"Transcendent plane" doesn't really mean anything at all. In particular, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the qualities ascribed to deities are found in that plane. In fact, you fail to show that the "transcendental plane" has any properties at all, and your argument boils down to "something created the universe". What something? A God? A machine? A random process? Who knows?
You see, science is not only about figuring out things about the physical universe. Science is the general process of filtering the likely from the possible using evidence. Your "transcendental plane" is a complete unknown. You can try to guess what's in it, but there are so many things it could be that you're almost certain to be wrong. If you wanted to know with reasonable certainty, you'd need to peek in it, form hypotheses about the underlying processes, and test them in order to gain confidence. Without science, your "transcendental plane" is an empty and meaningless abstraction.
Besides, even if you could somehow "prove" the existence of a transcendental plane, nothing in your argument is inapplicable to that plane itself, so you'll end up with an infinite hierarchy of "transcendental planes". I don't see the point.
Natural events have culled biodiversity throughout the history of the Earth. Even if 90% of existing species die out, within a hundred million years or so, biodiversity will be back to what it is now. Probably better, if humans die out and are not replaced. That's the beauty of evolution:)
I tend to see C as a regression, and Unix as a great system that unfortunately cannibalized its own succession. Of course, Plan 9 is a poor example since it was made by the same people who made Unix, but had C and Unix not existed, we might just be using Pascal and Multics instead. Would that be better or worse? I have no idea. I think it'd probably be roughly equivalent.
Special relativity was an elegant mathematical framework that gave a basic postulate through which *existing equations* could be derived. Einstein did not discover time dilation nor length contraction. Lorentz/Poincaré/etc did. Einstein merely showed a derivation from simple postulates, which was deemed more satisfactory. That is actually a very incremental contribution. Of course, somebody had to think about it, and he made many more contributions, but it's almost a given that somebody else would have had the idea that "the speed of light is the same in all referentials" eventually.
Ritchie made great contributions, but if C didn't exist, Pascal still would. Unix took inspiration from Multics, which was probably too far ahead of its time. There is no reason somebody else wouldn't have tried something similar, and technology would have caught up anyway. Ultimately, something like Unix has success because it is good and because it fills a niche. People do great stuff all the time; new OS with great ideas are made all the time. They don't take off because they can't stand out from competitors enough in the niche they would normally appeal to. Had Unix not existed, something would eventually have fitted the bill, either something that already exists but never took off because Unix was already there (there are MANY of these), or something new from someone who didn't feel like reinventing the wheel, but would have invented it if necessary.
Apple was originally a well-packaged patchwork of existing technologies. These technologies would not have gone to waste without Apple, and as I said, new OSes pop up all the time. The void would have been filled by something else; or Windows would have had even less competition; either way, not a significant loss. Apple did not invent mp3 players, they merely made a good one. They did not invent the smartphone, they merely made a good one. Had they not done that, we'd still have mp3 players and smartphones, either marginally worse or marginally better, but still.
If Walt Disney hadn't existed, cartoons would still exist. He wasn't the first to make them. A different dominant style might have appeared instead, and perhaps we'd have sane copyright terms. Now that would have been nice.
Re:Well..a bit more than that
on
Dennis Ritchie Day
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Had Einstein not existed, somebody else would have come up with the Theory of Relativity shortly thereafter. It was just the next logical step in the development of physics. Similarly, had Ritchie not existed, all of modern computing would still work pretty much the same way it does now, using tools other people would have developed. Had Jobs not existed, Apple would probably never have got off the ground, an Apple lookalike would have come up a bit later instead, somebody else would have introduced multitouch devices, and so forth. Heck, if Walt Disney never existed, some other creations would have taken the available mindshare instead of Mickey and al. One must always keep in mind that when people invent or develop stuff, it reduces the incentives for others to redo the work. Worse yet, these people who might have done the job later on might have done it better - there was a need for a language like C, and had Ritchie not come up with C, a much better language might have taken its role. Or a worse one. We simply don't know. Basically, people deserve a lot of credit for their discoveries, but the impact of their discoveries is a poor barometer for these people's importance. The more impact a discovery has, the more likely it is that somebody will do it eventually.
I was talking about mathematical notation there. I know that programming languages don't have that ambiguity, but they are nonetheless inspired from mathematical notation.
That is only one of the two syntactic roles assigned to parentheses. The other is to disambiguate priority. For instance, you have to write (a + b) * c if you don't want it to mean add(a, mult(b, c)). But you see, combining multiple lines is very exactly this: priority disambiguation. Consider "if (cond) a; b". Priority is such that the statement is parsed like "(if (cond) a); (b)", because the if statement doesn't eat up semicolons. If you want it to mean "(if (cond) ((a); (b)))", then you could just put parentheses like this: "if (cond) (a; b)". Combining multiple lines into a single logical command precisely requires to override the fact that statements have higher priority than statement separators. This is perfectly consistent with what parentheses *already* do. Syntactically speaking, the if statement is to the semicolon what multiplication is to addition. Seriously.
This being said, I consider that using parentheses both for priority disambiguation and for function calls is one of mathematical notation's biggest fuckups. For instance, a(b + c) can be either multiplication or a function call depending on context. That's just mind-bogglingly terrible. It's not nearly as bad in programming languages because straight up juxtaposition is often a syntax error, but nonetheless I would say that function calls should NOT use parentheses. They should use square or curly brackets, and parentheses should only serve to disambiguate priority, which includes grouping statements. You might see my point better then.
You know, I've always wondered why so many languages use braces the way they do. In the majority of cases, the syntactic role of curly brackets could easily be taken up by mere parentheses.
Heck, you can actually write if/while/for statements in C replacing curly brackets by parentheses and semicolons by commas (caveats: no comma on the last statement and a semicolon after the closing parenthesis). I feel that using (), instead of {}; would make most curly bracket languages more regular. Plus, you'd get to reuse {} for templates instead of that god forsaken <> syntax.
On the other hand, you might as well go all the way: while... endwhile and if... endif are themselves much easier to read than while {...} or if {...}, because it helps a lot visually distinguishing different kinds of blocks. Sometimes it gets confusing inserting code at the right place when there are 5 closing braces in a row (which is still easier than if you have no braces at all).
There are many things they could do, not necessarily what's immediately obvious. After all, the iPod kind of came out of the blue.
They could dabble in the home console market, though a television would do just that. In a nod to Futurama, they could make an actual EyePhone: electronic glasses for augmented reality (though that's probably years from being feasible). They could start making small electric cars. They could go insane and make "Apple condos" with Siri-controlled locks and appliances. Maybe robotic stuff, though I'm not sure what could be done in the near future that's interesting for the masses.
I don't think he was ever interested in "dominating" the ecosystem. Domination in the sense you are describing dilutes profit margins, dilutes brand control and recognition, and the heterogeneity of the platforms you have to support makes it more difficult to offer a stable, consistent experience. Making your own locked down device, on the other hand, drives brand recognition and allows you to get much higher profit margins.
In other words, Apple could license OSX or iOS, but it's not clear they would reap larger profits by doing so. In order to properly compete with Windows or Android, they would have to license it for as much, or less, which would start a price war. Their own products would become much less differentiated from PCs/other smartphones, they would sell much less, and Apple would stop enjoying the outrageous profit margins they have right now. In the end, such a move would make OSX's market share soar, and the consumer would benefit from having more choice, but Apple's profits would likely plummet. Maybe it would make them more profitable in the long term, but that just means they have to choose the right moment to switch up their model. I don't think that's now.
Why not? Caring more about products than profits does not mean you don't care about profits. It means that your first priority is to create great products, and then you minimize the costs of fabricating them, you maximize your profit margin, and you obstruct competition as much as possible.
Getting parts built in sweatshops and suing others on spurious grounds is perfectly consistent with prioritizing product quality. What it isn't consistent with is being a decent human being.
Math exists if it has been invented. In order for math to be "discovered", it would have to "exist" in some other fashion beforehand, and I suppose that the laws of physics could be viewed as being such prior art.
Though, that doesn't really change the thought process of coming up with mathematical tools, so one could say that all math is invented, and that links with the workings of the universe are later discovered.
We don't know what is "part of nature". Nature might very well be a sort of cellular automaton, in which case the only math that could be described as "real" is the math needed to describe a cellular automaton. Nature might very well be discrete, in which case real numbers have absolutely no basis in reality and are an invention proper. What we observe of reality pushes us to make up systems to describe it as accurately as possible, and in turn these systems are shaped, completed and extrapolated by human thought. Take real numbers, for instance: we intuitively perceive a space continuum where any length can conceivably be cut in half, and such a continuum also happens to be easy to manipulate mathematically, so we made up rational numbers and real numbers. We then showed that both systems are not equivalent, that is, real numbers are a strict superset of rational numbers.
But we don't know if the set of numbers required to accurately describe the universe is equal to either, or a superset of reals, or a subset of rationals, or one of the zillion subsets of reals that could be concisely described, or some completely awkward "thing" that's virtually impossible to formalize. Math covers an extremely wide range of ideas and formalism. Maybe we could frame some of it as "discoveries", but 99% of math is clearly invention and does not correspond to anything real, though it can certainly approximate what we see. The abstract concept of Turing-computability might be a discovery, but I would say real numbers are an invention.
If you really want to save time, navigate with the keyboard, not with the mouse. And if you really want to use the mouse, put the tabs at the bottom, to minimize movement from the task bar to the tabs.
MDI programs might not close themselves when the last document is closed, but it would be sensible behavior to do so. I'm often annoyed that they don't.
Hiding http is not really useful, but it saves some space in very common cases and it's pretty obvious that it's there. So who cares?
Of course! But then I realized that when I didn't go to parties, somebody else was a really big hit instead. Since that role could be filled without me, I decided to go on a quest to find something that I could do where I could not be replaced. Since then I have set a turd shop; my only client was an old man who is since deceased and a kid or two for pranks, but so far I have not seen any competition, and when I tried closing the shop for a couple months, nothing filled the void. I now feel irreplaceable and am quite confident that I have found my way.
I thought there would have been a Slashdot comment, but I didn't pay attention. I agree that it would have been appropriate, so maybe Ritchie was indeed short-changed here.
Well, there are tens of thousands of people who have had a great, lasting impact on society, may that be contributing greatly to practical computer science, to theoretical computer science, to the enjoyment of electronic devices, to the understanding of the universe, to peace, to curing diseases, and whatever else it is that matters. If everybody of Ritchie's caliber made headlines, you would have a headline every goddamn day.
If attention was given on pro-rata of achievement, given the understandably limited attention span we all have, the death of someone should never make headlines. A headline is appropriate to notify people of something they might care about, or to draw their attention to something. For this reason, it is understandable that the death of a celebrity gets a headline, or the death of somebody unknown but whose actions are inspiring for a lot of people. Jobs' death can be in the newspaper, because everybody knows who he is. Ritchie's can be on Slashdot, because people here are likely to care, but in the big picture, nobody cares. That might seem unfair, but keep in mind that it is that or nothing: nobody has the attention span to honor everybody who is deserving, other than within their respective specialties, or acquaintances.
I agree that we rarely converge on the best possible solution (after all, even Unix killed its own successor, Plan 9 - if the best possible solution always won, Unix would be dead). I am just saying that Unix does fill some roles (open source fosters research and development, many systems require multi-task and multi-user, etc.), and that its existence made the development of alternatives less likely and their success less probable, so that it is difficult to tell what would have happened if it did not exist. Unix is not the only open source multi-task multi-user system ever made, and they are not all inspired from Unix. It makes sense to think that one of them would have filled Unix's role in its absence.
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.
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.
There is no shortage of 5 second soundbites that work, they just happen to hand out a straw man to your opponents on a silver platter. For instance: "WE WILL ALL DIE" works to get people to care about climate change. Of course, that statement is false and ridiculous, but nuance in a statement will never fly against the lack thereof. Reasonable people cannot be heard by the masses unless they resort to the same type of rhetoric as their opponents, in which case they cease to be reasonable, but start being effective. Pretty unfortunate, really:(
Slashdot Mirror
"Transcendent plane" doesn't really mean anything at all. In particular, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the qualities ascribed to deities are found in that plane. In fact, you fail to show that the "transcendental plane" has any properties at all, and your argument boils down to "something created the universe". What something? A God? A machine? A random process? Who knows?
You see, science is not only about figuring out things about the physical universe. Science is the general process of filtering the likely from the possible using evidence. Your "transcendental plane" is a complete unknown. You can try to guess what's in it, but there are so many things it could be that you're almost certain to be wrong. If you wanted to know with reasonable certainty, you'd need to peek in it, form hypotheses about the underlying processes, and test them in order to gain confidence. Without science, your "transcendental plane" is an empty and meaningless abstraction.
Besides, even if you could somehow "prove" the existence of a transcendental plane, nothing in your argument is inapplicable to that plane itself, so you'll end up with an infinite hierarchy of "transcendental planes". I don't see the point.
Natural events have culled biodiversity throughout the history of the Earth. Even if 90% of existing species die out, within a hundred million years or so, biodiversity will be back to what it is now. Probably better, if humans die out and are not replaced. That's the beauty of evolution :)
I tend to see C as a regression, and Unix as a great system that unfortunately cannibalized its own succession. Of course, Plan 9 is a poor example since it was made by the same people who made Unix, but had C and Unix not existed, we might just be using Pascal and Multics instead. Would that be better or worse? I have no idea. I think it'd probably be roughly equivalent.
Special relativity was an elegant mathematical framework that gave a basic postulate through which *existing equations* could be derived. Einstein did not discover time dilation nor length contraction. Lorentz/Poincaré/etc did. Einstein merely showed a derivation from simple postulates, which was deemed more satisfactory. That is actually a very incremental contribution. Of course, somebody had to think about it, and he made many more contributions, but it's almost a given that somebody else would have had the idea that "the speed of light is the same in all referentials" eventually.
Ritchie made great contributions, but if C didn't exist, Pascal still would. Unix took inspiration from Multics, which was probably too far ahead of its time. There is no reason somebody else wouldn't have tried something similar, and technology would have caught up anyway. Ultimately, something like Unix has success because it is good and because it fills a niche. People do great stuff all the time; new OS with great ideas are made all the time. They don't take off because they can't stand out from competitors enough in the niche they would normally appeal to. Had Unix not existed, something would eventually have fitted the bill, either something that already exists but never took off because Unix was already there (there are MANY of these), or something new from someone who didn't feel like reinventing the wheel, but would have invented it if necessary.
Apple was originally a well-packaged patchwork of existing technologies. These technologies would not have gone to waste without Apple, and as I said, new OSes pop up all the time. The void would have been filled by something else; or Windows would have had even less competition; either way, not a significant loss. Apple did not invent mp3 players, they merely made a good one. They did not invent the smartphone, they merely made a good one. Had they not done that, we'd still have mp3 players and smartphones, either marginally worse or marginally better, but still.
If Walt Disney hadn't existed, cartoons would still exist. He wasn't the first to make them. A different dominant style might have appeared instead, and perhaps we'd have sane copyright terms. Now that would have been nice.
Had Einstein not existed, somebody else would have come up with the Theory of Relativity shortly thereafter. It was just the next logical step in the development of physics. Similarly, had Ritchie not existed, all of modern computing would still work pretty much the same way it does now, using tools other people would have developed. Had Jobs not existed, Apple would probably never have got off the ground, an Apple lookalike would have come up a bit later instead, somebody else would have introduced multitouch devices, and so forth. Heck, if Walt Disney never existed, some other creations would have taken the available mindshare instead of Mickey and al. One must always keep in mind that when people invent or develop stuff, it reduces the incentives for others to redo the work. Worse yet, these people who might have done the job later on might have done it better - there was a need for a language like C, and had Ritchie not come up with C, a much better language might have taken its role. Or a worse one. We simply don't know. Basically, people deserve a lot of credit for their discoveries, but the impact of their discoveries is a poor barometer for these people's importance. The more impact a discovery has, the more likely it is that somebody will do it eventually.
I was talking about mathematical notation there. I know that programming languages don't have that ambiguity, but they are nonetheless inspired from mathematical notation.
That is only one of the two syntactic roles assigned to parentheses. The other is to disambiguate priority. For instance, you have to write (a + b) * c if you don't want it to mean add(a, mult(b, c)). But you see, combining multiple lines is very exactly this: priority disambiguation. Consider "if (cond) a; b". Priority is such that the statement is parsed like "(if (cond) a); (b)", because the if statement doesn't eat up semicolons. If you want it to mean "(if (cond) ((a); (b)))", then you could just put parentheses like this: "if (cond) (a; b)". Combining multiple lines into a single logical command precisely requires to override the fact that statements have higher priority than statement separators. This is perfectly consistent with what parentheses *already* do. Syntactically speaking, the if statement is to the semicolon what multiplication is to addition. Seriously.
This being said, I consider that using parentheses both for priority disambiguation and for function calls is one of mathematical notation's biggest fuckups. For instance, a(b + c) can be either multiplication or a function call depending on context. That's just mind-bogglingly terrible. It's not nearly as bad in programming languages because straight up juxtaposition is often a syntax error, but nonetheless I would say that function calls should NOT use parentheses. They should use square or curly brackets, and parentheses should only serve to disambiguate priority, which includes grouping statements. You might see my point better then.
You know, I've always wondered why so many languages use braces the way they do. In the majority of cases, the syntactic role of curly brackets could easily be taken up by mere parentheses.
Heck, you can actually write if/while/for statements in C replacing curly brackets by parentheses and semicolons by commas (caveats: no comma on the last statement and a semicolon after the closing parenthesis). I feel that using (), instead of {}; would make most curly bracket languages more regular. Plus, you'd get to reuse {} for templates instead of that god forsaken <> syntax.
On the other hand, you might as well go all the way: while ... endwhile and if ... endif are themselves much easier to read than while {...} or if {...}, because it helps a lot visually distinguishing different kinds of blocks. Sometimes it gets confusing inserting code at the right place when there are 5 closing braces in a row (which is still easier than if you have no braces at all).
There are many things they could do, not necessarily what's immediately obvious. After all, the iPod kind of came out of the blue.
They could dabble in the home console market, though a television would do just that. In a nod to Futurama, they could make an actual EyePhone: electronic glasses for augmented reality (though that's probably years from being feasible). They could start making small electric cars. They could go insane and make "Apple condos" with Siri-controlled locks and appliances. Maybe robotic stuff, though I'm not sure what could be done in the near future that's interesting for the masses.
I don't think he was ever interested in "dominating" the ecosystem. Domination in the sense you are describing dilutes profit margins, dilutes brand control and recognition, and the heterogeneity of the platforms you have to support makes it more difficult to offer a stable, consistent experience. Making your own locked down device, on the other hand, drives brand recognition and allows you to get much higher profit margins.
In other words, Apple could license OSX or iOS, but it's not clear they would reap larger profits by doing so. In order to properly compete with Windows or Android, they would have to license it for as much, or less, which would start a price war. Their own products would become much less differentiated from PCs/other smartphones, they would sell much less, and Apple would stop enjoying the outrageous profit margins they have right now. In the end, such a move would make OSX's market share soar, and the consumer would benefit from having more choice, but Apple's profits would likely plummet. Maybe it would make them more profitable in the long term, but that just means they have to choose the right moment to switch up their model. I don't think that's now.
Why not? Caring more about products than profits does not mean you don't care about profits. It means that your first priority is to create great products, and then you minimize the costs of fabricating them, you maximize your profit margin, and you obstruct competition as much as possible.
Getting parts built in sweatshops and suing others on spurious grounds is perfectly consistent with prioritizing product quality. What it isn't consistent with is being a decent human being.
Who knows, that AC might be an early prototype.
Math exists if it has been invented. In order for math to be "discovered", it would have to "exist" in some other fashion beforehand, and I suppose that the laws of physics could be viewed as being such prior art.
Though, that doesn't really change the thought process of coming up with mathematical tools, so one could say that all math is invented, and that links with the workings of the universe are later discovered.
We don't know what is "part of nature". Nature might very well be a sort of cellular automaton, in which case the only math that could be described as "real" is the math needed to describe a cellular automaton. Nature might very well be discrete, in which case real numbers have absolutely no basis in reality and are an invention proper. What we observe of reality pushes us to make up systems to describe it as accurately as possible, and in turn these systems are shaped, completed and extrapolated by human thought. Take real numbers, for instance: we intuitively perceive a space continuum where any length can conceivably be cut in half, and such a continuum also happens to be easy to manipulate mathematically, so we made up rational numbers and real numbers. We then showed that both systems are not equivalent, that is, real numbers are a strict superset of rational numbers.
But we don't know if the set of numbers required to accurately describe the universe is equal to either, or a superset of reals, or a subset of rationals, or one of the zillion subsets of reals that could be concisely described, or some completely awkward "thing" that's virtually impossible to formalize. Math covers an extremely wide range of ideas and formalism. Maybe we could frame some of it as "discoveries", but 99% of math is clearly invention and does not correspond to anything real, though it can certainly approximate what we see. The abstract concept of Turing-computability might be a discovery, but I would say real numbers are an invention.
If you really want to save time, navigate with the keyboard, not with the mouse. And if you really want to use the mouse, put the tabs at the bottom, to minimize movement from the task bar to the tabs.
MDI programs might not close themselves when the last document is closed, but it would be sensible behavior to do so. I'm often annoyed that they don't.
Hiding http is not really useful, but it saves some space in very common cases and it's pretty obvious that it's there. So who cares?
Of course! But then I realized that when I didn't go to parties, somebody else was a really big hit instead. Since that role could be filled without me, I decided to go on a quest to find something that I could do where I could not be replaced. Since then I have set a turd shop; my only client was an old man who is since deceased and a kid or two for pranks, but so far I have not seen any competition, and when I tried closing the shop for a couple months, nothing filled the void. I now feel irreplaceable and am quite confident that I have found my way.
Slashdot story, I mean. I'm sure comments are a-plenty :)
I thought there would have been a Slashdot comment, but I didn't pay attention. I agree that it would have been appropriate, so maybe Ritchie was indeed short-changed here.
Well, there are tens of thousands of people who have had a great, lasting impact on society, may that be contributing greatly to practical computer science, to theoretical computer science, to the enjoyment of electronic devices, to the understanding of the universe, to peace, to curing diseases, and whatever else it is that matters. If everybody of Ritchie's caliber made headlines, you would have a headline every goddamn day.
If attention was given on pro-rata of achievement, given the understandably limited attention span we all have, the death of someone should never make headlines. A headline is appropriate to notify people of something they might care about, or to draw their attention to something. For this reason, it is understandable that the death of a celebrity gets a headline, or the death of somebody unknown but whose actions are inspiring for a lot of people. Jobs' death can be in the newspaper, because everybody knows who he is. Ritchie's can be on Slashdot, because people here are likely to care, but in the big picture, nobody cares. That might seem unfair, but keep in mind that it is that or nothing: nobody has the attention span to honor everybody who is deserving, other than within their respective specialties, or acquaintances.
I agree that we rarely converge on the best possible solution (after all, even Unix killed its own successor, Plan 9 - if the best possible solution always won, Unix would be dead). I am just saying that Unix does fill some roles (open source fosters research and development, many systems require multi-task and multi-user, etc.), and that its existence made the development of alternatives less likely and their success less probable, so that it is difficult to tell what would have happened if it did not exist. Unix is not the only open source multi-task multi-user system ever made, and they are not all inspired from Unix. It makes sense to think that one of them would have filled Unix's role in its absence.
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.
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.
Yeah "WHO NEEDS CONTEXT" is a good one too.
There is no shortage of 5 second soundbites that work, they just happen to hand out a straw man to your opponents on a silver platter. For instance: "WE WILL ALL DIE" works to get people to care about climate change. Of course, that statement is false and ridiculous, but nuance in a statement will never fly against the lack thereof. Reasonable people cannot be heard by the masses unless they resort to the same type of rhetoric as their opponents, in which case they cease to be reasonable, but start being effective. Pretty unfortunate, really :(