It needs 3D borders.

c-suite

CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.

giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases

Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.

Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.

How is a database a trick?

The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).

Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.

As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.

Is BeOS still floating around?

They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.

/s just in case.

They get taken over by sales & marketing types

Like Steve Jobs lol.

Spy magazine back in the late '80s and early '90s was basically an NYC magazine and they used to mercilessly rip on Trump. Every year they did a “Top 10 Worst People, Places or Things” list and he was always on it. One year, the only mitigating factors in his favor were his offer to pay for the funeral of a child killed by a bear (which he probably reneged on) and the fact that he didn’t run for office.

They also did a prank once where they sent checks for tiny amounts to millionaires to see who would cash them. Trump survived the first round by cashing a check (that he actually hand-endorsed) for something like $1.30, and he was one of two recipients to cash the last round of checks for 13 cents. Dude has been the exact same bit of trash for his entire life.

it was the first one

Uh, I think the Magna Carta is a little bit older.

No way. Big corporations like … uh … Boeing would never just kill somebody to protect their billions of dollars of earnings.

Their spell check sucks too. “I’m the capstan now!”

I don’t remember us ever using the thing. My parents were sort of proto-hippies and we didn’t eat stuff like hot dogs very often.

That thing is built like a tank and a probable fire hazard.

Back in the '70s my parents got gifted an electric hot dog cooker. It basically had two rows of electrode spikes and you’d stick a bunch of hot dogs between the spikes and electrocute them. Dangerous as fuck since it had no kind of guard or anything - and how hard is it to just boil hot dogs anyway?

I recently bought a 1970s Sunbeam food processor to replace my broken modern one. It’s so incredibly quiet that I thought it was broken as well until I tried it out grinding stuff and found that it was even better and faster than the modern one. It is much heavier, though, and a pretty ugly shade of '70s yellow.

Old speakers had enormous, heavy magnets and were great at reproducing audio, especially on the low end. The only major “development” with modern speakers has been the ability to sort of reproduce sound with lighter-weight, cheaper materials.

I don’t still have my dad’s whole 60s-era stereo but I do have the speakers and they’re absolutely fantastic. Heavy as fuck with the giant magnets and solid wood cabinets. Modern stuff just does not compare, especially on the low frequency end.

I watch a lot of street food videos on Youtube, nothing angering or annoying about them at all. The weight gain is a problem, though …

Fluoridex. Prescription-only and pricey (~$17 per tube) but worth it. My dentist prescribes it and also sells it from his office for a bit less than what drug stores charge. Health or dental insurance may cover it but probably not.

He’s the CEO of five companies, so even if his absurd claim of 100-hour weeks is correct, he’s admitting that CEO is a 20-hour-per-week part time job.

It’s like reading the Kobe Bryant autopsy report. Yeah it’s awful, but it happened a long time ago and he was instantly dead before the really awful stuff happened anyway.