Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

[Greyeagle]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

I F*KING HATE SIX SIGMA. It's common sense that requires a colossal amount of effort to adhere (no pun intended) to the standards and analyze performance to create new standards.

To ultimately create the world's best buggy whip.

[BassAle]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

please forgive the following nerdyness

I am a relatively late comer to the Apple family -- never had and Apple II or original Mac. I was a graduate student in computer science from 2002 to 2004, and I did most of my work on Linux. I had been reading about the new Unix-based OS X near the end of my undergrad, but never really bothered to try it out beyond a beta copy of OS X 10.0 that I installed on an iBook in my advisor's lab. It had some issued but did show some promise (I pretty much thought Macs were toys though and thought you did real work on Linux or Solaris).

I was doing research work developing supercomputing technology used by the U.S. Army to simulate hypersonic missile flight, and we were designing a new test system. I benchmarked the simulation code on a bunch of systems, and was pretty much sold on first generation AMD Opterons, and then I got a pre-release 64-bit Intel Xeon that performed great. Intel was ready to subsidize a new system by giving us half of the new processors for free. But our sponsor had other plans.

The main researcher that did the simulations was a huge Mac fan, and he and the main programmer flew out to Cupertino and worked with some Apple engineers on performance tuning and said the G5 smoked everything else (I couldn't duplicate these results). Anyway, we ended up building a test system with 512 G5 processors, and our partners built one with about 3,000 G5 processors.

As the ink was drying on the PO (almost literally) I flew out to WWDC 04 as a Linux guy surrounded by Mac fanatics. I was a Mac newbie (I wouldn't have one on my desk for a few more months). Got a VIP pass to the keynote (which just meant I didn't have to wait in the insanely ridiculously long line, just a long line, and got to sit about 20 rows back) and I drank the kool aid Steve was serving. The trip culminated in a trip to the "Mother Ship" -- a keg party at the Apple campus with Jimmy Eats World for entertainment followed by drinking at a brewpub next to campus with a bunch of Apple employees after the buses took everyone else from the conference back to San Francisco. I was blown away by the developer tools and APIs for OS X 10.4, which was introduced at this conference. That week in the summer of 2004 transformed me into someone that was skeptical of the whole project to an Apple fanboy that couldn't wait for the delivery truck to roll up with our hundreds of XServes.

I really enjoyed using and programming on Macs, but after working with two large XServe clusers I didn't have a high opinion on OS X for server use (unless you were a small business with nothing but a hand full of Macs to support, it certainly wasn't great for a large high performance computing system), but it has been the best desktop operating system by far over that time. (Apple seems to agree with me since they eventually killed the XServes.)

I moved from research contract work for the Army (which I did full time for a bit after finishing grad school) to scientific programming and a genetics research institution that is heavily Mac on the research side of the house, but the department I was going to was 100% Windows at the time. I considered not taking the job if I couldn't use OS X or Linux on my desktop (nearly all the software I write needs to run on Linux -- Windows made no sense for me), they let me have the first Mac in the department (the department had legacy project management software that was Windows only so at first I had a second computer just to run that, and then I switched to a VM when the Intel Macs came out, and now it is mostly web-based), and now there is a large group of us in the department -- and we like to make fun of the people doing .Net programming (unless it is F#).

I don't go a day without using multiple Apple products -- my work computer, my home computer, my iPhone, iPod (still holding out on the iPad, but not much longer). It is hard to think of another company that even comes close when measured by the impact it has had on my daily life.

[Twitch Boy]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

The irony is delicious.

*****http://i.imgur.com/5kjVw.jpg******

[ExileOnDaytonStreet]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

Evidently Charles Napier died yesterday as well.

[dxmnkd316]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

Obama said it best: "There may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."

This is true for me. I got a text from someone on my iPhone.

[Kepler]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

"There may be no greater tribute to his success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."

Also said of Thomas Crapper.

[jmh]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

Lost in the Steve Jobs shuffle:

Fred Shuttlesworth, 89, reverend and leader in the civil rights movement who vowed to "kill segregation or be killed by it"

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

Obama said it best: "There may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."

This is true for me. I got a text from someone on my iPhone.

Pretty sure he didn't invent the TV, so I'm safe here.

[dxmnkd316]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

also said of thomas crapper.

a

[Kepler]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

The Onion, baby. The Onion.

Link won't work because USCHO sucks. Here it is spelled out:

"www.theonion.com/articles/last-american-who-knew-what-the-fuck-he-was-doing,26268"

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 shit 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.

[The Rube]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

Also said of Thomas Crapper.

That legend is partially true. Per wiki (and I have read it elsewhere before wiki was around, most notably "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" book series; great series, btw):

It has often been claimed in popular culture that the slang term for human bodily waste, "crap", originated with Thomas Crapper because of his association with lavatories. The most common version of this story is that American servicemen stationed in England during World War I saw his name on cisterns and used it as army slang, i.e., "I'm going to the crapper".[8]

The word crap is actually of Middle English origin; and hence predates its application to bodily waste. Its first application to bodily waste, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in 1846 under a reference to a crapping ken, or a privy, where ken means a house.[8]

Its most likely etymological origin is a combination of two older words, the Dutch krappen: to pluck off, cut off, or separate; and the Old French crappe: siftings, waste or rejected matter (from the medieval Latin crappa, chaff).[8]

[Handyman]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

Pretty sure he didn't invent the TV, so I'm safe here.

I own nothing by Apple so I am beyond safe

[Ralph Baer]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

I own nothing by Apple so I am beyond safe

I learned about it on USCHO. I wonder if he was the one who used to close threads after 1000 replies. Didn't that stop about the same time as he retired from Apple.

[goldy_331]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

I own nothing by Apple so I am beyond safe

I thought you had a used iPad you bought from a friend?

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead (Part Whatever v2.0)

I own nothing by Apple so I am beyond safe

Yeah, I can say that too. I don't like Apple, I refuse to buy their products.