Steve Jobs Ponders His Legacy In Never-Before-Seen 1994 Video

Post by jad » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 4:16 AM UTC

hello_newman wrote: post #4

Steve Jobs had such a way with words. I personally love this quote: "This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete." I loved the metaphor: "It's sort of like a sentiment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much h…

Post by acqq » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 5:33 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #56

hawkharris wrote: post #55

Steve Jobs' sedimentary rock analogy might deflate the egos of some developers. We work so hard on developing innovative hardware and software that will be relevant in the future. On top of that there's a lot of hyped-up business rhetoric about disrupting whole industries and changing the world with our products. Yet, even when we do manage to shake things up, what Jobs said is true: Our innovations will get buried u…

Just last night on IRC I was commenting on the stinkeye I received at a company once when I suggested their tagging functionality mimic Stack Overflow's. Even though their product was a multiuser version of something that had existed at 1:1 scale for a decade, never did I hear it described in terms of what already existed. Based on more than this one example, I am convinced that there is a beautiful-farts narcissism…

Post by rdouble » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 6:29 AM UTC

Someone wrote: post #74

Nice metaphor, but is it right? I don't think mountains ever get built by laying down layers of sediment. Sand castles, maybe, but mountains? Those need earth quakes, or at least plate tectonics. In some sense, Jobs was an earth mover who could shake up the earth and make what previously was a sandplain into maybe not a mountain but at least a hill.

Post by doctorstupid » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 7:40 AM UTC

jdpage wrote: post #61

dman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Ritchie and McCarthy deserve a special place in computing heaven.

Okay, I appreciate that Ritchie was a genius and that C was revolutionary and is foundational to modern computing. But seriously, C arrays not having bounds checks has probably caused more security disasters than anything else in the history of computing, with the possible exception of end-users. Was there a good reason for this, and if so, what was it?

Post by yuhong » Thu, Jun 20, 2013, 9:45 AM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #63

jdpage wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I appreciate that Ritchie was a genius and that C was revolutionary and is foundational to modern computing. But seriously, C arrays not having bounds checks has probably caused more security disasters than anything else in the history of computing, with the possible exception of end-users. Was there a good reason for this, and if so, what was it?

C was introduced in 1972, that's a year before I was born (and it had been in development for a couple years prior). The first computer I programmed on ran at 1 mhz and had 64 kilobytes of RAM. Is it really so hard to see why C didn't historically have bounds checking? Bounds checking was pretty controversial in languages even as late as the early 2000s because of the runtime cost.