Actually, at the time you mention, 1993, Apple was just beginning to suffer a particularly bad quality control problem, which lasted over two years. CEO John Scully finally managed to get a handle on it, but he still got canned for it... well, for that and for still being around when Jobs came back.
From the article: "Critics of Humphrey's high-quality software regimen -- which imposes strict performance measures on programmers -- protest that it cramps creativity.... 'It's a good thing for the technology that so few people are disciplined in the way Humphrey proposes,' grumbles a techie reviewer..."
This critic misses the whole point. There are places for creativity. Two good examples are the R&D department and process review and improvement meetings. But creativity is not necessary when crafting a quality, reliable product. In fact, it gets in the way of reliability.
Now, I know this isn't going to be a popular argument on Slashdot, but sometimes good medicine tastes bad. Consider it this way: how would the auto industry appear if autoworkers felt it was their perogative to "be creative" while doing assembly line work? This is exactly what programmers act like. The smart auto companies give their line workers time to be creative, during process review, so that they can concentrate on quality the rest of the time.
I know, the analogy between autos and computers breaks down quickly, and it breaks down pretty damn early with software. But there's still a point to be made. Many programmers (and engineers), especially young ones, are too eager to be doing the "elite" work, that they don't pay attention to detail. They want to go straight to designing better suspensions instead of just installing the struts. (I know. I've been there.) But it builds character to do the rote, mundane work - you learn how to check your work as you do it, and fix errors as they are made, so that you or someone else doesn't have to come back and fix it later. This talent is especially necessary in programming.
Perfect example: If your attention is focused on writing the slickest, most 31337 bubble sort for the product your team is developing, you are going to introduce more errors than if you had just instantiated the algorithm you've used a hundred times before. But creativity isn't necessary here. Just implement the function that's needed. If they had needed a high performance sort function, it would have been in the requirements handed to you when you started. As the first Project Engineer I worked under used to say: "Better is the enemy of good enough."
The fact that Chennai's Advanced Information Systems company has achieved the astonishingly low 0.05 per kloc defect rate, and that 22 of the 28 companies with a SEI Level 5 cert are in India, demonstrates that the Indians understand this point, and proves the "techie reviewer" dead wrong. He sounds just like another 'leet code jockey who's whining because Humphrey's telling him he can't doodle in your POS transaction software anymore...
This was moderated up as "insightful?" An uninformed stereotyped insult from an obvious OS elitist who has no clue what a Mac OS has looked like since 1985 when he first tried using a Mac 128 and got frustrated because he turned it on and it wouldn't boot into BASIC?
By "marketing department," I was including Steve Jobs, for sure. The iron hand with which he controls ideas is legendary. But I consider him a marketing person, not an engineer. Most engineers would agree.
Your "facts" are dead wrong, and insulting... Your "radical" perception of UI tweaks gives away that you know nothing about Mac users, or the history of the Mac OS.
First of all, your attempt to sterotype all Mac users as neophobes is small minded and offensive. Many Mac users have been trying, fruitlessly, to change Wintel users over to the Mac, and continue to do so. Many Mac users look forward to the next release version of the OS, so they have an excuse to do what is otherwise completely unnecessary: tinker with their system software. And many Mac users will eagerly upgrade to OS X, either because it's cool, or because they've been waiting years for preemptive multitasking.
And we have little reason to believe that Apple's engineers are going to change their MO. Historically, popular Mac OS "hacks" have been assimilated by the OS. I confidently predict that people at Apple will care very much how people tweak the UI. They will watch which third party hacks are the most popular. Something very much like the following conversation will one day take place:
Marketing Droid 1: "We have research showing that 2,343,891 shareware copies of DeThrobinator and 2,667,562 freeware copies of DockDoubler were downloaded in 2002. Both of these figures represent more than 60% of our OS X sales."
Software Engineer: "Yeah, most of us down in Engineering have those installed already. We've reverse engineered them in our spare time. Want us to assimilate them?"
Marketing Droid 2:"But we worked hard to make those gumdrops throb... it was a mission critical goal in 1999. Besides, for thinking up the throbbing gumdrop, Steve looked at me once. That was my baby."
Engineering: "Resistance is futile. The unthrobbing gumdrop can easily become a new option on the Controls Control Panel."
Marketing Droid 1:"Stop whining. We've saturated the throbbing gumdrop market. We must have something to sell OS XI with. Make it so. Contact Legal and tell them to proceed with acquiring all rights to the DeThrobinator."
OK, ok... so it won't be exactly the same conversation. But you get the point.
Make a folder of aliases. Or make a few. Make the background of each a different color. Put them in the dock.
Grossly inferior. You can't label the icons in the dock. They move and shift and shrink depending on what else is on the dock. How am I going to distinguish seperate alias folders? How are other people using the computer supposed to know what they are, and where to find them?
The only reason that I am required to put up with these inferiorities is Apple Marketing. I resent that. The reason I chose a Mac in the first place was the superior utility and efficiency of its UI. Now that's being taken away by a bleeding marketing department? Not without hearing me complain it isn't. All the years of expertise and experience that went into the Macintosh UI Guidelines were chucked out the window because some salesmen wanted gumdrops and modernism? And they're trying to sell it to me as an "advance?" Isn't that what Microsoft is continually ridiculed for? The only advantage Apple had over the Wintel monolith was its superior engineering, and they're about to throw that away like an old pair of shoes. Total raging idiocy I tell you. God, I'm this far from going totally Kinnison...
And if Apple's marketing department continues to make UI decisions, it's going to take more than another 16 years of experience and tweaking for Aqua to become as streamlined as the one that it replaces. Bah! I might as well switch full time to WinME - at least its poor copy of the Mac UI is better than that of Aqua.
There's a difference between not wanting to change, and not wanting to have your carefully crafted tool taken away and replaced with a marketing-designed toy. Aqua strikes most Mac users I've talked to as a step backward, a pretty-widget marketing schtick, or both. And without exception, they've heaped derision on the icon dock.
Now I don't think the dock is a bad idea by itself, but they took away every other means for the user to customize the way his desktop works: the Hierarchical Apple Menu (with the Apple Menu Items folder) and the Tabbed Folders cannot be replaced with a row of icons.
Classic MacOS users have been hacking thier OS to make it more "useable" for years.
Aye - tis true. In fact, many of the hacks were later adopted by Apple and worked into the OS (anyone remember SuperClock?) or became commercial products (or Now Utilities?). I guess the good news is there's lots of new niches for improvements!
I knew I wasn't the only one chagrined and disappointed by the Aqua interface. I told myself when I read the first reviews that I'm not going to, ahem, "upgrade," my Macintosh to OS X until I can customize it so that the UI works like OS 9 does. (I like my Apple Menu and my Tabbed Folders Full Of Aliases, thank you very much, and I resent being forced to use that clutzy icon dock for everything.)
This sounds so much like the video rental "agreement" that I am forced to endure with my local video rental store. They change the rules whenever they please, the deadline hour for late returns always changes, and they don't even pretend to honor the agreement that's printed on the contract that you sign. This is exactly how MSFT wants to behave, but they're not some rinky-dink video house that is below the courts' radar.
In April of this year, I was told for the first time ever that if I wanted to rent, I had to renew my account. I had held an account here for 7 years and had never been told I needed to renew my membership. I complained, but the clerk was just a register jockey and had no authority to override anything. So I paid the $3 fee and filled out a new contract... and before I signed it, I read the small print. Guess what the first item was?
"By signing this agreement, I enter into a lifetime contract with..." [emphasis added].
I hit the roof... but what am I going to do? Take them to court over a $3 service charge? But at least I have a theoretical avenue of recourse. If UCITA passes, MSFT will behave the same way, but you won't even have the option of taking them to court.
Oh oh. Can't have any "tangible harm" to three of the most profitable companies in recent history. It would be unconscionable if we permitted anything to put a dent in Microsoft's 10-figure profits.
It's getting to the point where these megacorps are acting as if they're entitled to this kind of obscene profit, claiming legal protection for every cent they make. What ever happened to competition? What ever happened to earning your profits?
AOL and Microsoft are in businesses where the incremental cost of their products are practically nil compared to the cost of the first item. I know I don't have to tell you how obscene the pricing structures are for MS products. THAT should be the subject of uniform legislation...
In FY2000, MS Office accounted for $7 billion in sales for MSFT, just under a third of their total revenue, and the new release (Office 2000) was on the market only a fraction of the year. That's immense! And don't try to convince me it cost anywhere near $7 billion to write MS Office 2000. (And if it really, truly did, then Bill is hiring the wrong programmers.) For chrissake, if you're selling $23 billion worth of goods and services and making $2.2 billion in profit per quarter, you don't need a law to make it any easier to turn a profit. Hell, a lot of people are claiming that the rest of us need laws to protect us from you. But then, we don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to influence legislators with.
Go away, Bill, Steve, and Andrew. Go spend your money on some island nation somewhere where you can make your own laws. Leave ours alone.
Furthermore, what if we told you that your laws are in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution? Would you feel in any way compelled to change them?
No one has yet build a facility that accurately represents the full spectrum of the space radiation environment. It would be nearly impossible, especially at the GeV particles at the far end of the spectrum - and you need those, both to test for SEE susceptiblity, and to accurately evaluate the effects of High-Z shielding, which can often cause more damage by showering the protected components with secondary radiation produced by ultra high energy flux.
And results obtained with accelerators and isotopes have to be analyzed to reveal the specific damage mechanism, and then those mechanisms modeled to predict what might happen in the space environment. This is by no means an exact science.
Typically, for components used in highly critical applications, like manned space, all three types of tests are done, typically in order of expense.
Yeah, I agree - it was oversimplified... on purpose. I figured that there might be only about three people who would understand, or care, about the details.
I was searching the web for more info on this story last nite, and entering the keywords "monkey brain robot" into the Duke and MIT search engines. I felt like Homer Simpson let loose on Google.
In space, there's a continuous energy spectrum of ionizing radiation that is fiendishly difficult to recreate in the laboratory. In the lab, you can get radiation at a single energy, or more typically, a handful of energies, from a single radioactive isotope very inexpensively. At a linear cost increase, you can add more spectral lines from additional isotopes. But at no point are you going to reproduce the space environment that way.
If you were ambitious, you could try is a variable linear accelerator, with gradient filters and attenuators - a very expensive setup. But you still are only going to be able to reproduce a relatively narrow region of the energy spectrum.
So the bottom line is, if you can get an inexpensive launch, it's actually cheaper to toss up a big, well-instrumented bundle of test articles than it is to build a test facility that can reproduce the space environment.
This New Scientist article goes to great lengths to misrepresent the primary mission of the STRV satellites. New Scientist is by far one of the worst abusers of this sort of spin doctoring. Any link to a New Scientist story should be carefully reviewed before taken seriously.
Specifically, these aren't servers - they're testbeds using two Sun Sparc chips among dozens of other devices. All the devices are being evaluated for their tolerance to space radiation. Sure, these chips are used as server CPUs, but they're also useful in avionics and instrumentation. I wager they'll see much more use in the latter two roles.
It would have made an equally interesting and much more truthful article if the author had dug just a little deeper and described how challenging it is to make rad-hard electronics - how tiny details of IC layout can make a device susceptible to low levels of radiation... how the different types of radiation occur in different orbits... the different damage mechanisms for these different radation types... about the South Atlantic Anomaly... how the continuous spectrum of natural radiation is nearly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory, making this the only way to test materials, devices, and surfaces.
Oh right. Like in Mexico, where for 30(? 50?) years nobody dared vote for anybody but the PRI.
We're just as bad here. The only difference is that we have two parties that are virtually indistinguishable, instead of one.
This mess isn't Nader's fault. How is anyone entitled to my vote?? Especially when it is cast because the voter actually has made an informed decision in favor of that candidate?
Yes, I specifically called out Bush - there's a distinctive odor of fish wafting from the Sunshine State. The smelliest part is the way that republican judges and the republican secretary of state are doing everything they can to take the decisions about recounts out of the hands of individual counties. And if you notice, I specifically named members of his legal staff as the worst ones practicing "third world politics."
Well, there's a reason: They are the worst offenders! I hold equally distasteful opinions and paranoid hypotheses regarding the Dems, but I chose to express others because they were more relevant to the thesis of my little screed.
If there's one area where the GOP really turns my stomach more than anyone else, it's their rhetoric. They pretend to speak from a moral or ethical high ground, esconcing themselves as the word of law and the hand of equity, when in reality they're practicing petty partisan politics, motivated because they still haven't forgot how they totally lost the '92 general election.
I don't endorse Gore's legal team's strategy in Florida, but his statement last Sunday that, to paraphrase, we should take the time to make a careful deliberate count, is on its own merit the most reasonable thing to do. (Heck, the EC doesn't even vote until Dec 20; they can recount every vote in the state five times by then.) However, put it in context, and you're correct - he really only wants it done in precincts where he'll gain votes as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, at the time you mention, 1993, Apple was just beginning to suffer a particularly bad quality control problem, which lasted over two years. CEO John Scully finally managed to get a handle on it, but he still got canned for it... well, for that and for still being around when Jobs came back.
Well, the article makes it pretty clear that India is shaping up to give the US software industry a wake-up call real soon now.
This critic misses the whole point. There are places for creativity. Two good examples are the R&D department and process review and improvement meetings. But creativity is not necessary when crafting a quality, reliable product. In fact, it gets in the way of reliability.
Now, I know this isn't going to be a popular argument on Slashdot, but sometimes good medicine tastes bad. Consider it this way: how would the auto industry appear if autoworkers felt it was their perogative to "be creative" while doing assembly line work? This is exactly what programmers act like. The smart auto companies give their line workers time to be creative, during process review, so that they can concentrate on quality the rest of the time.
I know, the analogy between autos and computers breaks down quickly, and it breaks down pretty damn early with software. But there's still a point to be made. Many programmers (and engineers), especially young ones, are too eager to be doing the "elite" work, that they don't pay attention to detail. They want to go straight to designing better suspensions instead of just installing the struts. (I know. I've been there.) But it builds character to do the rote, mundane work - you learn how to check your work as you do it, and fix errors as they are made, so that you or someone else doesn't have to come back and fix it later. This talent is especially necessary in programming.
Perfect example: If your attention is focused on writing the slickest, most 31337 bubble sort for the product your team is developing, you are going to introduce more errors than if you had just instantiated the algorithm you've used a hundred times before. But creativity isn't necessary here. Just implement the function that's needed. If they had needed a high performance sort function, it would have been in the requirements handed to you when you started. As the first Project Engineer I worked under used to say: "Better is the enemy of good enough."
The fact that Chennai's Advanced Information Systems company has achieved the astonishingly low 0.05 per kloc defect rate, and that 22 of the 28 companies with a SEI Level 5 cert are in India, demonstrates that the Indians understand this point, and proves the "techie reviewer" dead wrong. He sounds just like another 'leet code jockey who's whining because Humphrey's telling him he can't doodle in your POS transaction software anymore...
And once you're there, memorize the toggle hotkey: Cmd-Shift-S.
Puh-leeze.
By "marketing department," I was including Steve Jobs, for sure. The iron hand with which he controls ideas is legendary. But I consider him a marketing person, not an engineer. Most engineers would agree.
First of all, your attempt to sterotype all Mac users as neophobes is small minded and offensive. Many Mac users have been trying, fruitlessly, to change Wintel users over to the Mac, and continue to do so. Many Mac users look forward to the next release version of the OS, so they have an excuse to do what is otherwise completely unnecessary: tinker with their system software. And many Mac users will eagerly upgrade to OS X, either because it's cool, or because they've been waiting years for preemptive multitasking.
And we have little reason to believe that Apple's engineers are going to change their MO. Historically, popular Mac OS "hacks" have been assimilated by the OS. I confidently predict that people at Apple will care very much how people tweak the UI. They will watch which third party hacks are the most popular. Something very much like the following conversation will one day take place:
Software Engineer: "Yeah, most of us down in Engineering have those installed already. We've reverse engineered them in our spare time. Want us to assimilate them?"
Marketing Droid 2:"But we worked hard to make those gumdrops throb... it was a mission critical goal in 1999. Besides, for thinking up the throbbing gumdrop, Steve looked at me once. That was my baby."
Engineering: "Resistance is futile. The unthrobbing gumdrop can easily become a new option on the Controls Control Panel."
Marketing Droid 1:"Stop whining. We've saturated the throbbing gumdrop market. We must have something to sell OS XI with. Make it so. Contact Legal and tell them to proceed with acquiring all rights to the DeThrobinator."
OK, ok... so it won't be exactly the same conversation. But you get the point.
Grossly inferior. You can't label the icons in the dock. They move and shift and shrink depending on what else is on the dock. How am I going to distinguish seperate alias folders? How are other people using the computer supposed to know what they are, and where to find them?
The only reason that I am required to put up with these inferiorities is Apple Marketing. I resent that. The reason I chose a Mac in the first place was the superior utility and efficiency of its UI. Now that's being taken away by a bleeding marketing department? Not without hearing me complain it isn't. All the years of expertise and experience that went into the Macintosh UI Guidelines were chucked out the window because some salesmen wanted gumdrops and modernism? And they're trying to sell it to me as an "advance?" Isn't that what Microsoft is continually ridiculed for? The only advantage Apple had over the Wintel monolith was its superior engineering, and they're about to throw that away like an old pair of shoes. Total raging idiocy I tell you. God, I'm this far from going totally Kinnison...
And if Apple's marketing department continues to make UI decisions, it's going to take more than another 16 years of experience and tweaking for Aqua to become as streamlined as the one that it replaces. Bah! I might as well switch full time to WinME - at least its poor copy of the Mac UI is better than that of Aqua.
Now I don't think the dock is a bad idea by itself, but they took away every other means for the user to customize the way his desktop works: the Hierarchical Apple Menu (with the Apple Menu Items folder) and the Tabbed Folders cannot be replaced with a row of icons.
Aye - tis true. In fact, many of the hacks were later adopted by Apple and worked into the OS (anyone remember SuperClock?) or became commercial products (or Now Utilities?). I guess the good news is there's lots of new niches for improvements!
I knew I wasn't the only one chagrined and disappointed by the Aqua interface. I told myself when I read the first reviews that I'm not going to, ahem, "upgrade," my Macintosh to OS X until I can customize it so that the UI works like OS 9 does. (I like my Apple Menu and my Tabbed Folders Full Of Aliases, thank you very much, and I resent being forced to use that clutzy icon dock for everything.)
Satellite imagery confirmed our suspicions that his lipids are dangerously elevated and also detected the presence of hemmorhoids.
That should be: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." --Gregory Benford
In April of this year, I was told for the first time ever that if I wanted to rent, I had to renew my account. I had held an account here for 7 years and had never been told I needed to renew my membership. I complained, but the clerk was just a register jockey and had no authority to override anything. So I paid the $3 fee and filled out a new contract... and before I signed it, I read the small print. Guess what the first item was?
"By signing this agreement, I enter into a lifetime contract with..." [emphasis added].
I hit the roof... but what am I going to do? Take them to court over a $3 service charge? But at least I have a theoretical avenue of recourse. If UCITA passes, MSFT will behave the same way, but you won't even have the option of taking them to court.
It's getting to the point where these megacorps are acting as if they're entitled to this kind of obscene profit, claiming legal protection for every cent they make. What ever happened to competition? What ever happened to earning your profits?
AOL and Microsoft are in businesses where the incremental cost of their products are practically nil compared to the cost of the first item. I know I don't have to tell you how obscene the pricing structures are for MS products. THAT should be the subject of uniform legislation...
In FY2000, MS Office accounted for $7 billion in sales for MSFT, just under a third of their total revenue, and the new release (Office 2000) was on the market only a fraction of the year. That's immense! And don't try to convince me it cost anywhere near $7 billion to write MS Office 2000. (And if it really, truly did, then Bill is hiring the wrong programmers.) For chrissake, if you're selling $23 billion worth of goods and services and making $2.2 billion in profit per quarter, you don't need a law to make it any easier to turn a profit. Hell, a lot of people are claiming that the rest of us need laws to protect us from you. But then, we don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to influence legislators with.
Go away, Bill, Steve, and Andrew. Go spend your money on some island nation somewhere where you can make your own laws. Leave ours alone.
"Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 Requested action not taken:user account inactive"
Email me at the address registered with Slashdot. Remove the antispam device ".snipme" before sending.
Furthermore, what if we told you that your laws are in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution? Would you feel in any way compelled to change them?
We thought not. Point proven.
And also, I bet that if the US had been conquered by the Nazis in WWII, we'd all be required to buy Nazi propaganda.
No one has yet build a facility that accurately represents the full spectrum of the space radiation environment. It would be nearly impossible, especially at the GeV particles at the far end of the spectrum - and you need those, both to test for SEE susceptiblity, and to accurately evaluate the effects of High-Z shielding, which can often cause more damage by showering the protected components with secondary radiation produced by ultra high energy flux.
And results obtained with accelerators and isotopes have to be analyzed to reveal the specific damage mechanism, and then those mechanisms modeled to predict what might happen in the space environment. This is by no means an exact science.
Typically, for components used in highly critical applications, like manned space, all three types of tests are done, typically in order of expense.
Yeah, I agree - it was oversimplified... on purpose. I figured that there might be only about three people who would understand, or care, about the details.
I was searching the web for more info on this story last nite, and entering the keywords "monkey brain robot" into the Duke and MIT search engines. I felt like Homer Simpson let loose on Google.
Oooh, monkey brain robots! Doh!
If you were ambitious, you could try is a variable linear accelerator, with gradient filters and attenuators - a very expensive setup. But you still are only going to be able to reproduce a relatively narrow region of the energy spectrum.
So the bottom line is, if you can get an inexpensive launch, it's actually cheaper to toss up a big, well-instrumented bundle of test articles than it is to build a test facility that can reproduce the space environment.
Specifically, these aren't servers - they're testbeds using two Sun Sparc chips among dozens of other devices. All the devices are being evaluated for their tolerance to space radiation. Sure, these chips are used as server CPUs, but they're also useful in avionics and instrumentation. I wager they'll see much more use in the latter two roles.
It would have made an equally interesting and much more truthful article if the author had dug just a little deeper and described how challenging it is to make rad-hard electronics - how tiny details of IC layout can make a device susceptible to low levels of radiation... how the different types of radiation occur in different orbits... the different damage mechanisms for these different radation types... about the South Atlantic Anomaly... how the continuous spectrum of natural radiation is nearly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory, making this the only way to test materials, devices, and surfaces.
We're just as bad here. The only difference is that we have two parties that are virtually indistinguishable, instead of one.
This mess isn't Nader's fault. How is anyone entitled to my vote?? Especially when it is cast because the voter actually has made an informed decision in favor of that candidate?
Well, there's a reason: They are the worst offenders! I hold equally distasteful opinions and paranoid hypotheses regarding the Dems, but I chose to express others because they were more relevant to the thesis of my little screed.
If there's one area where the GOP really turns my stomach more than anyone else, it's their rhetoric. They pretend to speak from a moral or ethical high ground, esconcing themselves as the word of law and the hand of equity, when in reality they're practicing petty partisan politics, motivated because they still haven't forgot how they totally lost the '92 general election.
I don't endorse Gore's legal team's strategy in Florida, but his statement last Sunday that, to paraphrase, we should take the time to make a careful deliberate count, is on its own merit the most reasonable thing to do. (Heck, the EC doesn't even vote until Dec 20; they can recount every vote in the state five times by then.) However, put it in context, and you're correct - he really only wants it done in precincts where he'll gain votes as a result.
In the original novels, Herbert used it as its own plural.