bmac

If you look at the 2nd to last page of the PDF you can see Tim Schafer's deception where he hadn't actually designed the ending puzzle by the time the document was due.

> We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.

Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain had a very good section on this. Ross Perot (one time third party presidential candidate) was a big investor in NeXT. Since he had founded 2 IT services companies that had extensive government contracts he was responsible for introducing many government agencies to NeXT and encouraging them to buy NeXT hardware on his personal endorsement. In Geoffrey's telling Steve ultimately blew up these relationships as a result of his immaturity and idealism to NeXT's detriment but he learned these lessons when we returned to Apple and became a more reliable business partner in his 2nd stint running apple.

One time charges are pretty typical when layoffs are announced. They are usually the cost of severance pay for the weeks or months of salary paid to employees who are no longer working. Office space leases are typically long term (multiple years) and accounting rules require they recognize the expected future cost of that now-useless space when the layoff decision is made. In practice, cash won't actually change hands for the office space until rent is due in future months. And companies will work with the landlord to get out of the lease (but often pay some penalty for the privilege).