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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."
http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
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
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.
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?
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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
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Goodbye Steve, and thanks for everything. Even the stuff I hated.
Go somewhere random
Sue you later.
Sent from my Galaxy S II
I think you're not giving Jobs enough credit even for the first wave of personal computers. The Apple II was probably the most important step into the world of computers in the home, school and business, moving us from the era of hobbiest kit computer to what we view as the standard computer, keyboard and monitor. Jobs was instrumental in that as well. 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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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?
Armies need generals, and generals need armies.
No reincarnation. Only 56. Lame.
(RIP)
Somebody like Woz needed somebody like Jobs to reach the masses, at least before the Internet came around. He wasn't just "design and marketing", though those are areas are extremely important. He was also the guy who had a vision for a consumer product and brought the company to fruition. Woz was never going to do that on his own.
It's not just Jobs, and it's not just Woz. They were a team.
Woz would still be doing what his boss at HP told him to do if it wasn't for Steve.
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.