California Declares Today "Steve Jobs Day"

First time accepted submitter onezeta writes "California Gov. Jerry Brown, in an announcement via a Twitter post, has declared it 'Steve Jobs Day.' The Apple co-founder's life as a technology trailblazer will be marked Sunday by his company's home state at a private memorial service and in a television documentary airing tonight at 8 pm EST on Discovery."

Comments

Another holiday:

[Hartree]

I want a Dennis Ritchie day!

Re:Another holiday:

[cognoscentus]

Sure they do... My condolences to his son Lionel, by the way.

Re:Another holiday:

[eexaa]

He didn't look nor act like a magician, he probably had nothing to do with recent computers...

Actually this whole thing is pretty sad.

Re:Another holiday:

[NotSoHeavyD3]

It's like they're creating a big holiday for a guy who happened to build a bunch of builds because they were really nice while at the same time ignoring the death of the guy who invented the concrete that is the basis for the construction that everybody uses, including that first guy.(Go ahead everybody, come up with your own analogy, it's fun.)

Re:Another holiday:

[hedwards]

If only Steve Jobs had had that sort of foresight, we might actually get to own the computers we purchase.

Re:Another holiday:

[msobkow]

He wasn't a true American. He didn't earn millions or billions by offshoring his factories. He didn't profit by patenting his work. And he never sued anyone.

If you want a state memorial, you have to be a ruthless, immoral, no-holds-barred capitalist.

Re:Another holiday:

[Broolucks]

I don't really like these analogies because they are comparing apples and oranges. Inventing concrete is nice and all, but people do need nice buildings, and the inventor of concrete might be completely incapable to build anything but large cubes of concrete, much like someone who designs nice buildings might be clueless about materials. Most programmers are godawful at design, whereas most designers are godawful at programming, so in my book they are all equally deserving. We need all of these people.

This being said, Steve Jobs is getting clearly disproportionate attention. I think Ritchie is getting just as much attention and celebration as I think he should, but Steve Jobs is getting way, way, WAY more than he deserves, it's getting embarrassing at this point. I mean, a headline I can understand, but this is ridiculous.

Re:Another holiday:

[tqk]

He didn't look nor act like a magician ...

That was the best part of his act.

Just think, what, forty years ago he designed a programming language in order to port an operating system that would eventually run on everything from PDP-11's through cell phones, so they could play a computer game on (then) new hardware.

Who but dmr comes up with !@#$ like that? That was a class act.

I still haven't seen any mention of his passing in my newspaper. He's like a ghost in the machine, just as he always intended. Awesome.

Re:Another holiday:

[Broolucks]

When you create something, normally, you fill a niche. Dennis Ritchie did something useful and did it well, but if his stuff took off, that's because there was a need for it in some way. If he didn't exist, then somebody else would have filled that need a short while later, with something that might have been better or worse, there is no way to tell. Without Ritchie you would have no UNIX, but then somebody else would have made something similar. To say that Steve Jobs would be nothing without Ritchie is disingenuous, because without Ritchie he would have based his work on something else that would have been roughly equivalent. Jobs is a designer, he would base his design on whatever technologies are available, no matter who made them, and he would have success no matter what.

For the most part, technology (much like science) progresses at its own rhythm. At any point in time, the current state of science and technology allows for a certain number of incremental improvements, and hundreds if not thousands of people have the technical capability to make these improvements. These improvements will happen no matter what, by one or more people with the technical capability, within a limited time window. Individuals really don't matter all that much.

Re:Another holiday:

[wisnoskij]

Everyone should know who that is, at the very very least he is as important at Jobs and many people would say much more.

Re:Another holiday:

[Runaway1956]

"I think Ritchie is getting just as much attention and celebration as I think he should, "

That's a little bit funny, when you consider that Mr. Ritchie doesn't seem to have made any headlines at all. Only after reading OP above, did I do a google search, to learn that Mr. Ritchie is, indeed, just as dead as Steve Jobs.

Rest in Peace, Dennis Ritchie, and thank you!

Re:Another holiday:

[gman003]

I suggest you find a copy of "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing". Jobs was not a good manager, and was a downright terrible businessman. He was a good leader, very inspirational, but independently he was a failure at making a product people would buy. I believe he was successful at Apple (the second time) mainly because he was managed well, because he had people in charge who would say "no, you can't do that, that's too expensive" or "no, you don't need to do that, nobody cares about that".

Re:Another holiday:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really like these analogies because they are comparing apples and oranges.

More like comparing Apple to Unix, if you ask me.

Re:Another holiday:

[gman003]

Jobs was an over-perfectionist. He commissioned a logo from Paul Rand for $100,000, and then sent memos to every retail store specifying the exact colors to use and that the logo absolutely must be tilted at precisely 22 degrees. He mandated that the NeXT Cube be a perfect cube - most manufactured cubes have a shallow draft of half a degree or so so it can be removed from the mold; at the time there was only one foundry in the country capable of forming absolute perfect cubes. His market research showed that universities (his main target demographic) wanted a powerful computer for ~$6,500; the first NeXT computer was $9,999 because of all the perfectionist things Jobs demanded be added. He bought $10,000 sofas for the office and had a full-time art curator.

If any of those things sound like bad business decisions for a company that never employed more than 600 people and never had significant sales, congratulations, you're a better businessman than Steve Jobs.

Re:Another holiday:

[thetoadwarrior]

Turok the dinosaur hunter got its own street in a city. Anyone can do it if you want to throw some money their way. Apple obviously rakes in a lot of money for California so of course California is going to give him a day.

Re:Another holiday:

[arth1]

At least he's giving back, being a philanthropist, unlike Steve Jobs, whose first action when regaining the rudder of Apple in 1997 was to cut Apples charitable initiatives, It stayed that way until early this fall - after Jobs had mostly stepped down and Apple had been publicly criticized, they added a company matching of employee contribution.

That doesn't mean I like Bill Gates, but at least he's human. Jobs was just an asshole with a smile. People buy that.

Re:Another holiday:

[LucidBeast]

How about Alan Turing day!

Of course Steve Jobs day is decided by bunch of n00bs.

Re:Another holiday:

[betterunixthanunix]

it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.

"The masses" must refer to people who had the money to spend on a Lisa or a Macintosh. Most people did not see a GUI until Windows 95.

As for Ritchie, his most important contribution was not C, but rather his work on UNIX. You know about Unix (as it is now capitalized), right? That's the operating system on which the World Wide Web was originally built, the operating system that popularized the "everything is a file" abstraction, and yes, the operating system that Mac OS X is based on. Steve Jobs' contribution was in identifying things that could marketed, but it was men like Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and Lee Felsenstein, and many other unknown engineers and researchers, who provided Jobs with something to identify in the first place.

Sure, all these things would have "eventually" been created by someone else, but guess what? The GUI, tablet computers, etc. would have also been "eventually" marketed by someone else. We care about Steve Jobs because he brought things to market before other people did, and that is why we care about C, Unix, and Ritchie.

Re:Another holiday:

[ScrewMaster]

I'm genuinely confused by NeXT's failures.

I'm not. The problem I think they had was that of many startups with a great product: they expected customers to flock to them because they were, in fact, good. The reality is that even great ideas and products need marketing. Bad ideas and products even more so. The "if you build it they will come" mentality rarely works out in practice. At the very least, you have to let people know you have a product, and that requires sales and marketing.

Re:Another holiday:

[LetterRip]

Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.

Except that is the opposite of history - Jobs kept trying to kill the project at Apple that brought the GUI to the masses. Raskin and his team had already incorporated most of the Xerox PARC technology in the Macintosh project, and Steve wanted it killed, so Raskin went over his head. Steve still kept trying to kill the project so Raskin organized a field trip to Xerox PARC so that Jobs could get a clearer idea of why the ideas were important and would hopefully stop trying to kill the project. After this instead of trying to kill the Mac, Jobs forced Raskin out to take his project.

So we have the GUI in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html

Re:Another holiday:

[thetoadwarrior]

Yes he's a charitable person whose scholarship program is racist and who invests in companies that are damaging the nations they claim to help because all they're concerned about, imo, is profit to fix their narrow set of causes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Investments

The foundation invests the assets that it has not yet distributed, with the exclusive goal of maximizing the return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been criticized for worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty.[55] These include companies that pollute heavily and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world.[56] In response to press criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments to assess social responsibility.[57] It subsequently cancelled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.[58]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

What good is curing Malaria for those people when in order to get there you help turn their environment into a complete mess? Also while Apple did certainly cut back on charity they didn't give it up completely and had with charities like Red.

http://www.apple.com/uk/ipod/red/

http://www.joinred.com/red/

The (RED) team would like to express condolences to Steve Jobs' family, friends and colleagues today. Mr. Jobs led Apple into its partnership with (RED) in 2006 and that partnership has helped to save the lives of millions of people with HIV in Africa. We are forever grateful for his leadership.

Re:Another holiday:

[sootman]

> If any of those things sound like bad business
> decisions for a company that never employed
> more than 600 people and never had significant
> sales, congratulations, you're a better
> businessman than Steve Jobs.

Way to cherry-pick your facts. Did you co-found what is, at the moment, the most valuable company in the world? Did you form another company (NeXT) for a few tens of millions of dollars and sell it for $429 million a few years later? Did you buy an animation studio for $10 million and sell it $7.4 BILLION twenty years later? (Bonus question: did you run both of those companies at the same time?) Ever create any products that sell in the tens or hundreds of millions? And not just paperclips or address labels or something like that, but nice, multi-hundred-dollar items? No? Well, congratulations, you're a worse businessman than Steve Jobs.

His time at NeXT was his time to try various things, find out who he was (he was only 30 at the time), try MORE things, FAIL a little, and learn. You make it sound like that's a bad thing.

And the part about "sent memos to every retail store specifying the exact colors to use and that the logo absolutely must be tilted at precisely 22 degrees"? EVERYONE does that. That's totally standard in the design world. Ever wonder why you don't see the Ford logo in purple, the Coke logo in green, or the Nike swoosh at a crazy angle? DESIGN GUIDELINES, that's why. EVERY company has them. Fucking foursquare has an intricate collection of design guidelines.

Re:Another holiday:

[macs4all]

Chances are there wouldn't have been an Apple if not for Ritchie.

Hmmm. I think not.

I don't think that C (even Objective-C) was used by Apple until later on in the Mac days. The Apple 1 through /// were all 6502 Assembler-based. "BIOS" (Monitor ROM), DOS (all versions) and all applications were either 6502 Assembler or BASIC (neither of which BASICs were C-based).

Then along came the Lisa, which was a combination of 68k Assembler and Pascal, with bits and pieces of SmallTalk and even Apple's Dylan thrown in. But no C. Same with the 68k Macs.

Later, C began to be used instead of Pascal, perhaps when the PPC Macs began to appear in the early 1990s. I would imagine that Apple's first Unix, A/UX, was C-based as well. But that wasn't until 1988, long after Apple was well-established as a company.

Objective-C at Apple didn't come along until much later, as the language in which NeXTStep was written.

So, no, I really don't think that Mr. Ritchie had all that much to do with the success of Apple, sorry.

BTW, that is in no way intended as a slight against the achievements of the late, great Dennis Ritchie. Most of us who call ourselves "developers" wouldn't have careers if it weren't for his part in computing history...

Re:Another holiday:

[drinkypoo]

Jobs failed at making computers in the middle Macintosh era because it's not an industry where you can just do any old thing you like. Oh, it was at the beginning, when the Apple I came along, because the barrier to entry was low — there was no entrenched competition in the particular space into which they sold. But Apple clearly lost its way after the Macintosh II. The Quadra era was a downright insulting time to be a Mac user, and it's when they lost me. You want me to pay WHAT for a machine a third as powerful as a PC? Uhhhhhh no.

The NeXT is the same story, unfortunately. The fastest processor ever available was a 68040, and it was one of the most expensive workstations around. Thou shalt pay what I think it's worth? Fuck you, Steve.

So putting everything he wanted in the box didn't work, and NeXT limped along selling the OS for PCs until it became part of the deal to get Steve Jobs, rather than the BeOS which I personally think would have been a far superior choice when compared to NeXTStep, Steve Jobs aside. I do think that Jobs is a better boss than Gassee... NeXT could have worked if he hadn't botched it, but Be was doomed to fail from the beginning because they didn't offer enough. Yeah, it's fast, but next year I'll be able to buy twice as much computer for the same money, so why do I care? And ultimately, even though OSX is about as responsive to the user on a modern machine as NeXTStep is on an antique, people still use it happily.

PIXAR is an example where the Steve Jobs method works, because as it turns out, letting the creatives run with their creativity is what makes things that people want to see. You do need some who are tapped into society and not off in their own little world, but you need some of those people too. But it didn't work for NeXT, which is too bad, because it's still a pretty nice OS today, and for its day it was astounding.

Re:Another holiday:

[drinkypoo]

It was slow, just like macs were slow. When workstations were going RISC and PCs were getting clock-multiplied 486s the NeXT and the Apple machines were still dorking around with 68k, and they didn't even go to the 68060! Surely Apple had the clout to get Motorola to make a reasonably-priced, pin-compatible version of the '060 (at the time, for example, they were ordering 68040s without MMUs to save money, so most Quadras are shitty Unix machines) and could have gone that way as a stopgap but instead they shat upon their customer base. NeXT saw the writing on the wall, I guess, since they developed an x86 version, but it retained the outrageous cost and meanwhile simply threw away any benefit they had gained by producing their own workstation. IOW, NeXT was doomed to failure from day one, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the optical drive.

Re:Another holiday:

[drinkypoo]

By the time clock-multiplied 486s appeared, Apple was already gearing up for PowerPC. They saw the writing on the wall for CISC designs, but I agree they should have hedged their bets by developing a '060-based Mac.

Yes, but remember, PowerPC didn't even exist yet. And PowerPC macs ALSO lagged in performance for real work (although they benchmarked very fast) until Altivec, and yet the PPC macs still cost more than PCs which were notably faster than they were. It wasn't until the G3 that you could even take Apple seriously, not until the G4 that they had a processor that was actually competitive... and then the G5 was heinously overpriced. Almost like Apple learned nothing from the beginning of PPC, or for that matter, from the 68k era. At least the 6800 series was cheap.

When you add to this insult the fact that they could have done little more than update the CPU and the ROM to support the '060 it makes the gap between 68k and PPC utterly inexplicable, but only if you don't account for arrogance.

NO

[Killer Instinct]

iSorry but I declare it Dennis Ritchie Day!

Re:NO

[Anonymous Coward]

iSorry but I declare it Dennis Ritchie Day!

I agree. How about we honor a few more true creative minds too. Steve Jobs day? Might as well declare a Nelson Rockefeller day, or a British Petroleum day. The fact that it's California doing this makes it suspect from the beginning, so I would suggest the following as more rational substitutes (feel free to add more):

Ken Thompson Day (yeah, Apple, where would you be without C and Unix?)

James Clerk Maxwell Day

Max Planck Day

Nikola Tesla Day

Einstein Day

Marie & Pierre Curie Day

Darwin Day

Jonas Salk Day

Galileo Galilei Day

Copernicus Day

Van Leeuwenhoek Day

I left Edison off the list because he was a bit too much like Jobs for my taste.

Re:NO

[arth1]

Yebbut, how many of those were Californians?
You don't expect California to declare a day for out-of-staters, do you?

And besides, many of the people on your list have had national days for them declared by the president - that kind of trumps California, no?

But its a Sunday

[rossdee]

They should Mondayize it, like Columbus Day, Presidents Day, and MLK Day.

Whats the point of a Holiday if nobody has the day off?

For that matter why are Halloween and Valentines Day called holidays - nobody has them off...

Misspelling?

[Anonymous Coward]

CORRECTION: Today is blow jobs day!

Oh god please no. Really?

[flimflammer]

n/t

Re:California lol

[geekmux]

I'm waiting for "balanced budget" day.

It's right on the calendar man...it's a holiday in fact.

See, says right here, "Balanced Budget day is usually celebrated the day after 'Cold Day in Hell'."

Written in C

[SgtChaireBourne]

Just think, what, forty years ago he designed a programming language in order to port an operating system that would eventually run on everything from PDP-11's through cell phones, so they could play a computer game on (then) new hardware.

It's not just that C is the second most common programming language: Most of the other languages are actually written in C. That includes Perl, Python, and PHP.

Re:Written in C

[ScrewMaster]

Just think, what, forty years ago he designed a programming language in order to port an operating system that would eventually run on everything from PDP-11's through cell phones, so they could play a computer game on (then) new hardware.

It's not just that C is the second most common programming language: Most of the other languages are actually written in C. That includes Perl, Python, and PHP.

Not only that, but realistically you have to count embedded systems, not just personal computing devices. By that measure, C is still by far the most popular programming language on the planet.

so....

[atarione]

just checking does this mean I can park my Mercedes in the Handicapped spots today?

Hey, I like my apple stuff...

[Quiet_Desperation]

...but if this is the silliest thing the California government does for the rest of the year, we Californians will consider ourselves fortunate.

Hard to feel any antipathy towards Jobs when our statehouse is basically a giant, impacted colon full of human shit.

By Design

[andersh]

They were designed by his friend Issey Miyake after Steve decided a corporate image and uniform would help his company. I believe he was impressed by the workers' uniforms at Sony.

Found a source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fash-track/steve-jobs-issey-miyake-black-turtlenecks-246808

Not as much attention

[SuperKendall]

I was astounded that on the day Ritchie died, and the day AFTER, there was no posted story on Slashdot. I assumed someone was waiting for a good retrospective summary, but even so that's a long time and it was newsworthy enough to post right away...

I'm not sure if Jobs is getting more attention than he deserved, but Ritchie is definitely being short-changed.

Re:Shut the fuck up

[Hartree]

Except I wasn't angry when I wrote that.

Of all things, I was taking a walk down memory lane on a Sunday morning, listening to Henry Mancini's version of Brian's Song and feeling a bit wistful.

Dennis was a sort that I like. He made great tools for the sake of making great tools and didn't make much fuss over himself.

That's why he wasn't so well known. I like that. But, YMMV. If it helps your day to tell me to STFU, what the hey. I'll just drink my coffee and listen to Brian's Song again.

Wow. get a load of that crap.

[unity100]

The creator of C, the language which enabled ALL of these shit - including EVERYthing steve jobs has done - have died, and california has the 'foresight' to declare a steve jobs day.

This shows how deep is the retardedness that is valuing form over substance in our society is. Few buttons to push and shiny metallic corners on an object is more important than any stuff that make those stuff actually run.

Re:Shut the fuck uphttp://apple.slashdot.org/comme

[cyber-vandal]

Tell that to the millions of people who fucking cried when a ruthless capitalist that they didn't even know died. That's far far more pathetic.

How about a real visionary and genius?

[mr_mischief]

Steve Jobs helped make Objective C, an offshoot of C, popular.
Dennis Ritchie made C.

Steve Jobs convinced his company to port an OS.
Dennis Ritchie helped create the very idea of a portable OS.

Steve Jobs eventually decided Unix would make a good basis for the OS on his hardware.
Dennis Ritchie helped Ken Thompson create Unix.

Steve Jobs and his company eventually decided that a similar OS and development stack across all the company's devices would be a useful idea.
Dennis Ritchie helped create an OS and development stack used on everything from phones to supercomputers.

Re:Shut the fuck uphttp://apple.slashdot.org/comme

[thetoadwarrior]

I agree completely that there were a lot of fake people crying over Steve Jobs but that doesn't mean people should turn around take advantage of Dennis Richie's death to stick it to Steve Jobs. It's disrespectful to both men and I'd argue it's more disrespectful to Dennis Richie.

Two men have died. People should just let them rest in peace and not use either person's death to push an agenda.