> If any of those things sound like bad business > decisions for a company that never employed > more than 600 people and never had significant > sales, congratulations, you're a better > businessman than Steve Jobs.
Way to cherry-pick your facts. Did you co-found what is, at the moment, the most valuable company in the world? Did you form another company (NeXT) for a few tens of millions of dollars and sell it for $429 million a few years later? Did you buy an animation studio for $10 million and sell it $7.4 BILLION twenty years later? (Bonus question: did you run both of those companies at the same time?) Ever create any products that sell in the tens or hundreds of millions? And not just paperclips or address labels or something like that, but nice, multi-hundred-dollar items? No? Well, congratulations, you're a worse businessman than Steve Jobs.
His time at NeXT was his time to try various things, find out who he was (he was only 30 at the time), try MORE things, FAIL a little, and learn. You make it sound like that's a bad thing.
And the part about "sent memos to every retail store specifying the exact colors to use and that the logo absolutely must be tilted at precisely 22 degrees"? EVERYONE does that. That's totally standard in the design world. Ever wonder why you don't see the Ford logo in purple, the Coke logo in green, or the Nike swoosh at a crazy angle? DESIGN GUIDELINES, that's why. EVERY company has them. Fucking foursquare has an intricate collection of design guidelines.
Back in the 80s and 90s I'd read ads in car magazines for the RX-7, where Mazda touted the virtues of the rotary engine, and wonder "If it's so great, why don't they use it to power all of their vehicles?" Obviously, it doesn't have any huge advantages over conventional piston engines--they cost about the same, they weigh about the same, and they produce about comparable amounts of power for any particular amount of gasoline ingested.
You beat me to it. There are some VERY HARD PROBLEMS that need solving in the news business: the cost of copying someone else's content and distributing it to the world is effectively zero; there is always "somewhere else" to get the news, probably for free; lots of people don't care about non-celebrity-related news; and the entire print publishing industry has not done very well coping with the digital world. Plus there are big problems with the media as we know it today (as evidenced in the annual "top ten stories the mainstream media didn't cover this year" that you can read in any "independent weekly" (are about as independent as Clear Channel stations anymore)) but even with that, stories like this one are EXACTLY why I hope newspapers don't die.
Not so much the physical "news on paper" part, but the trained, experienced staff who actually knows how to research things, with the resources and knowledge to do things like file lawsuits against the federal fucking government. It's like investing in academic research. Even if I never read a single newspaper or watch a single news broadcast, I would happily pay every year just to keep organizations like the NYT running, warts and all.
He was a fun guy. I'll miss his writings. I've been reading his stuff for about six years, starting with http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide/ , which got me into using Handbrake shortly after I got a video iPod. No more google cache, but at least he couldn't/didn't remove himself from archive.org
I hope he enjoyed his work--he didn't have much of a retirement.
Re:he was an idea man (even if taken from PARC)
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
> he was an idea man (even if taken from PARC)
Part of being smart is being able to recognize good things when you see them AND be able to figure out what to do with them. PARC was sitting on top of a handful of great technologies and was able to do exactly squat with them.
Oblig. car analogy: it doesn't matter how big your engine is--if you don't have wheels and tires to transfer the power to the ground, you'll go nowhere.
People always look at people like him and say "he's nothing special, all he did was take things other people made and change them a little and he was successful." If it's nothing special, then explain why there were no wildly successful MP3 players before the iPod, or wildly successful smartphones before the iPhone, or why MS and friends couldn't make a go of tablet computers for almost a decade before the iPad came along. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, right? If it was just style and marketing, then a few big checks to some designers and ad agencies would make every product a success, right?
Slashdot is sending him away the only way they know how... inaccurately.
But hey, I was half expecting "No pulse. Less respiration than Ellison. Lame."
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, because nobody tried to lock in customers before Apple.
There is always a yin and a yang, a back and forth, an up and down, everywhere. You might see iDevices as a low point in the cycle but they are not the first step on the road towards the end of computing freedom. Apple has done plenty of stuff in the open direction, too. Putting a rather open, very-tinkerable UNIX on tens of millions of desktops? WebKit? Thoughts on music?Thoughts on Flash? All the work they did to make Web apps as close to first-class citizens as possible on mobile devices?
No one is perfect, but I think (and I think history will show) that he gave a LOT more than he took.
My favorite joke on the difference between Americans and Europeans: "Americans think 200 years is a long time ago, Europeans think 200 miles is far away."
I got as far as the fifth paragraph (fourth, if you don't count the obviously unintended break between 4 & 5) and realized the horrible truth: he DID have spellcheckers and editors going over his work while he was here and, God bless their tortured souls, they did as much as they could--they just couldn't completely contend with the torrent of spelling and grammatical errors he sent their way.
My favorite bit is this sentence in paragraph 2:
Silk is the tech amazon [not capitalized] has built to pre-render? [he uses two spaces after questions marks and periods; sometimes three] to pre-cache? web pages on the massive AWS/EC2/S3 network (the same network that Iâm [quotation marks instead of an apostrophe] using to actually host this very web page in fact. [Parentheses not closed]
Slashdot editors, I salute you. *wipes tear from eye*
> from what I've heard, a high percentage of > SHC victims were known to be heavy > drinkers, which would only add more > fuel to the fire.
The average adult has about six quarts of blood. Assuming the density of blood is somewhat close to that of water, that's about 12 pounds of blood in, say, a 150-pound person. "Legally drunk" used to be 0.1% BAC so that's 1/1000th of 12 pounds of alcohol--about two tenths of an ounce. That's a very, very small amount of fuel. Even if you're five times over the old legal limit, that's just one ounce of alcohol.
An old rule: "If you don't have physical security, you don't have security." You can also set a firmware password so people can't use this trick, or Option to choose another boot device, or T to enter target disk mode, etc. They can still pull the drive out, but short of that, you're more covered.
Netflix's CEO also made clear that his company was "evolving rapidly," and his goal from here on out is to move "too fast," if anything. So why, might you ask, did Reed just make a 180-degree turn, slam down the pedal and throw his entire DVD business in reverse? Because that's exactly what needs to be done. Creating a completely unmemorable web address with a totally unmotivated mantra reeks of idiocy... but it all seems to make a bit more sense when you're proactively ridding your company of a business that will do nothing but nosedive in the years to come.
Like it or not, physical DVD distribution isn't an area that most sane folks would categorize as "primed for growth," particularly not when bumped up against streaming. Netflix admitted in October of last year that it was now "primarily a streaming company," so the shrill sound of shock resonating around the tech universe today is a bit hard to grok. Did we all really forget the direction Netflix was already moving in? All that happened with the introduction of Qwikster was a scorching beeline towards the end result: a thriving business devoid of physical movie delivery options.
Despite what the man on the street thinks, Netflix KNOWS what their customers are paying for, and even though we may HEAR a loud outcry about them getting out of the disk-by-mail business, it's entirely possible that 80, 90% of their customers do not care. Remember, too, that there's a LOT more cost on the mailing-physical-things side of the market, so even if they're losing, say, 20% of their customers, that might only equate to 5% of their income.
Slashdot Mirror
> If any of those things sound like bad business
> decisions for a company that never employed
> more than 600 people and never had significant
> sales, congratulations, you're a better
> businessman than Steve Jobs.
Way to cherry-pick your facts. Did you co-found what is, at the moment, the most valuable company in the world? Did you form another company (NeXT) for a few tens of millions of dollars and sell it for $429 million a few years later? Did you buy an animation studio for $10 million and sell it $7.4 BILLION twenty years later? (Bonus question: did you run both of those companies at the same time?) Ever create any products that sell in the tens or hundreds of millions? And not just paperclips or address labels or something like that, but nice, multi-hundred-dollar items? No? Well, congratulations, you're a worse businessman than Steve Jobs.
His time at NeXT was his time to try various things, find out who he was (he was only 30 at the time), try MORE things, FAIL a little, and learn. You make it sound like that's a bad thing.
And the part about "sent memos to every retail store specifying the exact colors to use and that the logo absolutely must be tilted at precisely 22 degrees"? EVERYONE does that. That's totally standard in the design world. Ever wonder why you don't see the Ford logo in purple, the Coke logo in green, or the Nike swoosh at a crazy angle? DESIGN GUIDELINES, that's why. EVERY company has them. Fucking foursquare has an intricate collection of design guidelines.
... what would the gulf oil spill have been like if oil and water did mix?
> the hydrophobic interactions between fats and water
> are crucial to the mechanics of microbiology
Also, salad dressing.
Back in the 80s and 90s I'd read ads in car magazines for the RX-7, where Mazda touted the virtues of the rotary engine, and wonder "If it's so great, why don't they use it to power all of their vehicles?" Obviously, it doesn't have any huge advantages over conventional piston engines--they cost about the same, they weigh about the same, and they produce about comparable amounts of power for any particular amount of gasoline ingested.
You beat me to it. There are some VERY HARD PROBLEMS that need solving in the news business: the cost of copying someone else's content and distributing it to the world is effectively zero; there is always "somewhere else" to get the news, probably for free; lots of people don't care about non-celebrity-related news; and the entire print publishing industry has not done very well coping with the digital world. Plus there are big problems with the media as we know it today (as evidenced in the annual "top ten stories the mainstream media didn't cover this year" that you can read in any "independent weekly" (are about as independent as Clear Channel stations anymore)) but even with that, stories like this one are EXACTLY why I hope newspapers don't die.
Not so much the physical "news on paper" part, but the trained, experienced staff who actually knows how to research things, with the resources and knowledge to do things like file lawsuits against the federal fucking government. It's like investing in academic research. Even if I never read a single newspaper or watch a single news broadcast, I would happily pay every year just to keep organizations like the NYT running, warts and all.
... is wholly good or wholly evil. Can we leave it at that?
Bruce Schneier: "Simply put, the Israeli airport security model does not scale."
Sorry, I had a few windows open and didn't get through them all before posting. Mirrors listed in the comments here.
Still, it's sad to think that there will be no fun, new, snarky writings forthcoming. :-(
Dive into HTML5 has this at the beginning: "The Work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 License." Anyone know a way to get complete archives of his books that's easier/better than scraping http://web.archive.org/web/20110726000452/http://www.diveintohtml5.org/ ?
He was a fun guy. I'll miss his writings. I've been reading his stuff for about six years, starting with http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide/ , which got me into using Handbrake shortly after I got a video iPod. No more google cache, but at least he couldn't/didn't remove himself from archive.org
I hope he enjoyed his work--he didn't have much of a retirement.
> he was an idea man (even if taken from PARC)
Part of being smart is being able to recognize good things when you see them AND be able to figure out what to do with them. PARC was sitting on top of a handful of great technologies and was able to do exactly squat with them.
Oblig. car analogy: it doesn't matter how big your engine is--if you don't have wheels and tires to transfer the power to the ground, you'll go nowhere.
People always look at people like him and say "he's nothing special, all he did was take things other people made and change them a little and he was successful." If it's nothing special, then explain why there were no wildly successful MP3 players before the iPod, or wildly successful smartphones before the iPhone, or why MS and friends couldn't make a go of tablet computers for almost a decade before the iPad came along. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, right? If it was just style and marketing, then a few big checks to some designers and ad agencies would make every product a success, right?
Also, he didn't live in Cupertino.
Slashdot is sending him away the only way they know how... inaccurately.
But hey, I was half expecting "No pulse. Less respiration than Ellison. Lame."
Yeah, because nobody tried to lock in customers before Apple.
There is always a yin and a yang, a back and forth, an up and down, everywhere. You might see iDevices as a low point in the cycle but they are not the first step on the road towards the end of computing freedom. Apple has done plenty of stuff in the open direction, too. Putting a rather open, very-tinkerable UNIX on tens of millions of desktops? WebKit? Thoughts on music? Thoughts on Flash? All the work they did to make Web apps as close to first-class citizens as possible on mobile devices?
No one is perfect, but I think (and I think history will show) that he gave a LOT more than he took.
Follow up question: what are the fans like at Boston Legal conventions?
Top 1% of almost anything makes 1/3 of the income in that field.
Flat-out wrong. Two spaces after a period only if you're using an actual, physical typewriter or a monospaced font.
My favorite joke on the difference between Americans and Europeans: "Americans think 200 years is a long time ago, Europeans think 200 miles is far away."
I got as far as the fifth paragraph (fourth, if you don't count the obviously unintended break between 4 & 5) and realized the horrible truth: he DID have spellcheckers and editors going over his work while he was here and, God bless their tortured souls, they did as much as they could--they just couldn't completely contend with the torrent of spelling and grammatical errors he sent their way.
My favorite bit is this sentence in paragraph 2:
Silk is the tech amazon [not capitalized] has built to pre-render? [he uses two spaces after questions marks and periods; sometimes three] to pre-cache? web pages on the massive AWS/EC2/S3 network (the same network that Iâm [quotation marks instead of an apostrophe] using to actually host this very web page in fact. [Parentheses not closed]
Slashdot editors, I salute you. *wipes tear from eye*
Nothing to add or ask, just wanted to say "thanks" for the cool post.
> the Patent Office is like a whorehouse for trolls.
So why is it we're the ones getting fucked?
> from what I've heard, a high percentage of
> SHC victims were known to be heavy
> drinkers, which would only add more
> fuel to the fire.
The average adult has about six quarts of blood. Assuming the density of blood is somewhat close to that of water, that's about 12 pounds of blood in, say, a 150-pound person. "Legally drunk" used to be 0.1% BAC so that's 1/1000th of 12 pounds of alcohol--about two tenths of an ounce. That's a very, very small amount of fuel. Even if you're five times over the old legal limit, that's just one ounce of alcohol.
An old rule: "If you don't have physical security, you don't have security." You can also set a firmware password so people can't use this trick, or Option to choose another boot device, or T to enter target disk mode, etc. They can still pull the drive out, but short of that, you're more covered.
That's doubleplusgood news!
> actual collaborative calendaring on the level
> of Lotus Notes or Exchange has been missing
> from linux for decades
Technically correct, I guess, since Linux just recently became exactly two decades old. Odd complaint, though, since Notes is only 2 years older and Exchange was developed in the mid-1990s.
My bigger concern is Lightning's fate after it hits 1.0. Lightning's predecessor, Sunbird, was killed at 1.0, after seven years of development.
Engadget has pretty good coverage
Netflix's CEO also made clear that his company was "evolving rapidly," and his goal from here on out is to move "too fast," if anything. So why, might you ask, did Reed just make a 180-degree turn, slam down the pedal and throw his entire DVD business in reverse? Because that's exactly what needs to be done. Creating a completely unmemorable web address with a totally unmotivated mantra reeks of idiocy... but it all seems to make a bit more sense when you're proactively ridding your company of a business that will do nothing but nosedive in the years to come.
Like it or not, physical DVD distribution isn't an area that most sane folks would categorize as "primed for growth," particularly not when bumped up against streaming. Netflix admitted in October of last year that it was now "primarily a streaming company," so the shrill sound of shock resonating around the tech universe today is a bit hard to grok. Did we all really forget the direction Netflix was already moving in? All that happened with the introduction of Qwikster was a scorching beeline towards the end result: a thriving business devoid of physical movie delivery options.
Despite what the man on the street thinks, Netflix KNOWS what their customers are paying for, and even though we may HEAR a loud outcry about them getting out of the disk-by-mail business, it's entirely possible that 80, 90% of their customers do not care. Remember, too, that there's a LOT more cost on the mailing-physical-things side of the market, so even if they're losing, say, 20% of their customers, that might only equate to 5% of their income.