California Declares Today "Steve Jobs Day" 333
First time accepted submitter onezeta writes "California Gov. Jerry Brown, in an announcement via a Twitter post, has declared it 'Steve Jobs Day.' The Apple co-founder's life as a technology trailblazer will be marked Sunday by his company's home state at a private memorial service and in a television documentary airing tonight at 8 pm EST on Discovery."
Another holiday: (Score:5, Insightful)
I want a Dennis Ritchie day!
Re:Another holiday: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Another holiday: (Score:0, Insightful)
Why? Did he get filthy rich on other people's back like a true American? I guess not.
Re:Another holiday: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another holiday: (Score:4, Insightful)
If only Steve Jobs had had that sort of foresight, we might actually get to own the computers we purchase.
Re:Another holiday: (Score:3, Insightful)
He wasn't a true American. He didn't earn millions or billions by offshoring his factories. He didn't profit by patenting his work. And he never sued anyone.
If you want a state memorial, you have to be a ruthless, immoral, no-holds-barred capitalist.
Re:Another holiday: (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really like these analogies because they are comparing apples and oranges. Inventing concrete is nice and all, but people do need nice buildings, and the inventor of concrete might be completely incapable to build anything but large cubes of concrete, much like someone who designs nice buildings might be clueless about materials. Most programmers are godawful at design, whereas most designers are godawful at programming, so in my book they are all equally deserving. We need all of these people.
This being said, Steve Jobs is getting clearly disproportionate attention. I think Ritchie is getting just as much attention and celebration as I think he should, but Steve Jobs is getting way, way, WAY more than he deserves, it's getting embarrassing at this point. I mean, a headline I can understand, but this is ridiculous.
Written in C (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just that C is the second most common [gcn.com] programming language: Most of the other languages are actually written in C. That includes Perl, Python, and PHP.
Re:Another holiday: (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think Ritchie is getting just as much attention and celebration as I think he should, "
That's a little bit funny, when you consider that Mr. Ritchie doesn't seem to have made any headlines at all. Only after reading OP above, did I do a google search, to learn that Mr. Ritchie is, indeed, just as dead as Steve Jobs.
Rest in Peace, Dennis Ritchie, and thank you!
Re:Another holiday: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course Steve Jobs day is decided by bunch of n00bs.
Re:Shut the fuck uphttp://apple.slashdot.org/comme (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that to the millions of people who fucking cried when a ruthless capitalist that they didn't even know died. That's far far more pathetic.
How about a real visionary and genius? (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Jobs helped make Objective C, an offshoot of C, popular.
Dennis Ritchie made C.
Steve Jobs convinced his company to port an OS.
Dennis Ritchie helped create the very idea of a portable OS.
Steve Jobs eventually decided Unix would make a good basis for the OS on his hardware.
Dennis Ritchie helped Ken Thompson create Unix.
Steve Jobs and his company eventually decided that a similar OS and development stack across all the company's devices would be a useful idea.
Dennis Ritchie helped create an OS and development stack used on everything from phones to supercomputers.
Re:Another holiday: (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
Except that is the opposite of history - Jobs kept trying to kill the project at Apple that brought the GUI to the masses. Raskin and his team had already incorporated most of the Xerox PARC technology in the Macintosh project, and Steve wanted it killed, so Raskin went over his head. Steve still kept trying to kill the project so Raskin organized a field trip to Xerox PARC so that Jobs could get a clearer idea of why the ideas were important and would hopefully stop trying to kill the project. After this instead of trying to kill the Mac, Jobs forced Raskin out to take his project.
So we have the GUI in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html [stanford.edu]