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.
