Steve Jobs has passed

[luckton]

The Westboro Baptist Church has announced they will be protesting at Jobs' funeral.  See if you can spot the irony:



 

[K9]

I wish people would stop giving those idiots attention.

[naum]

A visionary has passed. A lot are casting him in the vein of Edison, Ford, etc.… but I think more in the light of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Also, watching this (WWDC 1997 Closing Keynote) this morning while I code…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY

[ghost]

I wish people would stop giving those idiots attention.

I wish people would herd them up and ship them off to Greenland.

[Paelos]

I wish people would stop giving those idiots attention.

I wish people would herd them up and ship them off to Greenland.

I'd round them up and send them all to visit Jesus. See what he has to say. He'd probably get mad at me for murdering the lot of them though. It's a lose-lose when you have to turn the other cheek sometimes.

[Ingmar]

A visionary has passed. A lot are casting him in the vein of Edison, Ford, etc.… but I think more in the light of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Also, watching this (WWDC 1997 Closing Keynote) this morning while I code…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY

Ford is the only one that is a sensible comparison, IMO. Jobs's great strength was in management and marketing, not in actually inventing or designing stuff personally.

[K9]

By saying that you acknowledge that they have won. They exist to elicit responses, and negative responses are so easy to get. The only way to destroy them is to ignore them; starve them of the attention they seek.

[ghost]

You'd be doing them a favor, Paelos.  That is their ultimate goal, I'd imagine.  

By saying that you acknowledge that they have won. They exist to elicit responses, and negative responses are so easy to get. The only way to destroy them is to ignore them; starve them of the attention they seek.

I'm not sure that's true with this particular brand of religious nut.  They'll keep doing this shit not matter what because it's what "god told them to do".  

[Ironwood]

The title of this thread makes me giggle every time.

I don't know whether he shat himself or if he just walked by.

Sigh.

[K9]

You'd be doing them a favor, Paelos.  That is their ultimate goal, I'd imagine.  

By saying that you acknowledge that they have won. They exist to elicit responses, and negative responses are so easy to get. The only way to destroy them is to ignore them; starve them of the attention they seek.

I'm not sure that's true with this particular brand of religious nut.  They'll keep doing this shit not matter what because it's what "god told them to do".  

Based on what I have read and seen, the Phelps family and the WBC is nothing more than a massive trolling effort designed to antagonise people into situations which enable the WBC to sue and win. The religious notions are all just part of the act. Even if they are genuinely buying that stuff, the best solution to them is to ignore them. Anything that gives them publicity gives them legitimacy, and only furthers their cause.

[Paelos]

Based on what I have read and seen, the Phelps family and the WBC is nothing more than a massive trolling effort designed to antagonise people into situations which enable the WBC to sue and win. The religious notions are all just part of the act. Even if they are genuinely buying that stuff, the best solution to them is to ignore them. Anything that gives them publicity gives them legitimacy, and only furthers their cause.

I agree, but I take a more Machiavellian stance on the issue. It's hard to collect the spoils when your entire family is dead.

[ghost]

I agree with Paelos here.  I do like the idea of them starving/freezing to death in the frozen tundra of Greenland quite a bit. 

[bhodi]

The onion, as always, does it right.

[Engels]

Probably not the most popular thing to say, but I'm getting a bit tired of the Jobs hype today. Everyone's posting about it on Facebook, attributing things to Apple that are just patently false, and making him out to be some sort of Dalai Lama of the IT world.

Look, I'm glad that when you got your first MacBook you managed to install Skype on your own.
I'm glad you managed to look sufficiently hip at the coffee shop with the cute barista you still don't have the courage to ask out.
I'm overjoyed that you dimwitted musicians can use Garageband to edit your gruntings into some semblances of presentableness.
I'm beside myself that office parks full of software developers are currently working on the next Angry Birds killer.

Honestly, I'm thrilled, but please, he wasn't the second coming.

[naum]

Probably not the most popular thing to say, but I'm getting a bit tired of the Jobs hype today. Everyone's posting about it on Facebook, attributing things to Apple that are just patently false, and making him out to be some sort of Dalai Lama of the IT world.

Can you push aside your ADS affliction and acknowledge the major force he (and Apple) was in forging the computing experience?

Yes, a lot of the advancement was evolutionary, not revolutionary (except maybe the early days with Wozniak, but even that was due in large part to other influential players).

And you are in a minority, as most of the heavyweight overlords in the industry are all chiming in on how Jobs was an inspiration -- from Brin & Page at Google to just about every major software creator of the past half century.

Finally, here's a nice bit from Stephen Fry with an anecdote about a question I had always wondered about after reading TBL autobiography:

I will end with a story few people know. What you probably do know is that Jobs wooed Pepsi Cola boss John Sculley to Apple in 1985. He wanted him to do to IBM the unthinkable thing that he had done to Coca Cola: beaten the brand leader into second place. He won Scully with the famous phrase, “do you want to sell fizzy sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” Sculley came and a few months later, astoundingly, their disagreements came to such a head that Jobs found himself fired from the company he had founded.

You probably knew that. You probably knew he went on to found his own computer company NeXt – a black cube computer that ran a UNIX operating system, revealing Jobs’s already growing conviction that the professionally popular UNIX, so suited to networking, should be the future kernel (if you’ll forgive the geeky pun) of any sensible consumer oriented operating system.

It was on a NeXt machine that the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote the protocols, procedures and languages that added up to the World Wide Web, http, HTML, browsers, hyperlinks … in other words the way forward for the internet, the most significant computer program ever written was done on a NeXt computer. That is a feather in Steve Jobs’s cap that is not often celebrated and indeed one that he himself signally failed to know about for some time.

After having written www, Berners-Lee noticed that there was a NeXt developers conference in Paris at which Steve Jobs would be present. Tim packed up his black cube, complete with the optical disk which contained arguably the most influential and important code ever written and took a train to Paris.

It was a large and popular conference and Tim was pretty much at the end of the line of black NeXt boxes. Each developer showed Steve Jobs their new word-processor, graphic programme and utility and he slowly walked along the line, like the judge at a flower show nodding his approval or frowning his distaste. Just before he reached Tim and the world wide web at the end of row, an aide nudged Jobs and told him that they should go or he’d be in danger of missing his flight back to America. So Steve turned away and never saw the programme that Tim Berners-Lee had written which would change the world as completely as Gutenberg had in 1450. It was a meeting of the two most influential men of their time that never took place. Chatting to the newly knighted Sir Tim a few years ago he told me that he had still never actually met Steve Jobs.

Their work met however and it is through it that you are reading this. I will not be so presumptuous as to mourn the loss of Steve as a personal friend, but I will mourn his loss as a man who changed my world completely. As the great writer, wit and sage John @Hodgman (who played the pasty-faced PC in the old Apple TV commercials) wrote a few hours after Steve’s death “Everything good I have done, I have done on a Mac”.

[tgr]

Probably not the most popular thing to say, but I'm getting a bit tired of the Jobs hype today. Everyone's posting about it on Facebook, attributing things to Apple that are just patently false, and making him out to be some sort of Dalai Lama of the IT world.

While it is going to grate if they keep it up for a few weeks (kind of like 9/11, or for us Norwegians, 7/22), he was still a major player, and I doubt we'd have all these gadgets we do have now if he hadn't been alive. I may frown upon the tablet hype, or smartphones etc, but tons of people adore them.

The big question now is whether or not Apple will continue being the innovator they've been the past few years, or if Steve Jobs really was their magic touch.

[Ghambit]

Jobs was more of a prophet than an innovator.  He brought tech. to the masses (in trickles mind you; and largely due to Chinese outsourcing), he didnt necessarily "invent" tech.  This is why putting him with Edison and Ford is apropo, because they essentially were the same.

May he RIP, but even still... idolizing him like this is a bit tiresome.

[Lucas]

Heh, nice contribution by Ron Gilbert over at his blog, "Grumpy Gamer":

http://grumpygamer.com/5851503

Several years ago I had the great pleasure and privilege of meeting Steve Jobs.

I had a meeting at Pixar and I heard that Steve Jobs might be there.  First thing I did was ask a good friend of mine that knew Steve Jobs what he was like and was there any advice she could give me.

She said that Steve Jobs is an incredibly intelligent and passionate person and the one piece of advice she had for me was: don't argue with Steve Jobs and everything will go fine.  Argue with Steve Jobs?  He's probably one of the smartest people in the whole world and someone I have unequalled respect for, why would I ever argue with him?

I arrived at the meeting and went into the conference room. John Lasseter was there (who I casually knew from when Pixar was part of Lucasfilm) and we chit-chatted.

A few minutes later Steve Jobs came in.  He sat right across the table from me and the first words out of his mouth where: "I don't believe you can tell stories in games."

Now...

Steve Jobs could have told me the sky was green, he could have told me that dogs gave birth to cats, he could have said just about anything and I would have nodded thoughtfully and probably been totally convinced, but he had to say the one thing in all of creation that I could not let go.

I spent the next hour arguing with Steve Jobs.

My advice to God: Don't argue with Steve Jobs.

Goodbye Mr. Jobs, you really did change the world and we will miss you.

[Segoris]

RIP

[Trippy]

Steve was a Buddhist.

[UnSub]

Probably not the most popular thing to say, but I'm getting a bit tired of the Jobs hype today. Everyone's posting about it on Facebook, attributing things to Apple that are just patently false, and making him out to be some sort of Dalai Lama of the IT world.

It's the result of Jobs' cult of personality combined with the US tendency to sanctify their celebrities after death.

Apple has had a large impact on the western world and Jobs was the face of that.

 

The title of this thread makes me giggle every time.

I don't know whether he shat himself or if he just walked by.

Sigh.

Perhaps it should be "Steve Jobs Discontinued"? 

[Tale]

Steve was a Buddhist.

Reincarnation as a Foxconn assembly line worker then?

[luckton]

Steve was a Buddhist.

Reincarnation as a Foxconn assembly line worker then?

[Ironwood]

Um.

Of course you can tell stories in games.

That's a retarded position to take.

I like your idea Unsub.

[tgr]

wat

[Sheepherder]

This is very debatable.  Apparently he had pancreatic cancer.  I'm not aware that working too hard will give that to you.

Shift work is a known cause of cancer.

[Sky]

Steve Jobs: didn't die from a virus.

[Ginaz]

I feel sad for his family and friends and the contributions to our lives shouldn't be forgotten, but I'll never understand the hero worship he gets.  As a man, he was no different form any other corporate douche bag.  He wasn't exactly the nice guy all the Apple hipster sheep make him out to be.  Gawker has in interesting article on him and what he was really like.

http://gawker.com/5847344/what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say-about-steve-jobs

[Nebu]

I think it's safe to assume that anyone with his net worth is an asshole to some degree.  There's just a socially acceptable grace period before we're allowed to talk about it.  See also Al Davis. 

[Surlyboi]

And seriously, a gawker article?

[Paelos]

I think it's safe to assume that anyone with his net worth is an asshole to some degree.  There's just a socially acceptable grace period before we're allowed to talk about it.  See also Al Davis.  

Al Davis was a myopic dick, though.

EDIT: Racist is the wrong term, myopic when it comes to race is better.

[Ingmar]

You totally lost me there, even with the word change. If there's one thing that every Al Davis tribute I've seen agrees on, it is that he was anything but. First guy to draft a black QB in the first round, first guy to name a black head coach, first guy to name a Latino head coach, etc.

No argument on "dick" though. 

(We have another thread for this though right.)

[Paelos]

Yeah I meant more myopic in the other direction. Like he was so focused on being progressive it sorta lost focus, and you get Jamarcus Russell as your QB.

Hard to explain. But you're right, other thread.

[bhodi]

So I read this incredibly sad thing last night.

http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to-alternative-medicine/

Basically:

Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates — if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it’s removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.

Incredibly tragic. Had he gone in to surgery immediately after discovery, he would probably still be alive today. This seemed so incredibly relevant but I only found out about it a day or two ago.

You can thank a "Doctor" named Dean Ornish. I don't know why this isn't getting more publicity. It's not mentioned on his wiki page, either.

[K9]

Fucking alt-med...