Memories of Steve
donmelton.com
donmelton.com
I passed Steve in the hall and he glared at me as I walked with my doughnut. Steve was in great health in those days while I was pasty and obese. (Still am, sad to say.).
But I was happy with my doughnut. Steve glared at me but didn't say anything. I slunk away.
The next day, there were no more doughnuts at any of the cafés on the main campus. I don't think it's a coincidence.
a. It was bought on-campus.
b. If he stopped all donut services because of one guy who looked unhealthy, then it again shows how capricious he was. One person who looked a little unhealthy ate a donut on one occasion and he removed donuts from every single store on campus for every single person for no reason other than he didn't like to see someone who looked pasty and obese walking around eating a donut.
Because that's the sort of guy Steve Jobs was. A sociopath.
Is Michelle Obama a sociopath too?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/6/1m-kids-stop-...
The poster to whom I was responding was associating the control of menus with sociopathy. I was simply pointing out that the First Lady is on record as attempting to do the same thing at a much larger scale.
Yes, god forbid someone takes our precious donuts away from us...
Indeed, most organizations that offer on-site catering have such paternalistic concerns. Google historically (I don't know if it still does) limits and effectively taxes unhealthy food, while providing healthy food for free. Does that make Sergey and Page sociopaths?
I will add the disclaimer that what is healthy or not is a passing fancy, enduring unending change. But people act on the best knowledge they have, and often the best intentions.
I'm not defending the new age medicine he opted for first. But I don't think it's what caused his death. Might have hastened it a little is all.
These are generally fair better behaved than the more common and far more deadly type of cancer you are probably familiar with, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. While pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas have a dismal prognosis, most neuroendocrine tumors have a good survivability index.
I used to be fat. I knew it was unhealthy. It was incredibly obnoxious and, frankly, unhealthy, to hear people tell me that I needed to get healthy like I didn't know better. What I needed was to get away from poisonous relationships (I eat to cope with sadness) and hellhole suburbs that make it impossible to walk or cycle anywhere. Moving to the city and going out more instead of keeping a freezer full of crap made a world of difference. The assumption that a stranger on HN knows more about health than he does is insulting and counterproductive.
Agree with this. In many (but of course not all)[1] cases there is a root cause to overeating in order to mask pain or give you pleasure.
The unfortunate part though is that not everyone can make a lifestyle change to remove the pressure or geography to allow them to make the needed changes. For example someone might be in a relationship and/or have children and need to work where they are or need a certain amount of $$. (But for sure that is not everyone.)
[1] While it is definitely true that there are people that have body types that prevent them from losing weight when this is not the case it usually boils down to some other issue that is causing the overeating or lack of control.
Admiring or having respect for someone does not necessarily imply you're having a "god-like image" of the person, or that you're unconditionally accepting everything the person has done.
Nobody denies that Jobs has a world-class ego, but I challenge anybody to point out where, in one of Jobs' keynotes or interviews, where he ever takes credit for an invention or innovation using "I" instead of "we."
Not logically ironclad, of course, but we are talking pop psychology here.
Nailed it. Most of the Silicon Valley hotshots are those who've become extremely adept at exploiting talented people with low self-esteem.
I'll list a few:
* Stalin
* Pol Pot
* Shoko Ashara
* David Koresh
Ad hominem attack on a dead man is so low I can't even describe it.
Sadly, this is HN. So long HN.
It's been a nice day since I left, much more productive. So in the end I guess I have to thank you for being such an asshhole.
Anyway, if you enjoyed this, you should read the history of Safari posts he did a while back, also a podcast he was a guest on one time, though I forget who it was with -- ah, Debug I think -- that was really excellent and well worth listening to.
[1]http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...
[2]There's also Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org, however that is focused on Steve's original tenure at Apple, not the "comeback" from the late-90s on.
Sounds like people at Apple spent too much time worrying about what Steve thought of them, whether he'd remember their names or invite them to meetings.
While everyone is worried about what one man thinks, the man himself was thinking about design and business issues, trying to solve problems.
Funny how bookmarks was never really solved in Safari. On my iPad, I hate the bookmarks functionality, it confuses me pretty much every time. When I try to find a bookmark, or add a bookmark, every time it seems I have to "figure out" and remember how to do that. It's not intuitive or snappy. And now with iOS7 flat design, all your bookmarks and history appears as one big list - black text on white background. The lack of interface delineation mean elements bleed into other elements and make it harder to mentally remember where things are found.
If Steve were still around, he'd be kicking someone's ass over the half-baked iOS7 flat design.
Otherwise another great piece.
Much different landscape now. Most devs are running macs now anyway, Chrome exists and is very popular, etc.
With the release and success of the App Store, that became unnecessary. I guess killing it was a function of its relative lack of popularity; Apple in the Jobs 2.0+ era justifiably don't like keeping dead-weight projects around.
On another note, it would be interesting to see if a website containing all these memories of Steve Jobs ever comes about. A crowdsourced biography if you will: storiesabout/stevejobs .
He looked at me funny, but I couldn't tell if he got the reference to Bizarre Sex #10: http://silezukuk.tumblr.com/post/3151672333 [NSFW]
In making sure nothing ever crashes, Apple has moved more and more to an OS that is too restrictive for my taste.
And it's important. OS X is not.
You being not a fan of OS X apparently clouds your judgement in this case.
Yes, Steve could be intense at times. But he was also a real person. He had to deal with the ordinary and mundane aspects of life like everyone else. Maybe even enjoy them.
I also don't get the hero worship on HN for the guy, there are other actual hackers for worthier (in my opinion of course) of respect (as an aside I think Wozniak is worth far more respect than someone like Jobs).
Pretty trinkets combined with aspirational marketing and a form always beats function attitude and somehow this guy is a hero, never could figure it out.
End of story. Before continuing celebrating Jobs, ask yourself a question, do you want to promote that kind of behavior in the Valley?
"What Steve does on the good side — like the music scenario [in which] we didn't bring just a music device called the iPod, we brought a whole music system: a store that sells it, a computer that manages and organizes it. And an iPod is just a satellite to your computer. Plug it in and it works. You don't have to do anything. You've got to admire Steve for that kind of thinking. Nobody's perfect. [Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
Specifically:
"[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
I think that's a more enlightened point of view.
Source: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/steve-wozniak-on-...
But my point was different. We just can't afford to celebrate lies. It is very very very harmful.
As for the specific event in question (the Atari money), do we know what Steve did with the extra money? Seems to me, maybe he really did need it (for rent/food/etc.) and was too ashamed to ask Woz for the extra. Maybe he figured he would re-invest it, and that it was easier to do behind Woz's back than to try and explain his plans.
Steve was no saint, but in my experience he was generally a nice guy. He also thought he knew better than everyone else, and so it would not be unusual for him to leave out explanations, make snap judgements, and be rather brusque in general (when dealing with business decisions). Why should he have to explain himself when he was obviously right?
I'm sure it didn't help that the world so often (especially toward the end) only reinforced the notion that he knew better than everyone else...
So, if someone else did it too, it's somehow not that bad?
Great world to live in.
There's a vast difference between what you call "celebrating lies", and celebrating the life and work of a man who, while every bit as human as anyone else and with feet of clay to match, was nevertheless possessed of the sort of visionary genius which comes along perhaps half a dozen times in a generation. Certainly Steve Jobs could be, and was, a real revolving bastard from time to time. But so can everyone; people are complicated and they don't always behave in ways which others regard as preferable, sensible, or nice. If you're going to require sainthood as a prerequisite for honoring the accomplishments of a historical figure, I suppose that's your prerogative, but I suspect you'll find it a lonely stance to take, and I think it's strange you should utter it in the same breath as a word like "enlightened". Have you heard the one about the blind men and the elephant?
Maybe you could say that ipods with itunes is simpler than dragging and dropping like that. Though I don't see much of a diffrerence; drag and drop is a common action in Windows and the like. In order to selectively add files to your ipod you'd need to learn to drag and drop... in iTunes.
iTunes is an okay-to-annoying program, at least on Windows. I've bought music on itunes that I have to "enable" on every new PC I might use. The last time I tried it dodn't even work. I ve bought an audio book that I have never been allowed to even play! iTunes can't (or couldn't) even compete with pirated media, not by a long shot.
\* let's say when mp3 players had a capacity that actually made them worthile, maybe as small a capacity as 256MB, or 512 and more.
I gave concrete examples of the usability of the ipod. I would like it if people argued against those points, rather than some smartass, sarcastic response like the grandparent.
Just as terse, no sarcasm.
I don't see how it saves time when it necessitates you to follow up with a wordy response - if you were after saving time, you wouldn't even have responded to my response. But I guess this is yet another case of me not _getting_ something.
You won't necessarily agree with those reasons -- I certainly wouldn't want everything to work like iTunes or my iPhone in general -- but you will understand why your limited perspective on UX doesn't catch on like Jobs's philosophy did.
The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
I'm not a usability person, never claimed to be. I am a user who is sharing his experience with using ipods. In order to empathize with other people's experience I need to hear them first.
I feel like I'm being painted like "oh look, another tasteless nerd who doesn't _get_ the benefit of UX that comes in another flavour than a virtual terminal". I have never, ever touched a terminal unless I absolutely have to, right up until about my second year as a programmer, which learnt as an adult. I still think that things like terminals are overrated as far as streamlined work flow goes.
> The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
I haven't had the impression that ipods were such a revolution. Maybe it has to do with where I live.
I'll concede that the ipod was clearly simpler for people who thought dragging and dropping to a USB like thing was intimidating, and at the same time couldn't/wouldn't/had moral qualms about pirating music. I reckon ripping CDs was not a viable option for most people. I think I've only tried to do that once or twice myself.
I'm actually traditionally a Windows guy and scoff/roll my eyes at a lot of Apple stuff, but it's pretty undeniable that they've created some amazing, bar-raising products. They've done this by enforcing an uncompromising UX-first philosophy that covers all aspects of product design.
When I got the first iPod, I also had a Creative Nomad player that had a little more storage and a search function. However, the iPod on the other hand had Firewire rather than USB 1.1, making it a painless process to add and remove songs right before you go somewhere, rather than a hours long process you had to plan in advance. Even more importantly the scroll wheel on ball bearings with made it feasible to fly through a tree of artists and albums with thousands of audio tracks.
The shift in convenience was on the level of shifting from a phonograph to a cassette tape, except that records are more convenient in some situations.
It doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in 2001 it was a very big deal.
> I think that's a more enlightened point of view.
This kind of argument is weak. It's just a bland kind of truism that everyone can agree with that is unrelated to the original argument - when someone says that some one is a bad person, there is an implicit comparison to most people, ie the "badness" of a person is a relative one. Then bringing up some kind of absolute quality - perfection - is just trying to distract from the original argument.
At the very least Steve Jobs was an intensely interesting person. I don’t think characterising him as a bad person makes much sense. This is such a simple-minded worldview.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Wozniak+jobs#!/all/forever/0/Wozni...
Maybe we can find a better way rather than create a throwaway account and rehashing the same thread?
And it's not a bad thing, it's part of the "whole truth" about someone and about how you need to be in order to succeed. And the fact that you need to be like that is not something that one should "sweep under the rug" or present as a "minor part of an otherwise great personality", because it does show you something: that at some level something is very wrong with the system and as much as we like to believe otherwise, fairness and success are a bit like having the cake and eating it too ...something that rarely happens.
So to be a great businessman, I just have to lie to people that help me, right?
I suppose it would revolve around what people think "success" is - if it means lying to others and abandonment of morals for personal gain, then that's a very sad definition of "success".
Haha strange human race
At least in 2000+ years we got to the level of social/human evolution where "the stuff" keeps flowing :)
Woz probably didn't became upset about it because by the time he found out about that little incident, he was in some kind of "managing" position himself, and "playing the same game" but in his advantage now, and he was there because of the other decisions that Jobs made, so...
Basically what at the small "garage business" is called "being a liar" is what at the bigger levels is called "the rules of the game". And yes, you're no longer a "liar" and no longer breaking the rules, but simply because the rules are bent the way you need them to be bent.
The only alternative would be to have only fully transparent employee owned companies... and we all know this is not how our current flavor of capitalism works :)
EDIT - TL;DR: it's basically the same "bad" deal one gets in any employee <-> employer relationship, just that they didn't have this explicit relationship
It is pretty safe to assume that Steve Wozniak was not pulling the same types of shenanigans. And, it's really too bad if the story serves to normalize such behavior.
Second, it isn't a story about managers providing no value compared to less well paid engineers, it is a brilliant engineer letting something despicable pass because his partner brought so many non engineering assets to the table.
I think people should flee any company where there are dishonest managers who provide no value. It isn't uncommon to see companies that start out with comparable products, design and engineering talent diverge because one has a terrible management team.
Personally I think Jobs was an over hyped marketing manager (with perhaps a true gift for getting talented people to do the work).
There are dozens of people in the computer industry that I respect far more who will never get 1/100th of the adulation (and I'm not sure most of them would want it).
Look at the contributions of people like John Backus, Edgar Codd or Maurice Wilkes and of course Kernighan and Ritchie, those people (to me) are worth far more respect.
This one in particular, though, was a human enough perspective that it would have been interesting to read if every single mention of the particular terrifying-and-respected-CEO were redacted. So I'm glad I read it.