Ok, computer user then.

Steve Jobs built Apple 1.0 that popularized desktop computing & publishing.

Then on the side he bought a failing business, and turned it into the company that's become the future of entertainment with Pixar.

In between he founded NeXt where he demonstrated his understanding that integrated hardware design and supply-chain-management was going to be essential to the next generation of computing, and hired amazing people to help him realize this vision when back at Apple.

With these experiences upon his return to Apple, he bet on mobile and consumer products and turned a failing computer hardware maker into the world's most valuable company - out pacing even EXXON that's entire business is pumping liquid gold out of the ground.

He authored or co-authored 323 patents at Apple alone.

So I strongly disagree that he was not an "inventor", a "hacker", or undeserving of the media's attention and analysis.

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/ste...

I'm using the Jargon file's definition of hacker [1], which is :

"HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

[1] http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

I could keep going, but your points seem entirely designed to throw rehashed cliches about Apple that feed some cliched narrative. Your argument about patent assignment is so oddly narrow I'm just curious why you'd drag it out absent a general dislike of patents here on HN. But other then that IP quirk, I'm quite familiar with folks who believe it's fashionable to hate on Apple/Jobs. For these types, unfortunately many of them short sighted programmers, Apple can do no good, and everything Steve did was based on stealing other's ideas — evidence be damned.

Never mind that Jobs is the quintessential malicious and inquisitive meddler, the one who helped grow a film company, a music company that single-handedly changed the industry, and one of the top computer firms that introduced the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, iPhone and iPad, the latter four two while battling cancer. Now you can argue what it takes to do that, but only one thing really matters: building passionate "A-Player" teams dedicated and willing to pour their best work into building great products. You admit this and then negate it's importance, when it's actually all that matters.

Jobs built these kinds of teams over and over again, and he was very good at doing that. Part of that was his often abrasive attitude. He didn't tolerate lots of things, no less faux "hackers" who would dominate the discussion about what it means to be hack while completely missing the forest for the programming trees.

Nor did he tolerate constant optimists, who believing in "playing, and build great things together with all of the talented people who are working so hard on your behalf." Sorry, but that's a load of bullshit, and I'd buy it from someone who worked on one of the rare misses from Apple in the mid-2000s, MobileMe. I'm sympathetic to the author, she seems to be talented (nice SproutCore shirt) and means well. But there's no arguing that even after an initial gestation period that MobileMe wasn't a steaming pile of shit. You can debate all you want about web technologies and who's fault it was at the beginning, but the idea of cloud services isn't some breathtaking impossible task and as an end-user it was bad. Equally talented folks down the road in Mountain View were doing it and after a certain point you should feel bad if you're working on a consistently shitty product.

So, the bad definition of "hacker"?

I wouldn't disagree that Jobs was good at his job, nor that he provided value to society overall, but I would say it is really difficult to tell the technical skills of a leader (since they don't get much opportunity to show them off).

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, but I also do not like to sugar-coat things.

Steve Jobs was mentally ill. A lot of people don't like to say that, but that is what he was. I cannot diagnose his exact condition, but he shared many traits of the common sociopath -- all except that he was never very charming, generally speaking. [0] Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the right people (Steve would have been an absolute nobody if he had never met Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he probably would have turned out to be a homeless person (if you had met him at Atari, you would have thought so). Steve was a bag of ideas -- ideas that were not original but, to his blessing, very consistent. And as most of us agree, ideas are only worth the quality of their execution. A lot of people look up to Steve for this reason - he was a non-engineer who came to rule the tech world. If he could do it, so could they.

I have no real agenda against Jobs, and I would definitely say that his life was filled with interesting accomplishments (even if the only accomplishment was only swindling the world to pay 2x as much for his products). But this is one man I would never place on a pedestal, because he is not a model human being.

The only heros I have know humility. Steve Jobs, even in the face of death, never learned that.

[0] http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

> Jobs was a good husband and father and a great businessman who had an eye for details. He said Jobs was a good marketer and understood the benefits of technology.

> When it came to Apple's products, "while everyone else was fumbling around trying to find the formula, he had the better instincts," he said.

> According to Wozniak, Jobs told him around the time he left Apple in 1985 that he had a feeling he would die before the age of 40. Because of that, "a lot of his life was focused on trying to get things done quickly," Wozniak said.

> "I think what made Apple products special was very much one person, but he left a legacy," he said. Because of this, Wozniak hopes the company can continue to be successful despite Jobs' death.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak-steve...

While you're right that Steve Jobs would have gone nowhere without Steve Wozniak, the reverse is likely also true. Steve Wozniak had a big doubt on working on the Apple start-up; the security HP offered him was very tempting. I don't think the world would have known about Steve Wozniak if Steve Jobs didn't convince him to leave HP for the Apple start-up.

I agree Steve Jobs might have been a sociopath, but then again, aren't many higher-up people in other businesses either? I think what mattered for Apple is that Steve Jobs cared about products most of all - sociopaths at many other companies only seem to care about how much money they make.

You can say the same of almost everyone that is successful in the world. Also, Steve didn't turn himself into god, people did. Ambition and determination play a huge role in successful people's lives (depending on your definition of success), but LUCK is always a huge factor.

For example...

0.) Lincoln wouldn't have become President if he had given up after a few election losses, and we could make an argument that slavery in America would have taken much longer to abolish or not at all without his leadership. Perhaps Lincoln was mentally ill to run so many times instead of gracefully accepting his loss.

1.) Elon Musk would never have cofounded SpaceX & Tesla would not be possible without him betting his financial future on the company. But you could make a similar statement that Elon wouldn't be who he is today, if he hadn't left Sooth Africa, if he hadn't stumbled upon SV, etc.

2.) JayZ would never have become what he is today, if he had gotten busted or shot in his younger years when he was dealing drugs.

3.) Nelson Mandel wouldn't be who he is today if he had given up on his ideals and dreams of the future while serving for 27 years in prison.

4.) Justin Bieber wouldn't be the most popular musician alive today if he(his mom) hadn't uploaded a video on youtube that resulted in his being recruited by some music manager and promoted just as social media and sharing where becoming the part of everyday life. He'd just be another guy that saw singing as a hobby or gained only regional fan following if he pursued his passion.

TL:DR -> Almost everyone you know, respect, admire or don't would have been an "absolute nobody" if it weren't for certain circumstances favorable/unfavorable in their lives.

On a more generic level, you could say if a person's biological mother hadn't consummated a relationship/fling/marriage with that person's biological father, that person and everything s/he has accomplished wouldn't exist.

Anyway, all of what you say is basically true. :) But I feel like Jobs has stolen most of the respect from all the people who work so hard under him that really have made Apple what it is. I guess I kind of have the engineer's mind set, for better or worse - I admire people who can create things with their own two hands (or at least the people who get their hands dirty), and I don't particularly care for those who can't -- I can't really say that without sounding like an elitist prick, but maybe that is what I am. :)

(Searching JayZ on google yields About 123,000,000 results.)

- How do you know if someone doesn't own a television? They tell you.

The Onion article is just an elaborate version of the joke.

The joke here is people making a big deal about not knowing who Jay-Z is, to the extent they post comments about how they don't know it - rather than just google his name if they were curious. Which indicate that the do know who he is, but want to make a show of being the kind of guy who don't know who someone Jay-Z is.

Dubmood OTOH, is excellent.

But give the ability I'd go back and get an old Porsche 356 Speedster.

The Miata is superior technically in every way. But I just love the old Porsche for its history, aesthetics and legacy, and thats the car I'd always prefer.

I don't think any of this is any sort of reflection on what kind of "hacker" I am.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_356

Yes, you could record a vinyl losslessly and it would sound indistinguishable from the vinyl. But why bother, when you already own loads of vinyl and are familiar with that format? Plus some people enjoy the 'ritual' of vinyl, the sense of ownership not offered by digital music, and the way that medium places focus on records as self-contained works, rather than as a collection of songs from which people 'pick-and-mix'.

Don't get me wrong, I love all digital music has to offer, but I'm just saying there are still plenty of reasons to listen to vinyl too.

I own nearly a thousand vinyl records, and I recorded them digitally and play them through my Audiotron (crackle and all). I bother because playing vinyl records is a bother. They need to be cleaned regularly, dinking around with the records is more work than just pushing a button. Some of them are warped and to get them to play ya gotta put slight pressure on the needle.

I did try various software to remove clicks, but it made the recordings sound muffled.

But I do like the smell of the turntable & records. It's analogous to the pleasing smell of an old paperback novel. Can't have everything.

You could go out of your way to try to simulate all the mechanical interactions, but why? What is so important about faking something?

No. Sampling truly analog data always involves approximating.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28signal_processing%2...

Notice how they use the term "theoretical ideal sampler".

Now, it is the case, as user rayiner mentioned, that there can be advantages to using more than the required number of bits and samples (though not quite for the reasons he mentioned). For starters, you do need an anti-aliasing filter between the signal source and your ADC. Increasing the sample rate reduces the complexity of the AA filter, and digital-domain math can make up for it (and increase the effective number of bits, to boot!). But when you go to reproduce the signal, there's no good reason to use more samples and bits than necessary. That was the whole point of the "Niel Young paper" that has been linked to so many times.

Vinyl does not come close to the limits of consumer-grade recording devices (except maaaaaybe in certain bands, but that can be dealt with by using noise-shaping techniques). Does that make those who like the sound of vinyl bad people? No. Just like those who enjoy sitting in front of a wood fireplace are not bad people. Gas fireplaces have a lot of advantages, but some people like the crackling of the wood and the smell it produces.

[1] Tektronix made a very nice set of (entirely analog) sampling oscilloscopes in the 1960's which used sampling techniques to measure high frequency signals (on the order of 1GHz when contemporary continuous-signal CROs could barely reach 100MHz). These oscilloscopes displayed discrete-time, continuous-amplitude signals, and deliberately excluded the anti-aliasing filter I mentioned above (though it wasn't true heterodyning as most RF people would think of it, because samples were taken based a delay from a trigger recognizer, and thus not necessarily equally spaced in time).

[2] Signals below the noise floor are outside the scope of this discussion and usually require some form of synchronous detection (like a lock-in amplifier) or frequency-spreading / -despreading (like GPS).

The page you listed also says: "There has been an industry trend towards sampling rates well beyond the basic requirements; 96 kHz and even 192 kHz are available.[1] This is in contrast with laboratory experiments, which have failed to show that ultrasonic frequencies are audible to human observers"

This is total and utter BS. I know how audio quality works. I've got a CS degree, have take information theory and DSP classes, have even written audio plugin code (VST/AU), and have worked with DAWs and samplers for nearly two decades.

Still, I like vinyl better.

What you said has nothing at all to do with "audio quality" and how it works. It only has to do with audio _fidelity_, at best. Quality and fidelity is not the same thing. And fidelity and human preference towards a sound source is not the same thing either. For example, people prefer (and enjoy more) colored sound over more neutral reproduction all the time.

Not to mention vinyl is also about the cultural experience (connection with the cottage era of the music industry, large cover art, etc), the tactile feel, and even the patina and fragility of the medium (which can even include the crackle). Consumption of art, any art, is not at all about perfect reproduction.

>But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored, then the world is suffering from a serious case of myopia

Steve Job's work was important to the economy and the consumers at large in a manifest way (ie. building the company with the largest quarterly earnings of all time, for one).

Ritchie's work, no so much and in a much more roundabout way. And McCarthy's work was even more marginal. Those two are important for computer science, and the programming industry, but not for the economy, market, culture etc at large.

>Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications.

That's the very role of a good CEO.

You probably mistook him to be something like Tesla?

The other worked within the confines of a established company and co-developed C and Unix. Both had other developers already working on them. Arguably both could be created even without him, by Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan et co. And the more widely used versions of both were released by other companies later, not AT&T (the UNIX vendors of the 80's, the C compiler companies, and later GCC and Linux).

He was a great of computer science and our Unix culture in general -- just not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, turns over whole sections of the economy, and dines with Presidents.

Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work. That's an unusually obvious example of standing on the shoulders of giants, and Ritchie and Thompson are the giants. Jobs just brought their work (and the work of others) to market successfully.

You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it.

It very much is for the perception of their contribution though. One was a leader himself, the other was part of an established team (which could presumably do the same work without him).

>Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work.

No, it merely uses C and Unix as very basic components at the very base of it all, a C and Unix that are many times removed from the origins at that PDP-11, and have had the contributions of thousands upon thousands of people (including tons of hard work from hundreds of Apple's own engineers).

And even C/UNIX weren't created by Richie himself alone. There's BK, Ken Thompson et al too. So, sure we can celebrate Richie as the co-creator of C and Unix but not of something as indirect and removed such as "Apple's product line".

Else, we might as well say "IBM's entire product line is built on top of the discovery of electricity". Which while true, it doesn't mean we celebrate Maxwell and Tesla for IBM's work. We don't even celebrate Turing and Von Neuman for IBM's stuff. We celebrate the company's engineers.

>You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it..

I'm not so sure. There are people who have discovered great things that went nowhere without some proxy. I think this is the naive programming concept that "marketing doesn't matter, it's just BS". Then you go code the finest program, and nobody buys/uses it.

Yes we do. We celebrate Maxwell and Tesla, along with all of the other great scientists back through history, because without them and their discoveries the things we create today wouldn't be possible. That's the entire meaning of Newton's phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants. We may not mention every link in the chain every time we talk about any given product, but it is implicit that the chain is there. Every new scientist adds on to what we already have, and if their contribution is significant enough, the next generation of scientists will learn their name along with the ones we learned.

Ritchie built C. He built on Thompson's work with B, but the C programming language is Ritchie's creation. He was also not “part of an established team” when building Unix. He and Thompson built and led the team after leaving Multics. Considering that he wrote the language they built the system in and was also one of the two leaders of the team, your presumption that the same work could have been done without him is a bold one.

Steve Jobs sold some products for a while, and he did a really good job of it. He had a significant economic impact, but it was a temporary one. Future generations are not going to build on top of his work, because he didn't create or discover anything to build on top of. He was a businessman, and history will remember (or forget) him as such.

Valuing great work and discovery is not a “naive programming concept”, it's an inheritance from the scientific community. We honor those who have gone before who make it possible for us to do what we do. Without Dennis Ritchie, my working life and the things that I create would be very, very different. Without Steve Jobs, they'd probably be the exact same.

Now, I could go on debating what I thought he was but that would be pointless. Steve changed the world, with whatever combination of qualities and abilities that he had.

You know what doesn't accomplish anything? Debating on Hacker News if it's better to be like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, Steve's design ability, which of the ideas from Apple were his, why he listened to music on vinyl, etc.

If you can't understand why Steve Jobs was a household name and Dennis Richie wasn't, well, sorry... I guess you don't understand life. There really isn't any use in whining about it though. In 200 years, most of us will probably be forgotten, including Steve.

Shrinking from normative discussions like this is essentially abandoning the idea that there is any moral dimension to technology, which is more dangerous than any side you can take in the debate.

There is a difference, of course, between meaningful discussion and fanboyism. But whether or not Steve is worthy of the praise he has is definitely worth discussing.

At the end of today, ask yourself what you actually accomplished. Are you making forward progress on your goal or dream? You get about 30,000 days to accomplish it.

There are lots of not so famous people with great stories where I find inspiration. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

Also the "logic" that if you listen to vinyl records makes one ignorant about audio quality is silly. And honestly you can can like Steve Jobs and still appreciate someone like Dennis Ritchie.

Steve Jobs was a media figure who was present up to the end of his life, whereas Dennie Ritchie has invented something extremely important decades ago and then kept a low profile. The respective amount of media coverage has nothing to do with who was objectively the more important human, only postings like yours claim to know the answer to this, and I think it's rather tasteless.

This was undoubtedly his best strength. It's a heck of a strength to have as a CEO, though.

As stated before, gathering those talents and driving them to make these things does take a lot of effort and he did that very well.

Behind that guy in the cover of the magazines there are tons of people that actually made those amazing things. Many gave ideas that in the end made that product a whole.

And finally, without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot. Or not. The thing is, you can't know what would've happened without him. So don't say that as a fact, it's at best a supposition.

You could easily say that about the "true" inventors.

The point is Steve Jobs _was_ heavily involved in all of these major breakthroughs, spanning decades, industries, and personnel. He is an incredibly important and influential figure in the history of technology. Not sure why people feel the need to downplay his role when the very people he is supposedly stealing the spotlight from will attest to his genius (with the exception of Jef Raskin of course, who was a bit of a Svengali himself).

This is distinct from, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a solution from a direction which no one was looking. Everything Steve helped create was already underway.

The Mac was hardly the only game in town at the time. History does indeed belong to the winners.

Go and learn about Vannevar Bush and Memex, Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad, Doug Engelbart and his contributions like the the Mouse and his oN-Line System. The history of modern computing is simply not as black and white as you are trying to portray.

Finally, anyone that has used both Windows 1.0 (and 2.0 for that matter) will tell you just how awful it was, especially when compared to the Macintosh. Microsoft didn't come close to the ideas presented in the Mac until 1990 with Windows 3.0, and arguably it was the 3.1 release in 1992 that was useable.

Sculley, Spindler and Amelio all did, and all of them failed to various degrees, which illustrates just how facile that comment is.

Lol, i've tried explaining this to soooo many people. (But to be fair, there are other reasons to listen to vinyl other than just 'quality'.)

...and of course regardless of relative quality, CD and other digital formats seems to have encouraged producers to move towards some really bad production habits. The end result might be that while the media can reproduce better sound quality, the quality of the sound on a CD might be worse.

Philippe Starck designed the yacht.

Obviously you are ignorant of the difference between an analog music and digital music, many people still prefer vacuum-tube amplifier than solid-states amplifier because of the music quality it produces.

People listened to Vinyls because of their distinct sound it makes, for people who are as old as Steve Jobs and Neil Young, the experience listening to Vinyls is nostalgic.

Your article [2] mentions mastering issues. In many cases, the master for the vinyl edition of an album differs significantly from that of the CD or digital release; for example, the vinyl edition may feature less compression, preserving dynamic range.

http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...

No organization/endeavor/enterprise rises to tremendous success without an extraordinary leader at its helm, yet many failures have had armies of smart engineers/builders/managers on their staff. There are underlying reasons for that but I'm of the opinion, of late, that absorbing them from a book or commentary is rather hard for most people - you need to actually experience/witness the right set of circumstances to really appreciate the true nature of what transpires behind success at the top tier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

he knew that coding isn't measured by the number of lines you write, and that providing a good environment to developers is absolutely essential. I don't know too many managers or CEOs who really grasp that.

So what? Ideas aren't very special in and of themselves. I have lots of ideas every day that end up having no impact on the world, because I don't do anything about them.

Also, I think you underestimate the importance of editing. There is a reason writers have editors, bands have producers, actors have directors, and so on.

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Deta...

"it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others"

That's all it was--a matter of taste, and his was the very, very best. He had an order of magnitude capability in expressing his taste into product visions that he forced into the world, sure on the backs of others, but nonetheless.

Secondly, the house metaphor about ignoring the carpenter and contractor is silly. Comparing Jobs to an interior designer is complete ignorance -- Jobs didn't "decorate" technology -- he saw what technology could potentially accomplish and pushed his teams to execute that vision. He wasn't arranging digital throw pillows -- he was reinventing how people interact and use their "houses."

That contractor and carpenter build what the designer/architect create. Contractors and carpenters, while certainly skilled tradesmen, are merely inputs to a system. Inputs are generally interchangeable. There are very, very few contruction projects that require one specific carpenter's skills. I can find thousands of carpenters (and hackers) who can built competently. But it's rare that you find a hacker (or anyone) that has the vision, and executive ability to create something like Apple, Google or Microsoft, just as a carpenter might be able to build a Frank Lloyd Wright home from a blueprint, most carpenters wouldn't be able to concieve of that final product, having never seen it before. Who can name the carpenter of a Frank Lloyd Wright home? Who cares? The person living in the house certainly doesn't care about the individual inputs -- they care about the finished product. The ability to take disparate inputs and create something magical, amazing, useful and functional.

Dennis Ritchie, while certainly the father or pretty much most of what we do on computers, doesn't matter to the general public. People love to also suggest that Elon Musk of Tesla as a visionary as well, but without Michael Faraday, electric motor technology might not have developed as it has.

Genius always stands on the shoulders of greatness, but let's also remember that simply inventing some technology or another doesn't make one a "genius" or even a groundbreaking figure -- it's the application of that technology into a form that benefits society. Theories of flight don't matter a bit until someone like the Wright Brothers actually build the damned thing.

The C Language or electric motors didn't matter one bit to the world (aside from academics) until some follow-on "genius" actually does something with it.

Steve Jobs, while maybe not a hacker under the definition used amongst a select group of disgruntled HN-snobs, did something bigger than simply "hacking" -- he turned a group of inputs (highly talented to be sure) into products and companies that changed the world.

Which is exactly what people do!

History was clear, Apple had delivered so many great products when Steve was their CEO, period. Even if Steve was not a hacker.

Do you mean if a person is not a hacker, he has not the right or he could not deliver great products or is not fitted to produce any products at all?

>>> He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture,

ditto

Also, why was it necessary to troll vinyl lovers aswell as Jobsians?