Posted on 10/07/2011 1:30:39 PM PDT by toma29
Steve Jobs is dead. A tech genius has passed on. Sad. Certainly a devastating loss to Steve Jobs' close friends and family members, as well as to Apple executives and shareholders. The rest of you? Calm down.
Among my Facebook friends yesterday, more than one wrote publicly that they were "crying" or "can't stop crying" or "teared up" due to Steve Jobs' death. Really now. You can't stop crying, now that you've heard that a middle-aged CEO has passed, after a long battle with cancer? If humans were always so empathetic, well, that would be understandable. But this type of one-upmanship of public displays of grief is both unbecoming and undeserved.
Real outpourings of public grief should be reserved for those people who lived life so heroically and selflessly that they stand as shining examples of love for all of humanity. People like, for example, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who—along with his family—was bombed, beaten, and stabbed during his years of principled activism in the US civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth died yesterday, the same day as Steve Jobs. He did not die a billionaire.
Death, of course, is not a competition. All deaths are sad for the living. Everyone deserves to be mourned, and well-known people will inevitably be mourned more loudly than others. But it is actually important to keep our grief in perspective. When we start mourning technocrats as idols, we cheapen the lives of those who have sacrificed more for their fellow man.
Steve Jobs was great at what he did. There's no need to further fellate the man's memory. He made good computers, he made good phones, he made good music players. He sold them well. He got obscenely rich. He enabled an entire generation of techie design fetishists to walk around with more attractive gadgets.
(Excerpt) Read more at gawker.com ...
O.K.
I’m sorry, but to me this is quackery, but you seem like a nice and sincere person, and I don’t want this to end up insulting you. I understand where you are coming from, and I disagree, and will keep it at that.
Don't get me wrong, all these devices without mouses that fit in you pocket or a small tablet are neat, ditto the Nano's and digital audio revolution.
But what bothers me about Apple is they could but won't make one device that does all. Add a phone to their tablet and I don't have to carry around both. Instead like a drug dealer they string Mac fanatics along to buy the latest fix, and for those of you who make fun of the Palinista's? Mac zealot's are ten times worse....
Now on China.
No one will address that, ya a great guy. But not just his stuff but so much of our stuff is made by a quasi Corporate/Marxist State with one child only then abortion (policy) and now a "death van" with lethal injection for dissidents. Add to that all those who have committed suicide building all these electronic devices because the working conditions are horrible. Where is Richard Trumka to talk about that?
I hate to be a Luddite, but given who we buy all this crap from i.e. Evil China, ( their I said it ), maybe we don't need any more stuff....
ok, thanks.
I wanted to change my tagline and that was the first thing that came into mind. It’s always amused me and with the way things are going,it fits!
Came across this on another forum:
‘Steve Jobs never invented the Ipod - this chap did:
Quote:
http://www.kanekramer.com/default.htm
Quote:
Kane Kramer is a serial inventor. His inventions include the technology behind the MP3 player and Monicall. He was the first to conceive the idea of downloading music, data and video down telephone lines in 1979 when he was 23 and patented it with James Campbell who was 21. Together they went on to pioneer digital recording and built the world’s first solid state digital recorder/players.
Apple didn’t invent the first digital music player:
Quote:
The SaeHan Information Systems MPMan, which debuted in Asia in March 1998, was the first mass-produced portable solid state digital audio player.
The South Korean device was first imported for sale in North America by Michael Robertson’s Z Company[1] in mid-1998. Around the same time, Eiger Labs, Inc. imported and rebranded the player in two models, the Eiger MPMan F10, and Eiger MPMan F20.
The Eiger MPMan F10 was a very basic unit and wasn’t user expandable, though owners could upgrade the memory from 32MB to 64MB by sending the player back to Eiger Labs with a check for $69 + $7.95 shipping. Measuring at 91 mm tall by 70 mm wide by 16.5 mm thick and weighing a little over 2 oz, it was very compact.
The Eiger MPMan F20 was a similar model that used 3.3v SmartMedia cards for expansion, and ran on a single AA battery, instead of rechargeable NiMH batteries.
The Iphone wasn’t invented by Apple neither. Been around in the 1990s.
Quote:
The first smartphone was the IBM Simon; it was designed in 1992 and shown as a concept product that year at COMDEX, the computer industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was released to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail client, the ability to send and receive faxes, and games. It had no physical buttons, instead customers used a touchscreen to select telephone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen “predictive” keyboard. By today’s standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end product, lacking a camera and the ability to download third-party applications. However, its feature set at the time was highly advanced.
The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia’s smartphones starting with the Nokia 9000, released in 1996. This distinctive palmtop computer style smartphone was the result of a collaborative effort of an early successful and costly personal digital assistant (PDA) by Hewlett-Packard combined with Nokia’s bestselling phone around that time, and early prototype models had the two devices fixed via a hinge. The communicators are characterized by clamshell design, with a feature phone display, keyboard and user interface on top of the phone, and a physical QWERTY keyboard, high-resolution display of at least 640x200 pixels and PDA user interface under the door. The software was based on the GEOS V3.0 operating system, featuring email communication and text-based web browsing. In 1998, it was followed by Nokia 9110, and in 2000 by Nokia 9110i, with improved web browsing capability.
In 1997 the term ‘smartphone’ was used for the first time when Ericsson unveiled the concept phone GS88, the first device labelled as ‘smartphone’.
Jobs and Apple didn’t invent the PC mouse:
Quote:
The trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor working on the Royal Canadian Navy’s DATAR project in 1952. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, as it was a secret military project.
Independently, Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype in 1963,[4] with the assistance of his colleague Bill English. They christened the device the mouse as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device looking like a tail and generally resembling the common mouse. Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.
The invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart’s much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect.
Apple and Jobs didn’t invent touch screen technology used by smartphones and Ipads:
Quote:
The first touch screen was a capacitive touch screen developed by E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, UK. The inventor briefly described his work in a short article published in 1965 and then more fully - along with photographs and diagrams - in an article published in 1967.
So he wasn’t that much of a visionary after all.’
Jobs ripped off his best friend Wozniak in a deal in 1975.
Jobs was a tyrant at Apple first time round, compared by ex-employees to the 16/17th French kings for his arrogance and unpleasantness.
Worst of all, Steve Jobs was a man who refused to acknowledge his own child, and stood up in court and lied that he was sterile.
Add to the fact that imo he was not the genius and visionary they are claiming he was, and frankly I lost and lose no sleep over the death of Steve Jobs. He was a man whose fortune came from making money from gullable people desperate to be cool.
To your TWO RANTS...
No one ever said he did any of those things... The MP3 players were always recognized to have been on the market. Apple made them work. Doug Engelbart invented the Mouse at SRI in the 1960s... not the Canadian Navy, they invented the humongous trackball... an entirely different concept. Apple licensed the mouse from SRI. . . and contrary to your contention THEY PAID ROYALTIES for the use of that patent. They never claimed they invented the mouse. Apple never claimed they invented the smartphone... they just made the most practical one. The Nokia was a feature phone that had a few apps... the better smartphone to show as a predecessor would be the RIM blackberry. The Simon was a “feature phone” and was not programable. The Simon keyboard was NOT predictive. That was a later addition to Wikipedia and is wrong. That tech was NOT available as they did not have connection to an internet or an onboard dictionary to find words. As for touchscreen technology, Apple pioneered MULTITOUCH on small devices and made it work.
He recognized his daughter two years later when he found out she was his daughter and supported her... she was part of his life from then on.
As for the $600 Atari scandal and Wozniak, he made WOZ a multi-millionaire, several hundred times over. Woz has long since forgiven him the $600...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.