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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."
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
Also, if CmdrTaco's trend continues, tomorrow will be a very bad day for him.
Love or hate him, no-one can deny the guy achieved a hell of a lot in his life. Even though he'd resigned his post the man still had a lot to offer.
RIP Steve.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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.
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.
Love or hate him, no-one can deny the guy achieved a hell of a lot in his life. Even though he'd resigned his post the man still had a lot to offer. RIP Steve.
amen to that, he contributed more to driving the technology industry than just about anyone else.
'Nuff Said.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Sent from my iPad.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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.
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."
Think about them what you will, but no denying he's one on the big three that have brought us to the commonly known and use computer tech world that everyone knows today...
RIP
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
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.
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.
From the fall of AOL to the rise of iComputing, we had a 12 year golden age where walled gardens were derided, people owned their own devices, and the landscape of the internet formed more or less naturally.
Nevermind things like WGA, TPM, DRM, the omni-present EULAs in nearly everything that the majority of humanity used, making backups of one's media was considered to be "theft", Windows(!?) was actually poised to take over the server room, decoding an encrypted file or a proprietary chip meant litigation and/or jail time, and many, many other examples...
Golden age, my ass.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No way. I don't want to in any way disparage the man, he was certainly a visionary, but it was the forgotten engineers and technicians, laboring away for 80 hours a week with no overtime who have driven and continue to drive the technology industry. People love to heap praise on the CEOs, because people like having a single figure to praise (and blame). But Apple would be nothing without the hard work of the faceless employees who actually gave form to Jobs's ideas.
And before you say that Jobs contributed more than any individual one of them, let me ask: do you really even know how many of his contributions were truly his, and not his underlings'?
And before you say that Jobs contributed more than any individual one of them, let me ask: do you really even know how many of his contributions were truly his, and not his underlings'?
Doesn't matter. Being a great leader or CEO isn't about coming up with great ideas, it's about recognizing them.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Torvalds was 9 when Jobs and Wozniak were doing their revolutionizing. There is a good case to be made that without Woz, Torvalds wouldn't have done what he did.
Armies need generals, and generals need armies.
No reincarnation. Only 56. Lame.
(RIP)
But, the decision to buy something isn't purely an objective decision. It's as much about preference as anything else -- do you need a customizable, extensible command line, or do you want something that's largely idiot proof?
When I was in university, Linux was the coolest thing ever because I could endlessly discover all of the free stuff there was ... not to mention coolness and multi-tasking.
Now, for sitting in my recliner, or in an airplane, or a hotel room and essentially just noodling around, my iPad is pretty much exactly something I've always wanted. I'm not writing code on it, or tuning databases ... I'm playing games, watching videos, surfing the web. And in a way a netbook would never be appealing to me.
And, the notion of a walled garden and openness is a political position ... to a lot of people the ease of a well-managed 'walled garden' makes for a pleasant user experience. They have no idea what you're talking about for the most part, they just want to click the pretty buttons.
To put it in free market terms (which I generally avoid using), the market has decided they like these products. People have exercised their free will and chosen to buy these products.
You can say it's because these buyers are stupid, or trendy idiots, or smug people in coffee houses with pony tails all you like ... it's awfully hard to argue with the sales figures Jobs drove Apple to with these devices.
And, contrary to your expectation of objectivity, I must say that subjectively I like the iPods, iTunes, and now iPad progression of nice toys. And, maybe, just maybe, all of these people buying these devices subjectively believe they get value for money.
At which point you might as well be complaining about Coke vs Pepsi. Because there is no objective criteria, and just because you don't like the product doesn't mean that other people are required to not like it either.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Jobs, Gates, Torvalds... I've spent a couple of decades slowly coming around to the idea that it's individual leaders who make the real difference, but everyone else who does the real work. Down below a guy is talking about all the brilliant engineers at Apple working 80+ hours per week, and how that's what really counts, and this CEO worship is stupid. Do you think Sun didn't have those guys? Did they fail because they were stupid and lazy?
The world is far better off for having let Jobs lead. It's not that guys like Jobs are impossible to find, but getting them into places of power where they have permission to change the world... that is impossible to find. Sony had a guy like Jobs, and when he died, it left the music player market wide open for Jobs. The cell phone industry hadn't had a brilliant innovator with permission to make a difference since the Razor. Jobs fixed it. Bill Gates hasn't been a factor at Microsoft for a decade, and Jobs has walked all over them. The world is far better off due to what Jobs accomplished.
That said, Jobs was an ass hole, who both saved us from the stupidity of failing innovation in several markets, and shacked us with the most oppressive crap ever invented. If you ever wondered why e-books now cost the same everywhere you normally by them, that's 100% pure evil genius, courtesy of Jobs, called the "agency model". Sony is banned from iPads, and GPL 3 software can't even run on any iOS device legally. Jobs arrogance had no bounds. He wanted no less than 30% of every dollar you spend, even if it was on bread. No one knows of any significant charity supported by this man.
I hope Apple can find a new middle ground going forward that is somewhat innovative and somewhat less evil. However, the great man has passed through the veil, and while I'm not bashing Apple, there's no way their board could possibly let another Jobs take control. My guess is stock price is headed down... however, my stock advice is generally wrong.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The guy freely acknowledges he can't run a company nor does he want to, that's why Apple is a story of 2 Steves instead of 1.
"I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I'd been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That's what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it." - Woz
"Steve and I are very different. Mainly, I want to be an engineer and make neat things for my own fun, forever. I told Steve and Mike Markkula that I wouldn't expand Apple into a real company because I had to quit HP (I'd designed all the Apple stuff moonlighting for a year!). I loved HP. But I finally realized that I could do it and not have to run it. From the start, Steve wanted to run a company and learn the ways to. " - Woz
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Steve Jobs and Woz did work for Atari as technicians.
Wikipedia has a story on how they were paid to reduce the chip count on some arcade boards. They worked together to create one ASIC to replace 50 logic chips.
Reading computer magazines between the 1970's and1990's was an experience. Seeing the evolution of computing from home-assembled S-100 boards in the 1970's to Apple ]['s, Apple Mac, NEXT workstations in the early 1990's, hand-held devices like the Newton in the later years.
How many other people need three separate pages of historical time lines to list all the products that they were involved in designing?
Time Line of Apple Products
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Leaders are rightly credited with the accomplishments of their team. Apple would be nothing without the "faceless employees", but would just the right faceless employees have come together, and excelled together without him?
Jobs cultivated a lot of very excellent lieutenants, despite (or because of) his mixture of passion and draconian habits. His lieutenants were very smart people with thoughts and opinions and could argue with him: but they better be right. That's an actual compelling environment for some types of innovative people: not all, certainly. But he gathered together people who seemed to work quite well in it, and even thrived. These, in turn, cultivated their lieutenants, and down through the company. How many companies get bogged down by bureaucracies and middle-management? You don't end up with a company like Apple without leadership from top to bottom: leadership *matters*. As much as any other single factor, I think.
Jobs has never claimed the one-man-wonder credit certain parts of the press often heaps on him; he has always praised his lieutenants and their teams by name even, publicly. Is there countless others who are not named? Well, of course. But he's always held that it was a team effort, and that the team mattered.
Huh? 3D animation was on the desktop long before Jobs had anything to do with Pixar. Imagine 3D, Autodesk 3D Studio, and Lightwave (which started life as part of the Amiga-powered Video Toaster) brought real 3D animation tools to the desktop in the early 90s. While many of the great visionaries who laid the foundations of 3D animation ended up at Pixar, Pixar's Renderman-related patents also arguably held back the industry somewhat.
And anyway, John Lasseter's genius directorial skills have a great deal more to do with Pixar's longstanding success than anything technological. Cars 2 was the first real dud from the studio after what, 12 features including a trilogy that didn't suck? And the graphics in Red's Dream are 1st-year student work by today's standards (although groundbreaking for the time), but the timing is brilliantly expressive and the script still makes you care about that unicycle 20-something years later.
Anyway, back on topic - RIP Steve. I never liked using your computers myself, but I liked that they existed and I liked the things other people found easy to do with them.
This reminds me that computing is unique in that a fair number of the pioneers are alive, or were until very recently. My list of major computer names is a lot longer: Alan Turing, Von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Doug Engelbart, Vint Cert, Bob Metcalfe, Ken Olsen, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Grace Hopper, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Tim Berners-Lee, John McCarthy. Of those names, quite a few are still alive right now. It's actually possible to travel around and meet them. This is a feature of computing that differentiates it from many other fields. In Math, Physics, Biology, etc., most of your heroes died hundreds of years ago.
Someone must have sanitized it. Look in the entry for Breakout. Anyway, Woz removed 50 chips from the design and the Jobs was paid $5,000 for the work. Jobs lead Woz to believe that it was a $750 reward, so he gave Woz half of that. In other words, Jobs pocketed $4625 for doing absolutely no work and screwed Woz.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Do you think Sun didn't have those guys? Did they fail because they were stupid and lazy?
I think other companies fail because those people working 80 hour weeks are only paid to create crap.
Steve Jobs isn't terribly unique. What's unique is Steve Jobs in a position of influence to devote the resources needed to execute said vision.
A perfect example is something like the iPhone 4s Siri feature. Last week I upgraded to the new version of Windows Phone 7.5 and I was trying out the voice control features. You can say "Text ___" but you can't say "Message ___" or "Send Text To ____"
I was lamenting how incredibly stupid that was. It even shows that it perfectly understood my message "Send Text To _____" it just was too brain dead stupid to know what that means. It would take one intern an hour to come up with a list of phrases to *hard-code* into the phone for a number of situations and associate basic commands to them.
"Send Text to____"
"Message ___"
"Send a text to _____"
"SMS ______"
"Send a Message to ____"
Regex those suckers and the feature would actually be pretty cool instead of playing "Guess the magic keyword."
I have to believe (for the sake of my soul) that someone at Microsoft wanted to do that but was *stopped* for some reason from adding the extra 0.5 KBs of synonymous commands for each of the included commands.
It doesn't take a Steve Jobs visionary--it just takes getting rid of the all of the anti-visionaries who are stopping innovation.
Another example, I have a Galaxy Tab. When it shipped its keyboard was useless. I don't just mean "bad" I mean useless. Typing a word would result in a 3-5 second delay. That was how it came out of the box. I fixed it by using a different browser or using a different keyboard.
Who the #)@# ships hundreds of thousands of products but doesn't do something so basic as... I don't know... turn one on and see if the #*^! keyboard works?!
The reason the ipad has been so successful isn't because it's some genius product--it's because the competition is evidently brain dead.
Thank God for Steve Jobs or we might not even have 'acceptable' products. He really pushed at least mediocrity on the industry for which we should all be thankful.
Gates created the IBM PC as much as anyone who worked for IBM.
I suppose, in a way... His wasn't the only disk operating system. The IBM PC would not have been significantly different without him.
The choice of MS-DOS and the non-exclusive licensing agreement they signed with Gates did have an effect on the PC-clone market that developed since they could use the exact same operating system.
However it was Compaq who actually did all the technical work of reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS, and fought the resulting IBM lawsuit, that really enabled the PC-clone market. Gates' shrewd business decision wouldn't have mattered had it not been for that.
And without that decision, the clones would have used a DOS work-alike and maybe the OS monopoly would never have gotten established. But now I'm just speculating.
Nevertheless, I can't say Gates did nearly as much to create the PC as either IBM or Compaq.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sun did some amazing things, so did a lot of other companies and individuals. The thing Steve Jobs did is make off the shelf technology useful. Ever try to make some random person care about ZFS or Solaris? They couldn't care less. But a music player that held 1,000 songs at high quality and didn't skip when you jogged with it was an innovation. Nobody had put that together like that before. For the next five years, they kept improving the function and form factor of the iPod by orders of magnitude in the face of almost no competition. Anyone can call it "nothing new was invented here" and it wasn't - but nobody ever put so much thought into the product, using slimmer, lightweight materials, menu layouts that made sense without an instruction manual, battery life that mattered and a hundred other things completely absent from anything made by a "competitor". It cost more to make than the other crap but it was worth it, so I wouldn't call it "overpriced". Ok, so maybe I'd want it to be a lot cheaper... but it worked well and I got way more value out of my iPods than any other music player (and I've had a few).
That brings me to the "stifle competition" statement. Believe it if you like, but I view it as Apple selling something people actually wanted instead of the junkyard class crap getting shoveled out by everyone else. Making something that made anything else on the market look 10 years behind isn't "stifling" competition - it's embarrassing the competitors right out of the market.
My $0.02
Most of the stuff on
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.
Who the #)@# ships hundreds of thousands of products but doesn't do something so basic as... I don't know... turn one on and see if the #*^! keyboard works?!
The reason the ipad has been so successful isn't because it's some genius product--it's because the competition is evidently brain dead.
Mod up. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried a new product and thought "what the fuck were they thinking". Are Apple and MS the only companies in the world that do user interface testing?
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.
Most of what you say is true, however:
"he either openly ripped most of it off from the Palo Alto Research Center"
Apple paid Xerox for the tech. You may think they got a good deal, but there was no theft or coercion and Xerox took it. That isn't ripping off.
"Apple nearly died in the early 90's"
That is correct, they almost died after Steve was booted. If you don't see how that fact, combined with their mind-blowing recovery after his return, indicates that he was an amazingly effective leader, then you seem to be lacking basic comprehension skills. I'm much more of a technical and creative guy than a leader, so it pains me to say this, but being an effective leader (what Steve did) is a much harder and rarer talent than being technologically proficient or creative. I've known many, many people with amazing minds for technology and creativity. I don't know if I've met _any_ great leaders personally.
Hate him all you want, he had an impact. Your comments on the stock price indicate a profound misunderstanding of the market. Did you not notice that the stock closed higher today than it was before the iPhone 5 non-announcement? Why would anyone laugh their ass off at meaningless short term market fluctuations unless they were a creepy obsessive trying to feel better about their inability to make sense of the world?
Good luck, sir. And stay classy.
But a music player that held 1,000 songs at high quality and didn't skip when you jogged with it was an innovation.
Sure, it just wan't Apple's innovation. The day it was released and instantly panned by Taco for not being as good an iRiver has become part of Slashdot lore. Apple's genius was the scroll wheel interface, and perhaps making it easy to rip CDs with iTunes.
Jobs didn't invent much, he just figured out how to make things easy to use so that consumers would buy them, going right back to their early computers. I'm not saying there wasn't some impressive technology too, but that wasn't his area.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC