Well, well, well.
Turns out having the Secret Service guard your server doesn't keep it from being hacked, or prevent the equipment from becoming a political football. As the un-inevitable Hillary! campaign takes on water, rumors swirl about the cadaverous creatures that could be called from the ranks of old white Democrats to replace her on the Treason Ticket.
Run Al!
Run Joe!
Even Fauxcahantas should get into it. Sure. Let's have a donnybrook, Dems. It'll be fun.
Pass the popcorn.
Friday, August 14, 2015
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Republican Primary for 2016
After flitting about Twitter and Instagram for awhile, I'm settling in back here at TP to record the upcoming super-sized Republican primary.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
I'm Over at Ricochet.com
Wow. Just realized it's been the better part of a year since I updated this blog. I've never been a daily blogger, but that's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? If you like short pieces, please navigate over to ricochet.com and look me up: MJB Wolf.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
In Praise of Steve Jobs
Note: This was adapted from a really long comment at althouse.com based on her post here: http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/who-has-had-as-much-impact-on-business.html
I've read a lot of nonsense today about Steve Jobs. A man that brilliant deserves a little more respect from people -- many of whom may not have been alive in 1976 -- who are discounting what he did for Apple and technology in general.
For those of you saying Apple had zero impact on your life, yadda yadda, then you're not in publishing, marketing or graphic design. But every print or motion advertisement you've seen since 1979 was made with the assistance, if not solely on, a Mac. But first Mac -- following on Apple IIe -- opened up a world of personal computing before the PC world adopted those initials. That is, just a short few years after the CEO of IBM stated that the ENTIRE MARKET for computers added up to maybe 5 users, Apple proved that there was a viable HOME market for computing. The elegance and sophistication and power in the Mac design (aesthetic and operational) revolutionized many industries.
Every ad agency, art director, and small publisher adopted the Mac system because it was built to do tasks that the glorified typewriters sold by IBM just weren't suited well for. Creative ideas blossomed across the land by people using Macs. It doesn't matter if their market share was small, it was highly influential. And seeding schools with Macs was another brilliant stroke during Jobs first tenure as CEO.
Now, many comments here reflected the "sure they had great design but" argument. Your eliding a lot of unbelievable value with that big but in there! If you don't think Jobs mattered to Apple then you didn't see how they floundered without him, even though the designers had great ideas: Newton was a tablet computer long before the iPad but didn't have the elegance and power-packed features of the later iteration. It came out when Apple was rudderless. The kind of creative teams developed there needed a strong hand, a man with a good eye. Steve Jobs was that man.
And Apple welcomed him back in 1996 just in time to take advantage of powerful new chipsets and bigger brighter screens were being developed, as wireless systems were being designed and people were experimenting with hooking television and cable to their computers.
Sure it's easy today to look back and think the iMac and iPod and iPhone and iPad followed a natural progression. Maybe you even think anyone could have done it, but that's not the case. It would not have been this way but for Steve Jobs. Going against the norm for marketers, who are slavishly devoted to decoding customer signals and addicted to focus groups, Jobs lays it out in the quotes Ann posted today. They built the machine for tomorrow. Customers liked it. People bought it. They packed as much forward-thinking technology into the iPhone as they could, even things other phone makers didn't think of. Apps? People here have said, in so many words, that tell the people what to buy and they'll do it. Well, that's a clever, if cynical, way to phrase it. But it's completely wrong. Sometimes the customer DOESN'T know what he wants until he sees something and involuntarily says, "Wow!"
Steve Jobs knew how to organize an enormous multidimensional company made up of brilliant people and get them to make things that make people go wow. And, he did it in a way that can't be written about without using the word elegant. It's true.
If you're here today reading this comment then you know more about computers than your grandparents ever did. They have changed your life. And many of the things we use -- graphical user interfaces (as opposed to DOS commands), a mouse, a CPU separate from the screen and keyboard, a flat screen, app stores, huge catalogs of music )legally!) at your fingertips -- all those things are Apple inventions that were adapted to PC design over time.
Sure, Steve Jobs is not a revolutionary like Henry Ford, but after assembly lines, standardization and charcoal briquets what did Henry do? Steve Jobs kept going, kept pushing technology into directions that people needed but didn't yet know they wanted. It's easy to make fun of or even miss, because like any consummate master he made it look easy, even inevitable. But all these things were not inevitable and Apple is second to only Exxon Mobile in value right now, because it was led by a one-of-kind visionary named Steve Jobs.
I've read a lot of nonsense today about Steve Jobs. A man that brilliant deserves a little more respect from people -- many of whom may not have been alive in 1976 -- who are discounting what he did for Apple and technology in general.
For those of you saying Apple had zero impact on your life, yadda yadda, then you're not in publishing, marketing or graphic design. But every print or motion advertisement you've seen since 1979 was made with the assistance, if not solely on, a Mac. But first Mac -- following on Apple IIe -- opened up a world of personal computing before the PC world adopted those initials. That is, just a short few years after the CEO of IBM stated that the ENTIRE MARKET for computers added up to maybe 5 users, Apple proved that there was a viable HOME market for computing. The elegance and sophistication and power in the Mac design (aesthetic and operational) revolutionized many industries.
Every ad agency, art director, and small publisher adopted the Mac system because it was built to do tasks that the glorified typewriters sold by IBM just weren't suited well for. Creative ideas blossomed across the land by people using Macs. It doesn't matter if their market share was small, it was highly influential. And seeding schools with Macs was another brilliant stroke during Jobs first tenure as CEO.
Now, many comments here reflected the "sure they had great design but" argument. Your eliding a lot of unbelievable value with that big but in there! If you don't think Jobs mattered to Apple then you didn't see how they floundered without him, even though the designers had great ideas: Newton was a tablet computer long before the iPad but didn't have the elegance and power-packed features of the later iteration. It came out when Apple was rudderless. The kind of creative teams developed there needed a strong hand, a man with a good eye. Steve Jobs was that man.
And Apple welcomed him back in 1996 just in time to take advantage of powerful new chipsets and bigger brighter screens were being developed, as wireless systems were being designed and people were experimenting with hooking television and cable to their computers.
Sure it's easy today to look back and think the iMac and iPod and iPhone and iPad followed a natural progression. Maybe you even think anyone could have done it, but that's not the case. It would not have been this way but for Steve Jobs. Going against the norm for marketers, who are slavishly devoted to decoding customer signals and addicted to focus groups, Jobs lays it out in the quotes Ann posted today. They built the machine for tomorrow. Customers liked it. People bought it. They packed as much forward-thinking technology into the iPhone as they could, even things other phone makers didn't think of. Apps? People here have said, in so many words, that tell the people what to buy and they'll do it. Well, that's a clever, if cynical, way to phrase it. But it's completely wrong. Sometimes the customer DOESN'T know what he wants until he sees something and involuntarily says, "Wow!"
Steve Jobs knew how to organize an enormous multidimensional company made up of brilliant people and get them to make things that make people go wow. And, he did it in a way that can't be written about without using the word elegant. It's true.
If you're here today reading this comment then you know more about computers than your grandparents ever did. They have changed your life. And many of the things we use -- graphical user interfaces (as opposed to DOS commands), a mouse, a CPU separate from the screen and keyboard, a flat screen, app stores, huge catalogs of music )legally!) at your fingertips -- all those things are Apple inventions that were adapted to PC design over time.
Sure, Steve Jobs is not a revolutionary like Henry Ford, but after assembly lines, standardization and charcoal briquets what did Henry do? Steve Jobs kept going, kept pushing technology into directions that people needed but didn't yet know they wanted. It's easy to make fun of or even miss, because like any consummate master he made it look easy, even inevitable. But all these things were not inevitable and Apple is second to only Exxon Mobile in value right now, because it was led by a one-of-kind visionary named Steve Jobs.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
The Civility Project
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/02/democrats_also_need_a_presidential_primary_in_2012_110793.html
Given your extremely uncivil rhetoric in the article linked above, I have only one question. How's that Civility Project going, Froda?
MJB Wolf
Given your extremely uncivil rhetoric in the article linked above, I have only one question. How's that Civility Project going, Froda?
MJB Wolf
Friday, June 17, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tyranny of the Union Minority
I was reading something on Ricochet yesterday on American exceptionalism (and would link to it but their "search function" at Ricochet can't find an article with that term in it and I have to peck this out and get working) about which the comments veered into a discussion of why Conservatives cry about curtailed Liberty when they really mean we don't like taxes. The commenter (again, sorry I can't link to the idiots at Ricochet) went on to deride the conservative position on over-regulation, minimizing it as a "little red tape."
And all this got me thinking -- which is the real point of the geniuses who started Ricochet -- about how many Americans never try to start a business in this hostile environment (I live in California) or are aware of just how encroaching the administrative state really is. And I'm not blaming Obama for things that came before him, but he has taken this tendency of the state to administer business to death to a whole new level. And he has strong allies in this with unions, both public and private.
Maybe like most Americans, you are not aware that Obama's recess-appointed majority on the NLRB has stepped in to tell Boeing where they can and can't do business now. Maybe you didn't know that the Feds are killing the fishing industry in this country. But it is happening, the same way Obama is strangling the last vestiges of oil exploration and recovery in the USA -- even after a federal judge declared his moratorium illegal. (His contempt of court decisions is a rips subject for an intrepid reporter who wants to write real news.)
His contempt for free market principles is what most disturbs me about Obama. But what is harming America is this administrations all-out fealty to Big Labor -- which ain't so big anymore. At the behest of 7% of the work force, Obama is enforcing directives and stifling business. A small, nefarious minority of working Americans many of whom were coerced into joining their union, are wreaking havoc on the rest of us.
This tyranny of the minority cannot stand, and the majority will eventually vote out politicians who hew to the same line as president Obama.
And all this got me thinking -- which is the real point of the geniuses who started Ricochet -- about how many Americans never try to start a business in this hostile environment (I live in California) or are aware of just how encroaching the administrative state really is. And I'm not blaming Obama for things that came before him, but he has taken this tendency of the state to administer business to death to a whole new level. And he has strong allies in this with unions, both public and private.
Maybe like most Americans, you are not aware that Obama's recess-appointed majority on the NLRB has stepped in to tell Boeing where they can and can't do business now. Maybe you didn't know that the Feds are killing the fishing industry in this country. But it is happening, the same way Obama is strangling the last vestiges of oil exploration and recovery in the USA -- even after a federal judge declared his moratorium illegal. (His contempt of court decisions is a rips subject for an intrepid reporter who wants to write real news.)
His contempt for free market principles is what most disturbs me about Obama. But what is harming America is this administrations all-out fealty to Big Labor -- which ain't so big anymore. At the behest of 7% of the work force, Obama is enforcing directives and stifling business. A small, nefarious minority of working Americans many of whom were coerced into joining their union, are wreaking havoc on the rest of us.
This tyranny of the minority cannot stand, and the majority will eventually vote out politicians who hew to the same line as president Obama.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)