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Apple Ending Engineering Credits in Products
JChris writes "Apparently Apple is ending its tradition of allowing team members to take named credit for products." It also talks about the end of easter eggs and changes in the Apple corporate with Jobs back at the helm. Its an interesting bit. Makes me kinda sad. Easter eggs are one of those things that I always enjoyed, and just seeings credits... well, it only seems fair.
Actually he is right, a flight sim demo "easter egg" was added to one version of excel that increased its size by several hundred megs.
As a onetime Mac user (I still have a small MacOS partition on my LinuxPPC box, this strikes me as sad way for Apple to usher in the new year.
While quite different on the whole, parallels can be drawn between Apple's software and the kind we're now used to in the open source world -- the spirit of fun, and healthy pride. Happy as I am to see Apple doing better, and turning out new and interesting hardware, I can't help but think that if this is the new attitude, they've lost something, and are not the same company that I once enthusiastically supported.
Farewell, Secret About Box!
John
We have names on the credit screen for our World War II online flight sim, "Air Warrior", that go back to the original Macintosh program from circa 1987-1988.
That's typical in a corporation that has lost contact with its roots and no longer values its engineers.
The best advice when that happens is: abandon ship. There are plenty of companies out there that value technical work sufficiently to offer credit where credit is due.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
True engineers don't sign their products; do you see any credits on your car stereo, or on a box of crackerjacks?
I don't know...have you looked closely enough?
Molecular Expressions - Chip Shots - Microscopy of Integrated Circuits
I own Apple hardware, but I don't use any of their software. Just because they're spending their time fighting over the order of bits in the show_about_box() function doesn't mean the G4 isn't a monster of a chip. Throw LinuxPPC or Debian or something on it.
--
Yes, it indeed is so. 99% of people do not look at the credits. But does it not make the little guy, whose name scrolled by in the end if the credits happy? I bet it does. And who does it bother? Nobody. So why remove it if it makes somebody much happier and doesn't bother anybody?
I am SO cool I can keep meat fresh for a WEEK!!!!
probably because MS has an operating system on more machines then IBM..
There is an incredible difference beween the "bloat" introduced by a list of developers in 7-bit ASCII and a program that simulates the physics and visuals of flight over a modeled terrain!
--
ohh and the company is worth over 1/2 trillion dollars
As a grip/electrician myself, I certainly do care about the names of my co-workers, but beyond that, being listed in a movie's credits is often the only way to have a confirmable resume. Production companies often don't exist for more than one movie, so the only way to know if someone really worked on what they say they worked on is those credits.
Anyway, what do you care if there are 40,000 names scrolling by after the movie's over? No one's forcing you to sit there and read them all, and it doesn't make your ticket more expensive.
I think it's only reasonable that Apple wants to protect the names of their key engineers from those slimy head hunters working for Micro$oft and the gang. But programmers have egos too, so I wonder if it would work to replace the engineers' full names with nicknames, or create teams with funny names and let them take credit for their work.
Easter eggs are part of what makes programming fun, and Apple management is sorely mistaken if they think that they can kill this tradition with a single stroke of a pen.
Ad Majorum Corporation Glorium.
...
Your opinion is evil. That individual acheivment
is not important, reeks of feudalism. You are
probably a Democrate, promoting ideoligies that
are designed to insure that no one can climb high
enough to threaten the old order.
Wallstreet has been trying to remove creativity
and individuality from the workplace for decades.
This is contrary to the image that is promoted
with the fawning over a few "pet celebrity"
inventors. Creativity and individuality are too
difficault to predict. And a person with no identity is easier to control.
And since when does identity and team membership
become mutualy exclusive. I think you just want
to insure that all programers become disposable
interchangable components, living to please there
sharholders. Secure in the knowledge that there
meager insignifigant efforts, though lost in a sea
of ananimity, still adds to the glory of the
Corporation whos true splender is beyond the
understanding of a simple programer.
... gota go... All code compiled succesfully
hurrah....
P.S. I read to much Ayn Rand as a kid. Does it
show?
Yup, I like BeOS more every day. Glad someplace still thinks credits are important.
Leilah
~ Leilah
Actually, including that many credits in the movie WOULD increase ticket price, seeing as the credits do take up film, and studios always bitch about how expensive film is. But, that's pretty well offtopic.
Including people who aren't involved in acting, directing, or creating sets/effects, distracts from the listing of the people who actually affected the movie/couldn't be replaced with temp workers.
It may be cool for you to have your name listed, but do you honestly expect people to believe that you affected the final movie in any way? If those cords hadn't been taped a certain way, that scene just wouldn't have worked?
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
I did 3d text in win98 se and got this easter egg:
RUNDLL32 caused a general protection fault
in module USER.EXE at 0003:00006c50.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=17b7 EIP=00006c50 EFLGS=00000206
EBX=00632f34 SS=116f ESP=000085d6 EBP=000085d8
ECX=bff53ce6 DS=16bf ESI=00028656 FS=2db7
EDX=00010000 ES=112f EDI=00020e2a GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
1f c9 ca 0c 00 66 58 5b 66 50 e8 59 fb 55 8b ec
Stack dump:
85f2492f 4b1f07df 492f0092 116f8656 00000000 0000116f 116f036f 6d2a8610 865617b7 0000116f 16bf0000 0e2a52a8 00000002 112f0002 864c0000 17af1a8f
see how fun windows is? who needs this linuz anyways!
Lars -
I guess the sad thing about this is that we HAVE been slipping into an Orwellian society. Not just your wonderful US of A, but elsewhere, as well.
To me, the biggest non-violent crime out there is the stealing of intellectual property. But can anyone tell me who invented the mouse? The OS? Fridges? Washing machines? Digital clocks? Scanners? etc. etc. - the list goes on.
We wax lyrical about our sporting heroes. But what about the people who REALLY changed society for the better? It's not Logitech (or whoever), it's the guy who thought up the first mouse! THESE are the guys we should be worshipping on national TV. THESE are the guys that should be getting prizes, international recognition, lots of money, etc. After all, THESE are the guys that deserve it! Who cares if somebody can hit a ball over a net very fast?
If you work at a University, anything you think up and/or do is automatically the property of the University. And these organisations are supposed to be more free than commercial ones!
And this IS one of the concepts of an Orwellian society! If we didn't know that it was Linus Torvalds that designed Linux (ie if a company had released it), do you think it would attain the same "alternative" or "rebellion" status that it has today?
-Shane Stephens
Come on! Have you ever watched a movie or read a book? The people who make those get paid, though sometimes much less than software developers, and yet their names are allowed to show up.
I know it for a fact that had my previous employer treated me right instead of heaping abuse on me when times got a little tough for them; I'd still be around- and they'd still be a player in their industry. Now, they're an also-ran in document imaging, trying to pimp this caching accelerator/structured document storage system that runs under NT- in competition with UNIX based systems (Care to venture a guess which is being bought by people in droves? :-) Treat your people right and they'll stay. Let them think for one moment that they're being abused and you set the forces in motion for their departure.
Yeah you start your own company and name it after yourself, if is that big a deal. If not, like most things aren't that big a deal in software develoment it has generally all been done before, you get paid by your employer. If I were the employer, and someone demanded credits for things they do on my time and my equiptment, I would show them where the door is so they can start their own company.
Or, do you care if other developers, other programmers, and other clueful people know that you wrote the code, and that you wrote it well?
Litter your code with tons of useful comments, and sign them, and anyone who touches the code forever after will know exactly which portions of the code you wrote, and they can decide for themselves how well you wrote it.
If your name just appears in the About box, maybe you just brought coffee to the real developers. Who can tell the difference?
-JTB
You know what it really is? Jobs is just trying to protect the feelings and egos of all his programmers. How would you feel if you poured your heart and soul into one of the many ill-fated apple projects (i.e.: Copland), only to have it killed? By taking out the easter eggs and credits, the programmers are less likely to become personally attached to future development projects that get the axe.
_______
2B1ASK1
I was wondering where that "J.S." on my left ass cheek came from...
I just have to add my 'me too'. Unless it's a Hollywood movie (and I'm just there to give my brain some sleep), I'll stay through the credits, and at least 20% of the audience does too. A lot of it is quite interesting, and you get to make useless observations like "hey! he was the boom operator for movie XYZ!" Skip the credits and you're missing half the movie experience, sheesh :)
IIRC, both Windows 3.1 and Internet Explorer 4 both had credit lists as easter eggs. Of course, if you believed what that article said, though, those credits were never there in the first place!
That's too bad. I've always had fun hacking into programs with ResEdit, and adding my name to the credits... ahh, now I'll actually have to work in order to get credit.
(P.S. - 1st Post?)
Huh?
Apple's stock has gone up over a hundred yesterday, its highest ever.
What do you mean?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
In Apple's famous commercial, they are fighting against "Big Brother" (then IBM). It seems as though the Mac is trying to emulate that Big Brother attitude in saying that no one person deserves the credit for something, all credit goes to your glorious employer, Apple. Kinda scares ya when you think about it.
"Out, OUT! You demons of STUPIDITY!" - Dogbert
You've given no reason to remove the credits. By removing the credits, you lose absolutely nothing, and lose a negligible amount. They're good for posterity.
This is like being adament for removing FCC ID numbers from electrical devices. 99.99999% of the people don't even know they exist, let alone care about them, so we should get rid of them, right?
This is yet another plot to suppress engineers. Or, should I say, "knowledge workers." Paying them peanuts is not enough. Now, the mental-inferiority-complex-suffering managers have taken away even these benign HIDDEN credits.
Engineers revolt. Remember, you're smarter than The Man.
_.......................__
||.....__...._._||_..||-\\..._...._._||_
||......_\\.(/_'..||....||-//.//.\\.(/_'..||
||__((_||_,_/).||_..||....\\_//.,_/).\\_
HAHA! LAST POST! Anything following is redundant.
This is really too bad. Easter eggs are so much fun. I remember the "peter peter cheater wimp" one in A-Train, that gave you $10^6, and the well-known Shift-F-U-N-D one in SimCity.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
You must hold CTRL-ALT-LEFT SHIFT through out this
1. Click Help then About
2. Double click one of the panes in the Windows logo
3. Click OK
Once you've done steps 1-3 and then repeated them again, you will be greeted with a waving MS flag. Repeat 1-3 one more time, and you will see one of the Microsoft head hanchos (at the time), or the Microsoft Bear, introducing each of the programmer's e-mail address names (i.e. billg for Bill Gates, etc) broken down by development section.
--------------------
now only if Micro$oft stopped doing that, it'd make their products about 300 megs smaller and more stable :P -motardo
The main problem with this line of reasoning is that if your engineering team is that susceptible to being poached, you have other (major!) problems. Being listed in the credits does impart a certain sense of pride in the work... pride which might actually keep workers from taking other places' offers. I would think more companies would try to encourage that... the ones that do certainly seem to keep their employees longer.
Leilah
~ Leilah
I know I'm being picky, but the article states that Microsoft has never included credits in their products. Well, in IE4, not only was there an easter egg, but it included credits for the people who worked on the program. I don't know about other Microsoft products, but I know that that one definitely had credits in it.
Again, just nitpicking....
--- Jeff
The mb in an SE is flat against the bottom. The sigs are in raised plastic inside the rear of the case. BTW, the same ones are in the PLUS and all earlier machines. They stopped after the SE however. The Mac II has sigs on a metal plate indside the case, but that's the absolute end of sigs in an Apple.
Absolutely thats the reason! Every company i've worked for has been quite sensitive about its internal org charts.
And this is for the employees benefit as well. You don't know how FRUSTRATING it is to have someone important leave your project.
Imagine Linus leaving the Linux community to work for Microsoft just because Microsoft offered him a HUGE salary just to take the wind out of the Linux momentum.
Microsoft did that very same thing several years ago when OpenDoc threatened OLE. MS swooped in and swiped key personal from Apple and Claris.
I doubt Apple will be firing anyone over Easter Eggs, but I know PLENTY of other companyies that have in the past.
Business is war. If you can take the wind out of the sails of your enemy - then you must do it or die.
Tom
No, it is true. You have to go to the about box three times without releasing CTRL+ALT+LSHIFT, but the third time you either get a pic of Gates, Balmer, or a Bear that points at the credits.
If it wasn't for the opportunity to importalize themselves in the software, would all those developers work such long hours? Admittedly, the money's good, but you don't think that's the real reason they went into this field, do you?
Mike Eckardt meckardt@yahoo.spam.com
This is no big suprize. Steve Jobs put the idiot into iMac. When you build a computer a moron can use,only morons will want to use it .Oh BTW if Steve Jobs reads this. Thank you for the layoff in feb of 97. Becuse of your bad managment I make 50,000$ more and never have to hear your arrogant voice ever again . Friends dont let friends do 68k A.P.P.L.E= Arrogant people profit losing Entity
Maybe it's not that they'll no longer allow employees to take individual credit; perhaps it's that the employees no longer want their names associated with the products.
Maybe when microsoft bought 10% of apple they were also changing their ethics. The great thing about apple was always that they were fun and actually acknowledged the hackers working for them. This was a lot like what OSS is now. In my eyes this culminates a series of changes that makes them just like Microsoft. Now they care more about selling their colorful computers than anything else. I think that Jobs was better on acid.
This reminds me of my favorite RMS quote:
Those who benefit from the current system where programs are property offer two arguments in support of their claims to own programs: the emotional argument and the economic argument.
The emotional argument goes like this: ``I put my sweat, my heart, my soul into this program. It comes from me, it's mine!''
This argument does not require serious refutation. The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes. By contrast, consider the great artists and artisans of medieval times, who didn't even sign their names to their work. To them, the name of the artist was not important. What mattered was that the work was done--and the purpose it would serve. This view prevailed for hundreds of years.
According to RMS, those Apple employees should just be happy that the work was done, and shouldn't be concerned with having their name on it. After all, getting credit for something is like saying you own it, and we all know* that owning software is evil.
---
* yes, that's sarcasm
while Looking for eggs in system 9 I found that in the system file at STRs -16096 is the name of the owner of the Machine
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
Oh please. I remember that mars.exe program that was only a few K. It would have taken less than 100K to do that small flight simulator. Less than even one clipart that comes with office.
The code for that sort of thing won't be that large....what makes things like flighsimulator 2000 big is the data for all the cities etc. Randomly generating a little terrain you fly around is not bloat, far from it.
I hope that this answers your questions.
>Why don't they just write their names down on a >piece of paper?
No comment at this time
Cool.
Now, can you guys spend a week and get the BeOS running on my G3? I'm tired of having to boot up my old PowerTower Pro to use it.
(and yes, I will dump tons and tons of money in the form of upgrades for it, too)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Commumisum is where the workers have the power.
Not the boss.
One person telling everyone else, that they may not be acknoledged for there hard work any more, is not communistic.
Sounds to me as if apple are turning into a capitalistic corperation just like microsoft. Acctually, they probably started that years ago, M$ are just doing a better go at it.
You are mistaken. I'm one of them.
For a movie, you might have a point readable sized screen text and available time to roll credits is limited. With software, though, you could fit 40000 names w job titles in under a meg. And a meg is nothing nowadays. The only real reason not to list all names is some asshole "we are gods, workers are scum" attitude. A company's employees aren't a bunch of borg drones with no self-identity beyone the company collective. GIVE PEOPLE THE RECOGNITION THEY DESERVE PENCIL-NECK!
Apple. I am the best programmer to have ever graced these parts, this perfect fruit, but this absurdity, this suffering, it begs a conclusion. Tomorrow I tender my resignation. Oh, imagine, being compared to some mere engineer. What blasphemy fills this deed! For programming is an art, superseded not by some simple trade whereby anonymous entities form the gears of a machine, spinning for all of eternity lest they break down and are taken out and replaced and forgotton. No, I am not some piece in a machine, I cannot be replaced, and I will not be forgotten. Programmiing is to zeros and ones what painting is to canvas; sculpting to stone; music to the air. I am Picasso, I am Mozart, I am Da Vinci. For programming is the spirit; it is the soul; it is life. With my silicon and plastic buttons and CRT, I carve these ones and zeros, these electrons, into a work that trancends the human mind. To be understood, my work must be appreciated. That, my friends, is the travesty. Programming simply is, and I will not be forgotten. Crush these ones and zeros and you crush the spirit of humanity, the true meaning of life. Please, tell me this is not the end. I will not be forgotten.
Moron, do you really expect us to believe that you ever worked for Apple? Well, as a janitor maybe. Thank god they got rid of you in 1997.
Where the hell did you get that from?
It does a scrolling box with the credits.
ROTFL! Thanks, I needed a good laugh. I guess you have the right to watch anything that's boring, as long as it doesn't endanger your life. That's where I draw the line. If you ever start reading the phone book, email me and I'll get you some help.
No comment at this time
Normally, most companies (including Apple until now) had a policy where all easter eggs had to be reported and approved. Often times the easter eggs introduce bugs and instability into the program and have to be thoroughly tested.
If Microsoft, Apple, etc. had an official place for credits, then there'd be a lot less incentive for programmers to spend lots of time creating fancy easter eggs. Besides, I'll bet that practically all Easter Egg programming is already done off the clock anyway.
Steve Jobs' email to employees:
"...Here at Apple we have to remember that we are a team. Every product is a team effort from the marketing people, the execs, and oh ya, the programmers, etc. Everyone has a hand in our products accept those crappy tech support people and human resources."
"PS I alone deserve credit."
Let me guess... you never quite understood team sports either.
Sorry, but you probably wouldn't make a good manager. To generalize: Employees are people and they like recognition. Recogintion makes them happy. Happy employees do better work. A friend of mine got his credits into Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. No one will ever notice but him and me, but it keeps him doing good work for Lucasfilm. I've seen this work both in software as well. I admit that 40,000 person movie credits are ridiculous to the audience. But they are not ridiculous to Mr. or Ms. 39,412. The cost/inconvenience is negligable. I think Jobs made a poor decision.
wrong. ibm is not primarily a "software maker."
> generation of weirdos is.
using linux, of course. ;-)
--
I like to watch.
Get real. There is not a flight sim in Excel. Its a very small xml demo, hardly a flight sim.
Programmers are easily replaceable. Who cares if someone find out their name and hires them away. On the other hand, executives are not easily replaceable. If an executive leaves, with him or her goes lots of non-codified knowledge, visions, and leadership. So if anything, companies should not divulge the names of their top executives.
And let us not forget "I wish Bill Gates was dead" through the English(US) spellchecker
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Well, because for some strange reason it makes you feel a lot better if it's in the software you have been slaving over for the last year. People are strange. Wht can you do. A piece of paper stuck on your office wall just doesn't feel half as good as your name at the edn of the credits in the program...
And what harm can it do? Software bloat? Oh, come on. Who cares if your program takes up 50 more kilobytes? And what I really can't understand, how can involving credits make your program crash more? I mean hven't the guys who say that ever heard of "modular" programming?
I am SO cool I can keep meat fresh for a WEEK!!!!
>and I'm rarely the only person in the theater who does.
Are these people (a) trying to see the movie again for free (b)asleep or (c)do they have the same strange facination with people's names that you do?
At this point, I suggest that you start a club. I think Yahoo! offers a service for doing that.
There's a program called Select Phone, which is basically a list of names that you can scroll through. You could buy it, and demo it at your first club meeting!
No comment at this time
Sure. If they're free, why the hell not.
But they're annoyingly PC. Gone are the days of credits being for people who actually did something. Now you've got to include everyone in the department, if not their families.
The grips of the world, and their office counterparts, who do jobs that need to be done, but who don't have any effect on the final product simply don't need to be listed.
If the movie or software credits were carried into other fields, you'd see companies crediting their janitorial staff alongside their engineers for new consumer electronics.
Maybe it's a great way to pacify the workers, but that doesn't mean it makes sense.
Jobs does have a few valid points, I suppose...
1) It's not feasible to truly give proper credit in an Easter egg for an operating system. The text of the credits along would bloat the OS by a nontrivial amount (up to several megs). Individual teams are pretty small (usuallt about six people) but you have lots of teams.
2) Easter eggs reduce stability. Why? Because engineers have an annoying tendency to put them in before everything's stable yet.
3) Easter eggs violate specification documents. In other words, technically they're bugs.
Note that I'm not agreeing with Jobs entirely. I do agree about that first reason; you can't give truly proper credit to everyone, therefore it's not fair to give credit to only a few. Even so, though, it's a shame to see the Easter eggs going away. I've always liked them. I hope they'll be snuck into the OS in the future.
If someone wants to prove that first point wrong, be my guest: put an Easter egg into the kernel which lists everyone who's worked on it (and then we'll see if Linus lets it in).
The fact I have done it. It is a scrolling box they point at, but that does not significantly change anything I said before.
Do you remember the credits of some games from Lucasfilm /lucasart ??? They were really funny.
Now, many movies offer some "easter eggs" for people who wait till the end of the credits (I remember that at the end of lethal weapon 2, but there's many more).
--I like 2 kinds of women : GIFs and JPEGs--
Quite funny - I especially enjoyed the transformations of the departments...
Please, whatever you do, DO NOT GET A MAC!!! It would be really unfortunate for other prospective mac buyers to think of someone as cooky as you as a "mac user". Please continue using ill-conceived arguments to support your PC usage. that should get more people turning to apple pretty quick.
Its not like every developer on a project is spending days working on these easter eggs. Generally it's ONE salaried programmer who does it in his spare time and includes everybodys name. Hardly enough resources to make or break a project or to significantly effect the number of bugs fixed.
I worked for a company once that wouldn't let you put your name in the credits. It seemed to me that if I was making something I couldn't tell others about that at least those who used it could know who did it. I didn't want to own my own code, just be credited for my hard work.
That's one of the reasons I don't work for that company anymore. If apple does this that will be one reason I won't work for apple.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
=)
yes monty, with this one change "it sucks to work there now". This is what coders live for. this is the make or break difference between a good place to work and a "sucky place to work". your insight is keen.
>>Ah- you're forgetting that this is Slashdot, where it's a requirement to get worked up over trivial things!
/., this just means a lot of crap on one page.
No, this is merely another instance of the John Dvorak effect.
Step 1. Say something (even something evenhanded and neutral about Apple).
Step 2. Someone will bash Apple. (Repeat as necessary)
Step 3. Someone will defend Apple.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
For ZDNet's Talkback this means an extra page view for every comment.
For
Let's face it, nobody has really had their opinions about the formerly hexachrome fruit changed by this non-incident. Also, no one is even mentioning the real reason it was done, which was evidently employee-poaching by other companies. If any other company did this, it would be a non-issue. Nobody cares about anything, unless Apple is doing it. So, as always, continue to expound on how evil Steve and company are, but methinks thou doth protest too much. Why don't you all stop pining away, and just realize that you all secretly love Apple, and are perplexed by the mysterious ways in which it operates. Just remember, it's that same stealthy manner which allows it to shock the computer industry every 4 months for the past 2 years.
That's not too much to ask from Apple, is it?
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.
Wanna get into Marx? Separating the individual from what they produce? Making people feel worthless?
Ever think that maybe, just maybe, the credits aren't there just for you? Maybe they're for the people who worked on the movie, members of their family, their friends, people who can say "See that? I know that guy." Which would make "that guy" or "that girl" pretty cool.
I can't believe you're chasing this as a valid argument. Give credit where it is due. If you don't personally care, don't read them, leave the theatre, don't run the Easter eggs...
Stock Hits 100.
Apple Faithful crushed by success of company.
Ok, so we're aware that the company is doing really really well under Jobs. Stock is at its highest price ever. Loads of new users, based on the iConcept.
But those of us who've used Macs for more than just six months feel left out. No more easter eggs, engineering credits, or... what else? This makes Apple Products more like any other company's, takes it out of the realm of "hey, Apple is just more fun" and makes it an actual competitor, or at least, so the theory goes by the iCeo.
My take? It's a sad day of passing, but I'd rather Apple produce stronger product, and maintain that then go under like they've threatened to do so many times before.
Then again, I fail to see how something as small as EE or EngCreds would threaten a computer manufacturer w/%8 marketshare. I'm not stupid, just blindingly obtuse on this one.
File this under "Jobs Thinks He's Got A Good Thing Going And Now Wants To Make Sure Nothing Messes It Up"
It was stated in the San Jose Mercury News the other day that part of the reason Apple is doing this is because 1) key people would often get left out 2) irrelevant people would get included 3) people no longer associated with projects would get included anyways. So yeah, it's a bummer, but makes sense.
um... sorry..
but its not a rumor.
I have a friend who is currently in a Apple software About box.. and he said that when version 1.1 ships, no names will be in it.
It is true, it is real, and i don't really have a feeling on it one way or the other...
___
"I know kung-fu."
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I think that a lack of signatures would hardly make your company "commie". Besides, to make such brash political allegations about Microsoft would have to mean that they all get paid the same, and i KNOW that ain't true
I'm talking about the appearence from a PR standpoint. Here you have a story on how Apple is eliminating a harmless little concession to the individuality of its employees. Then the author sticks in a quote from an MS spokesperson where he says that MS already does this and the quote implies that Microsoft takes a collectivist attitude towards its workers. A lot of Americans (myself included) tend to associate collectivism with communism. It's just a matter of perception, not a political allegation.
Does this
What's Happen to Jobs? (Score:2)
by coaxial on 05:36 PM December 1st, 1999 EST
"What has happend to the guy that said once asked, "Do you want to change the world, or do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"? "
It's quite simple, he grew up, got older, got burned and as a result got serious. Jobs is still a visionary, he's simply exhibiting the traits of most visionaries past their prime. Perhaps its an extension of a natural response one reaches at his age, the desire to simplify and focus.
Sounds like a good way to get sued, branding someone like that. If a surgeon does something gratitious like that to a patient he deserves at least to get his lights knocked out.
If BeOS was truly written for geeks or at least the platform that gave it it's real start, it'd be running on my G4 now. Be doesn't need any help from apple, it just needs to remove that chip from JPG's shoulder.
I always did like that Poof! button though.
>The same with software credits. They're just a morale boost for the people who write software.
And why shouldn't we let the people who write the software we use every day have credit for their hard work? Why shouln't every little bit of morale boosting possible go to the programmers? A happy coder = good code!
Sure a lot of people don't watch the credits in movies.. the same is true for software, not a whole lot of people actually read what's in the docs or about box. I'm not saying that everyone should be forced to know what brand of caffeine the programmers used to code this peice of software, but that coder damn well better get credit for his work somewhere!
The first portion of your comment has some validity, easter eggs could add a bug or destablize a product depending on the nature of the easter egg. Saying that Excel would have to be banned because of a no games policy is absurd. Have you ever seen the easter egg in Excel? It hardly qualifies as a game. The reason games are banned is because they reduce productivity, no one is going to spend more than 2 minutes on these easter eggs. They'll waste far more time bullshitting with co-workers, or going on smoke breaks every 30 minutes.
Please, OSS programs humble? Some are, no question but most simply make their mark in other ways. Comments in source code being one, since the source is distributed they get their recognition by having other programmers see their name in the code. Do you really think that if I or someone else took a piece of code, striped out the comments and name from the original coder and added my own that there wouldn't be a stink raised about it? The person who did that would be ostisized from the community. OSS coders are no more humble than closed source coders.
so it goes.
Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, has never included credits. The company has always considered its name to represent the work of all its internal teams, said company spokesman Adam Sohn.
I think that they overlooked some famous MS Easter Eggs of past that did, in fact, include a roster of credits for Windows (3.1? 95?) including some artistic renderings or pictures of some members, IIRC.
Yeah, here they are...
[Courtesy of http://www.htsoft.com/easter]
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
I think this could actually be doing the programmers a favour.
I mean, most of them are probably a little bit embarrassed about having MacOS associated with their names anyway.
Their union will have asked the Apple management to cut the crediting system to save them having to change their names by deed poll, I should imagine.
-- Stu
Maybe all those Apple programmers will start writing for Linux... where they can get credit for the code they write?
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
I'm sorry to see the tradition of credits ending. Even easter eggs are sometimes ok, although embedding flight simulators in spreadsheets is a bit extreme. While at the CGE in August I listened to the original Activision guys talk about how credit for their work at Atari was important. Atari didn't like giving its programmers credit, and even got upset at easter eggs. (Pay was certainly a factor too, but I'm not sure where Apple stands on that issue right now.) They left Atari and founded a company so that they could enjoy life again, while also getting financially rewarded for their efforts. You gotta wonder if the engineers at Apple are feeling the same way right about now.
I use Windows 95 at work and it crashes about one to three times a week for me. Individual applications (both MS and third party) crash much more frequently, often daily, sometimes several time a day. This is usually caused by the application itself of course. But too often, a poorly written app can take Windows down with it or leave it impaired (usually by making it slow down) in some way. When I run several apps at a time, especially resource hungry MS Office apps, a crash is more likely. When an MS Office app crashes it usally takes the ability of all MS Office apps to print away until I restart Windows.
Windows 9x does tend to be a little messy with its system resources and this causes instability. It does include a handy resource monitor which I run so I'll know when I need to restart Windows and this keeps it from slowing down too much and from crashing too frequently.
This isn't fantasy, it's reality. Note that I'm talking about Windows 95 and 98 here, not NT. That's a completely different story.
Does this
At least we won't be seeing a pinball game, a flight simulator, or even a 3D first personal shooter to double the hard disk space requirements for Apple's software. But still, I doubt Steve Jobs did this to remove bloat.
So because you left (fired maybe?) the company has gone down hill and isn't a major player anymore. How do you get that ego through the door?
I have a feeling you haven't *thoroughly* tested the entire product.
So for one of Steve's companies (Apple), credits are bad. For another of Steve's companies (Pixar), credits are good. I wonder what Tom Hanks and Tim Allen would think of not having their names in the Toy Story 2 credits.
Not those are all just stupid excuses that are not valid if the project is managed correctly. It is really not THAT hard to make sure proper credit is given. Hell, even the pornos manage to get the credits right and give credit where credit is due!
Problem: Credits take disk space and can sometimes introduce unexpected bugs in their activiation sequence possibly slowing down software. Solution: Have a "credits" app with the OS that is a self-contained list of credits. Those who want to see it double click, those who don't drag it to the trash. Problem solved, everybody happy.
Whenever I'm at computer stores, it's usually Macs and Wintels on display. And I always go straight to the Mac's. I go machine to machine, roll the credits, and grin. Easter eggs are great fun if they're small and rewarding.
Good easter egg examples:
The simple and old-school 'About the Finder'
Some not Apple ones:
From Photoshop 4: The electric pussy cat that belches!
Come on, these things are just hilarious. Even Gnome has strange and obscure About dialogs.. Like the new Rubber Squeaky Gnome.
You don't know how FRUSTRATING it is to have someone important leave your project.
Then compensate those people equally with how important to your project they are, and they won't leave. If someone important leaves, then good for them, they were being used and abused. Treat your employees right.
This argument makes little sense now that SNK vs. Capcom is made. :)
I once heard that if its not good enough to put your name on it, then it shouldn't be released. Will this bring an end to the tradition of quality which Apple software has had?
This may be a bit offtopic, but according to the article
"Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, has never included credits. The company has always considered its name to
represent the work of all its internal teams, said company spokesman Adam Sohn."
I seemingly recall that in Windows 3.1, you could get a list of developers by holding CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and double clicking on the Windows logo in the about box (or something similar to that). Also, there were similar "easter" eggs in Excel and Word that I heard about.
Anyway, I personally believe in giving credit where credit is due. I don't agree with Apple's excuse for having large development teams, with input coming from "thousands" of developers. True, there may be a large number of people working and contributing to a project, but I still think that everyone should be recognized. And, as the article mentioned, Apple was really good about it from the beginning. Oh well, times do change, I guess.
I showed it to somebody at work, his NT box blue screened, and I got fired.
Steve, although he has brought the compan I love back to profitability, is not going to win this war. Many easter eggs cannot be accessed with keyboard short \cuts etc and are almost impossible to catch. Anyone remember that is you run the Finder in a text editor the bits about being Trapped In A System Softwware Factory? classic... but is he or one of his minions actiually going to examine every resources, hex code, line of source etc to find a two lines that have credits I don't think so.... Even those that are found out, Like the secret about box only found in System 7.0.0 even though it was found out the resource remained in the programs resource fork. And those who say this is a good way to get rid of bloatware? If the programmers who crafted the Mac OS into the wonderful elegant creature it is today want to take a few hundred Kb tooting their own horn i say more power to em!
Ryan Dorman, CCNA Network Communications Specialist Millersville Univesrity
That app's been around for 10+ years. With all the layoffs at Apple, I would have expected more people to have touched that code. Pick a better example next time.
I just wasted four hours on the excel game. That damn thing is hard. Plus, the graphics are better than Q3. Let the flamage begin.
That just sealed it. I was thinking of making an apple my next computer, what with the G4 and all, but with this recent development I can't say I'll ever buy an apple product.
I can't believe I've ever advocated these morons to any customer during my days of tech support.
As an overall all-around "geek" and a bit of a programmer, I can't believe my eyes on this little bit. Any software developer working for apple just got thier pride and joy taken away - the right to call the software they created thier own.
I wouldn't be suprised if there's a slew of "layoffs" now that apple has decided to do this, as they try to get employees to sign stupid legal agreements that keep them from claiming rights to the software, if they haven't given up that right already.
Sticking with my PC, I guess.
And you don't think Jobs would fire them immediately? I think that fear is enough to keep anyone from putting anything extra into their codebase at apple.
A bit of a dumb move by Steve.. The last thing you want to do when trying to build a company up is to piss off your employees.
:-)
While it is a minor thing, nothing I'd quit over, it would make be quite angry. I mean, what about tradition, huh? What about pride in your work? Does craftsmanship mean nothing?
Admittedly, it's just Apple, which is a horrible steaming pile of crap nowadays. Forget good products, we'll sell colored ones!
Whatever happened to the movers and shakers? What happened to the guys who did these things because they thought the technology was cool, not because of profit potential?
I just can't help but wondering where the new generation of weirdos is.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Like if you write a book your publisher has no right to remove your name from the cover. Doesnt it work this way for programs? It should be in copyright law.
A company that won't allow easters eggs and no credits, has IMHO lost his sense of humor and its soul... It was nice when Apple where not only colored computers, we'll miss it...
I bet the M$ employee who decided to stick the flight sim in programmed it specially. It was probably something he had knocked up at university and was looking for something to do with it.
Before this continues and this becomes "Slashdotted", you need to read some of their possible reasoning towards this. "Others say the ban may also mask Apple's increasing paranoia to keep the identity of its key people under wraps. Engineering teams highlighted in credits are at times believed to be the source of leaks of confidential company information and are increasingly the target of poaching by other companies and search firms in the fierce high-tech job market." If you ask me, they have every right to keep their engineers to themselves. Who the hell spends time reviewing the credits anyway, maybe to find a version number!
> In my opinion, listing grips and other people in movie credits
> is ridiculous. Their influence is insignificant, and doesn't
> take any 'art', they could be easily replace by anyone else
> trained in the field and the work wouldn't suffer.
apparently you're not a stagehand. i am. you probably don't know how few people there are who are actually well trained for each job. you probably don't know what a best boy is, let alone that there's no practical way to become one wihtout the patronage of someone already placed in the industry. you probably don't know that _Casablanca_ is rated as one of the greatest movies of all time because of the miracles the focus puller was able to bring off. you probably bitched that the Star Trek movies looked like TV episiodes without ever knowing why (answer: zero involvement by the focus puller). you probably don't know that _Titanic_, that CG tour-de-force, had a scene that couldn't be shot with the latest & greatest programmable cameras, and that the production company had to fly a 70-odd year old, retired focus puller to Mexico to do half a day (for him) of work that *no one* else could do.
you probably wouldn't even be able to say what shot it was if you watched the movie.
you probably have no idea how much skill is being lost in the industry because the people who know how to do all these things are retiring without passing their lore on to a new generation.
movies are hard work, and everyone.. right down the the gofers.. has to do their job right, or it shows. you may not be able to see the effects of their work, but that's strictly because you don't know what to look for. granted, i can't look at a 30-second clip and tell you whether the catering was good, but i can tell you a lot about the production environment. shitty catering, disorganized bookkeeping, techinical glitches that mean one more take at the end of a long day.. all of those are visible in the way the performers move. there's a lot of information about the making of a movie, right there in the product, as long as you know how to find it.
if you don't happen to like sitting through the credits, that's fine. it's your call, and it would be stupid for me to say you're 'robbing the workers' of their credit. just don't take the extra step into pointy-haired-boss logic and assume that anything you don't understand has to be easy. *that's* a disservice to skilled workers in any field.
as programmers, we owe our colleagues in other trades the same respect we want for ourselves. the best way to get it is to show some of our own.
To me this just seems an awful large bother over such small things that don't cause any problems. I always enjoyed the little Easter eggs in programs, they are fun. Not that I think anyone reads the credits, but I always enjoyed having my name somewhere on the few programming jobs I've worked on.
The fact that Steve Jobs took the time to come up with a memo telling people that such things are banned seems a waste of time. Maybe Steve has too much time on his hands? Perhaps the same amount of time on his hands that the programmers have when they create such little eggs?
I feel bad to see Apple pulling all the 'fun' out of their products. But if the eggs and the credits have to go, I feel it is only fitting for the man who started them, Jobs, to hand down the decree.
Let's all power up the old LC or IIfx we have in the closet and hit it one more time for the guys and gals at Apple. We appreciate your effort, even if you don't get your name etched in.
.sig: Now legally binding!
ROM 01s (like mine) have an Easter egg that's brought up the same way, though it's not quite as much fun: it displays the names of the people who worked on the IIGS.
Fun machines, though it's a bit of a bummer that one of the HDs on mine went bad. (I had transferred the contents of both drives to a Zip disk, though, and it'll boot off of that, so at least I didn't lose anything.) It started life back in '85 as a IIe with 128K and two 5.25" floppy drives; it now has 4.25 megs, two 40-meg HDs (one dead), Zip, CD-ROM, and runs at 12.5 MHz. These days, it mainly runs ProTERM 3.0 and acts as a dumb terminal hanging off a Linux box.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Back in the early 80s, there was a good deal of competition for videogame programers. Companys were known to poach each other's talent. Mattel Electronics (Intellivision) attempted to avoid this by not listing the names of their developers. Instead, the group was referred to as The Blue Sky Rangers.
Monty
Do you read them all, caring about the name of the grip, or do you do it looking for the odd joke, and waiting till the theatre empties?
You're thinking geek-centric.
My sister is an amateur actress, and in my spare time (when I had spare time), I used to engineer sound for community theatre. We, and lots of our friends also involved in drama, often stay for the credits and applaud the grips, gaffers, best boys, and other similar jobs that never get much recognition for their hard work.
Just because you don't do it doesn't mean nobody cares.
2 annoying trends: more and more credits in the beginning of the movie, and an interminable crawl of everyone except who you're interested in at the end. At the start, the title, 2 or 3 main actors, music composer, and director are sufficient. At the end, use this order: 1. Cast 2. Director, producer, composer, musicians 3. Titles of songs 4. Special effects crews 5. All other straphangers, including key grip, etc.
Ok, I'll clarify a little.
I still don't think most of the work is 'art' and I don't believe that what 95% of people do couldn't be done by a replacement just as easily.
I'm sure there are a few jobs that the public wouln't recognize that are a black art, that you can't train someone in, they have to apprentice and pick it up by osmosis, and I'll even grant that some of these jobs might be important to the final quality the film.
But, I'm sure these are few and far between. For every focus puller there are ten assistants to the stars, who are being listed more and more often, and caterers, etc.
Why am I sure? What's my vast experience in the theatre industry? Zip. I admit that. But I've worked a lot of jobs and seen that it's very rare more then 10% of the people in a company actually work on the final product, everyone else just supports the people who do. I don't imagine hollywood, which is about money, not art, at least at any big studio, is any different. (At least, this is how the money end sees it, I'm sure the workers usually see it as more than just another movie.)
I've even had a gopher job. I did incredibly dull stuff and waited on my boss. I took phone calls, did minor paperwork, got coffee, etc, all so she could keep working. And I'm sure she got more work done because of it... But, I don't think that I influenced the quality or design of her work, just the ammount of it. And I could have been replaced by any equally trained gopher who would have been just as helpful to her. If someone had asked about her work, should I have volunteered that I helped make it? Should it have been in my contract with her that I must get mentioned?
And I'm not making the assumption that because I don't understand it, it must be easy. Some of what I did took months before I could do a single task as well as she could. And I also wrote custom tracking software, and did many other non-trivial things. But, I still didn't produce the final product. She did. If I was sick, work went on. When I eventually left, work went on.
And it's not like this is an amateur play where the support staff does it out of the good of their hearts. This is payed work. The same thing almost everyone else does every day.
To me, credits are a way of finding out who did something in the movie that you saw and liked. Actors names are listed so you can identify them. The director is listed, as are many of the important FX people so you can identify their work. But, if a job doesn't affect the quality of the movie directly, it is unimportant to the audience.
It doesn't really matter. The contracts are already written, and the film cost is negligible compared to the length of the movie. I'm not campaigning to wipe out credits, just to explain why I, and obviously a lot of other people, feel the way I do about them.
So you have to draw the line somewhere. When an engineering effort gets big, it can become unwieldy just to list all the current workers, much left those who've moved on. What do you do: list them all, just the current people, or nobody at all? It's easiest to list nobody.
Take a look at the credits for Eudora Pro sometime when you're bored (and if you're really bored, hold down the ctrl key while the list of names is scrolling by). Some of the people listed there haven't worked at Qualcomm for years. But they've been left in because some part of themselves went into Eudora.
Leaving them in is fine by me -- they were all part of the same big family. But maybe Apple doesn't think that way anymore. Maybe Jobs is just making sure he has one less thing to worry about. Either way, it's not much of an issue.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Yeah, they'll just drive the programmers into an illegal "Creditz" scene, where the upload their Creditz at a ratio of 3:1. If they upload enough they get a disabled Creditz ratio. :)
BTW, of Atari and Activision, guess who's still around today?
Wow, yeah, I never noticed the oh-so obvious connection between movie credits and marxism.
Dude, you really need to get out more, the black helicopters track you if you're in one place too long.
I am not a lawyer, but I thought that the author of a work has the right to be identified as the author. Unlike other copyright powers, this cannot be assigned or given up - it is an inalienable right. That's why books say 'All rights reserved.' but also 'The moral right of the author has been asserted.'.
(This is for the UK, I think - I don't know how it works in other countries.)
Would this mean that software companies are obliged to give credit to people who wrote code, and that any contract signing away this right is not valid?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Because if people know who programmed that wonderful products they would lynch 'em!!!
Anyway, more of this stupidity can be found at The Easter Egg Archive.
Regards, Ralph.
Getting credit for your work leads to feeling connected to the things that you produce. This leads to a more fulfilling work experience, happier people and higher productivity.
Removal of this feeling of contentment from knowing that you've accomplished something leads to lesser feelings of self-worth, lowered productivity and unhappy people. This is pretty basic stuff.
I'd be willing to get that you've never noticed the oh-so obvious connection between marxism and anything. Any idea what marxism is about? Or is it maybe just that evil red stuff, from the evil red book that you've been told not to read...
Is there an email address or website where we can show our displeasure at these decisions?
man is machine
You press the "programmers switch" (gotta love that phrase) and type G and 3 photos loop over and over endlessly every few seconds. Unfortunately, I've forgotten the address.
Of course your right. Windows is unstable because of the ending credits hidden inside.
Bad Command Or File Name
"You can limit my mouse input to one button. You can give me a really fast processor and a limited number of programs to use on it. You can have my spot in the credits, but as God as my witness you will not take my right, as a programmer, to write easter eggs!" Jobs should expect to hear this muttered at Apple right before the fighting breaks out.
That's totally not true about Microsoft and the no-name credits rule. I have a friend on the Win2000 dev-team, and not only is his name in the easter egg, so is a "Free Kevin" comment. 8-) -=- SiKnight
Programmers have egos, too, you know (especially at Apple). If executive staff can't or won't acknowledge that, then they're further down the path of their own demise than they suspect.
I remember back during Atari's golden years, when they were run by Warner Communications. The edict was that no credit was to be given to any programmer, ever. Individuals who incorporated easter eggs were fired and, occasionally, sued (as Mark Riley, author of AtariWriter, will attest. There were extenuating circumstances in this particular case, but the lawsuit was just gratuitous).
Hell, Electronic Arts was, in part, founded on the idea of giving programmers credit for their work. On the box. With a short bio and photo! The first products out of EA clearly demonstrated the pride these people took in their work. Programmer credit continues at EA to this day.
There is no legitimate reason for them to impose this rule, especially after all these years. It's just mean-spirited.
"But if we put the names of our programmers in the product, our competitors will know who they are and hire them away!"
I've heard this argument before, and it's impossibly lame. If you treat your people well, pay them well, offer a good work environment, and offer the opportunities to work on seriously cool sh*t, this problem does not exist.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"Today Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs announced the end of 'credits' at the end of Pixar feature movies..."
I mean think about it, when you go to a restaraunt it doesn't say on the menu, the food is prepared by so-and-so. When you buy a car there isn't a pamphlet that says this car was assembled by so-and-so. Heck when you buy jeans all you get is the number of the inspector (it almost always seems to be 11).
I think we are all getting too worked up for nothing. The programmers can still put food in their family's mouth and a roof over their head. I think that is what is really important to them.
If you've ever played all the way through some earlier Japanese-made video games, like Street Fighter II for example, you may have notice that the names in the credits at the end are very strange-- usually single-word names like "Zummy" and "Bok!!" I read in a video game magazine many years ago that the game companies did this on purpose to avoid giving away the names of their staff to other companies.
Consider this: You work for SNK, a video game company competing with Capcom, another video game company. You see a new game from Capcom with absolutely fabulous artwork in it! So, you look at the credits for the game, find the names of the art staff, and offer them jobs at SNK with much higher salaries!
This may be part of the reasoning behind Apple's move. They don't want to risk losing their best workers to headhunters from other companies.
For further fun with easter eggs, I recommend The Easter Eggs Archive.
I believe this only applies to the version 3 ROMs (with the updated motherboard).
Hit control-apple-option-N any time there's a "sliding apple" system error screen up and it'll print out a complete list of names on the team and a sample of the team yelling "Apple II!" will play.
Ahh, the good old days...
It seems as if the description of an article posting on /. determines the tone for the response here in the forum. The description made note of how it made him "sad" to see the credits go, but if you read the aricle, Steve chose to eliminate the credits because only a small number of people were gettting credit for work that several people did.
Rather than list thousands of people in a credits list and acknowledge everybody who helped support a product launch (which would be stupid) Steve did the wise thing and took the whole thing out. He took it out, not because he didnt want to offer credit, but instead to insinuate a notion of teamwork, rather than individuaality.
If you recall Apple's darkest years, you'll remember that everyone took the company to a downward spiral that seemed never ending. This was because nobody was working towards a common goal, and instead sought out what they felt was of the utmost importance.
Now that Apple is on track, with everybody working towards a common goal, people should realize that TEAMWORK is what matters, and not getting credit for your individual part.
Steve's rationale for this, according to a buddy of mine who works at Apple, is that the credit lists are never complete and are generally dictated by whoever is writing the credit code, so some deserving people get left out. Appearantly Steve sent all the employees a memo to this effect.
Course, the OS 8 credit easter egg with the names of the engineers who laid off in the massacre of '96 was pretty damn cool.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -- Emerson
On the other hand, as some may have noted, sometimes it just feels good (or at least, I should say better) to have your name displayed on something you have created, so you can be proud of your work if you have put substantial time and effort into it.
When you write the software yourself, in your own time, you make the rules (licensing, credit). However, all that changes when you get into the commercial world. Here it's not about pride... it's not about credit... respect... face it! wake up! it's all about the money. Companies market to end-users and other companies, and if they can do something or say something that will make them or their products look better, THEY WILL! Note that saying they will remove Easter eggs allows them to claim that their products will be smaller in size. It follows quite logically: when you remove code, program becomes smaller. The purchasers at other companies may like this, or they may not. And also, let's not forget: your average Joe could CARE LESS about all the programmers who wrote his favorite word processor. Why? He's not a programmer, he doesn't know many (if any) people who are, and generally tries to spend as little time with the computer as possible. What does it matter to him? But... if the company can say "program smaller, will run faster" Joe may be happy, because he can understand that much. He may not have the appreciation for Easter eggs or the coding that goes behind it, he just wants to type his annual reports up, print them out, and go home at the end of the day. Why bother?
So this will upset programmers. GUESS WHAT? Do you know just HOW many programmers there are? Apple surely knows that if some quit, there are quite many more others who are either seeking better-paying jobs than they have now, or just a job, period! And they will be willing to take this job, knowing they can't see their name in the credits, because, heck, everyone needs food/clothing/shelter, and some have to support FAMILIES as well!
I guess what I am trying to say is that:
a) Apple doesn't care, it's a win-win for them,
b) Programmers come and go, corporations generally stay, and finally,
c) one may conclude (from the Emerson quote) that if something isn't worth doing FOR THE HELL OF IT (ie. without getting credit/award for it), then it just may not be worth doing it. However, do not forget, there are plenty of other hungry programmers out there who won't think twice about filling your job.
The moral of the story is perhaps this:
When you are your own boss (read: your own startup!! :)), things are better because you can make your own rules, but hey - if you don't want to work on, say, a video driver because your name won't be displayed every time the driver is loaded... well... that's perhaps your loss.
When, however, someone else takes care of everything else besides the coding (contracts, equipment, management (yeah, it may actually be useful. sigh.)), then you have a price to pay for that. Your peace of mind == less control. Your own business => opposite.
Same thing as with individuals living under a common set of laws and a government (sacrifice individual freedom for the good of the society or something to that effect). Not that I'm advocating either, or neither, it's an observation.
Sorry to digress, but I just noticed the quote and the rest followed as a stream of consciousness..... :)
-- another speck of dust on the face of planet Earth
Not that communism is necessarily theoretically bad, but this sounds like a very communistic move on Apple's part (all for the good of the people...er, company)... Personally, I think credits are one of the few things still good and decent in the software industry. What's next, no credits in movies, and you only recognize the two or three stars that "grace" the screen, and the 300+ others all on the crew just didn't do anything?...sigh.
I'm curious, with many people claiming credit should be due to the hard working employees, where do the support staff fit? I imagine there are PR people, human resources folks, janitors, and maybe an IT staff that all helped to make that product successful. Are their names in the products?
I know the products at my company are credited to the entire company. Of course, NASA, banning any type of advertising on the products, helps this policy.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I have a few surgeon friends who say they usually sign their name or some special symbol into patients when stitching up their internal organs. If doctors can do it, programmers should be allowed to do so too.
IIRC, behind the motherboard (which was vertical near the back) was a protective metal sheet of some sort. It had the signatures (reproduced, of course) of everyone who worked on the SE.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
What about pride in your work? Does craftsmanship mean nothing?
Which rock have you been under? No, craftsmanship doesn't mean squat anymore. Pride in your work... what an outmoded concept.
Look, this civilization no longer rewards things like pride, or craftsmanship, or doing a good job just because that's the right thing to do. It's all about the cash, now. Get in, get the money, get out -- and damn to hell anything else.
Which is very sad, and likely to topple our civilization, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Pouring your heart into your work so much that whether your name gets put on it or not matters to you, is just going to get your heart ripped out of your body and stomped into the ground when your short-term usefulness to your corporate masters is over.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
>Movies credit most all involved all the time,
:-)
>right down to the waterboys. Why shouldn't
>programmers receive similar recognition?
Duh. If you'lll notice, NO ONE watches all the
credits because NO ONE cares who the
executive assistant best grip gaffer was, except
for the executive assistant best grip gaffer. The
same with software credits. They're just a morale boost for the people who write software.
Basically, no one cares about the credits except
for the programmers themselves. Why don't they
just write their names down on a piece of paper?
As for the death of Atari, it could be because
Atari became synonomous with "crappy console gaming system."
No comment at this time
If you ask me, they have every right to keep their engineers to themselves.
<sarcasm mode=heavy>
Damn straight. After all, these are their engineers, right? They should be able to do with them as they please. No more sneaking out of the 'engineers quarters' after dark. And the beating will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, is anyone else disturbed by this "Massa - Sla^H^H^H Engineer" attitude? Do people honestly think "The company is allways right" and the rights of the company outweigh the rights of the individual?
To quote:
Engineering teams highlighted in credits are at times believed to be the source of leaks of confidential company information
Like what sort of company information? Trade secrets? Those are covered in the swamp of intellectual property agreements all employees have to sign these days. But what about the other kind of "confidential company information"? Like maybe they're secretly selling missile guidance software to terrorist nations (not that I think Apple is capable of writing any missile guidance software that any self respecting terrorist dictator would want to use). God forbid that sort of "confidential company information" should get out where the public might see it.
and are increasingly the target of poaching by other companies and search firms in the fierce high-tech job market.
And then Apple might have to pay its developers more in order to keep them. Now this is an ugly trend is it not? God forbid we should have to pay the people who actually create the product what they're worth in a free market environment. I don't know what the world is coming to when lowly engineers and programmers start earning as much as management and marketing executives. That just goes against the natural order.
</sarcasm>
Regardless, let's all observe a moment of silence in honor of "Fred Burst -- the only man whose name is a complete sentence," and other classic Apple credits.
When I worked at Apple, my manager mentioned to me that org charts are confidential documents because there are so many headhunters out there looking for Apple employees.
So I think it only makes sense that credits are being taken out, because that's almost an org chart of sorts. Headhunters could just look at the credits and go after people.
(I'm posting as AC in case I wasn't supposed to tell anyone this, though I don't recall this as being secret.)
The problem is, Windows doesn't crash so much.
Except in the fantasies of those who fear it.
For some reason none of the rest of us can figure out.
This is yet another plot to suppress engineers. Or, should I say, "knowledge workers." Paying them peanuts is not enough. Now, the mental-inferiority-complex-suffering managers have taken away even these benign HIDDEN credits. Engineers revolt. American society is currently structured to screw you over. __ ___ || ___ __ _/|_ |/-\ ___ __ _/|_ || __\\ (/_' || ||-/ // \\ (/_` || ||__((_||_,_/) \|_ || \\_// ,_/) \|_ HAHA! LAST POST! Following posts are redundant.
After reading about the control-apple-option-n thing, I tried it on OS 8.6, while going into the Apple menu, and I found "About the MacsOS 8.5 team" - in fact, you only need to press "control-apple-option". Anyway, enjoy!
More specifically, Atari (in the early 80's) forbade its programmers from hiding their names in the credits of video games for one primary reason: because it easily identified the best game programmers to headhunters, who would then know exactly who to lure away from Atari.
Problem is, when Atari made this rule, the best game programmers there got ticked off and left for companies who would give them recognition -- like Activision.
Lotus still does it.. the Monty Python thing in Notes, the Possum that craps blue M&Ms in Wordpro...
They won't disappear.
"Like colors from the Logo, these are the eggs of our products."
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
This is yet another plot to suppress engineers. Or, should I say, "knowledge workers." Paying them peanuts is not enough. Now, the mental-inferiority-complex-suffering managers have taken away even these benign HIDDEN credits.
Engineers revolt. Remember, you're smarter than The Man.
_.......................__
||.....__...._._||_..||-\\..._...._._||_
||......_\\.(/_'..||....||-//.//.\\.(/_'..||
||__((_||_,_/).||_..||....\\_//.,_/).\\_
HAHA! LAST POST! Anything following is redundant.
There was a IIcx. It had the same case as the IIci, but it was slower, and it didn't have builtin video. It was also one of the four Macs that was unable to use 32-bit memory addressing without MODE32 or 32-bit enabler, along with the SE/30, IIx, and II.
--
"I was a fool to think I could dream as a normal man."
/joeyo
aka the MacJedi
2^5
Speak for yourself; I always stay through the credits, and I'm rarely the only person in the theater who does.
I was getting set to contradict you until I reread the article. What a bonehead spokesbot! Microsoft has always had credits and easter eggs and this wuss makes his own company look like a bunch of soulless commie robots for a story that has nothing to do with them! Is it any wonder that they botched their own anti-trust trial so badly with the fake videotape and Bill Gates' limp testimony?
No wonder Windows crashes so much. Like the rest of Microsoft, it's suicidal. At least now they have Apple to keep them company.
Does this
It's also bloat, and can potentially be a political hot potato. (Although no company ever acted on it, any company with a no-games policy would either have to ban Excel or scrap the policy. In the end, the compromise of everyone shutting their eyes became standard practice.)
But what if a company stood firm? Can you imagine the publicity that could generate? I doubt much of it would be favourable to the company, either.
Credits, though, are another matter. There's no real risk of bugs (it's mostly text), there's no real space consumed (text compresses to around 1/10th uncompressed size, which is often small, anyway. A few 10's of K, tops.)
There is no justification for omitting credits, either in terms of stability or space. As for ex-employees, keep 'em in. If they've earned the right to be there, they've earned it. Taking it away, merely because they've moved, quit, been sacked, etc, is churlish.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you recall, Activision's television commercials mentioned the lead developer on the project. This was due to a longstanding Atari policy not to release names. The issue came to a head, after a programmer put his initials in Atari's "Haunted House" as an Easter Egg. Some kid found it and contacted Atari to see if there was a prize for finding the "secret message." When Atari investigated, they figured out what happened and fired the programmer for violating the policy.
Activision promptly began raiding Atari for talent and ended up with most of their top programmers.
I hope for their sake, Apple doesn't make the same mistake Atari did...
I must be losing my memory. I remember a II ci and a II VX, but no II CX.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I don't see credits indicating that a team of programmers is putting their egos "above" the rest of the company - I see it as being proud of their achievements.
To deny those people primarily responsible for a product recognition smacks of the type of reasoning where people in large organizations seek to obscure the source of information or of a decision in order to prevent responsibility from being attached to any particular individuals.
There were two issues which kind of made sense:
1. Too many people contributed to each product, making it impossible to credit everyone.
I guess this is a possibility, although I suspect that if you don't include the people outside of the main project (such as administration or the people who did tools & toolkits), then the number of people involved in generating an individual product is probably not too big. Certainly not any larger than a large Hollywood movie production - and they have people up the wazoo listed on the ending credits.
2. Competitors using the credits to target the developers for recruitment.
This is probably a valid concern - although it could probably be argued that if a competitor is able to entice a developer away from a company, then that company either didn't compensate the developer enough or the morale was too poor to instill any loyalty for company. By "hiding" the names of their developers from the public, the company is trying to keep their labor costs lower by keeping their developers from temptation.
I'm wonder if a company could use a clever marketing ploy and actually play UP the reputations of the developers involved with popular products, so that people would feel that products associated with that developer are "higher quality" than something which is generic. (I guess this kind of fits what Transmeta is doing w/Torvalds reputation.
BTW, what programmers work at Activision either? Unless I'm mistaken, nowadays they only publish games that other companies develop.
When I see the Easter Eggs that those fun-loving wacky light-hearted minions of the Dark Side over in Redmond toss into their products, I immediately wonder "how many of the fscking bugs in your fscking products could you have fixed while you were programming that fscking pinball game!?"
(Funny, I tend to use the phrase 'fscking' an awful lot when it comes to our pals at Microsoft....)
I suspect that people are coming to realize that unless you have a nearly airtight application, you'd better not trumpet the fact hat you let your programmers goof off and do silly things with their time. Now, minor little quirky easter eggs, such as the little taxi that zips across your screen in some version of the Pilot OS, are less harmful along those lines. I don't believe the Apple folks were every guilty of the excesses of the Microsoft folks. But, programmers being programmers are always going to try to outdo each other, so... perhaps it's better to nip it in the bud.
If the engineers unionized and made credits part of their contract like all of the movie industry they could have their credits. Do you think only the people in the credits work on the movie? No its the people who have getting credit part of their contract are on the credits, many more people work on the film than are credited.
BTW don't weep over the engineers loosing their credits, as an engineer in the SFBay area, I can safely say that it is an employee's market, don't like it, it only takes a second to find a new job. Credits are simply gravy, I doubt that any of the engineers base their employment on credits.
By what measure? IBM and others are much larger.
If they're trying to cut down on bloat, maybe they should remove all those wasteful "copyright this" and "trademark that" statements that nobody reads anyway. Or better yet, include a complete GPL'd copy of the source code, so that each user can decide whether or not to re-compile their system "--with eggs" or "--with credits".
This is gonna piss off the wife; she thought she was getting an iMac for Christmas....
Knowing a few people in Apple I heard this was because the credits did not cover everybody that worked on the projects and some people got upset... ohwell... I really liked the pretty picture of the apple campus...
Finally no more undocumented "features" that bloat up applications. Software coders are engineers, that are supposed to deliver robust code that does what it's supposed to do; not waste their time writing flight simulators in spreadsheets or whatever kind of nonsense. True engineers don't sign their products; do you see any credits on your car, stereo, or on a box of crackerjacks? Creating software is not an artform , but an engineering project. I am glad to see that Jobs realizes this. I'll certainly consider buying Apple.
You simply cannot imagine a movie which doesnt give credit to the people who put in hours days and weeks of effort to make it. Can you? I cant. Tell me how computer programs are any different, Mr Jobs?
I know that this is probably not a popular move on Apple's part. However, this is how I see it: Programmers should (ideally) speak with the quality of their code. I enjoy Linux partly because of the humility of its developers. Aside from their sometimes tongue-in-cheek talk of world domination, most don't pat themselves on the back or search for approval. They speak with their code, as do many anonymous or near anonymous contributors to the Open Source library.I would much rather have Apple employees speak with tight, efficient code than with some fancy flag graphic no matter how neato.
While I don't think an easter egg containing credits for the authors would violate the GPL, I wonder if it would satisfy the deprecated "advertisement" clause in the BSD license.
Is Linux "too serious" for easter eggs, or has some humor been put into the kernel and libc?
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I first saw this bit several days ago in a rumor column. That's all it is, a rumor. Then, as happens quite often these days, some news agency decided it sounded like a fact and reprinted it. Then Slashdot people saw that story, and now this thread is open.
Am I the only one who is sick and tired of how the media takes rumors as fact (especially those that are Apple-related, it seems)? Now thousands of people believe it's really true because it's been in the news. Let me reiterate, it's only a rumor.
-Rafi Remove the Spanish to email me.
I think that a lack of signatures would hardly make your company "commie". Besides, to make such brash political allegations about Microsoft would have to mean that they all get paid the same, and i KNOW that ain't true.
now a socialist company....
semantics are everything!
On those occasions, Apple's SCM (Software Configuration Management) organization, which was chartered with doing all offical software builds, had their engineers scouring the source code looking for easter eggs and credits. It became a game for development engineers to find creative ways to hide them such that SCM couldn't find them. In one case the credits were stored in a block of hexadecimal data. In another, thousands of characters of source code for an easter egg were present in the source code, but indented hundreds of spaces so that the MPW editor wouldn't normally show them (unless you scrolled right).
The super-secret about box in the first release of Multifinder was done despite management efforts to eradicate such things. If they couldn't do it then, I doubt that they can do it now.
Where is the "Steve Capps Memorial No-name Burrito Joint", anyhow? I don't think it is La Costena, although they make damn good burritos.
Do you read them all, caring about the name of the grip, or do you do it looking for the odd joke, and waiting till the theatre empties?
Movies have the same problem software is starting to have. Way too many people to list. You either list just the big names, thus pissing off people who didn't make the cut, or you list everyone, drowning out the names of the important people, or you go with the minimum, ie those people whose union contracts require them to be listed.
In my opinion, listing grips and other people in movie credits is ridiculous. Their influence is insignificant, and doesn't take any 'art', they could be easily replace by anyone else trained in the field and the work wouldn't suffer.
If you start listing everyone in software projects, either you get insanely long lists, which have to be alphabetically sorted (to avoid fights over priority) and include everyone from the lead programmers down to temporary data entry staff, or you get arbitrarily short lists and piss people off.
A company like id software can do it, because they have few enough employees, and all of them (even, so they say, their secretary/mom) have enough influence on the project that listing them isn't a joke. But this is because they have less than twenty people involved in actually making the game.
And even then it's a stretch. They aren't mentioning any of the testers, famous ones like Thresh, or anonymous ones at Activision, or (I think) the guy who now maintains the eiting tools, etc.
So, being that any attempt to list credits in a company with more than 20-30 people is going to be flawed, I think it's something that should best be left out.
What they could do, if they make feel team spirit, is to code some cool effect, and use the team's internal codename (if they have one.) Thus getting an easter egg, and team pride, without the task of having to name each and every person at all responsible in such a way that wouldn't piss anyone off.
This doesn't sound like the legendary Steve Jobs to me. Sounds more like a Corpro-Tron 6000. Sure there's alot of people that go into making software, but there's alot of people that go into making a movie too. (Hell Hollywood even credits the damn caterer.) It's a tradition. It encourages pride in your work.
Sure someone may go after your talent if yopu publish their names. But killing your corporate culture doesn't exactly make people want to stick around.
What has happend to the guy that said once asked, "Do you want to change the world, or do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"?
I knew apple had gone over to the dark side a long time ago, but this is still ridiculous...
For those of you worried about software bloat, side effects, etc., etc.: shut up! This is only an issue if you can't code well in the first place. As long as you have a simple, well-written, 'credits scrolly' type module, all it does is take up disk space until it is executed. Therefore, no real extra bloat (oh no, it calls a library function...) and no side effects. And geez, if you can't figure out how to compress a *text* file, go to jail, do not download mini-lzo, do not write a credits scrolly...
If Jobs had told Woz this back in the day, do you think there would even *be* an Apple? Of course, Hertzfeld had to fight to get the frickin' puzzle game in, so what do we expect...
(incidentally, the article I linked to has a *real* list of hacking feats. I'm gonna have to save that page...)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's another issue going on at Apple, which is the tension between Mac guys and NeXT guys. If you look at the credits for, say, the Apple CD Audio Player, it's positively *embarrassing* how many people it takes to write a trivial app using the Mac toolbox. I count thirteen people who probably touched the code, and a total of about 38 when you include the Q/A folks and the managers.
The equivalent app on NeXTSTEP, and/or Mac OS X Server can be written by one or two people in a weekend. This was made glaringly obvious by looking at apps like the ProcessMonitor (two coders.)
I see this business of ending the creds as a part of Apple's need to avoid scaring away the Mac Luddites.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Easter egg's have always been one of the many things about the mac os that make me smile, and so I am very sad to see this article, but the fact is that steve "My way or the highway" Jobs has not ended the tradition. He has just ended one of it's more common forms, credits to be precise. I think we can still look forward to the delightful "Help! We are being held prisoner in the testing lab!" type egg, as well as the famouse "About the Finder" type egg's. Still, it is kind of a shame to see the Apple grow to maturity(finnaly).
Actually there are cars with the people who HAND assembled them with there names in them, and if you go to some resteruants, the name of the chef is On the meun's. admittedly this only happen on the high end of the price range, like Apple's
Apple pays programmers salaries+stock that easily runs into six figures.
If you think that's peanuts, take a look at what most people in less-pampered professions take home.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I agree with Jobs. The people who get the credit are those who develop and market user-land applications, it's rare that you'll see the name of a driver or kernel engineer in any credits panel. Being a driver engineer, I can maybe get my name printed to a log file somewhere when a driver initializes or something, but realistically, who's going to look there for credits...
Actually, I do it for all of those reasons. If I were in a movie, I'd want people to see my name, and there's the off-chance I'll see a name I recognize. I may not remember the names, but I like to see them, note the strange names, etc.
I stay and read them all - including the grip, though I admit I'm paying more attention when they list the name of the CG workers. The jokes are nice if there are any, but I'm not staying expecting that...
I wait until all the credits are over, not just until the theatre empties.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Holding down option changes "About this Computer" to "About the Finder". Until quite recently that got you the original black and white about box from Mac OS 1.0. In Mac OS 8 it got colorized. In Mac OS 9 you get a picture of the Apple campus.
Here's one of the best: in Mac OS 7.5.x, drag the text "secret about box" from any app that supports drag-and-drop to the desktop. The secret about box that pops up is a playable pong game, with the name of each programmer written on a brick.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
G 41D89A (and that's from memory, heh :-)
true engineering is always an artform. To produce an engeneering project for a tried and true product, like engeenering another 56K modem can be a project, true engineer comes from creating something nobody else has done and doing it in the most gracefull way possible, that is a true art form.
If you don't believe try to gat a look at the code from the apollo 11 mission. Not to mention the elegency of the physical design of the spacecraft.