RUSH: David, my brother, is having problems setting up iCloud. He’s sending me notes. I’m trying to help him. You need iPhoto 9.2 for PhotoStream to work. That means photos in iCloud showing up in all your devices after you take a picture on an iPhone. You need iPhoto 9.2, which is part of iLife ’11. It’s Friday — let’s go, folks.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: And, if you have iPhoto 9.2, you have to click on the PhotoStream button both in iPhoto and on your iPad or your iPhone. PhotoStream is like a photo album where those photos go to the cloud and back to your devices. I hope that helps. Multitasking. That’s what we’re known for here at the EIB Network. I do my own show and help other people do their work at the same time. 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
I love it, by the way, I’m a big evangel for this stuff. I’ll tell you what, I could spend as much time talking to you about the new Apple things as I could football, and the stick-to-the-issues crowd would go nuts. They would literally go nuts. I’m tempted to get my phone out here and show you what this Siri will do. (chuckling) I demonstrated Siri in the iPhone for Snerdley the other day, and he was blown away. People are playing with this because the phone, the computer talks back to you. It’s official intelligence, it’s not just programmed words. So I asked the iPhone, “Will you marry me?” And it came back and said, “My end user agreement doesn’t permit things like that.” I said, “What’s your bust size?” “I’m not allowed to answer those questions.” It’s fun. Everybody’s trying to figure out what all you can do with this, and there’s all kinds of room for growth in it.
Anyway, Open Line Friday whatever you want to talk about is fine.
Have I asked Siri any political questions? I haven’t. Let’s just try something. Let’s see how liberal Siri is on the iPhone. I’ve not done this. This is a live demo. I have no idea what’s gonna happen here. All I know is there’s never any profanity out of this phone so I’m safe there. Okay, turn on the speaker, turn the mute off, here we go. “Siri, should I vote for Obama in 2012?” Doesn’t know. That’s the first time I haven’t gotten an answer. Oh, it says “one moment,” trying to figure it out. Let’s try something else, let’s try another demo. “Just a couple more seconds,” it says here. Maybe I’ll be lucky and the phone doesn’t know who Obama is. Still nothing. This is what happens with live demos. What question do you want asked of the phone, Snerdley? You got a question off the top of your head? Let’s try it a different way. Who will be elected president in the United States in 2012?
SIRI: Checking on that for you.
RUSH: Did you hear that?
SIRI: How about a web search for who will be elected president in the United States in 2012?
RUSH: No thanks. I don’t want a web search to find that. If the phone can’t answer it that’s one of the questions that you get. Okay, let’s try one more. What is the distance from the earth to the moon?
SIRI: Let me check on that. Okay, here you go.
RUSH: And the answer is on the screen from Wolfram|Alpha. The answer is 232,993 miles. You can have it do math problems, anything of the sort. You can have it set up appointments, calendars, make phone calls, you can dictate e-mails and text messages to it. (interruption) No, you can’t rename it, but you can ask it to call you something else. Let’s try this. Call me El Rushbo.
SIRI: I don’t have a phone number for El Rushbo.
RUSH: Ah, you have to have a contact in your database with that name before it will call you that. So if I wanted the phone to call me El Rushbo I’d have to create a contact database card El Rushbo and it would do that. Speaking of all of this, the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson is due on Monday. It was actually due in January, then they moved it up because of his death, and there have been a number of leaks, and one of the leaks of information that is in the book, Huffington Post got a copy of the book, AP got a copy of the book.
“The Huffington Post, however, managed to obtain a copy early and revealed some very interesting tidbits about the life of the Apple visionary — namely that, upon meeting President Barack Obama in 2010, Jobs told him, ‘youÂ’re headed for a one-term presidency.’ According to HuffPo, the book states that Jobs was critical of the Obama administration for not being business-friendly and blasted the nationÂ’s education system as it is ‘crippled by union work rules.’ Jobs, who insisted the president personally extend an invitation to meet with him, told Obama that ‘regulations and unnecessary costs’ make doing business in the United States, as opposed to China, prohibitive.
“Though Jobs was not that impressed by Obama, later telling Isaacson that his focus on the reasons that things canÂ’t get done ‘infuriates’ him, they kept in touch and talked by phone a few more times. Jobs even offered to help create ObamaÂ’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. ‘He had made the same offer in 2008, but he‘d become annoyed when ObamaÂ’s strategist David Axelrod wasnÂ’t totally deferential,’ writes Isaacson. Jobs later told the author that he wanted to do for Obama what the legendary ‘morning in America’ ads did for Ronald Reagan.”
Now, I have been a student of Steve Jobs for a long time. There are a lot of things about him that would surprise people. He was as profit oriented as any capitalist you have ever met. One of the stories that the left is very uncomfortable with about Jobs, when he took Apple back over in 1997, he went back after being exiled, he went back in 1997 and after a few months became interim CEO, then full time. The first thing he did was cancel every philanthropic program that Apple had, because they were in a loss situation. He said, “I’m not gonna give away money here while we’re losing it.” And after Apple started turning profitable he did not reinstitute the philanthropic programs that Apple had in place, and nobody knows what he did in private. But Apple as a corporation did not have any official philanthropic programs, which bugged a lot of people and made it sound very strange.
Wozniak tells stories that when they were first starting out in the garage, one of the things they built was blue boxes. Do you know what a blue box was? A blue box tricked the phone company, could make long-distance calls, and the phone company never knew that the phone had been taken off the hook. I, El Rushbo, had one when I lived in Pittsburgh. It worked. And Wozniak and Jobs made these blue boxes and ran around to college dormitories and they sold them. Wozniak tells people he felt guilty over how much Jobs was charging versus how much it cost to make them, that Jobs would sell something for 60 bucks that cost them six cents, and Wozniak said, (paraphrasing) “I wasn’t interested in making money. I just liked building things. But Steve, all he wanted to do was just profit and profit, make a lot of money, and I guess we needed that part of ourselves working together because we were totally different in that way, ’cause if Steve hadn’t cared about the money we’d-a never made any.”
On the other hand, there was no questioning that Jobs would in no way give any indication to anybody at any time anywhere that his political leanings were anything but liberal. And they probably were anything but liberal. But when it came to running that business of his, he was as capitalist as any capitalist this world has ever produced has been. I totally believe, I don’t think they’re leaking lies from Isaacson’s book. It’s gonna be out Monday. We’ll be able to check. But, you know, all of Apple’s products, 99% of them are made in China. They’re made in China because if they weren’t they’d be prohibitively expensive made in the United States. The fact that he would tell Obama that unions are destroying the schools, perfectly true. It’s perfectly true. And that you’re gonna be one-term president? A lot of Democrats think that now. If the election were tomorrow he would be a one-term president.
There are other tidbits in the Walter Isaacson book. He slammed Bill Gates as a competitor. This is another thing. The Android operating system for Google phones, he just thought that he had been stolen, copied from by Google, and the book says that he was gonna spend every dollar he had to put them out of business. I mean there was nothing anti-competition, there was no guilt over winning. None of these liberal traits that you associate with the wishy-washy, spineless linguine type behavior of liberals existed in Steve Jobs when it came to his business. When it came to his business he was gonna triumph, he was gonna win, and he was gonna be the only one in it. They weren’t gonna be any competitors if he had his way. He was gonna wipe them all out. He made no secret of the fact to people that he thought Windows was a total rip-off and copy. However, if it hadn’t been for Bill Gates there might not have been a second iteration of Apple. Gates invested $150 million when Apple was in trouble, I think in 1997.
That wasn’t because they were friends, largely Gates did it because Microsoft even then was just huge and monopolistic and to give your competitor $150 million keeps the wolves at bay in the federal government and it helps keep the industry alive at the same time. It was insurance against the government. There were some other factors in play, too, but $150 million was not a big hit at all to Microsoft at the time. Microsoft had other places to steal from, but it kept Apple going. And it was to Microsoft’s credit that it could be said they had a role in helping a competitor stay alive rather than go out of business. So there was that political benefit to it, too. But some of the stuff that’s been leaked is fascinatingly interesting. Let me try one more time here. People on the blogs are writing all these questions about stumping Siri. And I’ve stumped Siri twice here. Siri, what is your bust size?
SIRI: Yes?
RUSH: (laughing) What is your bust size? What is your bust size?
SIRI: It’s nice of you to ask. Now, can I help you with something?
RUSH: Yes. Are you a communist or a conservative? We’re waiting. Are you a communist or conservative?
SIRI: I’m sorry, Rush, I’m afraid I can’t answer that.
RUSH: There you go. People are having fun trying to figure out what kind of things you can get the phone to say to you. But you can have it do real things, schedule appointments, dictate e-mails, dictate texts. And that’s, in my experience, near flawless translation of voice to text.