Words in Memory of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs passed away just a few hours ago, and this is really a saddening news. One thought that comes to my mind is the consequence of this might be as much as an non-neglibgle factor that would worsen the situation of IT industry and even cast a shadow to the already gloomy global economy.

I personally am not a Apple fan at all. I really have quite a few reasons for that,

- As a user and developer I don't like the way its products are delivered and used, particularly the classical pattern of iPod/iPhone/... having to be used with iTunes which does have so many restrictions in the sense of performance, configurability, development and so forth; although it's justifiable that it prevents piracy to a great extent.

- As a developer I don't like the way it builds its development ecosystem, I generally don't like its development toolkits, its reference manuals, the programming languages it advocates or has chosen to support, even the naming of the APIs, and how all these are revised and updated. Having essentially selected BSD Unix  (if i did't remember wrong) as its OS architecture, it legitimately or not fails to open its source code as much as expected, although I do agree it's still far ahead of Microsoft in the sense of both technological advantage and the disclosure of implementation details; and also it's justfiable for it to keep its underlying stuff clean and untouched.

- Commercially speaking, ... of cause I have no idea :b (all I would say is Jobs doesn't provide as many jobs (pun intended) as Gates does and I doubt the how long this success can last of such an enterprise and lines of products that so strongly depend on the personality of its leader).

Apart from these, I would never forget the painful days I had back in college when I had endlessly to figure out workarounds for those issues with implementing QuickTime/Final Cut Pro media processing plugins to just get our 'exciting' non-linear editing ideas to be realized on top of that unfriendly, closed and clunky framework, simply due to the aformentioned deficiencies in development support and a lack of flexibility in subsystems and consistency between subsystems (and also partially due to the complexity and inefficiency of JPEG2000).

Nevertheless, these do not stop me from regarding Jobs as a great leader, innovator and master of technological fads. He and his coworkers literally created in human history the first series of PCs with modern GUI based operating system predating MS Windows 3, refined computer fonting system, invented document-view architecture  predating MS's MFC, during his frustrating days established PIXAR which laid the groundwork for Disney to produce its first 3D animation movie and almost all subsequent movies of such kind, and after the frustrating days brought UNIX into his dream system of different versions that wins him great success through products of iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad... known to all... can hardly believe these achievements are all linked to one person, and his pursuit of buddism is as interesting to me.

All that I want to say has already been said by my supervisors and colleagues of those days as well as others.

- 'Then it's the micro-kernel that's more mysterious' (after realizing unix is just used as a system service layer), Asso Researcher Dr. Wang

- 'You never need to worry about the state of your mac laptop left powered-on in your backpack',  Dr. Wang

- 'It's a perfect combination of Art and Technology', Dr. Kwan

- 'Apple is among those very few organisations that have succeeded in carrying out the process from Why (ideas/reasons/goals), How(approaches) through to What (products/services) rather than the reverse which is what most people do.'

It has been, as Bill Gates said, an insanely great honor to get to work with Jobs; though I didn't work with him in a direct manner, I did work insanely with Dr. Wang who had such an insanely great enthusiasm for the cause Jobs had devoted himself to and we did in those days and Dr. Wang is still doing to our best abiltiy to extend his cause to the growing industry of China's HDTV programme production. And Bill Gates has convinced us it is an honor.

Steve, May you rest at as much peace as the zeal you've aroused in this world.