You're saying that using the past reliability of a source to judge its current crediblity is *perhaps* justifiable? What else would you go on?
For judging truth? Not on your life.
There is no point of even bringing up the question of the truth of a claim in a total absence of evidence.
However...
If a source makes an unsubstantiated claim that *could* be substantiated if it had a reasonable basis for believing it, AND the source has made similar claims in the past that were false but could reasonably have been checked AND the source has a motivation or making such a claim with disregard for the truth, that is not absence of evidence. There is a *preponderance* of evidence is that the claim is false.
Such prima facie evidence of falsehood not conclusive of course, but it is reasonable basis for forming a *provisional* belief that the claim is false. This is not a subtle point of philosophy, we do this all the time knowing it's reasonable. I don't know for sure that Uncle Fred will stiff me on the $100 loan he's asking for like he did the last four times, but I have a reasonable justification to believe he will do so again.
As for demanding that people who have formed such provisional beliefs provide proof of a claim's falsehood when the party making the claim has not provided proof of its truth -- forget it. That's a sucker's game.
It is perfectly valid to impeach the reliability of a information source when evaluating the credibility of what he says. When the mayor says don't come downtown because there's been a terrorist attack, it's not ad hominem to regard him as more credible than that homeless guy who talks to people who aren't there making the same claim. Ad hominem is a fallacy of distraction ; it's about bringing in irrelevant data (I hate the mayor, the mayor is a Republican, the mayor is a Jew, the homeless guy has a PhD ).
As I say you're completely justified in feeling 100% satisfied with Word's backward compatibility. But other people have clearly experienced compatibility issues with Word, and they're equally justified in being unsatisfied. That makes this a YMMV situation, which is *not* good enough for backward compatibility in something like a word processor, even though I don't dispute that you, and many like you, and probably even *most* people have never had a problem.
Well, I don't know if I'd call the story itself interesting, but it is candidate/. material on three points. (1) Slashdot readers do travel by air, probably with more tech bling than average, so this story could be a launching point for a discussion about protecting your geek toys. (2) Geeks enjoy a story that reminds them they're smarter than other classes of people, especially if that class *should* be screened for intelligence but isn't (e.g. cops). (3) People here seem to enjoy an NRA-style "cold-dead-hands" rant when it comes to law enforcement meddling with... well anything, but particularly mobile technology. So I'm sure that a few thousand readers will manage to squeeze a dram or so of near-beer strength entertainment from this story.
That said I think it stinks that this got posted an my Lloyd Alexander obituary from 2007 was ignored.
Simple. As indispensable as engineering know-how is, it doesn't include formal training in two critical tasks that weren't done in the case of Health, Power Meter, and all the other examples I mentioned.
(1) Developing a model of market needs that can be used to rationally guide product development. Granted, marketing guys aren't very good at this either, but at least they know that it's part of the job. Engineers probably could get good at this if they understood it as part of the design process, since analyzing systems and developing models are things that come naturally to a good engineer.
(2) Developing a communication campaign which gets the attention of likely users and gives them at least one compelling reason to choose the product. This is probably harder for engineers *because* analysis comes so naturally to them. Although everybody *should* be able to think analytically like an engineer, not everyone can.
Roughly speaking, these two questions boil down to two head scratching questions. Why did they build *this* bizarre product? If that is the poser, then nobody bothered to understand the market's needs, which is normally outside the engineer's purview. Why couldn't they get this *useful* product in the hands of people who need it? If that is the mystery, then nobody figured out how to explain the product, which is *also* not usually the engineer's responsibility. These two questions seem to be the ones that have people stumped on Health and Power Meter. Who would use this thing? Why didn't people see how useful this is?
But I'll admit that what I should really have said wasn't "thinking like an engineer", because of course an engineer could learn to do marketing. I should have said "looking at the big picture including the kinds of issues that aren't part of an engineer's training." That'd be more precise, but less pithy.
Apple is consistently brave for throwing in the towel and starting froms scratch when it is necessary.
It's only brave if Apple is facing unpleasant consequences. If its customers simply grouse then eat the cost and buy more Apple product, Apple isn't being brave. It's being indifferent to customer pain.
I haven't dealt with Apple hardware and software professionally in many years, but this kind of thing is an old, old story with Apple and customers for high end products. Apple makes some change that is in many ways wonderful and visionary, but leaves a bunch of people who invested at ton of money into high end Apple products high and dry. The customers scream bloody murder, but Apple ignores them. It won't even throw them a bone like letting them buy some old software sku so they don't have to change everything overnight. The customers make do, do without and fork over. Apple suffers *zero* consequences for inflicting pain it could easily have avoided. Life goes on in the Apple ecosystem.
I admire Apple's design prowess and creativity. I admire their audacity at trying things other companies wouldn't. But this kind of "put up AND shut up" attitude toward companies with high investments in Apple software is not a one-shot phenomenon. It's been that way for twenty years at least, so I can only assume it's part of the bargain you make when decide to rely upon Apple.
Personally, having been jerked around with A/UX and high end Appleshare servers as a consultant, then technologies almost too numerous to mention as a developer, I've chosen to avoid depending on Apple for anything where there was a reasonable alternative. Does that mean I don't like Apple products? Of course not. Does it mean I think anyone who makes a major business commitment to high end Apple products is a fool? Not necessarily. You're only a fool if you expect Apple to act like it cares that you're a great customer who's dropped a ton of dough on Apple products.
It's just one of those bizarre corporate culture things. Microsoft can't do anything halfway right until version 3.0, and Apple can't bring itself to act like it gives a shit about customers except as a bit player in the story of its design brilliance. Their customers should know what to expect, they deliver for the stockholders, and they're probably pretty good to work for if you don't have to deal with Steve Jobs. So I'd say Apple is a good company, but not one I'd rely upon as a customer or developer.
I can still load Word 95/97 docs in Word 2010. Try again.
Sure, you can *open* it. But will it *render* the same. It *might* open all your old files and render them just the way you intended, in which case you'd be perfectly justified in being satisfied with Word's backward capability. Just like somebody who found his files hopelessly screwed up would be perfectly justified in being unsatisfied.
Nobody ever claimed that Word wouldn't go through the motions of opening old Word files and produce *some* kind of output, but my own experience with older versions of Word is that they couldn't be relied upon to render large, complex documents consistently, even if the documents were created in the same versions of Word. Granted, such documents should be produced in something like page layout software, but Word was what we had to produce proposals with and we didn't have time to teach everyone a totally different kind of software.
Setting the compatibility bar at simply *acting* like "everything was hunky dory what's your problem you moron" would make most open source word processing programs "compatible" with MS Office. In fact I'd say they were *more* compatible in that when something goes wrong they tend to hash up formatting, not lose text. That's probably the result of defensive parsing of an undocumented format. In fact, I've found that open source implementations of ".doc" are considerably better at recovering the content of corrupted files than Word, probably for that reason.
Which is not to say that a human being an engineer isn't capable of giving great customer service, or leading the way on issues of usability and practicality.
In defense of engineers, non-engineers seem to have no idea how much more it costs to *change* a requirement than to state it up front. Furthermore non-engineers seem unable to grasp the principle that some things have to wait for others; that the change that was out of the question last quarter might be easy to do this quarter. They often don't believe you when you say this is because you've done the laborious spadework to make the new changes possible. Some will conclude you must have been goldbricking, *because they have no fricken' idea how hard it is to do things right*.
So as an engineer, you develop what I call the "Dr. No" persona. You learn to say "no" in the way that makes the asker feel like an asshole for asking. It wouldn't feel necessary to do that if you weren't plagued by so many assholes who won't take "no" for an answer unless they're treated like the assholes they are. It's a short skip and a hop from that to treating every non-engineer who has something to say like an asshole, and that is a bad habit.
I'd say every engineer needs to have "Dr. No" in his toolbox, but should not get in the habit of using him on everyone.
It *thinks* like an engineer. As a result it makes a lot of amazing products but these products sometimes fail to address user concerns when Google judges those concerns to be unimportant. It also doesn't put much effort into explaining the benefits of its products. Engineers generally treat marketing (or any other non-engineering discipline) with contempt, even when they understand it can be more than crafting deceptive advertising. Gogle does remarkably little traditional marketing for a company its size, and treats its products largely as self-evident choices for users that will spread by word of mouth. That's *efficient*, but not necessarily *effective*.
Example: search. Of course there's all the wizardry behind the search results, but the startling thing to the user back in '99 was how spare the search UI was after getting used to the clutter of Yahoo. Brin and Page clearly asked, "how much of this stuff is unnecessary?" That's engineering thinking at its finest. Henry Ford once remarked that the most beautiful things in the world were those from which all excess weight was removed.
Example: Gmail. Great product, works well, but my wife *still* gripes about not being able to sort her inbox. The Google answer to that is you don't really have to, that search is a better way to do this. My answer to that is, who makes you the fricken' judge of what is better? Sorting is how many users *think* about the task, and the fact that even after years of using it Gmail's alternative feels alien to users should tell them something. But it doesn't.
Same goes for calendar by the way. It took them forever to create a "to do" feature, and still tasks are a second class citizen. You can't use them on your Android phone, for example. This is typical of the worst of engineering thinking. Once an engineer decides something is irrelevant, he won't change his mind unless you show him incontrovertible hard data. That's hard to get in the usability field.
Example: Wave. The product that might have changed the world but for the fact that apparently nobody at Google's job description included explaining what it did. And so the world is mired in badly designed social media crap services like Facebook, and doesn't have an affordable Internet based system for cooperative work that can scale from ad hoc to enterprise.
Google is clearly an agile company where an idea can take off without the dead hand of management vision strangling it in the cradle. But then those ideas reach a tantalizingly close to product stage and die, because that's as far as an idea can go without the rest of the company getting behind it. At the very least products usually need marketing investment, not only to promote and explain them to customers, but to explain customers to project leaders.
The fact that people need software to tell them this would save money is sad indeed.
Not really, because I'd probably turn the AC back on at 5AM. I wouldn't necessarily know that the marginal savings of keeping it off between 3AM and 5AM are so small that I'd might as well make the gym comfortable for early morning users. Likewise, I might turn the gym AC off at 11PM, not realizing that the gym wouldn't warm up enough to affect the people working out after 10PM.
So by turning the AC off between 9pm and 3am instead between 11pm and 5am, hypothetically I might be keeping the gym more comfortable for the users while using less energy, even though the AC runs the same number of hours.
That's like blaming the Baseball Commissioner for a corked bat. Trust me, the Commissioner was not told about the bat, and if he had been, he would have put a stop to it right away. There are just different interests. It is the middle managers that come up with this stuff, and hide it from the top, and wreck havoc on those below who say anything.
That may be the common case, but in *this* case the President ordered the investigation. It'd be more like the commissioner telling a manager to increase the swing speed of the batters on his team overnight. The only way to do that would be to tamper with the equipment.
In any case, the President isn't like the Commissioner of Baseball. The team owners and managers don't work for the Commssioner; it's the other way around.
When human beings are offered the opportunity to work at secret agencies, on secret things, they will take advantage of the ability to keep their mistakes secret.
That may be true, but in this case it was the workers at the secret agency who were the whistleblowers trying to uncover waste. The secrecy came from the political appointees above them. It was the President above those appointees who initiated the vendetta against the whistleblowers. The vendetta itself was performed by a different, non-secret agency. The people working at the agency tried to make the waste public, but it was the political overseers who for its own reasons continued to pour money into the program for years after the agency's own IG branded it a billion dollar boondoggle.
So, I'd say that in *this* case, at least, it wasn't the career bureaucrats that failed the American people. It was democracy itself that failed. We, the people deserved to get fleeced of ever dollar the frauds we elected took out of our hide, but letting those frauds use mafia tactics on the only responsible and honest people in the scenario is going too far.
Chewing on an iPod touch isn't so far-fetched. Some people have the habit of absent-mindedly putting small stuff they're carrying into their mouth.
How many pencils have you seen with teeth marks all over them? I suppose in ancient times these folks would walk around with twig in their mouth, but you can see their modern counterparts chewing all kinds of random stuff: writing instruments, notebooks, fingernails and so on. I've seen people absent-mindedly chewing the end of their hair. Would it be so far-fetched to imagine them chewing on their earbud cords, or in the case of the iPod shuffle, the device itself? Some of the models even look like a pack of gum.
We're speculating here, and it's easy enough to cast the fired guys as villains or victims depending on what you want to imagine.
In the universe where they're victims:
That the security breech occurred so soon after these guys were fired is far from proof that they were incompetents. Two weeks is plenty of time for key systems to be mis-configured by a replacement who doesn't understand what's going on, or to fail to perform some important maintenance task like applying a critical security patch. It is also possible that the attack ought to have been detected and contained, but there was nobody left who knew how to do that.
In the universe where they're villains:
That the security breech occurred so soon after these guys were fired suggests they failed to secure the system, or were in fact actually malicious themselves. Two weeks would not be enough time to fix much after you fired them.
In any conceivable universe:
It would be stupid fire all your security guys for incompetence without bringing in replacements *first*. Even if these guys are incompetent, they know details that their competent replacements will need to know, and which are probably not well documented. Not knowing these details would set the competent replacements back far enough that they might take several more weeks to get things locked down properly.
Being prepared before you give the old team the boot goes even if you have *malicious* network guys. If management knows its job, they get the security tiger team AND the legal team AND the computer forensics team ready for action before the evil admins realize anyone's on to them. Then one morning the admins find themselves locked out of work and subpoenaed, and the systems all shut down damn the cost until the new security team say it's kosher to open for business.
In the universe we actually live in:
As yet we know very little about how the security disaster happened, and have no idea whether the events mentioned in the lawsuit are relevant at all.
The plus side of going to MIT was that things like playing D&D or reading "Compressed Air" Magazine didn't make it hard for you to get dates. The minus side was being a straight male *did*, at least for the guys who never left campus.
I don't think in this case corporate personhood is behind this "nonsense". Rather, it is one of those situations where the naive interpretation of one right (the right to free speech) conflicts with another right (the right to privacy).
Nobody really believes in a "right to free speech" that allows you to say anything you want, any time you want. For example, a lawyer can't divulge confidences his clients make to him because somebody offers to pay him for it. As an IT professional for many years, I've often been in possession of confidential information that it would be unethical for me to use for private gain. Were a law to make it *illegal* for me to sell that information, that law would not infringe on any reasonable interpretation of my right of free speech, because my misuse of that information would impinge on the rights of others.
The problem is that our framers, while able men, weren't superhuman. They didn't specifically understand the existence of a right of privacy because the institutions that threatened that right didn't exist yet. It was only a century later that a common law right of privacy began to be formulated, and not until the mid 20th century that the *implication* of a right of privacy in the Bill of Rights was discerned. Even so, the right of privacy, which nearly every American in his capacity as private citizen believes he has, is stuck in the 9th Amendment ghetto of "penumbra" legal reasoning. The recognition of such rights are often particularly controversial. They include the rights to abortion and contraception, which are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution and which were illegal in the early 20th C.
Because things we desire tend to conflict in the real world, you can frame any restriction on the rights of an individual as a restriction on government power. You can restrict the right of an individual to privacy by restraining the government's power to regulate speech that infringes on privacy. Such a policy sounds libertarian. It might even *be* libertarian under certain interpretations of the word. But it damages individual liberty.
My wife's Scandanavian ancestors came up with an answer to that. You beat each other with birch twigs in the sauna until jumping through a hole in the ice into freezing water begins to look like an attractive proposition. Once disabused of that insane notion, you crawl out and do it again.
I think the beating part would go over big with some elements of the New York population.
Mod up Parent! If that's not insightful, hell if I know what is!
Not to disagree about GP post's insightfulness, but I am concerned about your difficulty in being able identifying insightful ideas without its aid. Let me toss a few out:
the laws of thermodyamics
the biggest homophobes are the people most insecure about their own sexuality
the origin of various species by the operation of natural selection upon random genetic variations
George Lucas should have quit making Star Wars movies after "Return of the Jedi". Maybe before.
In the UK we managed to get rid of slavery without a war, as did most other places.
But the UK was a colonial power, so it's a bit like the US today reducing its carbon footprint by offshoring manufacturing to China. You guys had surplus labor from country folk robbed of their traditional rights by enclosure acts, working in conditions so bad many were anxious to give communism a go.
Slavery was established in Colonial America by the British, and kept alive by laws which prohibited production of industrial goods like textiles in the colonies. When American colonies attempted to ban the importation of slaves (for economic reasons rather than moral ones), the British Privy Council vetoed those laws because Britain needed the cotton to feed its dark satanic mills.
The point isn't that Britain was just as wicked as the Americas (or arguably more wicked at times). The point is that the end of slavery in Britain was an economic phenomenon and the *moral* case against it came much later. It goes way back to the Black Plague, which made villeinage impractical, and continued through the Enclosure Movement, which displaced lots of freemen to serve as laborers. In any case slavery is a very unsatisfactory labor force in an industrial economy. John Adams once wrote to his wife Abigail as he traveled in the South, marveling at a half dozen slaves plus an overseer struggling at a task a single free man working for himself could have done better and faster. The US founders (the anti-slavery ones at least) expected that freed from British economic restrictions, the former colonies would outgrow their dependency on slavery. The timeline was screwed up by the invention of the cotton gin, which shifted the production bottleneck to the fields, but even so slavery was doomed by the eventual mechanization of agriculture.
What takes real moral balls is standing up for a principle when it hits you in the pocketbook. Show me a country that does that, and you'll be showing me a country that can boast moral superiority.
This is kind of like Washington politics. There's only only a limited number real, shoe leather reporters left who can actually find things out; most of the media is reporting on the opinions of other media. How many times can the popular IT press write a breathless article about yet *another* compact laptop which boasts long battery life and low price in exchange for delivering only modest but acceptable performance? The product category might be important, and earn money, but there won't be any new opinions to sell about it until some *real* reporter or technologist does some actual research.
The popular trade press has always been this way. I once *resigned* because my company hired a boss whose sole source of knowledge was from reading IT trade magazines. The company crashed and burned shortly after, thanks to her, which shows you who the market for tech media that runs on the brain-farts of other tech media is.
Now the *un*popular tech trade press, that's a different story. When I was an MIT student, one of the Course 2 (Mech E) guys in the dorm used to get *Compressed Air* magazine which (ironically named I guess) consistently had substantive, well written articles about compressed air technology. Even though it wasn't my field (I couldn't explain the difference between "stress" and "strain" without referring to Wikipedia, which didn't exist back then) I used to look forward to the next issue showing up in the dorm lounge.
Slashdot Mirror
For judging credibility? Perhaps.
You're saying that using the past reliability of a source to judge its current crediblity is *perhaps* justifiable? What else would you go on?
For judging truth? Not on your life.
There is no point of even bringing up the question of the truth of a claim in a total absence of evidence.
However...
If a source makes an unsubstantiated claim that *could* be substantiated if it had a reasonable basis for believing it, AND the source has made similar claims in the past that were false but could reasonably have been checked AND the source has a motivation or making such a claim with disregard for the truth, that is not absence of evidence. There is a *preponderance* of evidence is that the claim is false.
Such prima facie evidence of falsehood not conclusive of course, but it is reasonable basis for forming a *provisional* belief that the claim is false. This is not a subtle point of philosophy, we do this all the time knowing it's reasonable. I don't know for sure that Uncle Fred will stiff me on the $100 loan he's asking for like he did the last four times, but I have a reasonable justification to believe he will do so again.
As for demanding that people who have formed such provisional beliefs provide proof of a claim's falsehood when the party making the claim has not provided proof of its truth -- forget it. That's a sucker's game.
It is perfectly valid to impeach the reliability of a information source when evaluating the credibility of what he says. When the mayor says don't come downtown because there's been a terrorist attack, it's not ad hominem to regard him as more credible than that homeless guy who talks to people who aren't there making the same claim. Ad hominem is a fallacy of distraction ; it's about bringing in irrelevant data (I hate the mayor, the mayor is a Republican, the mayor is a Jew, the homeless guy has a PhD ).
Well, it worked for *you*, and that's great.
As I say you're completely justified in feeling 100% satisfied with Word's backward compatibility. But other people have clearly experienced compatibility issues with Word, and they're equally justified in being unsatisfied. That makes this a YMMV situation, which is *not* good enough for backward compatibility in something like a word processor, even though I don't dispute that you, and many like you, and probably even *most* people have never had a problem.
Well, I don't know if I'd call the story itself interesting, but it is candidate /. material on three points. (1) Slashdot readers do travel by air, probably with more tech bling than average, so this story could be a launching point for a discussion about protecting your geek toys. (2) Geeks enjoy a story that reminds them they're smarter than other classes of people, especially if that class *should* be screened for intelligence but isn't (e.g. cops). (3) People here seem to enjoy an NRA-style "cold-dead-hands" rant when it comes to law enforcement meddling with ... well anything, but particularly mobile technology. So I'm sure that a few thousand readers will manage to squeeze a dram or so of near-beer strength entertainment from this story.
That said I think it stinks that this got posted an my Lloyd Alexander obituary from 2007 was ignored.
Simple. As indispensable as engineering know-how is, it doesn't include formal training in two critical tasks that weren't done in the case of Health, Power Meter, and all the other examples I mentioned.
(1) Developing a model of market needs that can be used to rationally guide product development. Granted, marketing guys aren't very good at this either, but at least they know that it's part of the job. Engineers probably could get good at this if they understood it as part of the design process, since analyzing systems and developing models are things that come naturally to a good engineer.
(2) Developing a communication campaign which gets the attention of likely users and gives them at least one compelling reason to choose the product. This is probably harder for engineers *because* analysis comes so naturally to them. Although everybody *should* be able to think analytically like an engineer, not everyone can.
Roughly speaking, these two questions boil down to two head scratching questions. Why did they build *this* bizarre product? If that is the poser, then nobody bothered to understand the market's needs, which is normally outside the engineer's purview. Why couldn't they get this *useful* product in the hands of people who need it? If that is the mystery, then nobody figured out how to explain the product, which is *also* not usually the engineer's responsibility. These two questions seem to be the ones that have people stumped on Health and Power Meter. Who would use this thing? Why didn't people see how useful this is?
But I'll admit that what I should really have said wasn't "thinking like an engineer", because of course an engineer could learn to do marketing. I should have said "looking at the big picture including the kinds of issues that aren't part of an engineer's training." That'd be more precise, but less pithy.
Apple is consistently brave for throwing in the towel and starting froms scratch when it is necessary.
It's only brave if Apple is facing unpleasant consequences. If its customers simply grouse then eat the cost and buy more Apple product, Apple isn't being brave. It's being indifferent to customer pain.
I haven't dealt with Apple hardware and software professionally in many years, but this kind of thing is an old, old story with Apple and customers for high end products. Apple makes some change that is in many ways wonderful and visionary, but leaves a bunch of people who invested at ton of money into high end Apple products high and dry. The customers scream bloody murder, but Apple ignores them. It won't even throw them a bone like letting them buy some old software sku so they don't have to change everything overnight. The customers make do, do without and fork over. Apple suffers *zero* consequences for inflicting pain it could easily have avoided. Life goes on in the Apple ecosystem.
I admire Apple's design prowess and creativity. I admire their audacity at trying things other companies wouldn't. But this kind of "put up AND shut up" attitude toward companies with high investments in Apple software is not a one-shot phenomenon. It's been that way for twenty years at least, so I can only assume it's part of the bargain you make when decide to rely upon Apple.
Personally, having been jerked around with A/UX and high end Appleshare servers as a consultant, then technologies almost too numerous to mention as a developer, I've chosen to avoid depending on Apple for anything where there was a reasonable alternative. Does that mean I don't like Apple products? Of course not. Does it mean I think anyone who makes a major business commitment to high end Apple products is a fool? Not necessarily. You're only a fool if you expect Apple to act like it cares that you're a great customer who's dropped a ton of dough on Apple products.
It's just one of those bizarre corporate culture things. Microsoft can't do anything halfway right until version 3.0, and Apple can't bring itself to act like it gives a shit about customers except as a bit player in the story of its design brilliance. Their customers should know what to expect, they deliver for the stockholders, and they're probably pretty good to work for if you don't have to deal with Steve Jobs. So I'd say Apple is a good company, but not one I'd rely upon as a customer or developer.
I can still load Word 95/97 docs in Word 2010. Try again.
Sure, you can *open* it. But will it *render* the same. It *might* open all your old files and render them just the way you intended, in which case you'd be perfectly justified in being satisfied with Word's backward capability. Just like somebody who found his files hopelessly screwed up would be perfectly justified in being unsatisfied.
Nobody ever claimed that Word wouldn't go through the motions of opening old Word files and produce *some* kind of output, but my own experience with older versions of Word is that they couldn't be relied upon to render large, complex documents consistently, even if the documents were created in the same versions of Word. Granted, such documents should be produced in something like page layout software, but Word was what we had to produce proposals with and we didn't have time to teach everyone a totally different kind of software.
Setting the compatibility bar at simply *acting* like "everything was hunky dory what's your problem you moron" would make most open source word processing programs "compatible" with MS Office. In fact I'd say they were *more* compatible in that when something goes wrong they tend to hash up formatting, not lose text. That's probably the result of defensive parsing of an undocumented format. In fact, I've found that open source implementations of ".doc" are considerably better at recovering the content of corrupted files than Word, probably for that reason.
Which is not to say that a human being an engineer isn't capable of giving great customer service, or leading the way on issues of usability and practicality.
In defense of engineers, non-engineers seem to have no idea how much more it costs to *change* a requirement than to state it up front. Furthermore non-engineers seem unable to grasp the principle that some things have to wait for others; that the change that was out of the question last quarter might be easy to do this quarter. They often don't believe you when you say this is because you've done the laborious spadework to make the new changes possible. Some will conclude you must have been goldbricking, *because they have no fricken' idea how hard it is to do things right*.
So as an engineer, you develop what I call the "Dr. No" persona. You learn to say "no" in the way that makes the asker feel like an asshole for asking. It wouldn't feel necessary to do that if you weren't plagued by so many assholes who won't take "no" for an answer unless they're treated like the assholes they are. It's a short skip and a hop from that to treating every non-engineer who has something to say like an asshole, and that is a bad habit.
I'd say every engineer needs to have "Dr. No" in his toolbox, but should not get in the habit of using him on everyone.
It *thinks* like an engineer. As a result it makes a lot of amazing products but these products sometimes fail to address user concerns when Google judges those concerns to be unimportant. It also doesn't put much effort into explaining the benefits of its products. Engineers generally treat marketing (or any other non-engineering discipline) with contempt, even when they understand it can be more than crafting deceptive advertising. Gogle does remarkably little traditional marketing for a company its size, and treats its products largely as self-evident choices for users that will spread by word of mouth. That's *efficient*, but not necessarily *effective*.
Example: search. Of course there's all the wizardry behind the search results, but the startling thing to the user back in '99 was how spare the search UI was after getting used to the clutter of Yahoo. Brin and Page clearly asked, "how much of this stuff is unnecessary?" That's engineering thinking at its finest. Henry Ford once remarked that the most beautiful things in the world were those from which all excess weight was removed.
Example: Gmail. Great product, works well, but my wife *still* gripes about not being able to sort her inbox. The Google answer to that is you don't really have to, that search is a better way to do this. My answer to that is, who makes you the fricken' judge of what is better? Sorting is how many users *think* about the task, and the fact that even after years of using it Gmail's alternative feels alien to users should tell them something. But it doesn't.
Same goes for calendar by the way. It took them forever to create a "to do" feature, and still tasks are a second class citizen. You can't use them on your Android phone, for example. This is typical of the worst of engineering thinking. Once an engineer decides something is irrelevant, he won't change his mind unless you show him incontrovertible hard data. That's hard to get in the usability field.
Example: Wave. The product that might have changed the world but for the fact that apparently nobody at Google's job description included explaining what it did. And so the world is mired in badly designed social media crap services like Facebook, and doesn't have an affordable Internet based system for cooperative work that can scale from ad hoc to enterprise.
Google is clearly an agile company where an idea can take off without the dead hand of management vision strangling it in the cradle. But then those ideas reach a tantalizingly close to product stage and die, because that's as far as an idea can go without the rest of the company getting behind it. At the very least products usually need marketing investment, not only to promote and explain them to customers, but to explain customers to project leaders.
The fact that people need software to tell them this would save money is sad indeed.
Not really, because I'd probably turn the AC back on at 5AM. I wouldn't necessarily know that the marginal savings of keeping it off between 3AM and 5AM are so small that I'd might as well make the gym comfortable for early morning users. Likewise, I might turn the gym AC off at 11PM, not realizing that the gym wouldn't warm up enough to affect the people working out after 10PM.
So by turning the AC off between 9pm and 3am instead between 11pm and 5am, hypothetically I might be keeping the gym more comfortable for the users while using less energy, even though the AC runs the same number of hours.
That's like blaming the Baseball Commissioner for a corked bat. Trust me, the Commissioner was not told about the bat, and if he had been, he would have put a stop to it right away. There are just different interests. It is the middle managers that come up with this stuff, and hide it from the top, and wreck havoc on those below who say anything.
That may be the common case, but in *this* case the President ordered the investigation. It'd be more like the commissioner telling a manager to increase the swing speed of the batters on his team overnight. The only way to do that would be to tamper with the equipment.
In any case, the President isn't like the Commissioner of Baseball. The team owners and managers don't work for the Commssioner; it's the other way around.
When human beings are offered the opportunity to work at secret agencies, on secret things, they will take advantage of the ability to keep their mistakes secret.
That may be true, but in this case it was the workers at the secret agency who were the whistleblowers trying to uncover waste. The secrecy came from the political appointees above them. It was the President above those appointees who initiated the vendetta against the whistleblowers. The vendetta itself was performed by a different, non-secret agency. The people working at the agency tried to make the waste public, but it was the political overseers who for its own reasons continued to pour money into the program for years after the agency's own IG branded it a billion dollar boondoggle.
So, I'd say that in *this* case, at least, it wasn't the career bureaucrats that failed the American people. It was democracy itself that failed. We, the people deserved to get fleeced of ever dollar the frauds we elected took out of our hide, but letting those frauds use mafia tactics on the only responsible and honest people in the scenario is going too far.
Chewing on an iPod touch isn't so far-fetched. Some people have the habit of absent-mindedly putting small stuff they're carrying into their mouth.
How many pencils have you seen with teeth marks all over them? I suppose in ancient times these folks would walk around with twig in their mouth, but you can see their modern counterparts chewing all kinds of random stuff: writing instruments, notebooks, fingernails and so on. I've seen people absent-mindedly chewing the end of their hair. Would it be so far-fetched to imagine them chewing on their earbud cords, or in the case of the iPod shuffle, the device itself? Some of the models even look like a pack of gum.
We're speculating here, and it's easy enough to cast the fired guys as villains or victims depending on what you want to imagine.
In the universe where they're victims:
That the security breech occurred so soon after these guys were fired is far from proof that they were incompetents. Two weeks is plenty of time for key systems to be mis-configured by a replacement who doesn't understand what's going on, or to fail to perform some important maintenance task like applying a critical security patch. It is also possible that the attack ought to have been detected and contained, but there was nobody left who knew how to do that.
In the universe where they're villains:
That the security breech occurred so soon after these guys were fired suggests they failed to secure the system, or were in fact actually malicious themselves. Two weeks would not be enough time to fix much after you fired them.
In any conceivable universe:
It would be stupid fire all your security guys for incompetence without bringing in replacements *first*. Even if these guys are incompetent, they know details that their competent replacements will need to know, and which are probably not well documented. Not knowing these details would set the competent replacements back far enough that they might take several more weeks to get things locked down properly.
Being prepared before you give the old team the boot goes even if you have *malicious* network guys. If management knows its job, they get the security tiger team AND the legal team AND the computer forensics team ready for action before the evil admins realize anyone's on to them. Then one morning the admins find themselves locked out of work and subpoenaed, and the systems all shut down damn the cost until the new security team say it's kosher to open for business.
In the universe we actually live in:
As yet we know very little about how the security disaster happened, and have no idea whether the events mentioned in the lawsuit are relevant at all.
Well, maybe they can locate on Fire Island.
The plus side of going to MIT was that things like playing D&D or reading "Compressed Air" Magazine didn't make it hard for you to get dates. The minus side was being a straight male *did*, at least for the guys who never left campus.
I don't think in this case corporate personhood is behind this "nonsense". Rather, it is one of those situations where the naive interpretation of one right (the right to free speech) conflicts with another right (the right to privacy).
Nobody really believes in a "right to free speech" that allows you to say anything you want, any time you want. For example, a lawyer can't divulge confidences his clients make to him because somebody offers to pay him for it. As an IT professional for many years, I've often been in possession of confidential information that it would be unethical for me to use for private gain. Were a law to make it *illegal* for me to sell that information, that law would not infringe on any reasonable interpretation of my right of free speech, because my misuse of that information would impinge on the rights of others.
The problem is that our framers, while able men, weren't superhuman. They didn't specifically understand the existence of a right of privacy because the institutions that threatened that right didn't exist yet. It was only a century later that a common law right of privacy began to be formulated, and not until the mid 20th century that the *implication* of a right of privacy in the Bill of Rights was discerned. Even so, the right of privacy, which nearly every American in his capacity as private citizen believes he has, is stuck in the 9th Amendment ghetto of "penumbra" legal reasoning. The recognition of such rights are often particularly controversial. They include the rights to abortion and contraception, which are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution and which were illegal in the early 20th C.
Because things we desire tend to conflict in the real world, you can frame any restriction on the rights of an individual as a restriction on government power. You can restrict the right of an individual to privacy by restraining the government's power to regulate speech that infringes on privacy. Such a policy sounds libertarian. It might even *be* libertarian under certain interpretations of the word. But it damages individual liberty.
You forgot the booze!
Not to mention the much more sensible idea of getting in your longboat and sacking some country with a more pleasant climate. Scotland, for instance.
What happens in winter?
My wife's Scandanavian ancestors came up with an answer to that. You beat each other with birch twigs in the sauna until jumping through a hole in the ice into freezing water begins to look like an attractive proposition. Once disabused of that insane notion, you crawl out and do it again.
I think the beating part would go over big with some elements of the New York population.
Mod up Parent! If that's not insightful, hell if I know what is!
Not to disagree about GP post's insightfulness, but I am concerned about your difficulty in being able identifying insightful ideas without its aid. Let me toss a few out:
The biggest problem with the trade press isn't bullshit. It's the stuff that isn't substantive enough to qualify as bullshit.
In the UK we managed to get rid of slavery without a war, as did most other places.
But the UK was a colonial power, so it's a bit like the US today reducing its carbon footprint by offshoring manufacturing to China. You guys had surplus labor from country folk robbed of their traditional rights by enclosure acts, working in conditions so bad many were anxious to give communism a go.
Slavery was established in Colonial America by the British, and kept alive by laws which prohibited production of industrial goods like textiles in the colonies. When American colonies attempted to ban the importation of slaves (for economic reasons rather than moral ones), the British Privy Council vetoed those laws because Britain needed the cotton to feed its dark satanic mills.
The point isn't that Britain was just as wicked as the Americas (or arguably more wicked at times). The point is that the end of slavery in Britain was an economic phenomenon and the *moral* case against it came much later. It goes way back to the Black Plague, which made villeinage impractical, and continued through the Enclosure Movement, which displaced lots of freemen to serve as laborers. In any case slavery is a very unsatisfactory labor force in an industrial economy. John Adams once wrote to his wife Abigail as he traveled in the South, marveling at a half dozen slaves plus an overseer struggling at a task a single free man working for himself could have done better and faster. The US founders (the anti-slavery ones at least) expected that freed from British economic restrictions, the former colonies would outgrow their dependency on slavery. The timeline was screwed up by the invention of the cotton gin, which shifted the production bottleneck to the fields, but even so slavery was doomed by the eventual mechanization of agriculture.
What takes real moral balls is standing up for a principle when it hits you in the pocketbook. Show me a country that does that, and you'll be showing me a country that can boast moral superiority.
OK, ready for it?
The same people who killed the mainframe.
Well, bacteria are prokaryotes, so it's outside PETA's bailiwick.
This is kind of like Washington politics. There's only only a limited number real, shoe leather reporters left who can actually find things out; most of the media is reporting on the opinions of other media. How many times can the popular IT press write a breathless article about yet *another* compact laptop which boasts long battery life and low price in exchange for delivering only modest but acceptable performance? The product category might be important, and earn money, but there won't be any new opinions to sell about it until some *real* reporter or technologist does some actual research.
The popular trade press has always been this way. I once *resigned* because my company hired a boss whose sole source of knowledge was from reading IT trade magazines. The company crashed and burned shortly after, thanks to her, which shows you who the market for tech media that runs on the brain-farts of other tech media is.
Now the *un*popular tech trade press, that's a different story. When I was an MIT student, one of the Course 2 (Mech E) guys in the dorm used to get *Compressed Air* magazine which (ironically named I guess) consistently had substantive, well written articles about compressed air technology. Even though it wasn't my field (I couldn't explain the difference between "stress" and "strain" without referring to Wikipedia, which didn't exist back then) I used to look forward to the next issue showing up in the dorm lounge.