RIP Steve Jobs

[Ded10c]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/s ... -blog.html

Steve Jobs passed away last night at 56, after a long battle with cancer.

I may never have liked the macs, but the only thing that has ever beaten an iPod for me is another iPod. Preferably with RockBox.

[VSMIT]

The king is dead, long live the king.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

RIP Steve.


But I do hope we are
not inundated with
another week of Jobs'
articles, as we experienced
when he stepped down.

[Dataanti]

I personally never liked him, or the company he made famous. But I will say this, he did know how to run a company and get people to through all of their money at him. He was a master of marketing. He was good at his job. I personally don't care that he is dead since I never liked him, but that's based of what I've seen in the media and from the company. Despite that, R.I.P Steve Jobs.

[Ded10c]

Courtesy of eddy

[Red Devil]

he made good stuff for soccer moms and artist types.

[GSH]

I have more Pixar (which Steve Jobs bought after LucasArts spun it off) movies than Apple products at home. And, for that, my family will be more thankful overall.

Disclaimer: the last Apple product I bought new/used was the Apple IIgs, back in the 1990s. I've personally always sided more with "the other" Steve -- Steve Wozniak -- than Jobs. Wozniak made good computer hardware and software for the Apple 1/2 line, things that made a great sandbox for people interested in technology. Steve Jobs made a great case, logo, marketing, etc that got Apple off the ground. But, Jobs later tried to kill off the Apple ][ line in favor of his baby, the Mac, and I didn't appreciate that. I also didn't appreciate Jobs's Reality Distortion Field (RDF), where he could claim with a straight face that the PowerPC's superiority in 2 photoshop benchmarks were a sign that the entire system was faster than Intel-based PCs. As if.

For quite a while, Steve Jobs thought of computers for business use. Games on the Macintosh line were routinely deprecated and had their APIs backstabbed by Apple. Jobs had a fantasy of marketing towards the 'creators' in life -- see the whole "Think Different" line of ads. Eventually, Jobs learned from his work and time at Pixar. With the iPod, and later iPhone & iPad, Jobs finally got that the general user doesn't want to create media. The general user wants to consume media. And, if there are games available for iPhone/iPad, then that's ok too. Call it accidental support of games, rather than the deliberate suffocation they used to have.

Another random factoid about Steve Jobs -- he was adopted as an infant, after his unwed biological mother found herself pregnant in the 1950s. I wouldn't pretend for an instant that someone else would have replaced him had he never been born.

I still personally prefer to create code and sandboxes to play around in. That's me, and I wouldn't pretend I'd like to copy Jobs's career path. But, if you're going to celebrate Steve Jobs, remember to also thank the engineers who took his vision and made it actually work. Jobs was an ideas man who could communicate that vision to others and had the business sense to hire enough people to complete the tasks. Too many people think ideas without execution, or ideas with a sub-par team will work. No dice.

-- GSH

[Ded10c]

Well written, GSH. I take it this GS is the same GS as your namesake?

[GSH]

Yes. My first irc nickname, back in 1992 (efnet, #appleiigs) was GSHacker after the Apple IIgs. I eventually shortened it to GSH.

One more thought: Steve Jobs (and all of Apple, Google, Microsoft etc) are American success stories of entrepreneurial creation. They produced products more or less from scratch. (All software starts with the completely blank screen and a cursor blinking in the top left; hardware is a bit more assembling of other's parts.) They didn't go after government grants, support, etc -- just creating products that consumers wanted to use. They didn't owe anyone anything, and neither did anyone owe them anything. Celebrate those that created things. This quote is instructive:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

-- GSH

[Iron_Maiden]

Indeed a sad blow to entrapunurialship here in America and a sad time for many people across the globe.

[Zenophas]

Mmmm, didn't care for MAC either. But, R.I.P.

[blue_banana]

Mmmm, didn't care for MAC either. But, R.I.P.

i care for macs

it really sucks that he died of pancreatic cancer. what a sucker punch to the world, not just apple

[AcneVulgaris]

My first computer experience was on an Apple II, and it shaped my destiny. My little nerd friends and I would stay after school in the lab until they kicked us out. It was pretty much the only cerebral pursuit open to us in the crappy remote mining town we lived in. If not for those two Apple-donated machines, I would probably be another alcoholic miner like everybody else in that town.

I had pretty much ignored Apple since 1984, when the local community college figured out that I wasn't enrolled there and kicked me out of their computer labs. Just couldn't afford an Apple II. Spent a couple decades doing PC support and database stuff, and watched a goodly portion of my soul evaporate in the crushing boredom. About 2005, I made the insane decision that at 39 years of age, I was going to become a game developer.

A couple of years of scraping by on contract work eventually brought me a contract for an iPhone game that required me getting a Mac Pro and an iPod. I was using XP at the time, and OSX just blew it the hell out of the water with it's unix underpinnings. (Win 7 and 8 look like they've caught up and are fairly comparable now, but I haven't had time to play with them much) .

What really blew my mind was the first iPod touch. I've been seeing amazing technological developments all my life, and I hadn't actually been excited about any of them for several years, but the iPod touch was a freaking POCKET COMPUTER, capable of 3d graphics, gigs of storage, wifi, and a host of other things, for hours on a tiny battery, without generating any detectable heat. It didn't lock up, never needed to be turned off, reset, or have the battery yanked, and just did what it was designed to do without fussing. I'd had and supported various pocket devices (WinCE, Sony Clie, HP portables) and they were all buggy, crash prone, battery devouring trainwrecks that cost more to support than they ever produced value for.

I remember I'd catch myself just holding the iPod Touch, turning it over in my hands in pure awe at what it was. I had read about them, and been kinda "meh, expensive, stupid toy" until I actually had an iPod to examine.

Since then, nearly every dime I've earned has come from the App Store. The iThings and the store made it possible for me to run my own profitable game company, which made it possible to have a career in game development (nobody's gonna hire a 40+ year old game dev without 10+ years of experience).

From the beginning of my journey, the man behind the things that allowed me to have a rewarding career was Steve Jobs. I know he was kind of a prick, but I still owe him an enormous debt of gratitude, and I'm in awe of what he achieved, starting in similar circumstances as a random kid adopted by a middle class family.

I didn't know him, but I'm sad that he's gone. He changed the world for the better with Apple and touched the lives of billions by making Pixar possible. Who knows what he would have rolled out in the next 20 years?

The world is a substantially less awesome place with his passing. I've added him to a list of dead guys whose slack I try to pick up. If enough of us dimmer lights can contribute a little of what the bright ones were producing, world awesomeness can be maintained.

[Ded10c]

If OSX blew XP out of the water for you, I take it you missed out on Ubuntu and most other Linux distros?

Also, I'd like the iPod Touch very much indeed if it weren't for the limitations.

[AcneVulgaris]

I ran Ubuntu for quite a while, and ended up ditching it because the GUI related stuff was just so uneven, unpolished, and fragile. I did love KDevelop for C++ work though. I still run Ubuntu on my servers, but text only. Linux rules until you get out of text mode. OSX has a solid unix core AND the graphic stuff works right.

As for the restrictions on iOS, for the most part the decisions made were for good reasons, not all related to Apple making a profit. I can almost guarantee Google adopting some of those restrictions as they learn the hard way why they were needed. I've done a bit of Android development, and that openness just makes any meaningful deployment impossible for a small shop like mine. On iOS, you can test for your lowest powered target device and oldest OS version, and be reasonably certain it will work on all later devices. On android, you have to test the different processor/GPU combos at a minimum, and usually have to test a bunch of individual devices as well, and 3 or 4 different OS versions.... every time you make a new version. The amount of work involved just explodes, and the sales on Android haven't even been 1/10th what they are on the app store, despite a much larger user base.

From the consumer side, the Android devices still haven't reached the stability and ease of use of the first gen iThings. UI animations hitch up and glitch (the UNLOCK slider for FFS. With a freaking dual core 1ghz tablet, why can't the stupid slider animate SMOOTHLY?! when you drag your finger across it?!). Android is essentially the Linux experience on a mobile device with WinCE era stability, which is great if your purpose in having the device is hacking on it, but not so good if you actually want to use the thing, or are supporting software on it.

I'd love to see Android and Linux catch up, but for now they're just too scruffy to be used profitably. I see more "yes, but Apple is evil" responses than "we're gonna fix that" responses to criticisms of those platforms, so I don't hold out much hope.