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"Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story
theodp writes: Didn't like Jobs, the 2013 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher? Maybe you'll prefer Steve Jobs, the 2015 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender. "Steve Jobs is a tech visionary, total dick," writes Esquire's Matt Patches in his mini-review of the just-released Steve Jobs trailer. So, is inspiring kids to become the "Next Steve Jobs" a good or bad thing?
We're all dicks. It will inspire some to try to do it without dickness; others are going to be dicks regardless. Seriously, does anyone make it to the top without at least some dickness?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
I hope I won't be disillusioned by someone who has done research into Woz, but what I have heard of Woz has pretty much been all good. Seemingly kind hearted, personal integrity, not all about the money. While Jobs is the guy who lied to his supposed friend about how much he got paid for a project so he could embezzle money from said friend. I know which person I'd rather my children emulate.
Steve Wozniak as an engineer, and as a person in general, is much more of an inspiration to me.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You have intrigue, a second act, and an untimely death to the lead role.
This is likely not even the final rendition.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
http://www.folklore.org/
Not a bad source for stories about Jobs dickish behavior...and before some /.er wants to point it out I'll do so. There's one story with Knuth where Steve looks like a pretty big doofus. It's been reported that Knuth has denied it - in particular in a talk by Randal Monroe's where he was present - the actual quote from Knuth though could easily be interpreted as avoiding the question rather than denying it.
I'll wait for the furry retelling.
Let's face it; the reason Jobs is so admired is because we live in a "gimme gimme" world. The 1% love him because he actually did "build it" out of nothing (on the backs of thousands of other employees) -- which was their mantra while Mitt Romney was trying to prove that the 1% were the "job creators". The reality of course is that most of the very wealthy inherited their money; but that's the subject of another discussion.
What Jobs did was bully the people below him into creating great work. He knew they could do better if they just put in that 100-hour week and ended up divorced and alcoholics. Only by destroying those below you can achieve greatness by taking credit for all their hard work.
The 1% love Jobs because that's what they want to do; abuse everyone below them and in so doing, whip them into making something they'll be admired for.
But they are forgetting that Steve actually did have some out-of-the-box thinking; he wasn't a total idiot, and he could sell ice-boxes to eskimos. He actually had some skill and talent and a fuckload of charisma, and that's also why people were willing to kill themselves for him.
But the average borg-drone MBA only sees Steve being a dick, and assumes that's how he's supposed to treat his employees, and that's why America is so fucked up.
Apple made nice things, but America can't have nice things. Unless of course, you're already fabulously wealthy.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The Jobs hagiography and cult-like behavior surrounding Apple products from my generation ("millennials") is disturbing. If I had a nickel for the number of times that I asked somebody to click the Start button only to be met with the response "Where's that? Oh, sorry... I use a Mac at home" I'd be a billionaire. Which is more believable: that you don't know the location of a UI element that's been an institution SINCE THE DAY YOU POPPED OUT OF YOUR MOTHER THAT EXISTS ON A PLATFORM WITH GREATER THAN 90% MARKET PENETRATION or that you're not-so-subtly objecting to the hyperbolic pain and anguish that is the necessity of using Windows NT in a corporate environment? Apple's shit is just as uniquely stinky as every other tech vendor's. Their error messages are even more garbage and cryptic than Windows (ever try connecting to a CIFS-shared printer on OS X?). OS X apps crash with the same degree of regularity as Windows. And on top of all of this their UI is downright abhorrent and unapologetically dedicated to what some focus group leader perceives to be the LCD of computer users. OS X is the only desktop environment I've struggled to grok after having used at least a dozen different ones with some degree of regularity in my lifetime. Nothing about Apple at this point distinguishes it from the myriad of other offerings in the consumer IT world except for their Flavor-Aid, "Genius Bars," and pricing model. Jobs created a monster that's far greater of a threat to our freedom than M$. I can't help but think that we'd have been better off had NeXT succeeded and he hadn't had the smug satisfaction of returning to Apple and riding it up from its lowest point in history.
People will put up with a lot of shit if you're brilliant.
If you're just average, they're just going to call you "Asshole!" and walk away.
Teaching people to emulate Jobs is teaching them to be dicks, not to be brilliant.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Concerning Merkel and Greece, it is kind of hard to explain to the people of your country why they would have to work more years to get their pension, so that Greeks can enjoy their pensions a bit earlier. And why they have to pay taxes so that Greeks don't have to.
Someone is lazy and untalented if they think a father who abandoned his child is a dick? There are plenty of other examples of what a horrible person he was, but that alone is enough to damn anyone.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
All of us may be dicks, but very few of us are so dickish as to fuck over even Woz.
That's because very few of us will ever have such an opportunity. While I think most people are generally good and decent, experience has taught me that an awful lot of those same good and decent people are not above temptation. There are a lot of people (including some reading this most likely) who would screw over a friend for financial gain. People will steal if they think they can get away with it. I think Abraham Lincoln said it best - "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
He said "We're all dicks" not "we all have dicks."
I didn't know Jobs well, but I did have a number of direct conversations with him, sat in on meetings at NeXT with him, spent five years developing software for NeXTstep, and had many talks with people who worked closely him (again, mostly at NeXT); our last conversation was him calling me up to yell at me for an op-ed piece of mine in BYTE (Nov 94) called "Whither Nextstep?"
With that tee-up, I'll say that Fassbender's portrayal of Jobs in this trailer pretty much falls flat. Fassbender looks too professional and lacks that burning gaze that Jobs used to such great effect, even while using up the people around him. Frankly, Fassbender comes across more like John Scully trying to act like Steve Jobs than like Jobs himself. Also, it took me a bit to realize that Seth Rogan was supposed to be playing Woz; again, the wrong vibes and aura. Frankly, I think that Jack Black with a beard would have been a better choice for Woz. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Just wondering as it seems like I would like to see how they would do it.
The Greek people didn't take out the loans
No, but they voted for the bad policies that resulted in having to take out loans.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
"I'm gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it." This is Steve Jobs pushing the Macintosh team to redesign the circuit board because some of the spacing was ugly.
Steve Jobs also pushed them to make it boot as fast as possible, rejected computer fans because of noise, and said a multibutton mouse would be inelegant. He went to great pains to make the Apple Store out of glass. Even his slides were Zen.
He was a complex character. He certainly wasn't your typical businessman:
"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products . . . the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."
He was an asshat who accomplished some interesting things.
Let's just leave it at that.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert