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 ...
duct = dust
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No, Jobs wasn’t God, not even close. However, he will go down in history as one of the most prominent individuals of his generation. He has changed the way we use music and had a huge impact on the way we use the cell phone. Unless you only use a trackpad, he is responsible for the way most of us interact with our computers. He is responsible for the mouse.
“It’s one thing to be an idea man, or a visionary, it’s a whole other kettle of fish, to make that vision a reality”
Yes, that’s why I was talking about the administrator part. He hired artists to build the stuff for him; his job was to tell them what to do or focus them and keep them at it. That’s a businessman, not an artist.
The Newton PDA should have been a success, but John Sculley couldn’t pull it off.
“Generally speaking, Ayn Rand was wrong about everything, but reading something like this makes me think she had a point”
Rand was misguided to try to build up the American businessman, or The Producer, to a hero. Because we know better, and aside from the great role of fortune, there’s the plain fact that worthy economic victors aren’t great men. Very often they’re boring men. Maybe we need less great men, then. Nevertheless, it was too obvious a ploy.
Which is not to say the various other professions that routinely receive the laurels businessmen lack are deserving. Warriors we’ve pretty well debunked. What about artists, those heroes of the anti-bourgeois life? Often downright horrors.
Apple computers directly benefitted more people’s lives, almost certainly, than most latter-half 20th century politicians put together. No matter. We can see through business idolatry too easily, for whatever reason.
“The Newton PDA should have been a success, but John Sculley couldn’t pull it off.”
Jobs didn’t pull everything off, either. The Lisa and the aftermath of the Mackintosh, for instance. Which is why he was kicked out.
I cannot disagree, as I have big trouble with the word myself. Are popular musicians ‘artists’? Are producers of trashy cinema? Yeah, what is art? And, but, but, is it art?
A couple of months ago I went to as meeting of a photography group whose leader was a studio photographer of (presumably) art photography (as opposed to wedding photography and such.) I take a lot of photographs these days and have an educational background in the area. I have trouble calling myself an ‘artist’. Like the four others there I brought a pen drive with a few photos to be subjected to critique. He loaded it onto his Mac, yes, computer with a big screen, where they must reside to this day, dammit, and started critiquing. Only one of my photos had identifiable people in it, a scene I captured of a father and daughter in motion and interesting poses that provoked some thoughts about the sceneto the viewer. It was also the only one of the 30 or so photos we critiqued during the session that had identifiable people (i.e not some small shadows of figures out in the distance.)
Oh, boy, did I provoke this fellow, who had some Sanskrit sign tattoo on the side of his bald head, and whose persona triggered slightly my gaydar. My photo did not qualify as “art photography”, it was a mere “family snapshot”, he went on. And went on for a bit. It seemed to me that I hit some raw nerve in the man. But I consider all my photos, including those that he actually praised, as “snapshots”. Unlike he in his studio, I don’t spend more than a few seconds, or maybe a minute to compose and shoot a photograph. Oh, I have my favorite spots to which I return and endlessly retake photos, seeking that perfect composition and light, yes. Does all that make me an artist? I don’t think so, but the question is something of a struggle. And this particular fellow had for himself a very definite answer. I don’t.
“Which is why he was kicked out.”
Not that it was the right decision ultimately, obviously. I’m just saying there’s a reason for the large chronological gap in Jobs’ greatness.
Even the best baseball hitters fail at the plate over 60% of the time.
“My photo did not qualify as ‘art photography’, it was a mere ‘family snapshot’, he went on. And went on for a bit. It seemed to me that I hit some raw nerve in the man”
Philosophy is full of nonsense, but few subgenres get as ridiculous as aesthetics. Read very much of it and you’ll soon find no one knows what they’re talking about, if you can understand them at all. It took the common sense of Nietszche, of all people, to point out how silly it is to think aesthetic pleasure is disinterested, as Kant, Hume, and the like had painted themselves into a corner of believing. Duh, we wouldn’t bother if it didn’t interest us.
For my part, I don’t consider photography high art, for various refined, complicated, and stupid reasons. As to whether your work was fine (for photography), commercial, domestic, or kitsch, I don’t know.
“Even the best baseball hitters fail at the plate over 60% of the time”
Yes, and again, I think Jobs was a great businessman and visionary. Just not an artist.
If the geniuses of our times did that, all we would have is saved lives and no phones...no tv's....no cars..no electricity..no saran wrap...no toilet paper...no bug spray...no halloween costumes....etc.........
Absolutely, “x”. Jobs had a tremendous impact on the world of technology and how we use it to enrich our lives, whether for business or personal pursuits.
And with regards to some of the nonsense being posted here about him:
I lived in downtown Palo Alto from 1989 to 2003. During that time I ran into Steve Jobs dozens of times on the street, at Whole Foods, and professionally, as in the early 90’s I worked at an independent Apple retailer there on University Avenue which was frequented by many leading lights of Silicon Valley...Jobs, Bill Joy from SUN, Bob Metcalfe, those Russian guys that wrote Tetris, to name just a few. Jobs at the time was running NeXT, and our store was chosen as one of the two locations in the country to sell NeXT (whose Unix based graphical OS was the precursor to Mac OSX) on a retail level. So we all got to go to NeXT HQ in Redwood City for training, and Steve spoke to us at a dinner there. At no time did he give any indication of being gay, and every time I saw him in a non-professional setting in downtown Palo Alto, he was with his wife and daughters. So if he really did have HIV as one poster here is claiming, he likely picked it up from a tainted blood transfusion in the late 70’s or early 80’s, before blood banks screened for it.
The man is dead. He brought a lot of joy to many people’s lives through his products. His life is worth celebrating, for as other posters have said, he is an icon of American ingenuity. And for those spreading rumors, leave his family in peace, for crying out loud.
With that being said, who are you to deny that just maybe Jobs was given to us so as to help make our lives a little easier?
I think Pixar was during that gap.
So you’re saying I got cancer because I’m an asshole who didn’t work out enough...
Weirdo.
Gawker says that people should not be mourning Steve Jobs so strongly. He was just a “middle aged CEO” who doesn’t really deserve such empathy...
I’m saddened by the loss of Steve Jobs but by no means am near crying, tearing up or think that life at Apple won’t go on without him.
One of the state-run media’s talking heads compared Jobs’ inventions, equal to or better than Edison’s.
“He [Jobs] changed the way we live.” Grooooooan ...
You know, this is because you’ve leaved through it that you can groan like it’s not true.
The Apple II introduced computers to the home, schools and led to giants like IBM and Atari (At the time.) playing catch up to a start up. You cannot underestimate how the PC has changed the world and society. You wouldn’t have been able to groooooan without it online.
The internet may have been developed in the 60’s and used now for 40+ years but until there was a PC, no one outside government or education institutions knew what it was.
The iPod has nearly destroyed the brick and mortar music business replacing the progeny of the Edison concept of pre-pressed/recored media. Pixar has changed movies forever and the digitized productions have replaced the camera and film Edison invented.
The iPad I won’t even begin to touch on how it will change the world. The tablet PC wasn’t invented by Apple but they were the first to make it commercially successful and viable.
He did equal Edison in how he changed the world. After all, Edison stole from Tesla. I’ve not heard the same thing about Jobs.
Is that you Biden, didn’t know you were a freeper...:O)
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