Steve Jobs RIP 1955-2011

This is no time for your obtuse Twitter meta-jokes, can't you see people are grieving here

They should really consider putting a product back on the front page

I mean I know the world's still crying in unison but

ha

i liked kraftwerk's minimalist tribute on twitter: 'Danke, Steve Jobs'

straight, to the point, not a word out of place

ralf probably posted it from his iphone

http://www.residents.com/home/

Steve Jobs

I wasn't going to say anything. After all so many people are covering his accomplishments. But I thought it would be important to note how Steve Jobs has helped change and create The Residents.

Apple computers had a perspective that regular people should be able to do remarkable things that they would not normally be able to do if assisted by computers. Technicians should not be the exclusive controllers of that world.

The Residents have always been masters of using technology on a human scale. Ralph Records in the late '70's ran on an old Apple II. The software used was custom written by Cryptic. That system meant that Ralph could operate cheaper and cheaper meant it could exist on smaller margins.

Macintosh arrived in 1984 and went to work immediately creating graphics. Album covers from 1984's George & James to 2011's Coochie Brake have been done on Macintosh computers.

Cryptic and Ralph launched a bulletin board on-line system (BBS) on an Apple II in 1984 named Big Brother. It is the Big Brother which this site honors as our first venture into on-line interactivity. You can read more about Big Brother in The Last Word.

The Residents ran MIDI live on an old Apple II at the Snakey Wake in 1988. The following year they toured CUBE E carrying their entire studio which centered around a Mac II, the most powerful personal computer that existed at the time.

When Apple invented Quicktime, the wiz kids that actually did it were Residents fans. The original logo which was a big "Q" had a top hat to reference The Residents and the videos used to demo the software were the One-Minute Movies from The Commercial Album.

I was one of the people who appeared in the Apple "Think Different" campaign.

There is no way I can cover all the ways Apple and Steve Jobs impacted The Residents. I do think it fitting to conclude with the fact that Chuck on the Talking Light tour was controlling a Mac Air computer with an iPad that was running wirelessly on a local network utilizing an Airport, all Apple products, to make the statement that The Residents appreciation of the technology of Steve Jobs' company has never faltered.

Cryptic and The Residents join the long list of people who are saddened by the lose of Steve Jobs.

- Hardy Fox, The Cryptic Corporation

Ralph Records in the late '70's ran on an old Apple II. The software used was custom written by Cryptic

oh man this is totally pushing all of my nerd buttons

that is awesome

ok time for me to hit the sack

loving this cover of French daily Liberation:

http://journal.liberation.fr/api/libe/v2/paperpage/172124/?size=x500&format=jpg

Can already hear the lawyers rushing to translate various letters into French over that.

my brother did a "liveblog" (?) for the telegraph. thought he did a good job of collecting some of the less retweeted stuff, including some british interest things. quite a lot of this was new to me.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/steve-jobs/8809997/Steve-Jobs-dies-live-blog.html

http://artoftrolling.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/chatroulette-trolling-isee-what-you-did-there.jpg

There is some weird stuff out there on the interwebs

ha

http://chzmemebase.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/internet-memes-apple-does-not-support-flash.jpg

What that Hardy Fox says to me is that all the good stuff the Residents did had nothing to do with Apple.

Acting like life is a big commercial...

Okay, so there is this Japanese restaurant that I used to frequent often in the late 00s and Jobs would often be there (but not Woz lol).

Rumor had it he was quite tight with the owners, possibly helping bankroll the place when it opened.

They announced they were closing about 2 weeks ago.

5by5: http://5by5.tv/specials/2

"Steve Jobs was certainly not a singular man. He was not an—he was an island that touched so many people."—Sarah Palin in an interview with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren, Oct. 5, 2011.

our future President

he was an island that touched so many people

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/lost_smoke_monster_post.jpg

lol

hahahahaaaa

+1

i mean maybe if steve jobs actually invented a bunch of shit instead of just marketing it to people

― funk master friendly (moonship journey to baja), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 11:37 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html

I got into that debate on another thread about Jeff Bezos. With Steve Jobs, there are stories going back to the early Macintosh days where he worked day-to-day with teams that were developing products and prodded them into different decisions and guided development. There's also always been a strong sense that Ive is his designer, Cook was his supply chain man, and so on. I never got the impression that the last decade of Apple was a system where you could rise just by doing well -- you had to do things the Jobs way.

This is maybe more for the other thread, but

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.” -- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html?_r=1

That article starts with a claim that Steve Jobs hated nostalgia. GUESS THE REPORTER HASN'T USED iCal OR Contacts LATELY!

there was a Q&A from when jobs just came back to apple where all the fans are asking, "when's apple gonna make a flying car", stuff like that, and the response is there are already plenty of technologies in the workstation world already that they know how to do, that can drastically improve computing experience for regular people if it were brought to them in the right way, that that's what apple should do, and in fact, that's what apple has done since the beginning, and he's right. there is already an abundance of innovation; what's lacking is a will to bring it to the masses in any half-decent way.

Like making a pizza isn't theoretically very difficult but when a great pizza place opens up near you, of course you get excited.

100% not trying to open up a huge can of worms, but did I at some point miss some story that directly linked Jobs to the suicides in these factories? I mean, obvs the chain ultimately runs up to him, but it feels so weird that people are like personally blaming him for the deaths. I mean when Wal-Mart does something terrible the accustations are usually "Wal-Mart is a terrible company" not like strugging to hold the Walton kids directly responsible. If that makes sense. I mean, I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but I'm struck by the ire at Jobs directly. There's quite a few people below him that could have probably been more involved with preventing the suicides and improving worker conditions/pay/etc.

steve jobs did in fact push every single one of those workers off the ledge

100% not trying to open up a huge can of worms, but did I at some point miss some story that directly linked Jobs to the suicides in these factories?

people at the top are there to be blamed. this is their job. applies to the President, CEOs, generals, etc.

because if Steve Jobs had said "Apple is not going to tolerate substandard and cruel working conditions" you can bet your ass the company would have ensured that his directives were obeyed.

"buck stops here" etc

to be fair, apple has substandard and cruel working conditions for its stateside workers, too (allowing for the differential between tech workers in US & China)

Right, I'm not necc. disagreeing with that, but I don't feel like I've seen this stuff singled out a specific head of many other multinational corps with horrible records of the way their overseas workers are treated. Is it because Jobs is a more visible head?

it's more at discord with apple's image as an environmentally friendly, left leaning company

people totally went after Phil Knight

but dayo OTM that's a big part of it too, the disconnect between marketing image + reality

Late RiP for Steve. Agree that some of his business practices (and areas of his personal life) were far from sterling, but I have to respect his innovation. How many people are famous primarily for being intelligent in this day and age?

Per capita the number of suicides is high, but the living/working conditions are not unlike a college dorm, the deceased were mostly around 20, and the suicide rate tends to be naturally higher in those situations. Publicizing a suicide also has a proven copycat influence, and word would spread quickly in the area given the fact they jumped off a building.

Blaming Apple, when not only are there other companies manufacturing at foxconn and the very circumstances would lead to an increased suicide rate, seems a little overblown.

there's more of a narrative hook to other people suffering for your luxury good than other people suffering for your cheap good, because in the case of say a cheap bicycle, sure maybe it was made by a kid under candle light, but the brakes are really bad and you could die, too, so there's a kind of parity in suffering. also there's an expectation that some of the premium for buying a luxury good goes towards making sure everyone in the chain gets treated properly, so people are cheated out of the guilt-free premium.

like if you paid 30c more for fair trade banana and it turned out there's still body parts being severed haphazardly, you'd be mad!

Actually, the suicide rate on college campuses is, on average, four times that of Foxconn employees that year.

Yeah, and have you seen how popular Apple devices are on college campuses? Coincidence? I don't think so.

It's also that Jobs's schtick was "I can change the world" -- he took on the music and movie industries and bent them to his will because he wanted them to work differently. When you do stuff like that, "it's just the industry, we can't change this, but at least we're the best of a bad bunch" isn't really good enough.

Like making a pizza isn't theoretically very difficult but when a great pizza place opens up near you, of course you get excited.
Hah, superb!

Apple has a fairly comprehensive recycling program that probably doesn't involve children in southeast asia scraping capacitors off of motherboards into a bucket, but I might be wrong. That's a hell of a change.

also FYI music industry isn't really "working" very well btw

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I think a lot of it was overblown bullshit, but there's still something ~off~ about iPads being made in a factory by workers who never even get to *turn one on*. Compare w/Ford, who arranged higher salaries for his staff so they could afford to buy cars.

If Jobs had demanded Foxconn workers be paid enough that they could in theory afford an iPad, would it really have taken all of this $74bn surplus they're sitting on? I don't think so.

xp

I mean, I am all about talking about the shortcomings of individuals and companies, but creating issues or doubt to root around for a reason to be skeptical is kind of a bad look.

If Foxconn workers were paid enough to afford an iPad, then you're going to have to pay them enough to have all the things they'd rather have BEFORE an iPad and that's going to cost more than $74bn because you'd be basically building a whole new infrastructure for their lives.

No, that's paying them enough to have the disposable income to buy an iPad, which is a different thing. Ford didn't pay his guys so much that buying a car was a no-brainer: it'd still be stretch, something that needed saved up for etc. But a car wasn't this laughably impossible dream for them, either.

You're assuming they know how to use a computer or have internet access.