Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing

Customer Reviews:

History proved this guy wrong.......2004-02-12

I wish I could give this book less than one star. The author obviously hates Steve Jobs and chose to include accounts only by others that hated Steve Jobs and convince a publisher that could be the basis for a book.
But... history has proven that Randall Stross' assessment couldn't have been more wrong. He paints Jobs as incompetent and lucky and that time is proving him the failure-loser that he really is. I wonder if Stross is working on a sequel. The book was released in 1993. I found it especially interesting that he delighted in a story of Steve Jobs negotiating with a NeXT customer who tried to paint Jobs as a failure by virtue of his ownership of Pixar where the customer's husband had worked. Jobs had bought Pixar from George Lucas, headed it in a new direction and look where it is now--could there be a more successful company.
Stoss continually points out the inevitability that NeXT will crash and burn, but again history proves that Stross is probably the world's worst prophet. NeXT was purchased by Apple for around $300 million and Jobs return to run Apple has turned the company from issuing bonds to stay afloat to a thriving, innovative company with almost $5 Billion in the bank--this is failure?
The list of contrived reasons to hate Jobs and prove his failures is the entire basis for the book. It's not interesting when one concludes that it's all made up. I surmise that this guy (Stross) didn't have a grasp on anything related to the story--one can only conclude that this is pure fiction and very poor fiction at that.

Possibly one of the most annoying books I've ever read.......2002-10-30

For a book that claims to be a history, sort of, this has to be the least accurate and most biased history in, well, history. By the end of practically every page I found some point which was bugging me, from being arguable at best, to downright wrong, to obviously omitting important facts at worst.

For instance, Stross spends an entire chapter devoted to a glowing review of Sun Microsystems. This is arguably in order to have some sort of contrast with NeXT. No small part of the chapter is devoted to a description of the new low-cost SparcStation, which he describes in order to provide a counterexample to Job's overpriced machines. He re-iterates this point on several other occasions thoughout the book.

Missing fact #1: the SparcStation cost MORE than the NeXTcube. This vitally important point is not mentioned even once.

Want another example? He continually talks about how NeXT was non-standard and thus doomed, whereas Sun's standards-based machines were much better off that NeXT, or even other non-standard machines like the Apollo. It's so OBVIOUS that you have to be standards based, it's not even worth talking about! I mean duh, who would question that?!

Missing fact #2: all three were originally based on the same hardware (680x0 CPUs) and similar software (Unix versions). If anything it was Sun that went "non-standard" when they switched their CPU and OS.

The whole book is like this. I don't mean in a small way, I mean it in the largest possible way. I disagreed with almost every point he made, whether it be the "realities" of the computer market as he saw it, or practically any technical detail he attempted to describe. Stross seemed to be incapable of understanding any issue, no matter how large, small, technical or non-technical. It left me gasping.

Ignore the technical innaccuracies though, because they appear to be a side-story to the book's "real point". The "real point" seems to be that Jobs is incompetant at everything, egotistical, and mean. The book is filled with little anecdotes and Steve doing this (something stupid) or that (something mean), painting a very nasty picture of a man Stross implies has only a single quality: being in the right place at the right time.

Hey, he might be right, but I'll never know. I was so turned off by the continual negative vibe of this book that after a few chapters in I basically didn't trust a word he said. This isn't a history, or even a "cautionary tale". It's character assasination.

So Long Ross, and thanks for the millions.......2002-05-15

It could be that this author, who has written some very readable and penetrating stuff about Microsoft, ran into a problem when writing about Jobs. Jobs comes across as so negative, confused, and just plain destructive that Stross's book leaves a bad taste in your mouth. But this is still a very worthwhile book, and contains some good lessons, which Ross Perot learned were very expensive lessons:

1. Don't invest in someone just because they're cool, or at least cooler than you. Alpha-Nerd Perot sees a TV special on Steve Jobs, and exclaims how Jobs is "Mr. Excitement" or some such superlative. He promptly plunks down huge money to invest in the "Next" computer, which is portrayed as revolutionary hardware. But no one really knows up front what they're investing in. So what, it makes Ross feel like he can transform some of that hard-scrabble, uptight crew-cutness of his into hip, long hair, do-drugs California investing.

2. Watch the press releases. The big bomb that's hidden in a press release discloses that Next has dropped it's hardware business, and will now be developing innovative software. Which bombed. So Ross went in investing in one thing, and came out investing in something else.

3. Cool people scream a lot when things get uncool. The rest of the book is the typical tantrum about Jobs acting hard-to-manage.

A little dose of reality.......1998-05-04

Stross' sources are impeccable, which isn't all that surprising since he's a historian. Despite the fact that he was prevented from interviewing Steve Jobs, and presumably a number of other higher ups in the NeXT management, the book doesn't really suffer from the absence. Stross appears to have gone through each and every document related to NeXT's finances to compile a staggering testament to the various untruths NeXT, as a corporate entity, appears to have told its customers, the media and everybody else willing to listen. At the same time, it's a scathing critique of Steve Job's attitude, he can only be described as an enfant terrible. Stross goes to great lengths to illustrate his judgement of Jobs as a mean-spirited, perhaps "greatly insane", person with numerous anecdotes.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has read about Steve Jobs. We all know he's notorious for pushing people to their limits, the stories of people leaving Jobs' projects in a state of physical and mental fatigue are well known. What comes as a surprise is Jobs' capacity for deceitfullness and disloyalty and his utter disregard for the people working for and with him. Stross marvelously brings out Jobs' ego in all its filthy manifestations. The book is really an intriguing history of Steve Jobs at NeXT, complete with the gory financial details, the stories about mismanagement, Jobs' fetish for perfection in little things he latched on, the hype around NeXT and the failure. Still, the book lacks a sense of the things NeXT let its customer accomplish, from developing the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) and creating Quake, to WebObjects and cryptography (NSA and CIA).

That said, it is probably a good idea to read this book along with, or after reading Steven Levy's Insanely Great. Insanely Great is a more balanced book, Stross at times seems to detest Jobs passionately (which is certainly not surprising), Levy presents a much more considerate view of Jobs. Of course this has to be balanced ! with the fact that Levy is writing about the successful Macintosh project, and Stross is writing about the comparative failure that was NeXT.

What Stross' book could do with is a little more knowledge of NeXT's products (especially the later slabs and cubes) and some sense of the palpable advances NeXT made. There was technology in the NeXT that was not fully realized (Optical media and the DSP for instance), but this was true of the Macintosh as well (who had heard of 3.5" disks). We cannot dismiss NeXT simply on the grounds of the technology being new, untested, and expensive. As a NeXT user, it seems to me that Stross greatly underestimated the conceptual leaps made by NeXT, in designing Interface Builder and tying the software to Object Oriented Programming (OOP), using Display Postscript, the Installer application, the NetInfo server, successfully creating a multi user machine which a single Unix novice user could operate and run. I know people who have owned NeXTs for years and have never used the Unix command prompt.

Stross praises Sun for its strategy of pushing the speed envelope, and parceling out manufacturing, but SunOS and Solaris still have to attain the elegance of NeXT, and there were certainly far fewer software based advances at Sun than at NeXT. Stross has a reasonably firm grasp on the technology, there are no glaring problems with his analysis of some of the more complex pieces of NeXTStep and the NeXT computers, but at times one notices him stepping gingerly around something that is very involved, which is as it should be because the book isn't really about NeXT or technology, it's about Steve Jobs. Still, one wishes Stross would give more credit to NeXT's technology, after all NeXTStep continues to be miles ahead of all other Unix based operating systems in terms of a Desktop/Development platform. One big mistake is Stross' claim that NeXTStep is "closed", that NeXTs were not meant to work with other computers in a networked environment. This really cann! ot be substantiated.

After reading the book, one cringes at the thought of what melodramas Jobs is currently creating at Apple, and one hopes the port of NeXTStep to the PowerPC (Rhapsody) will not be bogged down with the sort of problems that NeXT had. The future for Apple/NeXT seems bright, though there's a lot of catching up to do before Apple can seriously challenge WinTel again. True, the PowerPC architecture is way ahead of Intel, and NeXTStep is far further along the development path than NT, but it's still frightening when one sees Jobs closing the doors to hardware competitors again. One hopes Jobs has learned from his mistakes and that Apple will concentrate on software development (Rhapsody can become a serious challenge to Windows 95/98 if priced appropriately). There's hope for Apple yet, NeXTStep/OpenStep is a great Operating System, it's certainly much better at internetworking than anything Microsoft has to offer (after all the Web was created on a NeXT). All the same, Jobs can still make or break Apple.

Average customer rating:
Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing / Randall E. Stross
Randall E. Stross
Manufacturer: New York : Atheneum ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000XKSHYI

Book Description

The LIBOR Market Model (LMM) is the first model of interest rates dynamics consistent with the market practice of pricing interest rate derivatives and therefore it is widely used by financial institution for valuation of interest rate derivatives.

This book provides a full practitioner's approach to the LIBOR Market Model. It adopts the specific language of a quantitative analyst to the largest possible level and is one of first books on the subject written entirely by quants. The book is divided into three parts - theory, calibration and simulation. New and important issues are covered, such as various drift approximations, various parametric and nonparametric calibrations, and the uncertain volatility approach to smile modelling; a version of the HJM model based on market observables and the duality between BGM and HJM models. Co-authored by Dariusz Gatarek, the 'G' in the BGM model who is internationally known for his work on LIBOR market models, this book offers an essential perspective on the global benchmark for short-term interest rates.

Customer Reviews:

Helpful addition to comprehension and discussion, but with frustrating errors....not for amatures.......2007-04-02

Pricing interest rate derivatives with short term interest rate models has been like a game of FANTAN for nearly a decade, until the LIBOR Market Model (LMM, aka the BGM model) came along. Before, everyone was using Vasicek and periodically someone would sweep the table of everyone's winnings. In the discrete world of increasingly complex structured trades and advancing "mark to market" mandates driven by bank regulators and BASEL II, the seat of the pants confessions of exotic interest rate traders using cobbled together non-published short term interest rate models for valuation fell under justified suspicions.

Along comes BGM (Bachert, Gatarek and Maksymiuk)....while not exactly "to the rescue" giant sighs of relief were expelled worldwide as it has been widely adopted, as the ghostly hand of Fischer Black almost endorses it from beyond.

BGM is especially beloved by those who have to price complex derivatives and exotics because fundamental inputs are a snap to observe: a set of LIBOR forward rates. (Actually, anyone should love this feature). Then the fun starts, each forward rate is modelled by a (pesky, defensible, arguable) lognormal process first made famous and advocated by Fischer Black. The LMM (BGM) model therefore is simplistically looked at as a collection of little Black models. The trouble is, how do we collect them and calibrate them?

So it isn't just that simple, and this book explains in more detail just what the BGM model is, explores uses and limitations, etc.

Use the "LOOK INSIDE" feature to see the contents, but briefly there are three parts - theory, calibration and simulation. Drift is the topic of the day, and BGM don't disappoint. The parametric and nonparametric calibrations section is impenetrable to me, but this isn't my space.

Smile modelling has gotten into a chant at a football match: "uncertain volatility approach" shouts one side, "ARCH, GARCH, FART" shouts the other. Whatever. If you really want to dig into the volatility argument I suggest Knight & Stachell's third edition of "Forecasting Volatility" but you'll need your head examined before you can keep the players straight and need a scorecard handy. A discussion and comparison of HJM (Heath-Jarrow-Morton) in comparison and contrast with BGM is covered here.

Okay, the problems: this book is written in Engrishlovakian, not English. The copy editor should be shot.

There are lots, and I mean LOTS of typos, of which about 50% are easy to figure out what was intended. The other 50% enjoy too high an uncertainty coefficient to be comprehensible. An ERRATA sheet should be inserted into copies of future shipments ASAP.

Which leads me to my gigantic Grand Canyon-size hole in my knowledge: I just skip about 60% of the equations I read in any book, expecting the narrative to support what is explicit in the equations. I have no idea if these equations are edited correctly, and I suspect they are better than the English...but on the other hand, the English is so poor it makes you suspect the whole darn thing.

Who is this book for: general quantfin readers like me will find this tough sledding, this is a printed whiteboard and marker walk through of BGM from start to finish with current state-of-the-art discussions (with unfortunately a lot of whiteboard sloppiness mapped into the "book" state space). I suspect that as a conversation among experts, this book is a nice round-up straight from the source. Experts can probably see past the errors easier than others and both find it sloppy, but still comprehensible. I would dis-recommend this book for a clueless beginner, as the text assumes a readership pretty familiar with the complex and not-inconsiderably large discussion of forward rate and term structure models. For example, maximum smoothness of cubic splines are pretty much assumed and quite possibly laughed at by this crowd.

James "Not-Vasichek"

Average customer rating:
Debt Collection Practice in California: June 1994 Update, Vols. 1, 2
William P. Weintraub , and Robert N. Waxman
Manufacturer: Continuing Education of the Bar-California
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Law | Subjects | Books
General | Law | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0881247839

Book Description

Organisms are increasingly being used to assess environmental impacts on ecosystems. Lichens are among the best known, most widely used biomonitors of environmental change, with thousands of papers published on this subject in the last decades. The present book provides the most recent synthesis on this subject. It is divided into three sections: (1) Monitoring lichens as indicators of pollution; (2) monitoring lichen diversity and ecosystem function; and (3) methods for monitoring lichens. The first two sections present the state of the art in the respective fields, while the third briefly presents the methods currently used in lichen biomonitoring. Sampling design, sampling strategy, and data quality evaluation are dealt with in detail in two chapters.

The first section reviews the huge body of knowledge of lichens as indicators of air pollution, including bioindication, accumulation of metals and radioelements, and the use of lichens as biomarkers. The second section covers an array of approaches to monitoring lichen biodiversity and ecosystem function, from focusing on one or a few species to monitoring the biodiversity of lichens across whole regions in terms of lichen abundance, diversity, and/or community composition. The third section presents methods for monitoring lichens, written as experimental protocols for use in other situations where monitoring is required.

Readership: A wide spectrum of users in fields such as education, environmental management, forestry, biodiversity research. A comprehensive, up-to-date review of lichen monitoring, and an aid in identifying problems and pragmatic approaches to the assessment of biodiversity and environmental quality.

A Guide to Air Quality Monitoring With Lichens

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A Guide to Air Quality Monitoring With Lichens
William C. Denison
Manufacturer: Lichen Technology, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000NUUXCM

Pollution Monitoring with Lichens (Harvester/Primary Social Sources)

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Pollution Monitoring with Lichens (Harvester/Primary Social Sources)
D. H. S. Richardson
Manufacturer: Richmond Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Engineering | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Lichen and moss bags as monitoring devices in urban areas. Part II: Trace element content in living and dead biomonitors and comparison with synthetic ... [An article from: Environmental Pollution]

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Lichen and moss bags as monitoring devices in urban areas. Part II: Trace element content in living and dead biomonitors and comparison with synthetic ... [An article from: Environmental Pollution]
P. Adamo , P. Crisafulli , S. Giordano , and V. Minganti
Manufacturer: Elsevier
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000PDTIG4

Book Description

This digital document is a journal article from Environmental Pollution, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Lobes of the lichen Pseudevernia furfuracea (L.) Zopf and shoots of the moss Hypnum cupressiforme Hedw. were subjected to different treatments (water washing, oven drying, HNO"3 washing, NH"4-oxalate extraction) to assess the influence of vitality on accumulation efficiency, during a 6-week exposure in bags in two Italian cities, Trieste and Naples. No trend emerged between treatments, in terms of accumulation ability, for major and trace elements. Only water-washed lichens showed an increased C and N content after exposure in both cities. Element concentrations generally reached higher values in mosses than in lichens, especially for Al, Fe, and Zn (both cities), and for Cu, Mg and Na (Naples). Surface development strongly influenced accumulation capacity of the biomonitors. Quartzose and cation exchange filters revealed, on a weight basis, a poor performance. In urban environments, surface interception of atmospheric particulate seems to play a major role in accumulation, irrespective of organism vitality.

Air quality monitoring with a lichen network: Baseline data

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Air quality monitoring with a lichen network: Baseline data
W. L Peterson
Manufacturer: Syncrude Canada Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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A guide to air quality monitoring with lichens
William C Denison
Manufacturer: Lichen Technology
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Book Description

This book contains edited versions of papers presented at Geo-Environment - the first international conference on Monitoring, Management, Simulation and Remediation of the Geological Environment.

The role of geosciences in environmental management has been underestimated and we are still far from exploiting their full potential. An understanding of the properties of Earth's materials and their dynamics is essential for unravelling problems in varying fields, such as air, soil or water pollution, soil erosion, waste disposal, water resources, and building materials and foundations. Understanding geological processes is also essential to other areas of study including the evaluation and mitigation of natural and man-induced hazards and risks, engineering, land preservation and restoration, landscape and urban planning, ecosystem inventories and natural heritage assessments.

Based on these principles, this book contains important presentations by researchers, engineers, planners, decision-makers, consultants and other professionals interested in the contribution of the geosciences and geo-information to sustainable development. The papers are divided under the following section headings: Earth's Materials and Resources; Soil and Rock Properties; Earth's Dynamics; Hydrological Studies; Natural Hazards and Risks; Vulnerability Studies; Environmental Planning and Management; Environmental Pollution and Remediation; Waste Management, Treatment and Disposal; and Environmental Modelling and Monitoring.

Book Description

Scanning Probe Microscopy - Analytical Methods provides a comprehensive overview of the analytical methods on the nanometer scale based on scanning probe microscopy and spectroscopy. Numerous examples of applications of the chemical contrast mechanism down to the atomic scale in surface physics and chemistry are discussed with extensive references to original work in the recent literature.

Book Description

"I started this meditation on the first day of Lent. I hope to keep going every day until Easter. Each day I go fishing in the water of this internal voice. This week the water's still, this angled pen a blue sail; the hook is lazy in the estuary, the water the color of lapis. So what if I don't catch a fish? I said that I would fish; that's all I promised. I bait the hook with each day's discipline. I have no guarantees that there is anything at all to catch in these particular waters, that something beneath the surface won't grab my pen and pull me under." —from Iconography

When Susan Neville enrolls in an icon-painting class in the cellar of an Indianapolis monastery, she begins a journey into a fascinating hidden world where saints are fabricated of mineral and wood, yolk and blood, earth and time. The process is tedious, and she begins to make mistakes, to become impatient; she doesn't feel ready for the challenge. To prepare herself, Neville makes a vow to write during the 40 days of Lent. What emerges is a journal, a meditation, a series of confessions that we are invited to listen to as we follow Neville's sometimes painful attempts to reveal the truth and discover the mystery of her existence. In the layering of colors and moods, her writing is the spiritual equivalent of an icon. As she observes the world around her and applies the paint of language to her observations, she realizes that spirit and matter are not separate—that now and then moments of meaning emerge from daily life, and the stillness and majesty of the universe shine through.

Customer Reviews:

A book for any serious writer.......2005-04-27

This is a brilliant book, a must-read for any serious writer, whether her or she is a poet, memoirist, or fiction writer. Susan Neville writes beautiful lyric meditations on par with great contemporary poet-essayists Robert Hass, Mary Oliver and Marianne Boruch. This book is as important to any writer / artist / thinker as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and Richard Hugo's Triggering Town.

disappointing!.......2005-01-30

Not what I expected. Ms. Neville writes very little about the process of developing an icon, and way too much about her own neuroses. Not inspiring!

A Gilded Doorway to Rich Realms.......2004-09-11

Fans of Susan Neville's stunning work will find Iconography another sustained meditation on meditation itself. As in her Fabrication where visits to Indiana factories act as conduits to the sublime, Neville here utilizes a nifty frame--that of a two year effort to paint an orthodox icon--to trigger her always surprising, nuanced, strongly felt ruminations on mundane and holy spheres. Neville is a wonder and wonderful. Her work is deeply layered, lacquered, burnished, gold edged, patinaed. This book is a gift, a gift from a sacred and very human space. It arrives as the original holy icons did--out of the clouds, upon the waves--direct from the hand of God.

NOT a book about icongraphy or, for that matter, meditation!.......2004-07-05

While the book title leads one to believe the book is about Neville's response to her experience with writing an icon, the book has almost nothing about that. Further, it has almost nothing to say about God or iconography. In short, I believe the title is misleading and the book disappointing!

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