but it turns out that the 20% of the time you don't is such high signal and so effective an ad that you can often charge something like 20 times as much for that view. And so, what you end up with is you end up with you just take that math and say, [inaudible 00:26:09] four times better monetization with a skippable ad than without a skippable ad. Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:13): It was not obvious that advertisers would be willing to pay that much more if they know you actually watched the ad but when you start ... But this is a good example, again, a beginner's mind and, Lane, I mean, this is one of his ... So, I've managed to convince the calibration committees and so on and turned to a product manager and turned into a great product manager. He joined me early on at Coda and now runs the product and design team here. Great example of coming fresh to a new problem. Rob Collie (00:26:36): Yeah. Well, if only he'd had a computer science degree, that idea would have been so much smarter. You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:43): Yeah. The crazy part, this is one of the most technical guys I know and he's like, "I don't understand. I write this stuff on the side. Why do I need a stupid degree for that?" Right? Rob Collie (00:26:53): I know. There was one time in my first three years at Microsoft where I used one piece of my computer science education, one time. I used O notation to prove that we shouldn't do it a certain way. And when I got my way after using O notation, it's like, "This is an O of N squared algorithm." I got to run around the hallways chanting, like, "Whoa, look, my education, it worked. It worked. It worked." And that was the only time I ever used any of that. So, no, that's a silly policy. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:25): Yeah. It was funny, when I was going to college, my parents were both computer scientists and I was one of those kids who grew up with a ... I never knew what I wanted to be. One week I was going to be a lawyer, then I was going to be a doctor, then I was going to be a scary period for my mom where I really wanted to be a taxi driver. I went through all the different periods. And then, I'm filling out my college applications and it says like, "What do you want to major in?" And I said, "Oh, I think I'll write down CS." I was into computers at the time and so I write down CS. And my dad says, "If you major in CS, I'm not paying for college." What are you talking about? I thought you'd be really excited. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:57): That's what you guys do. My dad now runs supercomputing for NASA. I thought this would be pretty exciting for you. And he says, "No, no, no. This is a practitioner's degree. I'm not paying for college unless you major in something where the books are at least 50 years old." And that was the policy. And so, I ended up majoring in math and computer science. And from his perspective, he paid for a math degree and I happened to get the CS degree for free. But his view was that ... Which is true ... Computer science changes so fundamentally every 10 years. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:22): And my classes the professors often taught out of the book that they're about to publish. The book wasn't even published yet and they're like, "Oh, here's the new way to think about operating systems." And it was totally different than what it was five years ago. I think there's a lot of knowledge in CS degrees but I actually think ... O notation is an example. I used to teach that class at school. That's math. That's not CS. Rob Collie (00:28:42): I know. Yeah. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:44): It's a very good way to think about isotonic functions but the actual CS knowledge is all but relevant by the time you graduate. Rob Collie (00:28:51): One thing that you said to me about your time at YouTube that stuck with me years, years, years, years later is that here we are at the tip of the spear, the head of this giant organization and YouTube eventually became giant, and with all this amazing machine learning and just so much algorithmic, not even complexity, but also just we don't even know what it's doing anymore. It's so sophisticated that we can't even explain why it's making these decisions but they're doing well, and yet every day we get together, we're looking at simple pivot tables and there's these knobs on the sides of these giant algorithmic machines that some human being has to set to, like, "Should we set it to six or seven?" And it's just this judgment call. And I just love that. That was, in a weird way, so reassuring to me that even at the absolute top of the pyramid of the algorithmic world, there's still a need for this other stuff. Shishir Mehrotra (00:29:43): The most fun example of this, backing for a moment, my dad, back to the story of me going into CS. At one point I had asked him, what is artificial intelligence? And he said, "Well, artificial intelligence is this really hard to describe field." I asked, "Why is that?" And he said, "Well, because it's got this characteristic that the moment something works, it's no longer AI." And so, AI is what's left is all the stuff that doesn't work. And so, you can use all these examples of when you have all regressions, it's like, "That's just math. That's not AI. We understand how it works." My favorite example with the kids is when you drive up to the traffic light, how does it know when to turn red and green and so on? Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:19): Oh, there's a sensor there. It just senses the cars there and so then it decides to turn red or green. That's not AI. I know how that works. I can describe it. It's a sensor. And so, we went through, I think, decades of time where the moment something worked, it stopped getting called AI. And then, some point, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say 10, we flipped it. And now, all of a sudden, anything that does math is AI. And it's amazing to me that we would look at some of these systems and it was literally a simple regression and we say, "Oh, that's machine learning." And it became very invoked. I think about it that way. Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:53): I mean, there are some really complicated machine learning techniques and the way our neural network works, which is the heart of how most of these machine learning techniques work is very complicated, but at the heart of what it's doing, it's approximation function for a multi-variable phenomenon. So, the most fun example I can tell you about your observation there is this project called DALS. DALS was an acronym for Dynamic Ad Load System where at the time, on YouTube, the rate at which we showed ads was contractually set. We would go negotiate with the creator and say, "Oh, ESPN, we want your content on YouTube." And we would say, "Look, our policy is we show ads every seven minutes." And they say, "No, our content is so good. We want it every two minutes." Shishir Mehrotra (00:31:32): And then, the Disney folks would have their own number. And so, there is this long line of contractual stuff baked into our ad serving logic that's like, "Oh, it's been two minutes. You have to show an ad." Because they all just thought they knew better of how good their content was. And so, one of the engineers had this idea and said, "This is dumb." We know our intentions are well aligned. Almost all our deals were rev share deals. We made money when the creator made money. And we know whether or not this is a good time to show an ad or not, why don't we turn this into a machine learning system and guess whether or not we should show an ad? So, it's called Dynamic Ad Load System. DALS was its acronym. So, the team goes off and this engineer goes off and builds this thing. Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:08): Lexi was his name. So, Lexi builds this thing and he brings it to one of our staff reviews. Every Friday, we had this meeting of IT staff. That's where we went through all the major stats for the business and including any major experiments that are running. If he brings something in and he says, "All right, before we launch this thing, I'd like to know what our trade-off function." The trade-off function in this case is, how much watch time are you willing to trade off for revenue? These are two primary metrics. At every moment we're going to decide, should we show an ad or not? And we have to make a guess at, "We think if we don't show an ad you'll watch for this much longer, if we do show an ad, there's a chance you'll leave but we'll make this much money. So, what's the number? How much should we trade off?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:45): This is a very typical question I would get in this forum. It's impossible to answer, how much would you trade off? Watch time, revenue. And so, I came up with a number and I put a slope on this chart and we decided two for one. I can't remember whether it was two points of watch time for one point of revenue. But whichever way it was, I do a slope and we got a lot of reaction. They're like, "Okay. Great." And they ran away from the room. "Okay. We have a number. We can go do our thing." And so, they come back a few weeks later and say that we're ready to launch. And I said, "Okay, so did you hit the number?" And they said, "Well, actually, we have some interesting news for you. Turns out in our first tuning of the system, we actually have a tuning that is positive on both watch time and revenue. And somehow by redeploying the system, we make more money and people watch longer." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:25): And I said, "Really? How does that happen?" And they said, "Well, we don't really know yet, but can we ship because clearly better than your ratio?" And I said, "Well, okay, you can ship but next week I want you to come back and tell me why." And so, next week they come back and I said, "Do you know why?" And they said, "Well, we don't know why, but we have another tuning and it's even better on both watch time and revenue. I was thinking we ship this one." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:47): I was like, "Okay, but please come back next week." This went on for four weeks. Right? So every week they would come back and they'd say, "Okay, we got this thing. It's even better on both. And we still have no idea why." And, finally, they figured out why. And it turns out that basically what was happening was the system was learning to push ads later in people's sessions. If you watch YouTube for a while, early on, you'll see very little advertising. But if you sit there and watch for hours and hours and hours, the ad frequency will gradually increase with a viewpoint of, this person's not going anywhere. They're committed, which makes intuitive sense, but it wasn't an input that we handed the system. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:18): And how did we figure that out? The pivot table. I notice that the ... What did we do? We went and charted everything we could out of the experiment group and in our experiment group and we just guessed at what is the way to figure out why is this happening? Because it's not a signal that we were intentionally giving the system, it's just the system got every other signal it could. And we looked at everything. I mean, is it geography? Is it tied to content? Is it age? Is it ... How is it possible that we're showing more ads and people are watching for longer? That story is a lesson in a number of different things. I mean, I think it was a great lesson in how when people think about machine learning systems, they miss this element of ... Any machine learning system is just a function. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:54): All the ML system does is take a very large set of inputs, apply a function to it and generate an output. Generally, that output is a decision, show an ad, don't show an ad. Self-driving car turn right or turn left. It's some decisions of, is this image a person or an animal? And that system is trained and is trained on a bunch of data. And at some point, somebody, usually fairly low in an organization, makes the tuning decision and says, "I'm willing to accept this much being wrong for this much being right." Generally called precision recall. More layman's term for it is you figured out your false positive rate versus your false negative rate for whatever system you're trying to figure out. But somebody has to make a decision. Shishir Mehrotra (00:35:30): It's usually three tunings, very deep in the system. And then, after that point, the system is unexplainable. You have no idea how this thing works. And so, what do you do then? You go look at a bunch of empirical data of what's happening and try to figure out, "What did I just do? I've got this thing and what's actually happening here?" And you try to figure out, is it doing what you actually want it to do? And all of that is done in fancy pivot tables. Rob Collie (00:35:53): Yeah. It's so funny, the AI, and you've said before, your dad, as soon as it reaches a equilibrium, it's not AI anymore. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:00): Right. Not anymore. Rob Collie (00:36:02): Now though, it seems like it's a funny thing that you built these systems that then figure things out and they seem to be working great but then they can't turn around and explain to you what they're doing. It's not built to explain. It's just built to do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:15): It makes some sense how the human brain works. Why did you do that? I don't know. I just did it. And when you're running a business, that's not an acceptable answer. I need to know why did it go that way instead of ... Why did it turn right? I need to know why. So, you end up with this interesting tuning and then you're constantly looking at charts of output, what is going on here? To try to figure out whether it's working the way you want it. Rob Collie (00:36:34): So, while we're on pivot tables for a moment, go back to your story about skippable ads. This is TrueView. Imagine how much better off we would be as a society if pivot tables had originally been named summary tables. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:50): Oh man. Rob Collie (00:36:51): You know? That one was blown. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:36:54): I actually tried to rename it stupidly. I mean, it was too late. It was way too late. And I fought that battle for way too long. It was a fool's errand to try to rename something that had been in the world for that long but what does it mean to pivot data? No one knows. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:08): It's now the insider's club handshake. Rob Collie (00:37:12): I know. I know. I think we probably lost half of the people who would have used them just in the name. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:17): It's interesting you say that because the way we do the equivalence in Coda, we don't use the term pivot at all. We call it grouping. We don't even call it a thing. Right? We don't give it a noun name. We give it a verb name. And it just turns out that grouping a table is a very understandable phenomenon. In Coda, our model of grouping doesn't require aggregates also turns out ... And the reason I don't love the word summary is I actually think most commonly what you want to do is you take a set of records and you say, "I've got a bunch of tasks. Let me sort them by in progress and done." And I still want to be able to see the tasks. And one of the things pivot table, I think screwed up, is that you can't see the tasks anymore. The moment you're in that world ... Rob Collie (00:37:55): Yeah. I agree. But given what was built, the pivot table implementation, right? Summary would have been the killer name, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:02): Would have been a much better name. What would you have named VLOOKUP to? Rob Collie (00:38:05): Oh, I don't know. Pivots is still relevant to me, VLOOKUP not as much. No. But like Bill Gates always pressing for the unification of grouping in Excel with pivots. And we were always like, "Hmm, no." And it became a running joke after a while, he'd be like, "To the extent that you guys on Excel ever do anything that I ask you." That would be his preamble to some of the things he would say to us. Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:33): I mean, I would say, nowadays, people use pivot for lots of things, but for our first year for the customer journey, our grouping feature was definitely the top of the list. And, honestly, there's a bunch of people who, like you said, never really understood pivot tables and could never compare the two, like, "Oh, that makes total sense to me. I drew up a table. That makes total sense." Then two, to show aggregates. Rob Collie (00:38:50): The way you zeroed in on noun versus verb, that actually has come up multiple, multiple times on this show. It's one of my things. My new hires, when they'd come to work for me on the Excel team, I would sit them down and say, "Listen, you are not allowed to introduce nouns into this product. If you want a new noun, you've got to come to me. You got to fight me for it. You can verb all you want." That was hard one knowledge. I was a noun guy coming out of computer science school. Computer science people love them some nouns. Entities. Just say the word entity and you get all gooey inside, but no, it's a verb world. Shishir Mehrotra (00:39:26): I make that specific statement, you can ask my team, all the time. You're going to add a new noun, you got to come through me. I mean, on YouTube, it was interesting because YouTube has three primary nouns, video, channel and playlist. And we spent forever ... For a long time video was the only noun that mattered. And it was a big debate over which one matters more, channel or playlist. And I made the team pick. You got to pick one. We picked channel, which is probably obvious. Playlists are these long forgotten feature of YouTube and channels are now a big deal. But that wasn't always true. Channels actually used to be a very small deal on YouTube. If you go back to what I do in 2008, yeah, you would publish a video, it's like, "A channel, whatever." Totally bit my fingers on this channel, but it has nothing else on it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:40:05): And, nowadays, all people care about on YouTube is like, "This is my channel. How many subscribers I have." And the same way with Coda, we've put a lot of energy into as few nouns as possible. We'd use common language for nouns, only brand the ones that you really, really, really want to brand. Because there are very few branded nouns in Coda. There's lots of incentives in product development that lead to it. In a lot of companies, you get promoted on it. Like, "I invented this thing. It's now Power BI. And it's now this pivot thing." And you get a lot of feedback loop because nouns are distinguishable but it doesn't help your customers. Rob Collie (00:40:37): Even the technology under the hood is screaming at you, "Noun me. Noun me." It's like, I've got this really cool data structure here. It's dying to be surfaced in the ... No, no, don't do that. That's not what we do. We do not surface the technology. That's not what we're here for, but it's a powerful instinct. Really powerful. Okay. So, Coda, that's the next chapter. And that's the next place where we crossed paths. So, I actually realized that it was six years ago. I visited you in the Valley six years ago. And the reason I know it was six years ago is because one of the people who was there in the early days with you, the very beginning. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:18): They're all still here, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:41:19): Okay. Good. So, got the feel that they will be long-timers. Yeah. It was a tight bunch. It was a tight crew. The two of you were joking to them, "Maybe we should go to Burning Man this year." And I was sitting there thinking to myself, I had been invited that year to a friend's bachelor party. He was going to Burning Man. And I didn't even speak up because I was so terrified of going. I wasn't even sure if I was going to go. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:42): Did you go? Rob Collie (00:41:42): I did. And that was 2015. So, that's how I know. It was also, I think, the first year that the Warriors had blown up down the NBA scene. So, we were sitting and watching the Warriors annihilate people after we talked. So, six years ago, you were pretty deep into this thing that's now called Coda. It was codename something else at the time that I kept getting wrong. Was it Krypton? Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:03): Krypton. That's right. Rob Collie (00:42:05): But I kept calling it Vulcan. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:08): The team had such a laugh out of that. Rob Collie (00:42:12): I kept forgetting it was Krypton and calling it Vulcan. So, why don't you explain both to me and to our listeners what the original vision was and how and if that's evolved over time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:25): By the way that meeting was, hey, super entertaining. Rob came in and described this as Vulcan as been repeated many times in the story. But it also was super informative because you came and gave a bunch of perspective. I think probably one of the most relevant to our last discussion, one of your most interesting observations that stuck with the team was you described this person and you said, "Hey, I can walk into a room and if I ask them just a couple of questions I can split the room into two groups of people very quickly." You used to call it the data gene. And your questions were, do you know what a VLOOKUP is or do you know what a VLOOKUP is? What a pivot table is? Bad for many of the reasons we just talked about, but for the perspective of understanding how humans are evolving and so on, it was actually quite insightful that these people you just can't keep them away. They will eventually figure these things out. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:11): And if you have that data gene, you will some point in your life intersect with these things and figure out what they are. The Coda founding story, so I was at YouTube and an old friend of mine, [inaudible 00:43:21] Alex DeNeui, now my co-founder at Coda, he and I have known each other for 20 plus years. We went to college together. And he's part of the founding team at Sintrata as well. Interestingly, we've worked every other job together, which is a fun pattern. So, he had started this company that got acquired by Google and he had just quit. And he was starting a new company and he'd come to me and he said, "Hey, my company's not doing that well. I'm thinking about pivoting to do something different. Can you help me brainstorm a new set of ideas?" So, we started brainstorming mostly about what he should do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:49): I was still relatively happy at Google, but I had told him, "If you pick something interesting, I'd be happy to invest or advise or help out in some way." Said this long list of ideas and we started brainstorming and at one point, one of us writes this sentence on the whiteboard, what if anyone can build a doc as powerful as an app? And that sentence ended up becoming the rallying cry for what became Krypton and then Coda. It's a very simple statement but it comes out of two primary observations. One is, I think the world runs on docs not apps. That if you go ask any team how they operate, any business, company person, so on, if you ask them how they operate, they'll immediately rattle off all the different packet software they use. "Oh, we use this thing for CRM and this thing for inventory. And we use this thing for pass tracking and so on." Shishir Mehrotra (00:44:32): And then, if you just sit behind them and watch them work for a day, what do they do all day? They're in documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and some communication tool. That's what they live in. And this first observation was one that was very deeply embedded in us because that's how we ran YouTube. I mean, YouTube, amongst other things was born right in the start of the Google Docs generation. I got the YouTube 2008, Google Docs is just coming out and, as I mentioned, we were the forgotten stepchild of Google, so we were allowed to do whatever we wanted but we could get no help in doing it. And so, we decided, for example, we would run our task management goal-setting process. We didn't like how OKRs worked. Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:09): I actually just published a whole paper on this last week. You can take a look. But we didn't like how OKRs worked. We wanted to do a different way. And so, how do we do it? We do in a big spreadsheet? I ran compensation differently at YouTube. I had this philosophy I call level independent compensation and the Google HR team allowed us to do it, but said, "We're building zero software for it." So, we did it in a network of documents and spreadsheets. One of the most fun example is if you hit flag on a YouTube video, for years, a flag on a YouTube video would show up as a row in a spreadsheet [inaudible 00:45:37] the person's desk. That's how we ran all these systems. We used to get made fun of. People are like, "Oh, look at these people. They're duct taping together documents and spreadsheets to run what became a multi-billion dollar division." I used to say like, "I actually think this is our strategic strength." Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:49): I mean, the reason we can plan so nimbly, the reason I can hire whoever I want, the reason we can adjust our flagging and approval system so quickly is because we didn't purchase some big bulky software to do it, we design it ourselves and turned it into something that then actually met our, at the time, current value system. So, this is observation number one, it's the world runs on docs not app, which is, by the way, not obvious to people but I feel fairly strongly about it. The second observation is that those documents surfaces haven't fundamentally changed in almost 50 years. The running joke at the company is that if Austin Powers popped out of his freezing chamber, he wouldn't know what clothes to wear or what music to listen to, but he could work a document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation just as well as anybody else could. Because everything we're looking at is metaphors that were created by the same people who created WordStar, Harvard Graphics and VisiCalc. Shishir Mehrotra (00:46:39): And we still have almost the exact same metaphor, which just seems crazy to me. In that same period of time, every other piece of software stack is totally different. An operating system from the '70s versus Android and iOS is unrecognizable. Databases, which we thought were pretty fundamental are completely different than they used to be. Things like search engine, social networks, none of these things even existed and yet the way that slide decks are put together, the way you navigate the spreadsheet grid and the way you think about pages and document is exactly the same as it was in the 1970s. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:10): So, you take the two observations, you stick them together and you say, "Hey, we [inaudible 00:47:13] runs on these docs, not applications." And those surfaces haven't changed in almost 50 years. Something's broken. What if we started from scratch and built an entirely new type of doc based on this observation that what we are actually doing with our docs is a lot closer to what we're doing with applications than not? That was the thesis we started with. I got personally obsessed with it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. And this went from, hey, let me invest, let me help, to I quit Google and went and started but at the time with Krypton and then eventually became Coda. Rob Collie (00:47:44): I'm sure he recruited you at some point by saying, "How about you just come run this small team over here?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:48): Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Rob Collie (00:47:51): Those are the magic words. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:52): We won't pay you at all. That's the ... Rob Collie (00:47:54): Something silly that occurred to me is that your Austin Powers metaphor might even be more accurate than you realize. We are now farther away, in terms of time, from the premiere of that '70s show, than that '70s show was from the time it represented. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:09): I like that. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:11): It's crazy. We passed that point six months ago. So, when did Austin Powers the first one come out? Sometime in the '90s? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:17): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:18): Right? And it represented a time probably 35 years before it? Probably 1964, maybe 1999. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:25): So, we're almost reaching the point where we're close to the Austin Powers movie as Austin Powers was to the time. So, clearly, if we rewind 35 years, we are what? We're in the '80s, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:35): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:36): You're right our documents basically look like that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:39): Yeah. You and I can probably geek out on this. And I get asked a lot about why did that happen? Lots of industries saw a change. And the database industry is a great example, you wouldn't expect the database industry to change that much. Codd wrote his book in the 1970s that's still the book that every database engineer you can find will have the book up on the shelf for Codd's relational databases, and yet things like OLAP came out and cubes and it turned into a Power BI. I think what happened in the document industry ... Well, two things. Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:05): One, every company that wanted to innovate in that space was a platform company whose primary interest was evangelizing a platform. Microsoft didn't really want to displace Lotus and so on with a new thing, they just wanted people to use Windows. It was very important that it actually be backwards compatible with everything at Soft. The other thing that happened is we live through what I think of as a period where we're beholden to file format. And so, one of my favorite examples is Steve Jobs and Apple. I've met a bunch of people that worked on the early iWork suite. And the iWork suite, Jobs came in with a bunch of new ideas. He's like, "This is dumb. We shouldn't have a spreadsheet that's one big universal grid. We should have a bunch of separate grids that are actually a little closer to tables." Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:45): And so, that's how numbers worked, actually, it's not actually one universal grid, it's a bunch of separate ones. And the way he did it with pages was a little bit different. And then, Keynote, which is probably the most popular of the three is actually different from PowerPoint in those really critical ways and none of the three took off. And why didn't they take off? I mean, Jobs was pretty smart and [inaudible 00:50:02] were pretty good. I think it was really simple reason. If I build something in numbers and then I want to send it to you, I have to assume that you have a copy of numbers and that you run on a Mac and that's not a safe assumption. It hasn't really been a safe assumption for a long time. And then, Google Docs came out. Rob Collie (00:50:16): Which, by the way, is fundamentally what YouTube did for video. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:19): That's right. Rob Collie (00:50:19): I had all these delivery ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:21): Plugin. Rob Collie (00:50:21): ... And Coda and pl ... I couldn't send you a video, trust that you'd be able to watch it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:27): And assume you could play. That's right. That's right. I mean, in that case, it was hard to send the videos because- Rob Collie (00:50:32): Yeah. There was a file size problem and there was also a software c
We've covered Xerox PARC a few times - and one aspect that's come up has been the development of the Bravo word processor from Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, and team. Simonyi went on to work at Microsoft and spearheaded the development of Microsoft Word. But Bravo was the first WYSIWYG tool for creating documents, which we now refer to as a word processor. That was 1974. Something else we've covered happened in 1974, the release of the Altair 8800. One aspect of the Altair we didn't cover is that Michael Shrayer was a tinkerer who bought an Alatir and wrote a program that allowed him to write manuals. This became the Electric Pencil. It was text based though and not a WYSIWYG like Bravo was. It ran in 8k of memory and would be ported to Intel 8080, Zylog Z-80, and other processors over the years leading into the 80s. But let's step back to the 70s for a bit. Because bell bottoms. The Altair inspired a clone called the IMSAI 8080 in 1975. The direct of marketing, Seymour Rubenstein started tinkering with the idea of a word processor. He left IMSAI and by 1978, put together $8,500 and started a company called MicroPro International. He convinced Rob Barnaby, the head programmer at IMSAI, to join him. They did market research into the tools being used by IBM and Xerox. They made a list of what was needed and got to work. The word processor grew. They released their word processor, which they called WordStar, for CP/M running on the Intel 8080. By then it was 1979 and CP/M was a couple years old but already a pretty dominant operating system for microcomputers. Software was a bit more expensive at the time and WordStar sold for $495. At the time, you had to port your software to each OS running on each hardware build. And the code was in assembly so not the easiest thing in the world. This meant they wanted to keep the feature set slim so WordStar could run on as many platforms as possible. They ran on the Osborne 1 portable and with CP/M support they became the standard. They could wrap words automatically to the next line. Imagine that. They ported the software to other platforms. It was clear there was a new OS that they needed to run on. So they brought in Jim Fox, who ported WordStar to run on DOS in 1981. They were on top of the world. Sure, there was Apple Write, Word, WordPerfect, and Samna, but WordStar was it. Arthur C Clarke met Rubenstein and Barnaby and said they "made me a born-again writer, having announced my retirement in 1978, I now have six books in the works, all through WordStar." He would actually write dozens more works. They released the third version in 1982 and quickly grew into the most popular, dominant word processor on the market. The code base was getting a little stale and so they brought in Peter Mierau to overhaul it for WordStar 4. The refactor didn't come at the best of times. In software, you're the market leader until… You thought I was going to say Microsoft moved into town? Nope, although Word would eventually dominate word processing. But there was one more step before computing got there. Next, along with the release of the IBM PC, WordPerfect took the market by storm. They had more features and while WordStar was popular, it was the most pirated piece of software at the time. This meant less money to build features. Like using the MS-DOS keyboard to provide more productivity tools. This isn't to say they weren't making money. They'd grown to $72M in revenue by 1984. When they filed for their initial public offering, or IPO, they had a huge share of the word processing market and accounted for one out of every ten dollars spent on software. WordStar 5 came in 1989 and as we moved into the 90s, it was clear that WordStar 2000 had gone nowhere so WordStar 6 shipped in 1990 and 7 in 1991. The buying tornado had slowed and while revenues were great, copy-protecting disks were slowing the spread of the software. Rubinstein is commonly credited with creating the first end-user software licensing agreement, common with nearly every piece of proprietary software today. Everyone was pirating back then so if you couldn't use WordStar, move on to something you could steal. You know, like WordPerfect. MultiMate, AmiPro, Word, and so many other tools. Sales were falling. New features weren't shipping. One pretty big one was support for Windows. By the time Windows support shipped, Microsoft had released Word, which had a solid two years to become the new de facto standard. SoftKey would acquire the company in 1994, and go on to acquire a number of other companies until 2002 when they were acquired. But by then WordStar was so far forgotten that no one was sure who actually owned the WordStar brand. I can still remember using WordStar. And I remember doing work when I was a consultant for a couple of authors to help them recover documents, which were pure ASCII files or computers that had files in WordStar originally but moved to the WSD extension later. And I can remember actually restoring a BAK file while working at the computer labs at the University of Georgia, common in the DOS days. It was a joy to use until I realized there was something better. Rubinstein went on to buy another piece of software, a spreadsheet. He worked with another team, got a little help from Barnaby and and Fox and eventually called it Surpass, which was acquired by Borland, who would rename it to Quattro Pro. That spreadsheet borrowed the concept of multiple sheets in tabs from Boeing Calc, now a standard metaphor. Amidst lawsuits with Lotus on whether you could patent how software functions, or the UX of software, Borland sold Lotus to Novell during a time when Novell was building a suite of products to compete with Microsoft. We can thank WordStar for so much. Inspiring content creators and creative new features for word processing. But we also have to remember that early successes are always going to inspire additional competition. Any company that grows large enough to file an initial public offering is going to face barbarian software vendors at their gates. When those vendors have no technical debt, they can out-deliver features. But as many a software company has learned, expanding to additional products by becoming a portfolio company is one buffer for this. As is excellent execution. The market was WordStar's to lose. And there's a chance that it was lost the second Microsoft pulled in Charles Simonyi, one of the original visionaries behind Bravo from Xerox PARC. But when you have 10% of all PC software sales it seems like maybe you got outmaneuvered in the market. But ultimately the industry was so small and so rapidly changing in the early 1980s that it was ripe for disruption on an almost annual basis. That is, until Microsoft slowly took the operating system and productivity suite markets and .doc, .xls, and .ppt files became the format all other programs needed to support. And we can thank Rubinstein and team for pioneering what we now call the software industry. He started on an IBM 1620 and ended his career with WebSleuth, helping to usher in the search engine era. Many of the practices he put in place to promote WordStar are now common in the industry. These days I talk to a dozen serial entrepreneurs a week. They could all wish to some day be as influential as he.
Eine Reise durch die Zeit mit dem c't uplink! Wir sprechen über unsere PC-Geschichten und die PC-Geschichte. Stargast ist der Spielejournalist Heinrich Lenhardt. Wie war das damals mit dem ersten PC? Was machte den Microsoft Flugsimulator so wichtig für die Hersteller von PC-Klonen? Und wieso war der Soundblaster der de facto Standard für Soundkarten? Fragen über Fragen! Im Retro-Uplink gibt es Antworten! Rudolf Opitz berichtet von seinem ersten "Schlepptop" und wie er und seine Freunde Tage in Civilisation versenkten. Spannend für ihn war der Sinclair Spectrum an dem er gebastelt und geschraubt hat. Stefan Wischner hatte nach der Bundeswehr seinen ersten Job im "Schillicon Valley". Einer Straße in München, in der sich alles sammelte, was mit Computern zu tun hatte. Seine Hauptaufgabe bestand darin Sinclair Spectrums zu zerlegen für nicht ganz koschere Deals mit dem Ostblock. Heinrich Lenhardt ist deutscher Spielejournalist der ersten Stunde. Seine Karriere begann er bei der Happy Computer, aus deren Spieleteil dann die legendäre Power Play erwuchs. Er hat für das c't Retro-Heft geschrieben und erzählt von seinen ersten PC-Erfahrungen und wie er sich mit WordStar rumgeschlagen hat. Mit dabei: Rudolf Optitz, Stefan Wischner, Heinrich Lenhardt und Jan-Keno Janssen. === Anzeige / Sponsorenhinweis === Die NFON AG aus München ist der einzige paneuropäische Cloud-Telefonie-Anbieter und zählt über 40.000 Unternehmen in 15 europäischen Ländern zu seinen Kunden. NFON bietet mit Cloudya eine einfache, unabhängige und verlässliche Lösung für Cloud-Businesskommunikation. Mehr Informationen finden Sie unter nfon.com === Anzeige / Sponsorenhinweis Ende ===
Eine Reise durch die Zeit mit dem c't uplink! Wir sprechen über unsere PC-Geschichten und die PC-Geschichte. Stargast ist der Spielejournalist Heinrich Lenhardt. Wie war das damals mit dem ersten PC? Was machte den Microsoft Flugsimulator so wichtig für die Hersteller von PC-Klonen? Und wieso war der Soundblaster der de facto Standard für Soundkarten? Fragen über Fragen! Im Retro-Uplink gibt es Antworten! Rudolf Opitz berichtet von seinem ersten "Schlepptop" und wie er und seine Freunde Tage in Civilisation versenkten. Spannend für ihn war der Sinclair Spectrum an dem er gebastelt und geschraubt hat. Stefan Wischner hatte nach der Bundeswehr seinen ersten Job im "Schillicon Valley". Einer Straße in München, in der sich alles sammelte, was mit Computern zu tun hatte. Seine Hauptaufgabe bestand darin Sinclair Spectrums zu zerlegen für nicht ganz koschere Deals mit dem Ostblock. Heinrich Lenhardt ist deutscher Spielejournalist der ersten Stunde. Seine Karriere begann er bei der Happy Computer, aus deren Spieleteil dann die legendäre Power Play erwuchs. Er hat für das c't Retro-Heft geschrieben und erzählt von seinen ersten PC-Erfahrungen und wie er sich mit WordStar rumgeschlagen hat. Mit dabei: Rudolf Optitz, Stefan Wischner, Heinrich Lenhardt und Jan-Keno Janssen. === Anzeige / Sponsorenhinweis === Die NFON AG aus München ist der einzige paneuropäische Cloud-Telefonie-Anbieter und zählt über 40.000 Unternehmen in 15 europäischen Ländern zu seinen Kunden. NFON bietet mit Cloudya eine einfache, unabhängige und verlässliche Lösung für Cloud-Businesskommunikation. Mehr Informationen finden Sie unter nfon.com === Anzeige / Sponsorenhinweis Ende ===
Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we're going to look at an often forgotten period in the history of computers. The world before DOS. I've been putting off telling the story of CP/M. But it's time. Picture this: It's 1974. It's the end of the Watergate scandal. The oil crisis. The energy crisis. Stephen King's first book Carrie is released. The Dolphins demolish my Minnesota Vikings 24-7 in the Super Bowl. Patty Hearst is kidnapped. The Oakland As win the World Series. Muhammad Ali pops George Forman in the grill to win the Heavyweight title. Charles de Gaulle opens in Paris. The Terracotta Army is discovered in China. And in one of the most telling shifts that we were moving from the 60s into the mid-70s, the Volkswagen Golf replaces the Beetle. I mean, the Hippies shifted to Paul Anka, Paper Lace, and John Denver. The world was settling down. And the world was getting ready for something to happen. A lot of people might not have known it yet, but the Intel 8080 series of chips was about to change the world. Gary Kildall could see it. He'd bought the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 when it came out in 1971. He'd been enamored and consulted with Intel. He finished his doctorate in computer science and went tot he Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey to teach and developed Kildall's Method, to optimize compilers. But then he met the 8080 chip. The Intel Intellec-8 was an early computer that he wanted to get an operating system running on. He'd written PL/M or the Programming Language for Microcomputers and he would write the CP/M operating system, short for Control Program/Monitor, loosely based on TOPS-10, the OS that ran on his DECsystem-10 mainframe. He would license PL/M through Intel but operating systems weren't really a thing just yet. By 1977, personal computers were on the rise and he would take it to market though calling the company Digital Research, Inc. His wife Dorothy ran the company. And they would go into a nice rise in sales. 250,000 licenses in 3 years. This was the first time consumers could interact with computer hardware in a standardized fashion across multiple systems. They would port the code to the Z80 processors, people would run CP/M on Apple Its, Altair's, IMSaI, Kaypro, Epson, Osbourne, Commodore and even the trash 80, or TRS-80. The world was hectic and not that standard, but there were really 3 main chips so the software actually ran on 3,000 models during an explosion in personal computer hobbyists. CP/M quickly rose and became the top operating system on the market. We would get WordStar, dBase, VisiCalc, MultiPlan, SuperCalc, Delphi, and Turbo Pascal for the office. And for fun, we'd get Colossal Cave Adventure, Gorillas, and Zork. It bootstrapped from floppy disks. They made $5 million bucks in 1981. Almost like cocoaine money at the time. Gary got a private airplane. And John Opel from IBM called. Bill Gates told him to. IBM wanted to buy the rights to CP/M. Digital Research and IBM couldn't come to terms. And this is where it gets tricky. IBM was going to make CP/M the standard operating system for the IBM PC. Microsoft jumped on the opportunity and found a tool called 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products. The cool thing there is that used the CP/M Api and so would be easy to have compatible software. Paul Allen worked with them to license the software then compiled it for the IBM. This was the first MS DOS and became the standard, branded as PC DOS for IBM. Later, Kildall agreed to sell CP/M for $240 on the IBM PCs. The problem was that PC DOS came in at $40. If you knew nothing about operating systems, which would you buy? And so even though it had compatibility with the CP/M API, PC DOS really became the standard. So much so that Digital Research would clone the Microsoft DOS and release their own DR DOS. Kildall would later describe Bill Gates using the following quote: "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.” While Kildall considered DOS theft, he was told not to sue because the laws simply weren't yet clear. At first though, it didn't seem to hurt. Digital Research continued to grow. By 1983 computers were booming. Digital Research would hit $45 million in sales. They had gone from just Gary to 530 employees by then. Gangbusters. Although they did notice that they missed the mark on the 8088 chips from Intel and even with massive rises in sales had lost market share to Unix System V and all the variants that would come from that. CP/M would add DOS emulation. But sales began to slip. The IBM 5150 and subsequent machines just took over the market. And CP/M, once a dominant player, would be left behind. Gary would move more into research and development but by 1985 resigned as the CEO of Digital Research, in a year where they laid off 200 employees. He helped start a show called the Computer Chronicles in 1983. It has been something I've been watching a lot recently, researching these episodes and it's awesome! He was a kinda and wicked smart man. Even to people who had screwed him over. As many would after them, Digital Research went into long-term legal drama, involving the US Department of Justice. But none of that saved them. And it wouldn't save any of the other companies that went there either. Digital Research would sell to Novell for $80 million in 1991 and various parts of the intellectual property would live on with compilers, interpreters, and DR DOS living on. For example, as Caldera OpenDOS. But CP/M itself would be done. Kildall would die in a bar in Monterey, California in 1994. One of the pioneers of the personal computer market. From CP/M to disk buffering the data structure that made the CD, he was all over the place in personal computers. And CP/M was the gold standard of operating systems for a few years. One of the reasons I put this episode off is because I didn't know how I would end it. Like, what's the story here. I think it's mostly that I've heard it said that he could have been Bill Gates. I think that's a drastic oversimplification. CP/M could have been the operating system on the PC. But a lot of other things could have happened as well. He was wealthy, just not Bill Gates level wealthy. And rather than go into a downward spiral over what we don't have, maybe we should all be happy with what we have. And much of his technology survived for decades to come. So he left behind a family and a legacy. In uncertain times, focus on the good and do well with it. And thank you for being you. And for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast.
Taito is going Made in USA Capcom launches the CP System 1 With the PS2 launch looming, the Dreamcast is thinking "I might be in trouble" These stories and many more on this month's episode of the Video Game Newsroom Time Machine This month we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in November of 1979, 1989, 1999. As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events.. Send comments on twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Or on YouTube https://tinyurl.com/y4st4bub And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=7594060 Show Notes: 1979: FCC Regulates computer market https://tinyurl.com/y6pnt3uy Last month we got Visicalc, this month we get WordStar https://tinyurl.com/yymblfrk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2018/04/25/fire-blood-on-the-way/ Taito opens American plant RePlay November 1979, pg. 7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taito AMOA show preview RePlay November 1979, pg. 28, 55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcmdlzm1Tyw Joe Keenan becomes president of Pizza Time Theatre Play Meter November 1979, pg 67 https://showbizpizza.fandom.com/wiki/Pizza_Time_Theatre Atari Chess is coming https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputing197911/page/n74 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess Atari tries to touch Simon... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkjjzNYDR9Q https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingbetterScan197911/page/n19 Electronic games are big business for Xmas http://www.wishbookweb.com/FB/1979_Sears_Wishbook/files/assets/basic-html/page-652.html Christmas outlook not so jolly Christmas Outlook for Stores: Not So Jolly, U.S. News & World Report, November 19, 1979 Consumer Scorecard, The Associated Press, November 23, 1979 1989: Logotron splits up https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n9 https://sonycorporation.fandom.com/wiki/Guerrilla_Cambridge https://www.mobygames.com/company/creature-labs-ltd Maxwell sells Microdeal https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n149 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorsoft https://www.mobygames.com/company/microdeal-ltd Epyx exits computer gaming biz https://www.filfre.net/2016/12/a-time-of-endings-part-2-epyx/ https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n149 https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_65/page/n9 Polarware gets bought by Merit Software https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_65/page/n9 http://graphicsmagician.com/polarware/index.htm The Sam Coupe gets presented to the press https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAM_Coupé Oswald is taking Danish TV by storm https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n8 http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=2764 Lucasfilm games is going console https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_65/page/n9 https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/lucasarts/offset,175/so,1d/list-games/ https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,1744/ Mega Drive peripherals are on the horizon https://archive.org/details/computer-video-games-magazine-096/page/n11 https://segaretro.org/Sega_Graphic_Board https://segaretro.org/Mega_Drive_Floppy_Disk_Drive Entrepreneurs are picking up NEC's slack https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n27 The PC Engine II is coming! https://archive.org/details/computer-video-games-magazine-096/page/n11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Engine_SuperGrafx PC Engine based arcade hardware shown off at Vegas AMOA show https://archive.org/details/computer-video-games-magazine-096/page/n102 https://www.tg-16.com/pce_tg16_JAMMA_conversion_kit.htm Capcom gets on the reusable arcade board bandwagon https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_26_1989-11_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_System 1999: Atari Games gets renamed to Midway Games West https://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/at_games.html Interplay is going to the movies https://archive.org/details/PC-Player-German-Magazine-1999-11/page/n10 https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Interplay_Films Hasbro buys Wizards of the Coast https://archive.org/details/PC-Player-German-Magazine-1999-11/page/n14 3dfx in trouble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive#Voodoo3_and_strategy_shift https://archive.org/details/PC-Player-German-Magazine-1999-11/page/n11 https://archive.org/details/PC_Zone_Issue_082_1999-11_Dennis_Publishing_GB/page/n34 Dreamcast US launch numbers revealed! https://archive.org/details/NextGen59Nov1999/page/n12 https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Release Dreamcast launches in Europe https://archive.org/details/MicromaniaTerceraEpocaSpanishIssue58/page/n4 Sega talks big about online gaming https://archive.org/details/NextGen59Nov1999/page/n22 PS2 details revealed! https://archive.org/details/NextGen59Nov1999/page/n34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_online_functionality Game Boy Advanced announced https://archive.org/details/NextGen59Nov1999/page/n11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance Recommended Links: They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/
Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning, we touched on a whole bunch of topics in the news. We discussed Apple's newly announced single sign-on and what they are doing that makes it different. We delved into DNA testing and some of the legal implications that are currently in the news. We talked about the NSA and the unprecedented step they took to warn everyone about the latest Microsoft vulnerability and why we must take it seriously. I gave Ken, a tongue-in-cheek explanation as to how he could fix the problems he is experiencing with his MacBook Pro keyboard. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: CEOs and Business Owners Aren't Taking CyberSecurity Seriously - And Are Facing Huge Penalties Week After Week Vulnerability After Vulnerability Multiple Logins The Bane of Modern Online Life Technology and Database have Murderers and Rapists Crying Foul --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 06/19/2019 Apple keyboard Issues, Legal implications of DNA databases, Apple's new Single Sign-on, NSA Warnings on latest Microsoft vulnerabilities, --- Craig Peterson Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. This morning, I got to talk with Ken and Matt a little bit. We discussed Ken's problem with his Apple keyboard, and I gave him a couple of solutions. His MacBook Pro. We reminisced a bit of a few things today, in fact, even with Matt. We did finally get to talk about some of the security problems that are out there., right now, There are some things you might want to be sure to give serious attention. We also went into some depth on Apple's new service that even Google is praising and is going to be a major competitor of theirs, right there in the same arena. So here we go with Ken and Matt. Matt Gagnon It is 738 on a Wednesday morning, which means it is time to talk to Craig Peterson who joins us now. Craig, how are you this morning? Craig Peterson Hey, it is, he does, and I'm doing well this morning. Matt Gagon Welcome back to the program. Ken Altshuler Craig my keyboard on my MacBook Pro keyboard keeps falling off. I am getting quite irritated. I'm going to bring it back, and they're going to have to send it to get fixed with a whole new keyboard. I'm not getting my computer back for a week. It has got to stop this insanity. It's got to stop. Craig Peterson Ken such a first world problem. Apple has, I think they still do, have a program for businesses, they had a program you would pay them a few hundred bucks per year. And they would give you loners and everything else if your machine had a problem. Ken Altshuler That is okay I could use Dropbox, and I could probably access it remotely. But you see Craig, nobody uses Word Perfect but me, anymore. Craig Peterson I was about to say that. Yeah, I'm glad you said it. Not me. No word perfect. There are still some lawyers out there that do that. Ken Altshuler It's the greatest ever made. Why would anybody use MS Word, it just sucks? Craig Peterson Well, I yeah, I was a big fan of WordStar to Ken Altshuler I used WordStar, too. Craig Peterson Yeah, I used to like that a lot. Then WordPerfect came along was perfect for attorneys. A lot of attorneys adopted it. Then I moved into Emacs. But I'm a geek. And it's not really for text editing. And I've used some others like TeX and LaTeX and Roff, and man all kinds of different typesetting tools and stuff over the years. I get you like that WordPerfect for your work again. Well, back to your keyboard. You've got that first generation of Apple's butterfly keyboard. Ken Altshuler That's correct. They'd said that they are not on the fourth version of it. Craig Peterson Yeah, they keep making changes to try and fit. What they did is they that they designed it so it would be small and light and narrow. They keep making this thing smaller. My son has one of these, and I think it's a second or third generation of a butterfly keyboard. I tried it, and I don't like it. I didn't feel of it. Right. But there's a certain point where they have to cut their losses. You know I learned on mechanical typewriters, right. 100%. Mechanical. Then a teletype, TTY 33. Back in the day. I liked the motion. I enjoy the click-clack, and it's big deep motion. I don't know, I think it's these kids, it's Matt's generation. Ken Altshuler It is magic. Matt Gagnon I don't know anyone, if you call me that, again, I'm going to come over there and punch you in the face with a baseball bat. Ken Altshuler See how angry they are? That generation. I do have a portable Bluetooth keyboard. However, the problem with that is, when you use it with the MacBook Pro, you have to put it so far out, that you can't see what you're typing because it's so far away. Matt Gagnon Nobody knows what you mean Craig Peterson You need to go to the dollar store and get a different pair of glasses. That will work for you. I have three different pairs of reading glasses, three different strengths, depending on how far away my screen is away. And so on might be all you have to do is you need a prescription. Thank God I don't need a glasses prescription. I need reading glasses. I have like one and a half, one and three quarters and twos. Sometimes I have to put two or three pair at the same time. If I need to read, the faintly printed model number on the back of a Mac. Ken Altshuler I take a picture of it and then enlarge it, to read those. Craig Peterson I've got a magnifying app. Matt, you can go away for a while. Ken Altshuler What's the name? Because I could use one. Craig Peterson I don't remember. I type in magnifier, and then it comes right up. But It's fantastic. It just it goes into super zoom mode and makes it easy to see. But you know that the high tech problems we have Apple are now kind of admitted they have a problem with a keyboard but not totally. But try some different reading glasses. That's what I do. Ken Altshuler I have to get the keys fixed. I've got an appointment at the Genius Bar tomorrow. The heart of geniuses I must say, and speaking of geniuses, why are murderers and rapists upset at technology, prey tell? Craig Peterson Yeah. What do you know about the Golden State Killer? You guys everybody's pretty much familiar with the this is the case of out in California. In California, where they had several murders, this was decades ago. They were never able to solve them. Then what the police did is that they went online, as many of us have done, to one of these DNA testing companies. I've done it, and my family's done it. Well, what happened is that when people have done it. In many cases they have shared their DNA information to find family members. And frankly, that's kind of cool. Sometimes, you'll find second, third, fourth, fifth cousins. Anyway, they go into these public databases, and the terms of views allow anyone to go in and search and try and find family members. Well, in the case of the Golden State killer, they found that it was an ex-cop responsible for the killings. At least, I think that that's might still be an allegation. I don't know, if he's actually been convicted, yet. Well, now we're seeing the same thing happening in another case. But in this case, both parties have conceded that okay, you're, you're obtaining of the evidence was legal. But Ken, this is a really, interesting question because the police used one of these public databases of DNA that people are using to share to find other family members. From that public DNA database that gave them a clue as to where to look. When they started looking more closely at this family because the DNA indicated that it was someone within you know, a few relatives of the suspect and narrowed it down to this one guy. They were able to get, I think it was like like a coffee cup or something, that was discarded by the guy at the crime scene. They pulled the DNA off of that and found it to be an exact match from you know, DNA is never like 100 hundred percent, but consider, yeah, an exact match. And so now they pulled him into court. It's a real, exciting case with unique problems, as you know, from the Legal side. How far does it go? Both sides conceded that, okay, that they legally obtained the initial DNA information, so there will be no challenge in court on that point. However, here's another side of this as well, that is the online website that the police used has since hanged their terms of service. Now they are no longer allowing police to do searches for DNA matches. Ken Altshuler Why? It makes no sense. Craig Peterson They're afraid that people are not going to put their DNA up or do searches any longer, for fear that the police might get involved or their DNA might get used for solving a crime. I agree with you. I don't know why you wouldn't, but, but that's why. It is one of the most significant sites out there for this public sharing of DNA information. They changed the terms of use two days after the police, apparently used it to find this guy. That brings up an interesting question. And I agree with you can I don't know what Matt saying, but you know, why would they do that? But should there? Should there be a law? Reminds me of something my dad always used to say. "there ought to be a law against that," or for that, or whatever. It will put a little bit of a kink into some of these police investigations. Matt Gagnon All right, Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does at this time on Wednesdays, Craig, the other day, I was signing my son up for soccer, whatever, and I couldn't for the life of me remember the login thing that I had created last year for the site. Like the week before that I had to log into something else that I hadn't logged into in a year. It happens to me pretty frequently. I just had to change my stupid password on this dumb computer. I have about thousand 1000 logins that I need, you know, in my head at any given time, and they are continually making me change my passwords and everything else. I can never keep it all straight. Is someone going to save me? Craig Peterson No. You're doomed? Matt Gagnon Oh, no, that's not the right answer. Craig Peterson Well, you already know about Facebook? Are you've seen sites that say to click here to login, with Facebook. And you've seen websites that do the same thing with Google, you know, use your Google login. There's a few of those out there. I have used them once or twice to see how they worked. I don't personally use those. Well, now Apple has come out with their login. It's a multiple login service, and you know by now that I like almost everything Apple is doing nowadays. They are trying to show "Hey, listen, we're going to keep your data safe, we're not going to keep it, we're not going to share it because we don't have it." "We're going to keep that information other than enough information that's required to get you logged in." I think that the fascinating thing about this is that with this multiple logins, single sign-on thing, that Apple's come up with, oh, btw, it's not quite available yet, but it will be. Apple has deals in place with almost everybody. It is going to be very big. Their concept is better than some of the others. Google has come out and said, "Hey, listen, we don't keep that information, either." Well, this is a company that used to say don't be evil, right, Google said. Google came up with a tacit recommendation for the Apple sign-in service saying, "Hey, listen, this is a read going to be a very, good thing for the internet although we don't share our information." They think this is going to be better, much better than normal logins. Not only do people forget them, and of course, many people misuse it them by using the same password, the same email on multiple systems. It's a bit of a problem. I think that you know if I was going to use one, once the Apple ones when it comes out, that's what I'd use. Under no circumstances would I trust Facebook at all with my data. I never use the Facebook Single Sign-On, on other sites. I don't use the Google Sign on, because frankly, they're trying to collect all of the data they can in the world and I don't trust them. The bottom line with Apple, If I am going to trust somebody at this point. They're the guys I trust, today. Ken Altshuler We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us every Wednesday at 738. You know, the people on our radio station makes us take a security test all the time. Now, are all the CEOs and business owners that conscientious? Matt Gagnon Are we way ahead of the curve? Ken Altshuler Well said. Craig Peterson Matt, Is that true? Or are they just giving Ken the test? Matt Gagnon Sadly, Craig, I have to report that they give it to me as well. Craig Peterson Well, I'm glad to hear that. The techniques and bad guys are using keep changing, and frankly, we have got to keep our employees up to date. Matt Gagnon Okay, that's fair enough, Craig. But there's a man in a gorilla suit in the video. Craig Peterson Really? Matt Gagnon And I can pass the quiz without watching the videos. Craig Peterson Or in a Bunny Suit, one of the two, right? Yeah, you know, we got to get back to the brass tacks of security and making sure employees are up to date at that is a good start. You don't want to overburden them by continually doing some of these pieces of training. I've seen a lot of them. We signed up for a company that provided us with training videos that we could provide your customers. I watched them and about pulled my hair out and stabbed by eyeballs out. They were so bad. We stopped using them. Now we send out a little notification email. Okay, guys watch out for this with a couple of samples, and maybe once in a while a short one to two-minute video explaining it. However, we need to get back to the brass tacks, everybody. That's the bottom line. And that means, the password stuff. Now we've got the NSA doing though this is the first time, it is unprecedented. Ken and I and may Matt, I think you're old enough to remember that the NSA used to stand for no such agency because the federal government denied it even existed. Well, now it's gotten to the point where the NSA has a warning out right now about cyber attacks. They are warning that this could be the worst ever worldwide computer shutdown. It's just incredible. It is all about BlueKeep and some other stuff. Why could this be the worst ever? Remember, two years ago, almost now, we had the shutdown to hundreds of thousands of computers around the world because of an attack - WannaCry and Petya/NotPetya. At the time it was worst ever. It all happened because we were not covering the underlying security best practices. We're not doing the brass tacks of security. We're not making sure we've patched our systems. We're not making sure we're following the right schedules. I have yet to go into a company and find that they've got their basics in order. I don't blame them for having you guys take these little tests. I think it's frankly, generally speaking, an excellent idea. Matt Gagnon All right, Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us this time every Wednesday. Craig, we appreciate it. As always, thank you so much. We will talk to you again next week, sir. Craig Peterson Take care, guys. Bye. Ken Altshuler Thanks a lot. Alright. So we're going to take a quick break. Craig Peterson Hey, everybody, have a great day. I'll be back Of course, with my weekend radio show, heard in the Northeast and throughout the Northeast. In fact, and it'll be a whole lot of fun. Of course, we will be talking about all the newest tech news out there. As we readily quickly heard, we are working on getting ready for our big summer of security coming up. We're going to do it. Need information, email me at Craig Peterson dot com. Have a great day, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Corey Haines This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Corey Haines. Corey first got into programming because when his father shifted over into programming in the late 70’s, that meant that there was always a computer in the house when he was growing up. He grew up playing games on his father’s computer, and from there gained interest in code and programming. He talks about his love for Ruby and Rails as well as his proudest contributions to the Ruby community, such as the different communities of learning that he has impacted over the years. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How did you first get introduced into programming? TRS 80 and WordStar Games C and C++ Getting a job as a web developer HTML Microsoft IAS Visual Basic and C# Java to Ruby How do you become a good mentor? Background in Math and English Was it hard to get back to programming? Excel and VBA in Hungary Index files The importance of learning from others Not having a CS degree didn’t hold him back Programming as a creative outlet Widgets How did you get into Ruby? Switching over to Ruby and Rails Heroku Really sticks to Rails and Ruby now Learn how to cash What are the highlights of your Ruby career? And much, much more! Links: Linode @CoreyHaines Corey’s GitHub CoreyHaines.com FreshBooks Picks: Charles Food Smoker Keto diet Corey Elm language The Beyond Burger
Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Corey Haines This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Corey Haines. Corey first got into programming because when his father shifted over into programming in the late 70’s, that meant that there was always a computer in the house when he was growing up. He grew up playing games on his father’s computer, and from there gained interest in code and programming. He talks about his love for Ruby and Rails as well as his proudest contributions to the Ruby community, such as the different communities of learning that he has impacted over the years. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How did you first get introduced into programming? TRS 80 and WordStar Games C and C++ Getting a job as a web developer HTML Microsoft IAS Visual Basic and C# Java to Ruby How do you become a good mentor? Background in Math and English Was it hard to get back to programming? Excel and VBA in Hungary Index files The importance of learning from others Not having a CS degree didn’t hold him back Programming as a creative outlet Widgets How did you get into Ruby? Switching over to Ruby and Rails Heroku Really sticks to Rails and Ruby now Learn how to cash What are the highlights of your Ruby career? And much, much more! Links: Linode @CoreyHaines Corey’s GitHub CoreyHaines.com FreshBooks Picks: Charles Food Smoker Keto diet Corey Elm language The Beyond Burger
Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Corey Haines This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Corey Haines. Corey first got into programming because when his father shifted over into programming in the late 70’s, that meant that there was always a computer in the house when he was growing up. He grew up playing games on his father’s computer, and from there gained interest in code and programming. He talks about his love for Ruby and Rails as well as his proudest contributions to the Ruby community, such as the different communities of learning that he has impacted over the years. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: How did you first get introduced into programming? TRS 80 and WordStar Games C and C++ Getting a job as a web developer HTML Microsoft IAS Visual Basic and C# Java to Ruby How do you become a good mentor? Background in Math and English Was it hard to get back to programming? Excel and VBA in Hungary Index files The importance of learning from others Not having a CS degree didn’t hold him back Programming as a creative outlet Widgets How did you get into Ruby? Switching over to Ruby and Rails Heroku Really sticks to Rails and Ruby now Learn how to cash What are the highlights of your Ruby career? And much, much more! Links: Linode @CoreyHaines Corey’s GitHub CoreyHaines.com FreshBooks Picks: Charles Food Smoker Keto diet Corey Elm language The Beyond Burger
Find Your Dream Job: Insider Tips for Finding Work, Advancing your Career, and Loving Your Job
When you hear the phrase “technology sector” you probably think of multi-billion dollar companies like Google, Apple, or Facebook. But you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to work in tech. There are opportunities across the globe, both in offices and in working at home. It is one of the fastest growing labor sectors, and the jobs pay above average salaries. And it’s not just for startup founders, engineers, or coders. The experiences, skills and values that serve you in one field--whether it’s marketing, sales, communications, HR or anything else--can be used in the diverse tech field. This week on Find Your Dream Job, Mac chats with Albert Qian a high-tech digital marketing and product marketing manager, and founder of the tech-centered job community, Albert’s List. Albert has helped professionals around the country find rewarding work in the technology space. In this episode, he shares tips on how you can make the jump into big tech. In this 34-minute episode you will learn: Backgrounds and skills that help people thrive in the technology sector How networking makes all the difference in landing a tech job How you can use your humanities degree to find a technology job The benefit of code training academies and what to look for in technology bootcamps This week’s guest: Albert Qian (@albertqian | LinkedIn)Founder, Albert’s ListAuthor, The Social Media EcosystemOrange County, Calif. Listener question of the week: I have an upcoming interview, and I’m curious how I should prepare my online profiles. What are employers looking for when they Google my name? Do you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Please send your questions to Cecilia Bianco, Mac’s List Community Manager at cecilia@macslist.org. Resources referenced on this week’s show: GlassDoor.com - Highest Paying Jobs In-Demand Hongkiat.com - To 10 Websites to Learn Coding (Interactively) Online Code Academy TreeHouse CodeTree Khan Academy Albert’s List Coursera U2Me Workbridge Associates Tech In Motion Events Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) - 2016 Edition If you have a job-hunting or career development resource resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. -- Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support!Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. -- FULL TRANSCRIPT Mac Prichard: This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life. I'm Mac Prichard, your host, and publisher of Mac's List. Our show is brought to you by Mac's List and by our book, Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. To learn more about the book and the updated edition that we're publishing in February, visit macslist.org/eBook. Thanks for joining us today. When you hear the phrase "technology sector" you probably think about multi-million dollar companies like Google, Apple, or Amazon. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley or Seattle to work in tech. It's no wonder many people move to these places to work for technology companies, however. This sector grows faster than the rest of the economy and the jobs pay above average salaries, but there are opportunities across the globe, not just California or Washington state. It's a field not just for startup founders, engineers, or coders. This week on Find Your Dream Job, we're talking about tech jobs. Ben Forstag has an online site you can use to find the highest paying jobs in the sector. Cecilia Bianco has answers for what you need to do when any employer googles you. Finally, I'll talk to an engineer who helps people find tech jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. First, though, let's start as we do every week by checking with the Mac's List team. Ben, Cecilia, how are you two doing? Ben Forstag: I'm doing great. Cecilia Bianco: Doing really good, Mac. Mac Prichard: Good. It's great to have you both here in the studio. Now, tech jobs. Before you all came here, did either one of you work in the technology sector? Cecilia Bianco: Yeah. I actually had an internship at a startup in college. It was called NOUO and it was a database for everything going on at the university restaurants, bars, and what to do on the weekend. It was an interesting experience. Ben Forstag: When I was in college, I was an intern at Compuware in Detroit. They are a software services company. I was in the marketing department so I wouldn't call it a tech job per se but it was where I first learned how to use HTML which has been a great skill for me. Mac Prichard: I have not worked in the tech sector. I had the good fortune, way back in the early 80s when IBM first introduced their PC's, to work at a non-profit that actually bought them. That was, in those days, bleeding edge technology. I learned all about floppy disks and Wordstar 3.0. Speaking of discovery, let's turn to Ben who's out there every week looking for resources that you, or listeners, can use. Ben, what have you learned for us this week related to technology? Ben Forstag: Mac, since today we're talking about technology I wanted to share two different blogs that I found, specifically blog posts, around technology. The first one comes from Glassdoor.com which is a resource we talked about last week. This comes from their blog which is around all kinds of workforce issues. This blog is the 25 highest paying jobs in demand. It's a list of the highest paying jobs that there's a huge demand for, as you would guess. The key takeaway of this job post is that almost half of the jobs listed were in the tech sector. I wrote out the top tech jobs. They are software architect, software development manager, solutions architect, analytics manager, IT manager, data scientist, security engineer, hardware engineer, database administrator, and software engineer. I don't know what most of the jobs do, I'll admit, but these are all jobs where the average salary is well over $100,000 a year. There's clearly a lot of money and opportunity in the tech sector. Thirty years ago our parents or grandparents might have been urging us to go and be doctors or lawyers because they thought that's where we were going to make a lot of money and take care of them in their old age. Nowadays, parents are probably urging their kids to go off to Silicon Valley and become software engineers and analytics managers because that's where all the money's at. Mac Prichard: That's an impressive list. I know we'll include that in the show notes, too. Ben Forstag: I'll include this specific URL to this blog post in the show notes. The key, I think, here is knowing the coding languages that are most in demand, if you want to get into the tech sector. I did a little bit of googling and what I found were the most in demand languages were SQL, Java, JavaScript, C#, C++, Python, Ruby on Rails, and iOS Swift. Cecilia, I saw you shaking your head when I read that list. Do you know any of these coding languages? Cecilia Bianco: (laughs) No, I don't. I did recently discovered that Mac's List runs on SQL. While I have no idea how to run it or anything about it, I know what it's called. Ben Forstag: You know we've got it. How about you, Mac? Mac Prichard: I'm doomed because I don't recognize any of these languages. I have some Spanish but I don't think that's going to cut it. Ben Forstag: Ten years ago, I thought I was really advanced because I know HTML. No, I don't know any of these either so I'm doomed as well. Here's the good news for all of us in this room and all of our listeners, you can learn almost all of these languages online, in your home, in your pajamas, and often for free, which brings me to my next blog resource for the week, which is a blog post on a website called hongkiat.com. That's H-O-N-G-K-I-A-T .com. (I don't know where these names come from!) The blog is the top 10 websites to learn coding, interactively, online. There are a lot of different websites out there where you can take courses, where you can learn just about any one of these languages, and other tech skills. Some of these websites you may have heard of before, Code Academy, Codetree, Treehouse, or Khan Academy. Khan Academy, I know, has been making the news a lot recently because they teach just about any subject you want to learn. The really cool thing about this is most of these sites offer at least some free training. You can scale up and pay for extras, but the baseline on most of them is free. The one reason I really like this hongkiat.com blog post is it gives a good summary of what each site teaches in terms of what languages you can learn, price point of what you can get for free and what you have to pay for, the teaching methodology, and the difficulty level for each online course. They have a matrix at the bottom of the blog post that displays all this information in a really easy and intuitive way. I would suggest you check out this blog post. It's, again, the top 10 websites to learn coding, interactively, online. I will have the URL in our show notes. Mac Prichard: Great. I know that our listeners will look forward to seeing that. Thanks, Ben. If you have a suggestion for Ben for a resource you think would be valuable to our listeners, write him. His email address is ben@macslist.org. Let's turn to you, our listeners. Cecilia, our community manager, is here to answer one of your questions. Cecilia, what are you hearing, this week, from our listeners? Cecilia Bianco: This week our question is, "I have an upcoming interview and I'm curious how I should prepare my online profiles. What are employers looking for when they google my name?" I think they're looking for a few different things, but the main reason an employer is googling you is to check your credibility. They want to see what pops up when your name is googled. Are you saying who you say you are? Do your online profiles align with what you've said about yourself thus far in your cover letter, resume, and any other correspondence you've had with them. Especially if you're applying for a tech job, this is important because you want to make sure what's popping up in a google search, that whatever comes up shows your credibility in your field. Are you a part of online tech groups? Online communities that are having conversations around the technology sector? Are you tech savvy and active online in social media, and with tech writing? Firstly, I think to prepare you should start by googling yourself and seeing what pops up. From there, you can focus on what you need to improve. Mac and Ben, I know I've googled my own name before, have you googled yours? Ben Forstag: I have. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I've got a last name that is not very common and it's probably the case that I know, or am immediately related to, any Forstag out there in the world. If you are a Forstag and you don't know who I am, please give me a call so we can chat. I have googled myself. I get the usual mish-mash of old posts that I've written for Mac's List, or other websites, my social media profiles, press releases I've written for other organizations. I would like to make one quick addendum to your suggestion, though. When you google yourself, I think it really helps if you're in blind mode or user mode on your browser because Google remembers a lot of your search history, and that doesn't show you what everyone else out in the world is looking for or finds when they type in your name. If you use, I think it's called "Guest Mode" in Chrome, or Blind Mode in other- Mac Prichard: I think it might be called Incognito. Ben Forstag: Incognito Mode in Chrome. That cleans the slate and shows you what everyone else in the world sees when they google your name. It's a good way to see what other folks see. Mac Prichard: I have googled myself and it is a good practice because you want to see what others will see about you. I made a deliberate effort some years ago to make sure I filled out online profiles for common sites like LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook. Those are the ones that pop up. Cecilia Bianco: I saw a lot of the same stuff when I googled myself. Past work, past blog posts, and all my online profiles came up, which I think is a good thing. After you google yourself, you want to figure out where you can improve what's popping up on Google. The first and most important thing to focus on is LinkedIn because you can get the most value out of an employer looking at your LinkedIn profile and it's really common to want to see that. If your LinkedIn profile isn't popping up, what you want to do is change the URL on your LinkedIn profile to include your full name. That way, it'll make you a little bit more searchable. That's pretty easy to do. You just hit edit profile and you'll see it pop up so you can make a change to that long URL.LinkedIn is very important to make sure that's popping up. It's good to have your profile setup and ready to go for an employer to see before you even apply for the job, because they might google you right when they see your resume. You want to be prepared for that. Once LinkedIn's taken care of, you want to see what other social media accounts of yours are popping up, if they are. You want to make sure you don't have anything on those accounts that you don't want an employer to see. If you're using Twitter and Facebook, you want to make sure your privacy filters are set to only show things to strangers that you want them to see. They can be great tools to support your credibility because if you're showing on all your social media platforms that your interests and passions and things you like to talk about are the same in what you've said in your job application, that demonstrates that you're a credible applicant and that they're going to trust you more. You want to make sure those are all cleaned up before you apply. If you don't have time to clean them up before applying, just make sure your privacy filters are locked tight with just what you want them to see. Mac, we've talked about this before. I know you've googled past job applicants. What were you looking for when you did that? Mac Prichard: Two things. One, I wanted to see that track record of accomplishment or experience in the area for the job that they were applying for. I think you're making a really important point, Cecilia, about the importance of showing rather than telling. People can say that they're interested in a topic or they have experience in an area, but if you go online and you see that they've actually done work and there are examples of that work then that's very powerful. The second thing I'm looking for is what clients and colleagues will see when they google that person because if I do higher than candidate, as an employer, they're going to become part of the time. The image that they're projecting to the world becomes part of our company's brand. I want to make sure that that aligns with the values and the mission of our firm. Cecilia Bianco: That's definitely really important. One last tip, the more profiles you're active on and feel comfortable with an employer seeing, the better. This gives you the most control over what's going to pop up into the Google search and what they're going to see when they google you. Overall, the easiest way to control what an employer will see if they google you is to google yourself and then determine where you can improve. Mac Prichard: Good. Well, thank you, Cecilia. That's excellent advice. If you have a question for Cecilia please email her. Her email address is cecilia@macslist.org.These segments by Ben and Cecilia are sponsored by the 2016 edition of Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. We're making the complete Mac's List guide even better by adding new content and making the book available on multiple eReader platforms. In February of next year, we'll launch the revised version of the book and you'll be able to access Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond on Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other digital devices. You'll also be able to get, for the first time, a paperback edition. Whatever the format, our goal is the same, to give you the tools and tips you need to get meaningful work. For more information, visit macslist.org/eBook and sign up for our eBook newsletter. We'll be sending you publication updates, share exclusive book content, and provide you with special pre-sale prices. Let's turn to our expert guest this week, and that is Albert Qian, who is a high tech digital marketing and product marketing manager. He's originally from Silicon Valley and he now works in Orange County, California. He's also the founder of Albert's List, a Facebook Jobs Community with more than 10,000 members that includes recruiters, hiring managers, job seekers, and more. Through the use of social media, Albert has helped fellow group members find work at companies like eBay, Google, and GoPro. Albert, thanks for joining us. Albert Qian: Thank you for having me on, I really appreciate the time. Mac Prichard: It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Let's talk about tech jobs. When people think about technology they think, "These jobs are in Silicon Valley, they're for coders, engineers. If you don't have a degree in electrical engineering you're out of luck." What's been your experience? Albert Qian: My experience is that when you look at the entire technology and high tech ecosystem for what's out there, there's actually a lot of opportunities available even for people who aren't engineers. I was out at the Golden State Warriors basketball game on Sunday and I ran into somebody who is a designer, so User Interaction Designing, UI, UX, that kind of thing, which is a really hot field right now in the area of high tech. You have a lot of people who need to design their websites, their web applications, there mobile applications. When I asked her what her background was she said that she was somebody who had gotten a degree in counseling psychology with an emphasis on education. I've seen similar stories where people who have psychology backgrounds also get jobs where they're in project management, PMP roles where they're working on, and with, engineers on getting a lot of products to market. There's a lot of different areas. Mac Prichard: Let's pause there for a moment, Albert. I can imagine our listeners thinking, "I've picked up my BA in Psychology. How do I make the leap into design work and doing user experience testing?" How do people make that journey? Albert Qian: I think the journey is made where you think about a product as just an end user, right? Many of us have smartphones today. We, no doubt, use a bunch of different applications whether it's on our phone, or on the web, we're all Facebook users, Twitter users, Uber users, things like that where we're using all these different apps. The way where we can apply a Humanities degree into a technology job is by applying our very own experience. Obviously, there's a little bit of knowledge in needing to know how some of this technology works and domain knowledge will always set you apart, but because we're all the end user of so many different types of technology today, we can always have the power and the ability to share these with the technology teams that we work with, and take those ideas into fruition into a product. Mac Prichard: Technology matters but so does human experience and understanding human behavior is always a marketable skill in technology. Albert Qian: Right now, you see a lot of technology that's out there on the market, a lot of prospective users. It takes a keen human eye to be able to look in-between, where you have the ability to use that technology, the solution to be able to really get users to come and user the product and stay using the product. Mac Prichard: For people who don't have psychology degrees, I know there are a lot of other opportunities in technology. Can you talk a little bit about that and the kinds of backgrounds and skills that help people thrive in this sector, outside of engineering. Albert Qian: I've seen people who have English degrees get jobs where they're doing things like technical writing, they are marketing specialists where they focus on writing collateral, or doing blogging content for a lot of technology companies that realize that they need to find a way to reach a broader audience. There are folks who can go into technology sales. If you're able to speak the language and also use your charisma in being able to sell technology products to others, that works as well. There's everything along the lines of the post-engineering process. Once you create a product, you've got to find a way to sell it. Selling the product includes everyone from product marketers, to sales folks, to people who manage social communities, to people who do the accounting/finance stuff in high tech, and really everything in-between. Mac Prichard: How do you see people break into that world, Albert? Whether it's after they've graduated or perhaps they're mid-career and they experience in another field but they want to break into technology. What do people that stand out or are successful at that do? Albert Qian: I think understanding the important of a particular domain is important to start out with. I think knowing what and why the technology is important is something that people are always looking for. Even though we live in such a technologically connected world a lot of people are great at using the technology but they don't understand why the technology is important from a business perspective. Mac Prichard: Albert, when we're talking about the domain, explain that for our listeners? Albert Qian: A domain would be a technology area. For example, one that I'll use is cloud computing… Mac Prichard: There's a lot of opportunity there and it's important to know the field that you want to focus on. What about training if you want to break into technology, there are code academies out there, online training schools, how helpful can those be to people who want to work as programmers, particularly those who didn't have that training in college and, maybe, want to make a career switch? Albert Qian: I think it's an interesting way to go about switching from one career into another. I've spoken to people who have taken these courses and people who are naturally interested in programming and they see people in these courses ... I've seen the example where these types of courses can really be beneficial for somebody who is interested in coding. One of my friends from college decided to go and take one of these 12 week boot camp courses. Now, he leads a technical team at a startup out in Santa Barbara. That's an example of where it is successful. Another one of my friends took one of these courses as well and now she has transitioned from an account management sales role into a product management role for a company out in Boston, Massachusetts. Have there been successes? Absolutely. I think, on the other hand ... I've spoken to programmers, as well, who look at this type of audience and they question whether they really get a lot of effective training out of it. On one hand, while you do know how to code, your ability to be creative within this coding knowledge is somewhat limited because you're working from a very limited perspective where, maybe, understanding coding isn't necessarily a natural forte of yours. This goes back to the original point where within technology and the technology sector, there is not necessarily a need to just become a programmer and that's just technology in its whole. As we've discussed throughout this podcast ... If you have the skills to be able to write, you can be a marketer, you can be a technical writer. If you're a person who can talk to people and to a very good job on that, you can be a salesperson. You can be an account executive, you can be a business development individual within any of the companies that work in tech out there. If you have in degree in, say, accounting or finance, you can go work in a money perspective in many of these different companies. You can do very well for yourself. Programming doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. However, there are a lot of different resources out there for people who want to pursue that path. Mac Prichard: When does it make sense for people to get training in programming? If they want to be a programmer? Can that be an asset if they want to be a project manager or work in marketing or sales or communications in tech? Albert Qian: I certainly think that being technical is very helpful, especially in an area where you might interface with a lot of engineers. If you are a web marketing individual and you want to launch a product, being able to talk about the interactive features of a website may help a lot. Being able to talk about how something can be marketed as a product marketer when you're interfacing with your social media manager who may know how to code can be really helpful once in awhile. A lot of the jobs these days are merging together. Your technical writer may need to know how code works and write about how that works from purely a writing perspective. Mac Prichard: Coding can help, and other skills matter a lot, too. If someone is thinking about getting training in coding, and you mentioned your two colleagues that have had a positive experience, what advice do you have for people who are shopping around for either an online course or a boot camp or a code academy? What should they look for? Albert Qian: For the boot camps that exist in 8 to 12 week increments, a lot of them have interesting payment plans where either you give them the $15,000 to start and they put your through that process. Or, there are ones that take a portion of your salary when you start. That's one pricing model that exists out there. Another model out there that exists are the massive open and online courses, the MOOC's, that exist. You can go to websites like Coursera, or Code Academy, or U-2-me.com and you can pay for anywhere from $30 to $200 to $300 course where you can do self-directive learning on coding. I think when you're doing the coding learning process, it's always important to have a project in mind that you're doing.If you're just doing the code to learn how to code, you don't really get much out of it. If there's a website that you'd like to make, or a business that you have that you'd like to improve upon and develop a web application, or a mobile application, I believe that's usually the best way to take and the best course of action to approach with when it comes to learning how to code and gaining technical knowledge. Mac Prichard: Have a project that engages you and actually produces a result. Stepping back to shopping for a course, you mentioned 3 different options, and they have 3 different price points, obviously, but are there any warning signs that people should look out for when they're considering signing up with one of these boot camps or an online course? Albert Qian: There's a lot of financial consideration. For example, there's a lot of these coding academies that have popped up in the last couple of years that have already seen their doors close. If you're learning how to code and you go to one of these coding academies that ends up closing after you leave, you may be no better than where you began. I think name recognition counts a little bit. I think understanding the practical outcomes of what you're learning is also important as well. If you're going in and you know you want to do front end web development, knowing the right types of languages that you're going to be taught is a very important first step. That's one thing as well. Looking at reviews from students who have attended in the past and seeing where they've landed and going with that as well. Mac Prichard: Look for companies that have a track record, have good reviews, and can talk about their outcomes and how they've helped students. Albert Qian: It also doesn't hurt ... If you do want to go on Coursera or u2me and you find yourself a $15 course that teaches you how to code, you can't really lose with that. Having a little bit of extra knowledge never hurts. Mac Prichard: Let's move on. In our earlier conversation before this interview, what struck me was when we were talking about how people find tech jobs, you brought up a lot of techniques that I hear about any job search. One point you made that stuck with me was that networking still matters. Can you talk more about that and how networking can make a difference in getting a tech job? Albert Qian: Networking can make a difference because you put yourself in front of a live person. If you email people, they have the option to ignore you. If you call people, they have the option to never return your voice mail. Putting yourself in front of another individual and putting your best foot forward is always a plus. Humans respond very well when they see somebody that impresses them. Going out there and giving out your business cards in a reasonable method, obviously, and immersing yourself in front of a lot of people who speak tech, perhaps even a lot better than you do, is really a great way to start. If you're in a major metropolitan area around the country, there are quite a few, actually, events one can attend on a bi-monthly basis. They can meet up with people who work in technology. Mac Prichard: Ours is a national audience. I know you're in California, but are there groups that you see that operate across the country that our listeners might want to check out? Albert Qian: Yeah. One major one that I've gotten to know a little bit here in my time in Orange County is called Workbridge Associates. They host an event in all major cities across the country called Tech In Motion. Tech In Motion is a monthly networking event. Sometimes, they have content, sometimes they don't. Various technology professionals in technology marketing, people who program, all get together to share insights, exchange business cards, and get to know each other. I think, just from my understanding, they've got people in Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, LA and Orange County, Chicago, Tampa Bay, New York City, Austin, Texas, and so many more. Mac Prichard: Excellent. We'll be sure to include that in the show notes. We're coming to the end of our interview, Albert. What else would you like to share with our listeners? Albert Qian: I'd like to invite any of your listeners to look at joining Albert's List. We, are you've mentioned, are that marketplace where we bring together job seekers, recruiters, and numerous opportunities. Like what you do with Mac's List. We have a main California group that you can find under Albert's Job Listings and Referrals. We also have groups that cover Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and New York City. We invite you to join. You can go to our main Facebook group at bit.ly/findyournextjob. That's B-I-T . L-Y / find your next job. All one word. You can also visit us online at albertslist.org. We currently just have a signup page for our email list. We send out emails every 2 to 3 weeks which includes everything from an update on the jobs report that the US Labor Department sends out every month to highlights of jobs that have been posted in our group, to upcoming live networking events, mainly available in the San Francisco Bay Area, where you can meet other professionals and get referred, and just get to know the people in your community. Mac Prichard: We'll be sure to include both of those links in the show notes. Albert, thanks so much for joining us this week. Albert Qian: Definitely. Thank you, again, for having me. Mac Prichard: Great. We're back with Ben and Cecilia. Now, what did you two thing of the conversation with Albert? What were some of the most important points you heard him make? Cecilia Bianco: I really liked what he had to say about applying for a tech job just with experience with human behavior and human experience and what a user experiences on a website. I think that's good to have in your mind going into an interview at a tech job. I think it can be a lot more valuable than I ever thought it was from what he said. Mac Prichard: I think you're right. Working the technology sector isn't just about coding. The experiences and values that can serve you in one field, whether it's marketing, sales, project management, human resources are also valuable in the technology sector. What about you, Ben? Ben Forstag: I think Albert went back to one of the golden rules of job searching which is networking and how important it is to network within the field that you're interested in exploring. I like the way he put it when you show up at a networking event, it's really hard for people to ignore you. It's an opportunity for you to present yourself in a positive light in front of people who matter and decision makers at companies. Mac Prichard: I agree. It doesn't matter what the sector might be. Human connection still matters. People always will tend to hire people they know or people that are recommended to them by people they trust. Well, thank you both, and thank you, our listeners, for listening. We'll be back next week with more tools and tips you can use to find your dream job. In the meantime, visit us at macslist.org where you can signup for our free newsletter with more than a hundred new jobs every week. If you like what you hear on our show, you can help us by leaving a review and rating at iTunes. This helps others discover our show and helps us help more job seekers. Thanks for listening.
Sobre o episódio Micros clássicos não são apenas jogos, mas também trabalho duro. Por isso fizemos a série O office antes do Office. E começamos com os processadores de texto. Nesta parte do episódio Depois de passear por metralhadoras, máquinas de escrever, esferas e margaridas, falamos de Wordstar, WordPerfect, Electric Pencil, Tasword e ASTEX. Ficha … Continue lendo Episódio 56 – O office antes do Office: Processadores de texto – Parte A →
Downloadmit Tim Krauss und Christian HeinkeIn Ausgabe #06 sprechen Apple Fanboy Christian und Android Aficionado Tim Krauss zunächst über das Duschen mit Google Glass und Christians neuen Grill. Dann wird etwas ernsthafter über Google Glass, virtuelle Geister und Probleme mit Word und die daraus folgenden Arbeitsmethodiken für Autoren wie Herta Müller gesprochen. Christian schafft es mal wieder sein neues Buch unterzubringen und in den Picks setzt Tim auf Trimm Dich und eine gute Datenleitung, während Christian mit dem iPhone Spanisch lernt und zu viel Geld für einen Computer hat.00:00:00 Podcast: TWiT #40400:00:38 Artikel: Mit Google Glass unter der Dusche00:02:22 Son Of Hibachi Grill00:05:41 Vorspann00:05:57 Artikel: Google Glass Review00:54:22 Herta Müller00:55:59 Wordstar 4.000:56:52 Scrivener01:09:59 Google Inactive Account Manager01:16:46 Buch: Heinke: escape (2013)01:33:26 Picks01:33:40 Bilateral: Any.Do (Android + iOS)01:39:32 iOS: Duolingo01:39:49 Video: TedTalk - Louis Van Ahn01:44:12 Android: Bike Intervall Clock01:47:26 Amazon: TP-Link TL-WR702N01:52:47 iMac 27" (Late 2012) (Amazon)
Cheap-ass bodega coffee or cheap-ass bodega coffee with an “aura of both urban exotica and blue-collar utility”? The greatest intellectuals of our era are using WordStar word processing An economic argument for trolls Maria Shriver I’d be able to hear you if I didn’t have this banana in my ear The City Section just keeps on keepin’ on In an age [...]
Buying a laptop (key specifications, recommended configurations), Profiles in IT (Seymour Rubinstein, founder MicroPro and creator of WordStar), AV-Comparatives anti-virus software evaluation (ESET NOD32 wins again), G8 President threatens to regulate the Internet, Fujitsu's Laptop For Life Program (get new replacement every three years), Kogan releases next Andoid handset (Agora Pro),hackers hijack large e-bill payment site (CheckFree.com), Nanotechnology Update (self-powered devices harvest energy using piezoelectrics), leadership on the Net (forums and social websites create tribal leaders), Website of the Week (21stCenturySkills.org, preparing students for 21st century), and Food Science (baking at high altitudes). This show originally aired on Saturday, December 6, 2008, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).
Buying a laptop (key specifications, recommended configurations), Profiles in IT (Seymour Rubinstein, founder MicroPro and creator of WordStar), AV-Comparatives anti-virus software evaluation (ESET NOD32 wins again), G8 President threatens to regulate the Internet, Fujitsu's Laptop For Life Program (get new replacement every three years), Kogan releases next Andoid handset (Agora Pro),hackers hijack large e-bill payment site (CheckFree.com), Nanotechnology Update (self-powered devices harvest energy using piezoelectrics), leadership on the Net (forums and social websites create tribal leaders), Website of the Week (21stCenturySkills.org, preparing students for 21st century), and Food Science (baking at high altitudes). This show originally aired on Saturday, December 6, 2008, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).
"What kind of man owns his own computer?"(Apple II ad, 1980)Welcome to Show #115! This week's topic: The Retro Spirit - Part II! Check out the Pandora project - a handheld computing/gaming unit designed by the community!The One Laptop Per Child "XO" is an example of modern day innovation in personal computing...here is the Wikipedia page...Rob Barnaby, developer of WordStar, visits the Digibarn! Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com. For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page! Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan. Thanks for listening! - Earl This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Show Complete - Ctrl-K D XA>_Welcome to Show 083! This week's topic: WordStar! Star Voyager - an NES game that looks like, hmmm, Star Raiders? See for yourself...Here's are some TI 99/4 videos, including a programming video presentation for the aspiring 99er!Want some help getting your Lisa Emulator up and running? Have a look at this step by step guide...if you need StuffIt Expander, check here...WordStar.org has some interesting history and other resources for modern WordStar users! Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com. For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page! Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan. Thanks for listening! - Earl This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
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