Steve Jobs is Dead

[Fandango 1,440]

the average consumer doesn't know what they are buying or understand the mechanics of it.

Maybe the government should step in to protect people from themselves

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Yeah... every consumer is stupid and uninformed. Get over yourself.

tell you what. Go up and down a local downtown street and ask people about their processor, chipset, mother board with its north bridge/south bridge, GPU, graphics memory, type of system memory and speed, etc... and ask them how well they understand it.

I guaran-damn-tee you that the average person won't be able to give you an answer except for "oh well it's a Mac." or oh "it's an HP."

[Fandango 1,440]

tell you what. Go up and down a local downtown street and ask people about their processor, chipset, mother board with its north bridge/south bridge, GPU, graphics memory, type of system memory and speed, etc... and ask them how well they understand it.

I guaran-damn-tee you that the average person won't be able to give you an answer except for "oh well it's a Mac." or oh "it's an HP."

I call BS.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

tell you what. Go up and down a local downtown street and ask people about their processor, chipset, mother board with its north bridge/south bridge, GPU, graphics memory, type of system memory and speed, etc... and ask them how well they understand it.

I guaran-damn-tee you that the average person won't be able to give you an answer except for "oh well it's a Mac." or oh "it's an HP."

Paul you really need to get over this self-superior attitude you have in which everyone else is stupid and where you need to create controversy for effect.

I guaran-damn-tee you that you aren't anywhere even remotely close to how smart you think you are.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Paul you really need to get over this self-superior attitude you have in which everyone else is stupid and where you need to create controversy for effect.

I guaran-damn-tee you that you aren't anywhere even remotely close to how smart you think you are.

not creating controversy for effect at all.

Not being self-superior either, despite how I might come across to you.

I'm simply saying your average consumer has no idea what they are buying, just as the average sales person at Best Buy is full of ####### with half the lines they feed consumers. When it comes to computers, as long as it gets the average person on the internet, they can watch youtube, hook it up to their tv if they want, and use itunes, etc.. Then they are generally happy. They don't give a damn, nor do they have the slightest clue about the mechanics of what they are buying.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Then you should easily understand why they buy Apple products. They are easy to use for people who aren't tech savvy. They have a simpler learning curve in most cases. Plus people have the preconceived notions about Apple so they cheerfully hand over their money. During the worst recession since the great depression Apple sales grew by leaps and bounds. They have had several consecutive record quarters along with several years worth of consecutive profitable quarters. It is the most profitable tech company on the planet. Marketing may be a big part of it, but they have the highest customer satisfaction rate in the industry.

To say that it is due to the stupidity of the consumer is stupid.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

not creating controversy for effect at all.

Not being self-superior either, despite how I might come across to you.

I'm simply saying your average consumer has no idea what they are buying, just as the average sales person at Best Buy is full of ####### with half the lines they feed consumers. When it comes to computers, as long as it gets the average person on the internet, they can watch youtube, hook it up to their tv if they want, and use itunes, etc.. Then they are generally happy. They don't give a damn, nor do they have the slightest clue about the mechanics of what they are buying.

Yes Paul, you are doing both. This 'average person' ####### is typical of someone who is self superior, you create a negative standard and apply it to everyone but yourself.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Yes Paul, you are doing both. This 'average person' ####### is typical of someone who is self superior, you create a negative standard and apply it to everyone but yourself.

just because something is fact of life, doesn't mean it's a negative standard on everyone else. I'm simply saying that most people don't have a clue on computers and that's a pretty accurate truth. You can like it or not.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

It's not a fact of life because you say so.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

It's not a fact of life because you say so.

and you can keep closing and opening your eyes all you want, the truth doesn't go away.

[웃 910]

I agree with Paul. I also guaran-damn-tee 95% (95 out of 100 people) will have no idea what their "processor, chipset, mother board with its north bridge/south bridge, GPU, graphics memory, type of system memory and speed" is.

I know I have no clue!

What I can do is look up the model and find that information out. Very simple actually. But off the top of my head I have no clue. I am the 95%. Only tech nerds, really smart people, and computer geeks know that stuff.

[Ban Hammer 13,465]

Defending Life’s Work With Words of a Tyrant

SAN FRANCISCO — The first time Steve Jobs ever bullied anyone was in the third grade. He and some pals “basically destroyed” the teacher, he once said.

For the next half-century, Mr. Jobs never let up. He chewed out subordinates and partners who failed to deliver, trashed competitors who did not measure up and told know-it-all pundits to take a hike. He had a vision of greatness that he wielded to reshape the computer, telephone and entertainment industries, and he would brook no compromise.

Maybe it is only the despair people feel about the stagnating American economy, but the announcement of the death of the Apple cofounder Wednesday seemed to mark the end of something: in an era of limits, Mr. Jobs was the last great tyrant.

Even in Silicon Valley, where corporate chieftains are frequently larger than life, and soul-enhancing technology is promised with the morning e-mail, there was no one quite like him. He used his powers to make devices that are beloved by their owners in a way that very few American products manage to achieve, especially these days.

“Amidst the oceans of enforced mediocrity in the bland, deflavorized culture of managed-by-committee corporate behemoths,” the entrepreneur Perry Metzger posted on his Google+ page, Mr. Jobs “showed that the real path to excellence was excellence — that you could do great things by, who would have imagined, being smart and having excellent taste and not ever settling for second best.”

After his death became public, there was a waterfall of emotion on Twitter and blogs. Fans gathered outside Mr. Jobs’s house in Palo Alto, Calif., and they placed candles and flowers in front of Apple stores everywhere. His house is in the center of town, easy to find and rather modest for a guy worth about $6.5 billion. He was planning another house, but even that seemed like it would be relatively restrained for a lord of Silicon Valley.

Where he was unrestrained was in his work. Stories of him forcefully telling Apple employees that a product was not good enough are legion. (“You’ve baked a really lovely cake,” he told one engineer, adding that the hapless fellow had used dog feces for frosting). Make it smaller and better, he commanded. No element of design was too minor to escape his notice. (On a Mac interface: “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”)

Mr. Jobs castigated competitors, particularly Microsoft. Bill Gates’s company, which dwarfed Apple in power and wealth during the 1980s and 1990s, was not even described as second rate; it was deemed third-rate. Worse, it was not even trying.

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” Mr. Jobs said in a typical broadside. “They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

This is not the sort of unvarnished comment you ever hear the founders of Google, say, publicly expressing about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, or vice versa. “We’re mourning Steve because we don’t have much of his passion and directness in corporate life these days,” said Jay Elliot, a former Apple executive who has written a book about learning from Mr. Jobs’s lessons in leadership. “He wasn’t driven by the stock price.”

Like many big tech companies, Apple has a formidable public relations staff, but Mr. Jobs was not constrained by this either. People knew his e-mail — “sjobs@apple.com” — and sent him queries and complaints. He often responded, if tersely. A persistent effort by a college student complaining about her inability to get information from the famously reticent P.R. staff finally elicited a testy “please leave us alone.”

Mr. Jobs’s self-confidence could sometimes be indistinguishable from arrogance and self-aggrandizement. At an Apple Halloween party during the wild early years, he reportedly came dressed as Jesus. (In a rare tribute for a lay person, Mr. Jobs’s career was celebrated Thursday on the front page of the Vatican newspaper.) But it was an arrogance tempered by faith in the power of technology to improve lives.

The satirical newspaper The Onion underscored this point nicely in its news story on Mr. Jobs’s death. The headline, modified here to replace an expletive, said: “Last American Who Knew What the Heck He Was Doing Dies.”

Funny, but it is deep in the nature of Silicon Valley to challenge such sentiments. “I don’t want to take anything away from the guy, he was brilliant and uncompromising and wonderful, but there’s a level of adulation that goes beyond what is merited,” said Tim O’Reilly, chief executive of the tech publisher O’Reilly Media. “There will be revolutions and revolutionaries to come.”

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[Dan and Judy 614]

My kid's school issued Mac laptops to all the kids.

First thing I had to do was google on my PC- How to cntl/Alt/Del on a Mac

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

just because something is fact of life, doesn't mean it's a negative standard on everyone else. I'm simply saying that most people don't have a clue on computers and that's a pretty accurate truth. You can like it or not.

Just because you don't understand the implications of what you say doesn't mean that others don't.

and you can keep closing and opening your eyes all you want, the truth doesn't go away.

You called the guy a conman, that's not truth.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Steve Jobs: Arab-American

By Shirin Sadeghi (New America Meda)

Thursday October 06, 2011 - 09:47:00 AM

Abdul Fattah Jandali, a young Syrian Muslim immigrant in Wisconsin, never met his son Steve Jobs. When a baby was born to the 23-year-old Jandali—now known as John— and his 23-year-old German-American girlfriend, Joanne Schieble, in 1955, there was no chance he'd be able to grow up with his biological parents.

Joanne, who belonged to a white, conservative Christian family could not convince her parents to marry an Arab, a Muslim, according to Jandali, who called her father "a tyrant" in a New York Post interview in August 2011. In fact, according to Jandali, she secretly went from Wisconsin to liberal San Francisco to sort out the birth and adoption without letting either him or her parents know.

And so it was that a nameless Arab American baby was adopted by an Armenian American family. Clara Hagopian and her husband Paul Jobs had been married around seven years and had not been able to conceive. The little bundle that would be Steve, was very much wanted in the Jobs household.

Steven Paul Jobs, as they named him, grew up without ever knowing his biological father. It seems he had no interest in knowing him later in life, either. When, in August 2011, the London tabloid The Sun, contacted Jandali, he publicly reached out to Steve saying, "“I live in hope that before it is too late he will reach out to me. Even to have just one coffee with him just once would make me a very happy man.”

But Steve never replied. Less than two months later, he has passed away.

Jandali says it was his "Syrian pride" that kept him from reaching out to his famous son. In a September 2011 interview with the Reno Gazette—Reno, Nevada being the city the 80-year-old Jandali lives and where, having never retired, he is the Vice President of a casino. "The Syrian pride in me does not want him ever to think I am after his fortune. I am not. I have my own money. What I don’t have is my son...and that saddens me."

One wonders what Jobs knew of his background.

His biological father was no ordinary Syrian. According to an interview he gave to the Al Hayat newspaper in February 2011, he was born in French-mandated Syria in 1931 in the town of Homs to a "self-made millionaire" father with no university education who owned "several entire villages" and a homemaker, traditional mother. He was one of five children – the only son of a family with 4 daughters.

He left Syria at 18 to study at the American University in Beirut, where he was "a pan-Arab activist", a "supporter of Arab unity and Arab independence" who organized with some of the most famous activists of his time. After university, he moved to the United States, and the rest is history, though he regrets leaving his homeland.

"If I had the chance to go back in time, I wouldn’t leave Syria or Lebanon at all. I would stay in my home country my whole life. I don’t say that out of emotion but out of common sense,” he told Al Hayat. “Of course I miss the social life and wonderful food [in Syria], but the most important thing is the outstanding cultural attributes which in general you don’t find in the West,” says the non-practicing Muslim, who nonetheless “believe in Islam in doctrine and culture.”

His nostalgia aside, millions worldwide would no doubt disagree with Jandali. Surely a Steve Jobs of Apple Computers could only have been possible in America.

The estrangement of a father and son is made even more tragic by the fact that not only did each know of the other, but they shared more than a father-son biological connection. Jandali and Schieble eventually did marry— just ten months after she gave their baby boy away to adoption, and just a few months after Joanne's father died. And they had another child—a daughter with whom Steve eventually had a relationship. Mona Jandali— now Simpson— is a world renowned author who was, in her own words, "very close" to her brother Steve once they established a relationship as adults.

According to Jandali, he had no idea until just a few years ago that the baby his then-girlfriend secretly gave birth to in San Francisco was the man the world knew as Steve Jobs. But Steve must have known for decades, through his relationship with Mona.

In the August New York Post interview, Jandali tried to let his son know that he didn’t know of Joanne’s San Francisco plans. That he was saddened when he learned of it. "I honestly do not know to this day if Steve is aware of the fact that had it been my choice, I would have loved to have kept him," he said.

And unless Jobs’s upcoming November authorized biography addresses the issue, Jandali may never know. Instead, with news of Jobs's death, Jandali has

Edited October 9, 2011 by Sofiyya