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Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the silly con man remark,

"but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"

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While i find Apple products really well made, they have only given us minor technical innovations (unibody construction, 3d desktop graphics, sensible touch-based apps, etc?). In fact, you could remove apple products from the world, and we wouldn't be missing anything essential technology-wise. Yes they did match the technologies right to make amazingly desirable products, just like expensive cars match technologies without introducing major innovations.

I would rephrase the pythonesque quotation "But apart from the polish in sanitation pipes, better scrubs for doctors, yellow paint on roads, cleaner baths and lighter shields for soldiers, what have the Romans done for us?"

Unibody minor? Please. I'm on my 3rd MBP. I destroyed my 4 yr old model (last before unibody). The latest is model is wicked tough. I also have recent Dell and HP laptops. Pieces of shit. No comparison.

I've never understood how people manage to mess up cases so badly - especially other (supposedly) technical people. I have never replaced a computer because of physical failure. --Even my first laptop, which lasted me 5 years, was replaced because I was moving overseas and didn't want to have to worry about paying higher prices for a laptop in the UK.

People expect different things from their hardware. Some people are super careful with their kit. Always keep it in a special case when not using it, always transport it in a padded bag, always put it down very carefully, never but anything on top of it etc. Others simply chuck their phone or laptop unprotected into whatever bag they happen to have handy and set off.

Personally I'm very much in the second camp. I expect my hardware to keep up with me, not to change my habits to accommodate my hardware.

My laptops go EVERYWHERE with me. I really beat the shit of out them. Despite the case and padded backpack.

The right side sagged from where my wrist rests, a problem eliminated by the unibody.

I put my thumb through the LCD, replaced it, and not being very handy, the case lost its factory fresh fit and finish.

in terms of big-picture technology, it's 2011 and we have personal 3d printing. unibody is not that novel.

substractive vs additive. As far as I know, there's no 3D printing technology nearly as strong as aluminum. Yet.

At least 4 of the items on your satirical list have the power to literally save lives from infection, head-on collision, or swordfighting. So, yeah, even "merely incremental" improvements can be world-changing.

All Einstein did was add a small error-correction term to Newton's theory.

get your facts together, the ISS still thinks thinkpads are sturdier, and Einstein altogether replaced Newton's concepts, reducing him down to a marginal case in his equations.

You point out the 'silly' con remark but you do much worst, actually comparing a mere successful business guy with a whole civilization.

...It's a Monty Python reference. The point is that someone has enumerated a list of fairly substantial things and then, quite absurdly, discards them.

http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html

I know perfectly where it comes from, I have access to google too, and the quotes remarked perfectly that the quote was not yours. I was replying to your intention, not to the literal text.

EDIT: this reply actually looks more personal than I wanted it to be, and given your clarification, have my apologies...

So it's your thinking that my intention was to compare Steve Jobs to the Roman Empire (an apple to an elephant), and it was not my intention to compare OP's remark to absurdist writing in The Life of Brian (a piece of writing to a piece of writing)?

Well. Okay then.

I didn't mean to imply Jobs was a con man. But I don't get why your comment applies, especially since it credit a large group which I would be entirely willing to accept contained numerous geniuses. It would be equivalent to praising Apple as a whole, which I would definitely be fine with. Lots of excellent work from very talented people going on there no doubt.

> It would be equivalent to praising Apple as a whole, which I would definitely be fine with

Okay.

Well, the thing about that is, Apple as a whole almost burned to the ground once upon a time.

A man's singular vision turned that around. A company on the brink of death turns into one of the most valuable in all the world.

If the guy who can do that isn't a genius, we might as well give up on using the word.

Genius is not somebody that makes you believe that you 'need' something that you actually don't, those are mere leaders of the consumerism religion. Geniuses were people like Pitagoras, Newton, Gödel... you know, people that opened whole new science fields just with the power of their minds. Please don't insult them with your first world cheap heros.

Newton and Godel are first world heroes. Pythagoras lived long ago, so the concept of first/third worlds is moot here.

I guess "First world Heroes" means people who solve problems that are do not really matter for humanities progress. And I think there is a lot of truth in that: Mp3 players, Smartphones and such are nice things to have, but their impact is negligible in comparison to things like the telegraph, Phones, microprocessors, mobile phones, cars, railways, aviation, space flight, the internet and the theoretical works enabling them.

^ This is what I mean with my sentence, thanks :)

Is good leadership always genius? Was his good leadership all the way up there at genius level? Is working hard to bring out the ideas of your staff worthy of genius-level praise? If he was more humble no-one might have called him a genius, although he would still be respected.

I think there is plenty of room for praising people for quite astonishing accomplishments, but I don't necessarily equate accomplishment with genius. It's not a knock on someone if they really pull something off but they don't get called genius. Genius is in the mind.

> Genius is in the mind.

Agree completely.

Steve didn't accomplish all he did using his fists.

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