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From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

blog.hayman.net

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Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#121

Post by 3pt14159 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #118
pkaye wrote: post #108

What if a new employee was named Steve Teve?

Heh. I have a somewhat related story. In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing. USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case. Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This i…

Hahahaha. I wish HN allowed the use of the joy emoji in response for these types of posts.

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#122

Post by [deleted] »

ubermonkey wrote: post #118
pkaye wrote: post #108

What if a new employee was named Steve Teve?

Heh. I have a somewhat related story. In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing. USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case. Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This i…

[deleted]

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#123

Post by sailfast »

mattl wrote: post #8

Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT. His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw

Oh my god what a gem: “it’s got a steep learning curve which is good because that means you learn a lot in a short period of time” hahaha

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#124

Post by GuB-42 »

daseiner1 wrote: post #101
vkou wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

you and i certainly have very different ideas of what an "awful" human being looks like and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price o…

For the insulin thing, maybe you are thinking of Martin Shkreli. What he did got him in prison more than he got him rich.

For the pollution thing, the truth is that many of those who got rich polluting the rivers and such actually produced lots of innovation. Plastics fit your description, and I think few things have been more of a paradigm shift than plastics.

I get you with the ads business, but Google made a revolutionary search engine, Amazon disrupted e-commerce. I have a hard time defending Facebook/Meta but they have their fair share of innovation.

Almost all "very good businessman who made a lot of money" actually made great things, that's how you make a lot of money doing business. Though usually, there is a dark side, and Steve Jobs is no exception. You can also make a lot of money just being an asshole, think crime lords, or Martin Shkreli, but it often doesn't end well.

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#125

Post by malcolmgreaves »

daseiner1 wrote: post #101
vkou wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

you and i certainly have very different ideas of what an "awful" human being looks like and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price o…

[flagged]

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#126

Post by lutusp »

My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976:

"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"

"No, I'm Steve Jobs."

"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"

I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.

Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.

I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.

Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.

First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#127

Post by layer8 »

tuyiown wrote: post #83
williamdclt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to root@hpe.com?

(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge) cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file. When email got interconnected more…

If you ever come across a ~/dead.letter file, that's one way it can be misconfigured. ;)

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#129

Post by vkou »

ab5tract wrote: post #100
vkou wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think he was all of those things, but also could be the opposite of those things, too. Humans are complex and when you already changed the course of history by 25 or whatever, you are going to be even more complex. I don’t idolize Steve Jobs but I do find him to contrast positively against other similar figures like Gates and Ellison. Low bars, I know. But I guess I wanted to defend that people can have a soft spot…

People are complex, with good and bad areas, which is precisely what makes cults of personality problematic. And the discourse around some people (Jobs in particular) is waaaay more cultish than is healthy.

And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it.

'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.

Re: From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."

#130

Post by agentjj »

lutusp wrote: post #126

My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976: "Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?" "No, I'm Steve Jobs." "Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?" I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was. Ironic…

So the mythical Apple car project actually goes way back :)
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