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On Steve Jobs and his health
May. 19th, 2011 08:54 pmSteve Jobs. Hero? Evil insane control freak? Manipulative freak? Egomaniac? Maker of worthless shiny toys?
Yes, Jobs is a control freak, but don't knock it. His obsessiveness and extreme attention to detail has produced a remarkably high proportion of the technical advances of the entire personal computer industry over something like 35 years now. The whole damned world owes him.
Without Jobs, we wouldn't have Windows. We would probably have GUIs - he didn't invent them - but we'd have really crap GUIs. The early experimental ones were rubbish. It was Apple - Jobs' Apple - that took this plaything of the academics and refined it and polished it and made it useful and friendly and attractive and easy... which the rest of the IT industry then copied. Often badly - look at OS/2, or AmigaOS, or even Windows 1, 2 and 3. All were pretty crap GUIs.
Without Jobs, we'd have shitty geek-toy smartphones.
Without Jobs, we'd have some kind of solid-state successor to Minidisk as audio players, software-locked down tighter than a duck's arsehole with dreadful apps. Look at the abominations Sony creates and ships with Vaios or its music players.
Without Jobs, we'd have had CLI-driven text-mode OSs well into the 90s and some terrible OS/2-derived OS that cost a fortune. We'd never have got laser printers or WYSIWYG or rich media integrated into our OSs for free.
Stallman and GNU and so on would never have delivered all this. They like EMACS, FFS! We Linux and especially Ubuntu users have what we have because the FOSS world copies Microsoft, and Microsoft copies Apple.
Jobs has done more to change this planet and benefit the human race than any single politician since WW2 and probably more than any single other American citizen who has ever lived.
He is a genuinely great man, and after some truly *horrific* medical procedures in the last few years...
(If you don't know what the poor bastard has endured, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_procedure
He survived that. He then underwent this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplant
The fact that he came back to work after that is incredible and nothing short of heroic.)
... and now, after this medical nightmare which it is amazing he survived, he is slowly dying. And that is a great shame, as this man deserves all the praise we can give him.
Yes, he is head of a huge rich company with dodgy practices. All huge rich companies have dodgy practices; Apple is better and cleaner than most. It is vastly cleaner than Microsoft, for instance, or Exxon or any fossil fuel company, or any major financial institution. Apple got where it is by making insanely great products. Dozens of them, over four decades.
Sure, they're not all great. Lots of them suck. Some are horrible, some of the business models ethically dodgy. But there are so many great ones, it's forgiveable, and unlike Microsoft, nobody is forcing you to buy them. (Try buying a brand-name PC without Microsoft. Try running a major company without running Microsoft. It's virtually impossible.)
Apple has done amazing things and it has, literally, changed the world. So has Microsoft, yes, but in many cases either by copying Apple1, by methodically and illegally screwing its competitors2, by buying in products it is not competent to make itself3, or by illegally and immorally manipulating the marketplace4. And of course by simple lying5 and theft6 when none of the above worked.
Selected examples:
(1) Windows, especially 95 and 7.
(2) Aldus, WRT Word for Windows; Netscape, WRT IE.
(3) MS Mail, Powerpoint, Visual Basic, FrontPage, IE.
(4) Q.v. the deal with Hitachi over BeOS, or IBM re OS/2 and Office, or any of its OEM contracts in the '80s & '90s.
(5) the obfuscation of deliberate, faked failure of Win3.1 on DR-DOS.
(6) DoubleSpace, from STAC; Video for Windows, from Apple.
Yes, Jobs is a control freak, but don't knock it. His obsessiveness and extreme attention to detail has produced a remarkably high proportion of the technical advances of the entire personal computer industry over something like 35 years now. The whole damned world owes him.
Without Jobs, we wouldn't have Windows. We would probably have GUIs - he didn't invent them - but we'd have really crap GUIs. The early experimental ones were rubbish. It was Apple - Jobs' Apple - that took this plaything of the academics and refined it and polished it and made it useful and friendly and attractive and easy... which the rest of the IT industry then copied. Often badly - look at OS/2, or AmigaOS, or even Windows 1, 2 and 3. All were pretty crap GUIs.
Without Jobs, we'd have shitty geek-toy smartphones.
Without Jobs, we'd have some kind of solid-state successor to Minidisk as audio players, software-locked down tighter than a duck's arsehole with dreadful apps. Look at the abominations Sony creates and ships with Vaios or its music players.
Without Jobs, we'd have had CLI-driven text-mode OSs well into the 90s and some terrible OS/2-derived OS that cost a fortune. We'd never have got laser printers or WYSIWYG or rich media integrated into our OSs for free.
Stallman and GNU and so on would never have delivered all this. They like EMACS, FFS! We Linux and especially Ubuntu users have what we have because the FOSS world copies Microsoft, and Microsoft copies Apple.
Jobs has done more to change this planet and benefit the human race than any single politician since WW2 and probably more than any single other American citizen who has ever lived.
He is a genuinely great man, and after some truly *horrific* medical procedures in the last few years...
(If you don't know what the poor bastard has endured, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_procedure
He survived that. He then underwent this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplant
The fact that he came back to work after that is incredible and nothing short of heroic.)
... and now, after this medical nightmare which it is amazing he survived, he is slowly dying. And that is a great shame, as this man deserves all the praise we can give him.
Yes, he is head of a huge rich company with dodgy practices. All huge rich companies have dodgy practices; Apple is better and cleaner than most. It is vastly cleaner than Microsoft, for instance, or Exxon or any fossil fuel company, or any major financial institution. Apple got where it is by making insanely great products. Dozens of them, over four decades.
Sure, they're not all great. Lots of them suck. Some are horrible, some of the business models ethically dodgy. But there are so many great ones, it's forgiveable, and unlike Microsoft, nobody is forcing you to buy them. (Try buying a brand-name PC without Microsoft. Try running a major company without running Microsoft. It's virtually impossible.)
Apple has done amazing things and it has, literally, changed the world. So has Microsoft, yes, but in many cases either by copying Apple1, by methodically and illegally screwing its competitors2, by buying in products it is not competent to make itself3, or by illegally and immorally manipulating the marketplace4. And of course by simple lying5 and theft6 when none of the above worked.
Selected examples:
(1) Windows, especially 95 and 7.
(2) Aldus, WRT Word for Windows; Netscape, WRT IE.
(3) MS Mail, Powerpoint, Visual Basic, FrontPage, IE.
(4) Q.v. the deal with Hitachi over BeOS, or IBM re OS/2 and Office, or any of its OEM contracts in the '80s & '90s.
(5) the obfuscation of deliberate, faked failure of Win3.1 on DR-DOS.
(6) DoubleSpace, from STAC; Video for Windows, from Apple.
