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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.
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
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.
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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!
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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.
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?)
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 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.
--------------------
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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'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 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?
So, you include 40,000 names. Wow. That's going to be exciting to read. Nobody, not even the obsessive types who've posted in this thread, would stay to read that, it'd be like reading a phonebook.
And are the names meaningful? Are they simply an alphabetic listing of everyone who worked at the company during the product development, or do you list people in order of importance?
Listing actors above grips is appropriate in a movie because actors (unfortunately) are a commodity. People pay to see films starring a certain actor even if they wouldn't have watched the film otherwise. The same isn't true about the grip, the makeup staff, etc.
But, with software (with the exception of some people buying anything John Carmack writes for instace...) you buy the product because of what it is (or what it does) not because of who wrote it.
In this case, the lead programmer (who probably spent most of his time in meetings) is less important that the grunts who slaved away writing the actual thing. So how do you justify listing the lead programmer above the grunts? There are no accurate ways to determine who to list. (Look at the argument surrounding how to judge a programmer's output.) So you either piss off half the staff by listing some ass-kissing management guy first, or ruin the list by simply making it an alphabetic list of names.
The alphabetic list of names might work for small projects, less than a hundred or so people, when the people listed could easily point their name out to friends. But what about a product like MS Office, or Mac OS X... I wouldn't doubt that five or ten thousand people helped in some way to make those products.
So, lacking a fair and interesting way to list the credits, I agree with the decision to scrap them.
Or, as I said earlier, replace them with a 'team credit', where the particular dev team gets to make their own logo and display that...
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!
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.
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.
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
Anyway, more of this stupidity can be found at The Easter Egg Archive.
Regards, Ralph.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft does not own 10% of apple. Microsoft bought $150mil of _non-voting shares_. Purely a PR deal.
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.
Microsoft owns 4% of Apple stock, and it's non-voting. The investment was done largely as a favor to Apple by MS, as part of a deal in which Apple agreed not to sue MS for patent infringement, and to bundle IE and OE as the default web and mail/news clients. MS made the investment, paid Apple an additional undisclosed sum (rumored to be $400M), and agreed to maintain MS Office on the Macintosh for a minimum of 5 years.
Though the investment paid off well enough for MS. They bought $150M worth of stock at something like $20 a share. Apple stock closed at $103.062/share today.
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Here is my take... If anyone cares. MacOS X and from what I gather, all future version of thier OS are based on BSD varients. Apples programer's might or might not be credited in the commented source just like everybody else... ? or not?
How would the OpenSource community feel if Apple took the source and put their programer's names in the credits of a graphical front end? If your code was running something like that would you like to see somebody at Apple taking the credit?
Could this be meant to protect Apple from taking credit where it isn't due?
Just a thought.
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.
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