Tech at Night: Steve Jobs 1955-2011
Steve Jobs died today after a long battle with cancer. He was 56. Founding NeXT would have been enough to turn anyone into a cult hero in his field. Acquiring Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group and turning it into Pixar would have made anyone a respected business leader.
But for Steve Jobs, those were feathers in his cap called Apple, the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak, and then later saved from extinction by returning to lead it again. He led Apple to its point today as the most valuable corporation in America, measured by public market capitalization. To do that, Jobs had to beat Microsoft and he had to beat IBM. He won in the end.
Far from just a visionary, people from Apple have always said he was a hands-on leader, who had a personal stake in the success of the company and of the products he helped create. Apple ][. Macintosh. NextStep. iMac. MacOS X. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Jobs leaves behind an incredible legacy, and his death will be felt by his industry, and the world. RIP.
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Tech at Night: Radicals want free stuff, UK rejects its own PROTECT IP, FDT on Internet Sales Tax, FCC games
South Korea has Net Neutrality activists in an uproar as, guess what? The government is considering asking a high-bandwidth Internet service to pay its fair share for the government-subsidized Internet in the country. Just more proof that when the radicals say “Net Neutrality,” they really mean “free stuff paid for by the taxpayers.”
The radical left’s push for freeloading continues in America too, as Public Knowledge insanely campaigns against 4G wireless Internet. Why? Because providers are making you pay for what you use. Clearly, paying for what you use, according to the principles of freedom of enterprise, is unacceptable to any committed socialist.
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Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, FCC, Republicans charge ahead
Forgive me if I’m not as engaging as usual tonight. Firefox robbed me of a good 20 minutes of time tonight. Firefox 3, what was supposed to be faster and better than ever, had taken up so much memory it was slowing my whole system, and then it took forever to restart. Of course, now they’re saying Firefox 4 will be better this time. Really. Forgive me if I’m not optimistic. As soon as NoScript or equivalent comes to Safari, I’m away from Mozilla forever.
Moving on, I wrote on RedState today about the FCC plotting something that could be a sign that the left wants to start manipulating statistics to push their agenda. We need to watch and make sure they don’t try anything funny.
The IPv4 Panic Button has been hit again. People are saying we’re out of addresses! But we’re actually not. We’ve just handed out many large blocks of addresses to regional authorities who then assign them to those who need them. Of course, if we actually did run out (and couldn’t fix the issue of a few large companies having obscene numbers of addresses, from the old days), I say we just strip pubic IP addresses from countries that firewall the Internet, including China, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. If you’re not on the public Internet, you don’t need public IP addresses.
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