Steve Jobs was a superficial asshole but was fundamentally a good and ethical person. There's only one major ethical mistake documented in his entire life (being an absentee father while his first daughter was young), which he spent decades making amends for.
The people that emulate Steve Jobs poorly are usually real assholes with a long list of ethical mistakes.
Steve Jobs gave Woz half of the base amount, which is what Woz agreed to. Jobs withheld the fact that he was going to receive a bonus on top of the base amount, and did not share any of that money.
Was it an ethical mistake? Sure. He should have at least disclosed that he was receiving the bonus money, even if he didn't want to share it.
But claiming it was a "major ethical mistake" seems fairly out of touch with reality.
And of course, taken in the context of all of the good things they did together, it was completely insignificant and Woz has said as much.
As a rule, Apple gave stock to employees prior to the IPO, many of whom got rich. But some employees weren't eligible according to the criteria Steve (really, the board) came up with, and so they did not receive stock. Their criteria were typical for the time.
Woz and a few others felt bad about this and shared some of their stock.
Whether those ineligible people "deserved" stock is a matter of judgement...
IIRC Jobs also later blamed Wozniak's head injury from a plane crash for him not remembering several good things Jobs did for him, as a cover for those things never happening.
The fools are the people who express more hatred for Steve Jobs than cigarette, oil, and pharma CEOs that irreparably injury and kill millions of humans simple because of his obnoxious methods of demanding the best from his highly privileged teammates.
Tensions run high in these situations, and in the end they were just building personal computers. So yes, I can understand a boss who's always yelling that the product is shit and demanding that people fix it, but is also an ok person.
If there's a comic book villain tech leader out there, it's a CEO of some lifeless conglomerate that mainly buys out the competition and fires everyone aboard, or it's someone in charge of society-altering tech who is choosing to misuse it. And I'm not going to name names.
By all accounts, he was an incredible bully not just to his employees but also to his family as well.
He refused to recognize his daughter even after a paternity test, and despite being a multi millionaire 1000 times over only paid child support when forced to by the courts.
Does that sound like the behavior of a good and ethical person?
Shhhhh, he's the patron saint of the tech world, and you're on HN -- do you really expect a large percentage of folks here to share your views?
FWIW, I think he did understand some very fundamental truths about how to sell technology to the masses, but he definitely diverged from Alan Kay's philosophy outlined in "Dynabook".
IMO, he's less of a "savior" and more of a "god-tier salesperson".
Edit: I mentioned the "Dynabook", because Jobs often used the "bicycle for the mind" line, in interviews and newspaper ads.
In fact, the average person in Silicon Valley is as clueless as you are about Steve Jobs and would agree he was merely a good salesperson.
But people that know what it takes to build great products almost universally respect his world-class design and leadership, and even his deep technical knowledge.
I agree, that and the "no cold call" agreement (which equally involved other CEOs). If I were that famous, someone would probably pick out all my missteps and make me out to look like a horrible person too.
The most iconic superficial Steve Jobs impersonation was the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Woz was a great engineer. He was years ahead of any other engineer on the planet in terms of building awesome PC designs. Millions of the computers he designed and programmed were sold, for billions of dollars. The computer he created was the "Model T" of the personal computer industry. It's hard to be more technically accomplished as an engineer.
He could not have done it without Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs could not have done it without him, either.
Steve Jobs was a major believer in the idea of the 100x engineer. During his entire career, he always tried to hire them.
And why did Steve Jobs believe in hiring 100x engineers? Because he knew and worked with Steve Wozniak.
Is there a neutral third-party that has validated S3's durability/integrity/consistency? Something as rigorous as Jepsen?
It'd be really neat if someone compared all the S3 compatible cloud storage systems in a really rigorous way. I'm sure we'd discover that there are huge scary problems. Or maybe someone already has?
Caesar procrastinated so hard he changed time itself!
(This is funny, but I'd be interested to read a source on how true this is. Presumably there were priests that could take care of such things. He took care of lots of other Roman business while he was in Gaul.)
Can't beat Canadian Prime Minister and Founding Father John MacDonald blacking out while drunk during the Fenian Raids (Irish American civil war vets fighting for Irish freedom by attempting to invade British North America as a bargaining chip) in the 1860s [0]
It would be unsurprising to find that Oracle's MySQL cloud service is 1000x faster than AWS Aurora for some specific things, or maybe even entire classes of problems.
It would be equally unsurprising if Aurora is 1000x faster for other classes of problems.
That's a very misleading set of partial quotes to assemble in that order...
Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.
This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.
No, he’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s basically saying cloud computing is nothing, just a redefinition of existing computing. He’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s saying that cloud computing is only marketing. Clearly he was wrong.
Was he clearly wrong though? I listened through the whole clip and it seems like he was spot on to me. Steve Jobs made similar comments about cloud in the 90s - it’s really just mainframe 2.0.
No, cloud at root is dynamic on-demand provisioning. A lot of times SaaS built on top of cloud was (and is) marketed as cloud, without meaningfully offering dynamic on-demand provisioning to the customer, which blurs it a bit, but cloud had a distinct definition that was neither just SaaS or “mainframe 2.0” in any sense where using the term dismissively makes any sense.
I like George's style and wish him well. But I'm not optimistic about their chances of selling $15k servers that are $10k in parts (or whatever the exact numbers are).
It's just too easy for anyone to throw together a Supermicro machine with 6x GPUs in it, which is what it sounds like they'll be doing.
My guess is they'll end up creating some premium extensions to the software and selling that to make money. Or maybe they can sell an enterprise cluster manager type thing that comes with support. He's good at software so it makes sense for him to sell software.
And maybe the box will sell well initially just as a "dev kit" type thing.
Have you seen what a DGXA100 costs? It starts at $199k for 8 40GB A100's, which have a list price of $10k each. So the GPU costs are $80k. What do you get for the extra $120k? 1TB ram, 2 2TB NVMe OS drives, 4 4TB NVME general storage, and 8x200Gbit infiniband. I would guess no more than 20k all of the remaining hardware. So that's a ~$100k computer selling for $200k. And that's with NVDA likely making massive margins already on the A100 and the Infiniband hardware.
The reality is that companies want to buy complete solutions, not to build and manage their own hardware. A $15k a computer that's $10k in parts is not a large markup at all for something like this.
I agree the DGXA100 is a "complete solution" because it's NVIDIA selling NVIDIA customized integrated/certified/tested/supported hardware and software.
NVIDIA's advantage is that they're a proprietary company and they're the ones actually making the chips they're putting in a box.
That's very far away from a random little open source startup slapping third-party GPUs in a generic box.
> It's just too easy for anyone to throw together a Supermicro machine with 6x GPUs in it, which is what it sounds like they'll be doing.
HPC compute is well advanced past just slapping GPUs into generic supermicro servers anyway. Without semi-custom hardware and equivalents to nvlink/nvswitch AMD won't ever be competitive in the HPC space.
What I cited is just the mathematical reason why Netflix (or any company, really) cannot grow strictly monotonic in perpetuity. In reality, this is the reason why Netflix's curve will NOT be strictly monotonic, as you rightly pointed out.
> Because a test that doesn't test "what happens when the enemy knows the weaknesses" is not a test.
Sure it is, if the opponent can't deploy effective counter-measures.
It doesn't matter if a protected drone is possible what matters is whether or not the opponent is capable of actually deploying protected drones. In a cat-and-mouse game all that is important is having an advantage for some period of time. It's not necessary to have the advantage persist indefinitely.
See: Russia's military being battered by very old technology every day in Ukraine, where in many cases counter-measures are well known but unavailable.
> The Roman Republic was dead when Caesar won the civil war
The Republic had been in trouble for a long time. IMHO it officially died as soon as the First Triumvirate was created. Rome was in complete control of just three people for many years.
Pompey was the leading figure of the First Triumvirate, so arguably he deserves more blame than even Caesar for the downfall. The fact that more senators chose him over Caesar says very little about how truly republican any of them were by that point.
The war between Caesar's party and Pompey's party was really just a battle for who would be Dictator for life. Neither of them had any intention of handing real power back, because they could honestly tell themselves it was unlikely to fall into any better hands.
Had he won, Pompey would have continued to (through military threats) control the Senate the same way he had for many years prior to the civil war.
The people that emulate Steve Jobs poorly are usually real assholes with a long list of ethical mistakes.