The leader of the Apple corporation, Steve Jobs has passed away, leaving a huge legacy. The company he co-founded with his 26 year old friend Steve Wozniak in his family garage has grown to become a world famous corporation with many incredible products such as the Apple Ipod, Itunes and the famous Ipad. His computers were always very easy to use and designed with a very stylish look; something that the competition did not have except maybe the Silicon Graphics UNIX machines of old. And Alienware, but they do not have the sleek look and lovely white casings of Apple Macintosh computers that have always been very popular due to their ease of use and the fact they are simple to set up. Steve Jobs will be greatly missed and I hope that someone else can take up the reins and run the company in his absence and do his legacy justice. There has been a lot of negative trolling directed at Steven Jobs, but this is not helping anyone and is best kept to yourself. It does not belong in the public arena. He came from humble beginnings and built up a very successful company. The reign of Steve Jobs brought us the greatest innovations in computing history, especially the Ipad that introduced Star Trek styled tablet computing that has become one of the most popular gadgets released by Apple. Apple corporation hit a second quarter profit of US$ 7.31 billion dollars in July of 2011 on revenue of US$28.57 billion.
Steven Jobs started Apple corporation with Steve Wozniak in 1977, starting up the company with US$1,300.00 from the sale of an old beat-up Volkswagen van and a programmable calculator to finance the first prototype. In that year, Apple’s revenues topped US$184,000,000 and when it was floated on the stockmarket, in December of 1977, the company became one of the most successful stock offerings Wall Street had ever seen. A very good investment for US$1,300.00. The Apple II computer retailed for US$1,435.00 and was a very popular machine using a mouse and a good quality screen allowing users to edit graphics and type documents like never before. Even though the 1981 Xerox Star computer system was the first to introduce the concept of a mouse and keyboard controls, the Apple Macintosh computer had an enormous mass market appeal. In the Spring of 1981, Apple Corporation shipped their one hundred and fifty thousandth personal computer, which is impressive for a company founded in 1977. In 1977, Apple had amassed sales of US$3,000,000, which by 1980 had rocketed to US$160,000,000. The initial financing for the fledgling company came from Markkula and a group of venture capitalists that included Venrock Associates, Arthur Rock & Associates and Capital Management Corporation. Apple also managed to obtain a line of credit from the Bank of America. Subsequent retained earnings by the company have provided most of the financing required for the growth of the company.
The company grew to about 800 employees in 1980, who occupied 560,000 square feet of floor space both in the US and in Europe. Apple corporation has grown significantly since then with the Iconic Apple stores in just about every town and city. The Iphone seems to be dominating the mobile telephone market. R.I.P Steve Jobs, you will be missed. The world has lost a great pioneer of computing that revolutionized the world of Information Technology.
I have recently had to copy a Fedora DVD to my hard drive to make a copy on a blank DVD as the disc was reporting errors. I used this command to copy the disc to my computer as a ISO image.
john@gethsemane:~$ dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=1 of=Fedora15.iso
This took a very long time even with a 22x drive, but this was successful. Now I can burn this to a clean disc and install Fedora 15 to try out the Gnome Shell desktop. The dd command can be used to copy any DVD to the hard disk and if it is a Video DVD you can play the ISO image, or you can burn it to another disk and make a 1:1 copy of your DVD collection.
And this is also a very useful command, I wanted to unmount a mounted NTFS volume, but the system said it was busy, so I used this command to see which user was accessing the drive.
root@gethsemane:/home/john# fuser -u /media/Elements/ /media/Elements/: 32041c(john) 32082c(john)
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