Listen to a voicemail you sent someone else?
Ring your voicemail and listen to the options given if nothing comes up, then I'm afraid you can't do it.
How was software engineering as a whole in 1990-2000 compared to how it is now decades later? how did it all feel for a software engineer? Did the limitation of options and solutions lead to more focus on the basics and general mastery of the domain?
In terms of how the industry has changed, much of the industry was focused on corporate IT in the early 1990s, before the Internet took off. Even in the late 1990s, there was an enormous corporate IT hiring push to address the Y2K bug. Another major push was the transition away from mainframe technology to PC technology. I can't cite any hard statistics, but I suspect the vast majority of software engineers outside Silicon Valley spent the 1990s working on corporate IT. It wasn't until the early 2000s that corporations started realizing they had to have an Internet presence. Corporate IT shifted toward Web technology, and using Web technology for internal corporate IT tasks as well as externally facing customer service.As far as technology, it's remained remarkably consistent, even as the trends have changed. In the early 1990s, most corporate IT was practiced in C. The new C++ language was just beginning to make inroads into early adopters. C++ dominated the industry for a long time. Some youngeens might not realize that C++ was the language that built the web. Virtually everything was written in C++ in the early days, because Java was too new and Javascript didn't exist yet.Later, when Java was published in 1995, it generated an enormous amount of hype, but in my experience, very few organizations were willing to bet the farm on Java, day one. Java started to come into it's own rather late in the game, perhaps as late as 2001 or 2002, when the development tools and APIs started to become mature enough that companies were willing to consider it an alternative to C++. (Although, C++ remains strong, even today.)The surprising upstart lately is Javascript. Javascript seems to be on a trajectory to overtake the other languages. Some people claim it has already done so.It's remarkable though that despite how much everything has changed, it has also stayed the same. C++ was first announced around 1990; Java in 1995; Javascript in 1996. Yet, here we are 20 years later, those three remain the core languages of Web technology.
What is the biggest mistake made by a multi-billion dollar company?
How about a companys market cap plummeting by £500 Million overnight?Sounds grave, well it is. One speech by the CEO of the company changed its whole fate, up-to the extent that it went near bankruptcy from being a billion dollar company churning out profits in the millions.Has anyone told you “Words once spoken cannot be taken back” ? Well, looks like someone wasn’t all aware of this.This is Gerald Ratner:He was the CEO, he was highly respected and credited for the growth of the Ratner group.He inherited the company in 1984.(It was a family-owned business) He expanded the group from 100 shops to over 2000 in just 6 years. Ratner didn’t play by the usual business tricks but rather used a lot of psychological tricks. He hung huge posters and covered every part of the facade of his shops with banners to attract customers.Ratners Jewellers were famous for selling Jewellery at dirt low prices, prices so low sales exploded and no other chain could replicate the prices and yet have the same profit margins.In 1991, he was invited to speak at the Institute of Directors and here’s where he made the Billion Dollar Mistake. When asked about how his products could be sold for such low prices, he replied stating “ because it’s total crap!”He also stated that some of the earrings sold by the Group were “Cheaper than an M&S Prawn Sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long”Here’s the video of the whole event:Prawn Sandwich remark at 05:58The next day his remarks were national news. The results were immediate and the company’s Market Cap dropped by 500 Million Pounds. Customers avoided the stores and within a year the Ratners stores started closing down the same way they had grown(2000 to 150).Gerald Ratner resigned in November 1992 and sold all his shares of the company. The company has now re-branded themselves as The Signet Group.And that’s what I’d consider one of the biggest screw-ups ever.Fun Fact: Many of you might have heard or read about “The Ratner Effect” Or the phrase “pulling a Ratner”, these are all named after him.
How much does Overhaulin' cost?
The show Overhaulin' on TLC seems like it would cost a fortune because of all the parts and the labor, how much does it cost for one of those cars to get overhauled? Secondly, does the Overhaulee have to pay anything at all?
Why did Linux succeed and BSD fail?
Firstly, as to Mei Douthitt’s answer, that covers much of the, shall we say, ‘external reasons as to why Linux overshadows BSD. And I do think that analysis is very accurate.Also, Mattia Campagnano raises some good points. Mei’s point covers the legal aspects, Mattia covers some of the historical and some of the technical reasons why Linux has done better than BSD.But I really must say, that the reasons that Greg Lehey offers are, from a development standpoint, crucial for the reasons why BSD has not done as well as has Linux.My own take is that the reasons for BSD’s relative lack of success have to do with the following:The Unix/BSD lawsuit slowed the whole development process down for BSDBSD developers are very finicky about what goes in under their cyber-hood, as it were. As Greg Lehey points out, that means that many BSD developers were not very … um …. user-friendly. Mind you, neither are many programmers generally very user-friendly (being introverts and exceedingly intelligent, as a rule); but BSD developers had developed an unfortunate reputation for being especially so.BSD in most forms (NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD) are very much “stripped down” OSs, and not all have a GUI on first bootup, unlike all major distros of Linux, which install with a graphical user interface such that one only has to log in, and in so doing, the X environment — plus and desktop managers and desktop environments — are loaded by default (sorry, but I can’t remember which loads just a command line, and which, if any, boot into a GUI environment).Until recently, almost all software for BSD had to be compiled from source. That is a difficult task for many, and made installing BSD software or software compatible with BSD quite dauntingBSD isn’t for newbies, unlike many of the mainstream Linux distros. I know this may surprise many, since most people believe that Linux is for hard-core users, and some distros are that, but others, such as Mint, Ubuntu Mate, Zorin, Elementary, Ubuntu (especially the new 18.04 release), and several others are very user-friendly. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for most of BSD. The one exception is TrueOS (TrueOS - Wikipedia), which is intentionally user-friendlyNo, BSD did not fail; it simply isn’t as successful as Linux.Anyway, that’s my two cents’ worth,Thanks for the A2A