Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

stevejobsarchive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 167 posts

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#141

Post by anthk »

deafpolygon wrote: post #138
anthk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs. The indirect effects of GCC, Emacs, the FSF and GNU around Linux and servers are astounding. From Android's core to the 90% of the growth of companies on tech. And not just tech: physics, genomics... lots of them backed and helped with free software from GCC to Coreutils. At least to build and port BioPerl sucessfully. And, still, Perl's growth was close…

> What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs. I know I'm going to get downvotes for this; but I disagree. While Stallman played an important role in GNU and Libre software through his work at MIT and FSF, there were already like-minded people working towards the same thing. It's hard to say that Stallman single-handedly influenced things like that in history to that much impact, given how much imp…

Eh, GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work.

With the GNU utilities Sparc and Java wouldn't be as used as they were. Everyone and his aunt used GCC, Bash and GNU utilities. And Emacs.

Even ksh form OpenBSD got autocompletion support. Some features are nice, I guess. And I use mksh myself on Hyperbola GNU/Linux, which mostly blends GNU's openness with BSD's KISS stance. No SystemD here, not even Pulse. Sndio, the same one as OpenBSD.

On OpenBSD, I love their stance on security and correctness, and ofc I know about pledge(4) and unveil(4). that's why Hyperbola will rebase their Unix-like OS from OpenBSD (minus the blobs) with GNU addons.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#142

Post by anthk »

eloisant wrote: post #85
anthk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "stolen" in a derogative way, but OFC I knew NeXT it's from Steve. But Apple without NeXT and BSD core it would die in 2001 against XP in the desktops. 2000 already was lights ahead Mac OS 9. In scientific Unix usage, GNU/Linux already won.

Apple needed a new OS, for sure, just like Microsoft needed a new OS after their DOS-based Windows 9x branch. But there were other options than NeXT. They nearly bought Be (and BeOS) instead of NeXT and that might have worked. Also they could have built a new OS on top of BSD without NeXT, that might have worked as well. Of course by buying NeXT they also got Steve Jobs back and that's a big part of what made them su…

NT borrowed a lot form VMS, I'm sure. But Apple took NeXTStep, a Mach kernel, did a facelift on the UI, and put Carbon and a Mac OS compat layer on top.

On XP, well, MS's reaction was not as calm. They had to release Vista with tons of FX as OSX looked much better than XP. Everyone copied OSX' interface, even under GNU/Linux/BSD and Fluxbox envs.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#143

Post by pcdoodle »

leobg wrote: post #129
teleforce wrote: post #126

How wonderful is that Steve was describing ChatGPT in his speech to the T back in 1983, and the vision is being realized in not so distance future in 2023, after 40 years instead of 50 to 100 years as his prediction: "The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spir…

It does take a special person, and a special frame of mind to even sit down and ask such a question. I guess 80% of the reward is simply asking the question. Having a system that actually answers it might only be worth 20%. We’ve already seen cases here where, if a doctor had asked ChatGPT, they would’ve diagnosed the disease correctly. The problem wasn’t that the AI wasn’t good enough. The problem was that they neve…

Questions can be one of the most advanced tools we are given in life.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#144

Post by pcdoodle »

musictubes wrote: post #66

I was working at an Apple Store when Jobs died. People started to leave flowers, management put up huge sheets of paper in the windows and people wrote all sorts of heartfelt messages. What other CEO’s passing would engender that kind of sentiment? Those people didn’t just prefer Apple equipment, they loved it. Jobs tapped into something deep with his ethos and product vision. He had an uncanny knack of understanding…

This hit me in the feels. Thanks for sharing this story.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#145

Post by Terretta »

anthk wrote: post #14
mxkopy wrote: post #11

In the popular T.V. anthology American Horror Story, Steve Jobs is shown to be conversing with aliens in a UFO. I thought that was a really apt and funny depiction given how advanced Apple's tech is. Though the vision and leadership that keeps Apple on top to this day probably can't be given by extraterrestrials.

Apple tech was not advanced. Back in the day Mac OS 9 was inferior to NT and years behind Linux 2.4 in stability and security. What you know today from Apple was stolen from NeXTStep and BSD's. You are basically using a rehashed NeXT environment with the Mac GUI on top.

> Apple was stolen from NeXTStep

Who founded NeXT?

Why?

What happened to the IP?

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#146

Post by earthling8118 »

thefz wrote: post #137
musictubes wrote: post #66

I was working at an Apple Store when Jobs died. People started to leave flowers, management put up huge sheets of paper in the windows and people wrote all sorts of heartfelt messages. What other CEO’s passing would engender that kind of sentiment? Those people didn’t just prefer Apple equipment, they loved it. Jobs tapped into something deep with his ethos and product vision. He had an uncanny knack of understanding…

I mean, do we need all that for a person that sold cellphones? Are we screwed so much by capitalism at this point?

With how people here worship Steve Jobs and the iPhone, yes we're screwed. People will talk about that damn phone as if it was the savior of humanity.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#148

Post by petilon »

sublinear wrote: post #120
petilon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do Absolutely not. First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Then you have to convince them to come work for you. Top talent is not always just motivated by money alone, so how do you attract them? Then after you hire them you have to retain them, which is also hard, because you have to understand what they are building, a…

> First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Yeah that's exactly why Jobs never did that. Nobody has to "recognize top talent" to assemble it. He knew that talent likes a good challenge without being micromanaged. The talent becomes top talent when they overcome the challenges and accomplish something new and exciting. You retain them by maximizing their autonomy. That's all.

Steve Jobs did that. He hired A+ players. See here: https://talentrust.com/blog/how-steve-jobs-got-the-a-players...

You need to have a vision that top talent believes in, in order to retain them.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#149

Post by bzzzt »

anthk wrote: post #141
deafpolygon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs. I know I'm going to get downvotes for this; but I disagree. While Stallman played an important role in GNU and Libre software through his work at MIT and FSF, there were already like-minded people working towards the same thing. It's hard to say that Stallman single-handedly influenced things like that in history to that much impact, given how much imp…

Eh, GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work. With the GNU utilities Sparc and Java wouldn't be as used as they were. Everyone and his aunt used GCC, Bash and GNU utilities. And Emacs. Even ksh form OpenBSD got autocompletion support. Some features are nice, I guess. And I use mksh myself on Hyperbola GNU/Linux, which mostly blends GNU's openness with BSD's KISS stance. No System…

> GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work.

Being more convenient doesn't quals changing the world... While Sun was hugely influential in the early days of the internet it's place could have been taken by a lot of other *nix vendors.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#150

Post by anthk »

bzzzt wrote: post #149
anthk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work. With the GNU utilities Sparc and Java wouldn't be as used as they were. Everyone and his aunt used GCC, Bash and GNU utilities. And Emacs. Even ksh form OpenBSD got autocompletion support. Some features are nice, I guess. And I use mksh myself on Hyperbola GNU/Linux, which mostly blends GNU's openness with BSD's KISS stance. No System…

> GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work. Being more convenient doesn't quals changing the world... While Sun was hugely influential in the early days of the internet it's place could have been taken by a lot of other *nix vendors.

If you think GCC and coreutils didn't change the world and shaped the commercial Unixen themselves, think twice.
Post reply on HN