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Steve Jobs Dead At 56
SoCalChris writes "Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was found dead in his Cupertino home this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him — even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."
RIP. He was a visionary.
Sent from my iPhone
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
Bill Gates put a computer on every desk. Steve Jobs put one in every pocket, purse, dorm room and bedroom.
His contribution will be sorely missed.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Thank you for giving people something to be smug about, no matter what side of the argument they are on.
... wait, what?
If you haven't already, filter through http://folklore.org/ , his antics at the beginning of Apple are hilarious.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
RIP, Steve. Love or hate you, you definitely made a huge impact on the tech industry.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
While I'm not a fan of Apple's business practices, Steve made a lot of advances in technology. RIP.
:(
Gone!
Also, if CmdrTaco's trend continues, tomorrow will be a very bad day for him.
He brought user friendliness, usability concepts to top of the pile, and caused computer technology to go for more style, but what he did with locking in his customers, limiting their freedoms and then making enormous profits over these, has caused almost all other companies to follow the same style. now every company, even google, is trying to lock in people to things so that they can cash-cow them. imagine how internet would be if it was limited to 10-15 companies and their app stores, estores, media stores etc from the start.
...
unfortunately, due to what he did, this is the direction the movers and shakers of the information technology are taking.
talk about the openness, freedom of apple at the starting stages, and talk about after jobs. i wonder if the other steve can turn things around and make apple more in line with the spirit of information technology freedom and progress again
Read radical news here
At times like this it is best to remember the good contributions from a man who provided so much to our industry. Thank you Steve wherever you are now
The answer to all your problems
You may disagree with his ideologies, but you have to admit that he changed the world we live in. Allow me to hold up my glass and tip my hat to a man to made the world just a little bit better.
jk...I'm not a big fan of his company, but RIP.
Some inspirational speeches
"Focus is not about saying Yes, but about saying No"
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-1997-video-2011-6
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
âoeThis was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and thatâ(TM)s what I had.â ...Steve Jobs, at home in 1982.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pacman3000/4042368287/
The IPhone 4S announcement must have hit him really hard.
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
====
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. --George Bernard Shaw
====
Goodbye Steve, and thanks for everything. Even the stuff I hated.
Go somewhere random
Thank you for inspiring millions and helping make some really cool dreams into realities.
'Nuff Said.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Damn it all
I'll be honest. I've never been a fan of Apple products, But I have and will always be a fan of Steve Jobs.
The man was truly one of the last great manager's and CEO's of American Business. Competitive to the end, Dedicated to the end, and capable of pushing people to their absolute limits for better or for worse to the point that something insanely great gets produced.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Everything builds on everything else. He was instrumental in the Apple II, and that was, no matter what anybody may say, a titanic shift in the manufacture, marketing and public perception of the computer.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Can we have Woz back in charge now?
Evil people are out to get you.
The immediate cause of death wasn't made clear, but this is immensely sad news for me. I have a friend who has recently been diagnosed with the same type of (rare) pancreatic cancer. Jobs' version of the cancer is supposed to be more treatable, and he wouldn't have lived as long as he did had he the more common, deadly form. I had hoped that he would survive longer.
11.09am: Steve Jobs's family has released a statement:
Mr Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family ... We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief."
I came to Slashdot specifically to read about it because I wanted to among friends that would pay their respect to Jobs from the point of view of geeks/nerds. So, yea I think this is exactly what Slashdot is here for and I would have felt an emptiness had it not been here. I am all broken up about his passing. No, I didn't know him personally, but I do want pay may respect to his obvious contributions to our lives and our community.
"Holde it juste exactlie thisse waye or yon WiFi will take a shite."
I'm seeing nothing in any story including the CNN one linked to that says he was "found dead in his home this morning". Seems dubious.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
âZ"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
I wish I was more in tune with his philosophy earlier on in life. When I was a teenager, I really could've fucking used it.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I never met him in person, but for a while my company leased space in an Apple-owned building on Valley Green Drive, and Steve would frequently walk past my window on the sidewalk on his way back and forth from HQ to various buildings on VGD (which tended to have all the windows covered up or painted black). He would just be walking alone without any entourage or anything, at a time when Carly was running HP and seemingly couldn't leave her office without press followers, support staff, security detail with automatic weapons, and a helicopter.
I can't imagine how much different (and for the worse) the history of the last thirty years of computing would have been without him.
He will be greatly missed by friends and foes alike.
G.
Steve saw the future of computers from the mouse/windows concept those guys at Xerox PARC developed. He pushed to bring that kind of IO into the markets beginning with LISA. It bombed but he still had the vision so Steve wouldn't give up and brought out the Mac. Say what you want (many called him a AH) but like other visionaries they don't care what others think (good thing he didn't do a market survey of what computers should be, i.e. if Henry Ford did one, people would ask for a faster horse). If not for Steve (and others working 24/7/365) the IO many of us use on computers will probably still sitting in some building at an unknown address in Palo Alto. Then there's the iphone, etc....
I could not help but noticed the tagline on bottom of /. "Man's reach must exceed his grasp, for why else the heavens?"
mfwright@batnet.com
Well-played Subby!
Are Stephen King and Alan Thicke still OK?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Suck it up Severus.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It was a pleasure to work for you...
text on the TextEdit app icon on every Mac OS X installation :D.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I was ten years old. After wearing out a Timex Sinclair 1000 and a VIC-20, my dad took me to the computer shop to pick out a new one. They all looked cool and incredibly complex - the TI/99 with it's bizarre cartridge slot, the Apple II with it's strange ribbon cables coming out of the back (sorry Woz) the Atari 400 with it's horrid keyboard, the clunky PC with it's austere green display.
Then there was the Macintosh. It made the other machines look like junk. It had real fonts. It had *graphics*. It could make sounds other than a harsh piezoelectric bleep. You looked at it and could figure out how to get something done. My dad saved up and pulled a deal from a friend, and my early Christmas (and birthday and second Christmas) present that year was a shiny new beige Macintosh 512K with a wide-carriage Imagewriter and external floppy drive. Using it felt like you were using something from Star Trek. I learned how to touch type doing papers on that thing. I learned how to program using Microsoft Basic, then Metrowerks Pascal. I took it to Heathkit and had it upgraded to a 512KE with an enormous 800k drive. While there I drooled over the completely maxed-out Mac II with color ImageWriter II, LaserWriter II, dual 1.44MB floppies, a stack of SCSI drives (40MB HD, tape backup, and CD-ROM) and every desk accessory known to man loaded and ready to go. I finally retired it when I got a job out of high school and saved up enough to buy a PowerMac 6100/60, which I still have, and still works. Since then I've gotten into DIY, building my own PC compatables to experiment with Windows, Linux, Inferno, BeOS, and OS/2. Then I needed a PC at home to run all the development environments I had to learn for work. But I still have a soft spot for the elegance and simplicity of Mac hardware and software.
Thanks, Jobs, for pushing computer design forward on all fronts - from UI design to standardizing iconography used for ports, and forcing everyone else to at least attempt to be as innovative. I think, for my next computer, I'm retiring the water cooled behemoth running Windows 7 under my desk, and buying a Macbook Air.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Jobs made life better for millions of people. The world was inarguably a better place for his having lived. What higher praise could there be than that?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Nowhere in the actual story does it say that Jobs was 'found' dead... yet somehow that's what the summary says.
The wording of the summary is a paraphrase of a long-running Slashdot meme. Just a little gallows humor for us old-timers.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
...he's a Buddhist.
In unrelated news, a squirrel in Central Park was this morning observed to be installing small devices on acorns which prevented other squirrels from eating those acorns without permission. The squirrel was quoted as saying that it wished to "streamline the acorn experience" for other squirrels in order to remove the "distraction" of being able to eat acorns however they wanted to.
Read Pynchon.
Also, he didn't live in Cupertino.
Slashdot is sending him away the only way they know how... inaccurately.
But hey, I was half expecting "No pulse. Less respiration than Ellison. Lame."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't think that having recently died should preclude criticism of what a person did while alive
However, the comments on the story announcing his death is not the place for it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's the phrasing from a 2002 era troll, if not earlier. (the mid-2001 references Google has seem to be replies to deleted posts.)
Context:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kadin2048/Slashdot_Trolling_Phenomena#Stephen_King_is_dead
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=41759&cid=4414746
steve wozniak: "hey check out this l33t floppy drive controller i made! sweet eh?"
steve jobs: "we can sell this"
ordinary people: "i did this on my mac. no, i didnt need an $8,000 workstation"
school children: "fd 40; rt 80; fd 40; lt 80;"
At times like this it is best to remember the good contributions from a man who provided so much to our industry. Thank you Steve wherever you are now
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them. Geeks would not be the new coolness, or at least in such demand, and I truly have no idea what computing would be like.
I have been with computing from the start of it and can honestly say that despite all the faults of both Microsoft and Apple, the entire industry was spawned by those two men and the groups of people they led.
Everybody else was just a 3rd party vendor.
Seriously... try to imagine an alternate reality where neither Apple or Microsoft existed. Who was going to create our industry the way that it is?
IBM? I sincerely doubt it. They would have never believed in personal computing, or that there could even be personal computing. Computers would still be AS400 mainframes to this day most likely.
"All technology is built off the shoulders of giants. Innovation is usually a process of small steps on uncharted terrain, and very seldom giant leaps over mountains."
It would nice if Apple acknowledged the shoulders it has stood on.
e.g. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 by Diamond multimedia was the first commercially successful portable mp3 player, release in 98. In contrast, the iPod was released three years later in 2001.
The designers of the RIO got no credit for being innovative, but they did get recognition from the RIAA, who sued them.
The ipod three years later got all sorts of awards for being an innovative _product_, however the most innovative thing about it was the fact they managed to do a deal with the RIAA and sell music online.
Another example would be Mac OSX being based on BSD.
I agree with you he was a visionary, he influenced the world in ways nobody else had (or is likely too), but while praising him for what he was. We shouldnâ(TM)t give him credit for what others did.
I think you're not giving Jobs enough credit even for the first wave of personal computers.
I think you're not giving Woz enough credit.
This is a man, whether you liked him or not or approved of everything he did or not, who was in fact instrumental in a number of steps in the post-1960s computer revolution.
Although Jobs had his part, it was Woz that designed the first two generations of apple computers himself.
I'm not trying to make light of this death, but the engineers behind all the devices are still alive.
So? He was an engineer. And he did a damn awesome job of it, too. Without Woz, early PCs might have taken longer to bring to market; they would have had more chips and would have cost more because of it. It probably would have taken an army of engineers to build what Woz did.
But the world has armies and armies of engineers.
On the other hand Steve Jobs, more than anyone, realized that computers could be made into consumer appliances that every housewife, artist, author, schoolchild and, yes, hipster would want to own. The design and marketing of computers and smartphones to ordinary people, not just businesspeople or techies.
Woz without Jobs would have been happy to stay in his garage and solder. Linus Torvalds would probably still have been inspired to create an open-source OS for geeks to play with and build upon. Bill Gates would have gone ahead and put business machines on the desks of every cubicle drone in the corporate world. But without Steve Jobs, personal computers would never have become personal.
Much of Slashdot hates him for this, of course. They hate the lack of choice, the warm and fuzzy design, the drool-proof UI and the high prices. But what they really hate is that he took this wonderful world of powerful technology, a world where they are kings, and turned the keys over to the unwashed masses of housewives, schoolkids, artists, and, yes, hipsters.
Sad new about Jobs. But I sure as hell didn't need ABC to break into the middle of the Double Jeopardy round and give me a fucking seven-minute retrospective of his career, hailing him as the god of all modern technology.
ABC is owned by Disney, who's largest single owner of stock was... Steve Jobs. Not that I agree with their decision, but maybe the folks there felt a bit more strongly about Jobs' passing a bit more than the people at NBC / CBS.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Thanks for all the heart felt sympathies.
Sent from my iPhone 5
iDevices with cut-down OSes optimised for being dumb terminals to the Cloud, and centralised oligopoly providers of rentable computing: Amazon, Google and Facebook.
iDevices are anything but dumb terminals. Google is the one that's trying to move everything into the cloud, Apple's the opposite putting devices in your pocket that sync from the cloud to your devices (the cloud as syncing mechanism) with a strong focus on local applications.
he didn't necessarily aim to make the production of computing content, rather than its consumption, open and democratic.
Is that why every mac ships with a free development environment, a music creation application and a video editing application ? Oh and iMovie and Garageband are also available on iOS.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
>While I'm not a fan of Apple's business practices, Steve made a lot of advances in technology. Like what exactly? What advances in technology did Steve Jobs make? I'd really like to know. What did he actually invent instead of borrow or steal?
Disgusted with some people here dancing on the coffin.
WTF is wrong with you? "Walled garden" my ass. It was his garden. Don't like it — buy something else, he never forced anyone to buy Apple products. The guy was a visionary. If it wasn't for him, the tech industry would be where it was 10 years ago, if that. Had Apple not released iPhone, your Android would look like ass today, which is what it looked like shortly before iPhone was released. That's assuming there'd even _be_ Android. Your PC laptops would be 1.5 inches thick and would have a battery life of 1 hour. Had NeXT not existed, Tim Berners Lee might not have invented the web. Had Steve not taken those typography classes way back when, chances are we'd have shitty monospaced fonts everywhere. Linux would be a lot more CDE like, and Windows would not look the same either, assuming there'd even be Windows. There would be no Toy Story, no Cars, no Up, no Finding Nemo, all computers would be made of shitty beige plastic, USB, CD/DVDs and WiFi would be set back years, there'd be no Chrome, no usable Clang and LLVM, no mainstream UNIX OSs, no DRM-free downloadable music, no ideas for other people to rip off.
Steve's reach extended far beyond Apple and iPhone. The guy simply gave a lot to this world, while not really taking much for himself. He has put a dent in the universe. You may glorify him or vilify him, but you can't ignore him. And if you're a decent human being, you can't cheer his death either.
Duchamp took a urinal and stuck it in a gallery wall, stating "this is art".
Jobs took a powerful yet arid piece of digital machinery, eliminated the aridness (command line interface), and as the object grew more powerful, turned it smaller and sleeker, time and time again.
All in all, a brilliant, earnest response to Duchamp's rhetorical provocation.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
In about 1985, at TI somebody brought in one of the first Macs and we got to play with it. It was different from everything on the market, not counting the old Xerox Star which was probably not still around at that point. The Mac was the first computer that was actually a personal computer and not a minimalist mainframe. Circumstances left me on the PC side of things, but it was clear they were following what was going on over there. There was more to it than that, but - good job, Steve. I wish you'd had 30 more years.
The reason you should be modded down, and not up, is that it is not appropriate to bring it up on the day the man dies.
Neither you or I have a great appreciation for how Apple does things, but make no mistake about it.... that man was partly responsible along with some other great men in ushering in a new age of technology.
All great men stand on the shoulders of other great men, and through the ability to benefit on their achievements make their own.
You sit here on Slashdot today, on a computer, with the Internet, and talk badly about the man on the day he dies without even realizing (or at least acknowledging) that the very same man contributed to your ability to do so in the first place.
Give respect where respect is due. You have 30+ years in computing... you should know better.
He'll *will* be missed - just not by you. And probably no one will care about that.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I attended the World Wide Developers' conference when the Mac II was introduced. Rumors insisted it was to be the first color Macintosh. When the exhibit hall doors opened, there was a Mac II with its big (for the time) monitor, but the image was the original Mac's crisp black and white. It was only when I got closer that I noticed the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen--it alone displayed in bright rainbow color. That was Job's showmanship.
NeXT, for one. Founded it, helped to shape it into what it became (including the first web server and web browser; cheers Tim Berners Lee), and took it with him when Apple bought it.
He was responsible for driving the early creation of the Apple II along with Woz - two essential sides of a coin - one could not have succeeded in quite the way they did without the other.
He was extremely good at what he did, and had an eye for helping to shape technology to take it beyond the realm of geeks and tech-minded people. You may not think that's a worthy skill, but it is a large part of why Apple is so successful.
Alas the passing of Mr Jobs
Gone to the Walled garden
From where there is no jailbreak
Flash ah ahhhhh
That wasn't one of yours..
E J Thribb 44 11/12
It was 1984 at Carnegie Mellon University... in this era the cutting-edge Microsoft (PC) operating system was MS-DOS 3.0.... it looked like this: http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/gfx/logo/msdos_screenshot.jpg . In this era, when using Microsoft PC's with MS-DOS it was quite common for people to lose hours of work unless they manually saved their work constantly, even if they did nothing wrong because the the computer often "froze up" with no warning. Anyway, I was trying out the Paint software on the new Mac, which looked like this: http://www.forevergeek.com/wp-content/media/2010/08/MacPaint-Japanese-Girl.png . Keep in mind that at this time there were no hard disks in PC's or Macs... just floppies. I had spent about an hour drawing a picture on the Mac but had not saved my work at all. I stretched my legs a bit under the computer table and my foot accidentally kicked the power cord out of the socket. The computer instantly died. I was bummed that I had lost my picture but I plugged the computer back in and watched it boot up again from the floppy. Did it come up with an error message "your computer was not shut down properly" (which you will see with a Microsoft Windows computer to this very day). No. Did it just boot up normally as if nothing had happened? No. Without a single message and without asking me a single question, it booted directly into the Paint software WITH MY ENTIRE PICTURE INTACT.