Life of Steve Jobs in 2 minutes

Jimmy Lai’s computer graphics people tell the Apple story

TAIWAN’S famous news graphics people have used their computer skills to recreate the life of Steve Jobs. Curious how this medium has remained an East Asian skill—you’d think the Western media would have copied it by now.

Anyway, it has no real dialogue, so in case you can’t follow the story, it basically runs like this – a student takes drugs, gets some wild ideas, invents the Apple computer, does battle with the evil warlord of the galaxy (Microsoft’s Bill Gates), defeats him, and the show ends with Apple’s latest battle – a fight with the only other really creative super-tech company, which is Google and its Android project.

Sadly, it misses Steve Wozniak, Apple’s creative genius.

Oddly, Steve Jobs is rescued in the last fight by a man wearing a rainbow hat, but I’m not sure who that is supposed to be. Can anyone work it out?

Incidentally, I heard a rumor that my old mate Jimmy Lai (the guy who runs the company, Next Media Animation, that produces the graphics above), is planning his own TV station. Watch out, Rupert.
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STILL ON THE SUBJECT of news, consider this. For many years, your humble narrator has been compiling a database called The Skindex. This correlates news value of an event against the ethnicity of the people the story is about. For example, I typically find that one white American is worth six to ten white Europeans or between 500 and 5,000 ethnic Asians or Africans.

There’s a good example in the news today.

While I was shaving an hour ago, I heard the discussion on the radio about whether there had been an over-reaction to the New York hurricane, which had been less dangerous than expected.

Getting to my desk, I flick on Google news. This is what I see: There are 25920 current articles on Hurricane Irene. (See below)

Then I flick to BBC News, where I learn that there are similar storms in Africa and Asia. First, I look up the Philippines story – only 893 results.  (See below.)

 

Then I look up the Nigeria storm – only 29 articles! (See below.)

Obviously, if I use different search terms, the results would change. But not much. I could do it more scientifically, and I will dig out my data and do that one of these days. Typically, Asian and African stories get similar results, often one per cent of similar stories in the US.

Extrapolating from the figures above, we see that one American storm is worth 30 Asian storms or 900 African storms. If we then actually measure the articles, we find that the reports of US storms tend to be 10 times as long as those for the other storms. So our final figure is that one US storm is worth 300 Asian storms or 9000 African ones.
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Technorati Tags: NWA,Steve Jobs,Apple,news,race,comparison

Comments

[Jason]

Nury I believe the Skindex has already been covered by The Onion a few years ago:

15,000 Brown People Dead Somewhere

OOGA-BOOGA LAND OR WHEREVER–Relief efforts are pouring into some country someplace, where 15,000 brown people have died over the past few weeks from flooding or a hurricane or something like that. "Never have our people endured such a terrible catastrophe," said this one dark-skinned guy who lost his entire family in the disaster of some sort. "Our God has forsaken us." The affected nation may possibly be the same one where about 90,000 brown people died two or three years ago in that one earthquake.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/15000-brown-people-dead-somewhere,3751/

I myself witnessed this in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, when living on Koh Samui and having 2 news channels only, BBC world and Fox News. BBC did a great job covering it. Fox on the other hand, gave about 30 seconds to the biggest story in the world, then went on immediately to discuss a potato found in Idaho that looked like Jebus.

[Nury]

Thanks Jason, very amusing. Although this seems to be one of those odd cases where the Onion is trying to parody something that doesn't need parodying -- it is already ridiculous!

[Vmlinuz]

Erm... Woz is the guy in the red shirt who actually delivers the Mac from (the other) Steve near the beginning - and the guy in the rainbow hat is Tim Cook, who has been promoted from COO of Apple to CEO to replace (the other) Steve, and who is by all accounts gay...

Also, the little green robots are going to win in the end - you heard it here first :)

[Nury]

Wow, thanks, Vmlinuz, you seem to know all the inside info -- so a rainbow hat signifies a gay guy? Then the design elements in Apple may even get better, if we believe the general wisdom that gay people have better visualization skills than heteros.
A friend of mine read some Apple bios and said that Woz was the genius and got screwed by Jobs, who was better at business...

[grandpa]

"general wisdom that gay people have better visualization skills than heteros. '"
They don't, but they don't
have to waste energy arguing with a wife

[Teewai]

The rainbow hat is used to signify a widely popular mascot for 7-Eleven in Taiwan called the 'Open Chan'

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/open%E5%B0%87/interesting/

And hello Uncle! I am one of the many lurkers who reads your column but never comment - though I very much prefer escalators than lifts :)

[Karuna]

" Woz was the genius and got screwed by Jobs"

@Nury, does it mean Steve is also a gay ;-)

[Chamin]

@Karuna: good one! :o)

[wally g]

there are plenty of screwed up people in
the world. some of these commenters here
are proof of that. time will take of them like all else. good bye cruel world
fair thee well yon fools. your time is at hand.