It's not so much that they couldn't sell it, but adjusted for inflation to today's money, a well equipped Xerox Star workstation with reasonable amount of RAM, HDD ($20000+ in 1981 money), would be the equivalent of $70,000 in today's money. It was very much a high end system affordable only by a few niche users.
It's not clear to me how much it cost them to build the Star, but it might have been pretty close to that 20000 figure if they included all the R&D costs that went into it, and the fairly specialized high end hardware at the time like 20MB HDD. And it was being done in fairly low quantities so not much economy of scale.
Yes possible. But really that video of them features the word prominently (even on the thumbnail) AND that vocabulary estimation website. The video/podcast is just slightly over a week old.
Anyway doesn’t really matter, it was more to see if anyone else was a listener of that podcast.
I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.
False equivalence. In your straw man, the elephant isn't misled into believing that by posing for a photo it could be "helped," nor is it possible to communicate such an idea to an elephant. In the story, money was raised for the boy's cancer treatment, and that money was improperly withheld, denying him the treatment those funds could have provided. He was harmed by that, and by being misled into thinking he could get treatment by appearing in the video, he was scammed. Lying to the family and stating the funds weren't raised is also scamming them.
But, of course, you know that, but you would rather dig and (try to) play semantic games than admit you are wrong. Do better.
Add in theseus, tock, hubris, and hermit-os. That is just the non academic ones. As for why none of them are widely used? Drivers. It wasn't that long ago redox didn't even support usb devices. The linux kernel is a giant mashup of oodles of drivers.
> A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it.
Or they're acting like they think there's going to be significant stock price growth between now and the bubble popping. Behaviors aren't significantly different between those two scenarios.
It's always been an interesting mental exercise for me to try and measure the unknowable gap between what people say they believe and the motivated reasoning that might drive their stated beliefs.
Putting your statement another way, if you and I can see the bubble, then it's almost a certainty that the average tech CEO also sees a bubble. They're just hoping that when the music stops, they won't be the one left holding the bag.
You can "have your cake and eat it too", as long as you're happy with a smaller portion of the cake.
I own some NVDA. I've sold a good portion of it, so I've "locked in the profit" on it. If it doubles again, I'll sell some more. If it crashes I won't be too disappointed -- I've locked in my profit, and now I own more reasonably priced NVDA shares.
Note that if you have index funds, you probably already own a surprising amount of NVDA.
No, it can still be a bubble when everybody knows it's a bubble. If the price is still going up, I may know it's a bubble, and still not get out, because I'm still making money. But it's a hair-trigger thing, where everybody gets more and more ready to run for the exits at the first sign of trouble.
That's the conventional wisdom, undercut by the fact that people have guessed (and bet their fortunes) that previous bubbles were bubbles well before they popped.
Its more accurate to say that bubbles rely on most people being blind to the bubble's nature.
A lot? Also irrelevant. All it takes is one for the statement "nobody can see the bubble" to be false. Take the housing bubble for instance. Do you think the people who called that one were successful purely by chance, or does the fact that a few investors observed that mortgage lenders were underwriting loans to people with extremely poor credit and approving loan applications the lenders knew to be materially fraudulent at a massive scale indicate that the call was more of an educated wager? Did they know to a certainty it was a bubble? No, of course not. Was it a very reasonable guess? Absolutely.
