961: Eternal Flame

< Prev Comic #961 (October 6, 2011) Next >

Eternal Flame

Title text: There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.

Explanation

Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, the day before this comic was posted. He was the CEO and one of the founders of Apple, Inc. He was the head of Apple for the introduction of OS X, the operating system used on all modern Macintoshes. For OS X, when a program ties up enough system resources, an animated cusor, affectionately referred to as "the beachball," appears and spins, seemingly endlessly. The image text refers to the fact that on the Mac, the application sometimes recovers and the system comes back; other times, however, the damage is irrevocable, a Kernel Panic happens and the system needs a restart.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

Transcript

[Two people before a memorial with an eternally spinning wait cursor. They contemplate silently on an influential life. Goodbye, Steve.]

 add a comment!

Discussion

Ugh, I hate it when people attribute everything the the technology to Steve Jobs. Apple spends pebbles on R&D, polishes up the work of other countries and they get labelled as inventors and heroes. Incredibly frustrating for the rest of us in the technology industry. Davidy²²[talk] 08:35, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

The way I see it, Apple's innovation is in their UI. The iPod wasn't the first portable digital music player, and the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but they were the first in their respective classes to have an intuitive interface that could easily be understood by someone with no technology background. Marketing is everything in the tech industry, and a product will fail if it can't convince the market that it's the better choice, even if it's absolutely better from a technical standpoint. Curtmack (talk) 18:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC)