patrick.net

Patrick says

The best tech companies tend to be like that too, unless they turn woke. If they turn woke, then it's how many "victim points" you get that determines whether you get hired. And then they fall out of the ranks of the best tech companies.

So tech companies are becoming like the federal government as far as Woke and diversity quota hiring (formerly known as affirmative action). I wonder if that is why it seems like the last 7 years that there really hasn't been anything extraordinary coming out of tech companies and productivity has lagged.

richwicks says

It's happening all over Silicon Valley right now.

"HIgh Tech" ain't what it used to be.

I really miss Steve Jobs. He lived somewhat before the "woke" era, but even still, he never put up with any of this pathetic victim mentality and virtue signaling. The two stints with Jobs were the best times Apple ever had.

I love it. Musk indeed knows how to fight these woke babies.

Not only did he turn their strategy right back on them by calling out that their tactics are based on bullying others into compliance via intimidation, but he also straight up stood up to the woke mob, which is the most important step here.

The woke became powerful because some of their elites won a few bully sessions early on, making people fear them. Then all the regular coward wokes jumped in as well, as they saw that they too could bully people and get away with it. So it was this flurry of woke rage mob bullying and attacks. They look like this:



I bet those spacex employees' jaws dropped when their punks asses got fired instead of the woker fantasy they anticipated where they bullied the fascistic elon musk into submission while prancing around spacex campus with protest signs, with other comrade employees joining their justice movement left and right while they chant "hey hey. ho ho. elon musk has got to go", ultimately bringing equity to spacex, and subsequently being showered in accolades from the woke npc establishment, maybe even receiving a "good job comrade". But they got some cold water to the fayce instead.

Elon has made an important move, and its congruent with some other tech ceos who recently gave the wokers the middle finger. The NPCs are panicking right now at the thought of losing their grip on power. Now is the time push back against them.

SunnyvaleCA says

richwicks says

It's happening all over Silicon Valley right now.

"HIgh Tech" ain't what it used to be.

I really miss Steve Jobs. He lived somewhat before the "woke" era, but even still, he never put up with any of this pathetic victim mentality and virtue signaling. The two stints with Jobs were the best times Apple ever had.

My primary complaint with Steve Jobs is that he was only a great marketer. That's all he was. He would take a standard device, call it "revolutionary", and people would believe it. Think the iPod was the first portable MP3 player? That was the MPMan from 1998. The first entirely touchscreen phone was from 1992 - the IBM Simon Personal Communicator. Think they made the first GUI interface for a computer? That was the Xerox Alto. X11 was created in 1984. The first MAC came out in 1984 - STILL Apple had the fucking OUTRAGEOUS BALLS to sue Microsoft over infringement when they made Windows 3.1 in 1992.

I regard Jobs as another PT Barnum. I never liked him. He would regularly steal work that was made by other people. He was a charlatan.

I don't know, after 30 years in "hi tech" I'm thinking there's too many companies trying to create mentally ill customers rather than products to improve people's lives. There's so much inversion by which I mean, I see so many ideas that make life WORSE rather than better. Getting somebody to spent $1,000 on a PHONE - that's creating a mentally ill customer base.

richwicks says

I regard Jobs as another PT Barnum. I never liked him. He would regularly steal work that was made by other people. He was a charlatan.

Literally steal.

richwicks says

My primary complaint with Steve Jobs is that he was only a great marketer. That's all he was. He would take a standard device, call it "revolutionary", and people would believe it. Think the iPod was the first portable MP3 player? That was the MPMan from 1998. The first entirely touchscreen phone was from 1992 - the IBM Simon Personal Communicator. Think they made the first GUI interface for a computer? That was the Xerox Alto.

Great marketer and ability to figure out synergistic technologies and long enough horizon to get all the pieces to come together.

The iPod had the click wheel, which was novel and effective. It also had a 10GB hard drive whereas the majority of players were flash memory and could only store a handful of songs simultaneously; with the iPod you can put all your songs in your pocket at 160 kb/s quality. The iPod also had iTunes, which allowed ripping existing CDs, managing songs into playlists, etc., before syncing to the iPod; it's much easier to set everything up on a desktop computer with mouse, keyboard, and large display. That is a complete music solution.

iTunes Music Store is another thing that was 3rd or 4th to market. ...and the only one (up until then) to not be closed down in a few months of abject failure. If memory serves, there was one (Sony store?) that shipped for Windows (20x market share), had all of Sony's content, integrated with Sony's player, etc. It shut down after a few months and having sold less than 1 MM songs. We were wagering on how quickly Apple's store would take to sell 1 MM songs just to Mac users (no Windows version of iTunes yet). I think the answer was something like 3 days. Boom! For sure, Jobs invented something there: A music store people actually wanted to use.

The iPhone, while not the first smartphone, was indeed revolutionary in a number of ways. The Blackberry was huge at the time, but didn't do email directly (went through a service) and didn't do web surfing of the real internet and didn't have a large enough screen to view the real internet anyway. iPhone's multi-touch screen (capacitance instead of resistance: light touch, accurate, no calibration, multi touch), full-on Unix OS with sufficient RAM and CPU, and concentration on a few keen features sent the competition scrambling. The big features where the iPhone was well above the competition were: internet browsing, music and playing with iTunes Music (and video) Store, maps, photos. This picture pretty much says it all:

SunnyvaleCA says

The iPod had the click wheel, which was novel and effective. It also had a 10GB hard drive whereas the majority of players were flash memory and could only store a handful of songs simultaneously;

Do you have any idea how much 10GB is? That's enough to store over 1000 hours of music on it. If you listened to music 8 hours a day for 4 months, it would repeat at the start of the 5th month.

It's fine to create this stuff, but there's no practical application for it. I have a 32 GB SD card on my "junk" phone (old phone, 3G, it will no longer connect to the network). I use this to listen to podcasts and so on which I download to the device. I have been using this since it was my good phone, 5 years ago. I have never bothered to delete anything I put on it. It's interesting to go back 4 years to see what I was listening to then.

Part of the reason I have a good list of people that are worthwhile listening to is that I can tell who is full of shit, because I can hear what they were saying 5 years ago. The reason I am so aware of propaganda, is that I've heard so much of it, but there's a group of people who aren't full of shit. They make mistakes, but they don't lie or make outrageously wrong predictions.

SunnyvaleCA says

iTunes Music Store is another thing that was 3rd or 4th to market. ...and the only one (up until then) to not be closed down in a few months of abject failure. If memory serves, there was one (Sony store?) that shipped for Windows (20x market share), had all of Sony's content, integrated with Sony's player, etc. It shut down after a few months and having sold less than 1 MM songs. We were wagering on how quickly Apple's store would take to sell 1 MM songs just to Mac users (no Windows version of iTunes yet). I think the answer was something like 3 days. Boom! For sure, Jobs invented something there: A music store people actually wanted to use.

I disagree. The reason that iTunes is successful, is you couldn't play an MP3 on the system without going through some major pain. I just FTP the file to my phone. I can download it from a browser. People who use Apple don't know how to use a computer, and Apple doesn't interoperate with anything.

Apple calls it an "ecosystem" - it's not an ecosystem, it's a prison. Give me an Apple device and you will regret it after 5 minutes when I ask "well, how do you this?" - the answer is you can't. Apple has loyalists, that no matter how much Apple FUCKS them, they will continue to buy the devices.

ad says

So tech companies are becoming like the federal government as far as Woke and diversity quota hiring (formerly known as affirmative action). I wonder if that is why it seems like the last 7 years that there really hasn't been anything extraordinary coming out of tech companies and productivity has lagged.

It seems that way to me. No one can really be creative or productive when there is wokeness in their workplace. It stomps everything good out of workers.

Wokeness is just another way to subvert and dilute the quality of the society. You can bet your bottom dollar that in mission critical, hi level areas, there is NO WOKEISM, just whoever can do the job the best.
Just look at the group photos from JPL and tell me how much wokeness there is there. Just a bunch of international nerds of the predictable ethnicities, with anything woke being strictly in the auxiliary support staff.

The guv forces the educational institutions to crank out the SJW printing press cadres and I can tell you that some are actually dangerous in the technical and knowledge heavy professions.

That's why they wind up so often in government/civil service/schools etc. because there is no place else they can go that want the headache. They also become these braying and frankly stupid and destructive politicians. But as we can see with the purposeful dismantling of our society, that is exactly the goal.

richwicks says

Do you have any idea how much 10GB is? That's enough to store over 1000 hours of music on it. If you listened to music 8 hours a day for 4 months, it would repeat at the start of the 5th month. ... It's fine to create this stuff, but there's no practical application for it.

Actually, I know exactly how much 10GB is. And it appears you confused hours with songs. 10GB is the term used by marketing people and refers to 10 x 10^9 bytes. (Not to be confused with 10 x 1024^3 bytes.) As mentioned above, 160 kb/s is a popular bitrate. So that equates to 138 hours of music. With average song being 4 minutes, that's "2000 songs in your pocket." There was also a 5GB version.

Anyway, you miss the point of having all of that storage because that's not the way you (and I) work. The average person (before or after the Reality Distortion Field™) is convinced that just putting all of their music onto the device and then choosing later what to listen to is a better experience than pre-choosing a few dozen songs and being stuck with them until they sync again.

richwicks says

The reason that iTunes is successful, is you couldn't play an MP3 on the system without going through some major pain.

First you were saying that the iPod missed first-mover advantage by a mile — wasn't innovative. Then you assert it having excessive storage (presumably at great expense). But now you are trying to say the only reason people were drawn to iTunes was because they wanted to use the iPod? Why wouldn't these consumers just balk at the $399 up-front cost ($499 for the 10GB) and go with an inexpensive flash-based player. I'd posit that the iPod + iTunes combination was actually a leap forward for consumers.

By the way, there is/was a "Linux on iPod" hacker community that managed to spend a lot of time and effort getting Ogg Vorbis files to play "natively" on the iPod. Apple did nothing to thwart this group, as far as I know. The whole thing was silly, though, as dragging your Ogg Vorbis files to iTunes would incorporate them to your music library; then, when syncing to a "normal" iPod, iTunes would synch a file transcribed to MP3 or AAC (user preference on format and bitrate).

Note that even with the first iPod, which had IEEE 1394 connection (FireWire™), Windows users were reaching out for it. Apple actually published specs for moving songs to the iPod so that Windows users (particularly Sony computers with their built-in 1394 ports) could use the iPod. This early interest for the iPod is what pushed Jobs over the line to switch to USB and get the ball rolling on iTunes for Windows. In fact, those protocols stuck around for a while after the iTunes for Windows release, but somehow everyone wanted to use iTunes anyway.

Another thing that people sometimes forget is that iTunes really was a great product in the early days. Starting with the iTunes Music Store, it's original goals became more and more complex and this user experience suffered. Since iTunes ran on Windows as well as Mac, it was the communication system to iPods, iPods, iPhones, and Apple TVs, further complicating things.

There is no room or place for progressives, Liberals, Socialists, Marxists or democrats in a productive profit producing company.
Period their whole platform is based on destroying capitalism and replacing it with Nationalized seized production and running it into the ground with nepotism and DEI woke policies. Hire accordingly.

DemocratsAreTotallyFucked says

Why would he even want to launch from CA? Makes no sense financially. It will cost him double or triple just to hold the land. That's why he went to TX and FL. He'd get the same federal funding anywhere.

My understanding is you want to be further south for launches. I could be way wrong. Not sure CA fits the criteria for space launches.

Fact is when your camping chair causes cancer according to CA, I doubt space launches are on the table. Probably ever.

And to add to what I said above.

In all of my professional career as a computer programmer. Democrats are the most impossible people to collaborate with.
They want shortcuts, premade solutions, and cookie cutter solutions for everything. And they will fight for it until the bitter end, because it's the only input they can offer. They defend their suggested easy way, because they have nothing else to offer, but they want to take credit for everyone's work someway. They are inferior to critical pragmatic thinkers, and spend the totality of their day in the work place, prohibiting them from producing stellar solutions to the toughest problems. Every attempt to collaborate with them, ends in an argument, and them trying to use corporate politics to reject the superior minds they cannot best in intellectual and productive thought.
They know this, they can't do anything about it, so they make their whole purpose on creating process to hold their betters back, and to make themselves look productive with the mounds of production killing paper work.

Again I warn you... Hire accordingly.

Tenpoundbass says

There is no room or place for progressives, Liberals, Socialists, Marxists or democrats in a productive profit producing company.
Period their whole platform is based on destroying capitalism and replacing it with Nationalized seized production and running it into the ground with nepotism and DEI woke policies. Hire accordingly.

Yep

Starlink Satellites need some high inclination launches which are facilitated better at Vandenberg.

rocketjoe79 says

Starlink Satellites need some high inclination launches which are facilitated better at Vandenberg.

Isn't Vandenburg federal property? Thus, California has no say in who can launch?

It has to fly over the California coast. Musk is posting that a First Amendment lawsuit will be filed.

EDS is now a thing too. All the singularity Leftoids hate the Rocket Guy now.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/strategic-ignoring-monday-october

The New York Times ran a truly miraculous story yesterday headlined, “SpaceX Advances Starship Program With a Launch and a Catch.” With everything happening these days, it would be easy to miss the record-shattering significance of yesterday’s SpaceX landing. A 20-story tall, 300-ton booster rocket lifted its cargo, then landed autonomously by precisely descending into the tender mechanical arms of a gigantic robotic crane custom-built for the purpose. It was literally the pinnacle achievement of human engineering.




CLIP 1: Official SpaceX video of Starship “chopstix” landing (0:22).
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1845467052443828579

CLIP 2: Enthusiastic bystander reaction to astounding Starship landing (1:11).
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1845446512584626586

Musk explained that the engineering purpose of the landing is so that Starship can keep working without long delays through “launch and return.” The goal is for the ship to be ready to rapidly re-launch just one hour after landing, so that Starship will be more of an everyday workhorse than a delicate one-trick pony like NASA’s Space Shuttle.

NASA, which could not build anything close to this even with its massively bigger budget and its access to decades of the full resources of the U.S. government, broke tradition and did not congratulate SpaceX on its successful landing. Sore losers.

SpaceX’s mechanical crane system just plucked one of the heaviest rockets in service right out of the air. And the rocket navigated itself into the perfect position to be caught. It’s nearly impossible to imagine the incalculable numbers of component parts that had to perfectly come together for the midair capture to work.

It truly is an incredible time to be alive.

Next:
1. Starship Reentry and Chopstick Catch. This should be easier, as Starship is significantly lighter. Reentry is a work in progress, but it's been done before.
2. On-Orbit Refueling. Musk is building many Starships in the 1-million-square-foot Starbase Factory. (That's more than three football fields on each side.) These early Starships are for iterative development, but later several Starships (10??) will be needed to refuel a single Starship for the flights to Mars.
3. Point-to-point Earth Landings. The Military will fund these first, because who doesn't want to drop 200 tons of Warfighting materiel behind enemy lines?
4. Back to Mars: It's already proven we can make oxygen on Mars: https://www.nasa.gov/tdm/mars-oxygen-in-situ-resource-utilization-experiment-moxie/ This will have to be scaled up considerably, but Starship will be able to drop such a generator on the Red Planet. To return, methane (CH4) is needed. The hydrogen will have to come from Mars water, so water will have to be found in quantity.
5. Autonomous Robots will make building the infrastructure of Mars much easier and faster. Tunnel boring machines will make radiation proof housing and output bricks for further building.
6. Energy: Some type of nuclear energy will be needed at first. https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/generating-electricity-on-mars/ Solar power is a later option.

Do you see where Musk is going? He's proving his technologies on earth, so he can later deploy them on Mars. He's so far ahead of everyone else, they're having trouble understanding his vision, much less trying to keep up. The Chinese are closest, working on rocket reusability, while NASA and Europe fund failed programs like Artemis and Ariane.