But what was Steve Wozniak’s Cal experience really like? We at the Daily Clog sat down with the Wizard of Wozillia himself to find out.

The Daily Californian: Can you tell us a little bit about how you arrived at UC Berkeley? Why did you choose to transfer here for your junior year?

Steve Wozniak: My parents had me apply to the University of California because it was an awful lot less expensive. So I applied. Berkeley really was the school I would have wanted to go to, because it had a reputation for intellectual free-thinking. Civil liberties and the politics and economics of war were being challenged. Freedom of speech was being brought up as a subject. So I really admired Berkeley in that sense. I just wanted to be among great thinkers. So in my third year of college, I transferred into Berkeley.

DC: After your first year at UC Berkeley, you left and founded Apple with Steve Jobs. But you made sure to return to UC Berkeley to finish your degree. Why? Why does a college degree matter to you?

SW: I had done a lot outside of Cal that would have been equivalent to Master’s and PhD projects, but having a symbol to represent these accomplishments is very important. Also, just being able to tell your kids what college you went to is going to encourage them to go to college. And college is just the most fun four years of your life.

DC: Where, in your experience, is the best place for experiencing what it means to be a Golden Bear?

SW: Oh my gosh. The first place that comes to mind is the rallies before the Big Game. As part of Berkeley itself, Sather Gate stands out in my mind as the most prominent feature of the university.

DC: Sproul Plaza has always been a center of campus activity. Any memories, strange encounters or lessons that you learned there?

SW: I often saw musicians sitting down and playing the guitar. I was into that kind of folkish approach. Sometimes, I’d sit down and listen to them — and even skip class for it.

DC: Do you still like the same kind of music? What’s playing on your iTunes right now?

SW: [laughs] Usually something a little bit country. A little bit folk. Ariana Gillis is one of my favorites. Let’s see, I like The Airborne Toxic Event, Train, Counting Crows — oh my gosh — Counting Crows. Right out of Berkeley! I love them so much. We got to meet the guitarist and we go out with him and his girlfriend all the time.

DC: Do you have a favorite song from Counting Crows?

SW: “Round Here,” “Mr. Jones,” … actually, all their songs. They are just so incredible. I actually take most songs I like and go online, read the lyrics and think about them. This kind of thinking is what college is about and it means a lot to me. Music was a big part of my life in learning how to live.

DC: Cool. Other than music, Sproul is known for its demonstrations. Was this true when you were at Cal?

SW: We had sit-downs in those days. But there was one protest where marchers went to Bancroft and Shattuck and smashed every window. We had large demonstrations; the police would show up and start firing tear gas and everyone would run. The cops would be shooting rubber bullets, so the kids in the dorms would love to go looking for them. I kept hoping … to get a picture taken next to a tear gas canister spewing out smoke. But I never achieved that. I never found a rubber bullet either — but thank God I never got a hit by one. Although, one time I was at a payphone on Bancroft and Telegraph and all of a sudden cops pulled up in “blue minis.” They started shooting their guns; the crowd started running but I was trapped in the phone booth, waiting for an operator to get back to me. I was ducking down. The windows were already broken on that pay phone. I was so scared I was going to get hit. But I didn’t. They left me alone. [laughs]

DC: While living in Norton Hall, Unit 3, you describe phone phreaking. Can you tell us a bit more? What experience stands out?

SW: Wow. I discovered, the day before coming to school at Berkeley, this whole idea that you could put little tones into a phone and dial calls anywhere in the world. It was  a bug in the phone system. I was talented enough to build tone makers — I did this with Steve Jobs — and I was excited that we would be able to make a device that would make calls all over the world. We were honest enough to tell our parents what we were doing. They just said not to make any of the calls from their phones. So we would mostly do it from the dorm rooms.

I had read about phone phreaks that were great engineers. They would hook into payphone cables in Arizona and set up worldwide networks. They were smarter than phone company engineers and drove around with vans full of equipment. And oh my gosh, they were just like science fiction heroes — except they were real.

DC: Tell us about the Blue Box. We know it’s a device that you used to make international calls for free, but what did you do with it?

SW: It was never my idea to sell a Blue Box — just to make one to show off. But Steve Jobs said, “Why don’t we sell these to students?” He was always short on money. So we would set up demonstrations in dorms around campus. We would knock on doors until we found someone that looked cool … so, you know, they wouldn’t turn us in. Then we would set up an appointment to come back that night. Usually a group of about 12-20 people would be in the room. I would be the master of ceremonies. I’d tell stories about what phone phreaks have done and what they could do. I’d make a demonstration Blue Box call and we would wind up calling around the world. At every single demo, we sold a Blue Box.

DC: Wow, it sounds like you could do some crazy stuff with the Blue Box. Did you pull any pranks with it?

SW: We called the Pope. I pretended to be Henry Kissinger with Richard Nixon at a summit meeting in Moscow. I said that I wanted to talk to the Pope. I reached the Bishop, who going to be the translator, an hour later — but he had called the real Henry Kissinger. So, I was busted. We didn’t have caller ID in those days.

DC: That’s awesome. Are there any other wild experiences you had because of your phone phreaking hobby?

SW: One day, we had a Blue Box to sell to somebody in the dorms. We stopped at a pizza parlor and demonstrated it to some people there. Then they came up to our car and robbed us of it at gun point. But they left their phone number so that we could call and tell them how to use it. They wanted to pay for it but just didn’t have the money.

DC: Wow, that’s intense.

SW: [laughs] We did a lot of incredible interesting things that people couldn’t believe.

DC: Looking back, what advice would you give graduating seniors?

SW: Don’t expect that right away — even though you’re smarter than someone else — you’re going to stand out and have better ideas and approaches. It takes a while to learn that.

Contact Alex Mabanta at amabanta@dailycal.org.

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He has his own category on Jeopardy! For $1,000: “Woz was the creator of this ’80s event that brought music fans out to see an all-star lineup”

He competed on Dancing with the Stars. As far as we know, he is the only person who can pull off the cha-cha-cha in a pink feather boa.

He dated Kathy Griffin. Did you know that the ever-naughty female counterpart to Anderson Cooper’s New Year’s Eve Live romanced Woz? Here he is on her show in a bear convention.

He cameoed on Big Bang Theory. And called Sheldon a nerd. Major swag.

He is a third-degree Freemason. National Treasure profiled it. He’s on par with 14 Presidents, Mozart and Bach.

He has four patents, 10 honorary doctorates of engineering and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He’s is listed next to the Wright Brothers, Walt Disney, Edison and Tesla. That’s Berkeley.

He has a street named after him. Woz Way is located in San Jose, the capital of the Silicon Valley

He gave a Game Boy to President H.W. Bush. Woz also scored 702,000 playing Tetris on his Game Boy.

He graduated UC Berkeley in 1986 as an EECS major. That’s not easy to do.

He is a really good friend. We cried when he talked about Steve Jobs too.

Image Source: The DEMO Conference under Creative Commons

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Written by Emmanuel Saez, a UC Berkeley economics professor and winner of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, the report showed uneven rates of recovery following the 2008 recession between the two financially disparate groups.

According to the report, the top 1 percent of incomes grew 11.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, while those of the bottom 99 percent shrank by 0.4 percent over the same period. Saez reported that the top percentage made 121 percent of income gains after the recession.

“In my opinion, the numbers are ambiguous,” said Russell Roberts, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “What Saez captures correctly is that the richest people in the United States are richer than they used to be. The question is why.”

Roberts explained that the ability to leverage talent is much greater today than it was in the past, as modern technology allows for wider audiences to be reached. He said that the disproportionate trend of large income increases did not necessarily detract from the total share of wealth and could actually encourage ingenuity.

Referring to innovators like Steve Jobs, Roberts remarked, “I don’t resent that they’re fabulously wealthy, because they’ve made the world a better place.“

However, both Roberts and UC Berkeley professor of public policy Robert Reich agreed that the concentration of political privilege resulting from income inequality might threaten American democracy.

“Even though we are becoming more productive, the vast middle class lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going at or near full employment,” Reich said. “When so much income and wealth is concentrated at the top, political power becomes concentrated there as well.”

In the report, Saez wrote that falls in income concentration due to economic downturns are temporary unless drastic regulation and tax policy changes are implemented.

“The policy changes that are taking place coming out of the Great Recession are not negligible but they are modest relative to the policy changes that took place coming out of the Great Depression,” Saez wrote in the report.

Reich noted that the government is working to reduce income inequality. These include efforts to increase the minimum wage as well as the Affordable Care Act, which will bring health insurance coverage to 20 million previously uncovered citizens, and the Dodd-Frank Act, which regulates financial transactions on Wall Street.

“None of these initiatives are large or bold enough to reverse the trend towards widening inequality,” said Reich. “It seems unlikely that income concentration is going to change very much in coming years.”

Contact Mia Shaw at mshaw@dailycal.org.

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Hansen has not disclosed many details of his new work at Apple. In an article written by CNN, Hansen expressed excitement about his work with such a brilliant group of people, describing them as “the best there is.”

In addition to his faculty position at UC Berkeley, Hansen has been a consultant for many major companies around the world and has published award-winning research in business management.

According to the story, Hansen was first approached by former dean of Yale School of Management Joel Podolny to join the program in 2009 but declined the offer of a full-time job so he could finish his book “Great by Choice” with co-author Jim Collins.

CNN reported that Apple approached Hansen again in late December and that Hansen accepted the job at Apple’s MBA training program under the condition that he could remain at UC Berkeley to teach one course per semester.

Apple University, an in-house MBA training program instituted by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, trains the company’s executives within Apple’s business culture.

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This week is no different. It’s not just because I burned all my furniture as firewood, but also because my bed happens to be hosting a premiere of sorts for the latest Julie Delpy film, “2 Days in New York.” Sadly, none of the stars will be in attendance. Indeed, the premiere was vacant to the point where I was actually the only one watching the film. Another column on illegal Internet streaming? Not quite. Last week, Magnolia pictures, the North American distributors of the film released the entire movie for online streaming and rental nearly an entire month before its theatrical release on August 10.

This is not a pioneering concept. It had its nexus in a series of big movie flops in 2005. Audiences across the board were down 10 percent. The list of box-office bombs for that year read like a veritable litany of sure-fire successes — commercial concepts with Oscar-winning names attached to them. For someone like me, who measures time in Woody Allen films, 2005 was the year of “Match Point,” when after 30 years of stateside cinema, the master abandoned the New World for the Old.

The crisis seemed to culminate in August when Robert A. Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation, issued what theater owners called a “death threat” to his own industry. Like several New York Times columnists, Steve Jobs and a host of other movie bigwigs, Iger saw the solution to the industry’s woes in the simultaneous release of a film through multiple platforms. Platforms could include theaters, iTunes and cable television. If digital pirates wanted online cinema, Iger would give it to them — for a fee.

He made good on his claims. With ABC television, which is partly owned by the Disney company, Iger began to offer legal television downloads through Apple’s iTunes store, just an hour after they had aired on TV. Indeed, Apple, feeling limber after resuscitating a well and truly Napstered music industry seemed poised to work another miracle with movies. In October 2005, they launched their video iPod before committing to full-length movie downloads in September 2006.

As fate would have it, 2006 proved to be a banner year for Hollywood, and many of these more radical ideas were put on the backburner and experimented on with smaller, less risky projects. These were films, like Steven Soderbergh’s 2006 film “Bubble,” distributed by — surprise, surprise –– Magnolia pictures! The test was a disaster and the film flopped. Perhaps Soderberg’s most recent offering “Magic Mike” has a future in streaming. It has all the hallmarks of a good laptop watch –– primarily, gratuitous amounts of male nudity.

For all online distribution’s false starts and failures, the concept seems to be ramping up again. After “2 Days in New York,” Magnolia will continue to release other films over this “online-first” model. With celluloid distribution being phased out in 2013, it seems that, with a whimper and not a bang, the age of films exhibited and distributed on physical film is drawing to a close.

Without a doubt, there are benefits: Smaller indie films that wouldn’t get a look at theatrical distribution are finding that they can distribute digitally and online. The digital revolution, it seems has made good on at least some of its promises to be a democratic one. Netflix, for one, has begun to self-distribute smaller films under the Red Envelope Entertainment label that perhaps might not have been given distribution under the old system.

And yet, for all the promise it yields, I’m not entirely sold on the model. It’s a philosophical, rather than aesthetic, issue that I have with digital distribution. Novelist Jonathan Franzen, speaking about the advent of e-books in publishing, said that digitization cheapens the voice of the author. The permanence of a printed book manifested in ink and paper is a testament to the truth and confidence of its author. A screen, by contrast feels “like we could delete that, change that, move it around.”  Don’t let “The Social Network” fool you. For all its pretenses, the Internet is written in pencil, not in ink. For all the echoes of paranoia, I think Franzen has a point.

Franzen’s vision is reminiscent of the edits filmmaker George Lucas made to his “Star Wars” films when they were rereleased in 1997. One particular exchange that drew the ire of fans was the alteration of a shootout between Greedo and Han Solo to make the former shoot first. Fans and cinema enthusiasts argued that it undermined Solo’s character development.

Newcomers to the series would be none the wiser; Lucas withheld the original cut of Star Wars in 1997 and then again for in 2004’s DVD re-release which featured still more changes. The originals were finally released on DVD in 2006. In the future, with celluloid distribution set to be phased out and digital distribution to the theater and home poised to become the norm, directors like Lucas may be able to dramatically change their film without alerting the public through rereleases of a physical product.

I must admit, it’s pretty heady stuff to be contemplating at 10 after midnight over a cute romantic comedy. I nearly turned the film off, but I don’t quite have the will for that. And hey, more online movies mean more indies, right? And you can’t fault the market research guys: The idea of converting one’s bedroom into a first-run movie theater has been begging attention since Tarantino made VHS cinephilia cool in the ’90s. I then made the decision that tomorrow, I would be a better and more ethical consumer –– well, at least I’d try. But nursing my battered sense of self-pride to sleep, it was hard to know whether either I or the commercial forces of progress had scored a victory.

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