OT: Steve Jobs just died

[Mitchell Coffey]

http://www.apple.com/

[wiki trix]

On Oct 5, 4:47 pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> http://www.apple.com/

so what?

[David Iain Greig]

wiki trix <wiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>

> wrote:
>> http://www.apple.com/
>
> so what?

Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.

--D. 'and so do you, right?'

[wiki trix]

On Oct 5, 7:28 pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:

I met with a few folks from apple, including Jobs back in the the fall
of 1987. Those were the halcyon days. National semiconductor, xilinx,
etc. Made a lot of money on dev contracts. Never met the Woz. I met
with a few other big names from that time, as well. My partners had
lunch with Gates, but I was on a trip and missed that... Never met
him, but I do live a short distance from where he lives, and i know
many people who know him. Back then, I had been doing a lot of
software development on CPM, DRDOS, MSDOS, they had all contracted me
back then. Cromenco, CDC, and Digital too. Jobs was good. Focused.
Knew whatt drove his market. Very smart. He is one of the few success
stories in computing that I can say had a gift. Many others were just
lucky. But Jobs had a fantastic gift. He knew what he was doing. Sorta
like Jimmy Page. Dead on. But he died. That's it. So I say... so what?

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/05/2011 07:47 PM, Mitchell Coffey wrote:
>
> http://www.apple.com/

Wonder if he, Woz, and Captain Crunch made one last Blue Box crank call
to the Vatican before he passed. If so, hopefully Ratz took it in stride
as a call from a visionary. Sure Xerox did most of the heavy lifting,
but Jobs put it together in a very appealing package, before Gates made
it cheesy and crass.

A friend of mine had one of the original Macintosh machines back in the
day via his dad. It was sweet. Now decades later I watch TV shows via a
42" HDTV connected to a very small yet powerful Mac Mini. Things have
changed thanks to Jobs.

Jobs made the daemon possessed Darwin OS very aesthetic. I stand humbly
by my sig line right now. Jobs packaged Unix (Mach/BSD) very nicely.
Aqua is beautiful.

He was the top-most Silicon Pirate (arrrrgh matey!). He actually put
PARC's vision on the desktop. He also pushed the envelope for small
music playing devices and smartphones. Kudos to him!


--
*Hemidactylus*
Darwin is daemonic

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/05/2011 10:28 PM, David Iain Greig wrote:

[snip]

> Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> --D. 'and so do you, right?'

Steve Jobs made a huge impact on the computing world. He stood upon the
shoulders of giants before him, of course, and had Woz in the early
days, but he was a pioneer with aesthetic standards.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 5, 7:28 pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:

David... is it OK that this is ***OFF TOPIC*** ???
Hypocrite

[Vend]

On Oct 6, 4:47 am, wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 5, 7:28 pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:
>
> > wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >>http://www.apple.com/
>
> > > so what?
>
> > Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> > --D. 'and so do you, right?'
>
> I met with a few folks from apple, including Jobs back in the the fall
> of 1987.

Jobs wasn't at Apple in 1987.
You are making things up.

[wiki trix]

Background was... back in 1987, Jobs was looking at how to get faster
graphics hardware for his Pixar projects. I was consulting (hardware/
software) at that time for Inmos (Transputer) and National
Semiconductor DP8500 RGP). At that time, those two combined
technologies were considered by some to be the best prospects for 3D
graphics rendering performance. Jobs was clever, driven, and
controlling, a bit of a jerk, etc. But he was not an engineer. So I
laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth. I also find it a bit
annoying that he is almost seen as a spritual leader by his groopies
and followers. But then again, Apple users have been in a cult state
for a long time now. Since 1984, Apple products were all over-priced
walled gardens. The last good product created by Apple was the IIe.
Bottom line is he is dead now, and I don't care about that any more
than all the other people who happened to die yesterday. I am sorry
that he suffered, as I would be for anyone who suffered. But this
media hype and adoration about his death is just stupid.

[wiki trix]

I never said he was working at Apple at the time. I just saw your post
here after posting another message with more details on that.

[Steven L.]

"Mitchell Coffey" <mitchell...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:j6iqaf$2op$1...@dont-email.me:

> http://www.apple.com/

A truly great man.
R.I.P.





-- Steven L.

[raven1]

Dick.

[Steven L.]

"wiki trix" <wiki...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:3b9f25ed-f722-4df6...@b6g2000vbz.googlegroups.com:

If it weren't for Jobs, when do you suppose we would ever have had the
graphical user interface on virtually all personal computers? In 1982,
Xerox wasn't interested in productizing what PARC had done, except for
some feeble efforts with the vastly overpriced Alto. IBM just didn't
get it--I remember what their user interfaces looked like.

Jobs had seen the advantages of the GUI for non-techies. The Lisa
failed but the Mac succeeded, and now every computer you buy comes with
a GUI. That sure wasn't true in 1983.

One other major thing that Jobs showed the world was that computer
products should have style and be esthetically appealing.

Prior to Steve Jobs, style was not something anyone ever thought of with
computers--computers were utilitarian boxes. We thought of style only
in the context of clothing and automobiles. People don't just buy
clothing to keep warm, they don't just buy cars as transportation, they
buy them to reflect their personality and even to make a social
statement.

But Jobs made computers beautiful. He styled them just like auto makers
style cars.
And now, when a new smartphone or a new tablet gets reviewed in the
trade press, they don't just talk about computing power or networking
speed. They talk about how esthetically pleasing the product is to the
eye.

That's one thing Jobs did that no one else had done:
Stylish computers.



-- Steven L.

[Friar Broccoli]

On Oct 5, 7:47 pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> http://www.apple.com/

Here's a link to Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. The whole
thing is an inspiration. After minute 9:09 is most relevant.
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Here's a link to the text. Minute 9:09 begins:
"My third story is about death. ..."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1422863/posts

[wiki trix]

> If it weren't for Jobs, when do you suppose we would ever have had the
> graphical user interface on virtually all personal computers?  In 1982,
> Xerox wasn't interested in productizing what PARC had done, except for
> some feeble efforts with the vastly overpriced Alto.  IBM just didn't
> get it--I remember what their user interfaces looked like.

It would have happened within a short time without Apple. Old ideas
only became feasable when CPU became sufficient. Apple was at the
right place and the right time. Alan Kay developed the window/icon/
menu/mouse idea in the 70's at Xerox PARC. The mouse had even older
origins. MIT copied Alan Kay's ideas and developed X Windows in 1983,
Apple copied the concepts in 1984 with the Mac, and then Microsoft
copied the idea as well to create Windows 1.0 in 1985. Apple was one
of many doing the same stuff at about the same time. They were not the
first, nor the most successful with their Mac system.

> One other major thing that Jobs showed the world was that computer
> products should have style and be esthetically appealing.
>
> Prior to Steve Jobs, style was not something anyone ever thought of with
> computers--computers were utilitarian boxes.  We thought of style only
> in the context of clothing and automobiles.  People don't just buy
> clothing to keep warm, they don't just buy cars as transportation, they
> buy them to reflect their personality and even to make a social
> statement.

A styled computer (or car or ... whatever) to reflect my personality?
How sad is that???

> But Jobs made computers beautiful.  He styled them just like auto makers
> style cars.
> And now, when a new smartphone or a new tablet gets reviewed in the
> trade press, they don't just talk about computing power or networking
> speed.  They talk about how esthetically pleasing the product is to the
> eye.
>
> That's one thing Jobs did that no one else had done:
> Stylish computers.

True. So he was the ralph lauren ( or perhaps the DeLorean) of the
computer world. Big deal.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/06/2011 07:12 AM, Steven L. wrote:
>
>
> "Mitchell Coffey" <mitchell...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:j6iqaf$2op$1...@dont-email.me:
>
>> http://www.apple.com/
>
> A truly great man.
> R.I.P.

I wonder if there will be an uptick in demand for the TV movie "Pirates
of Silicon Valley" which was a loose offshoot of the book _Fire in the
Valley_. Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs and does kinda look a bit like him.
Not sure how close the movie was to reality, but it covered some of the
highlights. Anthony Michael Hall was a perfect fit for Gates. Torvalds
was absent from the movie, of course, but he played no small role in
changing the overarching (read *corporate*) philosophy of how people
approach software. Pioneers like Stallman and Torvalds helped make
software readily available for the masses.

Jobs certainly made a huge impact upon the digital world, but others
came before him and others after him. He had an eye for aesthetics and
packaging and raised the bar for quality that others try to emulate (see
Windows 7 GUI and KDE). But he locked people into both software and
hardware platforms, which was good from a quality control standpoint,
but limited freedom of action and cost a lot of end-user money.

The patent wars begun they have...

[Paul J Gans]

I regarded him as a master salesman and a genius at industrial design.
He'll be missed in that there are few left who can produce what he
produced and sell it as well.

But I agree with you in that back then were the halcyon days. I
had a home built box from the Digital Group, later replaced by one
from Cromemco. And we all hacked CPM. It was the only way to
make drivers work.

--
--- Paul J. Gans

[Paul J Gans]

'Tisn't. Death is one part of the mechanism of evolution.

[Paul J Gans]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>I wonder if there will be an uptick in demand for the TV movie "Pirates
>of Silicon Valley" which was a loose offshoot of the book _Fire in the
>Valley_. Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs and does kinda look a bit like him.
>Not sure how close the movie was to reality, but it covered some of the
>highlights. Anthony Michael Hall was a perfect fit for Gates. Torvalds
>was absent from the movie, of course, but he played no small role in
>changing the overarching (read *corporate*) philosophy of how people
>approach software. Pioneers like Stallman and Torvalds helped make
>software readily available for the masses.

Consider that the Android platform is way ahead of Apple in sales,
and that Android is built on a linux base, I'd say that you were
understating the effect of Stallman and Torvalds.

And don't forget to add in most dedicated devices such as routers.
A majority of those work on linux too.

What we are seeing is an analog of the Cambrian explosion. New
developments in life opened up entirely new vistas -- and those
new vistas (the word "niche" sounds too small) were rapidly
populated. Apple stuff was beautiful, but other stuff was
more functional.

[Friar Broccoli]

On Oct 6, 12:51 pm, Paul J Gans <gan...@panix.com> wrote:

> *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >I wonder if there will be an uptick in demand for the TV movie "Pirates
> >of Silicon Valley" which was a loose offshoot of the book _Fire in the
> >Valley_. Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs and does kinda look a bit like him.
> >Not sure how close the movie was to reality, but it covered some of the
> >highlights. Anthony Michael Hall was a perfect fit for Gates. Torvalds
> >was absent from the movie, of course, but he played no small role in
> >changing the overarching (read *corporate*) philosophy of how people
> >approach software. Pioneers like Stallman and Torvalds helped make
> >software readily available for the masses.

.

> Consider that the Android platform is way ahead of Apple in sales,

What - they're selling Android now?

[Steven L.]

"Paul J Gans" <gan...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:j6kmak$ora$7...@reader1.panix.com:

> *Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >I wonder if there will be an uptick in demand for the TV movie "Pirates
> >of Silicon Valley" which was a loose offshoot of the book _Fire in the
> >Valley_. Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs and does kinda look a bit like him.
> >Not sure how close the movie was to reality, but it covered some of the
> >highlights. Anthony Michael Hall was a perfect fit for Gates. Torvalds
> >was absent from the movie, of course, but he played no small role in
> >changing the overarching (read *corporate*) philosophy of how people
> >approach software. Pioneers like Stallman and Torvalds helped make
> >software readily available for the masses.
>
> Consider that the Android platform is way ahead of Apple in sales,
> and that Android is built on a linux base, I'd say that you were
> understating the effect of Stallman and Torvalds.

The Android platform currently has 44% of U.S. smartphone sales.,

But no single vendor of smartphones is doing anywhere near as well.

The iPhone continues to outsell every other make of smartphone,
capturing about one-third of the U.S. market.

> And don't forget to add in most dedicated devices such as routers.
> A majority of those work on linux too.
>
> What we are seeing is an analog of the Cambrian explosion. New
> developments in life opened up entirely new vistas -- and those
> new vistas (the word "niche" sounds too small) were rapidly
> populated. Apple stuff was beautiful, but other stuff was
> more functional.

Apple's capitalization is comparable to ExxonMobil's.

I don't think they're in any danger of becoming an endangered species
any time soon.




-- Steven L.

[David Iain Greig]

wiki trix <wiki...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, because I am not bothered by it.

I like your new signature line, it suits you.

--D.

[raven1]

I'm not convinced of that as far as Android is concerned. I had a
Droid 2 smartphone for a little over a month, and it was one of the
worst, buggiest devices I've ever owned. Boot time of well over a
minute, random crashes, and a touchscreen that would freeze for up to
20 minutes at the slightest hint of moisture, including being in the
same room as a pot of boiling water, or talking on it for more than a
few minutes on a humid day. (Verizon made matters worse by telling me
they would only replace it with the same model; I had to threaten to
break my contract to get them to send me a non-smart phone).

[Glenn]

"David Iain Greig" <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote in message
news:cabal-j6ku3v$8sh$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...

He's done more than his share of creating OT threads.
And wasn't this the guy who ran around a little while ago like an idiot
claiming "you don't know where I'm posting from, ha ha"? I could be wrong.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Apple hasn't died off though. Heck they are about to unveil a new iPhone
to much fanfare no doubt.

There is certainly a lot of competition in the tech markets. If people
don't want to get locked into Apple, we have other choices. I use Mac OS
X on a lower end entry level Mac Mini and like it, yet I type this on an
Ubuntu platform. And I'm messing with the not quite ready for prime-time
PC-BSD9 (Beta3).

I like Android on my cell phone. It's cool. Supposedly Android (and
likewise Ubuntu) are getting ported to the bastardized, red-headed
stepchild of HP, the TouchPad.

Android is a viable alternative to iOS. That takes nothing away from
users of iPhones and iPads, who obviously love their products too.

Now Microsoft...there's someone we can all gang up on :-)

[grumble, snort, Windows...BSoD...Ballmer...Annoying Paperclip
ASSistant..snort]

[Tim Norfolk]

On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>

> But he was not an engineer.  So I
> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.

<snip>

Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/06/2011 02:29 PM, Steven L. wrote:
>
>
> "Paul J Gans" <gan...@panix.com> wrote in message
> news:j6kmak$ora$7...@reader1.panix.com:
>
>> *Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >I wonder if there will be an uptick in demand for the TV movie "Pirates
>> >of Silicon Valley" which was a loose offshoot of the book _Fire in the
>> >Valley_. Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs and does kinda look a bit like him.
>> >Not sure how close the movie was to reality, but it covered some of the
>> >highlights. Anthony Michael Hall was a perfect fit for Gates. Torvalds
>> >was absent from the movie, of course, but he played no small role in
>> >changing the overarching (read *corporate*) philosophy of how people
>> >approach software. Pioneers like Stallman and Torvalds helped make
>> >software readily available for the masses.
>>
>> Consider that the Android platform is way ahead of Apple in sales,
>> and that Android is built on a linux base, I'd say that you were
>> understating the effect of Stallman and Torvalds.
>
> The Android platform currently has 44% of U.S. smartphone sales.,
>
> But no single vendor of smartphones is doing anywhere near as well.

Verizon, ATT, and soon Sprint are selling the iPhone. All three also
sell Droids. These are smartphone vendors as are T-Mobile etc.

> The iPhone continues to outsell every other make of smartphone,
> capturing about one-third of the U.S. market.

Well Apple controls the hardware, no doubt, so how could iOS exist on
any other "make" without incurring the wrath of Apple? Android exists on
LG, Motorola, Samsung, giving people flexibility on hardware choices
instead of one size fits all. You can buy a lower end smartphone or a
top of the line model. Evolution in the non-iOS smartphone market is
ruthless and faster than that in the singular and insular iPhone. Sure
they unveil a new and very much improved model every so often, but the
hardware on the Android side of the market is ever changing, without the
pseudo punctuated eq of the iPhone's innovation trajectory. After the
iPhone5 hits the market, the Droid platforms will adjust accordingly and
continue at breakneck speed as the iPhone sits still.

[*Hemidactylus*]

My Droid works just fine. It might get wonky once in a while, but a
power cycle gets it back on track.

The big difference is apps. Apple exerts control on apps, which results
in people rooting or jailbreaking the iPhones to wrestle freedom. But
this control by Apple is a good thing for quality control. Droid apps
are like the Wild West and the user needs to be very cautious. There's
lots of good stuff out there, but there's some exploits lingering too.

One thing I don't do is let my Droid get in touch with my wireless
router. Google has been very naughty. OTOH I could care less if Google
knows I just drove to Home Depot for a new garbage can. Tracking can be
a good thing if you become a missing person lost in the woods or upside
down in your car in a swamp and the need arises to find you (hopefully
in time).

[*Hemidactylus*]

Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
Cryptomnesia essay).

[chris thompson]

On Oct 6, 2:29 pm, "Steven L." <sdlit...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Apple's capitalization is comparable to ExxonMobil's.
>
> I don't think they're in any danger of becoming an endangered species
> any time soon.
>
> -- Steven L.

In time-honored Usenet fashion, I was about to post a scathing reply
to this. But I'm old, and I'm getting over a cold, so I googled it.
Take me to the cleaners, but you're right on that. I'm still in old-
fart mode, I guess.

Thanks for the eye-opener!

Chris

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/05/2011 07:47 PM, Mitchell Coffey wrote:
>
> http://www.apple.com/
>
Someone posted this sickening story to a Mac related newsgroup:

http://news.yahoo.com/westboro-church-uses-iphone-announce-steve-jobs-funeral-134752333.html

Have they no shame? No compassion?

[quote] “Westboro will picket his funeral. He had a huge platform; gave
God no glory and taught sin,” wrote Margie Phelps, daughter of the
church’s founder. [/quote]

[*Hemidactylus*]

Capitalization and market share are poor metrics. If we need to use
popularity as a metric, I add as exhibit A "Backstreet Boys" and
exhibit B "Jersey Shore".

End-user experience is a much better metric. I have some recent
experience with Mac OS X and it is well done, very pricey, but very high
quality. It is this quality that led to market share and
"capitalization", but if the post-Jobs Apple jumps any sharks, this
could change.

At least they aren't fumbling around like HP yet, wondering what exactly
it is that they are doing.

[Steven L.]

"*Hemidactylus*" <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:eaqdncwbsJ5ijxPT...@giganews.com:

Based on your earlier comments, what do you find shameful here?

That they are going to picket Steve Jobs' funeral?
Or that they evidently bought an iPhone instead of an Android?




-- Steven L.

[Friar Broccoli]

On Oct 6, 4:02 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/06/2011 03:00 PM, raven1 wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 16:51:33 +0000 (UTC), Paul J Gans
> > <gan...@panix.com>  wrote:
>

> >> *Hemidactylus*<ecpho...@hotmail.com>  wrote:

Could you provide more details of the problem please? I have a Droid
Nexus One (which works just fine for me) and is always linked by Wifi
to me phone, when I'm home.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Whoah, please back up the truck. What earlier comments have I made that
would portray me as being sympathetic to the Westboro Baptist Church
protesting the funeral of Steve Jobs?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/06/steve_jobs_funeral_picket/

[quote] The group, best known for their rainbow ‘God hates fags’ signs
and web page, are claiming the action is in response to Jobs not using
his wealth to promote their interpretation of the bible and for Apple
being consistently voted one of the most gay-friendly employers. The
group’s grievances, and its original protest plans were posted from
iPhones, something the Twittersphere has been quick to point out. [/quote]

I could care less what platform they used to convey their message of
hate. It's the content itself that offends me.

BTW I'm not a knee-jerk Apple hater. One of my best computers is an
Apple and it gets the honor of being attached via HDMI to my big screen
TV. I do have a POV though.

[*Hemidactylus*]

http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/55515-are-android-devices-being-used-as-global-wardriving-machines

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/22/google_android_privacy_concerns/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20084285-281/researchers-probe-googles-geolocation-database/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20074571-281/google-curbs-web-map-exposing-phone-locations/#ixzz1TSdCPsec

Like Facebook, Google seems to be exhibitng a cavalier attitude towards
end-users.

I went into my Droid and found its MAC address to whitelist it and gave
it my WPA2 passphrase, thinking it would be cool to have it on faster
wireless connection. I was doing this on my laptop. When I refreshed a
connected device list, I got a message from my router that another
device with a given IP address had assumed control of the router. It
could have been a hacker who just happened to be sniffing me at that
very moment. But since it was exactly when I was giving my Droid the
keys to the kingdom, I suspected my phone was assuming control of the
network and I got spooked. I ethernetted to the router, unlisted the
Droid and changed the passphrase and network name. I also deleted the
previous network credentials from the phone. I haven't turned wireless
on the phone since. That was kinda spooky. I'm not sure it was my phone,
but I suspect it. Given how google has been snooping on wireless
networks as shown above, my concerns are warranted.

[Glenn]

"*Hemidactylus*" <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote in message

news:4Z-dnaLt_8vztRPT...@giganews.com...

Wo. The "I'm not sure it was my phone" should have preceeded "That was kinda
spooky". Your concerns are more than warranted, if you can't see who has the
keys to your router.

[Klaus Hellnick]

On 10/5/2011 9:28 PM, David Iain Greig wrote:
> wiki trix<wiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey<mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> http://www.apple.com/
>>
>> so what?
>
> Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> --D. 'and so do you, right?'
>
>

I liked Jobs as well, though I wish that all the media would stop
crediting him for the Woz's work. Jobs was a marketing guy, like Gates,
though much more honest and innovative. Wozniak was responsible for ALL
of Apple's early technical success, as well as OS X.
Klaus

[Klaus Hellnick]

On 10/6/2011 8:19 AM, Steven L. wrote:

>
> If it weren't for Jobs, when do you suppose we would ever have had the
> graphical user interface on virtually all personal computers? In 1982,
> Xerox wasn't interested in productizing what PARC had done, except for
> some feeble efforts with the vastly overpriced Alto. IBM just didn't get
> it--I remember what their user interfaces looked like.
>

> Jobs had seen the advantages of the GUI for non-techies. The Lisa failed
> but the Mac succeeded, and now every computer you buy comes with a GUI.
> That sure wasn't true in 1983.

>
> One other major thing that Jobs showed the world was that computer
> products should have style and be esthetically appealing.
>
> Prior to Steve Jobs, style was not something anyone ever thought of with
> computers--computers were utilitarian boxes. We thought of style only in
> the context of clothing and automobiles. People don't just buy clothing
> to keep warm, they don't just buy cars as transportation, they buy them
> to reflect their personality and even to make a social statement.
>

> But Jobs made computers beautiful. He styled them just like auto makers
> style cars.
> And now, when a new smartphone or a new tablet gets reviewed in the
> trade press, they don't just talk about computing power or networking
> speed. They talk about how esthetically pleasing the product is to the eye.
>
> That's one thing Jobs did that no one else had done:
> Stylish computers.
>
>
>

> -- Steven L.
>
>

Try looking up GEM, Atari ST, Amiga, and DOSShell, for a clue.

[Klaus Hellnick]

And Henry Ford did not invent the car, or even the automobile assembly line.
Klaus

[John S. Wilkins]

Not entirely. Innovation can include novel elements. I think evolution
proceeds that way.
--
John S. Wilkins, Associate, Philosophy, University of Sydney
http://evolvingthoughts.net
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre

[John S. Wilkins]

Paul J Gans <gan...@panix.com> wrote:

YES I AM
--
DEATH.
c/- the Monochrome House

[John S. Wilkins]

Ummm... pricey? OS X cost me less than $150 US/AUS and the upgrades are
regularly around $30 for a major point upgrade (equivalent to the shift
from XP to Vista or Vista to Whateverthehellitisnow.

The hardware is not low end, but the cost of my trusty MacBookPro was
around what I'd have paid for a similarly equipped Toshiba or Sony.
Sure, there's no equivalent of a Samsung or Asus low end laptop, but the
cost is right for what I want to do.

Moreover, I have a system that works out of the box and rarely fails,
and when it does I get it working in minutes, not days.

Apple is greta for those who need that functionality, and it is no more
expensive than equivalent Windowsy machines. It can't compare with
Linuxen or Unixen, of course, but then you have to be a maven...

[John S. Wilkins]

Woz had nothing to do with OS X

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X

It was based on Jobs' company's NeXTStep OS, which in turn was based on
Unix 4.3 (and OS X still is). I played with a NeXT in San Francisco in
1991 or so. Quite liked it despite the graphics.

[John S. Wilkins]

John S. Wilkins <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote:

> Klaus Hellnick <khelSP...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> > On 10/5/2011 9:28 PM, David Iain Greig wrote:
> > > wiki trix<wiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey<mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
> > >> wrote:
> > >>> http://www.apple.com/
> > >>
> > >> so what?
> > >
> > > Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
> > >
> > > --D. 'and so do you, right?'
> > >
> > >
> >
> > I liked Jobs as well, though I wish that all the media would stop
> > crediting him for the Woz's work. Jobs was a marketing guy, like Gates,
> > though much more honest and innovative. Wozniak was responsible for ALL
> > of Apple's early technical success, as well as OS X.
> > Klaus
>
> Woz had nothing to do with OS X
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X
>
> It was based on Jobs' company's NeXTStep OS, which in turn was based on
> Unix 4.3 (and OS X still is). I played with a NeXT in San Francisco in

^BSD

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/06/2011 08:18 PM, John S. Wilkins wrote:
> *Hemidactylus*<ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 10/06/2011 03:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:
>>> On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> <snip>
>>>> But he was not an engineer. So I
>>>> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
>>>> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>> Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
>>>
>> Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
>> stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
>> Cryptomnesia essay).
>
> Not entirely. Innovation can include novel elements. I think evolution
> proceeds that way.

What so-called novelty lacks an antecedent? Think in terms of the
duplication and divergence mode. Duplication allows the original to
continue its function, while the copy is free to diverge without
negative impact. Or a mutation is merely a relative change in something
that already exist. Ear ossicles came from antecedents that were jaw
structures at some point. Wings came from forelimbs.

[r norman]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2011 10:18:12 +1000, jo...@wilkins.id.au (John S.
Wilkins) wrote:

>*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 10/06/2011 03:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:
>> > On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > <snip>
>> >> But he was not an engineer. So I
>> >> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
>> >> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
>> > <snip>
>> >
>> > Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
>> >
>> Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
>> stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
>> Cryptomnesia essay).
>
>Not entirely. Innovation can include novel elements. I think evolution
>proceeds that way.

I thought mutation just destroys or damages while selection
eliminates. So how can evolution create novelty?

At least that is what I heard.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/06/2011 08:28 PM, John S. Wilkins wrote:
> John S. Wilkins<jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote:
>
>> Klaus Hellnick<khelSP...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/5/2011 9:28 PM, David Iain Greig wrote:
>>>> wiki trix<wiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey<mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> http://www.apple.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> so what?
>>>>
>>>> Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>>>>
>>>> --D. 'and so do you, right?'
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> I liked Jobs as well, though I wish that all the media would stop
>>> crediting him for the Woz's work. Jobs was a marketing guy, like Gates,
>>> though much more honest and innovative. Wozniak was responsible for ALL
>>> of Apple's early technical success, as well as OS X.
>>> Klaus
>>
>> Woz had nothing to do with OS X
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X
>>
>> It was based on Jobs' company's NeXTStep OS, which in turn was based on
>> Unix 4.3 (and OS X still is). I played with a NeXT in San Francisco in
> ^BSD
>> 1991 or so. Quite liked it despite the graphics.
>
>

I was wondering if you meant AT&T or Berkeley.

[Nic]

On Oct 7, 1:18 am, j...@wilkins.id.au (John S. Wilkins) wrote:

This topic is like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. TO was
never full of biologists and philosophers - we were all programmers
all along!

> --
> John S. Wilkins, Associate, Philosophy, University of Sydneyhttp://evolvingthoughts.net

> But al be that he was a philosophre,

> Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre-

[*Hemidactylus*]

Novelty is just reorganization or rearrangement. Evolution cannot create
something out of nothing. It works with modules or components that
already exist and just need some step-by-step tweaking.

[r norman]

On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:43:30 -0400, *Hemidactylus*

<ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>On 10/06/2011 07:31 PM, r norman wrote:
>> On Fri, 7 Oct 2011 10:18:12 +1000, jo...@wilkins.id.au (John S.
>> Wilkins) wrote:
>>
>>> *Hemidactylus*<ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 10/06/2011 03:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:
>>>>> On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> <snip>
>>>>>> But he was not an engineer. So I
>>>>>> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
>>>>>> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
>>>>> <snip>
>>>>>
>>>>> Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
>>>>>
>>>> Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
>>>> stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
>>>> Cryptomnesia essay).
>>>
>>> Not entirely. Innovation can include novel elements. I think evolution
>>> proceeds that way.
>>
>> I thought mutation just destroys or damages while selection
>> eliminates. So how can evolution create novelty?
>>
>> At least that is what I heard.
>>
>Novelty is just reorganization or rearrangement. Evolution cannot create
>something out of nothing. It works with modules or components that
>already exist and just need some step-by-step tweaking.

That is trivially true in the sense that the works of Shakespeare are
simply the result of those monkeys typing or, in other terms, just the
rearrangements of the pieces of the big bang.

John had it right -- there really can be novelty. But the key is in
recognizing it, not merely shuffling the pieces.

[John S. Wilkins]

That's like saying in an earlier age that scholars were not natural
philosophers or humanists because they all used pens and could write...

[John S. Wilkins]

I'm thinking conceptually - some novel theories have new ideas not
previously held (think of particulate inheritance or Galilean notions of
reference frames). Most of them have antecedents, but some (usually very
rare) do not.

It is true that in evolution, pretty well everything has antecedents,
but sometimes novel elements can arise that are not reasonably taken to
be the same as their antecedents: consider the pterodactyl pterygium or
the bat equivalent. Sure there were tissues between carpals and ankles
but they were not membranes that affected flight. You can always find
prior structures, but they are not therefore the same sort of structure
as the novelty.

And I would suggest that the jaw to inner ear transition does have some
novelties (e.g., hair cells, vestibular system) that were not present in
the ancestral state.

[John S. Wilkins]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/06/2011 07:31 PM, r norman wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Oct 2011 10:18:12 +1000, jo...@wilkins.id.au (John S.
> > Wilkins) wrote:
> >
> >> *Hemidactylus*<ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 10/06/2011 03:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:
> >>>> On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> <snip>
> >>>>> But he was not an engineer. So I
> >>>>> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
> >>>>> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
> >>>> <snip>
> >>>>
> >>>> Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
> >>>>
> >>> Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
> >>> stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
> >>> Cryptomnesia essay).
> >>
> >> Not entirely. Innovation can include novel elements. I think evolution
> >> proceeds that way.
> >
> > I thought mutation just destroys or damages while selection
> > eliminates. So how can evolution create novelty?
> >
> > At least that is what I heard.
> >
> Novelty is just reorganization or rearrangement. Evolution cannot create
> something out of nothing. It works with modules or components that
> already exist and just need some step-by-step tweaking.

So ultimately evolution rests on some early complexity? It's a miracle!

[Paul J Gans]

It is the price of freedom. Let the other idiots have *their*
say so that we idiots can have ours.

--
--- Paul J. Gans

[*Hemidactylus*]

No, the works of Shakespeare came from his being embedded within his
cultural milieu and taking bits and pieces of stuff he had digested and
putting them together creatively. I'm pretty ignorant of Shakespeare,
but I know enough about literature to realize some patterns emerge to
suggest similar antecedents. Jungians would posit archetypes. I think
this type of phylogenic thematic wellspring is largely bunk.

But we have the Faustus legend that inspired Goethe and Marlowe. Both
constructed stories along that theme.

> John had it right -- there really can be novelty. But the key is in
> recognizing it, not merely shuffling the pieces.

No, Jung had it right when he was looking at ways memory works before
getting caught up in his archetypal meanderings. He saw something in
Nietzsche's Zarathustra that was best explained as being unconsciously
lifted from another author. It wasn't true plagiarism, just
unintentional commonality (cryptomnesia). I think cryptomnesia explains
a lot more than Jung dealt with in his later career, since he went down
a very muddy path that foreshadowed evolutionary psychology from that
point.

For a brief synopsis of Jung discovering Nietzsche's cryptomnesia see
Daniel Schacter's _The Seven Sins of Memory_. I have Jung's actual essay
buried somewhere around here, but Schacter's second-hand treatment suffices.

Novelty is merely a shuffle of the pieces. Nothing new under the sun.

[*Hemidactylus*]

You're the one, along with your emergent (hehe) sidekick Norman, that's
positing the miracles of de novo appearances of novelties ungrounded in
past contigencies, some sort of mystical *sui generis* account. I don't
deny novelty per se, but I'm asserting you can't get something from
nothing. Change is the critical factor. The change could be a slight
modification of an element or a new juxtaposition of two or more
previously unrelated elements. This, in human creativity, is where
effort comes into the picture.

[Nic]

On Oct 7, 2:11 am, j...@wilkins.id.au (John S. Wilkins) wrote:

So says his nibs.

> --
> John S. Wilkins, Associate, Philosophy, University of Sydneyhttp://evolvingthoughts.net

> But al be that he was a philosophre,

> Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre-

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 9:22 am, Paul J Gans <gan...@panix.com> wrote:
> wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Oct 5, 7:28 pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:

> >> wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
> >> > wrote:
> >> >>http://www.apple.com/
>
> >> > so what?
>
> >> Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> >> --D. 'and so do you, right?'

> >I met with a few folks from apple, including Jobs back in the the fall
> >of 1987. Those were the halcyon days. National semiconductor, xilinx,
> >etc. Made a lot of money on dev contracts. Never met the Woz. I met
> >with a few other big names from that time, as well. My partners had
> >lunch with Gates, but I was on a trip and missed that... Never met
> >him, but I do live a short distance from where he lives, and i  know
> >many people who know him. Back then, I had been doing a lot of
> >software development on CPM, DRDOS, MSDOS, they had all contracted me
> >back then. Cromenco, CDC, and Digital too. Jobs was good. Focused.
> >Knew whatt drove his market. Very smart. He is one of the few success
> >stories in computing that I can say had a gift. Many others were just
> >lucky. But Jobs had a fantastic gift. He knew what he was doing. Sorta
> >like Jimmy Page. Dead on. But he died. That's it. So I say... so what?
>
> I regarded him as a master salesman and a genius at industrial design.
> He'll be missed in that there are few left who can produce what he
> produced and sell it as well.

Good in salesmanship. Not a designer though. That credit goes to
Jonathan Ive for just about every Apple product designed over the last
20 years or so.

> But I agree with you in that back then were the halcyon days.  I
> had a home built box from the Digital Group, later replaced by one
> from Cromemco.  And we all hacked CPM.  It was the only way to
> make drivers work.

I had at various times in those early days a synertek sym, a cromemco,
a sol,an Intel SDK-80, and occasionally I had access to my dad's
amdahl 370 account.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 11:29 am, "Steven L." <sdlit...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> "Paul J Gans" <gan...@panix.com> wrote in messagenews:j6kmak$ora$7...@reader1.panix.com:

>
> > *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >I wonder if there will be an uptick in demand for the TV movie "Pirates
> > >of Silicon Valley" which was a loose offshoot of the book _Fire in the
> > >Valley_. Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs and does kinda look a bit like him.
> > >Not sure how close the movie was to reality, but it covered some of the
> > >highlights. Anthony Michael Hall was a perfect fit for Gates. Torvalds
> > >was absent from the movie, of course, but he played no small role in
> > >changing the overarching (read *corporate*) philosophy of how people
> > >approach software. Pioneers like Stallman and Torvalds helped make
> > >software readily available for the masses.
>
> > Consider that the Android platform is way ahead of Apple in sales,
> > and that Android is built on a linux base, I'd say that you were
> > understating the effect of Stallman and Torvalds.
>

> The Android platform currently has 44% of U.S. smartphone sales.,
>
> But no single vendor of smartphones is doing anywhere near as well.
>
> The iPhone continues to outsell every other make of smartphone,
> capturing about one-third of the U.S. market.

>
> > And don't forget to add in most dedicated devices such as routers.
> > A majority of those work on linux too.
>
> > What we are seeing is an analog of the Cambrian explosion.  New
> > developments in life opened up entirely new vistas -- and those
> > new vistas (the word "niche" sounds too small) were rapidly
> > populated.  Apple stuff was beautiful, but other stuff was
> > more functional.
>

> Apple's capitalization is comparable to ExxonMobil's.
>
> I don't think they're in any danger of becoming an endangered species
> any time soon.

The Cambrian explosion was not a flash in the pan either.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 12:04 pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:
> wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > On Oct 5, 7:28?pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:
> >> wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
> >> > wrote:
> >> >>http://www.apple.com/
>
> >> > so what?
>
> >> Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> >> --D. 'and so do you, right?'
>

> > David... is it OK that this is ***OFF TOPIC*** ???
> > Hypocrite
>

> Yes, because I am not bothered by it.
>
> I like your new signature line, it suits you.

Ouch... that hurt. Clever though, I kinda like that one... but no, I
never do use a signature line...

[Tim Norfolk]

On Oct 6, 7:43 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/06/2011 07:31 PM, r norman wrote:
>

> > On Fri, 7 Oct 2011 10:18:12 +1000, j...@wilkins.id.au (John S.
> > Wilkins) wrote:
>
> >> *Hemidactylus*<ecpho...@hotmail.com>  wrote:

>
> >>> On 10/06/2011 03:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:
> >>>> On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com>   wrote:
> >>>> <snip>
> >>>>> But he was not an engineer.  So I
> >>>>> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
> >>>>> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
> >>>> <snip>
>
> >>>> Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
>
> >>> Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
> >>> stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
> >>> Cryptomnesia essay).
>
> >> Not entirely. Innovation can include novel elements. I think evolution
> >> proceeds that way.
>
> > I thought mutation just destroys or damages while selection
> > eliminates.  So how can evolution create novelty?
>
> > At least that is what I heard.
>
> Novelty is just reorganization or rearrangement. Evolution cannot create
> something out of nothing. It works with modules or components that
> already exist and just need some step-by-step tweaking.
>
> --
> *Hemidactylus*
>   Darwin is daemonic

Just like mathematics is discovering what is already there. Not
everyone can do that.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 12:26 pm, "Glenn" <glennshel...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> "David Iain Greig" <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote in messagenews:cabal-j6ku3v$8sh$1...@darwin.ediacara.org...

>
>
>
> > wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Oct 5, 7:28?pm, David Iain Greig <dgr...@ediacara.org> wrote:
> > >> wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> > On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
> > >> > wrote:
> > >> >>http://www.apple.com/
>
> > >> > so what?
>
> > >> Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> > >> --D. 'and so do you, right?'
>
> > > David... is it OK that this is ***OFF TOPIC*** ???
> > > Hypocrite
>
> > Yes, because I am not bothered by it.
>
> > I like your new signature line, it suits you.
>

> He's done more than his share of creating OT threads.
> And wasn't this the guy who ran around a little while ago like an idiot
> claiming "you don't know where I'm posting from, ha ha"? I could be wrong.- Hide quoted text -

Sort of... yes, but to be fair, I never did say "ha ha".

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 12:48 pm, Tim Norfolk <timsn...@aol.com> wrote:
> On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>> But he was not an engineer. So I
> > laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
> > Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
>
> <snip>
>
> Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.

Good grief… Edison held 1,093 US patents and Steve jobs held little
more than 300 US patents. Not that patents can be compared like so
many counted beans, and they both employed an R&D team that did a lot
of the leg work. But Edison is recognized as the quintessential
inventor. Jobs has never been viewed that way. He himself has said
that several times.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 1:10 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/06/2011 03:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:> On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com>  wrote:
> > <snip>
> >> But he was not an engineer.  So I
> >> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
> >> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
> > <snip>
>
> > Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
>

> Nobody creates from scratch. Innovation is just rearrangement of the
> stuff at hand in a novel manner. I stole that notion from Jung (his
> Cryptomnesia essay).

Not so. Take QM and SR... those were radically new and not just
rearrangements of NM.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 1:43 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/05/2011 07:47 PM, Mitchell Coffey wrote:
>
> >http://www.apple.com/
>
> Someone posted this sickening story to a Mac related newsgroup:
>

> http://news.yahoo.com/westboro-church-uses-iphone-announce-steve-jobs...

>
> Have they no shame? No compassion?
>
> [quote] Westboro will picket his funeral. He had a huge platform; gave
> God no glory and taught sin, wrote Margie Phelps, daughter of the
> church s founder. [/quote]

Well, I would no go so far as to picket his funeral... But he did rip
off the woz in the very early days for some money, and he did abandon
his daughter when she was a baby. People who worked for him often said
that he was a jerk. He was no saint.

[*Hemidactylus*]

But aren't mathematicians merely following a long hard fought tradition
handed down through the ages, cobbled together from rudimentary ideas
and slowly expanded from generation to generation? It's not like
everyone has to reinvent algebra, trigonometry and calculus from a
vacuum. And grounded in their math education, the truly gifted can take
what is given to them by forebears and attempt to go further by
reorganization or rearranging the ways that have been thought of numbers
in the past. Pathways have been partially cleared by the machetes of
other math geeks.

[r norman]

On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:53:11 -0400, *Hemidactylus*

There exist only a few kinds of elementary particles in the universe
so that everything physical is necessarily just a rearrangement of
these. However "novelty" is the recombination in such a way that the
new situation is qualitatively so different from anything that existed
previously that it represents a different category. There is a
discontinuity, a phase change. Wilkins vs. Norman is whether the
existence of that category is inherent in Schrodinger's equation (or
whatever you want to call all of physical theory) but we humans were
simply too dim to have seen that application earlier. Still, it is
something that never existed before.

You are talking about "evolution takes small tiny steps" but
eventually gets to a distant path. That disagrees with modern
evo-demo with reorganization of patterns of expression in the genome
that can produce true novelty. Your psychologizing about Jung and
Nietzsche and all is the "take small steps" argument. Some early
author wrote "Friends, listen" and someone else wrote "Friends and
Romans, give me your attention" until finally Shakespeare wrote
whatever he did write. No. There was poetry and drama and literature
before Shakespeare and he built on it and he created new scenarios
(based on histories or other plays in some cases) but made something
new and different in his use of words and development of character and
expression of emotion that never existed before.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Could either have been discovered by a prehistoric human lacking a long
tradition of thinking about math and physics?

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 3:46 pm, Klaus Hellnick <khelSPAMln...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On 10/5/2011 9:28 PM, David Iain Greig wrote:
>
> > wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> On Oct 5, 4:47?pm, Mitchell Coffey<mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>>http://www.apple.com/
>
> >> so what?
>
> > Compared to the rest of the crap posted here, I care, at least.
>
> > --D. 'and so do you, right?'
>

> I liked Jobs as well, though I wish that all the media would stop
> crediting him for the Woz's work. Jobs was a marketing guy, like Gates,
> though much more honest and innovative. Wozniak was responsible for ALL
> of Apple's early technical success, as well as OS X.
> Klaus

Gates was not just marketing. Unlike Jobs, Gates is and always was
very technologically knowledgeable. I would also say that Jobs was
less honest and less innovative than Gates. As a software developer
over several decades, I can tell you that Gates treated the software
developer far better and more fairly than Jobs.

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 3:53 pm, Klaus Hellnick <khelSPAMln...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On 10/6/2011 2:48 PM, Tim Norfolk wrote:
>
> > On Oct 6, 6:58 am, wiki trix<wikit...@gmail.com>  wrote:
> > <snip>
> >> But he was not an engineer.  So I
> >> laugh a bit when I often hear these days that he was a modern day
> >> Edison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
> > <snip>
>
> > Edison didn't do most of his stuff, either.
>

> And Henry Ford did not invent the car, or even the automobile assembly line.
> Klaus

True. I would say that Jobs is more like Ford, and Gates is more like
Edison.

[Mitchell Coffey]

Actually, the joke assumes everyone knows that.

Mitchell Coffey

[Mitchell Coffey]

Platonist, are we?

Mitchell Coffey

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 7:52 pm, Mitchell Coffey <mitchelldotcof...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Actually, my response above assumes that everyone knows that the joke
assumes everyone knows that. Duh.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Hmmm, somehow I was able to juxtapose Jung's ruminations on cryptomnesia
into a long-winded discussion about macroevolution that was aimed across
the bow of one immutabilist Ray Martinez.

http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_thread/thread/9d68a002967138f3#

In that very hard to follow essay I asserted the following passage:

" Hall and Brylski (1988) list three stages of development the of external
cheek:

1. Buccal evagination-There‘s an “evagination of oral epithelium into
the facial mesenchyme”. Epithelium is able now to interact with mesenchyme.

2. Pouch externalization and growth- “Evaginated epithelium” is the
“presumptive pouch”and is externalized around the same time the snout
appears. Snout and pouch development are related. Hall and Brylski say:
“the developing external pouch “escapes” the mouth cavity without
requiring any novel developmental events.”

As Jung (1905/1957) showed in his cryptomnesia essay, novelty is just
rearrangement of old parts. Nothing is truly new under the sun. Jung was
looking at this apparent novelty as actual recombination of elements in
the way unconscious memory works and how fragments left dormant to us
can emerge together in ways we think of as new. Material from disparate
sources can come together creatively. This is, in a sense, how evolution
works also. Old material gets put together in new ways. Things that
exist in the depths of a genetic “memory” (the phylogenetic mneme of the
old organic memory theorists like Semon that influenced Jung) that
ontogenetic processes derive from can be shifted in a manner that
generates apparent novelty. A difference in spatial location can
facilitate the same materials (epithelia and mesenchyme) producing a
different result."

It was several months ago. What the hell was I thinking? Maybe I was
trying to show how seemingly highly discrete and major (read
macroevolutionary) changes can be accounted for by mundane causes,
blowing immutability out of the water by a mile.

[r norman]

Where would microcomputer programming be without Microsoft's M80
assembler and L80 linker for CP/M? They were the fundamental tools
everybody used to do everything, including rewriting CP/M. Microsoft
also had a floating point package with transcendental functions, not
to mention COBOL, FORTRAN, and PL/I although those never really caught
on. That was long before MS-DOS came along. Oh, yes. There was that
BASIC business. I don't know how many people were involved in those,
but Gates certainly had a heavy hand in all of them.

The story at the time was that more people programmed the TRS-80 in
BASIC (Microsoft, of course) than all rest of the world's programmers
on all the rest of the world's computers.

[Glenn]

"wiki trix" <wiki...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:4e30a420-08e5-4c4b...@dk6g2000vbb.googlegroups.com...

Weren't you banned for nymshifting?

[r norman]

On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:14:15 -0400, *Hemidactylus*

That not everything is novel doesn't mean that nothing is novel.

[John S. Wilkins]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> As Jung (1905/1957) showed in his cryptomnesia essay, novelty is just
> rearrangement of old parts.

Jung showed nothing of the kind. Jung is largely a load of old cobblers,
warmed over.

The best analysis of novelty I know is

Boden, Margaret A. 1990. The creative mind: myths and mechanisms.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

[John S. Wilkins]

Well, I had an inkling somebody would say that. I had to pen myself from
getting cursive.

[Glenn]

"John S. Wilkins" <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote in message
news:1k8ruji.sodnzz178r6wqN%jo...@wilkins.id.au...

> Nic <harris...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Oct 7, 2:11 am, j...@wilkins.id.au (John S. Wilkins) wrote:
> > > Nic <harrisonda...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> > > > This topic is like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. TO was
> > > > never full of biologists and philosophers - we were all programmers
> > > > all along!
> > >
> > > That's like saying in an earlier age that scholars were not natural
> > > philosophers or humanists because they all used pens and could
write...
> >
> > So says his nibs.
>
> Well, I had an inkling somebody would say that. I had to pen myself from
> getting cursive.
>

John, your post timestamps are an hour ahead of mine, with both eternal
september and googlegroups. Does Australia have a problem, or are you just
getting an early start?

[*Hemidactylus*]

Gates and Allen had this crazy idea of providing functionality for this
odd contraption called the Altair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

They had also messed around with traffic data collection. They were
around before the GUI got borrowed from PARC. The rest is history. I
like Allen more than Gates, even if he is a patent troll. I read his
recent memoir and he has done some cool stuff post Microsoft, including
a major brain imaging map undertaking!:

http://www.brain-map.org/

Kudos! And he's a guitar nut who worships Jimi!

And like Steve Jobs, he's no stranger to life threatening illness.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 10/07/2011 12:27 AM, John S. Wilkins wrote:
> *Hemidactylus*<ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As Jung (1905/1957) showed in his cryptomnesia essay, novelty is just
>> rearrangement of old parts.
>
> Jung showed nothing of the kind. Jung is largely a load of old cobblers,
> warmed over.

Says you. Have you read the essay or are you just being grumpy? And are
you talking about people making leather shoes or the dessert? No less
than Harvard's Daniel Schacter cited Jung's views on cryptomnesia. Is he
a cobbler too?

> The best analysis of novelty I know is
>
> Boden, Margaret A. 1990. The creative mind: myths and mechanisms.
> London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
>

Oh bibliography without elaboration...again nothing new here :-) Jung
predated it by 85 years. Should I bother looking it up with my busy
schedule of feeding my dog and reading about BSD?

[now that's old school Hemi...again nothing new]

[*Hemidactylus*]

He's disproving my assertion that nothing new is under the sun as he is
ahead of the sun's travel around the Earth by an hour...oh wait, did I
just utter a Paganocentrism.

Wilkins' software controlled UEFI system clock might be out of whack.
UEFI is superior to BIOS you know. Apple uses it thus it is so. Mine got
issued an update last night. Firmware updates are scary.

[John S. Wilkins]

Apparently at a certain time of year the Sun leaps forward over New
South Wales and we are all awoken an hour earlier.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Screw Westboro Baptist. Don't minimize the mental derangement of what
they are doing by your criticism of Jobs as a person living a life. Jobs
does not deserve the scrutiny of knuckledraggers like WBC. If they are
pissed because Apple was a good employer for LGBT, then kudos to Apple
and I hope the bikers that supported our dead soldiers and Michael
Moore's sodomobile show up for counter-demonstrations. The guy passed
away. Maybe he wasn't perfect.

Why are these religious freaks wanting to turn it into a spectacle for
their sick and twisted agenda?

[wiki trix]

On Oct 6, 8:18 pm, "Glenn" <glennshel...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> "wiki trix" <wikit...@gmail.com> wrote in message

I don't recall.

[Glenn]

"John S. Wilkins" <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote in message

news:1k8rwg4.tt8kfp1n3lzqvN%jo...@wilkins.id.au...

Sounds harsh. So Australia does have a problem, and you are getting an early
start.

[Glenn]

"wiki trix" <wiki...@gmail.com> wrote in message

news:b886e0b2-0662-4121...@k15g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...

What other nyms did you use?

[wiki trix]

That's what they do. Go figure.

[John S. Wilkins]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/07/2011 12:27 AM, John S. Wilkins wrote:
> > *Hemidactylus*<ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> As Jung (1905/1957) showed in his cryptomnesia essay, novelty is just
> >> rearrangement of old parts.
> >
> > Jung showed nothing of the kind. Jung is largely a load of old cobblers,
> > warmed over.
>
> Says you. Have you read the essay or are you just being grumpy? And are
> you talking about people making leather shoes or the dessert? No less
> than Harvard's Daniel Schacter cited Jung's views on cryptomnesia. Is he
> a cobbler too?

I know some Harvard (full) professors personally, so that doesn't
impress me. I haven't read that essay, no, although I tried to find an
online version (vol 1 of the Collected Works has no preview at Amazon),
but honestly, life is too short to read stuff by people who one
satisfied oneself were full of it, years back. I also do not read Freud,
Adler or Fromm for the same reasons.

Basically Jung's notion of synchronicity, archetypes and so forth is
little more than Goethe warmed over a fire of Schopenhauer. None of it
has any real foundation, either empirically or philosophically. It's a
kind of post-Kantian idealism I find really really stupid.

>
> > The best analysis of novelty I know is
> >
> > Boden, Margaret A. 1990. The creative mind: myths and mechanisms.
> > London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
> >
> Oh bibliography without elaboration...again nothing new here :-) Jung
> predated it by 85 years. Should I bother looking it up with my busy
> schedule of feeding my dog and reading about BSD?
>
> [now that's old school Hemi...again nothing new]

Jung did nothing of the kind. Boden divides novelty into combinatorial
(the kind you claim without foundation is the whole of novelty) and deep
novelty. The latter kind changes the conceptual landscape rather than
recombining existing elements of it. I once published a paper relying
upon this distinction for scientific theories.

Stick with reading about Unix and feeding your dog.

[Glenn]

"*Hemidactylus*" <ecph...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:IPWdneVsRKnu4xPT...@giganews.com...

You answered your own question.

[John S. Wilkins]

Glenn <glenns...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> "John S. Wilkins" <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote in message
> news:1k8rwg4.tt8kfp1n3lzqvN%jo...@wilkins.id.au...
> > Glenn <glenns...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> >
> > > "John S. Wilkins" <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote in message
> > > news:1k8ruji.sodnzz178r6wqN%jo...@wilkins.id.au...
> > > > Nic <harris...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > On Oct 7, 2:11 am, j...@wilkins.id.au (John S. Wilkins) wrote:
> > > > > > Nic <harrisonda...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > > ...
> > > > > > > This topic is like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. TO
> > > > > > > was never full of biologists and philosophers - we were all
> > > > > > > programmers all along!
> > > > > >
> > > > > > That's like saying in an earlier age that scholars were not
> > > > > > natural philosophers or humanists because they all used pens and
> > > > > > could write...
> > > > >
> > > > > So says his nibs.
> > > >
> > > > Well, I had an inkling somebody would say that. I had to pen myself
> > > > from getting cursive.
> > > >
> > > John, your post timestamps are an hour ahead of mine, with both
> > > eternal september and googlegroups. Does Australia have a problem, or
> > > are you just getting an early start?
> >
> > Apparently at a certain time of year the Sun leaps forward over New
> > South Wales and we are all awoken an hour earlier.
> >

> Sounds harsh. So Australia does have a problem, and you are getting an
> early start.

It is unclear if it is a problem. Some say the curtains fade with the
extra hour of sunlight. Others say we can spend more time at the beach.
Still others say all this extra sunshine causes more skin cancers. Me, I
think it interferes with my computing schedule.

[John S. Wilkins]

They do it for the money, basically. Standard religious practice.

[Glenn]

"John S. Wilkins" <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote in message

news:1k8rzgg.1ou9rhqecpbkoN%jo...@wilkins.id.au...

I wouldn't stand for being awakened an hour before I wanted to awoke.

[Glenn]

"John S. Wilkins" <jo...@wilkins.id.au> wrote in message
news:1k8ruji.sodnzz178r6wqN%jo...@wilkins.id.au...

> Nic <harris...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Oct 7, 2:11 am, j...@wilkins.id.au (John S. Wilkins) wrote:
> > > Nic <harrisonda...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> > > > This topic is like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. TO was
> > > > never full of biologists and philosophers - we were all programmers
> > > > all along!
> > >
> > > That's like saying in an earlier age that scholars were not natural
> > > philosophers or humanists because they all used pens and could
write...
> >
> > So says his nibs.
>
> Well, I had an inkling somebody would say that. I had to pen myself from
> getting cursive.
>

So do you have a reference to the origin of "his nibs"?

[*Hemidactylus*]

So you dismiss combinatorics and a Jung essay you never read in one
swoop. Priceless. That's the kind of reply I've come to love about this
place. Dismissal sans *serious* consideration. Priceless!

Your lapdog emergentist should be opining about now. Don't forget his
biscuits lest you get bit hard on the hand and he might need to be put
down for rabies :-)

[*Hemidactylus*]

I see nothing novel in either your or Wilkins' replies, just
unsubstantiated assertion with no real explanation. Load me up with a
bibliography instead. That passes muster here. Sad!

I presented argument, cites to an old hard fought post (unaddressed by
Ray, you or Wilkins) and no novelty in thought. Sorry I'm not a PhD in
philosophy. I guess I'm a dipshit then. It's all about the bibliography
and superficial dismissal to be cheerled by the howlermonkeys. Hasn't
changed much in a decade. I'll go feed my dog then since I'm an idiot
with no real contribution and no valid bibliography.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Like you even took two seconds to think out that reply. What was my
point anyway. Not like you or Wilkins would know or care.

[high five]

[John S. Wilkins]

Well this took me 0.23 seconds to Google

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-nib1.htm