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Apple

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."
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California Declares Today "Steve Jobs Day"

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  • Another holiday: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hartree ( 191324 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @10:49AM (#37730850)

    I want a Dennis Ritchie day!

    • by NotSoHeavyD3 ( 1400425 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @10:59AM (#37730930) Journal
      It's like they're creating a big holiday for a guy who happened to build a bunch of builds because they were really nice while at the same time ignoring the death of the guy who invented the concrete that is the basis for the construction that everybody uses, including that first guy.(Go ahead everybody, come up with your own analogy, it's fun.)
      • Err, bunch of buildings.
        • by msobkow ( 48369 )

          Gotta pick up a new keyboard here, too. Sticky keys make it look like I can't spell sometimes. *LOL*

          Danged things only last 6 months to a year. Having learned to type in the days of manual typewriters, I'm pretty hard on them.

      • by Broolucks ( 1978922 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @11:21AM (#37731114)

        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.

        • by Runaway1956 ( 1322357 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @12:07PM (#37731450) Homepage Journal

          "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!

          • Well, there are tens of thousands of people who have had a great, lasting impact on society, may that be contributing greatly to practical computer science, to theoretical computer science, to the enjoyment of electronic devices, to the understanding of the universe, to peace, to curing diseases, and whatever else it is that matters. If everybody of Ritchie's caliber made headlines, you would have a headline every goddamn day.

            If attention was given on pro-rata of achievement, given the understandably limite

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I don't really like these analogies because they are comparing apples and oranges.

          More like comparing Apple to Unix, if you ask me.

        • I was astounded that on the day Ritchie died, and the day AFTER, there was no posted story on Slashdot. I assumed someone was waiting for a good retrospective summary, but even so that's a long time and it was newsworthy enough to post right away...

          I'm not sure if Jobs is getting more attention than he deserved, but Ritchie is definitely being short-changed.

          • I thought there would have been a Slashdot comment, but I didn't pay attention. I agree that it would have been appropriate, so maybe Ritchie was indeed short-changed here.

      • by tqk ( 413719 )

        It's like they're creating a big holiday for a guy who happened to build a bunch of [buildings] because they were really nice while at the same time ignoring the death of the guy who invented the concrete that is the basis for the construction that everybody uses, including that first guy.(Go ahead everybody, come up with your own analogy, it's fun.)

        Huh. I saw pretty much the same analogy posted in comments on ArsTechnica the other day. Paraphrasing, "Steve was like a gifted architect who oversaw the creation of buildings that many appreciated. dmr invented glass, concrete, and steel."

        I love that analogy. It gives them both their due in equivalent proportions. Apple hardware and software is pretty, robust, and sells ridiculously well. dmr's stuff just fscking works, elegantly and quietly, as he intended.

        • by sosume ( 680416 )

          This is Slashdot, car analogies are always superior. Jobs is like Enzo Ferrari, Gates is like Henry Ford and Ritchie is like the guy who invented the automobile. Whoever that may have been. And how sad this may seem, it still stands.

      • It's like they're creating a big holiday for a guy who happened to build a bunch of builds because they were really nice while at the same time ignoring the death of the guy who invented the concrete that is the basis for the construction that everybody uses, including that first guy.(Go ahead everybody, come up with your own analogy, it's fun.)

        What, no talk of a car in your analogy?!? You must be new here.

      • No, Ricthie is a guy who invented one specific type of concrete that just happens to be really popular. If Ritchie hadn't invented C, pretty much the same things would have been done in another language.

        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.

        Ritchie is important, but he didn't change the world.

        • No, Ricthie is a guy who invented one specific type of concrete that just happens to be really popular. If Ritchie hadn't invented C, pretty much the same things would have been done in another language.

          We would be programming in Pascal, Increment (Pascal), Pascal-Hash, or Papua & New Guinea.

        • it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.

          "The masses" must refer to people who had the money to spend on a Lisa or a Macintosh. Most people did not see a GUI until Windows 95.

          As for Ritchie, his most important contribution was not C, but rather his work on UNIX. You know about Unix (as it is now capitalized), right? That's the operating system on which the World Wide Web was originally built, the operating system that popularized the "everything is a file" abstraction, and yes, the operating system that Mac OS X is based on. Steve Jobs' c

        • by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @03:05PM (#37732778)

          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]

    • I want Fake Steve Jobs day!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      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.

      • by msobkow ( 48369 )

        By the way, I do think Jobs was a great business man who did a tremendous job of leading Apple to where they are today.

        But I am disappointed to see that the fanboism has infected society to the degree that a state would declare a memorial day for a business man who did little if anything for society itself. Shipping shiny toys may be profitable, but it does not change the world in the same way as philanthropy and political activism do.

        • I suggest you find a copy of "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing". Jobs was not a good manager, and was a downright terrible businessman. He was a good leader, very inspirational, but independently he was a failure at making a product people would buy. I believe he was successful at Apple (the second time) mainly because he was managed well, because he had people in charge who would say "no, you can't do that, that's too expensive" or "no, you don't need to do that, nobody cares about that".

          • by msobkow ( 48369 )

            I'm genuinely confused by NeXT's failures. Their APIs were clean, they had a system well in advance of what was available from other companies at the time, and proprietary hardware was still the norm when they were around.

            NeXT lives on in OS/X GUI, heavily adapted and updated, so at least the best of NeXT's technology was salvaged.

            But you're right -- Jobs had a whole team assisting him with Apple. I'm not sure he was forced to take advice from a team at NeXT.

            • Re:Another holiday: (Score:5, Interesting)

              by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @12:40PM (#37731750)

              Jobs was an over-perfectionist. He commissioned a logo from Paul Rand for $100,000, and then sent memos to every retail store specifying the exact colors to use and that the logo absolutely must be tilted at precisely 22 degrees. He mandated that the NeXT Cube be a perfect cube - most manufactured cubes have a shallow draft of half a degree or so so it can be removed from the mold; at the time there was only one foundry in the country capable of forming absolute perfect cubes. His market research showed that universities (his main target demographic) wanted a powerful computer for ~$6,500; the first NeXT computer was $9,999 because of all the perfectionist things Jobs demanded be added. He bought $10,000 sofas for the office and had a full-time art curator.

              If any of those things sound like bad business decisions for a company that never employed more than 600 people and never had significant sales, congratulations, you're a better businessman than Steve Jobs.

              • Re:Another holiday: (Score:5, Informative)

                by sootman ( 158191 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @09:00PM (#37734772) Homepage Journal

                > If any of those things sound like bad business
                > decisions for a company that never employed
                > more than 600 people and never had significant
                > sales, congratulations, you're a better
                > businessman than Steve Jobs.

                Way to cherry-pick your facts. Did you co-found what is, at the moment, the most valuable company in the world? Did you form another company (NeXT) for a few tens of millions of dollars and sell it for $429 million a few years later? Did you buy an animation studio for $10 million and sell it $7.4 BILLION twenty years later? (Bonus question: did you run both of those companies at the same time?) Ever create any products that sell in the tens or hundreds of millions? And not just paperclips or address labels or something like that, but nice, multi-hundred-dollar items? No? Well, congratulations, you're a worse businessman than Steve Jobs.

                His time at NeXT was his time to try various things, find out who he was (he was only 30 at the time), try MORE things, FAIL a little, and learn. You make it sound like that's a bad thing.

                And the part about "sent memos to every retail store specifying the exact colors to use and that the logo absolutely must be tilted at precisely 22 degrees"? EVERYONE does that. That's totally standard in the design world. Ever wonder why you don't see the Ford logo in purple, the Coke logo in green, or the Nike swoosh at a crazy angle? DESIGN GUIDELINES, that's why. EVERY company has them. Fucking foursquare [amazonaws.com] has an intricate collection of design guidelines.

                • Jobs failed at making computers in the middle Macintosh era because it's not an industry where you can just do any old thing you like. Oh, it was at the beginning, when the Apple I came along, because the barrier to entry was low — there was no entrenched competition in the particular space into which they sold. But Apple clearly lost its way after the Macintosh II. The Quadra era was a downright insulting time to be a Mac user, and it's when they lost me. You want me to pay WHAT for a machine a third

            • I'm genuinely confused by NeXT's failures.

              I'm not. The problem I think they had was that of many startups with a great product: they expected customers to flock to them because they were, in fact, good. The reality is that even great ideas and products need marketing. Bad ideas and products even more so. The "if you build it they will come" mentality rarely works out in practice. At the very least, you have to let people know you have a product, and that requires sales and marketing.

    • Get a PR firm.
    • by rsmith ( 90057 )

      I want a Dennis Ritchie day!

      Second that. Dennis Ritchie's legacy is way more important.

  • iSorry but I declare it Dennis Ritchie Day!
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      iSorry but I declare it Dennis Ritchie Day!

      I agree. How about we honor a few more true creative minds too. Steve Jobs day? Might as well declare a Nelson Rockefeller day, or a British Petroleum day. The fact that it's California doing this makes it suspect from the beginning, so I would suggest the following as more rational substitutes (feel free to add more):

      Ken Thompson Day (yeah, Apple, where would you be without C and Unix?)

      James Clerk Maxwell Day

      Max Planck Day

      Nikola Tesla Day

      Einstein Day

      Marie & Pierre Curie Day

      Darwin Day

      Jonas Salk Day

      Galil

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Yebbut, how many of those were Californians?
        You don't expect California to declare a day for out-of-staters, do you?

        And besides, many of the people on your list have had national days for them declared by the president - that kind of trumps California, no?

      • How about Albert Sabin Day. He fought the bureaucracy and won.

      • Just because Apple named a PDA after him doesn't mean you have to ignore him.

      • Include my favorite: Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the first person to figure out how to make AC motors work.
  • happy Steve Jobs Day everybody!
  • But its a Sunday (Score:4, Informative)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @10:57AM (#37730916)

    They should Mondayize it, like Columbus Day, Presidents Day, and MLK Day.

    Whats the point of a Holiday if nobody has the day off?

    For that matter why are Halloween and Valentines Day called holidays - nobody has them off...

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16, 2011 @11:14AM (#37731038)

    CORRECTION: Today is blow jobs day!

  • by flimflammer ( 956759 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @11:18AM (#37731084)

    n/t

  • I think Steve was okay, but it's worth noting that along being a computer innovator, one of his qualities was simply being a charismatic person, for partly which he will be remembered so well.
  • As long as the other 364.25 days are Steve Jobs free days.
  • So this is a day that all companies in California must hire someone named Steve on every year?
    Too soon?

  • Maybe they can celebrate by adding a $300 tax to the cost of all computers and mp3 players once a year.
  • Or will the world finally realize that he is not as fantastic a person as everyone is claiming he was.

  • so.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by atarione ( 601740 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @12:20PM (#37731580)

    just checking does this mean I can park my Mercedes in the Handicapped spots today?

  • October 16th is also the day that several major
    Nazis were executed following the Nuremberg trials.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trial [wikipedia.org]

  • by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @01:02PM (#37731980)

    ...but if this is the silliest thing the California government does for the rest of the year, we Californians will consider ourselves fortunate.

    Hard to feel any antipathy towards Jobs when our statehouse is basically a giant, impacted colon full of human shit.

    • Jerry Brown: Searching your cellphone on a whim is OK, and by the way, all hail Steve Jobs!

      I give a shit about Jobs, whatever. But Jerry Brown is the leading asshole in the state.

  • by unity100 ( 970058 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @02:10PM (#37732484) Homepage Journal
    The creator of C, the language which enabled ALL of these shit - including EVERYthing steve jobs has done - have died, and california has the 'foresight' to declare a steve jobs day.

    This shows how deep is the retardedness that is valuing form over substance in our society is. Few buttons to push and shiny metallic corners on an object is more important than any stuff that make those stuff actually run.
  • by mr_mischief ( 456295 ) on Sunday October 16, 2011 @02:14PM (#37732508) Journal

    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.

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