prbiker15
Blue Crack Addict
Wow...unbelievably sad. Steve Jobs, a legend and true visionary, your legacy will live on until the end of the world. If it wasn't for Jobs (and a few others), I would not have an iPod at this very moment.
If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com
Sad for his loss and condolences to his family.
I'm not too familiar with what he did - Did he actually invent things or did he just run the company?
not that it matter's
but I posted from that same speech, too
here is a link,
Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)
it is pretty good
stay foolish, stay hungry
That and esophageal cancer are my two worst nightmares. I've known several people who have died from those before age 60.Pancreatic cancer is evil.
Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 - YouTube
The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market. Listening to his Stanford Commencement speech above is a revelation, isn't it? He was a baby turned over for adoption by his biological parents. He dropped out of school. He was fired at the age of 30 by the very company he had founded. And in the face of early humbling, he focused on his own vision and his own passion - an individualist creed forged in the crucible of a sure knowledge of his own mortality, of his own death.
This sentence resonates very deeply with me:
These are the words of a man with great spiritual insight, and the courage to live it (because true spirituality requires extreme courage). His worldview was forged by an eery prescience of his own mortality. He got there long before his cancer diagnosis, which, perhaps, was why he transcended it with six of the most spectacularly creative and successful years of his life. And this fusion of counter-cultural courage with capitalist genius is what defines our time - as well as the fear-ridden reaction against it.Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Jobs simply defied convention at every stage in his life. He saw how the arts could deeply inform the sciences in revolutionizing human life and interaction. He dropped out of college in order to intensify his learning. And that learning came from many sources:
After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.
This is the fusion that has made the best in our modern world - and those who reflexively mock the counterculture miss its spiritual genius because they are incapable of the courage needed to understand it better. Think of Pixar. I remember during the darkest days after 9/11 feeling bleaker about the future than ever before in my life. And I went to see a Pixar movie. For some reason, I came out feeling better about the world and its prospects. If a civilization could produce that kind of genius conflation of the left and right sides of the brain, if it could also turn that into exquisite beauty and laughter and even sadness, then this civilization was a formidable force against its nihilist fundamentalist enemies at home and abroad. No politician - save Obama at his best - ever reassured in quite that comprehensive a way. And what was reassuring was that this had been rooted in a vision from an individual who took no-one else's lead and had the courage to realize it, to his own exacting standards of perfection.Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication.
Steve Jobs' approach to life is terrifying for most of us, because it demands firstly the hardest thing - facing death - and then its necessary, scary corollary - living your own life, and no one else's. These are difficult things, the bequests of a modernity we were born into, and perhaps beyond most human beings. Hence the enduring nihilist appeal of fundamentalism in all its forms - a fundamentalist approach to religion, in which fallible words are turned into literal gods; a fundamentalist approach to politics, in which every problem is defined by a dogma and every solution found in a catechism; and a fundamentalist approach to life, which is rooted in obedience and rules and the false comfort of Manicheanism, rather than freedom and love and terrifying, liberating existential doubt.
You cannot teach these things in a book. But you can see them in a life. And every life lived without fear is a life that can sustain and nourish others. And Jobs truly lived without fear - which enabled him to create beyond the measure of most mortals. That he had, in the end, everything to fear - a rare pancreatic cancer slowly moving toward him - only makes his energy and spirit more vibrant.
He was alive when he died.
How many of us live as if we were already dead?
Why Steve Jobs Matters - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast
Steve Jobs was a genius, and one of the most important businessmen and inventors of our time. But he was not a kindly, soft-spoken sage who might otherwise live atop a mountain in India, dispatching wisdom to pilgrims. He was a taskmaster who knew how to get things done. "Real artists ship" was an Apple battle cry from the earliest days. Everyone, by now, knows about the Steve Jobs "reality distortion field" -- the charismatic Care Bear Stare that compels otherwise reasonable people to spend weeks in line for a slightly faster telephone. In his biography of Jobs, journalist Alan Deutschman described the Apple co-founder's lesser-known hero-shithead roller coaster. "He could be Good Steve or he could be Bad Steve. When he was Bad Steve, he didn't seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions so long as he pushed for greatness." When confronted with the full "terrifying" wrath of Bad Steve (even over the slightest of details), the brains at Apple would push themselves beyond all personal limits to find a way to meet Jobs's exacting demands, and somehow return to his good graces. And the process would repeat itself. "Steve was willing to be loved or feared, whatever worked." As Bud Tribble, Vice President of Software Technology at Apple explained. "It let the engineers know that it wasn't OK to be sloppy in anything they did, even the 99 percent that Steve would never look at."
That attention to detail makes Apple products unique and desired. Does any other company produce ubiquitous, mass-market devices that still feel so rare, and deeply personal? Steve Jobs did that.
His life was too short, but never wasted, and his impact reaches even those who've never touched an Apple product. He ushered in the personal computing era, and rallied from pancreatic cancer to show us a glimpse of the post-PC world. That didn't just happen; it was made to happen.
In Praise of Bad Steve - D.B. Grady - Technology - The Atlantic
Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali, unmarried University of Wisconsin graduate students.
Of all the cool stuff Apple has sold I think he should not be forgotten for the mouse! Think of computing without a mouse....
No doubt the discussion about this person will only swell as times goes on.
The son of Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian born Reno, Nevada casino Vice President.
Add that to the list of things I (we) did not know about Steve (Jandali) Jobs.
Steve Jobs dies; obituary; Apple's co-founder transformed computers, culture - latimes.com
I learned a few things in my morning paper today. Interesting and very, very impressive.
My hope is that this thread can be used for any and all general discussion about Steve Jobs, his life, work and legacy, etc.
I was up in the University District this morning and I stopped by the Seattle Apple Store. Looks like they have it closed down for a day of mourning, which actually surprised me.