Women of the Future, 1902
Generals, marines, lawyers, coach drivers, politicians, and even artists! These were “Les Femmes de l’Avenir,” or “Women of the Future,” as imagined in a series of 20 postcards from the turn of the last century. Above is the wasp-waisted, tattooed General; below, the smartly-dressed, attentive Journalist with a post-modern duck on her hat. Despite some of these being a proto-version the whole “Sexy (fill-in-the-blank)” thing, which can be problematic, there is a sweetness and feeling of empowerment to these that modern costume equivalents (i.e. today’s “sexy general“) often lack.
See all 20 original postcards here. [via Darla Teagarden]
Post tags: Grrrl, Vive la France, Ye Olde
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Oct 7, 2011 (22 hours ago)
Steve Jobs' Forgotten Life-Saving Legacy (AAPL)
Steve Jobs, who died too young at 56 years old yesterday, was best known for imagining a better future and then organizing others to help him make that future happen.
Usually Jobs reserved this talent for gadgets and media.
But in 2009 and 2010, Jobs quietly put this skill toward saving lives.
In October 2010, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill that made California the first state in the nation to create a live donor registry for kidney transplants. The bill also required California drivers to decide whether they want to be organ donors when they renew their driver licenses. According to one supporter, this second measure alone should double the number of organ transplants available in California.
Neither of these life-saving changes to California law would ever have happened without the help of Jobs.
In December 2008, Jobs shocked the media and worried friends by announcing that he would not deliver Apple's keynote at the upcoming 2009 Macworld Convention. Two weeks into the new year, the company and the CEO announced he would be taking a leave of absence in order to deal with a "hormone imbalance."
Here's what was really happening: Steve Jobs' liver was failing and he was learning that he needed to replace it or else he would die.
Around this time, Jobs began looking for a new liver. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one doing so in California. In fact, over 3,400 Californians were waiting for a new liver in 2009. Only 671 got one. 400 died.
What Jobs probably did next was what most wealthy Americans with failing livers do in the same situation: travel around the U.S. and pay big fees to be examined by various doctors at various hospitals in order to get on as many waiting lists as possible.
This process is called multiple-listing. It's very time-consuming and expensive. One of the hospitals where Steve got listed required an interview with a doctor, an interview with a a social worker, and a complete and very invasive medical examination.
By early to mid-March: a miracle. One of the hospitals at which Steve had gotten listed reached him to say that they had a liver and that he was the best candidate to receive it via transplant. It was Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
By December 2009 – and for what we now know was an all-too-brief interim – Steve Jobs' life seemed to all the world much like it was before he got sick.
The news and rumors about Apple were once more all about its latest gadgets and not the CEO's health.
But something about his whole experience still bothered Jobs.
As he would later explain in his own words, Jobs was alarmed that while he, a very wealthy man, was able to survive his liver's failure, others were not so lucky. He knew that in California alone, 400 people died hoping that same year.
And so, in a departure from a largely apolitical career, Jobs decided to do something about it.
At a dinner in December 2009, Jobs sat next to Maria Shriver who was then married to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Steve told her the whole story of his liver transplant. He complained that California doesn't do enough to encourage people to become organ donors. He told Shriver that she should get her husband to do something about it — that California should require people who want driver licenses to say whether or not they want to be organ donors (previously, they'd only had the option of saying they wanted to be donors).
The First Lady talked to her husband. Then the governor called Jobs. Suddenly, a cause that couldn't find its way into a bill for two or more years was set to become State Senate Bill 1395.
Eventually Jobs and the governor planned to announce the bill at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.
After an introduction from the hospital's president and a short speech from the governor, Jobs stood at the podium.
He said:
Last year I received a liver transplant. I was very fortunate, because many others died waiting to receive one. Last year in California there were 671 liver transplants, but last year there were also over 3,400 people waiting for a liver and over 400 of them died waiting in California.
I was almost one of the ones that died waiting for a liver in California last year. I was receiving great care here at Stanford but there were simply not enough livers in California to go around and my doctors here advised me to enroll in a transplant program in Memphis, Tennessee, where the supply/demand ratio of livers is more favorable than it is in California here. And I was lucky enough to get a liver in time. As a matter of fact, this coming week is my one-year anniversary.
So why aren't there more organs available in California? Because in California, like most other states in the nation, you must specifically request to become an organ donor at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you're there to get or renew your driver's license. No one asks you if you want to become a donor. And there's no marketing campaign to make you aware of this opportunity, either, so unless you know about it and unless you specifically ask, nobody is going to ask you, nobody is going to give you this opportunity. And yet even with this obscure procedure over 20 percent of Californians have signed up to be organ donors, which is fantastic. But imagine what it could be if everyone knew of this opportunity.
And that's what the Governor's bill will do. It will simply require the DMV to ask you if you'd like to become an organ donor. That's it. Asking this one simple question may double the number of transplant organs available in California — one simple question. And that's a very high return on investment, especially for the over 20,000 Californians currently waiting for an organ transplant.
On the day of the announcement at the hospital, Jobs and Schwarzenegger took a tour of the facility.A hospital staffer recalls someone from Apple suggesting a very short tour. But Jobs wouldn't have it.
In fact, at the end of the tour, while everyone else — the Governor's people, Apple's people, and the hospital staff — waited outside the recovery room for the children who had just received organ transplants, Jobs lingered alone with the children.
"Steve was still in there talking to kids," says this staffer. "Steve stayed in there for a while, really enjoying himself."
Editor's note: We've told a version of this story before. We wanted to tell it again today.
Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:
- The Best Steve Jobs Moments From "The Pirates Of Silicon Valley" [UPDATED]
- Steve Jobs Was Always Kind To Me (Or, Regrets of An A--hole)
- Luminaries Respond To Steve Jobs' Death
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Oct 7, 2011 (16 hours ago)
Google Cloud SQL: your database in the cloud
By Navneet Joneja, Product Manager for Google Cloud SQL
Cross-posted from the Google App Engine Blog
One of App Engine’s most requested features has been a simple way to develop traditional database-driven applications. In response to your feedback, we’re happy to announce the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL.
You can now choose to power your App Engine applications with a familiar relational database in a fully-managed cloud environment. This allows you to focus on developing your applications and services, free from the chores of managing, maintaining and administering relational databases.
Google Cloud SQL brings many benefits to the App Engine community:
- No maintenance or administration - we manage the database for you.
- High reliability and availability - your data is replicated synchronously to multiple data centers. Machine, rack and data center failures are handled automatically to minimize end-user impact.
- Familiar MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) andDB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications).
- Comprehensive user interface for administering databases.
- Simple and powerful integration with Google App Engine.
Cloud SQL is available free of charge for now, and we will publish pricing at least 30 days before charging for it. The service will continue to evolve as we work out the kinks during the preview, but let us know if you’d like to take it for a spin.
Navneet Joneja loves being at the forefront of the next generation of simple and reliable software infrastructure, the foundation on which next-generation technology is being built. When not working, he can usually be found dreaming up new ways to entertain his intensely curious one-year-old.
Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor
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Oct 6, 2011 (2 days ago)
Samsung Galaxy Nexus full specs revealed; Verizon Wireless exclusive
Well, now that Apple has announced the iPhone 4S, there’s only one other flagship on the horizon that people are eagerly anticipating and that’s the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Codenamed “Nexus Prime,” the Galaxy Nexus is a phone we have scooped on numerous occasions, and now we can paint a complete picture of the device thanks to new information from a trusted source. Here’s what Samsung and Google will unveil next Tuesday:
- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
- 9mm thin
- 4.65-inch 1280 x 720-pixel Super AMOLED HD with curved glass
- TI OMAP 4460 dual-core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.2GHz
- 1GB of RAM
- 32GB of built-in storage
- 5-megapixel camera on the back, 1.3-megapixel in the front
- 1080p HD video capture support
- LTE/HSPA depending on carrier
- Wi-Fi a/b/g/n
- NFC
- 1,750 mAh battery
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Oct 7, 2011 (yesterday)
Sweet Stitching with Erin: Cross-Stitch iPhone Cases
I freely admit to being one of those people who standson the street corner with my iPhone, checking emails, looking for the closest Chinese restaurant, and calling my mom... all at the same time. But as a crafter and general lover of all things homey and handmade, I’ve longed to somehow make this sleek plastic piece of technology fit into my aesthetic worldview a little better.Add star
Oct 5, 2011 (3 days ago)
Snookums Cat Food
Loving this super cool cat food packaging:
Snookums is a cat food for cats with chutzpah; cats that are rough, tough and have had enough of your negligent and embarrassing, human behavior.
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Oct 6, 2011 (2 days ago)
Echo Chamber: Jeff Tweedy
Photo by Loren Wohl
"'Look at this beautiful kitten.' 'Fuck you, that kitten's a socialist.' 'You're a fag.' Basically, that's the crux of all Internet discussion."
-- Wilco's Jeff Tweedy pretty much sums it all up. (via Magnet)
"'Look at this beautiful kitten.' 'Fuck you, that kitten's a socialist.' 'You're a fag.' Basically, that's the crux of all Internet discussion."
-- Wilco's Jeff Tweedy pretty much sums it all up. (via Magnet)
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Oct 6, 2011 (2 days ago)
The Steve Jobs I Knew
That Steve Jobs was a genius, a giant influence on multiple industries and billions of lives, has been written many times since he retired as Apple’s CEO in August. He was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or a Henry Ford, and set the mold for many other corporate leaders in many other industries.He did what a CEO should: Hired and inspired great people; managed for the long term, not the quarter or the short-term stock price; made big bets and took big risks. He insisted on the highest product quality and on building things to delight and empower actual users, not intermediaries like corporate IT directors or wireless carriers. And he could sell. Man, he could sell.
As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it, because I spent hours in conversation with him, over the 14 years he ran Apple. Since I am a product reviewer, and not a news reporter charged with covering the company’s business, he felt a bit more comfortable talking to me about things he might not have said to most other journalists.
Even in his death, I won’t violate the privacy of those conversations. But here are a few stories that illustrate the man as I knew him.
The Phone Calls
I never knew Steve when he was first at Apple. I wasn’t covering technology then. And I only met him once, briefly, between his stints at the company. But, within days of his return, in 1997, he began calling my house, on Sunday nights, for four or five straight weekends. As a veteran reporter, I understood that part of this was an attempt to flatter me, to get me on the side of a teetering company whose products I had once recommended, but had, more recently, advised readers to avoid.Yet there was more to the calls than that. They turned into marathon, 90-minute, wide-ranging, off-the-record discussions that revealed to me the stunning breadth of the man. One minute he’d be talking about sweeping ideas for the digital revolution. The next about why Apple’s current products were awful, and how a color, or angle, or curve, or icon was embarrassing.
After the second such call, my wife became annoyed at the intrusion he was making in our weekend. I didn’t.
Later, he’d sometimes call to complain about some reviews, or parts of reviews — though, in truth, I felt very comfortable recommending most of his products for the average, non-techie consumers at whom I aim my columns. (That may have been because they were his target, too.) I knew he would be complaining because he’d start every call by saying “Hi, Walt. I’m not calling to complain about today’s column, but I have some comments, if that’s okay.” I usually disagreed with his comments, but that was okay, too.
The Product Unveilings
Sometimes, not always, he’d invite me in to see certain big products before he unveiled them to the world. He may have done the same with other journalists. We’d meet in a giant boardroom, with just a few of his aides present, and he’d insist — even in private — on covering the new gadgets with cloths and then uncovering them like the showman he was, a gleam in his eye and passion in his voice. We’d then often sit down for a long, long discussion of the present, the future, and general industry gossip.I still remember the day he showed me the first iPod. I was amazed that a computer company would branch off into music players, but he explained, without giving any specifics away, that he saw Apple as a digital products company, not a computer company. It was the same with the iPhone, the iTunes music store, and later the iPad, which he asked me to his home to see, because he was too ill at the time to go to the office.
The Slides
To my knowledge, the only tech conference Steve Jobs regularly appeared at, the only event he didn’t somehow control, was our D: All Things Digital conference, where he appeared repeatedly for unrehearsed, onstage interviews. We had one rule that really bothered him: We never allowed slides, which were his main presentation tool.One year, about an hour before his appearance, I was informed that he was backstage preparing dozens of slides, even though I had reminded him a week earlier of the no-slides policy. I asked two of his top aides to tell him he couldn’t use the slides, but they each said they couldn’t do it, that I had to. So, I went backstage and told him the slides were out. Famously prickly, he could have stormed out, refused to go on. And he did try to argue with me. But, when I insisted, he just said “Okay.” And he went on stage without them, and was, as usual, the audience’s favorite speaker.
Ice Water in Hell
For our fifth D conference, both Steve and his longtime rival, the brilliant Bill Gates, surprisingly agreed to a joint appearance, their first extended onstage joint interview ever. But it almost got derailed.Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple’s iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs.
He quipped: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell.” When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged, because my partner Kara Swisher and I had assured both men that we hoped to keep the joint session on a high plane.
In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs: “So I guess I’m the representative from Hell.” Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water he was carrying. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph, with both men acting like statesmen. When it was over, the audience rose in a standing ovation, some of them in tears.
The Optimist
I have no way of knowing how Steve talked to his team during Apple’s darkest days in 1997 and 1998, when the company was on the brink and he was forced to turn to archrival Microsoft for a rescue. He certainly had a nasty, mercurial side to him, and I expect that, then and later, it emerged inside the company and in dealings with partners and vendors, who tell believable stories about how hard he was to deal with.But I can honestly say that, in my many conversations with him, the dominant tone he struck was optimism and certainty, both for Apple and for the digital revolution as a whole. Even when he was telling me about his struggles to get the music industry to let him sell digital songs, or griping about competitors, at least in my presence, his tone was always marked by patience and a long-term view. This may have been for my benefit, knowing that I was a journalist, but it was striking nonetheless.
At times in our conversations, when I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he’d surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.
This quality was on display when Apple opened its first retail store. It happened to be in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, near my home. He conducted a press tour for journalists, as proud of the store as a father is of his first child. I commented that, surely, there’d only be a few stores, and asked what Apple knew about retailing.
He looked at me like I was crazy, said there’d be many, many stores, and that the company had spent a year tweaking the layout of the stores, using a mockup at a secret location. I teased him by asking if he, personally, despite his hard duties as CEO, had approved tiny details like the translucency of the glass and the color of the wood.
He said he had, of course.
The Walk
After his liver transplant, while he was recuperating at home in Palo Alto, California, Steve invited me over to catch up on industry events that had transpired during his illness. It turned into a three-hour visit, punctuated by a walk to a nearby park that he insisted we take, despite my nervousness about his frail condition.He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless Reporter Lets Steve Jobs Die on the Sidewalk.”
But he laughed, and refused, and, after a pause, kept heading for the park. We sat on a bench there, talking about life, our families, and our respective illnesses (I had had a heart attack some years earlier). He lectured me about staying healthy. And then we walked back.
Steve Jobs didn’t die that day, to my everlasting relief. But now he really is gone, much too young, and it is the world’s loss.
Editors Note: Here is a video of Walt talking about that walk with Jobs:
[ See post to watch video ]
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Oct 7, 2011 (17 hours ago)
National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily Recap 10-05-11
Here are the 23 reports of police misconduct tracked in our National Police Misconduct News Feed for this Wednesday, October 5, 2011:
- A number of videos came out stemming from a single incident at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City NY today, all showing a higher-ranking officer in a white shirt, alleged to be an officer Connolly according to the Gothamist, beating a large number of people with a baton… Popout Among those people being beaten and peppersprayed was a credentialed journalist that offered this first-hand perspective of getting hit: Popout …as well as a local Fox affiliate news reporter and his cameraman: Many are asking, in light of these videos and videos from last week showing white shirted officers as primary aggressors, why are the high ranking officers appearing more aggressive than the rank and file officers? Generally speaking, departments that have problems disciplining their officers for excessive force still have to do something to get cops that show a pattern of brutality off the street or else they risk more civil litigation or a pattern/practice investigation by the feds. So, instead of firing cops, they promote them off of the street to supervisory roles… which could be one explanation for the white shirts being more aggressive here. If you don’t believe that explanation consider the next report…
- A New York NY cop was arrested by the FBI for “repeatedly using his position to intimidate others, including beat downs and violence” as well as using police databases to get info on a man in a parking dispute, to tip off his cousin to a federal investigation, and for pepperspraying & illegally detaining man at bar owned by his cousin. He was finally suspended though… only after the arrest. [3]http://t.co/eqhgCnlM
- Popout
- Furthermore, another New York NY cop was caught on video bragging that his nightstick was going to get a workout at the #OccupyWallStreet protests tonight. So far, thankfully, it doesn’t appear as though his did at least. [3] http://t.co/TDpXX9y6
- New York NY police are being sued by #OccupyWallStreet protesters claiming the previous Brooklyn Bridge mass arrest was a civil rights violation because most of the protesters and journalists caught up in the kettling action on the bridge couldn’t hear any warnings about impending arrests. [0]http://t.co/h1AWhMaM
- New Orleans LA cop was sentenced to 8 years prison in his plea deal over his role in the Danziger Bridge shooting & subsequent cover up. [0] http://t.co/vxnaSFz2
- Popout
- New Brunswick NJ police are being accused of vandalism & false arrests against people protesting a questionable fatal officer-involved shooting incident. One person arrested was showing others what he claimed was evidence cops were tearing down their posters, even cutting a hole in a screen window to remove one that was posted inside a home when police came en mass and arrested him and at least one other person for no apparent reason. [4] http://t.co/9XxTBvN0
- Popout
- Portage IN settles suit for a confidential sum to a woman who was beaten by cop in high-profile 2007 videotaped incident where he slammed a woman’s head into a car then threw her to the ground. (sorry about the badly edited video with political commentary, the case is so old I had a hard time finding unedited video that could be embedded) [3] http://t.co/QCl3rr8K
- Gardner MA cop already charged with indecent assault of a child under the age of 14 has now been charged with indecent assault & battery of his female roommate as well. [0] http://t.co/XhZgmlPU
- Eastchester NY cop found guilty of manslaughter for fatally shooting a man in the throat while the officer was playing with one of his guns. [0] http://t.co/PB9eoH2r
- Cherokee Co SC deputy arrested for allegedly having sex with confidential informant, he resigned after the allegation surfaced in 2009. [0] http://t.co/thE3dW8q
- Plaquemines Parish LA sheriff resigns after arrested on federal mail fraud & bribery charges along with a local businessman in an ongoing federal investigation. [1] http://t.co/BPaPv0Y0
- Bandera Co TX deputy was caught up in an FBI gang and drug sweep for his alleged ties to a gang & for alleged drug distribution [0] http://t.co/VhemLuMA
- Caruthersville MO police chief & one of his officers arrested on 24 & 11 counts of forgery respectively, though no details on what the forgery entailed yet. [1] http://t.co/7q6a20kl
- Seattle WA police are being sued by a computer security expert alleging he was falsely arrested and that the department committed spoilation of video evidence when he was told there was no video of the arrest when he sought evidence to prove his case. [4] http://t.co/3sTh2Ons
- Harris County TX deputy sued by woman claiming she was falsely arrested because the deputy didn’t like her attitude and that she was then forced to listen to the Rush Limbaugh show in the deputy’s cruiser. [3]http://t.co/a86wyKrS
- Minneapolis MN cop accused of harassing & illegally accessing a now-former St Paul MN police officer’s driving records. [1] http://t.co/avXj1xzb
- Milwaukee WI settles suit for $6,500 to man claiming cops refused to return his gun after an illegal search of his car and home and subsequent false charges against him that were dismissed later. [0]http://t.co/tO81Y8JS
- Portage IN settles tort claim for $30k involving unspecified misconduct allegations over a DUI arrest. [3]http://t.co/QCl3rr8K
- Baltimore Co MD cop arrested on 1st degree assault charges involving an alleged domestic incident with his ex-girlfriend. [0] http://t.co/3BzXbGK3
- Fullerton CA police formally apologize for a wrong door drug raid that narcotics officers failed to report. [0]http://t.co/7yQO04TJ
- Middle Twp NJ cop suspended w/o pay after indicted on theft by deception involving over $4k in unemployment funds [0] http://t.co/v1jyxYW5
- 3 Houston TX cops under investigation for allegedly eating man’s pot brownies may have also stolen 3.5lbs of pot and then chatted about that over their police computers as well as discussing how the pot brownies gave them the munchies. [0] http://t.co/UqGperre
- 3 Los Angeles CA police detectives win $2.5mil judgment against dept for gender discrimination & retaliation. [0] http://t.co/pv6gsPui
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Oct 5, 2011 (3 days ago)
Caught
The following is one of two stories we gathered during the Pitch a WTF panel at Penguicon. As I'm sure you'll come to understand, the submitter wanted both them and their company to remain anonymous. Thank you to everyone who came out and inflicted their horrors in person.
Amalie M. heard a loud clanking sound coming from the back of the factory, near the ovens, where there ought not be any clanking whatsoever. Curious, and a bit worried, she grabbed a hard-hat and headed onto the floor.
"Scheduled maintenance of the equipment," she said, stating the obvious. Her company provided all the robots and machine vision equipment for their client's automobile engine factory. "Same as every month."
"You usually come on the fifteenth," he retorted.
"It is the fifteenth."
"Oh. Damn." he said, looking lost, shaking his head. "Working here alone, just me and the robots-- I lose track of the days."
"Yeah, so I bet you're wondering what that is. The furnace-to-finisher conveyor belt broke down a couple weeks ago."
A broken conveyor belt? That literally didn't sound right. "Why didn't you call for a service visit?"
He huffed. "I'm perfectly capable of fixing my own problems without racking up your billable hours."
"You aren't certified to work on the equipment," she said, her ears still ringing, "It sounds like you made it a whole lot worse!"
He took a step towards her. "I learned your system well enough. I used to build robots you know. And now--" his shoulders slumped, "-- now I just pick up after them. Give an old man a break, will you? I spend all my day forklifting pallets onto transport trucks. I just wanted to do something useful."
Amalie sighed. "Fine. I appreciate your effort, but whatever you've done, I'm probably going to have to undo and fix to spec."
The operator nodded. "Of course, of course. You don't have to worry about it. I'll even take it all offline for you. Why don't you get a coffee across the street while I do that?" He stepped forward, shooing her towards the door.
She spun around the operator and dashed up the steps, ignoring the calls for her to stop. She could see the entire factory floor from the catwalk. She spotted the broken conveyor belt right away-- the last belt in the line, between the blast furnace and the pallet stacker. The conveyor belt had buckled, and the motors were exposed. She could see plenty wrong with it-- but what worried her the most was that she couldn't see what this 'fix' was. And yet, the assembly line was running. A neat pile of engine block casings were stacked at the end of the line, and a new one was rolling fresh out of the blast furnace.
The operator caught up to her, leaning heavily on the hand rail. He stood beside her as she watched. "I'll show you what someone 'not certified on the equipment' can do."
The industrial robot at the head of the broken conveyor belt clamped onto the aluminum casing, and passed it though a series of sensors and cameras, using its machine vision to ensure all dirt and foundry oil had been blasted clean. If the engine block failed inspection, it'd be put on a conveyor belt back into the blast furnace. Otherwise, it'd be put on a different belt-- the broken belt-- and sent down the line for finishing.
All the right lights flashed. The engine had passed.
"How?" she mused. The robot went still, as if in thought, while the pallet robot waited patiently.
"They're using the factory's network to run a program I wrote," the operator happily answered. "Their sensors and machine vision are working out the telemetry data."
"What telemetry data?" she asked, confused.
-- which then implemented the data into a trajectory, wound up with a *whirr*, and threw the engine block overhand across the 100' gap.
Amalie ran for The Big Red Button, slammed it, and shut down the entire factory floor. Silence filled the air-- and her mouth as she struggled to find the right words. She glared at the operator.
"What?" he said with a shrug, "I was able to figure out your system well enough to do that all by myself. It's been working perfectly for weeks. There's no problem."
"Oh, I think OSHA would disagree," she said, "If they found out. Which they won't. Ever."
Before she deleted the custom program from the system, Amalie took a copy of it. The program wouldn't ever be used to chuck engine blocks again-- but it would get a certain operator onto the short list the next time a specialist position opened.
Amalie M. heard a loud clanking sound coming from the back of the factory, near the ovens, where there ought not be any clanking whatsoever. Curious, and a bit worried, she grabbed a hard-hat and headed onto the floor.
*whirrrrr*… *whoosh*… *clang*
Before she could take a step onto the floor, the factory's operator came bounding from around the corner. The old greybeard was moving faster than she'd ever seen. "Hey," he called out, nearly skidding to a stop, standing between her and the stairs to the catwalk. "What're you doing here?""Scheduled maintenance of the equipment," she said, stating the obvious. Her company provided all the robots and machine vision equipment for their client's automobile engine factory. "Same as every month."
"You usually come on the fifteenth," he retorted.
"It is the fifteenth."
"Oh. Damn." he said, looking lost, shaking his head. "Working here alone, just me and the robots-- I lose track of the days."
*whirrrr*… *whoosh*… *clang*
Amalie cringed. The sound rang in her ears-- so much louder now. Nothing on the floor should make a sound like that. She looked up at the operator, who slumped a bit."Yeah, so I bet you're wondering what that is. The furnace-to-finisher conveyor belt broke down a couple weeks ago."
A broken conveyor belt? That literally didn't sound right. "Why didn't you call for a service visit?"
He huffed. "I'm perfectly capable of fixing my own problems without racking up your billable hours."
"You aren't certified to work on the equipment," she said, her ears still ringing, "It sounds like you made it a whole lot worse!"
He took a step towards her. "I learned your system well enough. I used to build robots you know. And now--" his shoulders slumped, "-- now I just pick up after them. Give an old man a break, will you? I spend all my day forklifting pallets onto transport trucks. I just wanted to do something useful."
Amalie sighed. "Fine. I appreciate your effort, but whatever you've done, I'm probably going to have to undo and fix to spec."
The operator nodded. "Of course, of course. You don't have to worry about it. I'll even take it all offline for you. Why don't you get a coffee across the street while I do that?" He stepped forward, shooing her towards the door.
"Ok, but--"
*whirr* *whoosh*… *CLANG*
The sound stuck in her ears-- but worse, something caught the corner of her eye. Just a flash of something, beyond the machines. A metallic blur. What the hell?She spun around the operator and dashed up the steps, ignoring the calls for her to stop. She could see the entire factory floor from the catwalk. She spotted the broken conveyor belt right away-- the last belt in the line, between the blast furnace and the pallet stacker. The conveyor belt had buckled, and the motors were exposed. She could see plenty wrong with it-- but what worried her the most was that she couldn't see what this 'fix' was. And yet, the assembly line was running. A neat pile of engine block casings were stacked at the end of the line, and a new one was rolling fresh out of the blast furnace.
The operator caught up to her, leaning heavily on the hand rail. He stood beside her as she watched. "I'll show you what someone 'not certified on the equipment' can do."
The industrial robot at the head of the broken conveyor belt clamped onto the aluminum casing, and passed it though a series of sensors and cameras, using its machine vision to ensure all dirt and foundry oil had been blasted clean. If the engine block failed inspection, it'd be put on a conveyor belt back into the blast furnace. Otherwise, it'd be put on a different belt-- the broken belt-- and sent down the line for finishing.
All the right lights flashed. The engine had passed.
"How?" she mused. The robot went still, as if in thought, while the pallet robot waited patiently.
"They're using the factory's network to run a program I wrote," the operator happily answered. "Their sensors and machine vision are working out the telemetry data."
"What telemetry data?" she asked, confused.
"The usual. Angle. Velocity. Spin."
Before Amalie could even fathom what those data points meant, the second robot hunched into an abnormal position, and signaled 'ready' back to the inspection bot---- which then implemented the data into a trajectory, wound up with a *whirr*, and threw the engine block overhand across the 100' gap.
*whoosh*
The receiver caught it with a *clang*, and calmly put it into the carrier, and waited for the next casing.Amalie ran for The Big Red Button, slammed it, and shut down the entire factory floor. Silence filled the air-- and her mouth as she struggled to find the right words. She glared at the operator.
"What?" he said with a shrug, "I was able to figure out your system well enough to do that all by myself. It's been working perfectly for weeks. There's no problem."
"Oh, I think OSHA would disagree," she said, "If they found out. Which they won't. Ever."
Before she deleted the custom program from the system, Amalie took a copy of it. The program wouldn't ever be used to chuck engine blocks again-- but it would get a certain operator onto the short list the next time a specialist position opened.
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Oct 6, 2011 (2 days ago)
fuckyeahmoleskines: nawasaka.tumblr.com
from hitRECordJoe
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Oct 4, 2011 (4 days ago)
The Obama Stimulus Should Have Been More Manly
In the new book Confidence Men, Ron Suskind reports that President Obama initially wanted the stimulus plan to focus on generating infrastructure jobs so that it would address the economic and psychological needs of males in particular. Now blogger and law professor Ann Althouse argues that Obama was diverted by his female constituency into creating a jobs plan that failed because it wasn't male centered and infrastructure heavy. Here, in a Bloggingheads.tv debate with Amy Sullivan of Time Magazine, Althouse makes her case that the stimulus wasn't manly enough:
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Oct 5, 2011 (3 days ago)
Isaac Asimov on Security Theater
A great find:
In his 1956 short story, "Let's Get Together," Isaac Asimov describes security measures proposed to counter a terrorist threat:This Jeffreys guy sounds as if he works for the TSA."Consider further that this news will leak out as more and more people become involved in our countermeasures and more and more people begin to guess what we're doing. Then what? The panic might do us more harm than any one TC bomb."The Presidential Assistant said irritably, "In Heaven's name, man, what do you suggest we do, then?"
"Nothing," said Lynn. "Call their bluff. Live as we have lived and gamble that They won't dare break the stalemate for the sake of a one-bomb head start."
"Impossible!" said Jeffreys. "Completely impossible. The welfare of all of Us is very largely in my hands, and doing nothing is the one thing I cannot do. I agree with you, perhaps, that X-ray machines at sports arenas are a kind of skin-deep measure that won't be effective, but it has to be done so that people, in the aftermath, do not come to the bitter conclusion that we tossed our country away for the sake of a subtle line of reasoning that encouraged donothingism."
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4:08 PM (9 hours ago)
RIP. Thanks Steve.
from the johnson banks thought for the week
100+ people liked this
Just a small selection from our vast 25-year collection of hoarded, impossible-to-throw-away Apple ‘stuff’, starting with an 1986 SE, and going upwards.
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Oct 5, 2011 (3 days ago)
Editorial: Now we know why Apple went after Samsung in the courtroom
If you live in a cave and missed the "big" announcement of the
OK, we're done with the links and news about the iP4S -- promise. I just wanted to be sure you all had a chance to see just what Apple took 16 months to release, and have an idea how it was received. Now compare it to the reaction the Internet, folks in our forums, and people in general had to the Samsung Galaxy S II.
Apple no longer sets the bar that others are measured against.
This goes beyond the Galaxy S II. Samsung is releasing some amazing products, listening to user feedback, and delivering what consumers want. I don't like Touchwiz. Not even a tiny bit. But, damn, it is smooth and fluid on the latest Samsung hardware, including the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It's also functional, bringing things to the table that users haven't even thought to ask for yet. Techie types are falling in love with Samsung's new products, and we all know where non-techy types look for advice. No longer will the non-fanboy instantly say the word iSomething when asked what the best smartphone is, because until Apple can show something new, with features users have been asking for, the iProduct isn't it.We tend to think in terms of smartphone here (we are a Mobile Nation of Smartphone Experts after all) but Samsung, like LG, sells an amazing amount of phones every year. Numbers that dwarf any manufacturer's smartphone sales. They are in the Prime position (see what we just did there?) to put out the product that sets the tone for the next generation of smartphones, likely running Android. Apple can't risk that, because they have a giant cash cow they need to protect.
That's iTunes.
For all the polish and thought that goes into Apple's mobile products, they are just a front end for iTunes. The fellows in Cupertino know that they can create buzz on a brand (and they do a marvelous job at it), but can they compete when another product comes on the scene that is simply better? That's a risk that Apple is too smart to take. If Samsung is able to build and sell something to make the average user want it enough to leave the iTunes universe, Apple's revenue will be hit -- hard. Apple knows how to sell content and build mindshare. Samsung knows how to sell a whole lot of electronic devices. The two had to butt heads eventually, and as Android matures, that day isn't far off. NVIDIA shows us what can be done with powerful hardware on a mobile device. The Galaxy S II line shows us that hardware has reached a point where even less-than-optimized software can look and feel awful damn good. When the two meet (Ice Cream Sandwich? Maybe.), the chance to really shake up Apple's ecosystem is there.
I'm no fancy paid analyst -- I'm a middle aged father of three who happens to be a big nerd. I have a theory that ifI can see the big picture, real analysts and businessmen can as well. Samsung is in the position to de-throne Apple, and spending the last six months worrying about legislation instead of innovation makes perfect sense to me after the recent iPhone announcement.
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Oct 7, 2011 (14 hours ago)
Dear Theist: Do Your Job or Find Another
You know, I get that it’s a tough economy out there. Lots of people are taking jobs that aren’t necessarily optimal, like working at a fast food joint, cooking meth, or making YouTube videos. And not everyone is able to choose a job that is 100% in line with his or her morals, like a vegetarian flipping burgers, an ex-DEA agent cooking meth, or a normal human being making YouTube videos.
Or like a fundamentalist Christian who is a town clerk in New York, where same-sex marriage was recently made legal.
That’s right, there are people in New York who are refusing to approve the marriage licenses of same-sex couples because of “religious freedom.” Here’s one now!
Popout
“I love helping people . . . the Bible tells me that marriage is between a man and a woman. So I don’t feel I can endorse the new law, the policy for same-sex people to be married. I don’t feel it’s right.”
Look, I’m almost willing to overlook the fact that Bible actually defines marriage as a convenant between a man and a woman, a man and a woman and dozens of concubines, a man and several wives, a rapist and a woman, a man’s brother and a woman, a man and his aunt, etc. etc., because I realize that you said “the Bible tells [you]“, and who am I to interpret what an inanimate object is whispering to you late at night when no one else is around? If you believe that that’s what marriage is or should be, then fine! That’s what you think marriage is. Great for you.
But if you also think that the Bible tells you that you can’t stamp a piece of paper because you’ll be complicit in some evil deed, then you should not have a job that requires you to stamp a piece of paper. You should get a new job. Have you tried cooking meth? The Bible says literally nothing about meth. Nothing.
This is, of course, just the latest in a long line of attempts by fundamentalist Christians to not do their jobs. There are the pharmacists who refuse to fill women’s prescriptions because those women may be using those prescribed drugs to not have babies. There are the doctors and nurses who refuse to perform potentially life-saving operations on women because those operations may destroy a fetus. There are the science teachers who refuse to teach science because the facts contradict their faith.
I give a talk on women’s reproductive rights in which I compare these people to a vegan priest refusing to give the sacrament – if you can’t do the job, then quit your job. A commenter over at The Advocate brought up another apt analogy: would these fundamentalists support a Hindu meat inspector’s right to not inspect beef? What about an orthodox Jewish lifeguard who refused to touch members of the opposite sex?
I find town clerks refusing to do their jobs to be particularly vexing because they work for the US (state) government and have no idea what the first amendment means. No idea. “It is a religious freedom situation,” according to the woman in the video, who is completely unaware that religious freedom is about keeping religion out of governmental duties so that the rest of us can be protected from her bigoted beliefs. If only there were a basic constitution quiz given to any applicant for any governmental job. But then, who would the GOP run for president?
Or like a fundamentalist Christian who is a town clerk in New York, where same-sex marriage was recently made legal.
That’s right, there are people in New York who are refusing to approve the marriage licenses of same-sex couples because of “religious freedom.” Here’s one now!
Popout
“I love helping people . . . the Bible tells me that marriage is between a man and a woman. So I don’t feel I can endorse the new law, the policy for same-sex people to be married. I don’t feel it’s right.”
Look, I’m almost willing to overlook the fact that Bible actually defines marriage as a convenant between a man and a woman, a man and a woman and dozens of concubines, a man and several wives, a rapist and a woman, a man’s brother and a woman, a man and his aunt, etc. etc., because I realize that you said “the Bible tells [you]“, and who am I to interpret what an inanimate object is whispering to you late at night when no one else is around? If you believe that that’s what marriage is or should be, then fine! That’s what you think marriage is. Great for you.
But if you also think that the Bible tells you that you can’t stamp a piece of paper because you’ll be complicit in some evil deed, then you should not have a job that requires you to stamp a piece of paper. You should get a new job. Have you tried cooking meth? The Bible says literally nothing about meth. Nothing.
This is, of course, just the latest in a long line of attempts by fundamentalist Christians to not do their jobs. There are the pharmacists who refuse to fill women’s prescriptions because those women may be using those prescribed drugs to not have babies. There are the doctors and nurses who refuse to perform potentially life-saving operations on women because those operations may destroy a fetus. There are the science teachers who refuse to teach science because the facts contradict their faith.
I give a talk on women’s reproductive rights in which I compare these people to a vegan priest refusing to give the sacrament – if you can’t do the job, then quit your job. A commenter over at The Advocate brought up another apt analogy: would these fundamentalists support a Hindu meat inspector’s right to not inspect beef? What about an orthodox Jewish lifeguard who refused to touch members of the opposite sex?
I find town clerks refusing to do their jobs to be particularly vexing because they work for the US (state) government and have no idea what the first amendment means. No idea. “It is a religious freedom situation,” according to the woman in the video, who is completely unaware that religious freedom is about keeping religion out of governmental duties so that the rest of us can be protected from her bigoted beliefs. If only there were a basic constitution quiz given to any applicant for any governmental job. But then, who would the GOP run for president?
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Oct 6, 2011 (2 days ago)
Why Occupy Wall Street Embodies The Real Values Of The Boston Tea Party
ThinkProgress points out how little the Koch-manufactured tea party has in common with the real thing, and how the Occupy Wall Street movement embodies the real spirit:
1.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was A Civil Disobedience Action Against A Private Corporation. In 1773, agitators blocked the importation of tea by East India Trading Company ships across the country. In Boston harbor, a band of protesters led by Samuel Adams boarded the corporation’s ships and dumped the tea into the harbor. No East India Trading Company employees were harmed, but the destruction of the company’s tea is estimated to be worth up to $2 million in today’s money. The Occupy Wall Street protests have targetedbig banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, as well as multinational corporations like GE with sit-ins and peaceful rallies.
2.) The Original Boston Tea Party Feared That Corporate Greed Would Destroy America. As Professor Benjamin Carp has argued, colonists perceived the East India Trading Company as a “fearsome monopolistic company that was going to rob them blind and pave the way maybe for their enslavement.” A popular pamphlet called The Alarm agitated for a revolt against the East India Trading Company by warning that the British corporation would devastate America just as it had devastated South Asian colonies: “Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. [...] And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin.”
3.) The Original Boston Tea Party Believed Government Necessary To Protect Against Corporate Excess. Smithsonian historian Barbara Smith has noted that Samuel Adams believed that oppression could occur when governments are too weak. As Adams explained in a Boston newspaper, government should exist “to protect the people and promote their prosperity.” Patriots behind the Tea Party revolt believed “rough economic equality was necessary to maintaining liberty,” says Smith. Occupy Wall Street protesters demand a country that invests in education, infrastructure, and jobs.
4.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was Sparked By A Corporate Tax Cut For A British Corporation. The Tea Act, a law by the British Parliament exempting tea imported by the East India Trading Company from taxes and allowing the corporation to directly ship its tea to the colonies for sale, is credited with setting off the Boston Tea Party. The law was perceived as an effort by the British to bailout the East India Trading Company by shutting off competition from American shippers. George R.T. Hewes, one of the patriots who boarded the East India Trading Company ships and dumped the tea, told a biographer that the East India Trading Company had twisted the laws so “it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity.” Occupy Wall Street demandsthe end of corporate tax loopholes as well as the enactment of higher taxes on billionaires and millionaires.
5.) The Original Boston Tea Party Wanted A Stronger Democracy. There is a common misconception that the Boston Tea Party was simply a revolt against taxation. The truth is much more nuanced, and there were many factors behind the opposition to the East India Company and the British government. Although the colonists resented taxes levied by a distant British Parliament, in the years preceding the Tea Party, the Massachusetts colony had levied taxes several times to pay for local services. The issue at hand was representation and government accountable to the needs of the American people. Patrick Henry and other patriots organized the revolutionary effort by claiming that legitimate laws and taxes could only be passed by legislatures elected by Americans. According to historian Benjamin Carp, the protesters in Boston perceived that the British government’s actions were set by the East India Trading Company. “As Americans learned more about the provisions of the new East India Company laws, they realized that Parliament would sooner lend a hand to the Company than the colonies,” wrote Carp.
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Oct 7, 2011 (23 hours ago)
Steve Jobs
I last saw Steve Jobs a year and half ago. I spent an hour alone in his company while he showed me the latest piece of magical hardware to have come from the company he had founded in 1976, the yet to be released Apple iPad. Naturally I was flattered to have been approved by him to be the one to write a profile for Time Magazineand to be given a personal demonstration of the device of which he was so clearly proud and for which he had such high hopes. The excitement of him then handing me an iPad (after I had duly signed severe NDAs prohibiting my flaunting it in public until the embargo date had passed) and being able to play with it before the rest of the world had even seen one tickled my vanity and I would be dishonest if I did not confess to the childlike excitement, the pounding thrill, the absurd pride and the rippling pleasure I always feel on such occasions – emotions that have long been pointed out as pathological symptoms of the wilder shores of unreason that Apple idolatry induce in people like me and as a part of Steve Jobs’s almost Svengali like powers of persuasion, and Barnum-like huckstering.
Of course, you might point out that he asked for me specifically because he knew that I admired him and that I would write a positive piece, that I was more or less a patsy who would deliver what he wanted. I would not deny that for a minute. I like to believe that if I had been disappointed with the iPad I would have said so and written it clearly and boldly, but fortunately that issue and the inner turmoil it would have caused never arose for the iPad and I fell in love instantly. A month or so after that meeting with Steve, the “magical tablet” launched and was received with the inevitable mixture of admiration, contemptuous dismissal and bored incomprehension that had greeted so many of Apple’s previous products.
Like the original Apple computers, the Lisa, the Macintosh, the LaserWriter, the OS X operating system, the iMac, the iPod, the MacBooks and the iPhone before it, the iPad went on to reshape the landscape into which it had been born and to exceed the most optimistic sales forecasts and once again to make the Apple haters, doubters and resenters look like sullen fools. The contrast between those awful prophets and Apple’s awesome profits was (and is) something to behold.
Using my white iPhoneIt is a very dismal business when a great personality dies and the world scrabbles about for comment, appraisal and judgment. I have been asked in the last 24 hours to appear and to write and to call in to join in the chorus of voices assessing the life and career of this remarkable man. But what was Steve Jobs? He wasn’t a brilliant and innovative electronics engineer like his partner and fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak. Nor was he an acute businessman and aggressively talented opportunist like Bill Gates. He wasn’t a designer of original genius like Jonathan Ive whose achievements were so integral to Apple’s success from 1997 onwards. He wasn’t a software engineer, a mathematician, a nerd, a financier, an artist or an inventor. Most of the recent obituaries have decided that words like “visionary” suit him best and perhaps they are right.
As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.
It would be vulgar to say that the proof of the correctness of Jobs’s vision is reflected in the gigantic capitalisation value of the Apple Corporation, the almost fantastically unbelievable margins and the eye-popping cash richness which has transformed a company that was on the brink of collapse when Jobs arrived back in 1997 into the greatest of them all. All this despite low market share and an almost fanatical attention to detail and finish which would have 99% of CFO’s weeping into their spreadsheets.
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” Steve Jobs in an Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000
Which is not to say that abject worship is the only allowable viewpoint when it comes to the life and career of this magnificently complicated man. I am very glad that I did not work for him. I cannot claim he was a friend but over thirty year or so years I bumped into him from time to time and he was always warm, charming, funny and easy to talk to, yet I know, and the world has already been told enough times over the past few days and weeks, that he was a fearsome boss, often a tempestuous mixture of martinet, tyrant, bully and sulky child. His perfectionism, the absolute conviction and certainty in the rightness of his opinions and – I am afraid it is true, as it is of so many leaders, Churchill and other great figures not excluded – his propensity apparently to have originated an idea that he had previously dismissed but now suddenly owned and championed, these traits must have maddened his colleagues. But the charisma, passion, delight in detail, excitement and belief in the creation of a new future – the sheer magnetic force of the man made his many faults a forgivable and almost loveable part of his mystique and greatness.
The quality I especially revered in him was his refusal to show contempt for his customers by fobbing them off with something that was “good enough”. Whether it was the packaging, the cabling, the use of screen space, the human interfaces, the colours, the flow, the feel, the graphical or textural features, everything had to be improved upon and improved upon until it was, to use the favourite phrase of the early Mac pioneers “insanely great”. It had to be so cool that you gasped. It had to feel good in the hand, look good to the eye and it had to change things. It changed things because it made users want to use the devices as they had never been used before. As I used to say of the Mac in the early days, “it makes me jump out of bed early to start work”. People may not think so but I’m as lazy as can be, and the creative, human-based implementation of technology in such a way as to encourage labour and thereby invigorate innovation and change is a remarkable achievement in so potentially dull a sector as computing.
Jobs said, when he presented the iPad to the world in 2010 that he regarded Apple as standing at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. I pointed out that it might have been more accurate to say that Apple stood at the intersection of technology, the liberal arts and commerce. There is no doubt that as Disney’s biggest shareholder, as the boss of Pixar, the company that virtually invented computer animated cinematography, Jobs was in a unique position to bang heads together when it came to getting studio and record label bosses to consent to copyright agreements for what was to become the iTunes store, just one of the massive “game-changing” contributions he made to technology and the arts.
A control freak? Well, since “freak” is always the word used in such a context, then yes. But it was that controlthat won the war, freakish or not. The so-called “walled-garden” approach whereby Apple make the hardware, the software and control third party access to the APIs and architecture of each device may madden many but they are precisely what allows the devices to work so well, so cleanly, so fluently out of the box. They allow longer battery-life, less heat, more stable operating and dozens of other enormous advantages. If different companies are making the firmware, software, chips, screens, operating system, radios and cases the results will always be far less coherent and usable devices. I have nothing against Android and admire the idea of an Open Handset Alliance. I don’t want to be characterised as an incurable unthinking Apple “fanboi” – but I cannot fight the instinct that makes my hand always reach for the pocket with the iPhone in it when I have a Windows 7, a Blackberry and an Android just as available in other pockets. I have in the past set myself the task of using only an Android for two weeks, or only a Windows 7 phone or only a Blackberry and while it can be done (obviously) I am less content, more frustrated and crucially as far as I am concerned, less productive as a result. And the fact remains that it is so much easier to survive on an Android, a Windows 7 phone or a Blackberry nowadays precisely because they have all fundamentally modelled themselves on Apple criteria. They want to be smooth, graphically pleasing, they want the user to love and enjoy them. The frustratingly silly patent wars that are raging around the world between Google, Samsung, Apple and dozens of other companies would be a sad obsequy to Jobs’s colossal achievements, but with such gigantic sums of money in so huge a market at stake it is little wonder that others will do all they can to “crack” Apple. Well that is fine, I have no shares in the company. So long as the way they crack Apple is to learn from Steve Jobs that style matters, that beauty matters, that joy, simplicity, elegance, harmony, charm, wit and quality matter – well, I don’t care which company has the best stock market capitalisation.
Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn’t discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn’t invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn’t invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn’t invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented the novel and D. W. Griffith, the Warner Brothers, Irving Thalberg and Steven Spielberg didn’t invent film-making. Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish.
I once heard George Melly, on a programme about Louis Armstrong, do that dangerous thing and give his own definition of a genius. “A genius,” he said, “is someone who enters a field and works in it and when they leave it, it is different. By that token, Satchmo was a genius.” I don’t think any reasonable person could deny that Steve Jobs, by that same token, was a genius too.
I will end with a story few people know. What you probably do know is that Jobs wooed Pepsi Cola boss John Sculley to Apple in 1985. He wanted him to do to IBM the unthinkable thing that he had done to Coca Cola: beaten the brand leader into second place. He won Sculley with the famous phrase, “do you want to sell fizzy sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” Sculley came and a few months later, astoundingly, their disagreements came to such a head that Jobs found himself fired from the company he had founded.
You probably knew that. You probably knew he went on to found his own computer company NeXt – a black cube computer that ran a UNIX operating system, revealing Jobs’s already growing conviction that the professionally popular UNIX, so suited to networking, should be the future kernel (if you’ll forgive the geeky pun) of any sensible consumer oriented operating system.
It was on a NeXt machine that the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote the protocols, procedures and languages that added up to the World Wide Web, http, HTML, browsers, hyperlinks … in other words the way forward for the internet, the most significant computer program ever written was done on a NeXt computer. That is a feather in Steve Jobs’s cap that is not often celebrated and indeed one that he himself signally failed to know about for some time.
After having written www, Berners-Lee noticed that there was a NeXt developers conference in Paris at which Steve Jobs would be present. Tim packed up his black cube, complete with the optical disk which contained arguably the most influential and important code ever written and took a train to Paris.
It was a large and popular conference and Tim was pretty much at the end of the line of black NeXt boxes. Each developer showed Steve Jobs their new word-processor, graphic programme and utility and he slowly walked along the line, like the judge at a flower show nodding his approval or frowning his distaste. Just before he reached Tim and the world wide web at the end of the row, an aide nudged Jobs and told him that they should go or he’d be in danger of missing his flight back to America. So Steve turned away and never saw the programme that Tim Berners-Lee had written which would change the world as completely as Gutenberg had in 1450. It was a meeting of the two most influential men of their time that never took place. Chatting to the newly knighted Sir Tim a few years ago he told me that he had still never actually met Steve Jobs.
Their work met however and it is through it that you are reading this. I will not be so presumptuous as to mourn the loss of Steve as a personal friend, but I will mourn his loss as a man who changed my world completely. As the great writer, wit and sage John @Hodgman (who played the pasty-faced PC in the old Apple TV commercials) wrote a few hours after Steve’s death “Everything good I have done, I have done on a Mac”.
“…and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “this was a man!”
x Stephen
© Stephen Fry 2011
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Of course, you might point out that he asked for me specifically because he knew that I admired him and that I would write a positive piece, that I was more or less a patsy who would deliver what he wanted. I would not deny that for a minute. I like to believe that if I had been disappointed with the iPad I would have said so and written it clearly and boldly, but fortunately that issue and the inner turmoil it would have caused never arose for the iPad and I fell in love instantly. A month or so after that meeting with Steve, the “magical tablet” launched and was received with the inevitable mixture of admiration, contemptuous dismissal and bored incomprehension that had greeted so many of Apple’s previous products.
Like the original Apple computers, the Lisa, the Macintosh, the LaserWriter, the OS X operating system, the iMac, the iPod, the MacBooks and the iPhone before it, the iPad went on to reshape the landscape into which it had been born and to exceed the most optimistic sales forecasts and once again to make the Apple haters, doubters and resenters look like sullen fools. The contrast between those awful prophets and Apple’s awesome profits was (and is) something to behold.
Using my white iPhoneAs always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.
It would be vulgar to say that the proof of the correctness of Jobs’s vision is reflected in the gigantic capitalisation value of the Apple Corporation, the almost fantastically unbelievable margins and the eye-popping cash richness which has transformed a company that was on the brink of collapse when Jobs arrived back in 1997 into the greatest of them all. All this despite low market share and an almost fanatical attention to detail and finish which would have 99% of CFO’s weeping into their spreadsheets.
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” Steve Jobs in an Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000
Which is not to say that abject worship is the only allowable viewpoint when it comes to the life and career of this magnificently complicated man. I am very glad that I did not work for him. I cannot claim he was a friend but over thirty year or so years I bumped into him from time to time and he was always warm, charming, funny and easy to talk to, yet I know, and the world has already been told enough times over the past few days and weeks, that he was a fearsome boss, often a tempestuous mixture of martinet, tyrant, bully and sulky child. His perfectionism, the absolute conviction and certainty in the rightness of his opinions and – I am afraid it is true, as it is of so many leaders, Churchill and other great figures not excluded – his propensity apparently to have originated an idea that he had previously dismissed but now suddenly owned and championed, these traits must have maddened his colleagues. But the charisma, passion, delight in detail, excitement and belief in the creation of a new future – the sheer magnetic force of the man made his many faults a forgivable and almost loveable part of his mystique and greatness.
The quality I especially revered in him was his refusal to show contempt for his customers by fobbing them off with something that was “good enough”. Whether it was the packaging, the cabling, the use of screen space, the human interfaces, the colours, the flow, the feel, the graphical or textural features, everything had to be improved upon and improved upon until it was, to use the favourite phrase of the early Mac pioneers “insanely great”. It had to be so cool that you gasped. It had to feel good in the hand, look good to the eye and it had to change things. It changed things because it made users want to use the devices as they had never been used before. As I used to say of the Mac in the early days, “it makes me jump out of bed early to start work”. People may not think so but I’m as lazy as can be, and the creative, human-based implementation of technology in such a way as to encourage labour and thereby invigorate innovation and change is a remarkable achievement in so potentially dull a sector as computing.
Jobs said, when he presented the iPad to the world in 2010 that he regarded Apple as standing at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. I pointed out that it might have been more accurate to say that Apple stood at the intersection of technology, the liberal arts and commerce. There is no doubt that as Disney’s biggest shareholder, as the boss of Pixar, the company that virtually invented computer animated cinematography, Jobs was in a unique position to bang heads together when it came to getting studio and record label bosses to consent to copyright agreements for what was to become the iTunes store, just one of the massive “game-changing” contributions he made to technology and the arts.
A control freak? Well, since “freak” is always the word used in such a context, then yes. But it was that controlthat won the war, freakish or not. The so-called “walled-garden” approach whereby Apple make the hardware, the software and control third party access to the APIs and architecture of each device may madden many but they are precisely what allows the devices to work so well, so cleanly, so fluently out of the box. They allow longer battery-life, less heat, more stable operating and dozens of other enormous advantages. If different companies are making the firmware, software, chips, screens, operating system, radios and cases the results will always be far less coherent and usable devices. I have nothing against Android and admire the idea of an Open Handset Alliance. I don’t want to be characterised as an incurable unthinking Apple “fanboi” – but I cannot fight the instinct that makes my hand always reach for the pocket with the iPhone in it when I have a Windows 7, a Blackberry and an Android just as available in other pockets. I have in the past set myself the task of using only an Android for two weeks, or only a Windows 7 phone or only a Blackberry and while it can be done (obviously) I am less content, more frustrated and crucially as far as I am concerned, less productive as a result. And the fact remains that it is so much easier to survive on an Android, a Windows 7 phone or a Blackberry nowadays precisely because they have all fundamentally modelled themselves on Apple criteria. They want to be smooth, graphically pleasing, they want the user to love and enjoy them. The frustratingly silly patent wars that are raging around the world between Google, Samsung, Apple and dozens of other companies would be a sad obsequy to Jobs’s colossal achievements, but with such gigantic sums of money in so huge a market at stake it is little wonder that others will do all they can to “crack” Apple. Well that is fine, I have no shares in the company. So long as the way they crack Apple is to learn from Steve Jobs that style matters, that beauty matters, that joy, simplicity, elegance, harmony, charm, wit and quality matter – well, I don’t care which company has the best stock market capitalisation.
Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn’t discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn’t invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn’t invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn’t invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented the novel and D. W. Griffith, the Warner Brothers, Irving Thalberg and Steven Spielberg didn’t invent film-making. Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish.
I once heard George Melly, on a programme about Louis Armstrong, do that dangerous thing and give his own definition of a genius. “A genius,” he said, “is someone who enters a field and works in it and when they leave it, it is different. By that token, Satchmo was a genius.” I don’t think any reasonable person could deny that Steve Jobs, by that same token, was a genius too.
I will end with a story few people know. What you probably do know is that Jobs wooed Pepsi Cola boss John Sculley to Apple in 1985. He wanted him to do to IBM the unthinkable thing that he had done to Coca Cola: beaten the brand leader into second place. He won Sculley with the famous phrase, “do you want to sell fizzy sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” Sculley came and a few months later, astoundingly, their disagreements came to such a head that Jobs found himself fired from the company he had founded.
You probably knew that. You probably knew he went on to found his own computer company NeXt – a black cube computer that ran a UNIX operating system, revealing Jobs’s already growing conviction that the professionally popular UNIX, so suited to networking, should be the future kernel (if you’ll forgive the geeky pun) of any sensible consumer oriented operating system.
It was on a NeXt machine that the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote the protocols, procedures and languages that added up to the World Wide Web, http, HTML, browsers, hyperlinks … in other words the way forward for the internet, the most significant computer program ever written was done on a NeXt computer. That is a feather in Steve Jobs’s cap that is not often celebrated and indeed one that he himself signally failed to know about for some time.
After having written www, Berners-Lee noticed that there was a NeXt developers conference in Paris at which Steve Jobs would be present. Tim packed up his black cube, complete with the optical disk which contained arguably the most influential and important code ever written and took a train to Paris.
It was a large and popular conference and Tim was pretty much at the end of the line of black NeXt boxes. Each developer showed Steve Jobs their new word-processor, graphic programme and utility and he slowly walked along the line, like the judge at a flower show nodding his approval or frowning his distaste. Just before he reached Tim and the world wide web at the end of the row, an aide nudged Jobs and told him that they should go or he’d be in danger of missing his flight back to America. So Steve turned away and never saw the programme that Tim Berners-Lee had written which would change the world as completely as Gutenberg had in 1450. It was a meeting of the two most influential men of their time that never took place. Chatting to the newly knighted Sir Tim a few years ago he told me that he had still never actually met Steve Jobs.
Their work met however and it is through it that you are reading this. I will not be so presumptuous as to mourn the loss of Steve as a personal friend, but I will mourn his loss as a man who changed my world completely. As the great writer, wit and sage John @Hodgman (who played the pasty-faced PC in the old Apple TV commercials) wrote a few hours after Steve’s death “Everything good I have done, I have done on a Mac”.
“…and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “this was a man!”
x Stephen
© Stephen Fry 2011
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Oct 4, 2011 (4 days ago)
Taking Your Husband's Name
If you're female, it could influence your job prospects:
Even after controlling for education levels and work hours, a woman who took her husband’s name earns less -- €960 compared to €1156.In one study, participants judged a hypothetical woman who had kept her own name or not:
Despite the fact that other than their name choice the women were identical, the participants overwhelmingly described the woman who had taken her husband’s name as being more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional and (somewhat) less competent. Not necessarily qualities you would seek in a potential employee.
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