Cringely

For an account of early Silicon Valley, "Accidental Empires" by Robert Cringely. It's free on his website (https://www.cringely.com), but you need to search for it.

Gates is flat-out lying, because Microsoft is notorious for managing its earnings, just in the opposite direction of GE: https://www.cringely.com/2009/01/22/bob-the-impaler/ > The real problem at Microsoft is one that every other public company would love to have – they make too much profit. So unlike every other public company, Microsoft traditionally manages its earnings not by cutting expenses but by increasing spending. It’s a legacy technique invented years ago by legendary CFO Frank Gaudette and embraced by Bill Gates and Jon Shirley because it accomplished the task of meeting Wall Street expectations, allowed the company to hide spectacular true profit margins, while still generally keeping anti-trust officials off Microsoft’s back.

Link to 2014 article: https://www.cringely.com/2014/09/30/one-way-maybe-way-yahoo-can-succee… and follow up 2 yrs later: https://www.cringely.com/2016/07/26/15343/

Worth noting there is also 'The Decline and Fall of IBM' by Cringely (2014) : https://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/

I still read some of the classics (surprised nobody mentioned them so far) and also a few newer ones: https://kottke.org/ https://daringfireball.net https://seths.blog https://www.freedomain.com/blog/ https://www.cringely.com https://www.zeldman.com https://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com http://quirksmode.org/blog/ http://hypercritical.co

https://www.cringely.com over 3 decades of IT industry commentary and insight. he doesn't post as frequently anymore but I still enjoy it.

Is anybody doing "Parrot Secrets" type eBooks? And if you have and are reading this, what have been your best selling books? Referencing this sort of thing: http://www.parrotsecrets.com/ An explainer: https://www.cringely.com/2009/03/14/parrot-secrets/

You can very likely read it for free in a day or three at https://www.cringely.com/

Short answer: no one knows. He, or someone using that identity, has been hanging around technology media since the dim mists of time. Sometimes insightful, but no good information on whether that is pure chance or not exists. Long answer: https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/

So, I guess Cringely continues to be right http://www.cringely.com I notice he has an article on IBM on the top and his books is pretty good. I'm not sure I agree about Intel systems, but he at least reasons it out.

>reports of mass layoffs Whatever happened to the Cringley reported mass layoffs? http://www.cringely.com/2015/01/22/ibms-reorg-hell-launches-next-week/ IBM’s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone. I’m told this has been in the planning for months and I first heard about it back in November.

IBM employee here. I have no idea if the cuts are true or not but keep in mind that Cringely has made dooms day predictions in the past that were widely innacurate, see for example: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070504_002027.html or http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/18/not-your-fathers-ibm/ I am part of Watson and we have been hiring a lot (as well as providing great internships).

Cringely has written some interesting pieces about it. He seems to essentially think that the current management is just trying to suck the last bits of value from the organization. http://www.cringely.com/?s=ibm

This amuses me to no end: http://www.cringely.com/2012/01/02/prediction-1-a-new-ceo-for-apple/ That guy (who is pretty consistently wrong on ~everything) predicted Apple, Facebook, etc. would lose their CEOs in 2012; instead, Tim Cook has done an amazing job. Steve Jobs even called Cringely to tell him he was wrong on Tim Cook.

According to Robert Cringley iOS 7 includes Bluetooth mouse support: http://www.cringely.com/2013/09/19/the-secret-of-ios-7/. However, I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere. I would like to know where he heard this and hear more about how it works. Any links on this would be great!

Cringely has great articles on this subject: http://www.cringely.com/tag/bufferbloat/

To anyone interested, this link is referenced within the article and I think it offers a great deconstruction of what is wrong with the H1-B visa program: http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-about-h-1b…

It's funny to see this perspective; lately Robert X. Cringely devoted several posts on his site[1] to just how messed-up IBM seems to be. [1] http://www.cringely.com/

If you want to read the rest, Bob's already published all 6 articles in this series on his blog: http://www.cringely.com/

I'm afraid it is much too late. Cringely had an excellent discussion of why and how it is too late: http://www.cringely.com/tag/bill-hewlett/

How Google can beat Groupon: take 4 of the best developers, rent an apartment in Palo Alto, wait 3 months, take the Groupon clone they create and give everyone in the US $10 to signup: http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/bring-me-the-head-of-eric-schmidt/

Robert X. Cringely is doing a startup tour that's short on details but seems interesting. Might be worth a plug. http://www.cringely.com/2010/07/slouching-toward-sunnyvale/

I was going to suggest Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but several others already did so. While this would take you some startup time and money, you could go the ebook sales route as suggested here: http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/parrot-secrets/ I wish you the best of luck with trying to find a way to make a decent living.

He predicted the HP/Compaq merger (and, further, predicated that it wouldn't help). He also predicted Sun's march to irrelevance. And that the iPhone would crush Windows Mobile. But yeah, most everything else has been wrong. This episode was particularly amusing: http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/the-neokast-mystery/ That was around the time I unsubscribed from his RSS feed.

On July 2013, Robert X. Cringely wrote an article on a Def Con crackers' conference that took place in Las Vegas. https://www.cringely.com/2013/07/30/the-origins-of-defcon/ The events in that article took place in 1993. Read the whole article, but here's the best bit. Hotel security had mistakenly kicked out attendees at that conference, so they decided to get revenge by hacking their system. The is from Cringely: *** The meeting reconvened at 9 or 10 with the topic suddenly changed to Revenge on the Sands. Gail Thackeray, then a U. S. Attorney from Arizona who at that moment had approximately half the room under indictment, rose to offer her services representing the kids against the hotel management. Thackeray had been invited to speak by the very people she wanted to put in jail. I told you this was surreal. Adult assistance might be nice, but a potentially more satisfying alternative was offered by a group that had breached the hotel phone system, gained access to the computer network, obtained root level access to the VAX minicomputer that ran the Sands casino, and were ready at any moment to shut the sucker down. It came to a vote: accept Thackeray’s offer of assistance or shut down the casino. There was no real contest: they voted to nuke the casino. Not one to be a party pooper, I voted with the majority. Gail Thackeray, feeling her lawyer’s oats, was perfectly willing to be a party pooper, though. She explained with remarkable patience that opting en…

Hmmm, might be "do the wrong things well", but probably... lumpenprogrammers. The truth is that there are big differences in techie types. The hardware people are radically different from the software people, and on the software side alone, there are at least three subspecies of programmers, two of which we are interested in here. Forget about the first subspecies, the lumpenprogrammers, who typically spend their careers maintaining mainframe computer code at insurance companies. Lumpenprogrammers don’t even like to program but have discovered that by the simple technique of leaving out the comments—clues, labels, and directions written in English—they are supposed to sprinkle in among their lines of computer code, their programs are rendered undecipherable by others, guaranteeing them a lifetime of dull employment. The two programmer subspecies that are worthy of note are the hippies and the nerds. Nearly all great programmers are one type or the other. Hippy programmers have long hair and deliberately, even pridefully, ignore the seasons in their choice of clothing. They wear shorts and sandals in the winter and T-shirts all the time. Nerds are neat little anal-retentive men with penchants for short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors. Nerds carry calculators; hippies borrow calculators. Nerds use decongestant nasal sprays; hippies snort cocaine. Nerds typically know forty-six different ways to make love but don’t know any women. Hippies know women. In the actual…

I use Feedly / NetNewsFire for feeds, rather than newsletters, but in reality they're the same, just different consumption methods. Just interesting to see NNW was in HN recently. These are the most interesting things I keep in Feedly. acoup.blog - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - frequently linked to HN already. He's a great history writer, covering everything from Roman logistics, to analysis of current games and movies - eg. LotR battles. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC364qOwWXAzgRruHhhFMhVg - Croker vs Rover. A New Zealand guy restoring a 70s Land Rover. It's a Youtube channel, but both hilarious and informative. Infrequent too, so easy to cruise through at leisure. Atlas Obscura - https://www.atlasobscura.com/ - interesting history/geography mix. https://www.numberphile.com/ - Mathy easy-access but complex topics - mostly videos on Youtube. Very accessible, but interesting for a mostly non-math person to see real math at work. https://waynehale.wordpress.com/ - Wayne Hale - NASA flight controller. Interesting views and analysis of current space / incident management topics vs how it was done for the shuttle, along with some other commentary. Infrequent and interesting. https://computer.rip/ - Deeply geekly telco / 50s-70s computer history with some cold-war fun. Pretty in-depth, and a fun read. https://www.cringely.com/ - Cringley - weekly-monthly tech posts on bigger tech strategy with an Appleish focus. He's been around SV for years. Was early at…

Cringely https://www.cringely.com/

> Top tier software companies might claim the H-1B program allows them to hire the best and brightest from around the world, but that's not how everyone else uses the program. I am fine with immigration as it is a feature of a good system which people want to join, the US should attract the best and people looking to contribute, but it is obvious the H-1B system is rigged and bad for pretty much all but large companies in many cases. I have known many H-1Bs and I feel bad for their situation when they want to leave a company or feel locked in. The moment H-1Bs can work at other companies other than the sponsor, all that becomes more market priced via competition and will improve pay and discourage the H-1B abusers just looking for low wage ownership of workers. If companies REALLY wanted to hire the best and brightest from around the US and the world, remote development would be bigger and more widespread to the US and around the world. But as with most things, companies use it to own people rather than compete fairly or pay market rates. Remote development can be a cost savings and make companies more robust to employee/worker life changes over time rather than need employees to live near the company. Companies that abuse H-1Bs would rather have employees on site that they can lock into lower wages and control more. There is also the O visa that would really mean they want to hire the best from around the world [1][2]. But ultimately companies that abuse H-1B just want…