Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK.

Kinda, I mean he did well, but it went under. Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.

Furber and Wilson lacked that marketing muscle. Were they a unique talent? I mean... no one else did that. Their CPU worked first time, outperformed their contemporaries, ran at a fraction of the power cost a fraction of the amount and went on to become massively popular.

Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.

I'd argue that Jobs was unusually good at marketing. Maybe as rare as Woz. I mean, look at the cult of personality that's developed around him where people think Apple (or really Jobs himself) invented all sorts of things which were actually popularized by Apple, but invented by someone else.

His schtick works.

Wait what?

Are you also dating that love does not in fact transcend the fifth dimension and interstellar was also bullshit?

Come on man.

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,

Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?

Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it. Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.

Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...

The same people who steal music, software, and videos now want others to pay for their work.

Citation needed.

My current citation is Microsoft Secrets by Cusumano and Selby. Kind of old, so maybe someone can say how much things have changed over the years, but the point is that they are too optimized about getting more money. And they dominate the real world.

OSS is "stronger than ever"? In which dimension? I can't think of one. Even programmer satisfaction.

Me? I'm still hung up on the notion of a better structured charitable approach. Recovering costs, where the costs include appropriate payments for the programming work. The CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) will earn their way be providing project planning and management support. But I'm sure there will never be a CSB and it is too late to even try at this point. Very minor consolation that Microsoft also found project management difficult even back then...

Delivery vehicles are small.

They were in the process of being replaced with larger vehicles, most of which would be electric. The postal carriers who got to the drive the new ones raved about how comfortable they were, how large they were, and importantly, had air conditioning. I said were because his Orangeness wanted all the vehicles removed even if meant paying a $1.5 billion penalty to clear everything out.

Fortunately, Republicans tripped themselves up because the bill they put this provision into needed a 60 vote majority, not a simple majority. Needless to say, no more of these vehicles will be purchased.

Maybe the story is a bad target, but I'm not going to start with the rude jokes about what happened to IBM Research. Too close to the my own heart?

I did spot a few mentions of Xerox PARC and I think the managers deserve some sort of special funny booby prize for missed opportunities.

Mod parent funny but I can't concur because I have no bucket list and my fsck-it list has overflowed its bucket.

Still an interesting place to read about, though this story reminds me of an old article in Scientific American before the Germans bought it. Using large arrays of microphones in Houston they tracked the paths of individual lightning strikes. Pretty sure that was when they learned that most of it is cloud-to-cloud... (Two AI's agree over 75%. Trust no single AI? (Cue the married to an AI joke?))

Age verification is an outgrowth of the christian nationalism, it is a core part of Republican identity politics.

It may be many things but it ain't that.

Slavery was once legal because there were not laws AGAINST it. Laws don't make things legal, they make them illegal.

What utter bullshit.

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, -- Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield

And you know that general line of reasoning was why slavery had to be actually recognised in the constitution because if you have a nation of any laws at all you need to pass a law to not have them apply to some people.

Tencent?

They are on the steering committee.

no matter how "open source" they claim the process to be, and subject to American export laws.

What? A process isn't open source, code is. There are open source implementations of AV1 (or 2) and H.265 (and 6). Anything can be subject to American export laws, whether or not it makes sense, but America can't enforce that outside America (or even inside some of the time).

You can get porn for free you know, there's no need to wait 5 years for your fridge to show it to you.

Then, considering that this is at the Swizz and German border,

A swiz is a swindle as any fule kno.

and AAC is better than Ogg for the same bandwidth

Is it? When I followed such things that was the case for a while, but the encoders started getting better. Heck the MP3 encoders got so good they were surprisingly close. I thought all of the codecs of that later gen ended up basically on a par.

Anyway didn't Opus wipe the floor with all of them being better in every combo of bitrate and latency than the competition?

Yep.

But also I'm guessing they are suing Snap because they consider them to be a much softer target than, say, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Samsung or Tencent (like they'd care lol) who would likely kerb stomp them into the next millennium without even noticing.

Big enough to matter, not big or experienced enough to put up a good fight. And also holy shit they've been having a terrible time of it on the NYSE! Halved in value this year (and 1/10 from the covid peak). I expect they are perceived as not likely to want a protracted and expensive legal battle, and Dolby have identified the weakest zebra worth eating in the herd.

Patent troll fuckers.