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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Show me a serious battle in Italy or a battle in Rome that resulted in serious destruction as a result of Caesar's civil war.
The people fighting in Spain, Greece, and Africa were largely Italian Romans or non-Italian Romans or allies. Caesar and Pompey were Italian Romans. It was in every way a civil war of Romans. What difference does it make that, for logistical reasons, the battles took place outside of Italy proper?
> It was a handful of battles and sieges. It's nothing compared to other campaigns.
Greece was the hardest campaign of Caesar's life. For the first time, he was fighting a complete military peer that had more resources, more soldiers, and more money. Pompey even had important Gallic leaders and Caesar's #2 (Labienus) leading a much larger cavalry force. Pompey's army matched and beat Caesar's in siege warfare.
Caesar almost lost multiple times and was beaten and in retreat when he turned around to fight and win at Pharsalus. Had Pompey avoided a full scale engagement, it's very likely that he would have won.
> 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.
> Julius Caesar's civil war with Pompey was neither long nor protracted...
Compared to what? It was nearly two years just for the portion with Pompey.
> .. and never actually involved the populus of Italy, let alone Rome.
Of course it did involve a great many people from Italy and a great many Romans.
> Pompey's Macedonian strategy ultimately failed as soon as it was contested.
It failed after very nearly succeeding multiple times and after months of skirmishes, sieges, storming of cities, back-and-forth trench warfare on huge scale, and marches with counter-marches. It was a slugfest between the largest and most modern forces of the day.
> The difference seems to be that Tesla was 5-10 years ahead on everything...
This is pretty much the definition of a great tech product: it's ahead of anything else by N years. What makes a great technology company is that they manage to consistently maintain that lead with product after product.
We'll see if Tesla can maintain its lead. It's not looking good and it probably depends mostly on whether or not Elon Musk can regain his grip on reality.
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.