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California Declares Today "Steve Jobs Day"

Posted by samzenpus on from the final-goodbye dept.

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."

14 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Another holiday: by Hartree · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I want a Dennis Ritchie day!

    1. Re:Another holiday: by cognoscentus · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    2. Re:Another holiday: by NotSoHeavyD3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

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    3. Re:Another holiday: by Broolucks · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Another holiday: by tqk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
    5. Re:Another holiday: by Runaway1956 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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!

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    6. Re:Another holiday: by gman003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Another holiday: by LetterRip · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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

    8. Re:Another holiday: by sootman · · Score: 5, Informative

      > 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.

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  2. Re:California lol by geekmux · · Score: 4, Funny

    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'."

  3. Written in C by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Written in C by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  4. Re:Shut the fuck uphttp://apple.slashdot.org/comme by cyber-vandal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. How about a real visionary and genius? by mr_mischief · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.