The coolest part is that awesome wall.
That's awesome, 'cause I totally lost my old coathangermeasuringcupiceaxeapplechargercameraplatedrilltoaster the other day, and wasn't sure how I was going to make another one, but now I know. Thanks, internet!
I just ordered a multi pack of this. I expect great things from it, and I will blame Heebie if I am disappointed.
Now, how does it come apart? That's an expensive drill.
Pretty awsome. But the end of the ad leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Why specifically advertise this as some geek tech accessory?
I really want some of that. Our toaster takes up too much counter space.
5- well, that seems to be more or less what it was designed for.
I haven't installed flash on this computer, so I'm completely mystified by these comments. I could switch to a different machine, but I'd rather see how many comments it'll take for me to even be able to guess what the hell you guys are talking about.
8: The bikini scene probably isn't safe for work anyway.
7, I just hate the use of the word "hack" to apply to every way to improve anything, as if tech geeks have a superior way of dealing with the world that the rest of us need to learn from. Hack your sneakers! Hack your faucet! Hack your calendar! Hack your workout! Got a wobbly dining room table? Hack it by putting a folded-up napkin under one of the legs!
I kind of like it if you conceptualize it as meaning "Whatever your problem is, hit it repeatedly with something heavy and sharp."
11: Let's crowd source another word to use!
(That is, ask some people on the internet for suggestions.)
Hack it by putting a folded-up napkin under one of the legs!
A papercrafted napkin.
Purpose-driven artisanal imagineering.
RH is going to come sue you on behalf of Disney.
Apparently they didn't trademark "imagineering." Never mind.
So, I think I'll hack my kitchen to hone in on some more coffee and the reason is because I'm reticent to get any work done right now.
My mom's house (where I am) is on well water and the coffee is so good. I'm not sure if it's really because of the well water but that's her claim.
(I really did order some sugru. And I really do expect great things. The gallery of ideas has a bunch of dumb/poorly executed projects but also some really fun ones. Rubber stamps! Phone covers! I can't wait.)
I am fondly remembering a completely incompetent desk I made for myself in college. There was a set of those shelves made of vertical metal strips running down the wall with slots for metal brackets in them, and boards on the brackets to make the shelves. I put a shelf at desk-height, got a piece of plywood for a desk surface, and cut two lengths of 2x4 to nail on for front legs. They were within an inch of the right length, but not much closer than that. Took a lot of stuff under the legs to make it work, and it only sort of worked.
For something like that, I think 'hack', in the pejorative sense, is the right word.
I just bought some too. My zapper thing for my car's central locking is broken - the little loop that attaches onto a key ring just fell apart one day. This stuff looks like it will make me a new loop and save me having to actually use the key in the (one) keyhole.
I really did order some sugru.
And I really am curious to hear how it performs.
Also, I prefer "hack" to "mod", which I've also seen in the same context.
I will report back. But I bet Messily's things will be more exciting than mine.
I bet I can think of some exciting things to do to my truck.
20, I think that's more of a "kludge".
You know, I wonder how long this stuff lasts, though. People are claiming they use it to fix power tools and such. It would be a problem to grab the chainsaw in two years and have it come apart mid-use.
This product totally shifts the Overton Adhesion Window.
Rather than fixing it permanently in place?
11 Got a wobbly dining room table?
Watch out! It may get Red Cards from the chairs and the hutch and then they'll be agitating to organize all of the other furniture in your house.
Call in the Pinkertons before it is too late!
Someone from a local corporation that used to be mostly about Mining and Minerals that the first major breakthrough in abrasive technology in 75 years happened recently. And then I found 5 pieces of sandpaper.
For a while there, it looked like Stormcrow broke the blog. Fortunately, Natilo had some Sugru.
11: don't get me wrong, I hate the reclamation/popularization process as much as the next guy, but that's not terribly far from the original meaning of it. Fixing or implementing _____ in a novel or expedient way.
Someone from a local corporation that used to be mostly about Mining and Minerals that the first major breakthrough in abrasive technology in 75 years happened recently
Unlikely, given the date of Fran Drescher's birth.
Things seem to be going well for nosflow at Bruce Vilanch University.
Let's crowd source another word to use!
We always used "n*gger-rig".
Seems suspiciously like the epoxy putty sticks you can buy down at the True Value hardware store, except more colorful. I've had mixed results with reattaching my wife's side mirror back onto her car with that stuff.
Epoxy dries hard, though, right? This stuff's supposed to be rubbery.
Interesting that it releases acid as it dries. I wonder how corrosive that stuff is?
38: LOL. and let's crowd-source, from rick perry, a name for what happens when some asshole gets the end of the joint all wet with spit, too!
38 was distressingly common in the vernacular of many in my community during my early-60s Midwestern childhood.
If only I had known about this stuff when my engine exploded.
I got my brother some of this stuff at Christmas but he hasn't used it yet (it might be out of date now). I'll probably pick up some myself one of these days as there's a shop that sells it in town.
34: well, not the original meaning, which involved horses.
I actually heard the joking-faux-PC phrase "Afro-engineered" before I ever heard the unfairly-deprecated-by-the-PC-police phrase it was said to be replacing.
49: Against all better judgment, I ask whether "unfairly-deprecated" is your assessment, or one you are ascribing to either your interlocutor or some imagined anti-PC "they"?
Like with any faux-PC thing, it was used with the implication that it's silly to deprecate the phrase for which it was a euphemism.
51: that's a pathetically limited view of the horse etymology, though. One might have had a park-hack, a covert-hack, a road-hack (OED, 1971), each a nonshowy but useful horse for the job. "Hack" there is dismissive because of the "Hackney cabhorse" etymology, but these horses aren't worn out, they're utilitarian. 1798 to 1872, in citations.
In current - 1970 & later, and probably earlier - riding slang, hacking is riding on trails so you won't burn out on ring and race work. That just could be a back-formation from the computer use, but given two centuries of meaning "utilitarian but enjoyable approach", assuming that *none* of that made it into a 1980s term in Boston is wierd. Not that a Yiddish term for bad carpentry isn't interesting.
53.last: the etymology for the compoutational use there is actually deeply suspect, since as far as I know the term in its technological sense emerged from the tech model railroad club in the early-mid '60s, and of course the computer term existed significantly earlier (and must have been attested sooner than) the mid '80s. So I guess we'll never know. I am suspicious of the equestrian etymology, though, and would be less surprised if it emerged from the distinct verb lineage. (hacking away at model train wiring? I dunno.)
54 cont'd: and in fact I seem to remember that the term was originally (in the TMRC context) somewhat pejorative, as the less-electronics-nerd-y members of the club would complain about the more-electronics-nerd-y members (the hackers) spending all their time fucking around with swtiching systems as opposed to making the whole layout look cool.
I can't speak with knowledge, but the equestrian etymology works for me. You go from utilitarian horse, to unglamorous worker (this one comes up mostly with writers -- a 'hack' writer rather than an artist), and then you get to 'hack' as applying to the unglamorous work generally.
"I'm no good at the artsy stuff, so you guys paint the scale model of Penn Station, and I'll hack together the switches," sounds like a natural evolution of the horsy origin of hack. (Although, come to think, once 'hack' started meaning 'to do technical work', I bet the 'hack into' usage was influenced by hacking=chopping.)
But this is what sounds right to me; I don't know.
But 55 is perfectly consistent with the equestrian meaning of function rather than show, whereas ax-hacking is odd for something that works well.
The oddity might be, who at MIT rode? But it isn't all that unusual, especially if you don't compete, you just hack around. Also, mothers, sisters, etc.
Levy has some discussion in the context of the TMRC, of course (~pg. 23). He does add this point: This latter term may have been suggested by ancient MIT lingo--the word "hack" had long been used to describe the elaborate college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise, such as covering the dome that overlooked the campus with reflecting foil.
who at MIT rode
I would bet that's not it -- that it was horse-hack only through unglamorous-workman-hack, as in hack writer.
Certainly no chance a yiddish word for bad carpentry could penetrate MIT.
56, 57: you people are crazy, except for the first sentence of 57.2.
Look at the first noun definition here, people! Just look at it!
I mean, you might as well claim it came from golf.
Oh god, which reminds me of the story: we used to have these hacker (haxx0r) meetups every month (before "meetup" was a term) loosely sponsored by 2600 magazine (they happened around the country in proximity to a bank of payphones, so people could in theory call each other, and were advertised in the magazine). So anyhow, this one month these total hippie dudes came up and asked (paraphrasing) "hey, bros! Is this the hacker meeting? Sweet! Anybody want to hack?", at which point they proceeded to pull out hackey sacks.
So there you go: maybe the term original came from hackey sacks.
62: I'm not getting your reading of that link. The first definition is hack=chop, but computers aren't mentioned until the third definition, which is a backformation from 'hacker'. And when you click on 'hacker', it says it's from horses through hack writer like I said.
(The hack=prank thing confuses me, though. I can't make that work either as chopping or horsy.)
65: I'm not talking about the page order when I say "the first noun definition"; this is the one I mean:
hack (n.1)
"tool for chopping," early 14c., from hack (v.1); cf. Dan. hakke "mattock," Ger. Hacke "pickax, hatchet, hoe." Meaning "an act of cutting" is from 1836; figurative sense of "a try, an attempt" is first attested 1898.
But why are you ignoring:
hack (v.2)
"illegally enter a computer system," by 1984; apparently a back formation from hacker. Related: Hacked; hacking. Earlier verb senses were "to make commonplace" (1745), "make common by everyday use" (1590s), "use (a horse) for ordinary riding" (1560s), all from hack (n.2).
It traces hack as in computer right back to hack as in horse.
67: But it attests only to 1984, which is obviously wrong. How much can you trust that entry?
67: I'm not ignoring it. Various other things I've read (cf. 58) lead me to disbelieve it.
Why can't it be both? It's not like word usage only has to have one linear ancestor.
Tweety's model railroad club story sounds plausible.
A more useful page is probably this one, which appears to be having the same argument with itself that we are having.
Flipping sides merrily, I suppose I could see hacking coming out of hack=chop through "figurative sense of 'a try, an attempt' " as in "take a hack at it." It doesn't really ring true to me, but it's not impossible.
I can't make hack=prank work at all. I mean, I know the meaning exists, I have in fact done at least one stupid thing requiring ladders and homemade safety harnesses that I referred to as a 'hack' (not a particularly entertaining one, sadly) but the etymology from either chop or horse throws me.
The google n-gram viewer is surpassingly useless for resolving this.
through "figurative sense of 'a try, an attempt' " as in "take a hack at it."
Funny, that's the thing that strikes truest to me.
I can't make hack=prank work at all. I mean, I know the meaning exists, I have in fact done at least one stupid thing requiring ladders and homemade safety harnesses that I referred to as a 'hack' (not a particularly entertaining one, sadly) but the etymology from either chop or horse throws me.
As per the "etymology must make sense" philosophy of usage previously articulated in the "hone in on" thread, (above, circa 2009), we can assume that your view is that "hack" meaning "prank" is somehow WRONG.
through "figurative sense of 'a try, an attempt' " as in "take a hack at it."
Doesn't that come from baseball? Or golf?
Okay, ready? It came from
Slang sense of "cope with" (such as in can't hack it) is first recorded in Amer.Eng. 1955, with a sense of "get through by some effort," as a jungle (cf. phrase hack after "keep working away at" attested from late 14c.)
76: in each of those they seem to track back to cutting through the motion, not the other way.
As per the "etymology must make sense" philosophy of usage previously articulated in the "hone in on" thread
I was going to ask, is there anything truly stupider than attempts at etymology through rational inference?
On the other hand I did this the other day, which does nothing to disabuse me of my view that "hone in on" is correct (and I've been collecting uses by august, highly educated individuals just to reassure myself of my correctness).
But computer hacking is fun as well as useful, which is true of the horse use but none of the others. Sure, it's possible that this use, with the right emotional valence for 200 years, had nothing to do with the computer sense, but why do you want it to be irrelevant?
LB, I would guess "hack" included "prank" after the hacking skills proved so useful for pranks. Also, why not jury-rig a prank?
What threw me about hack for prank is that one of those links indicated that it was definitely older than the TMRC usage. I could see it evolving the way you suggest, but I can't get from either chop or horse to prank without going through 'apply technical skills to do something interesting' first.
I should see if the book on MIT pranks I have can contribute any suspiciously thinly sourced information.
I love the barber pole story. I wonder if it's true. That and the pigeons/guy in a black and white shirt story.
Someone with better access than I should try to read "The Short History of the Terminology" part of this book, Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT by T. F. Peterson, Instiitute Historian.
It traces hack as in computer right back to hack as in horse.
Yet the OED arrays the definition for "hack" as in "gain access to files" under the definition given the following etymology: "Early Middle English hack-en , repr. Old English *haccian (whence tó-haccian to hack in pieces)
Ah, the short history in 84 is written by the author of the book I have. Just the thinly sourced additional information I was looking for!
83: They must both be in your book -- they were old and poorly sourced back in the late 80s.
The barber pole story: Once upon a time, a policeman spotted two guys carrying a barber pole. Assuming they'd stolen it, he stopped them. They gave him the phone number of the barber shop they'd just bought it from, he called, confirmed with the barber, and let them go. Five minutes later, another cop stopped the same guys, same thing happened. They suggested to the cop: "Look, we're planning to carry this around for quite a while, could you send out a bulletin saying it's okay?" The cop complied.
Immediately thereafter, the word went back to MIT and two-man teams stole every barber pole in the area, bringing them all back to campus, with the police smiling and waving as they passed.
89.1: I'm sure they are in the book. I just haven't looked at the book in at least a decade.
I do remember a thing about some kids arc-welding a green line train to the tracks, which seems less like a harmless prank and more like an astoundingly malicious piece of vandalism.
Pigeons: Hacker goes out to field in Cambridge wearing a broad striped black and white shirt starting in late spring. He blows a whistle and scatters food for the pigeons. He does this consistently throughout the spring and summer, habituating the pigeons to expect food.
On the first day of the football season, the ref walks out to Harvard's football field, blows his whistle, and is immediately mobbed by thousands of hungry pigeons.
But you must have heard both of those, haven't you? No guarantees about the accuracy of my versions, but the versions I heard probably weren't accurate either.
arc-welding a green line train to the tracks,
When I heard that one, it was thermite.
But the OED hack-from-cutting is uncommonly sparse in its citations.
91: oh yeah, I think I'd heard that one. It still doesn't hold a candle to the actual Harvard-Yale game prank from '81 or whatever.
The linked book strongly implies that the earliest MIT use was for pieasant time not studying, & that TMRC uses descend from that, with the latter uses starting in the 1950s. Still most consistent with a hacking ride, especially as horses were surprisingly common in ag until WWII (agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farm_tech.htm, also my grandparents).
One of our vast conceptual differences may be that I'm not assuming modern culture started in the 1960s (what's that Larkin poem?)
96: I saw that -- 'hacking' as 'fooling around'. That seems like a very reasonable way to get to all the modern meanings of 'hack' (with probably some influence from 'chop' on 'hack into'.)
I saw it, but I ignored it.
I'm also ignoring 97, since it reads as kind of dickish to me and I'm sure that's not right.
Heavens forbid I should be dickish on Unfogged.
If we're referring to the same book, and it's the one you cite as your source and it says hacking was a common term for pleasurable activity before the TMRC used it, where's your argument? Other than that you aren't familiar with a rural/pre-1960s term, so it must not be relevant?
it's the one you cite as your source
It's not. I said I was looking for the thinly sourced information in that book, but the actual information I repeated about the TMRC came from different books (notably Steven Levy's Hackers, which Stormcrow quoted above). As far as I remember the IHTFP book doesn't have a terribly large amount to say about the TMRC.
That said, neither of us has an argument, actually. We're making arguments for etymology based on anecdotal plausibility, which means we're making arguments based on nothing.
On the other hand, making points about word usage based on even well-attested etymology are generally pretty silly, and that's what I was doing when I originally responded to cryptic ned way back when, so it's not like somebody else started it.
On the fifth hand or whatever we're at, don't be a jerk. It's a stupid argument about a stupid point that won't be resolved, so the fact that you grew up in the 19th century and darn your own wheat or whatever is marginally relevant at best.
I lose track of when knowledge increases one's believability & when it doesn't.
97 did make me think of this great "hey you modern kids get off my lawn" screed from historian Carl Bridenbaugh in 1962. Fake accent used it here not too long back. Can we reasonably assume that future historians will be able to recapture enough of a sense of the past to enable them to feel and understand it and to convey to their readers what this past was even remotely like?
102: What the fuck is that fucking shit?
Isn't it obvious? The first usage must be Cartesian. It's as if you people have never heard of putting Descartes before the horse.
Also, Steve Jobs died, twitter says.
||
This seems like the right thread... NMM to Steve Jobs.
|>
This article in the MIT Alumni Magazine from 2003 seems to have Leibowitz's (he wrote the section of the book I reference in 84) version of the history of the term at MIT:
The fifties saw the beginnings of the MIT term hack. The origin of the term in the MIT slang is elusive-different meanings have come in and out of use, and it was rarely used in print before the 1970s. Furthermore, the use of hack varied among different groups of students at MIT. "Hacking" was used by many MIT students to describe any activity undertaken to avoid studying-this could include goofing off, playing bridge, talking to friends, or going out. Performing pranks was also called hacking, but only as part of the broader definition. In the middle to late fifties, additional meanings for the word hack were developed by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, including an article or project without constructive end or an unusual and original solution to a problem, such as inventing a new circuit for a switching system. In the late fifties, students on campus began to use the word as a noun to describe a prank.
Damn you Moby! (Also, has anyone checked to make sure Gr/uber's okay?)
112: A short post: So it goes. So it goes.
There is a relatively extensive Wikipedia article specifically on Hacks at MIT.
102 is an appropriate response to 109/110.
I'm pretty surprisingly bummed about 109/110. A hell of a lot of my life has involved apple products in one way or another.
116: I wouldn't have figured you for that big a Beatles fan.
Earliest MIT version of "hack" I find in print is "The Electric Car Hack" from 1968.
Nah, seriously, though. [ Long comment about the startling extent that my life has been influenced by Jobs and his various companies deleted because fuck you (not you. The general-purpose you.) ]
Oh man. I feel like this is simultaneously one of the least-surprising death announcements ever, and remarkably emotionally potent. I've been a Mac user since 1987 -- it's hard to even imagine how thoroughly its design has influenced how I think and work.
I found this one (original Mac launch) to be quite poignant.
Oh wow, the video in 125 is quite something.
I think the music is from Chariots of Fire, which at the time was a fairly recent movie (from 1981, IIRC).
Sifu and Witt understand.
Bye, Steve.
I think there's a got to be a non-negligible chance that Jobs will be remembered as one of this era's robber barons (as distinct from captains of industry), right? I mean, I'm not saying that I'd want to bet on it or anything. Still, I've been surprised in the past few hours at how uncritical the comments about him have been. Maybe I'm missing something -- I mean that sincerely, by the way, as opposed to as a dickish throwaway -- but he seems like someone who clearly changed the world, probably for the most part for the better, but also a profoundly greedy individual without even a shred of a social conscience.
...but also a profoundly greedy individual without even a shred of a social conscience.
Everybody has their little weaknesses.
Also, Standpipe!
Maybe it hasn't been hours. More like an hour, I guess. And that's the part of my comment that matters.
It's disorienting and dismaying to lose one of your points of reference. You're so used to saying things like, "It's three blocks that way and take a left at the Steve Jobs", but you can't say that anymore, because there's no more Steve Jobs.
Or maybe it's that his achievements completely outweigh his greed?
DISCLAIMER: I did not know Steve Jobs personally even a little bit, and for all I know he was a world-historical dick.
A lot of my affection for Steve Jobs comes from my memories of the old Macintosh, and not Apple's more recent products. I think it really was quite an accomplishment, both the user interface and the engineering that made it work.
You know what it is? It reminds me of when John Lennon died. Jobs was that kind of a cultural icon, I guess, and people are grieving over having lost, as SB says, a touchstone in their lives. His warts are completely beside the point, then.
Look, I feel bad for myself. I have lost a chunk of my childhood, and am separated from the world I grew up in nontrivially. But beyond that, every time somebody used an Apple product instead of one from [ whatever competitor who didn't get the usability thing ] or every time somebody was faced with a windowing system rather than a CLI, their life was made incrementally, minorly better. Multiply that by millions of people over the course of decades, and that's a nontrivial contribution to reducing human misery. Now, did he also increase human misery in nontrivial ways? Dudes a billionaire. How does that not happen? But the fact the he didn't donate ostentatiously publicy does not seem to me to be a particularly good indicator of his social worth; who's our model? Andrew Carnegie?
Also: Pixar.
I'm surprised to find that I have pretty much no reaction worth publicly stating to Jobs' death, aside from this non-reaction. I'd probably feel the same about similar news about Bill Gates. I probably at the very least should be more curious about the people who've founded and run the big corporations.
My facebook feed has some heated arguments over whether Jobs is one of history's greatest monsters or the man who gave us the Arab Spring.
135: my immediate association was with the death of Jim Henson.
I'm just sorry he died at such a young age. I'd hoped that his retirement would allow him to recover somewhat. Feel badly for his family.
I come here to escape my FB feed, where some of my academic co-religionists are embarrassing the fuck out of themselves in their efforts to eyeroll the very idea that Steve Jobs was anything other than a filthy capitalist like every other CEO.
135: my immediate association was with the death of Jim Henson.
Yes! You are thinking my thoughts precisely. Except the one about my father's dog's ailing health. I bet you didn't think that one.
142: it may have taken a very different form.
128: Are there really many, possibly any, robber barons anymore? I mean in popular reputation, not in terms of actions bankers and corporate leaders have taken. There was a pretty widespread critique of corporate power going around in the late 19th-early 20th century, and in mainstream publications, not just isolated within the (relatively large) Populist and Progressive movements.* There are people like Taibbi writing in a similar vein today, but I don't think they have all that wide an audience.
*Yes, yes, there's debate over whether you can call Progressivism a movement.
Wait, Steve Jobs dying is like John Lennon dying? Huh.
Oh, here's the Jobs thread. I was wondering why the announcement in the other thread got no traction. Anyway, Sifu gets it exactly right, other than the part about Jim Henson.
I'm trying to think who else besides Henson and Jobs that belongs to my personal set of eigenfolk, and then supposing I succeed, to warn them of their untimely demise.
I think there's a got to be a non-negligible chance that Jobs will be remembered as one of this era's robber barons
Care to say why? Where do you get "a profoundly greedy individual without even a shred of a social conscience"? Just that he wasn't a big philanthropist?
147: wow, that's a question I hadn't considered, and which I suspect will now keep me up at night.
It's a good thing Buckaroo Banzai is fictional and thus immortal, I guess.
I knew he had pancreatic cancer, which nobody survives, and I don't follow tech news so for the last three years I kept being surprised he wasn't dead yet.
Douglas Adams, probably.
It's like, if you're a musician, you have to die at 27, but otherwise anything under 60 is OK.
151: oh shit! Yes. That's totally it. Man.
Crap. I hope William Gibson's okay.
148: I was thinking of especially ruthless business practices, Chinese factories notorious for serious depravity, and a lack of notable philanthropy (which might have been private). That said, I'm going to shut up now, as I don't want to back myself into a corner and end up arguing a position I don't hold. If Gonerill's FB feed is filled with predictable critiques, that's good enough for me. (Really, I was just struck by Sifu's and other people's reactions. But now that I've latched onto the cultural touchstone thing, I think I have a better sense of what's going on. Unless I don't.)
The problem with secular gods is, they die. Now tell me, to whom shall I make the burnt offerings?
147: I was pretty upset when Charles Schulz died.
Celebrity Deaths Sorted By Age
If Guid/o v/an Ro/ssum dies, I'm gonna be pretty bummed. Unless La/rry W/all goes at the same time.
154: You know, you don't need to burn everything. We like a little Greek yogurt now and then, like anybody. Maybe a muffin or two.
especially ruthless business practices
"Especially" ruthless?
I think Jobs compares favorably to most billionaires, doesn't he? Maybe that's damning with faint praise, I guess. Still, compare a Jobs to a, I dunno, Sam Walton*, and I think it's clear which the world could use more of, and which fewer.
*Or Carlos Slim or Ellison or the Koch brothers or etc etc etc. To pick more harmless names, how does he stack up against the Google founders (who are admittedly still young?) Against Jeff Bezos? Against Michael Dell? Mark Zuckerberg (also young)?
157: Needs Alexander the Great. And Mozart.
Evariste Galois! Why didn't anyone tell me?!
For literally no reason and shut up that's why, this year I have found particular discomfort in the knowledge that Dietrich Bonhoeffer died when he was 39.
(ObPatriarchy: No women mentioned yet.)
165: Way to dis the ghost of Marie Curie.
166: think of this way: if she wreaks vengeance upon him, he's kinda right!
Against Jeff Bezos?
I'd call that a draw in the eyes of many.
For the Thomas Edison or Henry Ford of his time, there's always this guy, inventor of Paypal, and of the electric car, and now intending to colonize Mars, apparently. Worth half a million dollars by the time he was 29.
every time somebody was faced with a windowing system rather than a CLI, their life was made incrementally, minorly better
Say what?
158: I already had my period of mourning when Tim Pe/ters (evidently) decided to move on from things Python.
168: I think many Gizmodo commenters would take issue with "inventor" in that description.
169: admit it, you use a window manager from time to time.
[Joni] Mitchell is currently receiving treatment for the controversial condition called "Morgellons syndrome". Mitchell spoke to the Los Angeles Times on April 22, 2010 about the disease, saying, "I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space, but my health's the best it's been in a while." She described Morgellons as a "slow, unpredictable killer" but said she is determined to fight the disease.
First Billy Koch, now Joni Mitchell. Who's next? There must be some pattern here.
169: Would it help if he'd added "who needs to be able switch programs quickly in the event someone comes into their office" after "somebody"?
170: Oh, alright, fine. First production level electric car, or whatever. Of the modern era. Without anything beyond a Bachelor's degree. Guy creeps me out, is all I'm saying.
171: He commented on a modulo operator bug earlier this year, so he doesn't seem to be completely gone.
176: to be fair, a lot of '80s DOS games had that fake spreadsheet switch set to one of the f keys.
174: We had a thread here several years ago about Morgellons.
But also:
Morgellons is not recognized as a unique disorder, so there is currently no list of symptoms or differential diagnosis for Morgellons that is generally accepted by the medical community. Patients usually self-diagnose based on media reports and the internet.
This is reminding me that one of the things I find most disorienting about my current job is the dearth of Macs. It's so odd to walk into a tech company's offices and not see them everywhere.
179: Wouldn't know. In the 80s, I had an Apple IIc.
Morgellons! Best new psychosomatic disease in a while, apparently.
177: I don't really get it, but okay.
Here, be creeped out by this guy.
Guy creeps me out, is all I'm saying.
This reads as a total non sequitor to me. Electric car >> creepy?
Ah, that's why it sounded familiar. I believe I wrote a comment here several years ago in a thread.
160: like I said, I'm bowing out now, as I didn't mean to suggest that we should be criticizing Jobs. I was just caught off guard by the reactions I was seeing. My facebook feed is very different than Gonerill's, apparently.
As for how he compares? To those guys? On the ruthlessness scale? Well, as Tweety said above, billionaires are a ruthless bunch. But most of those folks -- at least the ones who are out of their 30s -- have given a shitton of their money away, haven't they? Jobs, by contrast, was notorious for hoarding his wealth. Having said that, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that he was piling cash into the coffers of whatever charity meant something to him, just on the sly.
189: You might say he's just floating away from the community.
I believe I wrote a comment here several years ago in a thread.
Or so the mullahs would have you believe.
175: Yeah. Fingernails being too long.
169: admit it, you use a window manager from time to time.
Yes (I'm using an apparently moribund one right now!) but I wouldn't say that every time I use a window manager rather than a CLI, my life has been improved (especially since at least one of the windows my window manager is managing at any time is running a terminal emulator giving me a CLI).
193: I will cheerfully back down on including you among the someones I was referring to upthread. I'll also exclude Josh, who I am approximately 93% sure had an Amiga as a kid, if he likes.
194.last: Nope! Timex Sinclair 1000 to start (not that I ever did anything with it other than play a flight simulator), my dad's CP/M machine (portable! with a handle on top!), then PCs up until I inherited a pizza-box Mac LC in college. At school it was Apple IIe's and Commodore 64s.
186: It's not the electric car thing alone. He appears to be a bit of a prodigy in a certain realm of endeavors. He runs a (the?) private company that steps in for NASA by supplying the International Space Station, and his present goal is to make a reusable spaceship to Mars, passenger-carrying, in order eventually to colonize it, he hopes, because he feels this is the next important step in human evolution: interplanetary travel. Or as the wiki article puts it, multiplanetary life.
It's either creepy or brilliant, and he looks to be sort of brilliant, and he's only 40. I don't know what to make of it at all.
It's times like this that I think, "And Dick Cheney still lives.".
And oh my god the keyboard on the Timex Sinclair was *such* a piece of crap. So bad.
197: If you can call that living. Mumble Camelot mumble "Triumphant, perhaps, but not happy" mumble.
198: it was one of those blister type right?
200: Yeah. Clearly nobody at the company that built it ever tried to type on one.
Okay, here's the nice thing I can say about Steve Jobs: My cousin is mixed up with all of this TED stuff now, and has met a bunch of these guys. And he says they're all basically the same: smart people who had one brilliant idea, and are now desperate to have another one, to prove that they were not just lucky. The money doesn't really mean so much at this point, they just want a legacy. Steve Jobs was a smart guy with a brilliant idea. It was a meta-idea about how to put himself in the position to choose among the best ideas of many other people. And he accomplished that very well.
Well, you wouldn't want to see what I wrote on FB. Sometimes you have to have insipid if you're not going to have honest.
Which is not to discount the deep insights of your cousin who has totally met a bunch of people.
I'd take neither from you if you're offering.
And he says they're all basically the same: smart people who had one brilliant idea, and are now desperate to have another one, to prove that they were not just lucky. The money doesn't really mean so much at this point, they just want a legacy.
Well of course, just look at the response to someone who's had TWO brilliant ideas, like Elon Musk.
I have a whole bunch of cousins, but most of them have not met more than a handful of people.
I am, of course, still waiting for my one brilliant idea. All I ever get are intriguing notions and sinus headaches.
I only saw Jobs at one conference, but it was in rather a small room -- he was pushing WebObjects, so if it wasn't his nadir during my working life, it was close.
Damn he had charisma. Also, WebObjects looked pretty fine. NeXT was lovely.
My dad had a NeXT workstation for a while. When the printer ran out of paper a British-accented voice would announce this fact.
185: indeed, Burt Rutan is truly amazing. I've always wondered about his asymmetric designs, though... what are the handling qualities of an airplane like that?
My cousin is mixed up with all of this TED stuff now
I love the way this is phrased.
My (lack of) reaction to the Jobs news was similar to fake accent's. I wonder if there's a generational divide here.
I think I'm more or less the same age as Tweety and Standpipe, just less accomplished.
I'm much less disturbed by the posthumous hagiography of Jobs than by the similar treatment of many celebrities. At least he accomplished things that arguably improved the quality of life of many people, unlike most celebrities that get similar treatment (cough, Princess Di, cough). Still, it'd be nice if true philanthropists got the same treatment.
Do we have any active commenters these days who are my age or younger? I know we have in the past, but I can't think of any who are currently active. Of course, I haven't been all that active a commenter myself lately.
I think I might be younger than you?
No, you're definitely older, though not by much.
For reference, I turned 27 last week.
And they let you drive? It must be the hat.
You know what it is? It reminds me of when John Lennon died. ... His warts are completely beside the point, then.
I know you didn't mean to imply that John Lennon was flawed in some way.
My (lack of) reaction to the Jobs news was similar to fake accent's.
I must admit that I was pretty unmoved by this news and by rights I should be right in the bulls eye for Jobs worship - in my late 20s when the Apple II was released; enthusiastic computer user without the patience for being a deep techie. But still...
Successful capitalist dies, weather much the same as yesterday more or less sums up my reaction. Up to his Apple comeback I sort of thought of him in the same bracket as John Z Delorean.
I feel bad for anyone dying of cancer, and worse for those so young. I have to think that at least he wasn't some poor subaltern bastard, unable to obtain palliative care due to disgusting puritanism.
I have to think that at least he wasn't some poor subaltern bastard, unable to obtain palliative care due to disgusting puritanism.
True. And it's been pointed out that his condition might well have been curable in the early stages if he hadn't spent nine months arsing around with alternative "medicine" before he got a proper doctor.
Does anybody know if Jobs had a sense of humour?
