I have always been a day late and a dollar short. I would be delighted if things I worked on had been successful. But if you had everything we wanted in our palms we would be absolutely content for about 10 minutes.
Fascinating profile of Ronald Wayne, the third (and little known) founder of Apple Computer. And for the record, I am 100% in agreement with his “content for about 10 minutes” statement.
A funny thing happened in the lounge at Michael Mina (335 Powell St.). San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito was enjoying a beverage at the tony bar when a long-haired kid dressed in skater garb walked into the formal restaurant and brazenly strolled up to him. Well, almost. A restaurant manager immediately cut off the intruder, saying something along the lines of, ‘Please don’t bother Mr. Zito. No autographs tonight.’ Who was the ragged-looking youth? Fellow Giant and two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum.
It must be tough being a Freak.
The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed Friday night, that is, ‘Everybody needs to to get laid,’ and turned into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free web-hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time’. And it works. How could that have happened? There was no architectural reason. Facebook is the web with, ‘I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that.’ It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a Panopticon built out of web parts. And it shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at ‘spying all the time’, they are not technically innovative. They depend on an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad. I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists we should fix it.
Eben Moglen definitely has me thinking about the bigger picture on this fine Saturday morning in Berkeley.
Having been a senior executive at some of America’s largest corporations I am convinced that model is ultimately doomed. An entity that lasts forever and grows forever is just not possible and is silly anyway. It is a waste of resources. Society deserves a better model for the organization and deployment of resources to provide products and services. Scale is still important. Companies like Cisco have shown how to continue to innovate by acquisition, but the big question is how do corporations gracefully end? How can we break the cycle of Wall Street, a strong financial services industry is simply not good for society. Wall Street does not improve productivity, the model is parasitic, transferring huge resources out of the system. I am looking forward to the next phase of the industrial revolution.
Glen Edens (via azspot) (via dalasverdugo)
Some days, I don’t see much difference between indie developers and indie musicians…
Straight up, how do you feel about dudes downloading shit without buying it? Would you ever consider doing that kinda trendy ‘download it free/if you wanna buy, you can’ thing?
I am these dudes + No point in fighting it.
My people are grinding hard just to keep these groceries coming in at…
If they had a copyright lawyer among their founders, they never would have started the company. The basic business of a search engine is to copy everything. To make your copy, then search it. The first thing that happens, arguably, is infringement of copyright law. I say ‘arguably’ because there’s never been a case on it. From day one, Google went out and copied the whole Internet. Can you imagine a company starting in the film world and the first thing they did was make a copy of every film in existence? That company couldn’t have gotten started. The Web is all about copying, but copyright law is all about making copying illegal. There is an unavoidable disconnect between the two.
Columbia University law professor Tim Wu notes that without ‘copyright infringement’ of some sort, there is no Google… and there is no Internet.
I’m truly loving the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. And for some reason, the movie Hot Dog has been on my mind just about every time I watch the ski events. Cheers to the Tahoe and Squaw Valley crew!