Steve Jobs Crowned "Person of the Decade" 346
longacre writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs won over 30% of the vote in an online poll published by personal finance and investing news site SmartMoney.com, enough to earn their 'Person of the Decade' title by a solid margin over luminaries such as Warren Buffett (17%), Ben Bernanke (13%) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (12%). From the article: 'Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s: Not only did he revive sales at the failing computer company, he led the stock to a more than 700% increase in value, and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.'"
Mohamed Atta or GW Bush (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't name anyone else who could have had more of an impact on the world than these two assholes.
Steve Jobs introduced some nice toys, but that's nothing compared to the impact of dismantling the American way or life.
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But those toys were used to distract the mindless american consumers while the two assholes destroyed everything!
Big problem with online polls... (Score:3, Insightful)
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A president can have just as much effect by inaction as he can with Action. In the end, the buck stopped with Bush, whether he took action or decided not to. One of the biggest complaints about Reagan was his inaction during the A.I.D.S. breakout. It was essentially ignored by him. His inaction had a huge impact on thousands of American lives.
Inaction can have as much consequence as action.
Re:Mohamed Atta or GW Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the poll was by an investment site. I can imagine them appreciating someone who sends stock prices into the stratosphere more than someone who sunk the economy.
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Who other than Bush could have gotten the price of gas back under $3 a gallon?!!? Sure he had to all but destroy the economy and risk the world power structure, but we have cheep gas again!!
-Rick
Did I miss the sarcasm tags? (Score:2, Interesting)
Gas was about $1.26 a gallon [doe.gov] when he took office and oil was under $20 per barrel.
So quadrupling the price to over $5.00 per gallon then getting it back 'back under $3 a gallon' is not much of an accomplishment. It started its trend upward in mid 2003.
The fact that G.W. stood up to the V.P. [truthout.org] and opposed the use of military force on U.S. soil surprised me and is something to remember Bush for.
Gas 'under $3'? We had that before he took office and well after 9/11.
If I missed your sarcasm tags, then I'm so
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HA!
Gas will be over $3.00 a gallon soon enough. it's been creeping up ever since that mess. It's simply that the oil companies discovered that big jumps will get americans freaking out and actually conserving. but if you raise it by 0.02-0.03 a month they dont notice.
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Interesting pair of statements. In fact Americans already pay more per person for healthcare than any other country in the world. Your present system is the most expensive way of providing healthcare. The
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Re:Exactly how did Bush sink the economy? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it was the first time in US history that was ever done.
Further, he paid for those two wars using borrowed money, and using "emergency appropriations" instead of putting the wars in the budget, so that it would seem like the budget deficit wasn't as bad as it really was.
By the way, those two wars, over 6 years, cost more than the Health Care Reform legislation will cost over the next ten years.
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He took the country into two wars while simultaneously lowering taxes.
Forgetting that one war was foisted on him, how does that actually break the economy. Are you saying that running a federal deficit is bad for the economy? Government spending is supposed to be stimulative, isn't it?
If the deficit is so terrible, and I agree that its bad, then, isn't Mr. Obama three times worse the President Bush was, just from the sheer weight of debt?
Re:Exactly how did Bush sink the economy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Have you noticed what Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Frank are doing? And they're doing it faster.
Who made the list? (Score:2)
SJ is probably the best of that list, sure, but what a crappy list.
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Guess what, that's a minority.
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Not if 7% said "No answer/don't know."
say what you want (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you want about the rampant fanboyism, the DRM, and the culture of "idea X is dumb and there's no reason for us to support it HEY CHECK OUT OUR NEW FEATURE WE CALL IT iX AND IT IS TOTALLY AWESOME AND UNIQUE BECAUSE IT'S WHITE!" that permeates apple, but there are probably very few of us that wouldn't want to take a time machine back to Dec 2000 and buy a few thousand shares of APPL at $7.50.
(Of course, you could always just get hired by Apple and back date your stock option.....i keed i keed....)
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And there are very few of us who wouldn't want to take a time machine back to 2003 and buy a few thousand shares of GOOG.
Well... since we ARE talking time travel... (Score:4, Funny)
And there are very few of us who wouldn't want to take a time machine back to 2003 and buy a few thousand shares of GOOG.
I'd rather go to 1890 and get me a couple of shares of GOGH.
Vincent van, that is.
What about the iPod person? (Score:2)
It came down to one thing: the iPod caused the revivial of Apple. It led to the iPhone and gave them the financial resources to improve OS X.
So, what person, or team of people are responsible for making the iPod happen (for all I know maybe that was Steve Jobs)? Shouldn't they be getting all of the accolades now?
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Here he [ideafinder.com] is.
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You are forgetting the iMac, which was the product that changed everything at Apple.
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You are forgetting the iMac, which was the product that changed everything at Apple.
And gave us three years of "Bondi Blue" computer hardware...
Re:What about the iPod person? (Score:4, Informative)
You're simplifying matters... Drastically.
For example, without the release of the iMac in 1998, apple surely wouldn't have survived long enough to release an iPod.
Without OS X (admittedly in development before SJ's return) it probably wouldn't have got there either.
Without the revamp of apple's laptop line in general to make them into arguably the best laptops money can buy did a good amount too.
Without the iPod, it probably wouldn't be in the enormously successful state it's in now.
Without the iPhone, it probably wouldn't be looking too rosy right now either – iPod sales are slipping now.
Essentially what I'm saying is – there's significant vision and management going on here. It's not *one* hit product that someone got lucky on, it's a history, since he came back of *every* part of the company improving what it's doing, and becoming generally more appealing.
Most ways are overrated or overstated. (Score:2, Interesting)
"...From the article, 'Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s:
So? What did he do in the LAST decade? Shouldn't that be what matters?
... and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.
Really? I don't have an iPod. More Americans don't than do. What did he do exactly that change the way we listen to music? MP3 players were already coming into prominence. Perhaps he accelerated it, but he didn't change the way we do it.
Oh yea, he created the iTunes. Yup, he did indeed singlehandedly come up with a way to purchase music online, to put DRM into it, and was the first to do so. /end sarcasm.
If anything, he d
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The "last decade" is synonymous with "since the late 90s".
Change the way we listen to music.... (Score:2)
What did he do exactly? He sure didn't invent the mp3 player.
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Which "concept" would you be referring to here? If it is the "concept" of portable music, no, Apple did nothing to bring that to the people. The "concept" of portable digital music was also not introduced to the masses by the iPod, nor was the concept of more than 72 minutes of portable music. Really, as with most Apple products, the only innovation to speak of was the advertising.
"Mp3 players were just another tech until the iPod came
And he does a pretty good two step... (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention his appearances on 'Dancing With the Stars' [youtube.com]
Oh wait, wrong Steve.
Never mind
what seriously? (Score:2, Troll)
Steve Jobs is the farmer and the current generation of fancy-clothed-hip-young-lifestyle people are his sheep.
i SERIOUSLY do not get what is so great about Apple products. All they do is take a pre-existing product, add gloss and make it look nice and the sheep come pouring in. What a stupid time we live in, Idiocracy is not far away.
BTW I'm not a M$ fan-boy, but I would take aMicrosoft product (or Linux) over Apple any day. Practicality over aesthetics I say.
Re:what seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sick of the ridiculous assertion that anybody who buys a mac is a hipster. I'm a CG artist. I've been raised around computers since my parents bought me and my brother a commodore 64c. I bought Windows 95 the day that it came out. I install Ubuntu every major release and have used Windows 7 RC and every Windows that has come before it. For the past 2 years, though, my primary machine has been a Mac. For me, it's not about the aesthetics, but about the practicality. It works faster, and better. I'm a lot more productive on it and I actually enjoy using it a lot more than both Linux or Windows. When I use Windows at work and have to change some obscure network preference, it takes me a few minutes to find the hidden window inside the obscure preference panel. When I need to do the same thing on Mac OS, I can usually find what I need in 30 seconds. That's practicality. Hipsters might be the face behind Apple fanaticism but most of the people who I've convinced to buy Macs weren't hipsters but regular non-computer people who want a nice, easy, clean operating system that doesn't get bogged down with the bullshit that Windows does. My girlfriend bought a macbook last year and I haven't had to help her with it at all, meanwhile my neighbor's Windows XP machine has been destroyed by spyware and malware to an almost unusable state. That's practicality. If all Apple had to offer was a pretty way to minimize Windows, nobody would be interested. Ubuntu has better eye candy than Mac OS at this point. It's got flashy cube desktop switchers and transparent windows and a bunch of other flashy shit that people love seeing on YouTube [youtube.com] but then don't use because it's not practical.
I could even say the same thing about the iPhone. 3 years ago I only had a cell phone to make emergency calls and I rarely used it. Then the iPhone came out and I didn't want to join in on the hype so I bought a Palm Treo. The thing was absolute fucking garbage. It crashed 3 or 4 times a day and even after over 10 years of Palm OS being on the market, there wasn't a single application that I was interested in. The 3G came out and I decided to switch to iPhone. Now it's glued to my hand. It's changed the way I live my life. I need a restaurant nearby, I look to my iPhone. I want to look up something that we're talking about in everyday conversation, I check my iPhone. Yeah, other phones now have similar features, but Apple paved the way for it. Other smart phones focused on getting your e-mail to you wherever you are. Apple focused on getting the internet to you wherever you are. Now people constantly ask me to check my iPhone for some information. That's practicality. I don't give a shit that it looks pretty. It's a plus, but again, if all Apple could do was make a nice looking phone then they'd be out of business. No, they made a phone that's useful and that's why they've taken up half of the cell phone market-share. It's not just hipsters buying them.
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Pity for Apple that regular non-computer users wanting a nice, easy, clean operating system are *such* a rarity outside the US, given their comparatively abysmal marketshare everywhere else.
Or, y'know, perhaps it *is* the marketing after all.
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So my profession dictates everything about me, huh? Every person in the computer graphics industry is a hipster, every programmer or IT guy is a nerd, every manager is a pointy headed idiot, right? What does that make anonymous internet trolls?
Am I crazy... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, you are a bit nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I would have voted for Google myself as having greater impact, part of the problem is that the impact is not as widely noticed or has been forgotten since we are all used to how things are. But I think you are a little bit guilty of that with Apple as well.
If nothing else, Apple single-handedly made the entire music industry give up DRM, ironically (well not really ironically since it's an inevitable side effect of the technology) by using DRM to place Apple between customers and music labels in a way the labels could not control. We all just take DRM free music for granted but we'd not have that generally available yet without Apple, because the market would have remain too fragmented to force the need for DRM free music to get around Apple.
You may call it a "crappy store" but it was the first time selling music online ever went anywhere, and to date is far larger than any other online music presence and even most real world stores. I'm not sure how you can dismiss that out of hand as irrelevant.
And then of course they actually made smartphones a generally desirable product instead of a niche with corporate and technical users.
So in at least two areas they greatly expanded the whole range of the market, not just their own marketshare. That is why they deserve to be in the top list, even if you can quibble about who is really at THE top.
Re:Yes, you are a bit nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you will, Google has transformed the decade far more than Jobs and Apple have. No, the problem is that this transformation has happened through "Google" as an entity, while just about everyone's saying that Jobs was the sole driving force behind Apple's rise (which is only true in part). It's that perception that makes people feel Jobs is the more influential person.
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But you're right. Pre-iPod, almost no one had MP3 players. Before iTunes, almost no one bought music online.
Really... The sales of the Diamond Rio PMP300 were very high, but the RIAA tried to kill the mp3 player by suing them hard and getting injunctions on sales. Other companies started making players, iRiver being one tiny startup that still makes one of the best players out there. The RIAA and Diamond would eventually settle their differences in August 1999, but by then Rio was a household name, espe
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Google improved web search. Apple with Steve Jobs improved portable music (iPod), music and video distribution (iTunes and AppleTV), mobile phones, personal computers (first computers to go all-USB, Firewire, consumer-friendly iMacs, trendy computers), and to an extent, operating systems (not that Mac OS X is revolutionary, but they open sourced it, which is unprecedented for a commercial operating system for end-users). I don't think there is a single sector of the consumer electronics or computer industry
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I'd like to thank those gents (and ladies)... (Score:3, Interesting)
at the FreeBSD foundation and those among us that helped improve OS X's source via the OpenDarwin project. (And then Steve Jobs gets credit? Not in my book...)
Too dang bad Apple had to put it (the OpenDarwin project) down. As if over 90% of the kernel didn't come from the open source community...
Those guys/gals who did all that code and testing are the ones who really deserve to take a bow...
Oh, yeah, congrats Mr. Jobs.
Good job giving no credit to the grunts toiling for your profit margin...
Sorry to be a pessimist...
Just a thought, though...
--Stak
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Or:
You can thank Jobs for bringing attention on a massive scale to FreeBSD project, enough to garner the attention of the open source community to send developers to it.
Or do you think all those developers went to FreeBSD and the OpenDarwin project because FreeBSD was cool on its own merits???
If it wasn't for Jobs, FreeBSD (and OpenDarwin) would have been Yet Another UNIX, languishing in the marketplace.
Of course, Apple sucks for pulling the rug out from underneath the developers, but that is another story.
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We'll just ignore the fact that it came from KDE and give all the credit to Apple. For Steve's sake.
The majority of WebKit code was written by Apple employees. It started as a fork of KDE code, but Apple has been by far the largest contributor since then. Check out the history in its Subversion repository, and you'll see the magnitude of Apple's contribution.
Recognition (Score:3, Insightful)
Invalidated article (Score:2)
The minute someone puts Ben Bernanke on a "Person of the _____" list as a choice, the list is invalidated. Bernanke, like Greenspan, created policy that causes recessions and depressions and then makes them worse.
I can't understand why people continue to give any credibility to these deadpulp periodicals and their online offspring.
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My view of Bernake, summed up in one word ...
Treason
Though the list is fluff.. (Score:2)
It at least didn't say *Good* person of the ____. I.e. Hitler was a strong candidate for 'person of the century' in Time magazine's reckoning, but happened to be edged out by positive people (probably because they feared people assuming 'person of the century' was automatically an honor and therefore it was safer to go with Einstein). Most of these lists purport not to measure 'good' but how influential a person was.
Useless (Score:3, Insightful)
So, out of a bunch of people who have done bugger all other than accumulate wealth, Jobs won.
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Yes. Its an investing site called SmartMoney.com. Shouldn't that be what they focus on?
Changed the way people listen to music? Sorry, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched. I mean, Napster was up and running since around 1999 and, way before that, IRC was swarming with channels dedicated to transferring MP3 albums through DCC file transfers. The mIRC [wikipedia.org] world was packed with scripts to automatically handle that stuff. Before that there was already a pretty extensive sneakernet [wikipedia.org] dedicated to exchange music files through CD-Rs packed with MP3. Heck, back in 1994 I knew a group of people who were ripping CDs to WAV files and lending hard drives with that stuff (they were idiots but to each it's own). So, how exactly can a corporation "forever change the way people listen to music" if everyone was already doing exactly that for years before the company released a product?
Apple deserves credit in exploring the "pay to download music files" market, particularly by convincing record companies to authorize a new business model to sell their product. Yet, they didn't changed any habits. They realized that there was an extensive and overwhelming demand for downloading music (there was a heck of a lot of people doing that) and they invested in an attempt to capitalize from that demand. They succeeded at that. But changing the way people listen to music? No, they didn't. They were successful in riding the wave but I'm sorry to tell you, they didn't changed any habits.
Mod Parent Up! (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary was written in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
Remember people, Apple is a follower just like every big corporation. In the MP3 player's case, they waited for the industry to grow 'big enough' then sold a unique-enough player with total subservience to the media conglomerates and backed it up with extreme amounts of advertising.
Could any other company do the same? Probably not. One main reason being Jobs' participation in device design. The other being an advertising budget that no ri
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Apple won for one reason, iTunes. their PC transfer and management interface did not SUCK horribly like every other mp3 player out there.
Even now the software to manager and transfer your music on non apple ipods sucks horribly. the first thing I did with my iRiver was the firmware change to make it a USB drive so I could avoid their garbage software for music transfer.
Re:Mod Parent Up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is a follower just like every big corporation.
Yes, but the future is as much evolutionary as revolutionary. And Jobs has shown an unmatched ability to take technology that's crappy and hard-to-use and make incremental changes to it that makes it useful to someone who doesn't want to screw around with technology. In other words, "It's not technically innovative only if you think that human factors engineering is not a technical field."
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If you're definition of "everyone" means "college kids in the late '90s" then I'd suspect you are right.
But the iPod made it easy and mainstream to find and listen to mp3s. Now Apple, because of Jobs, dominates the lucrative market for legal, commercial distribution of music and portable music playing devices.
I'm not saying this makes him a person of the decade. But you are way off base if you think a majority or even a significant minority of people got their music from IRC or hard drives, even USENET, at
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A common problem here is that slashdotters think that "Me=everyone" or "Geeks=everyone". Back in 1999 many people were using napsters and had discovered MP3s. The first players were on the market. I even had a Rio PMP. But not "everyone" knew about MP3s or were using these players.
Apple has never been leading edge when it comes to tech. What Apple does better than anybody else did was bringing technology to a
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Upon Reflection (Score:2, Flamebait)
I'm glad Steve Jobs turned Apple into the company it did. Now that Apple PC's and MP3 Players and Phones are so expensive, I can make fun of those pompous pricks who think they are better than everyone because they have a certain iTem.
Now I don't have to feel ashamed for using a PC.
*half hearted smile*
*lowers head*
*breaks into tears*
Also, (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume (Score:4, Funny)
Mod Parent Funny. (Score:2)
For many of you, this comment would be a whoosh moment.
The usual caveat with online polls (Score:5, Insightful)
They tend to skew towards the young, tech savvy, and vocal. I'm sure many slashdotters have voted in polls on sites that they didn't frequent because someone told them it was a good idea, and we all know how vocal Apple Fanboys are.
That aside, Jobs was very important this decade. He helped bring about a credible threat to the Windows OS (causing Microsoft to make many positive changes), he helped to reform the music industry, bringing the aging RIAA and record companies to their knees, and he has shown the direction that telcos must move in as far as mobile computing by causing AT&T's 3G network to buckle. He was very influential, especially in the field of computing, and more deserving than most.
Now, personally I would have said that GW Bush was the most influential person of the decade. He was the most powerful man in the world for 8 (technically 7, whatever) years. He made an enormous power grab for the executive branch, changed how the country views terrorism (be scared, very scared), and brought several countries into two wars, one of which is hopefully mostly over, and the other with no end in sight. Also, under his watch, the worldwide economy took an enormous tumble due to his lax policies, with considerable help from previous presidents, especially Clinton and Reagan. To me, his influence was far greater than anything Jobs has done.
Nine down, one to go... (Score:2, Redundant)
So, this wraps up another Decade of Dreadful Apple Ads [slashdot.org]. (I couldn't resist.)
Well, if Steve was crowned -- (Score:2, Funny)
-- he'd be "King", not merely "Person" of the decade!
Voice: :"Well, I didn't vote for ya."
Other voice: "You don't "vote" for a King."
Ad infinitum/absurdum.
Ballmer (Score:2)
Whoever wrote this list appears to have omitted Steve Ballmer. I assume the article will be corrected in short order.
They forgot the second part of the headline: (Score:2)
“...by a load of Apple fanboys in a flash-mob-like stunt”. ^^
But on a more serious note: Would you want to get called “person of the decade” by a bunch of crooks that have no other purpose in life than the pointless pursuit of “moar moneyz”?
Just so you know, that’s the typical user of that site: http://lolfatcats.com/page/3 [lolfatcats.com]
Context people (Score:2)
The poll was done by SmartMoney.com so their emphasis would be on investors. In the past decade other individuals have had more influence on humanity in general but that's not the focus of this poll. This isn't a humanitarian of the decade award. Over the past decade, Steve Jobs had led Apple from the brink of doom to be a highly influential player in several markets: Music, Computers, Consumer electronics, and Cell phones. In that time, Apple's price has risen nearly 10x (from 25.90 on Dec 31, 1999 t
Bernanke Saved the West (Score:2)
IF it wasn't for Ben Bernanke studying the Great Depressions, and seeing the liquidity crisis and the hardship that it caused, we would have not had "helicopters of money" and unemployment would be 20% nationally, and 50% in regions, and we would be working WPA jobs. Democracies would be toppled by desperate people, perhaps even our own, and the world would be lurching to war.
So, by far, Ben Bernanke is the right man in the right place at the right time. This recession sucks, but he kept it from getting a
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The funniest thing is, some people actually believe this.
Why is it always Apple Fanboy? (Score:2)
Find any thread about Apple and the first thing that tends to get posted are Apple haters spewing their tired arguments and labeling anyone owning an Apple product a fanboy. I just don't get it, no one forces anyone to buy Apple products. Sure there are better products than most apple stuff on a technical level but for the average consumer ease of use and just working properly are the most important features, and Apple tends to excel at both. Why not just respect that others might actually like their st
Eh, yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
I listen to mobile music from a walkman (Sony) to a minidisc(sony) to a CD(philips) that eventually could play MP3(Fraunhoffer) and then my first HD MP3 player (Creative) then expanding to OGG/FLAC capable players (iRiver) and finally settling on my current one (Cowon).
And I bought my music first on tape, then LP then CD then Mini-Disc and then got it via Usenet and then Napster and now via Torrents.
Where is Apples involvement? Now I would disguss further, but the RIAA wants a word with me.
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And I think my comment was the cause for your down-moderation. My bad!
Thanks a lot for that!
(No problem really. I still have plenty of karma left.)
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Is this the right place to point out that the first decade of this century and millennium has one more year to go?
The only thing that matters to a kid on his first big cross-country trip is watching the odometer roll over from 9999 to 10000.
There is a awe and magic in this sort of thing that no logical argument is ever going to change.
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And it makes adult men cry when they watch the odo roll from 149999 to 150000 on a car they bough new 3 years ago... God I need to move closer to work....
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Contrary to intuition, "the decades" start on zero, whereas the centuries start on one. For example, "the 90s" refers to 1990-1999, but "the 17th century" refers to 1601-1700.
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There was no Year 0 so the indices start from 1 in this case. The second millennium ended at the end of 2000 and this decade will end at the end of 2010.
Re:First decade of this millennium (Score:4, Funny)
INCORRECT! Year zero doesn't even enter into the question, because as we all know the current epoch started with the year 1970. Thus, decades in our epoch end with zeros.
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There was no Year 0 so the indices start from 1 in this case. The second millennium ended at the end of 2000 and this decade will end at the end of 2010.
Yes and no. This decade, the first of this millennium, ends at the end of 2010. But this decade, the naughties, does however end in a matter of days. They're not mutually exclusive, various decennia can co-exist.
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Isn't any sequence of 10 years a decade? So who was the person of 1997-2006?
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"There was no year 0" should be placed in the context of the original folks who came up with the calendar and had it wrong. There have been various corrections to the calendar since, and calling the years xxx0 through xxx9 a decade is one of them.
Re:First decade of this millennium (Score:4, Insightful)
There was no Year 0 so the indices start from 1 in this case.
I'm always amazed how on a forum brimming with computer scientists, there's always an ample supply of pedants willing to insist that whatever calendar Gregory XIII pulled out of his ass in 1582 by papal fiat is somehow intrinsically less arbitrary than demarcating decades by years that end in zero.
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The calendar has no year zero.. So first decade is year 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.. Second is 11 thru 20.. i.e. This current decade is 2001 thru 2010. The media makes the same mistake as they did with saying 2000 was the new millennium and then in 2001 go "whoops". That is what he/she is talking about!
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You have made the assumption that the cycle of decades must have started with the first year of our counting. That's a wrong assumption. Same with millennia.
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Did you miss the part that this was from a website about investing?
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I was going to complain about the CEO worship. But the parent pretty much explains it.
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Doesn't that just prove his point? He's complaining that everything that isn't money-related is considered totally irrelevant, and you're replying that it's okay because it's from a site focused only on money-related matters to the exclusion of all else.
The award is called "person of the decade", not "profit-maker of the decade". All the things Synn mentioned are vital components of being a person.
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Re:Yes, but is he still an asshole? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, that bothers me too, Jobs is a classic narcissist, and stock price shouldn't be the measure of a person's worth.
Yeah! You have to factor in how many shares they've got, too!
Re:Yes, but is he still an asshole? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is a man a good father, good husband? Is he a positive influence on the people around him in his life? Is he happy and fulfilled? Who cares, as long as the stock options go up.
So you think we should nose into these peoples' personal lives as part of the evaluation process? I have a couple different questions to ask here. Since when did we ever care? How can we care? There's been bouts of faux morality over the millennia, but the bottom line is that collectively we don't care and most of us would hate it if the rest of world evaluated us on this criteria. Then there's matter of whether we're capable of making any such judgment. There are untold numbers of people who have improved my life. I only know a few thousand or so of them. I don't have the mental capabilities or knowledge to evaluate most of their lives.
Further, I don't see the reason why this stuff should matter. There are many ways that a person can succeed in life. Why should we expect someone to succeed in all of them?
Re:Yes, but is he still an asshole? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of people from the United States could care less about what is happening in other countries, but everyone in the United States wants an iPod or iPhone!
FTFY. Kool-aid drinking aside though, it strikes me that Brin/Page or Jimmy Wales has done far more to affect culture, politics, and industry than the entire music industry. More than 70% if internet users rely upon Google's algorithms to find the information they want. When it comes to learning about a given subject/topic (even if in just a basic sense of the word 'learning') Wikipedia has become the de facto source (for better or worse) for hundreds of millions of internet users. If you want to fixate on
Re:Jobs didn't design shite (Score:5, Insightful)
No, nobody made you say it. You wanted to say it, and it's meaningless bullshit.
There are lots of companies with designers, but please explain the worthless crap so many of them put out. The ultimate authority is Steve. Designers make a design, Steve throws it against the wall and tells them to do it again, only this time with no buttons. Programmers put things together, and if Steve doesn't like it, they do it again.
He then approves the ads, which have also won many awards and have sold a lot of stuff. He gives fantastic keynotes, and everyone has heard of the Distortion Field.
Look, like Apple or not -- I'm guessing you don't -- but give the man his props. It was close to bankruptcy. It now is one of the great American corporate stories. Design is at the center of it.
Oh, and his best choice of all was making OS X run on Intel, the most dominant chip in the market. Apple, and Jobs, had resisted that for years, but he recognized finally that he was wrong, and then the company produced a very graceful transition to the Intel world. It's when you could run Linux and Windows on Macs as well as OS X that the computers really took off.
I'm writing this on a 27" iMac quad. Fantastic.