Nosce te ipsum

Care of the Mac Observer

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs told Stanford University graduates Sunday not to be afraid of failing and not to "let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

Wearing jeans and sandals under his black robe, Mr. Jobs told some 23,000 people in the stadium in Palo Alto, Calif. of his early childhood days, his struggle to make Apple a success, and his thoughts on mortality after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in August of 2004.

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," Mr. Jobs said. "It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life."

Mr. Jobs began by reminding graduates of dropping out of college and that Sunday's ceremony was the closest he had ever gotten to a university graduation.

He admitted his biological mother was an unwed graduate student who had planned to have him adopted and that his adoptive parents did not have college degrees. Although his parents paid for his college courses from Reed College in Portland, Ore., Mr. Jobs said he dropped out to save money and concentrate on topics that interested him most, such as a calligraphy course that later inspired him to design different fonts in the first Macintosh.

The irony of Steve, a college drop out who went on to literally change the world in a facet of different ways, first the personal computer revolution, then changing the face of the movie industry, more recently he dragged the music industry into the 21st century with a slew of his innovations (which of course the rest of the world soon attempted to poorly copy).

Especially given the location and general culture surrounding Stanford University, there is little doubt that Steve's speach was well received and highly motivating. Anyone in attendance happen to have an mp3 of the event?

For a lot of us, this is a big deal and surprisingly, it was not (at all?) publicized with the release of 10.4 Tiger. It absolutely amazes me that in the year 2005, we still have these disparate IM networks that do not universally communicate with each other without requiring their users to go out and run multi-protocol IM clients (or God forbid, running the client from each network separately).

This kind of reminds me of (seriously dating myself here) back in the days just after the heyday of BBS's when we had individual email gateways and AOL's email was totally separate from CompuServes and if you were one of the super elite techs, you had this far out thing called an 'Internet email address!'. Amazing how far it's all come, now if we can just get this IM mess sorted out.

The iChat 3.0 Instant messaging (IM) that's bundled with Mac OS X Tiger allows iChat users to communicate with other IM platform, such as MSN messenger.

Some functions such as file transfer won't work, but the basic text communication will. That's a pretty good start. This is now possible because iChat uses the open IM protocol Jabber.

Read more.

Update - After wading through the full google translated article, it becomes clearer why Apple did not heavily promote this new feature. The good news is that it actually goes beyond just being able to IM with MSN members, it extends to MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ ( now if it only supported IRC ), but it's possible because of jabber.

From MacOSX.com

Through Jabber, which is supported under iChat 3.0, it is possible to login to many popular chat protocols that iChat did not traditionally support. Jabber supports accessing chat networks, such as MSN, Yahoo!, and ICQ, through entities called "gateways." iChat does not directly support gateways, however you can create gateways using another Jabber client. Once the gateways are setup in another program (for example, psi), you can login to your Jabber account through iChat 3 and be able to chat with your MSN/ICQ/Yahoo contacts.

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Three blind guys find themselves in a room with an elephant. Not knowing what an elephant is or what it looks like, they each step forward and begin to feel it. The first guy, feeling the elephant’s massive hindquarter, says, “The elephant is like a wall.” The second guy, feeling the elephant’s tusk, says, “The elephant is sharp, like a spear.” The third guy, feeling the elephant’s trunk, says, “The elephant is muscular and sinuous, like a snake.”

This is a market that Apple has absolutely no interest in, for one reason and one reason only: Steve Jobs has been there, and he doesn’t want to go back. The point of the story is that when different people look at the same thing from different points of view, they often end up with totally different impressions. The computer business is an elephant, and analysts are the blind guys. Everybody who talks about, writes about, or even thinks about the computer business necessarily looks at it from only his own point of view.

But sometimes, to understand a recent development or to make a sensible prediction about the future, it’s necessary to take a step back, not to look at just the trunk or just the tusk but to take in the big picture.

Real the full article here