Just because an individual is browsing HN does not mean the individual is procrastinating. Please consult a dictionary for an accurate definition of the term.
That should read "The Africa says, 'What electricity?'"
We certainly know what electricity is; we've heard of it and understand its usefulness; we even use it almost daily. However, as you aptly noted, its availability is sufficiently irregular and inconsistent that we expect it to be off as much as it is on.
"I'm extremely uneasy reading things that make any individual such an icon...Please can we let this personality cult dissipate..."
Personality cults are much more important than you realise. The post-modernist approach seems to be to downplay the significance of individual visionaries in favour of diffuse accolades attributed to the group or larger corpus. It's nonsense.
Shakespeare was an individual (not a nebulous, anonymous, amorphous collective) of unique literary gifts. Jobs is a design and technological wizard who single-handedly righted the ship. Tim Cook is a process engineering and business operations mastermind of the like that has never been seen since Carnegie. Ives' industrial design methodologies will blaze the path for decades to come.
You've fallen for it. Ives is the designer, not Jobs. Woz was the technological wizard, not Jobs. Jobs is a leader, a salesman and a marketer. Granted, he's a wizard (in the Oz sense of the word) but pull back the curtain and you'll find other incredibly talented people doing their jobs, if you'll pardon the unintentional pun.
"You've fallen for it. Ives is the designer, not Jobs. Woz was the technological wizard, not Jobs."
I don't think I've fallen for anything (in fact, I made strong mention of Ives with respect to industrial design). Being able to conceive good design and being able to guide good design are both signs of design competence; being able to conceive good technology and being able to guide its development are signs of technical proficiency. Jobs in his role as guide (or leader) is an exemplar.
I never claimed (and I don't think anyone else did) that there are no "other talented people doing their jobs".
Your rejoinder, rather than actually arguing against personality cults, is more a reminder that "a witty remark proves nothing."
> I never claimed (and I don't think anyone else did) that there are no "other talented people doing their jobs".
From your earlier comment:
> Jobs is a design and technological wizard who single-handedly righted the ship.
Thats you falling for the personality cult right there. That's also you claiming that Jobs somehow managed to fix Apple singlehandedly, which of course is wrong. Your comment about Ives trailblazing for years to come is quite amusing, given that Ive freely admits that he's heavily influenced by Dieter Ram's work (if you look at Ive's designs you'll see that he's following Ram's principles).
> Your rejoinder, rather than actually arguing against personality cults, is more a reminder that "a witty remark proves nothing."
That sentence appears to be a prime example of your quoted phrase.
Well. I am in favour of personality cults. I'm an ardent believer in personal responsibility. Personality cults encourage us to focus on our own performance and perfecting our own skills.
So If I'm "falling for the personality cult right there", I'm more than happy to and I encourage more people to.
ps. The debate on whether Apple would be what Apple is today without Jobs' Great Return is long and storied. I won't wade any further into those murky waters (As per the personality cult ethos, I'd wager that Jobs saved Apple and that without him it would have sunk).
Shakespeare was an individual (not a nebulous, anonymous,
amorphous collective)
Not that it matters concerning the point you make, but that may not be the best example, as the question of whether Shakespeare was an individual genius is a matter of some serious, although somewhat fringe, debate [1].
I am aware of the serious debate on the issue. But that's sort of the point I am trying to make: One approach seeks to recognise individual genius for what it is: the gift of a singular person; another approach seeks to discount those achievements by attributing them to a diffuse, sometimes ancillary but oft ill-defined group.
The latter approach has become prevalent in recent decades (in my opinion). Now, it is fashionable to question the legitimacy of an individual's greatness, to downplay it and instead award yellow stars to everyone who participated, no matter how tangential their contribution.
The new idea is that no one man could be so smart, so gifted or so diligent as to produce all that Shakespeare did; no one man could be so clairvoyant and visionary as to define the face of technology for a decade; no on man could have all that innate power.
> Nokia was close to launching N9? Where does that information come from?
The post is written by former Nokia exec, Tomi Ahonen. It might be reasonable to assume he had/has insider information that the public is not privy to.
> They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost.
I'm not certain that books ever competed on quality. A cursory glance at the NY Times best-seller list of the past few years seems to indicate that quality isn't a [major] factor. Unless you somehow consider Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, Twilight, and so on, to somehow be the paragon of quality literature.
You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read." They aren't the same (though they may overlap).
The Da Vinci Code keeps a frenetic pace that makes "quality" secondary, and quite difficult to achieve. (I would submit that The Bourne Supremacy is superior in both pacing and quality, however).
Harry Potter is insanely accessible and easy to read, and has a very surprising amount of internal consistency, even over 7 books (which is in stark contrast to most mainstream sci-fi/fantasy series).
As for Twilight, I don't know what makes a book appeal to that demographic, but it seems pretty different than any area I've dabbled in as a reader.
(I worry that giving opinions like these opens me up for some interesting flaming, but whatever.
> You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read."
I'm not confusing anything. The comment I responded to stated that "books have become commodities. They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost."
Assume it is true, as insinuated, that books did compete on quality, then the result of winning that competition is a given book becoming widely read (in other words "books people like to read"). I submitted that line of thinking has a false premise.
That's all I was responding to. No confusion whatsoever.
Actually, they are free. I am a graduate student in Mathematics and there is no book, on any level of mathematics that I have been unable to find for free download.
Places like www.avaxhome.ws and old.pdfchm.net are chock-full of math textbooks not to mention the torrents which can be found on isohunt.com and thepiratebay.org that consist of collections of thousands upon thousands of graduate level mainstream and esoteric mathematics texts, all high quality scans.
In total, I have many thousands of dollars worth of mathematics books, all of which I have obtained for free (and I feel justified; there's simply no cost-effective way to obtain those books on my side of the planet).
I feel it is instructive that we remember Tim O'Reilly's incisive piece titled "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0].
It makes little sense to claim that an author/musician is losing money through piracy when the likelihood is that the [majority of the] pirated copies would not have otherwise been bought.
