Here is the story of an adopted orphan who made good. He paid himself $1.00 a year as CEO and built Apple Computer into one of Amerika's most iconic companies. His story is living proof that buckets of money do not necessarily inspire innovation - that form and function and the sublime beauty of a thing can also drive a man. Ironically, Steve Jobs is one of capitalism’s greatest success stories; yet his story is one of the strongest arguments against aimless and reckless capitalism.
As the passing of Steve Jobs dominates tonight's headlines, let us also remember another iconic hero, The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the few remaining giants of the civil rights era who survived bombings, beatings, intimidation, and dozens of arrests to end segregation and transform our country.
R.I.P.
Intel, IBM, Kaypro, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Cray, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Ventura, Peachtree, WordPerfect...
ReplyDeletethe names that changed it all made a new reality brought the information of the world to our fingertips doubled the size of our brains
But it really was Jobs who made everybody want to buy it and use it every day right into this very decade
Thanks bro
Jobs was a remarkable innovator and extremely effective businessman. He did indeed make computers accessible to millions.
ReplyDeleteBut you're right that Rev. Shuttlesworth's passing shouldn't get short shrift from the media because of Jobs' death.
I was saddened to hear that Steve Jobs died so young. The world's a different and better place for his having been here.
ReplyDeleteRev. Shuttlesworth was a brave and good man, and he will be missed.
Okay, I'll try this again. My initial comment got eaten by blogger.
ReplyDeleteThank you for alerting us to the Rev. Shuttleworth's death. I'm glad he lived long enough to see Mr. Obama become president.
Steve Jobs was a remarkable innovator and marketer, but I don't understand the cult around the Apple founder and Apple products.
I own an iPod, given to me as a gift a couple of years ago (never updated it to a newer one). My pc is a HP laptop, my 3-year old phone is a Samsung. I did, however, learn my way around a computer on a Macintosh years ago. The marketing department in the high-tech company I worked for used Macintoshes, the rest of the company had desktop pcs.
A few members of my family are rabid Apple people, and you are NOT allowed to say anything against Apple products or Jobs. Ever.
I learned this years ago when I made some off-hand remark about Apple. I don't understand the fanaticism around this company, but there it is.
I received a Kindle for my birthday last July and can access the internet anywhere that has a WiFi connection. The Kindle is helpful when I'm traveling and don't want to pack three or four books.
One of my Apple-fanatic relatives informed me, when she got her new iPad, that she has access to thousands of recipes. Just for fun, I google "chicken recipes" on my laptop and received over 21 million hits.
But I didn't tell my relative. Why spoil her feeling of superiority?
Shaw,
ReplyDeleteI think what people used to say about the Mac/PC divide was that Macs were for people who didn't want to tinker with the "guts" of a computer but just wanted to use it, while PC's are more alterable and preferable for those (like myself) who take a Nietzschean approach to computing: "whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger." Hard-drive formatting? Compatibility issues? Messing with your BIOS? Sure, why not?
I think it's true that Apple products don't do anything you can't get elsewhere -- the appeal probably has a lot to do with how their stuff is combined and marketed. It's great stuff and I think Jobs was a very insightful and creative person, but I wouldn't say Apple products are superior to other high-quality items on the market. I myself use an ASUS PC laptop and have a little ASUS netbook for school use, and I love both devices. I've never gotten into the whole music or Iphone thing, so I don't know what that's like. Heck, maybe it's a tribute to both Jobs and Bill Gates that practically anything you buy in computing these days is likely to do what you want it to do.
About a decade ago, I left the PC world and bought my first Mac and have stayed with Macs ever since. Over time, I added a second laptop, an iPhone and a wireless Airport Extreme (really easy to install), which allows me to move any computer or other device freely about the house. I can even print from the john if so moved (but the toilet paper lacks a sheet collator).
ReplyDeleteI don't consider myself an Apple fanatic, but I never liked Microsoft and am happy to have a better alternative.
"the appeal probably has a lot to do with how their stuff is combined and marketed"
ReplyDeleteBingo! I detest the company for having kept so much for themselves for so long, like the company store at a coal mine. You had to buy everything from Apple when the world was writing innovative software for far less money and I hate them for their stupid advertising, for the "buy it because it comes in blue" or the stupid one where the dumpy IBM guy wears a brown baggy suit while the "hip" twirp wears high-school-hip duds.
Even now, much of the software I use for my radio station was written by engineers and radio nerds and won't run on those fruit-based machines with all their colorful graphics and cute little heart icons to click so your friends can see what you're looking at this moment.
Up until recently I built all my own computers and set them up the way I wanted them set up. I never cared much for what color they were. These days I'm a Dell dude mostly because I don't have the time and patience.
It's not that I don't like tech cults, I'm part of a few of them, but the ones sold to the public are fabricated of nothing but empty snobbery and pretentiousness. the products that use the world innovation and engineering and high tech as though they were oily things poured into them. There are people who would give up their indoor plumbing if Jobs had told them to buy an iPot instead - so hip, dontcha know. And then there's the 'capitalize the second letter' thing. Aaaarrghhh. Unforgivable.
Alright, so I bought an iPod. I wanted to play the Terabytes of music I have somewhere other than on my PC, but the software was so clumsy and idiot proof, only idiots would like it and it's so encumbered by options to buy more crap from Apple and to share more stuff with "friends" it makes me feel like a 13 year old girl. Next time I'll build my own and the Foggpod will be for adults only and won't refer to all music as "songs."
Anyway, to compare Jobs to Edison is simple blasphemy to me.
His story is living proof that buckets of money do not necessarily inspire innovation - that form and function and the sublime beauty of a thing can also drive a man. Ironically, Steve Jobs is one of capitalism’s greatest success stories; yet his story is one of the strongest arguments against aimless and reckless capitalism. Best damn eulogy I have read so far to the man with a wonderful bitchslap at capitalism added in.
ReplyDeleteI did not hear about Rev. Shuttlesworth's passing until I watched Democracy Now's morning broadcast on FreeSpeechTV. As someone that marched for civil rights as a teenager in the late 60's and farm workers rights in the early 70's, I am deeply saddened by his passing as he was the last link to that glorious, hard fought movement that started the ball moving rolling here in Amerika.
I don't know much about Fred Shuttleworth, so I will have to learn more. Thank you Octo. About Jobs and Apple I know a bit more. Having run ad agencies on Macs since 1986, I've seen all aspects of the Mac line, the hardware and software guts of the Mac, its proprietary issues/strategy, its clones and the Amelio years, and the subsequent renaissance of Apple.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you who don't understand, Jobs (perhaps the only one of all the computech pioneers) got Marshall McLuhan AND the essence of marketing. If McLuhan referenced us to "the medium is the message" Jobs understood that the medium is the experience. In other words, he understood intuitively—and consciously—that the "interface" was everything. THAT made him a zealot for great design, whether it was proportional fonts in a graphical user interface (GUI), the sleek look of a Macbook Air or iPod, or the aqua design (now aging) for OS X. He got that the entire thing was one unified design theme.
Now who else out there in business has managed to get this to such an extent in the 20th Century. I would argue, no one.
But I'm a designer; at least that's my original passion. To the rest of the world, Apple products are just tools (despite the fact that EVERY tech company has been playing catch up with Apple for decades). To say that Jobs' Apple is just another pretty good tech company is to say that The Beatles were just a pretty good band. And, as a Beatles fan, I think Jobs would get that.
Thanks for posting this Octo. Jobs' version of Apple is what all businesses should be in a world we Zoners would love living in.
Just to add a few flourishes to Edge's comment, the Mac has always been the best graphics machine for the visual trades. The earliest Macs had a Motorola microprocessor that employed a linear memory architecture, unlike PCs whose memory stacks were segmented, which meant that PC software had to assign tasks to specific locations within the memory stack - far more cumbersome, error-ridden, and demanding of system resources.
ReplyDeleteThe MAC-OS was Unix-based from the beginning, meaning it was multitasking (you could run several applications at the same time) and far less prone to system crashes and lost data. The first Mac windows OS offered file launch, group launch, and alias names from the beginning.
When Jobs left Apple and started Next, there was a nifty utility called Zilla bundled with every machine. Zilla was a parallel process utility that allowed you to connect multiple machines (as many as you had on hand) and use them in parallel process array across a LAN for running compute-intensive tasks in the background. Simply stated, Zilla turned a number of Next machines in supercomputer. Zilla disappeared when Next disappeared, and there is still nothing like it ... unless you go to a supercomputer lab.
What I am saying is that Apple was not just about marketing glitz, there was a lot of advanced technology under the hood.
Edge,
ReplyDeleteI think the McCluhanesque point you make about integral experience and design is a very good one. Orientation towards or away from Apple (their computers in particular) has a lot to do with how much this design issue matters to us. To me, it means little, though I can appreciate its appeal – if you’re like me, then your experience with computing also includes being part of the machine’s construction, making alterations to its stock features (hardware and software environments alike), and so forth. I built a number of PCs back when that made sense – I’m a laptop lizard nowadays, which is sort of like being a lounge lizard – and immensely enjoyed my trips to the local electronics mecca to get the components I needed. That was part of the whole experience for me – it’s a different approach to computing than I believe Mac people probably have: they appreciate the flawless end-product experience (I suppose it’s the same with all those iDevices we have today) and feel that it frees up their energy to be creative with the machine, while others are equally interested in what comes before the end-product experience.
Anyhow, both orientations are fine with me – I can understand the Mac approach because that’s how I am with cars: I don’t have any connection with car culture in the sense of wanting to know how to fix them, what precisely makes this or that part work, and so forth. I admire a fine-looking, solid old vee-hickle and appreciate the skill that goes into maintaining a work of art like that, but for my part, I just want to enjoy driving my car and get where I’m going without a hitch. I don’t care about the fancy stuff under the hood or even how to change the oil.
I agree with what Octo says, too -- in a sense, you could opine that Apple got a lot of "under the hood" stuff right in the first place, and that freed Steve Jobs up to focus more on the design elements that Edge addresses in his comment.
Good point, Dino.
ReplyDeleteI was more of a software geek than a hardware geek, and I still don't know which end of screwdriver is which (but don't take me too literally).
Perhaps what made Jobs different from Gates is that Jobs created integrated systems of hardware and software designed to work seamlessly; whereas Gates, for the most part, was a licensor, or plagiarizer, or outright thief, of software until he gained his desktop monopoly ... at which point he had the clout to hire whoever and whatever was needed (with only slightly less plagiarism and larceny) to claim his ill-begotten title.
Not to belabour the point. The Mac world from a mid-sized agency POV was all about "under the hood." There were extension conflicts, writing and rewriting scripts, changing out RAM, hard drives, video boards (not sound cards, normally, as Mac had this mostly covered), upgrades on operating systems, figuring out the soft and hard guts of the clones to get them to work, software installs and uninstalls (which could be more arduous on Macs than on PCs), file compatibility issues with the PC world (which used to be more problematic than now), finding techs who'd work on Macs when something really serious went down such as evil, impossible-to-rid viruses or motherboard failures and balky, early modem and Internet issues. Not to mention keeping all those legacy machines on line and talking to each other all at once and sorting out which legacy software would work on what machine. On the plus side (re-systems integration) Appletalk and plug and play add-ons solved a lot of communications issues that PCs had to solve with much more elaborate systems...
ReplyDeleteAll that said, Jobs got the elegance of interface: a visual experience rather than a numerical experience... and that (which he stole from the Xerox Alto) revolutionized computing. And the most amazing thing about Jobs was, he got it. He never lost it: the concept that computing should be a seamless experience—by removing the machine altogether. Like photography, it was a reductive design process. As I say, astonishingly revolutionary, especially for a high school graduate with no real (credentialized) skills...!
Now that kind of guy deserves (and got) our respect. And more than a few of our votes of confidence (dollars!).
This, of course, is only additive to all that's been said in the comments above.
To not get Jobs' contribution to seamless computing would be similar to suggesting every driver should also be a mechanic.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's Fred Shuttlesworth. Now there was a man with courage. Without men like this who can rise to the occasion, there can be no equality or quality of life... I particularly like this quote from the LA Times obit:
ReplyDelete"In 1957, he took two of his daughters to enroll in an all-white high school in Birmingham. More than a dozen men with chains, brass knuckles and baseball bats were waiting for him when he drove up. One of the men stabbed his wife, Ruby, in the hip. Shuttlesworth was beaten until he passed out, but he regained consciousness and managed to clamber back into the car, calmly telling the driver not to break any traffic laws as they rushed away."
How I Became An Apple Fanatic
ReplyDeleteI can't recall if it was 1984 or 1985, but I was a relatively new high school English teacher when Apple provided steeply discounted computers to schools and my high school got 30 brand new Apple II E computers. Macintosh was just an idea at the time.The math department had first dibs but they declined to be bothered and the science department also showed noting but disdain so the English department got all 30 computers for the writing lab.
We had one English teacher who had used a computer before and he offered to run classes after school for those of us who wanted to learn. A great love affair was born between me and Apple. I eventually transferred all of my lesson plans and record keeping to my computer (did I mention that Apple gave a computer to each teacher so I had a computer on my desk?).
I also remember the upgrade to the II C and then there was the Macintosh--color monitor, graphics to die for and a pull down menu that made it all user friendly. The school had IBM computers up in the business classes lab but there was nothing intuitive about those monstrosities; I had to search for the "on" switch. My students quickly became desk top publishers, creating brochures, newsletters and eventually a magazine for the school. The graphics were easy and I had a Mac on my desk! The first computer that I purchased for home was a Mac. I switched to a PC only when I began working for Legal Aid. All the office had were PCs and nothing was compatible with my Mac. Sadly, I purchased a PC. However, my sadness was mitigated when I discovered that sometime over the years, PCs had reproduced as Mac clones.
P.S. Thanks Octo for reminding us of the passing of Rev. Shuttlesworth. He was a heroic visionary and his life a testament to the strength of the human spirit.
Edge,
ReplyDeleteYes, that's an interesting branch of Mac people -- business users.
One thing I forgot to add is that Steve Jobs, to judge from his remarks over the years, really understood something vital about capitalism -- it's not so much about need as about desire. One of the quotations he made that's often cited is the one about people not knowing exactly what they want until somebody shows it to them. And that's probably the key to his success: he was able to come up with products people didn't even know they wanted until they saw and used them.
Dino,
ReplyDeleteThat's very insightful. Desire is the essence of all marketing, and Jobs really got it. Designing in desire is quite a feat. But your insight that desire is also the driving essence of capitalism is wonderful. The other half of the equation from a leadership perspective is power. Jobs also seemed pretty handy in that department, too...
"similar to suggesting every driver should also be a mechanic. "
ReplyDeleteEvery driver should be a mechanic.
Guess that counts out a lot of women and most people under the age of 40. Great way to clean up traffic congestion, though. Speaking of trades, you might want to check this out re: erosion of skills... http://ht.ly/6tyuo
ReplyDeleteIn the room, the women come and go
ReplyDeleteTalking on their iPhones.
Dino,
"Steve Jobs, to judge from his remarks over the years, really understood something vital about capitalism -- it's not so much about need as about desire."
Sure, ask any dope dealer. Ask the people who run casinos or sell two dollar shoes for $475. Are the sweat shop workers in Asia who make that shiny magic box you don't need to know anything about called iSlaves? Underneath the shiny plastic surface of these colorful beeping jewels you'll find children working for 72 cents an hour, while Apple stuff sells for a hefty premium even if it uses the same components as a Dell.
I appreciate beautiful design, but there are too many instances lately where form swallows function -- hell it may be the new rule: where function has more to do with status seeking and as to all that "technology," you can thank Motorola and Intel for that: the chip designers, the hard drive makers, the display companies not Jobs, and his hyperbolic psyops advertising. To me there's more poetry in the hardware than in the housing and there's nothing unique about Apple hardware, at least in my opinion.
Things that land on Mars aren't built by trendy young urban hipsters with their shirt tails out or 13 year old kids with green hair, but by genuine nerds wearing unfashionable clothes. There are no Apples on Mars.
Sorry, I'm not putting anyone down on purpose, I just want to speak up for the joy of mechanics, the joy of engineering. You know, I have a lot of expensive and complex radio equipment, but my favorite Transmitter is home made out of wood and wire, uses a 6L6 beam tetrode as a crystal controlled oscillator and it sure won't work at all without a good deal of knowledge from the user - and care since it uses a 300 Volt plate circuit.
Sorry, I like it that way. I'd rather use it to talk to someone on Christmas Island as I did Monday last than to call them on my smart phone as a friend smugly suggested would be more "high tech" and I think less is a whole lot more than magic black boxes you buy from an Apple authorized cult center that work by mysterious forces the user knows nothing about and require a trillion dollar infrastructure belonging to someone else and that you have to pay for.
It doesn't try to sell you anything, doesn't require an iTunes account to function and if I use it to share with friends, those friends also know the difference between a Hartley and a Colpitts oscillator, a control grid and a screen grid and a MOSFET from a JFET.
Ad of course we like it that way.
We all got flashy boat...
ReplyDeleteHe bag production he got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard he one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together right now over me
He roller-coaster he got early warning
He got muddy water he one mojo filter
He say "One and one and one is three"
Got to be good-looking 'cause he's so hard to see
Come together right now over me
That's the gloss.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteSo should everybody who uses the bathroom have to be a plumber, too? How about flying? If I need to take a plane to a conference or family reunion, should I need to know how to pilot a jumbo jet?
The truth is, we only have so much time on this earth, and must make choices how we want to spend it, what we want to prioritize. In some areas of life, we may take an interest in "how" things are done, while in others, it may not interest us at all.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteI think you’re conflating a number of claims in you most recent comment, and I also believe you’re not taking the proper measure of the point I made about desire rather than need being the driving force behind capitalism/consumer culture. Sure, we are often led astray by our desires, and not everything one can do or own is what one should do or own. But the point is of broader philosophical import and has nothing to do with Steve Jobs: people are partly creatures of reason and necessity, and partly creatures of imagination and desire for what goes well beyond necessity. Many are capable of sound reflection, but even the sharpest humans often dwell for stretches rather unreflectively within the cultural (and spiritual and technological, etc.) forms that have been handed to them. Life’s course involves an interplay between attempts to get beyond or outside the forms one inhabits, and dwelling happily within them without much or any reflection at all. It is perhaps impossible to fix the precise point at which either approach becomes inappropriate and destructive to oneself or others.
I say all this because you seem to look down on those young whippersnappers enjoying their multifarious iThingies like empty-headed cute little squirrels eating the fat walnuts you’ve just tossed them. You apparently insist that they should possess all the knowledge necessary to BUILD their iStuff from scratch. But if they just want to listen to some music, or watch a film or do some written composition on their little iThingy, why, oh why should they need to be experts in the technology wherewith they can do such things? Isn’t civilization ideally in part a coming-together of many with diverse talents and visions that work in complementarity with one another? I myself, as I’ve already said, used to enjoy building my own computers, but I would never insist that everybody else needs to do so even if they have no interest in that kind of thing. Everybody should develop an area or areas of expertise, but none of us can know everything or be experts in everything. To premise otherwise, as the Preacher saith, is “vanity.” Joseph Campbell the myth critic and master teacher used to say, "Follow your bliss." In other words, once you know what you love to do, go do it! That's wise -- and as we know, everything we do has an opportunity cost: there's something else we probably won't be able to do, for lack of time.
You're taking my lament about the alienation of our society from its technology too far. I don't insist on a nation of Edisons, or even Joe the Plumbers but only one with some tiny awareness of science and technology. We have a generation who couldn't wire a table lamp but who insist they're "tech-savvy." We're not savvy at all, we're competative consumers anxious to be judged by our purchases and our empty needs -- and easy prey for the Morlocks.
ReplyDeleteJust out of curiosity, with all the electronic things that will read books for you, wouldn't you rather that people continued to learn to read? That's all I mean. I fear that ignorance of technology is making us helpless and dependent on others.
No, I really don't have a serious hate thing with Apple or Jobs. If his demise hadn't produced a circus, I wouldn't be socynical. I just don't see him in a different light than Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford even if it's a somewhat better light than P T Barnum. Of late he's becoming another Princess Diana or Michael Jackson without the pederasty thing. It's too much. He's just a seriously competitive businessman with all that entails.
I certainly don't worship someone for maneuvering his product to the top, particularly when even I can envision something better, if not as profitable. There's not much to an iPod, you know and nothing mysterious to what Apple makes. I'd far rather have one without all the teeny-bopper features it won't let you remove, but no one can compete with these electronic Disney types at putting together components that others invented and built. That doesn't make me happy.
I have to wonder why at the same time we don't know who Shockley, Brittain and Bardeen were or that it was their invention - their original patent that changed the world as much as anything since fire. Have we ever heard anything about Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce? The worlds' commerce and all our science is the direct dependent of their nerdy, unhip and unfashionable work. I bet they wore baggy suits like the PC loser in the Apple commercial.
And the reason I say all drivers should be mechanics is that people who know the physics, the mechanics, are better, safer drivers who don't think their brakes work by magic and their cars are made of Turbonium like the VW commercial asserts. Besides I simply cannot understand those without a passion to understand how things work, whether it be a RAM chip or the universe itself.
Something died with Dyna-Flo.
ReplyDeleteTwo pedal cars
And all you know
Is which one makes it go,
Which one makes it slow
To drive it home.
Cam lift
Point dwell
Car smell.
Toe-in
Spring rate
Glass packs
Burger shacks.
Time slips
Road trips
Listen to the tires crunch
Gravel in the dark lot
And you both laughed
Real quiet in the back seat
To be alone.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteSure, I can understand what you're saying -- some level of understanding of how things work is very worthwhile and certainly we should teach science more thoroughly in the primary/secondary schools. The kind of curiosity you mention (i.e. about a RAM chip or the universe), for me, extends primarily to ideas and language themselves; it's also there for other areas of life, but somewhat more selectively. I enjoy astronomy and telescopes, for instance, but don't care much about engines and other such contraptions.
Now as for the reading/driving comparison, I don't agree: literacy has serious civic and humanistic implications; driving does not. Not knowing much about how your brakes work need not mean you won't exercise caution while driving. I'm a lizard who thinks that cars stop because of the brake fairy under the pedal when you push down on it, yet I'm a very safe driver -- never had a moving violation or serious accident in something like 25 years. It seems I know just how to press down on the pedal so as to keep the brake fairy happy, and all is well.
PS -- I should rather say "literacy about how exactly your car works" than "driving." Driving safely, of course, is not without its civic merit! But you can do that without being particularly well versed in the mechanical aspects of the affair.
ReplyDeleteCapt. Fogg, my husband, who graduated in 1958 from MIT with a degree in physics, loved, loved, LOVED everything you wrote and that I read to him. He actually knew personally and worked with Bob Noyce at Fairchild, and Gordon Moore and Andy Grove. He also met with Steve Jobs on several occasions when he was trying to buy RAMS when they were in short supply from NEC--(my husband worked for that Japanese company the last 20 years of his career.)
ReplyDeleteHe's been saying the exact same things you wrote, down to the details, and he roared with laughter, saying "this guy knows his technology!" with each sentence I read. He was especially impressed that you knew what a MOSFET is.
He says most of the people in Silicon Valley would heartily agree with you.
Well done, Captain.
A programmer and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from Los Angeles to New York. The Programmer leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer wants to take a nap, politely declines and rests his head against the window to get some sleep.
ReplyDeleteThe Programmer persists and explains that the game is easy and fun: "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I pay you $5."
Again the Engineer politely declines and goes back to sleep.
The Programmer, now somewhat agitated, says "Ok, if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I pay you $50!"
This catches the engineer's attention - seeing no end to the torment unless he agrees to play the game. The programmer asks the first question: "What is the distance from the Earth to the moon?"
The engineer doesn't say a word, but simply reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five-dollar bill, and hands it to the programmer. The engineer's turn, he asks the programmer: "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?"
The programmer looks up at him - puzzled. He takes out his laptop computer and searches his references. He connects his modem to the Airphone and searches the internet. Frustrated, he sends emails to his coworkers - all to no avail. After an hour, he wakes the engineer and hands him $50, who takes the $50 and turns away to get some sleep.
The programmer, more than annoyed, shakes the engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?" Without a word, the engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the programmer $5, and then goes back to sleep.
Edge:
ReplyDelete"Speaking of trades, you might want to check this out re: erosion of skills... http://ht.ly/6tyuo "
I forgot to thank you for that link - it confirms everything I'm trying to say and I blame it not only on lack of education, but on the fact that young people are so immersed in entertainment they don't know how to do anything but push buttons like a pigeon in a Skinner box. There are MBAs who can't write a simple letter too and half our high school critters think Beethoven is a dog.
And thanks Shaw too. I know I'm an old crackpot, but I do think I have a valid point. I've been into electronics since I was about 9 or 10 and I once had a company that made switch mode power supplies. I hold an Amateur Extra class license, so yeah I know the basics about how transistors work and the movements of charges across a junction and how a FET differs from NPN or PNP junction transistors. I think mechanical devices can be as sublime as a sonnet and I don't understand why fewer people now can see the poetry in engineering.
Perhaps one doesn't have to know disc brakes from drum brakes or know why double leading shoe drums provide their own power assist or know about pad materials or why we drill holes in discs to be a safe driver, but when you do know these things you're glad for it, particularly when you operate in extreme conditions. Is there a resaon I get 120,000 miles out of a set of pads and others ruin their brakes in 20,000? Is there a reason I always get better mileage than the window sticker says?
But I'm serious about literacy being replaced by passive listening. CNN.com doesn't want to offer articles as much as it wants you to listen to video clips where you have to get through an advertisement and more and more people are buying audio books. I think it fits perfectly with the idea that we're being made into passive enteratainment recepticles with no skills beyond our narrow occupational ones and I think that isn't good for democracy, civilization or driving.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteI think it's early education in particular that's a huge problem. I are a collidge teecher, and I've had the great pleasure of instructing many highly intelligent and well prepared young folk. Easy-tech probably has an idiot-making effect on all of us, but at the same time, it's clear to me as an educator that not everyone is sucked into the maw of the Great God Stultus through the shiny fruit-colored iJunk Portal. Some are escaping more or less intact....
Still, I'm often hit with a bewildering thought regarding the less well prepared: they've been going to school from the ages of around 6-18. Now, even a dinosaur knows that's a dozen years, so what HAVE their primary/secondary school instructors been instructing them in? If an English major can't get through a single paragraph without making ten or fifteen grievous errors -- dangling modifiers, random dropping-in of possessive forms, hopelessly tangled syntax, barbaric preposition choices that clearly are NOT the result of English being one's second language, etc. -- why wasn't that kid taught how to read, write, and do what them-there frenchies call "explication de texte"?
I mean, what else is there to do during class periods in elementary through high school besides studying English grammar, literature, basic science, mathematics, and so forth? What kind of education is it when you can barely make out a stop sign after more than a decade of "instruction"?
Of course, the American Right is 100% committed to anti-intellectualism, so we shall get no consideration from them: the last thing cynical, self-serving right-wing politicians want is an educated citizenry.
As for brake pads, I just put holes in them with my railroad-spike-sized teeth, and the brake fairy does the rest. Got almost 40,000 miles on my original set, which I suppose isn't too bad.
Um, I've put 120,000 on a set of brakes, but then, to quote Ettore Bugatti, "a car is to go, not to stop."
ReplyDelete