Now Steve Wozniak was a good guy. I like him, he is a good engineer. Of course Steve Jobs is nothing but a salesman full of BS to shovel. A lot like motor mouth, publicity hound Ernie Hancock.
Apple co-founder, Chairman Steve Jobs dies
By CNET Staff | Today in Tech
Apple co-founder and Chairman Steve Jobs died today. He was 56.
Jobs had been suffering from various health issues following the
seven-year anniversary of his surgery for a rare form of pancreatic
cancer in August 2004. Apple announced in January that he would be
taking an indeterminate medical leave of absence, with Jobs then
stepping down from his role as CEO in late August.
Jobs had undergone a liver transplant in April 2009 during an earlier planned six-month leave of absence. He returned to work for a year and a half before his health forced him to take more time off. He told his employees in August, "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come."
One of the most legendary businessmen in American history, Jobs turned three separate industries on their head in the 35 (April 1, 1976) years he was involved in the technology industry.
Personal computing was invented with the launch of the Apple II in 1977. Legal digital music recordings were brought into the mainstream with the iPod and iTunes in the early 2000s, and mobile phones were never the same after the 2007 debut of the iPhone. Jobs played an instrumental role in the development of all three, and managed to find time to transform the art of computer-generated movie-making on the side.
The invention of the iPad in 2010, a touch-screen tablet computer his competitors flocked to reproduce, was the capstone of his career as a technologist. A conceptual hybrid of a touch-screen iPod and a slate computer, the 10-inch mobile device was Jobs' vision for a more personal computing device.
Jobs was considered brilliant yet brash. [ Translation - he was an *sshole! ] He valued elegance in design yet was almost never seen in public wearing anything but a black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and a few days worth of stubble. A master salesman who considered himself an artist at heart, Jobs inspired both reverence and fear in those who worked for him and against him, and was adored by an army of loyal Apple customers who almost saw him as superhuman.
Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 to young parents who gave him up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs gave him his name, and moved out of the city in 1960 to the Santa Clara Valley, later to be known as Silicon Valley. Jobs grew up in Mountain View and Cupertino, where Apple's headquarters is located.
He attended Reed College in Oregon for a year but dropped out, although he sat in on some classes that interested him, such as calligraphy. After a brief stint at Atari working on video games, he spent time backpacking around India, furthering teenage experiments with psychedelic drugs and developing an interest in Buddhism, all of which would shape his work at Apple.
Back in California, Jobs' friend Steve Wozniak was learning the skills that would change both their lives. When Jobs discovered that Wozniak had been assembling relatively (for the time) small computers, he struck a partnership, and Apple Computer was founded in 1976 in the usual Silicon Valley fashion: setting up shop in the garage of one of the founder's parents.
Wozniak handled the technical end, creating the Apple I, while Jobs ran sales and distribution. The company sold a few hundred Apple Is, but found much greater success with the Apple II, which put the company on the map and is largely credited as having proven that regular people wanted computers.
It also made Jobs and Wozniak rich. Apple went public in 1980, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the first tech industry celebrities, earning a reputation for brilliance, arrogance, and the sheer force of his will and persuasion, often jokingly referred to as his "reality-distortion field."
The debut of the Macintosh in 1984 left no doubt that Apple was a serious player in the computer industry, but Jobs only had a little more than a year left at the company he founded when the Mac was released in January 1984.
By 1985 Apple CEO John Sculley--who Jobs had convinced to leave Pepsi in 1983 and run Apple with the legendary line, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"--had developed his own ideas for the future of the company, and they differed from Jobs'. He removed Jobs from his position leading the Macintosh team, and Apple's board backed Sculley.
Jobs resigned from the company, later telling an audience of Stanford University graduates "what had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating." He would get the last laugh.
He went on to found NeXT, which set about making the next computer in Jobs' eyes. NeXT was never the commercial success that Apple was, but during those years, Jobs found three things that would help him architect his return.
The first was Pixar. Jobs snapped up the graphic-arts division of Lucasfilm in 1986, which would go on to produce "Toy Story" in 1995 and set the standard for computer-graphics films. After making a fortune from Pixar's IPO in 1995, Jobs eventually sold the company to Disney in 2006.
The second was object-oriented software development. NeXT chose this development model for its software operating systems, and it proved to be more advanced and more nimble than the operating system developments Apple was working on without Jobs.
The third was Laurene Powell, a Stanford MBA student who attended a talk on entrepreneurialism given by Jobs in 1989 at the university. The two wed in 1991 and eventually had three children; Reed, born in 1991, Erin, born in 1995, and Eve, born in 1998. Jobs has another daughter, Lisa, who was born 1978, but Jobs refused to acknowledge he was her father for the first few years of her life, eventually reconciling with Lisa and her mother, his high-school girlfriend Chris-Ann Brennan.
Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, having convinced then-CEO Gil Amelio to adopt NeXTStep as the future of Apple's operating system development. Apple was in a shambles at the time, losing money, market share, and key employees.
By 1997, Jobs was once again in charge of Apple. He immediately brought buzz back to the company, which pared down and reacquired a penchant for showstoppers, such as the 1998 introduction of the iMac; perhaps the first "Stevenote." His presentation skills at events such as Macworld would become legendary examples of showmanship and star power in the tech industry.
Jobs also set the company on the path to becoming a consumer-electronics powerhouse, creating and improving products such as the iPod, iTunes, and later, the iPhone and iPad. Apple is the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, surpassing ExxonMobil?'s market capitalization in August.
He did so in his own fashion, imposing his ideas and beliefs on his employees and their products in ways that left many a career in tatters. Jobs enforced a culture of secrecy at Apple and was an extremely demanding leader, terrorizing Apple employees when he returned to the company in the late 1990s with summary firings if he didn't like the answers they gave when questioned.
Jobs was an intensely private person. That quality put him and Apple at odds with government regulators and stockholders who demanded to know details about his ongoing health problems and his prognosis as the leader and alter ego of his company. It spurred a 2009 SEC probe into whether Apple's board had made misleading statements about his health.
In the years before he fell ill in 2008, Jobs seemed to soften a bit, perhaps due to his bout with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004.
In 2005, his remarks to Stanford graduates included this line: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."
Later, in 2007, he appeared onstage at the D: All Things Digital conference for a lengthy interview with bitter rival Bill Gates, exchanging mutual praise and prophetically quoting the Beatles: "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead."
Jobs leaves behind his wife, four children, two sisters, and 49,000 Apple employees. [ And I bet a large number are happier then a pig in a mud puddle because of Jobs death. ]
CNET's Tom Krazit, Josh Lowensohn and Erica Ogg contributed to this report.
Record thin on Steve Jobs’s philanthropy
By Peter Whoriskey, Published: October 6
For one of the nation’s most famous billionaires, Steve Jobs kept a low profile as a charitable donor.
Unlike fellow tech leaders Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, he did not sign the Giving Pledge, the effort under which the nation’s richest individuals commit to giving at least half their wealth to philanthropy.
His name is absent from the list of gifts of $1 million or more maintained by Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy.
And it wasn’t until after an unflattering media report about Jobs on the subject over the summer, that Apple in September initiated a “matching gifts” program, under which donations to philanthropies made by employees are matched by the company.
Now what will happen to Jobs’s fortune — Forbes has estimated his net worth at $8.3 billion — is a matter of speculation that is provoking discussion both about Jobs and the societal obligations of the very rich.
The most recent round of debate began after the New York Times published an unflattering piece in August, stating “there is no public record of Mr. Jobs giving money to charity. . . . Nor is there a hospital wing or an academic building with his name on it.”
Moreover, Jobs had closed Apple’s philanthropic programs when he returned to the company in 1997 and never reinstated them despite $14 billion in profit last year, the Times reported.
“Many other innovative companies have found ways to apply their ingenuity and resources to helping society,” Vincent Stehle, a longtime grantmaker in nonprofit technology circles and a columnist for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said Thursday. “It was a little disappointing not to see Apple at the table.”
But Jobs supporters note that the bulk of his contributions to society may reside in the quality and innovation of Apple’s products. They also pointed out ways that Jobs and Apple have been charitable.
Bono, U2’s lead singer and a noted activist, quickly responded to the Times piece, writing that “Apple’s contribution to our fight against AIDS in Africa has been invaluable.”
The company had given “tens of millions of dollars that have transformed the lives of more than two million Africans through H.I.V. testing, treatment and counseling. This is serious and significant. And Apple’s involvement has encouraged other companies to step up,” Bono wrote. “Just because he’s been extremely busy, that doesn’t mean that he and his wife, Laurene, have not been thinking about these things.”
Jobs’s supporters say it also may be impossible to know from public records what he gave away because he could have requested anonymity. Indeed, his plans for the rest of his wealth may not be known until well after his death.
The fact that he doesn’t appear on lists of public giving “doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s not giving generously,” said Adriene Davis of Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, which tracks such gifts.
What may partly explain Jobs’s absence from the donor rolls is that he was so busy with his company.
Jobs’s most direct effort at philanthropy was when he set up the Steven P. Jobs Foundation, shortly after he was forced out of Apple in 1985. To run that effort, he hired Mark Vermilion, who first spent time at Humanitas International, a charity founded by Joan Baez, and then headed Apple’s community efforts, which began when Vermilion proposed the company give away computers to nonprofits.
Jobs wanted his foundation to focus on nutrition and vegetarianism. Vermilion favored programs that promoted social entrepreneurship. But then Jobs got tied up building another company called NeXT and the foundation shut down.
“I said, ‘You really need to spend some time on this’ and he said ‘I can’t right now,’ ” Vermilion said. “I really don’t blame Steve. I think I could have done a better job on selling him on my idea or I should have done his idea.”
Had Jobs, who died at 56, lived longer, he might have gotten around to more public charities, Vermilion said, but because he was a perfectionist, he would have needed to devote a lot of his scarce time to it.
“He’s gotten a lot of criticism for not giving away tons of money,” Vermilion said. “But I think it’s a bum rap. There’s only so many hours in a week, and he created so many incredible products. He really contributed to culture and society.”
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1972: Jobs becomes one of the first 50 employees at Atari, under Atari founder Nolan K. Bushnell. Jobs later asks Woz for help in creating the sequel to the smash hit "Pong", entitled "Breakout". Jobs cheats Woz out of $5000.
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Jobs noticed his friend Steve Wozniak—employee of Hewlett-Packard—was capable of producing designs with a small number of chips, and invited him to work on the hardware design with the prospect of splitting the $750 wage. Wozniak had no sketches and instead interpreted the game from its description. To save parts, he had "tricky little designs" difficult to understand for most engineers. Near the end of development, Wozniak considered moving the high score to the screen's top, but Jobs claimed Bushnell wanted it at the bottom; Wozniak was unaware of any truth to his claims. The original deadline was met after Wozniak did not sleep for four days straight. In the end 50 chips were removed from Jobs' original design. This equated to a US $5,000 bonus, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak, instead only paying him $375.
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Then there’s the tale of how in the pre-Apple days of 1973 or 1974, Jobs had cheated his friend and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak out of the money they had earned producing the game “Breakout” for Atari. As told in the pages of Michael Malone’s “Infinite Loop,” Atari founder Nolan Bushnell had paid Jobs $7,000 (or $5,000; published accounts vary) as a bonus for the delivery of the game. Jobs, the story goes, told Wozniak that the bonus had been $700, and thus gave Woz only $350 as his half. Woz didn’t learn about the deception until 12 years later.
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Breakout, the hidden game itself, is notable in Apple’s history as it was a product that both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on together at Atari, where legend has it Jobs cheated Wozniak out of thousands of dollars of bonus money.
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3. Fibbed to his Apple co-founder about a job at Atari
Jobs is well known for his innovations in personal computing, mobile tech, and software, but he also helped create one of the best known video games of all-time. In 1975, Jobs was tapped by Atari to work on the Pong-like game Breakout.
He was reportedly offered $750 for his development work, with the possibility of an extra $100 for each chip eliminated from the game's final design. Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak (later one of Apple's other founders) to help him with the challenge. Wozniak managed to whittle the prototype's design down so much that Atari paid out a $5,000 bonus — but Jobs kept the bonus for himself, and paid his unsuspecting friend only $375, according to Wozniak's own autobiography.
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SNIP While still with HP, Wozniak describes his moonlighting development, with Jobs, of the prototype of the arcade game Breakout for Atari, Inc in only four days. He also describes, without bitterness, how Jobs shortchanged him on the job. Jobs, who worked for Atari Inc., said he would give Wozniak half of "whatever they paid him" for development of the game. Jobs subsequently gave Wozniak $375, saying Atari Inc. paid him $750 for the game. Later Wozniak found out that Atari Inc. actually paid Jobs five thousand dollars for the game.
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Defending Life’s Work With Words of a Tyrant
SourceDefending Life’s Work With Words of a Tyrant
DAVID STREITFELD, On Thursday October 6, 2011, 10:17 pm EDT
SAN FRANCISCO — The first time Steve Jobs ever bullied anyone was in the third grade. He and some pals “basically destroyed” the teacher, he once said.
For the next half-century, Mr. Jobs never let up. He chewed out subordinates and partners who failed to deliver, trashed competitors who did not measure up and told know-it-all pundits to take a hike. He had a vision of greatness that he wielded to reshape the computer, telephone and entertainment industries, and he would brook no compromise.
Maybe it is only the despair people feel about the stagnating American economy, but the announcement of the death of the Apple cofounder Wednesday seemed to mark the end of something: in an era of limits, Mr. Jobs was the last great tyrant.
Even in Silicon Valley, where corporate chieftains are frequently larger than life, and soul-enhancing technology is promised with the morning e-mail, there was no one quite like him. He used his powers to make devices that are beloved by their owners in a way that very few American products manage to achieve, especially these days.
“Amidst the oceans of enforced mediocrity in the bland, deflavorized culture of managed-by-committee corporate behemoths,” the entrepreneur Perry Metzger posted on his Google+ page, Mr. Jobs “showed that the real path to excellence was excellence — that you could do great things by, who would have imagined, being smart and having excellent taste and not ever settling for second best.”
After his death became public, there was a waterfall of emotion on Twitter and blogs. Fans gathered outside Mr. Jobs’s house in Palo Alto, Calif., and they placed candles and flowers in front of Apple stores everywhere. His house is in the center of town, easy to find and rather modest for a guy worth about $6.5 billion. He was planning another house, but even that seemed like it would be relatively restrained for a lord of Silicon Valley.
Where he was unrestrained was in his work. Stories of him forcefully telling Apple employees that a product was not good enough are legion. (“You’ve baked a really lovely cake,” he told one engineer, adding that the hapless fellow had used dog feces for frosting). Make it smaller and better, he commanded. No element of design was too minor to escape his notice. (On a Mac interface: “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”)
Mr. Jobs castigated competitors, particularly Microsoft. Bill Gates’s company, which dwarfed Apple in power and wealth during the 1980s and 1990s, was not even described as second rate; it was deemed third-rate. Worse, it was not even trying.
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” Mr. Jobs said in a typical broadside. “They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”
This is not the sort of unvarnished comment you ever hear the founders of Google, say, publicly expressing about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, or vice versa. “We’re mourning Steve because we don’t have much of his passion and directness in corporate life these days,” said Jay Elliot, a former Apple executive who has written a book about learning from Mr. Jobs’s lessons in leadership. “He wasn’t driven by the stock price.”
Like many big tech companies, Apple has a formidable public relations staff, but Mr. Jobs was not constrained by this either. People knew his e-mail — “sjobs@apple.com” — and sent him queries and complaints. He often responded, if tersely. A persistent effort by a college student complaining about her inability to get information from the famously reticent P.R. staff finally elicited a testy “please leave us alone.”
Mr. Jobs’s self-confidence could sometimes be indistinguishable from arrogance and self-aggrandizement. At an Apple Halloween party during the wild early years, he reportedly came dressed as Jesus. (In a rare tribute for a lay person, Mr. Jobs’s career was celebrated Thursday on the front page of the Vatican newspaper.) But it was an arrogance tempered by faith in the power of technology to improve lives.
The satirical newspaper The Onion underscored this point nicely in its news story on Mr. Jobs’s death. The headline, modified here to replace an expletive, said: “Last American Who Knew What the Heck He Was Doing Dies.”
Funny, but it is deep in the nature of Silicon Valley to challenge such sentiments. “I don’t want to take anything away from the guy, he was brilliant and uncompromising and wonderful, but there’s a level of adulation that goes beyond what is merited,” said Tim O’Reilly, chief executive of the tech publisher O’Reilly Media. “There will be revolutions and revolutionaries to come.”
Hmmm .... I wonder this Steve Jobs write this blog about his death which appeared in the Onion? It sounds like it was written by an arrogant *sshole that could be Jobs himself!
Last American Who Knew What The F*ck He Was Doing Dies
October 6, 2011 | ISSUE 47•40
CUPERTINO, CA—Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. "We haven't just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we've literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his sh*t together and knew what the hell was going on," a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen. "This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over." Obama added that if anyone could fill the void left by Jobs it would probably be himself, but said that at this point he honestly doesn’t have the slightest notion what he’s doing anymore.
So I guess Steve Jobs wasn't as smart as everybody makes him out to be. A superstitious dope who though some magical dude in the sky was going to cure his cancer.
Steve Jobs regretted cancer surgery delay, biographer says [Video]
October 20, 2011 | 12:06 pm
For months after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2004, Steve Jobs decided to try to treat his illness with eastern-style remedies, rather than surgery. But delaying that surgery may have cost him his long-term health -- and it was a decision he regretted.
This comes from Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, who will appear in an interview this weekend on "60 Minutes" to discuss Jobs and his upcoming book, "Steve Jobs."
According to Isaacson, Jobs had a "very slow growing" type of pancreatic cancer "that can actually be cured," but still opted not to get the surgery until nine months had gone by and it may have been too late.
"I've asked him" why he didn't get the operation, Isaacson told Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes." "And he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened. … I didn't want to be violated in that way.' I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. It'd work for him in the past. He'd regret it."
Soon, Isaacson says, Jobs' wife and everyone around him convinced him to "quit trying to treat it with all these roots and vegetables and things," he said. But by then it may have been too late, as the cancer had spread to surrounding tissues.
Isaacson is the only author to whom Jobs gave long-term access, and he conducted more than 40 interviews. The book is scheduled to come out next week.
Was Steve Jobs a Christian and Where is He Today?
Posted by Paul Luna October - 6 - 2011 - Thursday
SNIP
There has been much speculation about the beliefs of Jobs. Some have asked, “was Steve Jobs was an atheist?” Others followed up with asking “was Steve Jobs a Christian?” Steve Jobs was neither a Christian nor an atheist; Jobs was a Buddhist.
In the early 1970’s Jobs went to liberal arts Reed College, he soon left for India in 1973 in search of enlightenment. In 1974 Jobs returned to California with a shaved head, traditional Indian clothing and a fully fledged Buddhist (source).
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Jobs Tried Exotic Treatments to Combat Cancer, Book Says
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Steve Jobs's early decision to put off surgery and rely on less conventional treatments angered and upset his family, the book says.
By STEVE LOHR
Published: October 20, 2011
In his last years, Steven P. Jobs veered from exotic diets to cutting-edge treatments as he fought the cancer that ultimately took his life, according to a new biography to be published on Monday.
His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.
Although the broad outlines of Mr. Jobs’s struggle with pancreatic cancer are known, the new biography, by Walter Isaacson, offers new insight and details. Friends, family members and physicians spoke to Mr. Isaacson openly about Mr. Jobs’s illness and his shifting strategy for managing it. According to Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Jobs was one of 20 people in the world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced. The price tag at the time: $100,000.
But the 630-page biography spans Mr. Jobs’s entire life, and also includes previously unknown details about his romantic life, his marriage, his relationship with his sister and his business dealings. Mr. Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews over two years with Mr. Jobs, who died on Oct. 5.
A copy of the book was obtained by The New York Times before it officially went on sale.
In October 2003, Mr. Jobs got the news about his cancer, which was detected by a CT scan. One of his first calls, according to the book, was to Larry Brilliant, a physician and epidemiologist, who would later become the head of Google’s philanthropic arm. The men went way back, having first met at an ashram in India.
“Do you still believe in God?” Mr. Jobs asked.
Mr. Brilliant spoke for a while about religion and different paths to belief, and then asked Mr. Jobs what was wrong. “I have cancer,” Mr. Jobs replied.
Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine.
Friends and family, including his sister, Mona Simpson, urged Mr. Jobs to have surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Isaacson writes. But Mr. Jobs delayed the medical treatment. His friend and mentor, Andrew Grove, the former head of Intel, who had overcome prostate cancer, told Mr. Jobs that diets and acupuncture were not a cure for his cancer. “I told him he was crazy,” he said.
Art Levinson, a member of Apple’s board and chairman of Genentech, recalled that he pleaded with Mr. Jobs and was frustrated that he could not persuade him to have surgery.
His wife, Laurene Powell, recalled those days, after the cancer diagnosis. “The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” she said. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however, Mr. Isaacson writes. “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued.
When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science, he became an expert — studying, guiding and deciding on each treatment. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs made the final decision on each new treatment regimen.
The DNA sequencing that Mr. Jobs ultimately went through was done by a collaboration of teams at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT. The sequencing, Mr. Isaacson writes, allowed doctors to tailor drugs and target them to the defective molecular pathways.
A doctor told Mr. Jobs that the pioneering treatments of the kind he was undergoing would soon make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease. Later, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he was either going to be one of the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or be among the last “to die from it.”
According to Mr. Isaacson, his interviews with Mr. Jobs were occasionally punctuated by music listening sessions in Mr. Jobs’s living room. During one interview, Mr. Jobs played music from his new iPad 2, cycling through the Beatles, a Gregorian chant performed by Benedictine monks, a Bach fugue and “Catch the Wind” by the Scottish musician Donovan.
Mr. Jobs’s personal affinity for music, and his friendships with musicians, helped him maneuver deals to build the iTunes library and special versions of the iPod. It also moved into his private life at times, Mr. Isaacson writes. After Mr. Jobs learned he had cancer, he exacted a promise from Yo-Yo Ma to play at his funeral.
Mr. Jobs sometimes entertained business guests at his home. Rupert Murdoch, the conservative head of News Corporation, came twice for dinner. Mr. Jobs joked to Mr. Isaacson that he had to hide the kitchen knives from his wife, Laurene Powell, because of her liberal views.
The book provides new details on Apple’s business dealings and rivalries. The author recounts Mr. Jobs getting into a shouting match with co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in 2008, over Google’s development of Android software for smartphones, which would compete with Apple’s iPhone.
Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he regarded Android as a “stolen product,” copying Apple technology.
In romance, Mr. Isaacson writes, Mr. Jobs fell hard, but often made it hard on the women in his life. In 1985, he met and fell in love with a computer consultant, Tina Redse. They lived together on and off for years, and Mr. Jobs proposed in 1989. But she declined, telling friends he would “drive her crazy.”
Later, he met Ms. Powell, a former Goldman Sachs trader who had enrolled at Stanford business school. They fell in love and she moved in with him. But his behavior could be maddening. On the first day of 1990, he proposed, and never mentioned it again for months. In September, exasperated, she moved out. The next month, Mr. Isaacson writes, he gave her a diamond engagement ring, and she moved back in. Eventually they married.
The book also offers some tidbits about Mr. Jobs’s legendary attention to detail, which, according to Mr. Isaacson, extended to a luxury yacht that he began designing in 2009. The design is sleek and minimalist, with 40-foot-long glass walls. It is being built in the Netherlands by the custom yacht firm Feadship, the book says.
Starting last spring, Mr. Jobs met individually or in pairs with people he wanted to see before he died. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was one of them. He came to Mr. Jobs’s house in Palo Alto, Calif., in May, and they spent more than three hours together, reminiscing, Mr. Isaacson writes.
By 2011, Mr. Gates, though still Microsoft chairman, had for years focused most of his time on his huge charitable foundation. Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that Mr. Gates was happier than he had ever seen him.
They talked about the emotional rewards of family life and having children, and the good fortune to have married wisely. Mr. Gates later recalled to Mr. Isaacson the two laughed that Laurene had kept Mr. Jobs “semi-sane” and that Melinda, Mr. Gates’s wife, “kept me semi-sane.”
The book will be published by Simon & Schuster, with a list price of $35.
Even if Steve Job's is an *sshole he was right about Obama. Or at least let's hope he is right about Obama. Now don't beat up on me and claim that I am a disgruntled Republican. I am not. I am a Libertarian and think the Republicans suck just as bad as the Democrats.
Of course I am in Arizona and the Libertarian party here make Libertarians across the country look bad with people that pretend to be Libertarian's like Ernie Hancock and David Dorn.
Ernie Hancock is a publicity hound who is always doing silly publicity stunts which often make the Libertarian Party look like a bunch of fools.
I discovered 10 years ago that David Dorn was spreading lies about me that I was a government snitch. I don't even know who David Dorn is other then I attended his F.R.E.E. Supper Club 13 years ago. I will regret that for the rest of my life because as a result of it David Dorn started spreading lies around about me that I was a government snitch.
Steve Jobs predicted Obama would be a one-term president
By Rachel Rose Hartman | The Ticket
Steve Jobs, known for his aggressive and sometimes prickly personality, didn't hold back when he met President Obama in 2010: The Apple CEO warned Obama he wasn't going to win re-election.
"You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs said during a meeting with the president that took place a year prior to Jobs' death related to pancreatic cancer, according to his upcoming biography as reported by the Huffington Post.
Walter Isaacson, who wrote the forthcoming Jobs bio, reportedly reveals that Jobs argued that Obama was jeopardizing his re-election prospects because of what Jobs took to be a pervasive anti-business climate in his administration. Jobs cited excessive federal regulations and operating costs for businesses as harmful legacies of the Obama White House.
Also, Jobs nearly missed the meeting in the first place.
From the Huffington Post:
Though his wife told him that Obama "was really psyched to meet with you," Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.
After laying into the White House's purported anti-business outlook, Jobs offered to help Obama repair the rift by arranging meeting between the president and a group of CEOs. When the guest list began to grow, Jobs reportedly resolved to back out of the gathering. Instead, he attended, though he poo-pooed the fancy menu. "But he was overruled by the White House, which cited the president's fondness for cream pie," Huffington Post writes.
Jobs also offered to to help create political ads for the president in 2012. Jobs had scotched a similar effort to craft Obama ads in 2008, when Isaacson claims that Jobs was unhappy that Obama strategist David Axelrod showed insufficient deference to the Apple honcho.
This and other political news is just the latest information to leak from the hotly anticipated book.
Another revelation that Isaacson has teed up for a "60 Minutes" interview featuring the biography this Sunday is that Jobs wished he had chosen sooner to undergo cancer surgery.
Apple's Steve Jobs stole the idea for Apple's Lisa "windows" based computer from Xerox. And of course the folks at Microsoft stole their idea for "Microsoft Windows", from Apple, after Apple stole the idea from Xerox. So Steve Jobs is a hypocrite when he calls Bill Gates a copyright crook. [Not that I have anything against copyright crooks]
"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything ... He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas." Jobs said of Gates.
I used to work at Xerox and loved their 6085 Workstation. Apple stole their "windows" idea from the ancestors of that machine.
I made the dumb mistake of thinking that Xerox stole the idea from Microsoft, but the Xerox employees quickly set me straight on the fact that Apple stole the idea from Xerox and Microsoft stole their "Windows' from Apple.
Sadly Xerox junked those machines and replaced them with Microsoft Windows based machines.
Last but not least it was Steve Wozniak who was the brains behind Apple's success. Steve Job's was just an obnoxious salesman who helped make Steve Wozniak's idea's successful.
Steve Jobs biography: His thoughts on Android, cancer, Bill Gates
October 21, 2011 | 12:25 pm
Steve Jobs biography: His thoughts on Android, cancer, Bill GatesDetails of the new Steve Jobs biography, scheduled for release on Monday, have leaked out all around the Web, offering new insights into the life of the Apple co-founder. We've collected a few of the more interesting tidbits in this post.
The book by Walter Isaacson, called "Steve Jobs," is the result of more than 40 interviews with Jobs by the author over a period of years, including one just weeks before his death two weeks ago. The book touches on Jobs' youth, his battle with cancer, his relationship with his biological parents, and his unvarnished feelings about the mediocrity of his rivals at Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and elsewhere.
On Thursday, we wrote about Isaacson's report that Jobs regretted waiting nine months to have an operation to remove cancer from his pancreas -- a delay that likely allowed the cancer to spread.
"I've asked him" why he didn't get the operation, Isaacson told Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes." "And he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened. ... I didn't want to be violated in that way.' I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. It'd worked for him in the past. He regretted it."
Jobs also had unwitting contact with his biological father, a Syrian immigrant named John Jandali -- now a casino manager in Reno. Though the two never realized each others' identities at the time, Jobs apparently ate at a restaurant Jandali managed years ago -- and found out only later, after he learned of the identity of his biological parents.
“When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn't like what I learned," Jobs told Isaacson. "I asked her to not tell him that we ever met ... not tell him anything about me."
Jobs has few kind words for the executives that succeeded him after his first reign at Apple, and managed to nearly run the company into the ground.
In the book, he refers to them as "corrupt people" with "corrupt values," according to excerpts reviewed by the Associated Press. That group was obsessed with profit -- "for themselves mainly, and also for Apple -- rather than making great products."
Jobs also told Isaacson that Jonathan Ive, the company's head designer and a man Jobs called his "spiritual partner," was also among his most powerful successors. Ive had "more operation power" than anyone at Apple besides Jobs -- which was the way Jobs "set it up."
The book also offers some insight into Apple's current patent battles with Google and makers of its Android phones, which he believed ripped off the design and functionality of Apple's blockbuster iPhone.
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said, according to the AP report. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Jobs also had some parting barbs for Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and Jobs' longtime business rival and, later, friend. "Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology," Jobs said of Gates. "He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas."
More on Steve Jobs the hypocrite
Apple stole the "windows" interface for their computers from Xerox. And of course Microsoft later stole the same interface from Apple for their "Windows" products.But hypocrite Steve Jobs bitches and moans that Google stole a product from Apple.
Of course Steve Jobs didn't invent jack sh*t at Apple. All of Apples original stuff was invented by the Steve Wozniack.
Steve Jobs biography provides revealing details about bitter divide between Apple, Google
MICHAEL LIEDTKE AP Technology Writer
7:02 a.m. CDT, October 23, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google can only hope that Steve Jobs' final vendetta doesn't haunt the Internet search leader from his grave.
The depths of Jobs' antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Apple's co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs' long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death. The Associated Press obtained a copy Thursday.
The biography drips with Jobs' vitriol as he discusses his belief that Google stole from Apple's iPhone to build many of the features in Google's Android software for rival phones.
It's clear that the perceived theft represented an unforgiveable act of betrayal to Jobs, who had been a mentor to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and had welcomed Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, to be on Apple's board.
Jobs retaliated with a profane manifesto during a 2010 conversation with his chosen biographer. Isaacson wrote that he never saw Jobs angrier in any of their conversations, which covered a wide variety of emotional topics during a two-year period.
After equating Android to "grand theft" of the iPhone, Jobs lobbed a series of grenades that may blow a hole in Google's image as an innovative company on a crusade to make the world a better place.
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs told Isaacson. "I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty."
Jobs then used a crude word for defecation to describe Android and other products outside of search.
Android now represents one of the chief threats to the iPhone. Although iPhones had a head start and still draw huge lines when new models go on sale, Android devices sold twice as well in the second quarter. According to Gartner, Android's market share grew 2 1/2 times to 43 percent, compared with 17 percent a year earlier. The iPhone's grew as well, but by a smaller margin — to 18 percent, from 14 percent.
Both Google and Apple declined comment to The Associated Press when asked about Jobs' remarks.
Jobs' attack is troubling for Google on several levels.
It suggests that Apple, which has pledged to be true to Jobs' vision, may try to derail Android in court, even if Google obtains more patent protection through its proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of phone maker Motorola Mobility Inc. The derision comes across as a bitter pill for Page and Brin, who have hailed Jobs as one of their idols. It also appears to contradict Schmidt's repeated assertions that he remained on friendly terms with Jobs even after he resigned from Apple's board in 2009.
Most of all, Google should be worried whether the Android brand is damaged by the withering criticism of a revered figure whose public esteem seems to have risen as friends, colleagues and customers paid tribute over the past few weeks.
"The words of cultural icons have a lot of power after death," veteran technology analyst Rob Enderle said. "This almost sounds like a spiritual leader declaring a jihad on Android as his dying wish."
Apple fans tend to be fiercely loyal, making it more feasible to envision an anti-Android movement taking shape like some kind of political protest, Enderle said.
It's also possible that Jobs' criticisms of Google may be seen as hypocritical. That's because some of Apple's computing breakthroughs were based on technology developed by others. The Mac's easy-to-use interface and its mouse controller, for instance, came out of Xerox Corp.
The bitter divide between two of the most beloved and successful technology companies would have seemed inconceivable a few years ago.
In 2006, Google and Apple were on such friendly terms that Jobs welcomed Schmidt to Apple's board of directors with these words: "Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric's insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead," Jobs said.
But in 2008, a year after the iPhone came out, Google unveiled plans to release Android as a free software system that phone makers can use to make devices that compete with the iPhone. Jobs was so infuriated that he went to Google's Mountain View headquarters — about nine miles from Apple's Cupertino office— to try to stop the project, according to the biography.
Jobs' persuasive powers failed to sway Google's leaders.
Now, more than 550,000 devices running on Android are being activated each day. Apple, meanwhile, sold about 3 million fewer iPhones than anticipated in the July-September quarter, contributing to a sharp drop in the company's stock. The newest Android challenger to the iPhone, the Galaxy Nexus from Samsung, is scheduled to go on sale next month.
Although there's no indication in the book that he ever forgave Google, Jobs set aside his disdain for the company long enough to counsel Page nine months ago, according to the biography.
After Google's Jan. 20 announcement that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April, Page called Jobs for some pointers. Jobs told Isaacson that his first instinct was to reject Page with a curt expletive, but he reconsidered as he recalled his times as a young entrepreneur listening to the advice of elder Silicon Valley statesmen including Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.
Jobs didn't mince words when Page arrived at Jobs' Palo Alto home. He told Page to build a good team of lieutenants. In his first week as Google's CEO, Page reshuffled his management team to eliminate bureaucracy. Jobs also warned Page not to let Google get lazy or flabby.
"The main thing I stressed was to focus," Jobs told Isaacson about his conversation with Page. "Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out adequate products that are adequate but not great."
Page has shut more than 20 Google products and services in his first six months as Google's CEO as part of an effort to "put more wood behind fewer arrows." It was the type of discipline Jobs instilled on Apple when he returned in 1997 after a dozen years of exile. Jobs killed such products as the Newton handheld device and the PC clones that were allowed to run on Apple's operating system.
It still remains to be seen whether Jobs' words of wisdom or his grievances will leave a bigger imprint on Google.
Steve Jobs trick on no license plates
SourceLatest Steve Jobs Mystery Revealed: How He Drove Without License Plates
By Justin Hyde
The multitude of mysteries revealed following the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' death now includes one that puzzled car enthusiasts for years: How did Jobs get away with driving without a license plate? It was common knowledge that Jobs would park his Mercedes SL55 AMG in a handicapped spot at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, with nothing to identify his vehicle other than the tiny barcode that usually rests behind the rear license plate. According to Walter Isaacson's new biography, Jobs wanted to avoid having a plate for privacy reasons; and yet when having a license-less silver Mercedes became a kind of trademark, Jobs kept motoring without one "because I don't."
For years, rumors swirled that Jobs had either won a special dispensation from California authorities or was just daring police to stop him. While the why remains somewhat cloudy, an interview by ITWire with a former Apple security executive reveals the real reason: a little-known loophole in California vehicle laws that gives owners up to six months to get plates for their vehicles.
According to Jon Callas, now chief technical officer of Entrust, Jobs would arrange with his vehicle leasing company to switch out his silver Mercedes every six months with a new, identical model — just another of the complicated and expensive ways Jobs thought differently.
Steve Job's FBI file???
Here is a link to the file the FBI thugs were keeping on Steve Jobs.The full link is: http://vault.fbi.gov/steve-jobs/steve-jobs-part-01-of-01/view
One question I have is why the f*ck was the FBI spying on Steve Jobs??? Sure I think the guy is a jerk, but why should the FBI give a krap about him????
About a week after the death of jerk Steve Jobs
Dennis Ritchie
who invented the C language and UNIX died.
While Steve Jobs is a world class jerk and
Dennis Ritchie
was a good guy in the world of computers.
Let me rephrase that, if Dennis Ritchie was a jerk like Steve Jobs, he wasn't a big enough jerk that the world found out about it.
According to this
article
John McCarthy who is the father of artificial intelligence and
the inventor of the computer programming language LISP
has died at 84.
I didn't know the guy by name, but I do want to learn the LISP language. I just never get around to learning it.