Steve Jobs is STILL DEAD Visitors to Apple's online shop were today reminded that Steve Jobs remains dead. Fanboys accessing the normally functional retail site, keen to buy such post-Jobsian products as the iPhone 5, were forcibly delayed for 1.45 minutes by a black and white slideshow presentation "Remembering Steve" featuring voice-over quotations …
But thank you. IF you had not posted this I would have missed it.
He meant a lot to a lot of people and he will be remembered fondly for years to come.
And a reply in the nature of the troll post itself, What will people be saying a year after Steve Ballmer is dead? Nothing, just soft sigh of the stockholders relived that he is finally gone.
Unfortunately he was made with non-user replaceable parts. When one bit goes, you have to throw the whole thing away. Well, actually, some iFixit fan did manage to spudge in a new liver, but then something else went kapput, so they had to make do with a backup model. Unfortunately I think the replacement doesn't have the same capacity as the original so a lot of the restore from iTunes has gone missing.
But seriously whoever is Editor in Chief at the Reg, fire Anna Leach. This article is pure spite and troll bait, and not even in an amusing way. Every Apple article she writes has some hipster "I hate Apple because Apple are cooler than I am" spin on it and frankly she can just fuck off back to secondary school and finish her GCSEs.
Summary:
"I disagree with author X's point of view, therefore s/he should be fired. [personal attack, personal attack, etc]"
I'm not sure what's more ridiculous - that you feel your own opinion is important enough that those who disagree with it should have their entire careers cast into the gutter, or that you think hating Apple makes you a "hipster".
This post has been deleted by its author
have to agree. Someone needs to take Anna aside on this one.
Her opinion is one thing , but this is complete and utter horrific disrespect. No-one deserves to have an article written about them like this, not matter what the small minded views of the author are.
Anna, it appears your only legacy will be known for spite and very bad taste in humour. Definitely not any bit of decency.
The tech world is a poorer place without the presence of pioneers like Jobs and Gates.
What is sad is the technology companies are now all run by businessmen with no vision. Ballmer, Whitman and Cook. So it's no wonder innovation seems to have stalled in the last few years.
A customer enters an apple store.
Mr. Balmer: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
The blue shirt does not respond.)
Mr. Balmer: 'Ello, Miss?
Blue Shirt: What do you mean "miss"?
Mr. Balmer: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
Blue Shirt : We're closin' for lunch.
Mr. Balmer: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Steve Jobs what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Blue Shirt: Oh yes, the, uh, the Apple CEO...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Balmer: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Blue Shirt: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
Mr. Balmer: Look, matey, I know a dead Steve Jobs when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Blue Shirt: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bloke, the Apple CEo, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Mr. Balmer: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Blue Shirt: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
Mr. Balmer: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up! (shouting at Siri) 'Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I've got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show...
(Blue Shirt hits the cage)
Blue Shirt: There, he moved!
Mr. Balmer: No, he didn't, that was you hitting the cage!
Blue Shirt: I never!!
Mr. Balmer: Yes, you did!
Blue Shirt: I never, never did anything...
Mr. Balmer: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) 'ELLO POLLY!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call!
(Takes iPhone5 out of the cage and thumps its on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)
Mr. Balmer: Now that's what I call a dead CEO.
Blue Shirt: No, no.....No, 'e's stunned!
Mr. Praline: STUNNED?!?
Blue Shirt: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! CEO's stun easily, major.
Mr. Balmer: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That CEOis definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged patent dispute.
Blue Shirt: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for Cupertino.
Mr. Balmer: PININ' for CUPERTINO!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got 'im home?
Blue Shirt: The Norwegian Blue prefers keepin' on it's back! Remarkable bird, id'nit, squire? Lovely plumage!
Mr. Balmer: Look, I took the liberty of examining that CEO when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.
(pause)
Blue Shirt: Well, o'course it was nailed there! If I hadn't nailed that CEO down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!
Mr. Balmer: "VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!
Blue Shirt: No no! 'E's pining!
Mr. Balmer: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This CEO is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-CEO!!
Apple/Apple fanboys' continuing unhealthy adoration of Steve Jobs - a year after his death now - is weird and excessive and completely worthy of ridicule such as this article. The fact some people here are whining about it just reinforces the point, no-one would care about an article like this over Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison.
"Because Steve Ballmer's death will only generate mild applause, and perhaps some celebrations."
More like indifference, which is the appropriate response for the general public to have about the death of a CEO, whichever Steve it happens to be. Nice hypocrisy there though, advocating making-light the death of one individual whilst chastising the same thing when it happens to be an individual you admire.
We're not talking about Microsoft having a tribute when Gates dies. It would be quite normal for a company to have a public tribute to a founder of a company.
The "one year on" thing is unusual, though.
My first reaction to this was "eh?" and my second one was that Apple are basically rallying the cult members after the disastrous iPhone 5 launch.
We'll probably find out in a few years when Tim Cook gets canned.
"My first reaction to this was "eh?" and my second one was that Apple are basically rallying the cult members after the disastrous iPhone 5 launch."
If selling five million gizmos in a single weekend is a "disastrous" product launch, then I hope one day to invent a gizmo that has such a disaster. :)
Henry Ford's name is still trotted out on occasion; the Kelloggs also had a full-on Hollywood bio-pic made about them. (And those two really didn't get on!) This isn't new.
Personality cults are hardly uncommon in any case: celebrities have entire racks of magazines dedicated to gossip about them, photos of them, and so on.
But... Steve Jobs actually made a difference. He turned Apple from a sinking basket-case everyone else—yes, Dell, I'm looking at you—had already written off, into a company that now dominates multiple sectors and makes an impressive profit. (It won't last forever; these things are inherently cyclical.) Jobs basically turned Apple from a company that made poor products nobody wanted into a company that made very good products millions upon millions of people wanted—demanded, even—to the extent that the company actually has genuine fans who go to the effort of queuing up outside of stores to buy the products.
This is, when you think about it, Business 101: it's how business are supposed to work. That so many people still don't get this makes it clear how poor our education systems have become.
Bill Gates is also likely to be similarly treated when he (eventually) passes away. Microsoft, for all their flaws, did manage to get a PC in every home—something Apple never managed—at affordable prices. Considering how much a 486DX/2 used to cost over 20 years ago, it's amazing what you can pick up now for about $400. And, when you compare the likes of WordStar on a CP/M computer in the early '80s to Microsoft Word on a modern PC, the difference is staggering.
No, neither Bill nor Steve were people you'd necessarily want to spend an hour in a broken lift with, but few great CEOs ever are: you really do need a level of ruthlessness and pragmatism if you're going to succeed in such a role; "business is war" is a cliché for a damned good reason.
People with that kind of drive and passion are just as OCD about their own passions as a FOSS fan is about GitHub, or a hardcore trainspotter about locomotive numbers, or sports fans about their favourite teams. Passionate people tend to obsess, even if only a little. Jobs was an aesthete with a gift for business and salesmanship. Gates was more of a pragmatist, but also had a talent for knowing bullshit when he heard it.
Even the UK's own Sir Clive Sinclair—who's had a TV programme made about him (and Acorn's Chris Curry)—and Sir Alan Sugar had famously abrasive personalities.
Ballmer's position is difficult, but Windows 7 did come out on his watch, so that's a big plus. The jury's still out on Windows (Phone) 8. To be fair, filling the shoes of a man who snatched a massive IBM PC contract from under Digital Research's nose, and even pulled a fast one over Steve Jobs himself back in the day, was never going to be easy. But Ballmer was one of Microsoft's co-founders and was there from the start. He might not have been a programmer the way Gates was, but he's been at MS long enough to know who to trust.
"Henry Ford's name is still trotted out on occasion; the Kelloggs also had a full-on Hollywood bio-pic made about them. (And those two really didn't get on!) This isn't new."
Yes, but when was the last time that you called into a Ford dealership and they stuck a video in your way to watch before you could talk to a salesman?
Indeed. Why people get so uptight about phones and computers I will never know.
In the 1980s I may have been a huge C64 fan at the time but I have massive respect for what Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry (where's his knighthood?) did too.
If anyone deserves some disrespect it is Google. Microsoft and Apple both make very distinctive software products and it's Google who produce products that are similar to their competitors.
The problem is that the spirit of Steve Jobs doesn't live on at Apple at all. The lack of anything interesting in the new iPhone shows that the vision went when he did.
This strikes me as a cynical bit of advertising. It's not an attempt to honour the memory of Steve Jobs, just an attempt to make some money out of it...
From what his biographer, Isaacson, has said about Jobs refusing surgery for nine months, it seems he paid a high price for believing in his own reality distortion field: “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking…we talked about this a lot”.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pancreatic-cancer-type-jobs
"Jobs had a rare form of the cancer, known as neuroendocrine cancer, which grows more slowly and is easier to treat, explains Leonard Saltz, acting chief of the gastrointestinal oncology service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "Survival for many years or even decades with endocrine cancer is not surprising." For that type, the sort that Jobs had, "survival is measured in years, as opposed to pancreatic cancer, which is measured in months."
"When you have a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, that is substantially different from pancreatic cancer," Saltz says."
"One form of treatment that is not recommended for most pancreatic cancer is a liver transplant. Media observers surmised that the transplant Jobs received in 2009 had been necessary because the cancer had spread to his liver. And although liver failure is a common cause of death for pancreatic cancer patients, because the liver is close to the pancreas and often gets invaded by the spreading cancer, getting a new one "is not an accepted standard form of treatment," he says, citing a lack of evidence to show that it works."
You can not seriously be suggesting that alternative medicine in any way helped his condition, I'm not saying he would necessarily live to park in another handicap space, but not only did he ignore rational advice, he prevented someone else receiving a replacement organ. I have less reason to think that man was even half a decent person.
Since the 1940s, medical science has developed chemotherapy, radiation therapy, adjuvant therapy and the newer targeted therapies, as well as refining surgical techniques for removing cancer. Before the development of these modern, evidence-based treatments, 90% of cancer patients died within five years.
So much for ancient cures.
I don't usually mind the biting satire of the I.T. world but why not let the man rest in peace? Surely the Reg and it's Jobs hating readers have had their money's worth by now. Anna/Reg - the man was a son, a husband and a father. Can't you at least lay off out of resect for those he's left behind? How would you feel if it was a relative of yours that had died in sad circumstances and was then held up to ridicule every time some 'smart young thing' fancied a bit of a laugh?
Let it go.
Cook said "one of the greatest gifts Steve gave to the world is Apple".
I would think Steve Wozniak would have something to say abou that, since he was one of the founders and actually the one who designed/build the first Apple.
Woz would have something to say about the BS.....if he had the ego that Jobs had. I'm sure Woz is more than happy to let this kind of public BS continue, rather that try to educate the Fanbois on reality.
Anyone remember the Atari Game Breakout? Just google "Steve Jobs, Wozniak Breakout" and learn who was the REAL programer and genius behind Apple. Steve Jobs was the Salesman....and a very good salesman, but that's as far as it goes.
You are 'celebrating' Jobs the plagiariser.
He stole / copied:
The 'Apple' logo; the name 'Apple'; the Xerox UI, the mouse; etc., etc.
Wire is just following those who celebrate Jesse James, Doc Watson, even Charles Manson.
John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, said it best forty years ago: This Jobs is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late Jobs. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-Jobs
We don't care because Steve Jobs was just another CEO of a large corporate that doesn't give a shit about its own customers. All corporates are like this, whether it's Apple, Microsoft, Sony or whoever.
We also don't care because Apple didn't innovate anything. GUIs, touchscreens, MP3 players, smart phones.. all existed years before an Apple produced their versions. Usually (but not always) Apple made a prettier product, sometimes they even made a better product, but they didn't invent any of them.
I guess what annoys us the most about people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is not the people themselves. It's the bullshit artists in their own companies and in the computer illiterate press that insist these guys have done something beyond being great at marketing what they sell.
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