Slashdot Mirror

For an article about Fernando Flores and his work see The Power of Words.

If you want to know about the chilean guy who was behind this, and what he is up to now, check this article.
For those of you already complaining about how a bloody coup thwarted this clearly great idea, please read that article. It is very politically biased, but it shows how this guys ideas have evolved over time, and I would dare to say he wouldn't think of building such a clearly useless system now.

A system like that cannot take individual human actions into account, it cannot deal with subjective market decisions, it cannot handle human relations. A professor at Universidad de Chile (the one the submitter mentions) told us about this system years ago, and how it seemed to be such a great idea for managing coal production (for example)... until it had to deal with a coal miners strike...

If you want to know why such a centralized system will never be useful check econlib, you might learn a thing ot two.

By the way, I'm chilean.

Softwre for rockets/space shuttle is not
something that is new.

And I do cringe like some other /. readers
thinking about how software houses design and
deploy and this process being applied to rockets.

Anyway there is a really good article on
how the write softweare for the shuttle.


As the article says its all about process not single minded genius/nutter.

The XHTML support in these phones is great! As a bit of an XHTML/CSS advocate myself, however, I think browsing the Web from such space-limited devices could become a chicken and egg situation.

A LOT of pages out there are poorly coded FrontPage (or even MS Publisher) not-even-HTML 3.2-compliant junk. There are a lot of amazingly beautiful XHTML/CSS coded pages out there, and they all display well on the small screens.

How many people will buy these phones, surf to their favorite page, and then discover they can't get anywhere fast? Will devices like smartphones and portable computers, with and 3G's ability to access the Internet at speed, force more Web designers to follow the chosen path and design in a fully backwards, and forwards, compatable way with XHTML and CSS? Or will we have a chicken and egg situation where people are turned off from using the devices because the content and pages available to them are so poor.. just like with WAP.

One area where eBay has gotten consistently high marks is in collaborating with law enforcement.

"We treat law enforcement [agencies] like a customer," Chesnut says. "We make sure that they get the information they need to fully and fairly investigate cases." And eBay leverages its experience with serial auction fraud - like the Jay Nelson case - to try to figure out how it can prevent future occurrences.

"Resting on our laurels isn't something that crosses my mind," Chesnut says. "I'd sure like to have the reputation of being the worst place on the Internet to commit fraud, because we're going to come after you, and you will go to jail."

Maybe your grandkids will be lucky and get into the India's future version of the H1B program to encourage tech workers to move and work there. :)

Seriously, there will always be a need for a highly skilled and highly educated workforce.

In case you're interested, here are some more links about this and other related issues that we have seen before.

Leaked: IBM Execs Urge Moving Jobs Offshore in Internal Teleconference

An internal recording of an IBM teleconference about moving jobs offshore was leaked (Google) to the New York Times by an upset employee. From the article: '...under increasing pressure to cut costs and build global supply networks... I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash among politicians and its own employees. "Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," said Tom Lynch, I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations. He also said that 3 million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015 (based on a Forrester Research report, which represents about 2 percent of all American jobs) and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries. Oracle plans to increase its jobs in India to 6,000 from 3,200, while Microsoft plans to double the size of its software development operation in India to 500 by late this year. Accenture has 4,400 workers in India, China, Russia and the Philippines.' Critics say 'schools will stop producing the computer engineers and programmers we need for the future' as a result of these moves. Listen to the IBM recording in Real format (direct link at pnm://audio.nytimes.com/audiosrc/2003/07/21/busine ss/20030722jobs.audio.rm). More at the SJMN, Inquirer, and CNN/Reuters. Slashdot has discussed Global competition, offshore outsourcing, lower cost replacement workers and the ensuing legal turmoil before.

To paraphrase from the movie Jerry Maguire:
It's not technology friends, It's technology business.

This story, covered by slashdot last week, is a lot more detailed.

NASA software engineering is actually quite remarkable -- at least for the shuttle program. I read a paper once about how they actually break many of the paradigms of writing code that so many programmers are accustomed to so that the code is absolutely perfect. Deadlines are met well ahead of schedule and nobody works late. They're not allowed to work late, because the pressure or fatigue could cause an error to occur. The code is personally signed-off by the chief software engineer that it won't hurt anyone. Every line of code is fully documented. The code is virtually written twice by two separate teams. This article actually details some of it great length: They Write the Right Stuff. I don't disagree with you that maybe the way they write software needs to be reviewed, but it seems that they already go a long way to ensure that happens.

NASA writes better software than perhaps anyone else on the planet. It's what runs the shuttle. Go read about how REAL software projects are undertaken.

The problem with most Mars programs is that the code seems to be developed like code everywhere else. Budgets overruns, working late to meet deadlines, and generally living the 'coder life.' This is NOT now critical software needs to be developed, and in fact isn't how most software should be developed.

To those proposing the 'more eyes open source' model, consider this: There's nothing in that model that GUARANTEES formal and complete code review. Something more rigorous is needed for projects like this.

The other end of NASA, for the manned spaceflight program, does not seem to have problems getting correct software, according to the article >

I think this article was referenced on slashdot a while ago.

The question is, how long until dynamic pricing permeates more of our markets? Dell tried this for a while with fluctuating prices on its website depending on the demand. People got pissed because they could buy a laptop one minute and the next it was $50 cheaper. Coke was thinking about the same thing, but got slammed by the public when it announced that it was investigating ways to "automatically raise prices for its drinks in hot weather." The article poses the question though: "Consider what the reaction might have been to this headline: "Coke testing machine that automatically discounts prices in cool weather.""

Being an Econ major I get frustrated with supply and demand curves because the truth is, they don't really exist... not in a measurable way at least. Its impossible for me to go out into the marketplace and know the exact equilibrium price for a given quantity supplied. However, we are closer now in history than ever before to being able to manage real time data, especially over the web, in order to dynamically change prices to reach these equilibrium prices. In many instances its just bringing the scalper's market straight to the distributor -- and while everyone complains when you pay $100 for a $50 concert ticket, few see the other side of the coin where you could pay $2 for a theater seat that will otherwise go unused -- however both are circumstances of the free market (surplus and shortage).

Computers crash because people cant catch that one little fatal error in 10,000 lines of code.

They can if they are fanatical about process and have the budget, like Lockheed Martin's on-board shuttle group.

I think the lesson the DRM-and-associated industries will take from this is the Boiling Frog story.

For those not familiar with it (there might be a few), the theory goes that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will immediately jump out. If you place that frog in a pan of warm water and slowly raise the heat to boiling, the thing won't budge until it's dead (and then it still won't budge. =)

You failed to point out that this is an urban legend (or this link is funnier as they actually tried it).

Phillip.

This article about how NASA develops software for the shuttle makes for interesting reading. It's a whole different world to the way most commercial (and open source software) is developed.

Every IT-implementation has bugs. Repeat: Every.

I disagree. There is perfect code out there.

When it matters, and when you can afford it, it's quite possible to have perfect code. Something tells me that the code for the space shuttle is significantly more complex than any voting booth code would have to be.

Here's my idea of a perfect electronic voting system:

Touch screen input, with a keyboard for write-in votes.

Plain as day listing of choices before final selection is made.

Paper audit trail printed though window visible to voter (window solid enough to prevent tampering, and record on something similar to a register receipt.)

EPROMS are not field-upgradable, and socket used to program eproms is tamper evident.

Hardware checksum of eprom code contents on the screen at all times, made as tamper-proof as possible.

Network programmable in terms of candidates and party affiliations only- nothing else can be changed by network. Results can be read by network.

tamper-evident physical reset counters, indicating the number of times the machine has been zeroed or candidates changed.

An internal hard-drive,cd or tape storage that's tamper-evident, making a permenant record of all activity on that machine.

So that's three records, -eprom for single election results, a printed audit trail, and permanent storage of lifetime activity on a particular machine. Tamper-evident/resistant.

In addition, I think that ID's should be shown before you vote, only to record that you did vote. To avoid allegations of a 'voting tax', non-driver's licenses would have to be free, subject to the same proof standards as a normal driver's license.

Oh yeah, the entire system should be open to everyone for review. If the system is robust enough, it shouldn't matter that everyone knows exactly how it's made, as it should be extremely difficult to scam the system. (This is, of course, the standard open-source mantra.)

Now, as a disclaimer, I'm a mechanical engineer, and my programming knowledge doesn't go much deeper than an introductory C class.

Whaddya'll think?

"Last year, U.S. computer- and video-game revenue surpassed domestic box-office receipts, and this year, the game industry is expected to widen that gap with more than $10 billion in sales."

Perhaps you and the original poster missed the memo, but games already make more than domestic movie sales. I'm sourcing this Fast Company article as one of many that state this fact.

My fault. His link is broken but the article is sound.

It should point to this slashdot article which references this fascinating article on setting prices

People here seem stuck on the fallacy of price having to do with cost.

There was a very enlightening article being commented on some site, which one was it... Oh, yeah this one ;-).

Here's a snippet:
"Monroe tells a pricing story that shows how even the simplest situation can confound accepted wisdom about prices. "A company is making two versions of the same product," says Monroe. "One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they're essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95." Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It's also the lower-profit product.

"Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it's essentially the same thing, but a fancier version. And it's much higher priced: $34.95."

For our original company, asks Monroe, "what becomes the best-seller? Why, the $18.95 version, of course."""

The gist is, price has nothing to do with cost (other, of course, that you don't want to lose money in the long run). Pricing is whatever will maximize your profit, either by selling more at a lower price, less at a higher price, charging different prices for different customers, selling at a loss now to acquire customers who will pay more later (DVDs for a penny each anyone?), or whatever you can get away with.

IMHO, LCD prices are high because people are buying. I still stick with my 19" CRT. Although I'd like to reclaim the desk space, energy savings, etc., I'm not gonna shell out big bucks for overpriced, lower refresh rate, lower resolution LCDs. Moreover, while other people do, the prices won't come down that much.

That was a great article.

I read an article about 10 years ago which was about some guy in Brasil, I think it was, whose rubber company was about to go down the toilet financially. [...] The guy went on to experiment with introducing worker democracy on a wide scale - salaries, job descriptions etc. and apparently the company became very successful.

I read an article about 10 years ago which was about some guy in Brasil, I think it was, whose rubber company was about to go down the toilet financially. [...] The guy went on to experiment with introducing worker democracy on a wide scale - salaries, job descriptions etc. and apparently the company became very successful.

And guess what? Walmart is now branching out into selling cars in some locations. See this article. So really it's "everything thing you can think of, including cars."

In a previous story about the POS world, related to the high tech pricing game, there is a passage about airfare pricing, where each airline publishes about 17 times a week the price of seats for all their flights..

So the big story here seems to be the tech behind fetching these prices from the website and not the prices themselves. ..unless the prices publishes on those websites do NOT concord with the ones they advertise to ATPCO?

All of the major airlines ( except Southwest ) participate in a joint fare-publishing enterprise called ATPCO. ATPCO collects fares and rules ( such as advance-purchase requirements, refundability, and so on ) from each airline. ATPCO then publishes those fares back out to the airlines and to the reservation services.

Competition is a good thing. See Intel vs. AMD, Sony vs. Nintendo, Linux vs. Microsoft.

For very high reliability software, competition is also used. For example, the space shuttle uses four sets of identical software on four sets of hardware that vote on results, with a fifth set running completely different software waiting to take over if the other fail (see Fastcompany for more details).

Also, one of the benefits of breaking up Ma Bell was that one company, with one set of software, was no longer running the telephone system in the United States.

In the long run I think this is a very good thing. In the short run, however, there might be problems.

Someone found this really cool article about the group that writes the shuttle software. I've always admired CMM level 5, having spent my entire career at level 1. ;) I wonder if they need more coders.

There's a good story about the software team at NASA here.

From the story: "Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."

Better they appear in Fast Company than Fucked Company

The company 'FAST' quoted in the article should NOT link to www.surffast.com. Obviously this is refering to the Norwegian company www.fastsearch.com who operates the supposed 'Google-killer'(obviously a bit magnamimous, yet still a good alternative) www.alltheweb.com .

Corporations cannot exist without the permission of the people. The corporation's existence depends on a charter issued by a state government, a government elected by the people to act in the public interest. It follows inexorably that corporations are allowed to exist, first and foremost, to serve the public interest. - Ralph Estes, founder of The Stakeholder Alliance

The first corporations, given license to operate in the 1600s, were strictly limited in scope and power by their charters. Corporations were kept on a very short leash right through the American Revolution and the early years of the new republic. When a corporation exceeded its powers or ceased to serve the public interest, its charter was revoked and its very right to exist was nullified. - www.adbusters.org

If business people resist the notion of legal change, we can remind them that corporations exist only because laws allow them to exist. Without these laws, owners would be fully responsible for debts incurred and damages caused by their businesses. Because the public creates the law, corporations owe their existence as much to the public as they do to shareholders. They should have obligations to both. It simply makes no sense that society's most powerful citizens have no concern for the public good. - Excerpt from an article Published in the January/February 2002 issue of Business Ethics: Corporate Social Responsibility Report

Fuck You!

Just because people whose job is not critical can afford to "try something out" does not mean that REAL programs are not engineered - in the truest sense of the word.

I've worked on code that controls nuclear plants. Believe me, it was engineered. It was simulated. It was revised in design and implementation countless times. It doesn't crash, it doesn't fail, it works better than most people's nervous system.

Just because your idea of programming entails crap such as shell scripts and "quick and dirty" hacks, does not mean that programmers, REAL programmers, are not engineers, architects, and artists of the most discriminating caliber.

Perl is a Swiss Army Knife. Slashdot, as a site, is at best, a covered bridge from Madison County. It is not a skyscraper. The people who write what you seem to consider "programs" are nothing more than white collar drones with workbenches in their garage and some power tools from Sears. Yes, any bank teller can go and build a deck in their back yard. This does not make them Professionals. Similarly, anyone with the most basal understanding of a language can put hammer to nail, and bang together a "program". This does not make them a professional Programmer.

REAL programs run space ships (except those that crash. Those are written by people who carve Indian heads out of stumps with chainsaws), power plants, pacemakers and banks. REAL software, designed and engineered, instead of hacked together between meetings, is as intricate as any tangible piece of engineering. And, as it comes after 50 years, instead of 50 centuries, of practice, I think we're doing pretty damn well.

The popular opinion of programming, the "shoot from the hip" attitude you claim as prevalent, is a problem. People think we all ride Razor scooters in our offices for God's sake. You and I clearly know better, but the word just isn't getting out.

Every time some putrid pundit whines about "the IT shortage", I want to scream. There is also a shortage of qualified rocket scientists, and metallurgists - the bolts and rivets on the space shuttle are made by grunts who push buttons on a robot, after all. But the few qualified people that are there, put us on the Moon.

There isn't a shortage of talent. It's just misplaced. It's thwarted by the weekend carpenters, who once read a "Learn C++ in 21 Days" book, and not command real salaries because they claim to be Programmers.

There is REAL talent out there, and it usually works for ignorant fucks who choose bravado over skill and common sense. This is why so much retail software crashes at the drop of a hat. This is also why I think we need a "Professional Software Engineer" certification - just as we already have a "Professional Engineer" one. You can do engineering without it, but your work better be signed off on by one before it sees the light of day, and puts the public safety at risk.

That is all.

Their engineering culture pretty guarantees that this innovation will keep going.

People said great things about Netscape's engineering-led culture too. A culture where engineers can thrive is an advantage, but what matters at the end of the day is selling products. Nokia came out of nowhere to dominate the industry, just like Netscape in their day, but they're just as vulnerable as any other incumbent now. For example, even Nokia's engineers couldn't prevent the 3G debacle. If someone comes out with a working business model for ubiquitous 802.11b with VoIP, the game changes radically.

Skeptics continue to wonder about Netscape's strategy: How can a company that aspires to dominate a market give away its core product? In fact the Navigator, while certainly Netscape's most famous product, is not its core product. The Navigator is the market-maker by which Netscape establishes a standard. Its growing collection of server products -- complex software that companies use to post information on the Web and conduct electronic commerce --are the revenue generators through which Netscape will earn the bulk of its profits.

"Netscape builds printing presses," says President James Barksdale. "But first I've got to teach everybody to read, or there won't be any publishers."

Jim Clark offers a simpler explanation. "This is not freeware," he says, "this is marketware."

Yes, there is. Here is a story about the software engineers (these people actually deserve the title) who design the inflight systems for the Space Shuttles.

The product is the process , moreso than the actual code. It is a fascinating read.

• [...] Mars probe that crashed because of mismatched units. And that was just poor communication among the software guys.

Give me an engineer that is willing to stay late and get the job done. And do so before the night of the dealine.

Sure, if you think "engineering" is writing Perl CGI scripts. Real engineering is not a seat-of-the-pants affair, just like any other mature profession. The reason good engineers work 9-5 is because you can't make silly mistakes when you're building something that has to do serious work in the real world. There's nothing glamorous about staying up all night before the delivery date, it merely indicates poor planning and unnecessary risk. Read this and get a clue.

The context was that of software for an unmanned microsatellite, not the shuttle.

Crewed spacecraft have an even more strict set of rules attached to the software development process. Have a look at some of the articles on DO-178B, the software development standard for avionics. Similar issues apply, but even more so.

Look, people - not Geniuses - just normal, everyday programmers - have been making software you can bet your life on for a long time now. We know how to do it even more cheaply than the normal buggy commercial work (though testing is radically expensive and blows out the total cost). There's no need, and no excuse, for BSDs and security problems. None. You just have to have the right tools, the right training, and the right attitude. If you like, the Right Stuff. Here's a quote from that article:

It's strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place -- there are late nights, but they're the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key. Many of them have put in years of work either for IBM ( which owned the shuttle group until 1994 ), or directly on the shuttle software. They're adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their remarkable software program.

That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up.

One area I disagree with in the "Right Stuff" article is that the work doesn't involve creativity. This is balderdash - we're doing stuff no-one has ever done before under really tight resource constraints. To get a reliable architecture often requires significant smarts, lateral thinking. Anyone can make a complex solution to a complex problem, the really good guys and gals make solutions so drop-dead simple, obviously-correct and efficient that it's miraculous how much such simple, obvious and readable code actually accomplishes.

Looking at the general world of InfoTech, we see that most programmers out there would rather write the winning entry for the "Obfuscated C" contest than make some software that gets us around the solar system. And that people who make reliable software hit the unemployment queue on project completion, while those making buggy stuff have jobs-for-life in maintenance. Of course, they often have 80-hour weeks too, and are driven by PHBs who know b* all, and can't even take pride in the product, so there is some justice.

There's an old Slashdot article that I couldn't find that pointed out this article about the code for the shuttle.

The implication in this article is that there few bugs in the code to start with (1 bug in 420,000 lines of code).

So was the first article bogus or this open source fantasy about flying a space ship?

Music won't be shared non-lossy. Sure, the transfers rates may be up, but this didn't have the beneficial side effect of increasing hard drive space. Very few people would be willing to d/l WAVs of CDs instead of MP3s for the extra bit of quality due to the 12x (average for 128bit MP3) file size increase. For now, at least.

Same goes with movies. Right now, a high-quality DiVX run you .5+ gig, and while harddrive sizes are increasing, we have a ways to go before we do straight DVD rips.

And again, we still have limitations of the system itself. Sure, you can run 1Gbps fiber into a 533 Celeron. The typical personal computer can't push 1Gbps through the system, and certainly not through the drives.

Maybe someone will set up a beowulf/distributed.net hybrid, using the low-latency network to set up parallel computing on a dynamic basis (systems going on/offline). It would be interesting to see, and would be great proof-of-concept for autonomous computer projects, like IBM's SMASH (part of Blue Gene).

Well, my .02$US at any rate

Yeah, but that sort of thing just turns people off. Take a look at the concept of
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin. If more websites and companies listened to him, we would all be happier and be subjected to less spam.

Morel

*Unless* you never stop testing your program.

Define acceptence criteria for the program eg: must process square widgets sucessfully, and test, using every valid and invalid situation you can think of (does it reject triangles correctly?) until you meet *all* those criteria.

There's always going to be issues, you just need to be sure that the cost of resolving those issues will be within acceptable tolerances.

Of course, making sure your system is designed and specified properly in the first place will eliminate most defects and (IMHO) make the ones that show up just all that much easier to fix.

btw: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml is a great article on how they test the software that goes into the Space Shuttle.

Fast Company also had an article on this recently.

Fast Company also had an article on this recently.

Also the same "HP Way" that dictates the workers on it's cash-cow production lines should labor in nearly sweat-shop conditions at subsidiary manufacturing plants (where's its shielded from ownership or employer responsibility) for barely a living wage, and works very hard to break up any attempts to unionize by targeting the squeaky wheels for layoffs.

Some software that works.

420,000 lines of code, and only one error found in each of the last three versions.

In the last eleven versions, 17 errors altogther were found.

Note how much money it costs to produce software of that quality, and you will see why software usually has bugs - especially when you add in the short development cycles that management wants today. Damn the testing, full release ahead!

Lets face it, Software Engineering is not (in most cases) like bridge engineering. Trying to build software like you build bridges just doesn't work.

I think you're only right if you look at a special subset of software: those software projects where failure and loss are acceptable.

Read this article from the December '96 issue of Fast Company. It's about the the team that writes the software for the space shuttle's on-board computer systems.

Interesting stats: at the time the article was written, the previous 11 releases of the software had had a total of 17 bugs. Not each; total. In 400,000+ lines of code.

Great quote, from one of the team members: "If the software isn't perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."

There's a big difference between computer programming and software engineering. Techniques like extreme programming may work well in a pure programming environment, in which the results of your work just don't matter all that much. So you software crashed; nobody got hurt, right? Just re-launch it, and remember to save often!

At the opposite end of the spectrum, though, software engineering is just like civil engineering, or mechanical engineering, or aerospace engineering. If you f*ck up, somebody may die.

Commercial software development is somewhere in between. If you don't have any discipline or oversight, your software will be so bad that your company will go out of business. On the other hand, if you institute military-grade processes, you'll never deliver a product in a reasonable time. So you have to compromise.

But people who say that software is totally different are just fooling themselves. In software, like everything else, there's good work and there's shoddy work. Putting a label on shoddy work and calling it a "technique" doesn't make it less shoddy; it's just gilding the lily.

Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Letter, June 1998
Shell, April 1999
Time, January 2000
National Hydrogen Association, Spring 2000
Red Herring, July 2000
Fast Company, October 2000
ENN, December 2000
BBC, December 2001
etc.

And Google Boy to the rescue:

Next Time, What Say We Boil a Consultant

What is that I hear? Another "Ask Slashdot" question being typed in? Up up and away!

You should refer to the article http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml entitled "They Write The Right Stuff" for some information about the developers who write the software for the Space Shuttle. It partially addresses your question.

"Most people choose to spend their money at the wrong end of the process," says Munson. "In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time -- they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it. In shuttle, they do it right the first time. And they don't change the software without changing the blueprint. That's why their software is so perfect."

(from an article on fastcompany.com)

"...the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."

It's not that humans can't get software right, it's that we don't choose to get it right. We're too sloppy, as another poster pointed out.

Price, Quality, Time to Market. Choose any 2.

I worked in the same building for a time. The law office I worked for was on the 49th floor, at the top of the keyhole. Here's a picture of the Chase Tower (formerly known as the Texas Commerce Tower). Arguably, space at the top of the keyhole was more prestigious than the floors above, including 54, where you couldn't even see the keyhole space. Maybe that was part of their problem. Their office space wasn't cool enough.

Another point of view regarding the Ion Storm office space was written up in 1998 here.

Coincidentally, the lawyer I worked for had a thing for style and appearance. He spent too much time worrying about that and not enough about his cases. As a result he ended up losing a HUGE case, filed for bankruptcy, lost his house and his wife and Mercedes, and had to move to a low-rent district in Dallas. Lawyers seem to always land on their feet, much like cats, however, so now, 3 years later, he's doing quite well again. I wish the Ion guys the same good fortune.