My wife’s uncle worked directly for Steve Jobs at Next. He never doubted Jobs vision, intelligence, drive or even sincerity; but the words: kind, considerate or sane were not words that he would ever consider using to describe him.
I like the onions take, the last businessman with a clue just died. Not true, but funny. Jobs was the anti-Gates. Gates never had an original thought… every single Microsoft product was stolen from somebody else. Jobs was one he stole from.
One exception, Gates was ahead of the curve on optical storage.
He was also ahead of the curve in laying out a challenge to the world to find a fast way to factor prime numbers.
I wish I had gotten to him before he found out…
“Factor prime numbers”? *scratches head*
Maybe you mean prove a number is prime, and therefore does not have factors?
Jobs never stole the idea for the mouse and icons from Xerox
Xerox was paid for their ideas (which they never marketed themselves) with shares in Apple.
I was merely replying to the suggestion that Gates never had an original thought and Jobs somehow did. Both were shrewd at implementing other people’s ideas, they invented nothing themselves and I doubt seriously they had any more original thoughts than you or I. This is not meant to slight either one. Success in business requires careful synthesis and implementation of lots of ideas and things. Few are masters of this, only a couple hundred to a thousand in the last century, Gates and Jobs foremost among them.
Perhaps the difference is Jobs wanted a better world but Gates just wanted to own it. Gates thought Jobs was stupid to show him the Lisa before the public knew about it. Jobs just wanted somebody to write a word processor for it. Gates was thinking how he could own the world with it.
Yes, both were successful. Woz describes Jobs best. Jobs tried to create the best products to compete. Gates is still trying to lock the competition out. Just look at the new bios all machines will need for W8 and the BS argument they use for it’s need rather than just fixing the OS. It is completely unnecessary to lock out another OS in order to be certain your own is functioning properly.
“Of all the words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.'”
I like my iPhone. When it’s time to get a new phone I’ll decide whether to stay with the iPhone or go Android or WP. If I stay, it won’t be out of sentiment.
If the ghost of Steve Jobs has an opinion about that, I don’t expect to hear about it.
I just switched to Android yesterday. The new phone is much faster with the 4G faster than my home wifi. It’s not nearly as intuitive as the iPhone, but I don’t need iPhone training wheels anymore (never did, but family did).
Note that Gates wants to own Android through litigation. Not something Jobs would do.
Since I can’t find it behind a wall, here’s Holman Jenkins from todays wsj:
‘And One Last Thing . .’
Digital immortality is an app that probably wouldn’t have interested Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was a private man who died in public. In latter years, he took the stage at Apple events knowing that, at least at first, the audience’s focus would be on him and the toll his disease had taken on his vibrant persona. Unlike a lot of CEOs, he seldom took to a stage for any other reason than to talk about Apple products, such as to declaim that the rich should pay more taxes. Bizarrely, he was even chided for not conforming, in the apologetic fashion of the truly rich, to the demand that he be seen conspicuously doing good works with his wealth—as if the work he was already doing was not a good use of his time. When he presented himself to the public, it was to offer instruction on only two subjects. One was Apple, and the other, in a famous address to graduating students at Stanford, was death.
Jobs reflected at length on the undesirability of death from the individual point of view, and the usefulness of it from nature’s point of view. He offered no comfort. He was not Thomas Buddenbrook, nonhero of Thomas Mann’s novel, who briefly glimpses a kind of peace in thinking that the stuff of which he is made will return to the universe from which he borrowed it. And even that arid peace promptly departs, never to return, and he dies regretting that he had to die, just as most of us will.
Jobs made it clear that he did not welcome death, but also that life could be more interesting knowing that death would be coming.
One wonders, then, with what mixed feelings he viewed his Silicon Valley compatriots who’ve been seeking ways to make sure, at least for themselves, death never comes. No doubt they are being perfectly reasonable. When wealthy enough to satisfy every material appetite many times over, it make sense to try to prolong those appetites indefinitely through cryogenics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
This would not have been Jobs’s interest in the subject. He likely would have been more intrigued by the specific claim, advanced by inventor Ray Kurzweil and other advocates of “technological singularity,” that soon our individualities will be able to live eternally through digital electronics.
What kind of device should our consciousness occupy? Should it have a 4-inch screen or a 9-inch screen? Should it fit in a pocket or backpack? Should it have Bluetooth? Where should our essence primarily reside, in the cloud or in device memory? How much battery life would the user want?
And who is the user?
Hmmm. Jobs looked at technology from the perspective of the user, who wanted an object both beautiful and beautifully functional. If the user is our “survivors”—i.e., our loved ones who still exist in physical form—he might conclude that the most important feature such a device could have is an off-switch—a permanent one.
Indeed, he might conclude that the whole flaw in the Kurzweil vision is that anybody anywhere would have any lasting use for us, that our sticking around in digital form would be welcome or valuable in any way.
He might conclude that such a device should have a battery that lasts, oh, about a month, and then goes permanently dead. He might conclude that our essence should not be inscribed on a hard drive or a thumb drive—but in D-RAM memory, the kind that vanishes forever when the power is shut off.
Such a device would let our friends and relations prolong their goodbyes for a few weeks while also avoiding the subsequent guilt when days, weeks and soon years go by without any urge to revisit their electronically immortal but increasingly irrelevant loved one. Such a device wouldn’t cure death or materially delay death. It would make death better. Create a month or so of pure communion with the loved one, via a sumptuous screen and high-fidelity headset, untroubled by medical decisions and interventions, free of pain—but also free of the more pleasant forms of physical urgency.
Such a device would offer more comfort, perhaps, to the survivor than to the departed, for whom artificial immortality in any form—whether it’s leaving behind an autobiography or monument or foundation—invariably proves a poor substitute for not dying. Electronic immortality would likely prove no less so. Death would still demand that its purpose be served, clearing the way for life to continue, leaving the past behind, where it belongs.
Steve Jobs, who was special, was not of the idea that anyone is special. But leave it to Apple. The iCrypt, whatever form it takes, would undoubtedly be done with the taste, attention to detail, and understanding of the customer that he and his colleagues brought to everything they did.
Holman Jenkins, WSJ, Oct 8, 2011
Lam is being disingenuous. He didn’t need a written statement from Apple to know an unreleased iPhone prototype, with Apple’s name and address on the back, belonged to Apple. Who did he think it belonged to, Zeta Reticulan? He wanted the letter so he could publish it — that’s the sort of juvenile thing Gizmodo does.
No, he publishes this insincere apology — or, rather, explanation — to get a few more web hits.
My wife’s uncle worked directly for Steve Jobs at Next. He never doubted Jobs vision, intelligence, drive or even sincerity; but the words: kind, considerate or sane were not words that he would ever consider using to describe him.
I like the onions take, the last businessman with a clue just died. Not true, but funny. Jobs was the anti-Gates. Gates never had an original thought… every single Microsoft product was stolen from somebody else. Jobs was one he stole from.
One exception, Gates was ahead of the curve on optical storage.
He was also ahead of the curve in laying out a challenge to the world to find a fast way to factor prime numbers.
I wish I had gotten to him before he found out…
“Factor prime numbers”? *scratches head*
Maybe you mean prove a number is prime, and therefore does not have factors?
Jobs never stole the idea for the mouse and icons from Xerox
Xerox was paid for their ideas (which they never marketed themselves) with shares in Apple.
I was merely replying to the suggestion that Gates never had an original thought and Jobs somehow did. Both were shrewd at implementing other people’s ideas, they invented nothing themselves and I doubt seriously they had any more original thoughts than you or I. This is not meant to slight either one. Success in business requires careful synthesis and implementation of lots of ideas and things. Few are masters of this, only a couple hundred to a thousand in the last century, Gates and Jobs foremost among them.
Perhaps the difference is Jobs wanted a better world but Gates just wanted to own it. Gates thought Jobs was stupid to show him the Lisa before the public knew about it. Jobs just wanted somebody to write a word processor for it. Gates was thinking how he could own the world with it.
Yes, both were successful. Woz describes Jobs best. Jobs tried to create the best products to compete. Gates is still trying to lock the competition out. Just look at the new bios all machines will need for W8 and the BS argument they use for it’s need rather than just fixing the OS. It is completely unnecessary to lock out another OS in order to be certain your own is functioning properly.
“Of all the words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.'”
I like my iPhone. When it’s time to get a new phone I’ll decide whether to stay with the iPhone or go Android or WP. If I stay, it won’t be out of sentiment.
If the ghost of Steve Jobs has an opinion about that, I don’t expect to hear about it.
I just switched to Android yesterday. The new phone is much faster with the 4G faster than my home wifi. It’s not nearly as intuitive as the iPhone, but I don’t need iPhone training wheels anymore (never did, but family did).
Note that Gates wants to own Android through litigation. Not something Jobs would do.
Since I can’t find it behind a wall, here’s Holman Jenkins from todays wsj:
‘And One Last Thing . .’
Digital immortality is an app that probably wouldn’t have interested Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was a private man who died in public. In latter years, he took the stage at Apple events knowing that, at least at first, the audience’s focus would be on him and the toll his disease had taken on his vibrant persona. Unlike a lot of CEOs, he seldom took to a stage for any other reason than to talk about Apple products, such as to declaim that the rich should pay more taxes. Bizarrely, he was even chided for not conforming, in the apologetic fashion of the truly rich, to the demand that he be seen conspicuously doing good works with his wealth—as if the work he was already doing was not a good use of his time. When he presented himself to the public, it was to offer instruction on only two subjects. One was Apple, and the other, in a famous address to graduating students at Stanford, was death.
Jobs reflected at length on the undesirability of death from the individual point of view, and the usefulness of it from nature’s point of view. He offered no comfort. He was not Thomas Buddenbrook, nonhero of Thomas Mann’s novel, who briefly glimpses a kind of peace in thinking that the stuff of which he is made will return to the universe from which he borrowed it. And even that arid peace promptly departs, never to return, and he dies regretting that he had to die, just as most of us will.
Jobs made it clear that he did not welcome death, but also that life could be more interesting knowing that death would be coming.
One wonders, then, with what mixed feelings he viewed his Silicon Valley compatriots who’ve been seeking ways to make sure, at least for themselves, death never comes. No doubt they are being perfectly reasonable. When wealthy enough to satisfy every material appetite many times over, it make sense to try to prolong those appetites indefinitely through cryogenics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
This would not have been Jobs’s interest in the subject. He likely would have been more intrigued by the specific claim, advanced by inventor Ray Kurzweil and other advocates of “technological singularity,” that soon our individualities will be able to live eternally through digital electronics.
What kind of device should our consciousness occupy? Should it have a 4-inch screen or a 9-inch screen? Should it fit in a pocket or backpack? Should it have Bluetooth? Where should our essence primarily reside, in the cloud or in device memory? How much battery life would the user want?
And who is the user?
Hmmm. Jobs looked at technology from the perspective of the user, who wanted an object both beautiful and beautifully functional. If the user is our “survivors”—i.e., our loved ones who still exist in physical form—he might conclude that the most important feature such a device could have is an off-switch—a permanent one.
Indeed, he might conclude that the whole flaw in the Kurzweil vision is that anybody anywhere would have any lasting use for us, that our sticking around in digital form would be welcome or valuable in any way.
He might conclude that such a device should have a battery that lasts, oh, about a month, and then goes permanently dead. He might conclude that our essence should not be inscribed on a hard drive or a thumb drive—but in D-RAM memory, the kind that vanishes forever when the power is shut off.
Such a device would let our friends and relations prolong their goodbyes for a few weeks while also avoiding the subsequent guilt when days, weeks and soon years go by without any urge to revisit their electronically immortal but increasingly irrelevant loved one. Such a device wouldn’t cure death or materially delay death. It would make death better. Create a month or so of pure communion with the loved one, via a sumptuous screen and high-fidelity headset, untroubled by medical decisions and interventions, free of pain—but also free of the more pleasant forms of physical urgency.
Such a device would offer more comfort, perhaps, to the survivor than to the departed, for whom artificial immortality in any form—whether it’s leaving behind an autobiography or monument or foundation—invariably proves a poor substitute for not dying. Electronic immortality would likely prove no less so. Death would still demand that its purpose be served, clearing the way for life to continue, leaving the past behind, where it belongs.
Steve Jobs, who was special, was not of the idea that anyone is special. But leave it to Apple. The iCrypt, whatever form it takes, would undoubtedly be done with the taste, attention to detail, and understanding of the customer that he and his colleagues brought to everything they did.
Holman Jenkins, WSJ, Oct 8, 2011
Lam is being disingenuous. He didn’t need a written statement from Apple to know an unreleased iPhone prototype, with Apple’s name and address on the back, belonged to Apple. Who did he think it belonged to, Zeta Reticulan? He wanted the letter so he could publish it — that’s the sort of juvenile thing Gizmodo does.
No, he publishes this insincere apology — or, rather, explanation — to get a few more web hits.