But people that know what it takes to build great products almost universally respect his world-class design and leadership, and even his deep technical knowledge.

Standards are important. So is perspective.

As a rule, Apple gave stock to employees prior to the IPO, many of whom got rich. But some employees weren't eligible according to the criteria Steve (really, the board) came up with, and so they did not receive stock. Their criteria were typical for the time.

Woz and a few others felt bad about this and shared some of their stock.

Whether those ineligible people "deserved" stock is a matter of judgement...

Was it an ethical mistake? Sure. He should have at least disclosed that he was receiving the bonus money, even if he didn't want to share it.

But claiming it was a "major ethical mistake" seems fairly out of touch with reality.

And of course, taken in the context of all of the good things they did together, it was completely insignificant and Woz has said as much.

The people that emulate Steve Jobs poorly are usually real assholes with a long list of ethical mistakes.

He could not have done it without Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs could not have done it without him, either.

Steve Jobs was a major believer in the idea of the 100x engineer. During his entire career, he always tried to hire them.

And why did Steve Jobs believe in hiring 100x engineers? Because he knew and worked with Steve Wozniak.

I'd rather believe the test results.

Is there a neutral third-party that has validated S3's durability/integrity/consistency? Something as rigorous as Jepsen?

It'd be really neat if someone compared all the S3 compatible cloud storage systems in a really rigorous way. I'm sure we'd discover that there are huge scary problems. Or maybe someone already has?

(This is funny, but I'd be interested to read a source on how true this is. Presumably there were priests that could take care of such things. He took care of lots of other Roman business while he was in Gaul.)

It would be equally unsurprising if Aurora is 1000x faster for other classes of problems.

Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.

This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.

NVIDIA's advantage is that they're a proprietary company and they're the ones actually making the chips they're putting in a box.

That's very far away from a random little open source startup slapping third-party GPUs in a generic box.

It's just too easy for anyone to throw together a Supermicro machine with 6x GPUs in it, which is what it sounds like they'll be doing.

My guess is they'll end up creating some premium extensions to the software and selling that to make money. Or maybe they can sell an enterprise cluster manager type thing that comes with support. He's good at software so it makes sense for him to sell software.

And maybe the box will sell well initially just as a "dev kit" type thing.

> ... strictly monotonic growth ...

Their growth is hardly "strictly monotonic" since their growth can fluctuate up and down, as can their subscriber count.

Sure it is, if the opponent can't deploy effective counter-measures.

It doesn't matter if a protected drone is possible what matters is whether or not the opponent is capable of actually deploying protected drones. In a cat-and-mouse game all that is important is having an advantage for some period of time. It's not necessary to have the advantage persist indefinitely.

See: Russia's military being battered by very old technology every day in Ukraine, where in many cases counter-measures are well known but unavailable.

The people fighting in Spain, Greece, and Africa were largely Italian Romans or non-Italian Romans or allies. Caesar and Pompey were Italian Romans. It was in every way a civil war of Romans. What difference does it make that, for logistical reasons, the battles took place outside of Italy proper?

> It was a handful of battles and sieges. It's nothing compared to other campaigns.

Greece was the hardest campaign of Caesar's life. For the first time, he was fighting a complete military peer that had more resources, more soldiers, and more money. Pompey even had important Gallic leaders and Caesar's #2 (Labienus) leading a much larger cavalry force. Pompey's army matched and beat Caesar's in siege warfare.

Caesar almost lost multiple times and was beaten and in retreat when he turned around to fight and win at Pharsalus. Had Pompey avoided a full scale engagement, it's very likely that he would have won.

The Republic had been in trouble for a long time. IMHO it officially died as soon as the First Triumvirate was created. Rome was in complete control of just three people for many years.

Pompey was the leading figure of the First Triumvirate, so arguably he deserves more blame than even Caesar for the downfall. The fact that more senators chose him over Caesar says very little about how truly republican any of them were by that point.

The war between Caesar's party and Pompey's party was really just a battle for who would be Dictator for life. Neither of them had any intention of handing real power back, because they could honestly tell themselves it was unlikely to fall into any better hands.

Had he won, Pompey would have continued to (through military threats) control the Senate the same way he had for many years prior to the civil war.

Compared to what? It was nearly two years just for the portion with Pompey.

> .. and never actually involved the populus of Italy, let alone Rome.

Of course it did involve a great many people from Italy and a great many Romans.

> Pompey's Macedonian strategy ultimately failed as soon as it was contested.

It failed after very nearly succeeding multiple times and after months of skirmishes, sieges, storming of cities, back-and-forth trench warfare on huge scale, and marches with counter-marches. It was a slugfest between the largest and most modern forces of the day.

This is pretty much the definition of a great tech product: it's ahead of anything else by N years. What makes a great technology company is that they manage to consistently maintain that lead with product after product.

We'll see if Tesla can maintain its lead. It's not looking good and it probably depends mostly on whether or not Elon Musk can regain his grip on reality.