The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'jwz'

2011/11/30

After allegations emerged of brutal working practices at online game company Zynga (who, as well as considering the idea of work-life balance to be tantamount to disloyalty, recently have been forcing some employees to give up stock options), venture capital douchelord Michael Arrington posted a defence of long working hours and nonexistent work-life balance in the software industry as part of the Silicon Valley way, extensively quoting Jamie Zawinski's Netscape diaries to back up his point. But then, jwz turned around and tore it to pieces.

He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous. What is true is that for a VC's business model to work, it's necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.
So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on.Instead of that, I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic.
Touché.

business capitalism evil it jwz scams tech work-life balance zynga 0

2009/10/20

A while ago, Jamie Zawinski bought a Palm Pre. Today, he finally gave up on Palm's new platform and bought an iPhone:

So why would I get an iPhone? Because it's an appliance that just fucking works.
I have a list of 30-ish reports of more-or-less irritating bugs that I encountered during my first week of using the phone that I back-channeled into Palm via several of their developers, but most of those bugs were tolerable. The deal-breaker bugs are as follows:
  1. I still can't reliably sync my phone to my Mac.
  2. Peformance is a joke.
The performance thing I can believe. Given that the Palm Pre's entire functionality is written in JavaScript and based on HTML widgets, there must be a performance hit when compared to Apple's compiled Objective C applications. (In fact, even Java-based phones feel sluggish.) I managed to play with a Pre in an O2 shop after it came out in the UK; it was very slow, taking a few seconds to respond to a touch. Granted, this may have been after other people have played with it for a while, but still it's not acceptable. Perhaps Apple were right in ruling out multitasking on phones.

I was thinking of getting a Pre as my next phone, though after playing with one, I'm not tempted to buy into an 18-month contract for one. Perhaps if they were available as prepaid, I'd consider one. (The Pre concept sounds nifty, and perhaps they'll fix the execution.) Until then, I'll probably stick to my ancient Treo 650; you can sort of get the web on that.

iphone jwz mobile phones palm palm pre 2

2005/6/10

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