I agree with this 100%. Zuck as CEO model was good when the issue was tech vision and growing the platform. He's fallen a bit short when it comes to things other than that, such as dealing with people, or privacy, or actually getting ad revenue, and others. Let us hold the lionization of his skills until he passes through his first rebuilding phase.
Facebook was different and new, they had an easy time. Money growth was easy when you can count on double-digit monthly compounded userbase growth. It will be harder now that user growth has slowed. Facebook also now has a target on its back, with many people shooting arrows. I can't guarantee success or failure, but i can guarantee with certainty Zuck will not have as easy of a time the next 5 years as the previous 5.
If you want to START a company, you need to have a drive that doesn't mesh well with sitting at the knee of an authority figure and have him dump his views into your brain.
I suggest that you read Steve Jobs' biography. Though he differed in skills, he both literally and figuratively sat at the knee of his (adoptive) father, Paul, and learned a great deal. His drive for perfection, even perfecting the things you can't see, came directly from Paul. Just because you have drive (and Steve definitely did) doesn't mean you can't learn from others. You just have to be smart on what you pick up, and Steve generally chose lessons well.
RUNNING someone elses company, on the other hand... any retard can do that.
Sure, just ask Leo Apotheker, John Sculley, John Corzine, etc... Corzine probably had the best resume of my short list of examples, yet failed hardest.
Running a company is not trivial. There was a book, From Good To Great, that talked about companies run so well that should be examples on how companies should be run. It was required reading in some business courses. Many of the companies listed are now gone, mostly from really bad management. Circuit City was one of those companies, so was Fannie Mae (easy to be good with implicit government backing, but even that backing failed them).
You have a very simplified view of the world. Entrepreneurs are mavericks that need to say f*ck off to absolutely everything around them. People who run companies are silly button pushers that can easily be replaced. My guess is you've never started nor run a successful company, for those views would cause you to crash and burn rather quickly. There is a common fallacy that just keeping things running is trivial. It isn't. The world can change around you and bash you against the rocks very quickly. Ask Nokia or RIM. Or the IBM PC division.
At some point you need to trust someone. I can't build a car. I can't build a computer from sand. If you've seen the gentleman who tried to build a toaster himself, you realize building these things yourself is hard. Is open source the cure? There was an attempt at putting a root hack in the kernel sources. It wasn't detected by a security sweep, just that it hit a compiler warning (luckily it was never committed to source). The person who was given the code didn't realize it was a roothack at the time. There was a telnetd bug that was in the source for 20 years.
And say, what if it wasn't a binary blob. What if I did get the code. My wife can't understand it. Neither can my uncle. Should they never use a router?
Either we all go back to subsistence farming, or we need to trust someone other than ourselves. There is no other option. Yes, you will be disappointed at times, and we need to continuously fight to ensure quality both as buyers with leverage and having external agencies (read: government?) act on our behalf (and can we trust them with our interests?). But at the base, we need trust in others.
The title of your post does not say 'anyone here'. It says STUPID OWNERS. 'Anyone Here' only makes it in the third paragraph of your post. The first paragraph is opinionated and makes no such restriction.
We're pissed because they shouldn't have done this to anyone, not that we got hit. I have an E4200 (the first router that worked all the rooms in my house), a v1 which is not on the upgrade list. Remote management and uPnP were the first things turned off. But though I'm set, i'm generous with my knowledge, and now I need to go ask members of my family what they run so they're not hit. I am upset about this.
If I read your new intent correctly, we should *not* be outraged that our parents and non-technical friends are subjected to net control and net snooping by Cisco. Technical users, such as us that read Slashdot, should just know these things and adjust should never complain about a poorly designed product. Non-technical users, well, too bad, and are left on their own. I'm not sure how this is a better world than one where technical people rail against poorly designed products and try to get them changed.
To continue my car analogy above, picture a car manufacturer (err, call it Tucker just to give it a name). In a Tucker car, the company is able to change how the car works at some point down the road. Tucker is able to change how the car drives, to potentially steer you to Tucker associated gas stations instead of the one you were going to. If the Tucker update then drove you off the road and into a fence, well, too bad, it was in the EULA. The Tucker would also be able to eavesdrop on your conversations in the car, and sell the info. You would be arrested if you talked about that parking meter you didn't need to pay for back there.
So in your world, me knowing that Tucker can do such update is required, and to be mad about it is foolish. Me being mad that my mom's car was updated and she was forced to drive into Tucker restaurants is stupid, since I knew to turn it off in my car. Again, I'm not sure how this is a better world.
Sorry to rail on so much about this, but this "blame the user" stuff gets me angry. We live in a complex world, one that existed only in the dreams of people 50 years ago. How much should a person be required to know before they can use the normal tools in society? Through the Internet, I can now be attacked by any person any place in the world, 24/7. By attacking controller software, Stuxnet made the jump from virus code to physical destruction. The human brain, on average, just isn't wired for that. Any improvements to tools to have sensible defaults that don't expose you is very welcome.
ho? Normal people, who don't have computers skills. People who don't know a firewall from Firefox would. It seems you damn them to hell.
Ok, so you know these things. My uncle, who was a CFO for a Fortune 500 company, doesn't know. Is he stupid? No, he just is as clueless about firewall and remote management as you would be about FASB157 and how you need to restructure your portfolio to comply. Are you saying that he shouldn't be on the Internet?
I know a bit about cars, I've changed oil, fixed a EGR valve, some very minimal carburetor work, but I couldn't do a tune-up on a modern car to save my life. I don't have the tools, nor the specialty. My wife knows less than I do. I don't know how to set up my fuel injector ratios, should we not drive? No, we trust the people who made our car and those who tune up our car (we're lucky we have a very good mechanic) to fix as needed. In the case of our car, we're literally putting our lives in Baykar's very capable hands.
We (collective we) hoped that we could trust Cisco to be trustworthy as well. For it to have capable, safe defaults for the vast majority of newbies that don't know better, and the opportunity for experts to customize. This faith in Cisco seems to be misplaced. Apple is selling billions of dollars of hardware because they understand this, that people don't know everything, and they just want things to work.
Forget the hacking component, high speed trading is legalized theft. Think about it, the essence of equitable trade is a wealth transfer in which both parties contribute something: I give you money, you give me a loaf of bread, and we both come out ahead. Or in the case of stock you give me partial ownership in a company.
It isn't quite theft. It's just a class of economic activity called rent seeking. Basically, people trying to make money on activities that should be free or at a small minimal cost (usually at marginal cost). They can always be made illegal
A big problem with HFT is that they're a leech. Its a siphon of real money that could go elsewhere. It's a siphon of the best minds in physics and science, instead of them creating new productive, having them try to siphon rents out of an existing system.
Sounds like 'Oz' from HBO. Seems like just about everyone died after a 2 or 3 episode arc. Sometimes seemed like realism, sometimes seemed like "not sure what to do with this character, have him shivved next episode"
Slightly off subject, I happened to be in Vegas in Jan 2002, otherwise know as about 3 months post-NY attack. At the NY-NY casino, they had a lot of banners and flags of sympathy. I always thought that was the oddest thing - showing sympathy for New York, in Vegas where no New Yorkers would see. I guess they needed to do *something*, but that was the only thing available.
To bring back to the point, people needed the symbol of the copy, so are copies all that bad?
MS would rather be a growth stock than a value stock.
Companies whose equity are considered growth stocks pay smaller (or no) dividends. Growth stocks make much better enticements for options grants than do value stocks.
Not sure why this should confuse you. Did you think you had Computer 95 when Windows 95 came out? Did your computer lose features when you went to Windows 7?
iOS versions are not the same as hardware versions. iOS version numbers would be very difficult to pin to the iPhone anyway, since iOS is now on the iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV, and iPad. Apple TV is the most confusing, where iOS 5 actually gets listed as AppleTV software bundle 4.x
I bet all 3 people that have Windows Phones will be calling Tim Cook to complain.... Too bad they don't have iOS, they could have saved money on messaging with iMessage.
CircuitCity at one time wasn't badly managed. But they did switch to bad management, and got rid of their differentiators (knowledgeable employees) to save some money which set them down the path of irrelevance.
Wasn't WEP (which has low level encryption, brute forcing can do it) but WPS. A flaw in the protocol makes what should be a hard to guess 8 digit pass-number into two 4 digit pass-numbers, several orders of magnitude easier to crack (brute force)
I have OSX lion, one of the most awkward features in launchpad, which tries to make the screen like iOS' Springboard screen. Springboard works best when you have hand gestures on a small area, not so useful on a non-touch 20" screen. Thats a lot of mousing.
Metro reminds me of this, touch metaphors on a non-touch screen to show they're changing something at least. At least i'm not forced to use Launchpad on OSX.
Launchers are surprisingly hard to do well. Apple had some bad ones in System 7 and before - At Ease, then morphing into Launcher. And then Control Strip.
They were also blind to what the market wanted. RIM saw Blackberry (solely) as a messaging platform. That is becoming a commodity, and you need more than that. Other than BBM, they have nothing.
I kind of chuckle when i read about phone vs. PC. The phone now is the PC. What can be more Personal than a Computer you bring everywhere, even the restroom? A Personal Computer that knows where you are (gps + cell triangulation) lets you communicate with every network (cell, sms, BBM/iMessage, email, twitter, facebook, etc) we know of. That's more personal than any grey box at home. Apple sees this, which is why they're pushing iCloud. The Network Is The Computer, yeah, that was just about 20 years too early.
And blackberry wanted to push email phones with a server they'd sell you somewhere. At one point, that worked. People knew only that. But the market expects much more now. RIM didn't sell anything near what the overall market wanted and they got crushed. I don't' see any vision that would make me believe they get the new world much better than before.
I have a blackberry bold, from work. New 7.1 OS. Touchscreen, aluminum design obviously takes from iPhone. yay.
But it sucks. Partly it's a chimera, gestures on the touchscreen battle with gestures from the keypad. The phone is awkwardly sized, trying to get a landscape wide screen with a need for a keypad.
The OS is better, but still lacks basic things. They've tried hard to embed Twitter in the OS for example, but the browser is horrible. Being horrible is in fact an improvement - the old browser made me want to stick a fork in my eye.
If i buy a smartphone, i buy it for the apps. If i just want to make calls, I'll buy a much cheaper feature phone. Or a low end android.
So, built in apps: It has a killer app (BBM) that is hard to use. Its usefulness depends on network effects, and as people move away from Blackberry, BBM becomes less useful. iMessage is shows you how this should have worked from the beginning, and as iMessage gets broader adoption (any iOS 5 device, and soon OSX 10.8 will do iMessage), BBM will become even less essential, and Blackberrys also.
A standard, essential tool (browser) is horribly implemented. I'ts slow, and has a horrible interface. A Bold is too expensive and bulky to be a simple phone, and very bad at being a smartphone. Even charging is a pain now - my Bold takes more current than other BBs so a subset of my chargers don't work any more. Though iPads warn you of this, they still charge (slowly), With RIM, you're SOL. This is why they're sitting on inventory.
A difference - MS creates platforms that you're supposed to build on. When MS pulls the rug from underneath you, you were building for quite a while. Wave got pulled early, too early to be a platform. Buzz never was. It makes for a lot lower impact.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this 100%. Zuck as CEO model was good when the issue was tech vision and growing the platform. He's fallen a bit short when it comes to things other than that, such as dealing with people, or privacy, or actually getting ad revenue, and others. Let us hold the lionization of his skills until he passes through his first rebuilding phase.
Facebook was different and new, they had an easy time. Money growth was easy when you can count on double-digit monthly compounded userbase growth. It will be harder now that user growth has slowed. Facebook also now has a target on its back, with many people shooting arrows. I can't guarantee success or failure, but i can guarantee with certainty Zuck will not have as easy of a time the next 5 years as the previous 5.
I suggest that you read Steve Jobs' biography. Though he differed in skills, he both literally and figuratively sat at the knee of his (adoptive) father, Paul, and learned a great deal. His drive for perfection, even perfecting the things you can't see, came directly from Paul. Just because you have drive (and Steve definitely did) doesn't mean you can't learn from others. You just have to be smart on what you pick up, and Steve generally chose lessons well.
Sure, just ask Leo Apotheker, John Sculley, John Corzine, etc... Corzine probably had the best resume of my short list of examples, yet failed hardest.
Running a company is not trivial. There was a book, From Good To Great, that talked about companies run so well that should be examples on how companies should be run. It was required reading in some business courses. Many of the companies listed are now gone, mostly from really bad management. Circuit City was one of those companies, so was Fannie Mae (easy to be good with implicit government backing, but even that backing failed them).
You have a very simplified view of the world. Entrepreneurs are mavericks that need to say f*ck off to absolutely everything around them. People who run companies are silly button pushers that can easily be replaced. My guess is you've never started nor run a successful company, for those views would cause you to crash and burn rather quickly. There is a common fallacy that just keeping things running is trivial. It isn't. The world can change around you and bash you against the rocks very quickly. Ask Nokia or RIM. Or the IBM PC division.
At some point you need to trust someone. I can't build a car. I can't build a computer from sand. If you've seen the gentleman who tried to build a toaster himself, you realize building these things yourself is hard. Is open source the cure? There was an attempt at putting a root hack in the kernel sources. It wasn't detected by a security sweep, just that it hit a compiler warning (luckily it was never committed to source). The person who was given the code didn't realize it was a roothack at the time. There was a telnetd bug that was in the source for 20 years.
And say, what if it wasn't a binary blob. What if I did get the code. My wife can't understand it. Neither can my uncle. Should they never use a router?
Either we all go back to subsistence farming, or we need to trust someone other than ourselves. There is no other option. Yes, you will be disappointed at times, and we need to continuously fight to ensure quality both as buyers with leverage and having external agencies (read: government?) act on our behalf (and can we trust them with our interests?). But at the base, we need trust in others.
The title of your post does not say 'anyone here'. It says STUPID OWNERS. 'Anyone Here' only makes it in the third paragraph of your post. The first paragraph is opinionated and makes no such restriction.
We're pissed because they shouldn't have done this to anyone, not that we got hit. I have an E4200 (the first router that worked all the rooms in my house), a v1 which is not on the upgrade list. Remote management and uPnP were the first things turned off. But though I'm set, i'm generous with my knowledge, and now I need to go ask members of my family what they run so they're not hit. I am upset about this.
If I read your new intent correctly, we should *not* be outraged that our parents and non-technical friends are subjected to net control and net snooping by Cisco. Technical users, such as us that read Slashdot, should just know these things and adjust should never complain about a poorly designed product. Non-technical users, well, too bad, and are left on their own. I'm not sure how this is a better world than one where technical people rail against poorly designed products and try to get them changed.
To continue my car analogy above, picture a car manufacturer (err, call it Tucker just to give it a name). In a Tucker car, the company is able to change how the car works at some point down the road. Tucker is able to change how the car drives, to potentially steer you to Tucker associated gas stations instead of the one you were going to. If the Tucker update then drove you off the road and into a fence, well, too bad, it was in the EULA. The Tucker would also be able to eavesdrop on your conversations in the car, and sell the info. You would be arrested if you talked about that parking meter you didn't need to pay for back there.
So in your world, me knowing that Tucker can do such update is required, and to be mad about it is foolish. Me being mad that my mom's car was updated and she was forced to drive into Tucker restaurants is stupid, since I knew to turn it off in my car. Again, I'm not sure how this is a better world.
Sorry to rail on so much about this, but this "blame the user" stuff gets me angry. We live in a complex world, one that existed only in the dreams of people 50 years ago. How much should a person be required to know before they can use the normal tools in society? Through the Internet, I can now be attacked by any person any place in the world, 24/7. By attacking controller software, Stuxnet made the jump from virus code to physical destruction. The human brain, on average, just isn't wired for that. Any improvements to tools to have sensible defaults that don't expose you is very welcome.
ho? Normal people, who don't have computers skills. People who don't know a firewall from Firefox would. It seems you damn them to hell.
Ok, so you know these things. My uncle, who was a CFO for a Fortune 500 company, doesn't know. Is he stupid? No, he just is as clueless about firewall and remote management as you would be about FASB157 and how you need to restructure your portfolio to comply. Are you saying that he shouldn't be on the Internet?
I know a bit about cars, I've changed oil, fixed a EGR valve, some very minimal carburetor work, but I couldn't do a tune-up on a modern car to save my life. I don't have the tools, nor the specialty. My wife knows less than I do. I don't know how to set up my fuel injector ratios, should we not drive? No, we trust the people who made our car and those who tune up our car (we're lucky we have a very good mechanic) to fix as needed. In the case of our car, we're literally putting our lives in Baykar's very capable hands.
We (collective we) hoped that we could trust Cisco to be trustworthy as well. For it to have capable, safe defaults for the vast majority of newbies that don't know better, and the opportunity for experts to customize. This faith in Cisco seems to be misplaced. Apple is selling billions of dollars of hardware because they understand this, that people don't know everything, and they just want things to work.
Oil Guy: Do you find it ironic that we denounce global warming, but use higher temps and lower ice mass to get more oil for more Carbon emissions?
Tobacco Guy: no, not at all.
Yarr! thar be a Raspberry Pi off the port bow!!
Raise the jolly roger my friends, we be going after all the sweet MAME booty that only a $30 computer can provide.... Pacman and Burgertime ye lads!
It isn't quite theft. It's just a class of economic activity called rent seeking. Basically, people trying to make money on activities that should be free or at a small minimal cost (usually at marginal cost). They can always be made illegal
A big problem with HFT is that they're a leech. Its a siphon of real money that could go elsewhere. It's a siphon of the best minds in physics and science, instead of them creating new productive, having them try to siphon rents out of an existing system.
Sounds like 'Oz' from HBO. Seems like just about everyone died after a 2 or 3 episode arc. Sometimes seemed like realism, sometimes seemed like "not sure what to do with this character, have him shivved next episode"
Slightly off subject, I happened to be in Vegas in Jan 2002, otherwise know as about 3 months post-NY attack. At the NY-NY casino, they had a lot of banners and flags of sympathy. I always thought that was the oddest thing - showing sympathy for New York, in Vegas where no New Yorkers would see. I guess they needed to do *something*, but that was the only thing available.
To bring back to the point, people needed the symbol of the copy, so are copies all that bad?
GNU Hurd anyone?
I'll applaud this 1%, now just need to fix the rest.
MS would rather be a growth stock than a value stock.
Companies whose equity are considered growth stocks pay smaller (or no) dividends. Growth stocks make much better enticements for options grants than do value stocks.
I'm a meebo user, and this sucks. For various reasons, i pretty much need a web chat client for big chunks of my day.
I liked meebo because the UI is small and gets out of my way most of the time. eBuddy is big and intrusive, any others?
Not sure why this should confuse you. Did you think you had Computer 95 when Windows 95 came out? Did your computer lose features when you went to Windows 7?
iOS versions are not the same as hardware versions. iOS version numbers would be very difficult to pin to the iPhone anyway, since iOS is now on the iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV, and iPad. Apple TV is the most confusing, where iOS 5 actually gets listed as AppleTV software bundle 4.x
My fave emacs joke:
Emacs would be a hell of an operating system if someone would just write a decent text editor for it.
I bet all 3 people that have Windows Phones will be calling Tim Cook to complain.... Too bad they don't have iOS, they could have saved money on messaging with iMessage.
CircuitCity at one time wasn't badly managed. But they did switch to bad management, and got rid of their differentiators (knowledgeable employees) to save some money which set them down the path of irrelevance.
Wasn't WEP (which has low level encryption, brute forcing can do it) but WPS. A flaw in the protocol makes what should be a hard to guess 8 digit pass-number into two 4 digit pass-numbers, several orders of magnitude easier to crack (brute force)
See: http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/723755
The only good cat, is a stir fried cat.
-- Gordon Shumway b.k.a ALF
NPH FTW
I have OSX lion, one of the most awkward features in launchpad, which tries to make the screen like iOS' Springboard screen. Springboard works best when you have hand gestures on a small area, not so useful on a non-touch 20" screen. Thats a lot of mousing.
Metro reminds me of this, touch metaphors on a non-touch screen to show they're changing something at least. At least i'm not forced to use Launchpad on OSX.
Launchers are surprisingly hard to do well. Apple had some bad ones in System 7 and before - At Ease, then morphing into Launcher. And then Control Strip.
They were also blind to what the market wanted. RIM saw Blackberry (solely) as a messaging platform. That is becoming a commodity, and you need more than that. Other than BBM, they have nothing.
I kind of chuckle when i read about phone vs. PC. The phone now is the PC. What can be more Personal than a Computer you bring everywhere, even the restroom? A Personal Computer that knows where you are (gps + cell triangulation) lets you communicate with every network (cell, sms, BBM/iMessage, email, twitter, facebook, etc) we know of. That's more personal than any grey box at home. Apple sees this, which is why they're pushing iCloud. The Network Is The Computer, yeah, that was just about 20 years too early.
And blackberry wanted to push email phones with a server they'd sell you somewhere. At one point, that worked. People knew only that. But the market expects much more now. RIM didn't sell anything near what the overall market wanted and they got crushed. I don't' see any vision that would make me believe they get the new world much better than before.
I have a blackberry bold, from work. New 7.1 OS. Touchscreen, aluminum design obviously takes from iPhone. yay.
But it sucks. Partly it's a chimera, gestures on the touchscreen battle with gestures from the keypad. The phone is awkwardly sized, trying to get a landscape wide screen with a need for a keypad.
The OS is better, but still lacks basic things. They've tried hard to embed Twitter in the OS for example, but the browser is horrible. Being horrible is in fact an improvement - the old browser made me want to stick a fork in my eye.
If i buy a smartphone, i buy it for the apps. If i just want to make calls, I'll buy a much cheaper feature phone. Or a low end android.
So, built in apps: It has a killer app (BBM) that is hard to use. Its usefulness depends on network effects, and as people move away from Blackberry, BBM becomes less useful. iMessage is shows you how this should have worked from the beginning, and as iMessage gets broader adoption (any iOS 5 device, and soon OSX 10.8 will do iMessage), BBM will become even less essential, and Blackberrys also.
A standard, essential tool (browser) is horribly implemented. I'ts slow, and has a horrible interface. A Bold is too expensive and bulky to be a simple phone, and very bad at being a smartphone. Even charging is a pain now - my Bold takes more current than other BBs so a subset of my chargers don't work any more. Though iPads warn you of this, they still charge (slowly), With RIM, you're SOL. This is why they're sitting on inventory.
Very nice post, I wish i had mod points.
A difference - MS creates platforms that you're supposed to build on. When MS pulls the rug from underneath you, you were building for quite a while. Wave got pulled early, too early to be a platform. Buzz never was. It makes for a lot lower impact.