cron is deprecated. Apple, Inc. uses launchd now.AAPL has lost $18 billion in market capitalization since the Jobs news broke, about the same as the GDP of Paraguay.posted by Rhaomi at 6:05 PM on August 24, 2011 [1 favorite]
Mac IIVx that I spent way too fucking much money on
I took a tour through liberal and conservative blogs, and it's remarkable how universally positive the comments sections are about him, considering his wealth and power.That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone likes him, rather, it would be unseemly to criticize him if he's actually ill and about to die. If bill gates were dying do you think people would be posting about how much Windows sucks? (Of course, he's removed from that somewhat now)
I was almost one of the ones that died waiting for a liver in California last year. I was receiving great care here at Stanford but there were simply not enough livers in California to go around and my doctors here advised me to enroll in a transplant program in Memphis, Tennessee, where the supply/demand ratio of livers is more favorable than it is in California here. And I was lucky enough to get a liver in time. As a matter of fact, this coming week is my one-year anniversary.Whatever you think of the man, that's not nothing. Not at all.
So why aren't there more organs available in California? Because in California, like most other states in the nation, you must specifically request to become an organ donor at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you're there to get or renew your driver's license. No one asks you if you want to become a donor. And there's no marketing campaign to make you aware of this opportunity, either, so unless you know about it and unless your specifically ask, nobody is going to ask you, nobody is going to give you this opportunity. And yet even with this obscure procedure over 20 percent of Californians have signed up to be organ donors, which is fantastic. But imagine what it could be if everyone knew of this opportunity.
And that's what the Governor's bill will do. It will simply require the DMV to ask you if you'd like to become an organ donor. That's it. Asking this one simple question may double the number of transplant organs available in California -- one simple question. And that's a very high return on investment, especially for the over 20,000 Californians currently waiting for an organ transplant.
"I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back." — Steve Jobs, 1985 Playboy interviewposted by furtive at 8:22 PM on August 24, 2011 [2 favorites]
I love Woz, but if he was *half* as brilliant as he's reputed to be, he'd have signed on as a technical lead at another company, and made his untold millions there.Why assume that everyone who's smart is also greedy?
"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me." [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]From a collection of Jobs' quotes
----
"I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back." [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]
On the day after this mass layoff, while the pain was still mighty fresh, Steve gathered us remaining employees in the company's auditorium and proceeded to rip us new assholes for approximately two hours, telling us point-blank that we sucked, that our software was awful, that we were dysfunctional, and that we were a blot on Apple's reputation and a drain on their resources. Only he was more direct than that, and his tone made it clear that he was personally disgusted with us as a company. At one point he noticed one of our VPs taking notes for another exec who was stuck on the wrong coast, and he became livid: "Give me that notepad! Anyone who is too stupid to remember what I'm saying is too stupid to work for me!" You could hear a pin drop in the room.maybe his pancreas would've laster longer if he hadn't done stuff like that
BillG will always be known as the guy who copied the idea for Windows from Steve Jobs.Who copied it from Xerox.
Just fyi, Edison was a hack, Slarty Bartfast.Actually, Edison and Jobs are pretty similar. They both package and made a business out of other people's innovation, while obviously being pretty technically smart themselves.
More than half of you aren't even old enough to know what it was like to use an original Apple II series computer, and even the original Macintosh from 1984 predates your computer-using life. I'm sure you realize the gravity of Steve Jobs' departure from Apple, but if you weren't around and using Apple computers (back when all they made were computers), you may not recall the days when Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple the first time, prior to 1987. For those of us who do, yesterday's news is even more jarring.Said home page, if you're interested, can be viewed here.
I'll make no bones about this -- as Apple resellers, we are very, very low on Apple's totem pole these days. It's not the 1980s or 1990s -- or hell, even the very early 2000s -- anymore, where stores like ours were important to Apple, especially as they were struggling for relevance. Back then, I'm told that they worshiped us. I wouldn't know; I would never have believed you if you told me I would own any business back then, let alone one that had anything to do with Apple, which I damn near worshiped, even back when it was supremely unpopular to do so. About the only thing I got out of that fanboyism was having the foresight to buy some Apple stock back in 1999 and hold on to it to this day.
Since 2001, when Apple decided to enter the retail game themselves, many resellers like us have felt stabbed in the back. Not a few of our fellow resellers and Apple Specialists have gone out of business, the latest (to my knowledge) being MacUpgrades in Bethesda, which happens to be located between both our current stores. It is very clear that Apple is both our best friend and our biggest enemy.
Still, I'm willing to set all that aside today to acknowledge the immeasurable contribution Steve Jobs has made not just to us as Mac fans, but to personal computing and the larger technology industry as a whole. Think about what we accepted as the most cutting-edge smartphone the day before the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Or what passed for an MP3 player the day before Steve introduced the iPod in 2001. Or -- if you're old enough to remember without the help of YouTube videos -- what it looked like to use a computer before the Macintosh. Without Apple and Steve to jerk us all forward, imagine where we'd be today. It isn't pretty.
I'm not going to be like these idiots who are dumping Apple stock today; I know Apple's got some more life in it yet. But Steve's departure is certainly a milestone.
I don't discuss this openly very often (if at all), but right now, CapitolMac is at roughly the same point where Apple was in the late 1990s. I don't intend to leave it there. If I can bring about even one percent of the turnaround that Apple saw in the years since then, we will all be wildly successful. I fully intend to right this ship, but it won't happen overnight. But I hope to assure you that I do not intend to cut and run; I have every intention of making things better.
I should go to bed now. But in the meantime, take a look at our home page.
And does the scurrilous rumor that Allen and himself did all the work, while Bill played poker hold true?posted by Zed at 12:32 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]
Not at all, he says. "We were both working pretty hard. The maths routines are a part of the interpreter, not all of it, and Bill and Paul wrote the rest."
charlie don't surf: I'm not going to refute your cites there. I'm just going to say that personally, my knowledge of the PARC visit comes from a recorded interview with Jobs where he tells the story of first seeing GUI there, and in which he himself credits Apple's success to having come across GUI during that visit.charlie don't surf isn't anything close to a reliable narrator. In almost all of his comments he writes some crazy story putting himself at the center of action.
"Jobs has done an awful lot for everyone."What?! Seriously, what has he done? He's released some niche computers a bunch of expensive trendsetting gadgets with a shallow learning curve and reduced functionality. He's had a positive influence on the entertainment industry too.
"Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find it reported in any legacy/mainstream outlet. And when the FT‘s Tim Bradshaw did no more than broach the subject in a single tweet, he instantly found himself fielding a barrage of responses criticizing him from so much as mentioning the subject. Similarly, when Gawker first reported Cook’s sexuality in January, MacDailyNews called their actions 'petty, vindictive, and just plain sad.'posted by ericb at 1:15 PM on August 26, 2011 [2 favorites]
But surely this is something we can and should be celebrating, if only in the name of diversity — that a company which by some measures the largest and most important in the world is now being run by a gay man. Certainly when it comes to gay role models, Cook is great: he’s the boring systems-and-processes guy, not the flashy design guru, and as such he cuts sharply against stereotype. He’s like Barney Frank in that sense: a super-smart, powerful and non-effeminate man who shows that being gay is no obstacle to any career you might want.
One of the issues here is that most news outlets cover Cook as part of their Apple story, and Cook’s sexuality is irrelevant to his role at Apple. And so the other story — the fact that the ranks of big-company CEOs have just become significantly more diverse — is being overlooked and ignored. And that’s bad for the gay and lesbian community more broadly.
The institution of the closet is one of fear — one where people would rather be ignored than noticed, because they fear the negative repercussions of being known to be gay. It’s an institution which Cook, like any gay man born in 1960, knows at first hand. But now the risk of being ignored is bigger in the other direction: if the world can’t see gay men and women in all their true diversity, if the only homosexuals they know of are the flamboyant ones on TV, then that only serves to perpetuate stereotypes.
As the Apple story moves away from being about Steve Jobs and becomes much more about Tim Cook, we’re going to see a lot of coverage of Cook, the man. He is, after all, not just one of the most powerful gay men in the world; he’s one of the most powerful people in the world, period. The first instinct of many journalists writing about Cook will be to ignore the issue of his sexuality. It’s not germane to his job, they’re only writing about him because of the job he holds, and therefore they shouldn’t write about it." [more]
"When you tell us it’s wrong to report on gay public figures, you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth. (What you’re telling us as gay journalists is even worse.)"posted by ericb at 1:17 PM on August 26, 2011
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posted by elsietheeel at 3:46 PM on August 24, 2011