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 ...
You are certifiably nuts.
Depends, some value loyalty and honesty above achievement. You can count me among those and after reading years ago how Jobs screwed Wozniak on the Atari gig Jobs fell off the admired list.
I do offer prayers for those he left behind and hope that he corrected that character flaw but the way he treated Gates after Gates saved Apple with cold hard cash, I doubt the correction ever happened.
The author of this article is just another vulgar, envious critic longing for some cheap attention. What a pity.
That’s quite a conclusion to jump to!
My dad died of Pancreatic cancer.... could you please use your extra special medical gizmo to see if he died of HIV too??
My mom died of cancer at 56, same age as Jobs, please tell me, did my mom die of HIV too???
So, it seems as though I could very well die of HIV over the next few years. It also seems that folks like you, folks with those special powers from their special medical gizmo’s, will say I died of HIV and think I had been a homo- a queer- a faggot.
That’s it, suicide is my only way out.
Agreed.
“I’m curious as to what the reaction would have been had it been Bill Gates instead of Steve Jobs?”
Much more of a shrug, since BG hasn’t been (take your pick) either centrally involved at MS for years, or has been quite ineffective at finding hit products, which Apple has been pumping our regularly.
“Both were giants, regardless of which side you were on in the PC vs. Mac debate, certainly Bill Gates would have deserved all of the kudos that Steve Jobs received.”
Well, one deserves the past tense, and not the one that just passed away.
BG doesn’t deserve the same respect at all. His family connections were central to his success. Not so with SJ. His company has been feeding off Apple technology for decades. Apple has literally been MS’ research division. Further, MS success over the last several years has not even remotely compared to Apple’s. Apple is now the #1 company on the US stock market, where Microsoft has lost its once premier position and is way down in the middle of the pack.
I hope this clears things up for you. :-)
I also meant to make the point that this headline (and thought) are both ridiculous.
Steve Jobs certainly never claimed to be God (or a god), and in fact was rather humble all things considered. I strongly suggest anyone desiring to learn more about Steve Jobs the man listen to Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech. It is excellent, and should give some food for thought.
Exactly. Just like the Model T went to the junk heap, and listening to music on wax cylinders became obsolete, and that's why no one remembers Henry Ford and Thomas Edison any more.
I sometimes go on a rant about the public reaction (that is STILL going on)to Michael Jackson’s death, and the passing of Dr. Michael DeBakey. The latter invented and pioneered more technologies and techniques that lengthened people’s lives for decades, allowing them and their families more time together. He got maybe a paragraph in the ‘big’ papers.
Apple went belly up. Gates rescued Apple and Jobs.
That is BS. He deserved a lot of credit for what he accomplished.
I'm two years older than Jobs and have been a software engineer my entire career.
Yes, I mourn his passing. Yeah, I'll miss his showmanship.
Sure, I admire him. Not everything about him, but those bits that have added to my life, I'll miss.
I'm kinda glad to be olde. I can ignore the cynics and the unwise ones that show themselves on FR from time to time.
What I do know is this:
As it must come to all men, death came to Jobs. The same death that will visit each of us in our own time. I'll never be mourned by millions or billions because I've done nothing to deserve it. Few people do. I rejoice that there are such people and that I've been able to share the planet with them.
I think what people are losing sight of is that Jobs' influence extends far beyond Apple's own products. Microsoft was not working on a GUI until they saw prototype Macs. MP3 was a fringe technology before the iPod. No one paid for it (there was no way to) before iTunes. Smartphones before the iPhone had tiny screens, WAP browsers and styluses. Tablets before the iPad had desktop operating systems, and again with the damn styluses.
In each of those cases, the Apple product drew a sharp line across the calendar, dividing the history of those technologies into the epochs before and after. When Henry Ford decided to mass-produce an affordable car for the middle class, that affected everyone who later bought a Chevy. Others follow, some more successfully in terms of units shipped and money made, but we tend to remember those who blaze the trails.
Well, that is one way to deny the truth...just call the perception nuts! Do you honestly believe that all of these millions of people are just struck with cancer for no reason? God is much more just than that...but unforgivness is a grievous sin and people do indeed tend to live off of angers which have been buried inside...because they are good people really...but have not found real love and do not want to hurt others, so the rage is internalized. I am sorry you guys think that is so nuts, it really is not.
Job’s products influenced me more than Gates’. I basically owe my career to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, because their early products (IIe) got me interested in computers and programming.
I only use Gates’ products because that is what my company requires me to use. At home I use OS X and Linux, and I’d use them at work if I could.
But I respect MS and Bill Gates, and I will definitely give him kudos.
So...another Gawker article meant to troll one group or another, LOL. We really should come up with a conservative version of Gawker, because when you think about it, it’d be pretty easy money.
Pixar and Dreamworks use Linux, not Mac, not Windows.
Pixar uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP blade servers.
There is no need to join but there is also no need to scoff. Let it go.
Didn’t know that but now that I do, I like them even more.
We all have different ways at looking at life and it’s many wonders. Mine is much different that yours and it will stay settled within me.
I wish you wellness....
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