A brief obituary was posted today: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...
290 karma · joined July 11, 2014
I never said that I thought otherwise, nor did I reference Cole in my linked article, and the comment you replied to didn't mention Cole either.
Mark Stephens does not appear anywhere in this list, nor have any other early employees confirmed that he worked there.
Yes, this might have just been a small slip-up on Cringely's part, but the trouble is that he continued to make claims about being employed by Apple that were clearly fabricated. For example, Cringely claimed to have invented the Lisa's trash can icon in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06M64l7pPIk&t=373s but if you read about the same story from other Apple employees, they don't mention him at all: https://folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html
These "tall tales" start to add up, and it becomes very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Cringely was a great writer, a great documentarian, and really wonderful at finding the human stories behind the giants of the personal computer industry. Unfortunately, he also often made up stories about himself that were later found to be untrue. He didn't need to do this, because his work stood on its own. It was just a flaw in his personality.
In any case, this is sad news. Rest in peace, Mark Stephens.
One of my friends sold ten (!!) novels in the 1990s to a small publisher, but they sold in low volume and never earned out their advance. When her publisher dropped her, she wanted to republish them herself. The cost to buy back the rights exceeded all the money she had ever earned from the publisher for the entire series.
I guess what I'm saying is this: anecdotes are not data. Some will find success with the big publishers; many will not. Some will find success self-publishing; many will not. And some will find success with small publishers, but again... this is rare.
Success in writing is just really really hard. No matter what route you choose, luck will play a significant factor. The quality of your writing will also play a big role. Writing really well, exceptionally well, is probably the hardest thing of all.
I wrote in more detail about it here [1], but the basic gist is:
1. A real "Metaverse" that isn't just another video game would require every tech company to agree on a single standard for a MMO world, and
2. There are zero financial reasons why any other company would agree to a) wait for a standard to be agreed upon and b) cede the majority of their profits to the owner of this singular Metaverse.
Therefore, a real Metaverse can never happen. Which makes it even sillier that Mark Zuckerberg continues to go all-in on this vision.
But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional.
A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.
If you liked this article and would like to read more, I'll take this opportunity to plug my History of the Amiga series on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/
The diagrams are simplified because they leave out things like connections to ground, attached resistors that mitigate the total current, etc. But I wanted to convey, as simply as possible, how transistors worked and how gates could be made very simply out of a small number of transistors.
The actual CMOS chips in use by ARM (and still in use today) complicate things more, because you have different types of silicon (NMOS and PMOS) on the same substrate, so the transistors work slightly differently and you can simplify making things like NAND gates, which themselves can be combined to make all other types of gates. For this article, I didn't want to get that deep into the woods, though. :)
I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").
There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.
I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.
I still have a day job (although I did write full-time for Ars for a couple of years) so this is a luxury I can afford. But I’m still happy to be able to do it.
I would also posit that the only way to be successful as a writer is to write about things you love. If you try to chase popular topics or genres without loving them, this cynicism will show in your writing and it won’t be much fun to read.
In 2009 I took basically the same path that Howey is proposing here. I started self-publishing on Amazon in 2011 and I've written five novels so far, and am working on a sixth.
Obviously I did not experience anywhere near the success that Howey did. This may be due to luck, but I've read Wool and it's also a much better novel than anything I've written (so far!) So it's not always about luck. An amazingly good novel can sometimes generate its own luck.
But my lack of success hasn't dissuaded me and I don't consider the journey I took in becoming a writer to have been wasted. On the contrary, it's been amazing every step of the way. I've learned so many things, met so many wonderful people, and even sold a couple of thousand books along the way, which isn't much, but it's not nothing either.
And at the same time, I've been writing non-fiction articles for Ars Technica, which has been considerably more successful for me. (An example would be my article on the history of OS/2, or my history of the Amiga computer). These articles have been read and enjoyed by orders of magnitude more people, which is very satisfying.
I guess what I'm saying is that there are more possibilities for being a writer than being a famous fiction author picked up by a major publishing house. There are all kinds of paths for writers to take.
Success is never guaranteed, and if you want to be a writer you have to be realistic about this. But if you really want to be a writer, nothing can stop you. In fact, that's kind of the only prerequisite for becoming one. If you feel compelled to write, regardless of any success or rewards, you will keep doing it. At the very least, you will become a better writer. And if you become a better writer, it's almost inevitable that, at some point, somebody will notice.
Don't expect to be famous. Expect to write.
This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a halfway decent copy editor for about $500-$1000. Tools like Scrivener can handle all the ebook and paper edition formatting for you, with built-in templates, so that's another $100 or so for the tooling, but you can reuse this for future books. Publishing to Amazon and other places (like Smashwords) is free, and this includes print-on-demand paperback copies as well.
What it does take is a lot of time for learning how to use all the tools and to navigate the many options available for covers, editing, etc.
As far as marketing expenses go, there are no good ways to spend money to sell books. I think you're correct that nobody knows how to do it. If you don't win the lottery and get featured on a celebrity's book club, how is anyone supposed to ever know that you even released a book?
Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeaRlhz96mI Part 2 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwGTHZzzF4
Bungie's aversion to being owned stems from their Microsoft days, when they yearned to be free from having to make Halo sequels.
However, the reality is that game development is expensive. Destiny doesn't have a monthly subscription fee, so the income for the studio drops dramatically between paid content expansions. It's tough to keep that going without outside support, given the cost of creating said content.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a division of Activision, but these opinions are solely my own)
Newton had lots of ways to share information between applications running on NewtonOS, but designed to fit the much smaller memory footprint of the device.
I believe the only things the Newton and OpenDoc had in common were that Steve Jobs killed both of them as cost-cutting measures.
From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of payment of advertising revenue to website users and contributors (which seems like an impossible business model)
The main issue, I think, is that "decentralization" means a different thing to every person, therefore "web3" can mean a different thing to everyone. This makes it hard to define it or to argue for it or against it.
I read a blog post linked on HN recently on "the architecture of a web3 application" [1] and it was so long and complicated that I honestly thought it was satire. I don't think the methods described in the post were at all practical.
Ultimately, web3 might simply be a rebranding of blockchain and crypto technologies in order to make them seem more democratic and transformational than perhaps they are.
[1] https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...