Everybody in this thread -
The natural 25-26 hour schedule is completely normal for most diurnal mammals. They've done research with humans giving them NO time queues for days, and it turns out EVERYBODY falls into a slightly over 24-hour schedule.
The conclusion here is that our chemical engines are too imprecise for us to evolve a dead-on circadian cycle. So instead evolution gave us an unaided circadian cycle that's calibrated with a mean of about 25 hours, so that people with a naturally extremely short cycle are still just over 24 hours, and it goes up from there. Then we get a natural reset cue to adjust the cycle every day to keep it in sync with the world. The primary component of the reset signal is sunlight exposure in the morning. If you get up at a reasonable time (near or after sunrise) and GET OUTDOORS for about 15 minutes, then you will feel like going to bed at the right time to get enough sleep and want to get up at about the same time the next day. We and our ancestors spent tens of millions of years with no choice but to receive natural light in the morning, so it was a pretty good system before we evolved to live in our parent's basements and stare at little screens all day.
I suffer big time from this - every day I want to stay up and get up about an hour or so later than I did the day before - but not if I'm spending much time outdoors, especially in the morning. When I'm backpacking, wholly cow do I just want to go to bed when it gets dark, and get up just after sunrise. If we spent the day exercising outdoors like evolution intended, we wouldn't have this problem... but good luck being able to/wanting to do that all the time. But if you just drag yourself out of bed and take a 15 minute walk outdoors, even if it's cloudy or right around sunrise, problem solved. It does get tricky if you have to be at work before sunrise. Or if you work night shift (which I did for about 2 years) you're just *'ed.
I think the light exposure causes melanin production on about a 14 hour delay, making us want top go to sleep about 16 hours after exposure. This is why melanin supplements near bedtime are somewhat functional as a surrogate for actual light exposure in the morning.
Or as an alternate solution, since the day gets longer by about 1.7 milliseconds per century, by my calculations you could just wait about 200 million years for the earth to get in sync with your natural clock.
I've been saying that this is where Apple's going for a while. Either the iPhone 5 or the one after it will only have a Thunderbolt port, no other dock connector (the Thunderbolt port can take a USB2 or Firewire to Thunderbolt cable for everyone with old computers/pc's and all.) And I be that after Mountain Lion, about two years from now, iOS and OSX will merge into one OS. The OS will know what hardware it's on and provide an appropriate user interface.
Phones will have all the power and storage most users need for everything they do. All many people will need is their iPhone and docking monitor, and the phone will behave like a phone when it's not docked, and like a computer when it is docked. At that point, yes it will cannibalize their PC sales, but the writing has been on the wall for PC sales since before the PC as we know it was even invented -since 1965 when Gordan Moore formulated his law. It's been inevitable that all the computing power and storage the average user needs will eventually be cheap and tiny, it's just amazing how long we've managed to come up with higher needs for power and storage space. But for the past 10 years usage requirements haven't kept pace with progress. Lower and lower end machines increasingly handle everything most users do. Apple is a smart enough company that they'd rather cannibalize their own sales and be the market leader in something than hold back on selling an inevitable progression for fear of cannibalization, like Kodak.
I wish Ubuntu luck with being first to market here, but I think it's a little early (not quite enough power and memory in this generation phone to be a good desktop), not a complete solution (this doesn't let you run the monitor off the phone and replace the guts of the computer entirely, it just lets you use a desktop interface for the phone when it's docked to a computer), and probably not going to be hugely successful.
Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967).
Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse's first success, was a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill.
And this entire comment is taken from Lawrence Lessig's work Free Culture, let's hope he doesn't issue a DMCA takedown notice for this comment;)
I used some of the nicest CRT's ever made - Noxia 445xi, Sony GDM-FW900 - and they're great and all, but LCD's are better now if you actually buy a good one. Yes, TN film is just cheap and crappy - though good enough for most people's web browsing at lower power use and much less space that a CRT. But if you just buy a nice LCD - I'm on a Dell U3011 - it's sharper, bigger, higher resolution, faster and has wider color gamut than any CRT I've ever seen. Plus it still takes less power and less space. And you don't need to re-profile it every month. And you don't have to watch the contrast ratio fall each month after it gets to be six years old like heavily used CRT's do.
The only thing I can find not to like is that the stand sticks out in front of the display (to stop it from falling over forward since it's so thin, not a problem with an 85 lb 20" deep CRT) so I can't put my keyboard as close to the screen as I like it.
I built a new middle-end system a couple of weeks ago - i5 2500k processor, $60 60GB solid state drive just for the OS and aps, regular cheap slow drives for everything else. Total system build about $800.
Photoshop CS5 launches in under 2 seconds. Illustrator is about the same. So while Adobe and the Creative Suite apps have a history of long load times where you stare at splash screens until you've memorized the names of the developers so you can punch one if you see them, with a new machine and new apps, it's nearly instant.
They can claim the value of the pending legal action against IBM is $1 trillion dollars if they want to resist a buy-out. Unlike other people who replied here, I don't think SCO wants a buy-out, I don't think they're in this for the money. I mean, they're in it for the money, but they're in it for the massive cash M$ already paid them, and in exchange for that, they are providing FUD. If they let IBM buy them, they will have no FUD left to sell.
Incidentally, the rumor mill says this sort of thing has happened before - a supposedly infringing company that would rather just buy the company who's IP they're infringing, but can not afford to buy that company for the sole reason that the perceived value of the lawsuit against them makes the company unaffordable. A higher offer simply provides evidence that the lawsuit is worth that much more. Supposedly Steve Jobs tried to just buy Apple Corps, and offered more than anyone thought the perpetual rights to the Beatles catalog is worth, but that wasn't enough because they wanted the value of the Beatles catalog plus the value of the lawsuit against Apple... and the lawsuit against Apple was worth at least any offer Jobs would make for Apple Corps...
You have this exactly reversed, and the world would be a better place if you and more people in busnesses would recognize this. In economic theory, if consumers care how they are treated and whether businesses behave ethically, they punish corporations for doing the wrong thing, creating the economic incentive for corporations to behave ethically. The idea that corporations are mandated by capitalism to behave unethically in the pursuit of profits, even if behaving unethically is ultimately bad for profits, comes up all the time here on Slashdot and never makes any sense.
In this case this will be a public image nightmare for Sony. They spend millions and millions on advertising to try to improve their corporate image and make people think favorably of them, and this just cost them a ludicrous amount. They were already going to make a killing off Whitney Houston's death, with no downside. Now in an attempt to bump up short term cash-flow by some amount irrelevant to their bottom line, they are shooting themselves in the foot. They already have an image problem, but more people are going to understand this than a rootkit. If internal management is any goods, heads will roll over this decision, and if it isn't, it's one more sign Sony is doomed.
If you were a merciless investor, would seeing this news item make you think Sony stock has a bright future? If not, then it means it's bad for them and a mistake, that behaving unethically is moving them towards being a defunct corporation, not securing their economic future. That would be my bet.
I was at DFW at Christmas with my girlfriend and watching the security line ahead of me. They had a regular metal detector and the nudie scanner going and were directing some people to one and some to the other. And every single hot woman got sent to the nudie scanner, where only about a third of the total people were being sent there. I pointed this out to my girlfriend, who noticed it was the case.
I'm male and not good looking at all, but was flattered to be sent there myself.
People interested by that may also be interested to know the demise of the former oldest living thing in the world, the Prometheus Tree, which a graduate student cut down so he could count the rings.
See also Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MR (4.8s) and Subaru WRX-STI (4.4s). The WRX-STI comes in a station wagon and is a 4.x second car factory standard. For anyone needing a practical family race car.
That's a good narrative of how Microsoft screwed up the browser war, but there's another story to tell about why Microsoft screwed up the browser war. Back in the mig 90's at the advent of the web, there was endless talk about how the web and web browser were going to replace the OS. "The Network Is The Computer," that sort of thing.
This may not actually be wrong for the common user and majority of machines, it may just be about 20 years off. Chrome OS or similar thin, probably Linux based OS's booting into a browser-only environment may still be the future of $80 commodity netbooks sold at the checkout line at Walmart. Which may become ubiquitous, with only "power users" who need Creative Suite, CATIA, Maya, etc. using computers that run a real OS anymore.
Microsoft jumped on the "we need to control this thing before it eats Windows" idea and spent a lot of money on a product that they gave away for free in order to control market share to protect Windows.
But then two things happened. First of all, Anti-Trust made every market-dominant position they held a scary liability, and here they were taking 80% of the browser market giving away a free product. Second, the idea that Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera were some kind of immediate threat to Windows dominance was looking more and more ludicrous.
So did M$ totally screw their huge lead in browsers? Definitely. Were they trying not to? I'm not so sure about that.
It may be ironic if thin-client/fat-web-browser cheaper-than-dirt netbooks and tablets still come around to sweep the mass market PC free of the M$ tax, relying on the viability of alternative browsers.
It's not a popular idea around here, but among my hard-core geek tech industry friends, there are several who used to use Linux as their primary OS who then got a Mac. Many still run both Linux and Windows virtualized, but still tend to boot into OSX.
A lot of geeks just hated Microsoft and were not necessarily huge fans of Linux on the desktop. Once Apple went to Unix, and to Intel, and started making nice laptops, it was an appealing option. Other geeks like open source but also still find Linux frustrating with dependency hell or config file editing or lack of some piece of software functionality, and just want an out-of-the-box OS that they feel they can spend less time messing around with so they can spend more time messing around with their code. [Obviously a contentious topic around here, but in my limited experience I have spent relatively less time troubleshooting configuration on OSX than Linux. Yes, yes, OSX supports a limited set of hardware and Linux tries to support everything, but that doesn't change the time commitment to making your stuff work.]
There are also developer geeks who, until Lion (which allows virtualization), practically had to buy a Mac because they wanted to test their software under Windows, Linux, and OSX, on one machine. So it had to be a Mac virtualizing the other two.
Why not also require them to make copies of their house keys for each other so they and their lawyers can go into each other's houses any time they want and rummage through each other's files, look for evidence of affairs in their bedrooms, look for property not reported in the divorce proceedings, look for signs of alcohol or drugs or depression or other personal factors that might have some bearing on the case?
Or to paraphrase: if you arbitrarily decide to define the timeline of the universe as non-infinite, and then decide there were cause and effect chains that predate your arbitrary start point, it implies there's a giant man with a white beard and robes on a thrown who uses our weekly schedule of fish consumption (amongst other factors) to determine whether we will spend eternity burning or playing a harp in the sky.
To follow up, both men were extremely influential on the history of technology, and in very different ways, so the proximity of their deaths has caused a lot of comparison. More attention has been brought to both of them due them being in the same industry and the timing coincidence.
Steve was a celebrity and already getting a lot of attention in the population at large, Dennis was mostly known within the industry. Bringing Dennis up to compare with Steve is introducing his legacy to some people who didn't know about it. It's a good thing, and the fact it is happening is not some kind of slight on Dennis.
I'm sure you're upset because you knew Dennis, but what the parent post said is objectively true, and it is not a slight on Dennis Ritchie. Did you even stop to think, you're calling his post BS in a discussion on a Steve Jobs article, in which most of the posts above this are about Dennis Ritchie? Every discussion forum about Steve these days has a bunch of posts about Dennis - if Steve hadn't died, these posts about Dennis wouldn't be here. I'm not getting the hate for his post.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody in this thread - The natural 25-26 hour schedule is completely normal for most diurnal mammals. They've done research with humans giving them NO time queues for days, and it turns out EVERYBODY falls into a slightly over 24-hour schedule.
The conclusion here is that our chemical engines are too imprecise for us to evolve a dead-on circadian cycle. So instead evolution gave us an unaided circadian cycle that's calibrated with a mean of about 25 hours, so that people with a naturally extremely short cycle are still just over 24 hours, and it goes up from there. Then we get a natural reset cue to adjust the cycle every day to keep it in sync with the world. The primary component of the reset signal is sunlight exposure in the morning. If you get up at a reasonable time (near or after sunrise) and GET OUTDOORS for about 15 minutes, then you will feel like going to bed at the right time to get enough sleep and want to get up at about the same time the next day. We and our ancestors spent tens of millions of years with no choice but to receive natural light in the morning, so it was a pretty good system before we evolved to live in our parent's basements and stare at little screens all day.
I suffer big time from this - every day I want to stay up and get up about an hour or so later than I did the day before - but not if I'm spending much time outdoors, especially in the morning. When I'm backpacking, wholly cow do I just want to go to bed when it gets dark, and get up just after sunrise. If we spent the day exercising outdoors like evolution intended, we wouldn't have this problem... but good luck being able to/wanting to do that all the time. But if you just drag yourself out of bed and take a 15 minute walk outdoors, even if it's cloudy or right around sunrise, problem solved. It does get tricky if you have to be at work before sunrise. Or if you work night shift (which I did for about 2 years) you're just *'ed.
I think the light exposure causes melanin production on about a 14 hour delay, making us want top go to sleep about 16 hours after exposure. This is why melanin supplements near bedtime are somewhat functional as a surrogate for actual light exposure in the morning.
Or as an alternate solution, since the day gets longer by about 1.7 milliseconds per century, by my calculations you could just wait about 200 million years for the earth to get in sync with your natural clock.
I've been saying that this is where Apple's going for a while. Either the iPhone 5 or the one after it will only have a Thunderbolt port, no other dock connector (the Thunderbolt port can take a USB2 or Firewire to Thunderbolt cable for everyone with old computers/pc's and all.) And I be that after Mountain Lion, about two years from now, iOS and OSX will merge into one OS. The OS will know what hardware it's on and provide an appropriate user interface.
Phones will have all the power and storage most users need for everything they do. All many people will need is their iPhone and docking monitor, and the phone will behave like a phone when it's not docked, and like a computer when it is docked. At that point, yes it will cannibalize their PC sales, but the writing has been on the wall for PC sales since before the PC as we know it was even invented -since 1965 when Gordan Moore formulated his law. It's been inevitable that all the computing power and storage the average user needs will eventually be cheap and tiny, it's just amazing how long we've managed to come up with higher needs for power and storage space. But for the past 10 years usage requirements haven't kept pace with progress. Lower and lower end machines increasingly handle everything most users do. Apple is a smart enough company that they'd rather cannibalize their own sales and be the market leader in something than hold back on selling an inevitable progression for fear of cannibalization, like Kodak.
I wish Ubuntu luck with being first to market here, but I think it's a little early (not quite enough power and memory in this generation phone to be a good desktop), not a complete solution (this doesn't let you run the monitor off the phone and replace the guts of the computer entirely, it just lets you use a desktop interface for the phone when it's docked to a computer), and probably not going to be hugely successful.
Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967).
;)
Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse's first success, was a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill.
And this entire comment is taken from Lawrence Lessig's work Free Culture, let's hope he doesn't issue a DMCA takedown notice for this comment
I used some of the nicest CRT's ever made - Noxia 445xi, Sony GDM-FW900 - and they're great and all, but LCD's are better now if you actually buy a good one. Yes, TN film is just cheap and crappy - though good enough for most people's web browsing at lower power use and much less space that a CRT. But if you just buy a nice LCD - I'm on a Dell U3011 - it's sharper, bigger, higher resolution, faster and has wider color gamut than any CRT I've ever seen. Plus it still takes less power and less space. And you don't need to re-profile it every month. And you don't have to watch the contrast ratio fall each month after it gets to be six years old like heavily used CRT's do.
The only thing I can find not to like is that the stand sticks out in front of the display (to stop it from falling over forward since it's so thin, not a problem with an 85 lb 20" deep CRT) so I can't put my keyboard as close to the screen as I like it.
I built a new middle-end system a couple of weeks ago - i5 2500k processor, $60 60GB solid state drive just for the OS and aps, regular cheap slow drives for everything else. Total system build about $800.
Photoshop CS5 launches in under 2 seconds. Illustrator is about the same. So while Adobe and the Creative Suite apps have a history of long load times where you stare at splash screens until you've memorized the names of the developers so you can punch one if you see them, with a new machine and new apps, it's nearly instant.
Mod parent up.
No 9/11 truther conspiracies there, but an interesting history predating this incident of other boxes out there exactly like this.
I'm more interested in why it has 25 stripes.
They can claim the value of the pending legal action against IBM is $1 trillion dollars if they want to resist a buy-out. Unlike other people who replied here, I don't think SCO wants a buy-out, I don't think they're in this for the money. I mean, they're in it for the money, but they're in it for the massive cash M$ already paid them, and in exchange for that, they are providing FUD. If they let IBM buy them, they will have no FUD left to sell.
Incidentally, the rumor mill says this sort of thing has happened before - a supposedly infringing company that would rather just buy the company who's IP they're infringing, but can not afford to buy that company for the sole reason that the perceived value of the lawsuit against them makes the company unaffordable. A higher offer simply provides evidence that the lawsuit is worth that much more. Supposedly Steve Jobs tried to just buy Apple Corps, and offered more than anyone thought the perpetual rights to the Beatles catalog is worth, but that wasn't enough because they wanted the value of the Beatles catalog plus the value of the lawsuit against Apple... and the lawsuit against Apple was worth at least any offer Jobs would make for Apple Corps...
Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves.
Specifically here, the claim that Monsanto has sued and then subsequently purchased any farm.
You have this exactly reversed, and the world would be a better place if you and more people in busnesses would recognize this. In economic theory, if consumers care how they are treated and whether businesses behave ethically, they punish corporations for doing the wrong thing, creating the economic incentive for corporations to behave ethically. The idea that corporations are mandated by capitalism to behave unethically in the pursuit of profits, even if behaving unethically is ultimately bad for profits, comes up all the time here on Slashdot and never makes any sense.
In this case this will be a public image nightmare for Sony. They spend millions and millions on advertising to try to improve their corporate image and make people think favorably of them, and this just cost them a ludicrous amount. They were already going to make a killing off Whitney Houston's death, with no downside. Now in an attempt to bump up short term cash-flow by some amount irrelevant to their bottom line, they are shooting themselves in the foot. They already have an image problem, but more people are going to understand this than a rootkit. If internal management is any goods, heads will roll over this decision, and if it isn't, it's one more sign Sony is doomed.
If you were a merciless investor, would seeing this news item make you think Sony stock has a bright future? If not, then it means it's bad for them and a mistake, that behaving unethically is moving them towards being a defunct corporation, not securing their economic future. That would be my bet.
I was at DFW at Christmas with my girlfriend and watching the security line ahead of me. They had a regular metal detector and the nudie scanner going and were directing some people to one and some to the other. And every single hot woman got sent to the nudie scanner, where only about a third of the total people were being sent there. I pointed this out to my girlfriend, who noticed it was the case.
I'm male and not good looking at all, but was flattered to be sent there myself.
Boll Weevil Monument
SKINNER
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA
But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER
No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA
But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA
But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
People interested by that may also be interested to know the demise of the former oldest living thing in the world, the Prometheus Tree, which a graduate student cut down so he could count the rings.
Slashdotter: Timothy, we're all a little mystified by your claim that the new python film stars Graham Chapman.
Timothy: It does, yes.
Slashdotter: Who died over ten years ago?
Timothy: Uh, that's correct.
Slashdotter: Are you lying?
Timothy: No, no, it's just that he's very popular.
Slashdotter: Does he have a big part?
Timothy: He is the star of the film.
Slashdotter: And dead.
Timothy: Well, we dug him up and gave him a screen test, a mere formality in his case, and...
Slashdotter: Can he still act?
Timothy: Well...well, he still has this-this enormous, ah-ah, kinda indefinable, uh...no.
Slashdotter: Was decomposition a problem?
Timothy: We did have to put him in the fridge between takes.
Slashdotter: Ah, what sorts of things does he do in the film?
Timothy: Well, we had him lying on beds, lying on floors, falling out of cupboards, scaring the children, ahm...
Slashdotter: But surely Graham Chapman was cremated?
Timothy: Well, we had to use a standin for some of the more visible shots.
Slashdotter: Ah! Uh, another actress.
Timothy: Dead actress. But Chapman was in shot the whole time.
Slashdotter: How?
Timothy: Oh, in the ash tray, in the fire grate and vacuum cleaner...
Slashdotter: So Graham does not appear in the film?
Timothy: Not as such.
Yes, sporty... 0-60 5.4s.
See also Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MR (4.8s) and Subaru WRX-STI (4.4s). The WRX-STI comes in a station wagon and is a 4.x second car factory standard. For anyone needing a practical family race car.
I can't believe I didn't see a link in this thread to the mother of all absurd cable review threads.
That's a good narrative of how Microsoft screwed up the browser war, but there's another story to tell about why Microsoft screwed up the browser war. Back in the mig 90's at the advent of the web, there was endless talk about how the web and web browser were going to replace the OS. "The Network Is The Computer," that sort of thing.
This may not actually be wrong for the common user and majority of machines, it may just be about 20 years off. Chrome OS or similar thin, probably Linux based OS's booting into a browser-only environment may still be the future of $80 commodity netbooks sold at the checkout line at Walmart. Which may become ubiquitous, with only "power users" who need Creative Suite, CATIA, Maya, etc. using computers that run a real OS anymore.
Microsoft jumped on the "we need to control this thing before it eats Windows" idea and spent a lot of money on a product that they gave away for free in order to control market share to protect Windows.
But then two things happened. First of all, Anti-Trust made every market-dominant position they held a scary liability, and here they were taking 80% of the browser market giving away a free product. Second, the idea that Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera were some kind of immediate threat to Windows dominance was looking more and more ludicrous.
So did M$ totally screw their huge lead in browsers? Definitely. Were they trying not to? I'm not so sure about that.
It may be ironic if thin-client/fat-web-browser cheaper-than-dirt netbooks and tablets still come around to sweep the mass market PC free of the M$ tax, relying on the viability of alternative browsers.
It's not a popular idea around here, but among my hard-core geek tech industry friends, there are several who used to use Linux as their primary OS who then got a Mac. Many still run both Linux and Windows virtualized, but still tend to boot into OSX.
A lot of geeks just hated Microsoft and were not necessarily huge fans of Linux on the desktop. Once Apple went to Unix, and to Intel, and started making nice laptops, it was an appealing option. Other geeks like open source but also still find Linux frustrating with dependency hell or config file editing or lack of some piece of software functionality, and just want an out-of-the-box OS that they feel they can spend less time messing around with so they can spend more time messing around with their code. [Obviously a contentious topic around here, but in my limited experience I have spent relatively less time troubleshooting configuration on OSX than Linux. Yes, yes, OSX supports a limited set of hardware and Linux tries to support everything, but that doesn't change the time commitment to making your stuff work.]
There are also developer geeks who, until Lion (which allows virtualization), practically had to buy a Mac because they wanted to test their software under Windows, Linux, and OSX, on one machine. So it had to be a Mac virtualizing the other two.
Why not also require them to make copies of their house keys for each other so they and their lawyers can go into each other's houses any time they want and rummage through each other's files, look for evidence of affairs in their bedrooms, look for property not reported in the divorce proceedings, look for signs of alcohol or drugs or depression or other personal factors that might have some bearing on the case?
It would have been awesome if he had put Rick Astley up on the big screen... greatest Rickroll ever.
He could have done it just for a moment then cut it off an come back to the piano guy. It would have been a perfect setup.
Or to paraphrase: if you arbitrarily decide to define the timeline of the universe as non-infinite, and then decide there were cause and effect chains that predate your arbitrary start point, it implies there's a giant man with a white beard and robes on a thrown who uses our weekly schedule of fish consumption (amongst other factors) to determine whether we will spend eternity burning or playing a harp in the sky.
They decided to imitate Starbucks.
To follow up, both men were extremely influential on the history of technology, and in very different ways, so the proximity of their deaths has caused a lot of comparison. More attention has been brought to both of them due them being in the same industry and the timing coincidence. Steve was a celebrity and already getting a lot of attention in the population at large, Dennis was mostly known within the industry. Bringing Dennis up to compare with Steve is introducing his legacy to some people who didn't know about it. It's a good thing, and the fact it is happening is not some kind of slight on Dennis.
I'm sure you're upset because you knew Dennis, but what the parent post said is objectively true, and it is not a slight on Dennis Ritchie. Did you even stop to think, you're calling his post BS in a discussion on a Steve Jobs article, in which most of the posts above this are about Dennis Ritchie? Every discussion forum about Steve these days has a bunch of posts about Dennis - if Steve hadn't died, these posts about Dennis wouldn't be here. I'm not getting the hate for his post.