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”.
RIP Steve
It was every kids dream, to be Bill Gates. Back then, I was a Windows fanboy.
My first Mac unlike my peers wasn’t an Apple II, but was an Apple Macintosh Performa 600. I have never really used it though, but it was the very first Apple product I’ve every come into contact with.
The next time, would be in my Windows fanboy days, laughing at the terrible speed and not candy colored designs of OS9 on the DV iMacs in my school’s audio visual rooms.
But when Steve introduced the iPod, I sat up. When he showed the world Aqua on OS X, I stood up.
From there, I was enamored with the design of the Mac. But it wasn’t until my really formative years in Polytechnic would I get my very own PowerBook 12”.
I identified with the attention to detail. The strive to be perfect. When I finally picked up Objective-C after years of various other languages, I never looked back too much.
RIP Steve. Without you, nothing that I do today and the friends I’ve made from WWDC would ever happen.
As anyone who watches Apple closely knows, analysts are absolutely fucktarded when it comes to Apple. If you bet directly against what they’ve said about the company over the years, you’d be a very rich person. They’re always wrong. And it’s clear that the vast majority of them do not understand the company.
Source: parislemon
For men, advances in one’s relationship are emotionally expensive, each step more costly than the next. For women, it is effectively a status change.
Google’s approach is to look at the technology first, and see how that aligns with what people want. Apple’s is to look at what people really want to do first, and wait until they can build the technology which delivers that (and just that).
(210811@1432): Every 21 Aug should be Cook Curry Day. http://www.straitstimes.com/STForum/Story/STIStory_703967.html
Source: bbqexpress
The 5 people you meet on earth
Well, not exactly 5, but that was just to get you to read this. But I digress.
I count myself as being really fortunate to have met many people thus far. While it is not mind blowing or a-success-story, I count my life experiences thus far as something that is out of the ordinary for a typical Singaporean.
I have failed before.
Hard to imagine in a society that tries to ensure that everything is perfect, but yes, I have diverted from the traditional path of doing things and it has proven to be one of the best things I have ever had the chance to experience.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
- Steve Jobs
Source: startupquote
Dylan Ratigan, Mad as Hell: His Epic ‘Network’ Moment
We’ve got a real problem…this is a mathematical fact. Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America. Democrats aren’t fixing it, Republicans aren’t stopping it — an entire integrated system, banking, trade and taxation, created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work decimating our entire country right now. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan took it all on in this epic rant from his show today.
If anywhere has a chance of making things happen, I would say America has it. LISTEN UP MR OBAMA.
Source: dylanratigan.com
jstn:
This is a VT220 serial console (circa 1983) set up as a terminal for my Mac Pro (circa 2010), a nerdy dream I’ve had for a long time that I finally made a reality yesterday.
Some quick history: in the early days of office computers, it was rare that you would actually have one on your desk. Instead there might be a central mainframe (running Unix) and everyone would have a terminal that connected to it over a long serial cable or modem connection. One computer, many users.
The terminal has a keyboard and monitor, but it’s not a full computer and worthless without the mainframe. It’s more like a teletype machine, all it can do is display the text sent to it (like a paperless printer) and send text back. It doesn’t have any knowledge of pixels or colors or graphics of any kind.
In modern times we don’t have mainframes anymore, but Unix is more prevalent than ever. It runs on the servers delivering this page and the iPhone in your pocket. For developers and power users the command line has never gone away, but instead of a dedicated hardware serial console we have Terminal.app (with translucent backgrounds and anti-aliased fonts). The software is just emulating the old hardware, though. The protocols haven’t changed much in 30 years. The Unix underpinnings of OS X still have all the stuff required to use a real serial terminal, it’s just no one actually does it (well, almost no one).
I’ve always thought those old terminals were beautiful, and I’m not the only one—there’s a Mac app called Cathode that does a convincingly wonderful job simulating vintage terminals, using OpenGL to degrade things into a nice analog haze. But it’s not quite the same as the real thing…
Hardware terminals regularly crop up on eBay for around $100. They’re actually still used in a lot of places (old warehouse systems, supermarkets, banks) and there are still companies that support and refurbish them. Back at Vimeo we discovered one abandoned in a server closet when we moved into the office. Finding one isn’t a problem, the main challenge is stringing together the right adapters to use an ancient serial port with modern USB.
My biggest source of information getting this going was Paul Weinstein’s post about setting up an Apple IIc as a terminal for his Mac mini (which is similar, but not quite the same since the IIc still has to emulate the terminal in software). I got the same USB-to-serial adapter, a Keyspan USA-19HS ($27), which has Mac drivers that I can happily confirm work well with 10.7 Lion. I also needed a null modem cable ($7) and 25-pin female/female converter ($4) to connect it to my VT220.
At first I used the same method as Paul to get it working, gluing together the terminal and OS with a utility called screen. As Paul notes, this is less than desirable. It still requires you to open a software terminal to make the connection, and you’re still operating through a layer of emulation. On most Unixes you can simply add a line to /etc/ttys and everything just works via getty, but apparently this has been disabled in OS X since 10.5.
Eventually I found this page, which explains the problem and how to fix it. After adding a line in /etc/gettytab to manually set the terminal type to vt220-8bit everything works perfectly! A real hardware terminal directly connected the old fashioned way, with no emulation. Awesome.
If this is something you want to attempt yourself please drop me a line; I learned a lot about how terminals work over the last couple weeks and the final result is quite satisfying, a soft amber glow and one less window on my desktop. It’s also a nice reminder that we didn’t get to where we are overnight, user interfaces and software development have been evolving in an unbroken chain for a long time and some of the old ideas are so solid that they persist 30 years later. Why not use the proper hardware?
So how do I make this happen?
Source: jstn
Apple has invested a lot of time and manpower in getting off of gcc and onto a faster, more capable compiler. Now that the transition is over, Apple’s attention can turn towards adding innovative features. The next few years of WWDC could be interesting.
Macworld reports that there will, in fact, be a physical manifestation of Lion. Starting in August, Apple will sell Lion on a USB stick for $69. Apple has also said that customers are welcome to bring their Macs to Apple retail stores for help buying and installing Lion.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica Review
Will gladly pay for the USB stick.
Source: Ars Technica
