Steve Wozniak remembers the early days [video]
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
2) Many years have passed since that time mentioned by the parent.
3) Woz is not the type to be "politically correct".
So what? Should one's opinion towards another person change when he/she dies?
>> Woz is not the type to be "politically correct".
Everyone is, to an extent. That's why I used 'may be', because a lot of people who weren't, learn it. I'm not saying it's bad.
Plus "how should behave logically" can also be illogical. We assume too much when we think of the ideal "logical" stance on things.
E.g. in the case of someone dying, the idea that "this should not change our opinion of them" assumes that our opinion of them is correct, and ignores that faced with larger life issues like mortality we might re-evaluate our opinion of the other in a more solid ground.
E.g. he did so and so and so for me, whereas I hated him all these years for BS reasons.
For people from Vulcan it's usually difficult to explain this, because the logical answer is no.
In real life though, one's opinion towards another person can and DOES change when he/she dies.
Plus, since you're being logical and all, we were discussing whether Woz changed opinion on Jobs, not whether he SHOULD HAVE changed. So the philosophical question "So what? Should one's opinion change...?", etc, doesn't apply to my response. I didn't say it should change (a moral judgement), I just listed the fact that Jobs died as one of three possible factors that might have changed Woz's opinion of him (an estimation of what might happened).
But, to answer that too, yes, I think changing opinion about someone when he/she dies it not that bad, and it actually makes sense. Not in all cases, but in some cases sure.
Death gives closure to the persons life story and makes you able to see it in perspective. It also makes you think of stuff that you are less trivial than the ones a lot of people focus on when the other person is alive (e.g. petty grudges).
Your question assumes the person that dies was in the wrong, and the person that lives should continue to have the same opinion on him. But the other person dying also triggers a re-evaluation of whether our judgement of them was correct or not. How many people regret not being nicer to their father or their spouse when they die, understanding that some things that seemed unsurmountable in separating were actually BS compared to those that should unite them?
I have nothing to add other than I really enjoyed reading this and felt compelled to comment. It upped my mood :) Keep up the positive outlook (sometimes rare on this site) and have a great day.
"Large fish eats people. Chomp. Chomp chomp."
"Ugly bell-ringer falls in love with beautiful social outcast. Doesn't get her."
"Man loses leg, sanity, life to large white aquatic mammal. Crewmember who enjoyed knocking hats off mens' heads returns alone to tell the tale."
Yep. Much better.
Third is The Hunchback of Notre Same.
Fourth is Moby Dick.
More like this can be found here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/explainafilmplotbadly
There's value in the TL;DR for those of us who don't have time/interest to sit through a video, but there's also value in having a long-form way of explaining a story to people.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Heck, I bet I did it in high school electronics class.
"In Minamata, Japan, pregnant women who consumed the contaminated fish manifested mild or no symptoms but gave birth to infants with severe developmental disabilities, including cerebral palsy, mental retardation, and seizures."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata,_Kumamoto
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/113/Supplement...
There's a huge difference between skin exposure and ingestion.
At some point being overly cautions crosses the border into pseudo science.
Sure, but there isn't much harm in that in this particular example. What is there to be gained by holding solder metal in the mouth?
Unless you have a third arm or a monkey tail, holding the solder in your mouth is about your only option when the component is in one hand and the iron is in the other.
Wiggling the joint while it's setting is sub-optimal.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=helping+hands+elect...
You can pick up one of these over-the-counter in one of several electronics shops in Vancouver for as little as eight dollars Canadian.
About mercury, consider that it's still widely used in dental amalgam.
FDA article on amalgam: http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ProductsandMedicalProcedur...
> A lot more brave than I am, even if it is lead free.
Nobody who knows what they are doing works with lead-free solder for manual rework or repair. It needs a higher temperature, flows poorly, and produces an ugly matte surface, upon cooling, that looks like a cold solder joint even when the joint is actually good.
I can almost guarantee you that Woz is using nothing but 60/40 Sn/Pb in that shot. :)
The fumes you're seeing and smelling are from the rosin flux being heated past its smoke point. (Though good for you, not lead).
I lost the fan years ago, and now just hold my breath when I solder.
Count me among the ones who played. My grandfather worked for AC Gilbert, who's company originally produced The Erector Set. It produced many toys, and we had one of these lead casting kits: http://www.girdersandgears.com/kaster.html
I never could figure out one of the molds, which is fortunate because it produced a whistle. In lead. That you stick in your mouth. Maybe I couldn't figure out how to assemble it because I was already too stupid from the lead poisoning due to the fumes while pouring the other molds.
But I have to say: Working with a crucible of molten lead was pretty fun as a kid.
I do this sometimes, but only when solder is in a plastic container, which allows me to hold the container in my mouth, without touching the solder.
It is sad that one of the most influential engineers or our time thinks that to be the best engineer he has to be on the bottom of the org chart. Says quite a bit about where we place value.
I suppose he means the business org chart because in the engineer/programmer/hardware guy/tinkerer hierarchy or org chart he is at the top. My first game was on the Apple II in 4th grade because of Steve Wozniak.
It's because he knows what org charts mean. Being at the bottom of the org chart doesn't mean being the least compensated or least respected, many engineers that are leaf nodes in an org chart are some of the highest paid and most respected.
Being at the bottom of the org chart means that your job is to write code, not to go to lots of meetings, make lots of slide decks, not to manage people with all of their weird quirks, not to persuade a bunch of executives, etc, etc, etc. What he's saying is that knowing what it means to be in other positions in the org chart, he'd happily be the guy whose job it is to write code all day.
Your ceiling in the lower ranks is often in the 100-200K range if you're lucky.
What's really sad that many companies have pay scales that all but force engineers to move up the org chart, and therefore out of engineering positions. But there's nothing sad about being happy to not have any direct reports.
This hasn't been my experience.
Those guys can be paid as normal, or they can be paid according to execs at similar slots in the chart, depending on why they are there. The latter will often be accompanied with a suitably important sounding title to justify it, but still be effectively engineering positions with some advisory capacity tacked on, often with wide latitude in picking and choosing what projects they want to work on.
A reasonable number of organizations also explicitly have "grades" associated with people and have parallel non-managerial grades for engineering that goes fairly high. E.g. when I was at Yahoo a decade ago, there were engineering grades that went up equivalent to 3-4 managerial levels - near director or VP level if I remember correctly. They'd still be leaf nodes, but in the more critical teams.
The Apple 2 is considered a beautiful and marvellous piece of engineering, and at least somewhat responsible for getting the fledgling personal computer business off the group. Here's the guy with his creation, fiddling about trying to get it to boot...
And what's he want his wondrous device to do?
10 PRINT "HELLO MY NAME IS STEVE."
# segments
$ for url in $(curl -sL http://b5vod-vh.akamaihd.net/i/m/NjIzMjk0Ng/xVc_Rg1fNn9bndgr_M6.GD7_Lk.3w3FeiCzVWzGcJJY1MDBh/3c45758f-6a07-47a2-8cbc-70d98b3e0bbc_,44,15,24,70,120,180,240,0.mp4.csmil/index_0_av.m3u8 | egrep '^http') ; do wget ${url} ; done
# reassembly
$ for segment in $(ls -1rt) ; do cat ${segment} >> complete.ts ; done
# joy
$ mpv complete.ts cat $(ls -1rt) > complete.tsI suspect glob collation is the same as the collation that `ls` uses for any given locale, so... :-)
No actual "myth" is debunked.
(If the alleged "myth" is that they "started the company in a garage", then the myth is confirmed but downplayed - they did use the Jobs garage but mostly as a staging area and quickly outgrew it.)
The two together seem to make an awesome bridge. Woz with the tech skills, but still with a passion to make things perfect and amazing and can see the potential for the designs (not just making it cause he's told), and Jobs picking up seeing those things as well and wanting the products made that way and being able to express/sell those ideas to others (which sometimes it seems is very undervalued by tech people)
There are numerous exemptions in RoHS on the requirement for lead-free. This is because everyone knows that lead-free solder is unreliable junk, and the risk is not acceptable in some applications.
Of course, it's much easier to downvote than to explain the apparent logical dissonance at work.
Same as if I said to you, "Open your eyes the sun clearly orbits the Earth!". You'd either ask for proof, or shake your head and laugh.
Edit: you do realize what the term elemental lead refers to, correct? Here's another complex multi-syllable word that's worth of study by HN moderators: bioavailability.
Also, remember, it's not like eating an ounce of lead will poison you.
Yes, kids eating lead paint over many months can be a problem. But there the lead is ingested, and they are kids.
An adult holding solder in his mouth is not a problem.
FWIW, I did this myself for many years from 13-24 without any problems... and I don't recall ever swallowing a single piece of solder.
As far as the hardware itself, it really doesn't compare to Amigas and 32-bit Ataris and so on. It managed to stay popular a long time by providing a software ecosystem that people were comfortable developing for and buying into and by Apple's courting relationships with schools.
If you look at market share before the IBM PC, Commodore actually owned the market. [edit] Looking at the graph from http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/08/from-altair-to-ipad-... Commodore peaked in the 80's (Commodore 64 launch). Apple wasn't the market leader, but probably made a lot of the profit.
The Amiga is not really of that era but is really a successor in spirit and technique to the Atari 8-bit computers (Jay Miner again). It is definitely a superior machine to the same eras Macintosh (Macintosh 512K vs Amiga 1000).
Over time, the simple design of the Apple meant it could be added to, and it's programming environment was very friendly.
Truth is, I learned 6502 assembly, and various languages on an Apple 2. The ROM code listing was right there, so was the schematic. That open nature meant people could open the box and just go.
Atari machines are capable, and fast, but...
They don't do that out of the box, and it took people a while to really exploit the things.
Apple got 80 column text, and it got cards for all sorts of things. Heck, I'm working on one myself. Always wanted to, so why not?
That expansion capability meant an Apple 2 made for a great 8 bit workstation, and an awful lot of Atari related development happened on the more usable Apple 2.
I think the technical capabilities of machines like the Atari were really noteworthy at that time. But, the Apple 2 did just enough. 6 colors on the high-res screen, for example, was just enough. You can do anything in 6 colors, but it's harder to do it in 4...
Today, I can fire up that machine, write some stuff, save it to a USB thumb drive, plug that into my PC, get the disk image open, get the data and go. Spiffy, if you ask me.
> They don't do that out of the box, and it took people a while to really exploit the things.
I never really had much problem programming the Atari, the Apple II was simpler but it sure is a less capable machine overall. Music and graphics are pretty simple on the Atari once you get the hang of it (which I don't think takes very long given the right book) and you can do things the Apple just cannot do.
Having 80 column text, a nice office type suite, lots of expansion options: test & measurement, industrial control, etc... made an Apple quite a nice machine.
In terms of entertainment, games, etc... yeah. Totally. Though I have to admit, many of the greater game experiences on an Apple are pretty darn great. But, there were a ton of things done on more capable machines with custom chips that were better. No argument.
But, when it came to getting shit done, making money?
I made a ton of money with an Apple computer. Money that was off the table with the Atari one, unless I was going to write a killer game. Plenty did.
But plenty more did things that were not so much entertainment too.
I love my Atari machine and spent long hours on it making it do all sorts of spiffy things with graphics and sound, and I really loved the bi-directional game ports. It is a nice machine.
We need to be careful about "less capable" in this context though. While I didn't spend the same hours on that Apple in the same way, because the simpler design didn't require it, I did spend them getting lots of things done for people, and for myself. Often somewhat boring things, compared to fun graphics and sound, but important things. The software was there, storage etc...
The Apple II was special because it was released in 1977 with bit-mapped color graphics and sound. The Apple Disk II disk drive was released in 1978. Being a few years early with an all-in-one computer with a fast disk drive, bit-mapped color graphics and sound gave the Apple II an edge over the others. Five years later, Commodore released the low cost Commodore 64, and Apple no longer had the edge in the 8-bit market, but did have significant market share.
Radio Shack TRS-80: 1977 mono-text (Z/80)
Commodore Pet: 1977 mono-text, VIC-20: 1981, Commodore 64: 1982, Amiga 1985
Atari 2600 game console: late 1977, Atari 400/800: 1979, Atari ST: 1985
Acorn System 75: 1979
ZX 80: 1980, ZX 81: 1981, Spectrum: 1982
CP/M operating system: 1973-74, S-100 bus: 1974, Altair: 1974
Those CP/M "business" machines, CP/M (Z80) and 80-column cards that you could plug into the Apple II, and then the IBM-PC was released in 1981.
Apple Lisa: 1983 mouse mono, Mac: 1984 mono 3 1/2" disk drive, 1985 AppleTalk networking
True for me.
Most of us got something else at home. For me that was an Atari, but I wanted an Apple. The Atari had fun chips and it was fast. But the Apple, well equipped, was a workstation, and that little difference meant a lot to some people. Others not so much.
Depends on games, programming, etc...
I really love how he talks about his work.
The Apple II is one of a number of machines at the time that had the system-unit-plus-keyboard as a base on which a matching monitor was put. The HP 9845A and PET 2001 for example.
Later CP/M systems often had the system unit built into the monitor - and sometime the keyboard as well in systems like the Intertec Superbrain.
though back in the day it was the PET's that where big - though some of the CPM systems could be bulky
Woz is famously agnostic when it comes to what brand phone/gadget he carries. I think he carries them all.
Also, it becomes much more clear in this video--for me at least--why he and Jobs hit it off. They both had almost a fundamental need to make it the best it could possibly be both inside and out. There's a lot to be said for developing that kind of attitude.
In a sense, Woz was incredibly lucky to be able to success that early, and never lost the childhood sense of wanting perfection and playful. And as someone else mentioned, Jobs is also a perfection-seeking type of personality, which helped alot - most of the "business guys" nowadays couldn't careless about that. At best you'd hope that your business partner care about how the product looks like, let alone the code behide it.
It's hard to keep your head down to produce good code, when the business side constantly remind you that customers don't really give a shit about the code, they just want it to run.
I'd say I wish more people had things they were so passionate about that what they were making felt to them it was more than just 'software', or 'hardware'. If you are making a product purely to make money, I don't think this mindset would be there, but if the product exists as something bigger (in Apples case, Jobs saw it as a 'bicycle for your mind', it wasn't just a computer). I like to think if you allowed the people just slamming libraries together till something runs something they were truly passionate about, things may play out differently. But iono :p
Uncle Bob in particular (the author of Clean Code[0], The Clean Coder[1], and the Clean Coders videos[2]) is a lot like Wozniak.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Coder-Conduct-Professional-Progr...
Considering software is much more easily distributable than hardware makes the fact that there is none works against him.
Robert Martin may be good at Marketing, but I've never seen something from him that I liked.
Closer to Woz would be people who ACTUALLY shipped working code (Linus Torvalds as an example) then people who like to complain about code not having enough test coverage
So yeah, I hold no respect for this "Uncle Bob" guy
I wish there were (more?) people who feel about software like Steve Wozniak feels about hardware. Because it is an art, a pursuit of perfection.
Didn't mention anything about shipping popular software, so I'm not sure where you're getting that metric from, but it's completely irrelevant to what OP was describing, and uncle bob fits OP's description perfectly. His talks show how passionate he is about code as a craft, and how he wants to strive for perfection. The popularity of his code doesn't take away from that (not to mention that Jobs played a significant role on Woz's end for that, so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison either). The fact that Martin has good rationales to support his ideas is just an added bonus in that regard. I get the impression that he's disliked more just because people have a fear of falling into the 'java culture' than because of his actual arguments.
Also, Linus is nothing like Woz other than their shipping of popular products. Nothing against the guy, I'm sure we're all grateful for his work, but he doesn't seem to display the same kind of childlike wonderment of his craft like woz does.
The headline is a bit of click bait in that sense, sadly!