ReHacked vol. 263: Lore Harp, CEO and founder of Vector Graphic, Working from home isn’t going away and more

She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home #women #computers #hardware #history #longread

London. 1981. A young, smartly dressed woman watches from the sidelines as a stage is prepared. Everyone is there to hear about a hotly anticipated IPO out of Silicon Valley. An investor approaches the woman and asks for a coffee refill from the table behind her. Her train of thought broken, she looks up at him. For a second, she holds his gaze. Then she turns and pours him a coffee. A few minutes later, the host announces that the CEO is ready to speak.

Tucking her short brown hair behind her ears, the same young woman straightens her suit and walks confidently up onto the stage. A murmur of surprise spreads across the room, which soon gives way to polite applause. She nods in acknowledgement, her eyes scanning the audience, searching.

“My name is Lore Harp, CEO and founder of Vector Graphic,” she says, her accent a mix of German and Californian. She locks eyes with the investor who asked her to refill his cup. “Sir, do you need me to get you any more coffee?”

The crowd looks at the embarrassed investor. He shakes his head.

“Good,” Lore Harp says with a thin smile. “Let’s continue, then, shall we?”

This is the story of Lore Harp McGovern, founder of Vector Graphic. With her friend Carole Ely, she launched a multi-million-dollar computer company from her suburban home and became one of the most important founders of the microcomputer age. It is based on contemporary accounts in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Interface Age, Kilobaud, Time, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as books such as Women, Technology and Power by Marguerite Zientara; Future Rich by Jacqueline Thompson; and The Untold Story of the Computer Revolution by G.H. Stine. It is also based on the words of Lore Harp McGovern herself.

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Help us to take down the parasite website | Notepad++ #software

Despite declaring itself an “unofficial fan website created for general information/educational purposes only”, this site harbors a hidden agenda. It is riddled with malicious advertisements on every page. These advertisements aim to deceive unsuspecting Notepad++ users into clicking on them, generating profits for the site owners.

Rest of World section

India’s electric rickshaws are leaving EVs in the dust - Rest of World

Even as India awaits its first Tesla, these humble e-rickshaws made by workers like Baran are powering an EV revolution in the country. In the last decade, around 1.73 million three-wheeler EVs have been sold in India. Just last month, around 500 manufacturers — most of them homegrown — sold over 44,000 e-rickshaws, compared to less than 6,800 electric cars sold during the month.

Jumia shut down food delivery and left workers stranded - Rest of World

On December 12, James Murimbi heard a rumor about Jumia Foods exiting Kenya from a group of fellow food delivery workers. But he brushed the news aside and thought they were “bluffing.”

The next day, however, he was abruptly locked out of the food delivery app that he had been working for since June 2022. Murimbi spent the following two weeks trying to reach the company to retrieve the 4,500 shillings ($34.62) he made during his final week on the job. “To date, I have not received my money,” he told Rest of World. “That small amount would have helped to at least buy food. From the time the company closed, I am still struggling.”

Shopee, TikTok, and Lazada dominate Ramadan shopping in Southeast Asia - Rest of World

Shopee, Lazada, TikTok, and Tokopedia have more than half of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market.
Shoppertainment, or content-driven commerce, is set to grow quickly with popularity of livestreams.
Regulations could damp growth, even as consumers spend more online.

For Fauzi Arif Hutama, who lives in the Indonesian city of Tangerang in Java, the holy month of Ramadan and celebrations for Eid al-Fitr are another excuse to check out deals on Shopee, the most popular e-commerce site in the country.

The 29-year-old electrician buys everything from clothing to food for his four pet cats on the Singapore-based Sea’s Shopee site. For Eid, which falls on April 10, he plans to spend his holiday bonus — equivalent to his monthly salary of 9 million rupiah ($566) — on snacks and refreshments for his relatives and neighbors and to also make charitable donations online.

Shein and MercadoLibre are fighting over vendors in Brazil’s largest garment market - Rest of World

After the pandemic pushed Brazilian manufacturers and store owners to digitize their businesses, e-commerce platforms began pulling out all the stops to lure vendors.

Other News

There’s a 30-year old dead rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station #hardware #travel #history

The dead rabbit is a legacy of an early form of mobile phone technology, albeit one that lasted less than two years before closing down.

We need to jump back to 1989, when the government awarded four licenses to operate Telepoint services, with the aim that their lower costs would offer competition to the country’s two mobile networks – Cellnet (now O2) and Vodafone.

At a time when the two mobile networks had 500,000 customers between them, it was expected these Telepoint phones would have as many as seven million customers by the middle of the 1990s.

Where to Find Tokyo's Sailor Moon Manhole Covers #culture #interesting

Anime and art permeates Tokyo, you’re even able to see it when you look down at your feet. Minato Ward has just installed new manhole designs, decked with the widely loved characters of the Sailor Moon series. If you’re a Sailor Moon fanatic, you already know that Minato is the stomping ground of Usagi and her friends. The Sailor Guardians attend school in the affluent neighborhood, and many of the landmarks of Minato, including Tokyo Tower, the shops of Azabu Juban and Hikawa Shrine make appearances in the series.

Here are the locations for each of the five Sailor Moon manhole covers, the sites to see and all the information you need to get there.

Jimmy Kimmel Labels the US 'Filthy' After Japan Visit #world #travel #culture

“After traveling to Japan, I realize that this place, this USA we’re always chanting about, is a filthy and disgusting country,” said the comic during his opening monologue on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “We were in Japan for seven days. Not only did I not encounter a single dirty bathroom, the bathrooms in Tokyo and Kyoto are cleaner than our operating rooms here.

“Everywhere you go, the bathrooms are clean,” continued Kimmel. “They don’t smell bad. They have those toilets that wash you from the inside out. And not just in the hotel: restaurants, bars, truck stops. I went to two truck stops, I swear to god the bathrooms were cleaner than Jennifer Garner’s teeth. Beautiful. And it’s not just the bathrooms. There’s no litter. People carry their own trash.”

Pompeii: Breathtaking new paintings found at ancient city #history

Stunning artworks have been uncovered in a new excavation at Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried in an eruption from Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

Archaeologists say the frescos are among the finest to be found in the ruins of the ancient site.

Mythical Greek figures such as Helen of Troy are depicted on the high black walls of a large banqueting hall.

The room's near-complete mosaic floor incorporates more than a million individual white tiles.

Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism | WIRED #internet #economy #society #world #longread

Yanis Varoufakis: Profit drives capitalism, rent drove feudalism. Now we have moved [from one system to the other] because of this new form of super-duper, all-singing, all-dancing capital: cloud capital, algorithmic capital. If I'm right, that is creating new digital fiefdoms like Amazon.com, like Airbnb, where the main mode of wealth extraction comes in the form not of profit but of rent.

Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That's a rent. That's like a ground rent. It's a bit like the Apple Store is a fiefdom. It's a cloud fiefdom, and Apple extracts a rent exactly as in feudalism. So my argument is not that we went back from capitalism to feudalism. My argument is that we have progressed forward to a new system, which has many of the characteristics of feudalism, but it is one step ahead of capitalism. To signal that, I added the word techno.

Peter Higgs, physicist who proposed Higgs boson, dies aged 94 | Peter Higgs | The Guardian #promemoria

Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who proposed a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died.

Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday.

After a series of experiments, which began in earnest in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012; the Nobel prize was shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery.

Wageningen University & Research - Plant Root System Drawings #nature

Working from home isn’t going away, even if some CEOs wish it would | TechCrunch #career #work

Today, 14% of U.S. workers work at home full time (including me), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today. In total, 58% of white-collar employees want flexibility in their work schedules to work at home a few days a week, per that same USA Today data. Yet, we are continually getting post-pandemic mixed messages about returning to the office.

Some companies like IBM and Amazon have been pushing hard to get people back to the office, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly telling employees if they wanted to stay remote, it probably wouldn’t work out well for them. Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, concentrated on remote workers over in-office folks in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.

Long-lost photos reveal details of world’s first police crime lab #history #criminology

A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science.

The huge collection, which comprises more than 20,000 glass photographic plates that document the laboratory’s pioneering scientific methods, crime scenes and Locard’s personal correspondence, is thrilling historians at a time when many consider that forensic science has lost its way. “There is a movement to look back to the past for guidance as to how to renew the science of policing,” says Amos Frappa, a historian affiliated with the Sociological Research Centre on Law and Criminal Institutions in Paris, who is overseeing the analysis of the images.

Spotify officially demonetises all tracks with under 1,000 streams | DJ Mag #music #media #creators #copyrights

Spotify has officially demonetised all tracks with under 1,000 streams. The new policy came into effect for all artists in 1st April 2024.

The revised revenue scheme was announced last year, and means music will only be included in the royalty pool calculation if it passes a threshold of 1,000 plays in the preceding 12 months. According to a Spotify blog post, 99.5% of all streams on the platform are of tracks that have above that many plays, with the platform claiming that these tracks will now earn more as a result.

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