Please understand that I do not wish to get anyone in trouble. It is common for heads to roll over product defects. That is not even remotely my objective.
To be perfectly clear: this is a widespread, systemic problem in many industries but in my own experience and that of many others it is particularly bad in the computer industry. The problem I see is that users pay for features not for quality. That's what users believe anyway; it's not hard to convince them otherwise but it's uncommon for high-tech products to obtain market share because they are good, rather they succeed because they are first to market. I once consulted for Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications because they once owned the smartphone market with Windows CE devices but then Apple ate their lunch with the iPhone due to Sony Ericsson's poor quality. I have many gripes with Apple's product but this eMail is not the place to discuss them. However I request that Apple's engineers and managers read every Radar bug I have ever filed - mdcrawf...@gmail.com, also from my amcc.com and atimi.com Apple IDs. I was a Senior Engineer working in the role of "Debug Meister" for Apple's Traditional OS Integration team in 1995 and 1996; despite my love for my work I requested an internal transfer to PowerBooks because I gave up all hope that our bugs would all be fixed. I was offered an internal transfer to Copland but declined it because I had the sense that Copland would never ship. While I was at first hired as a contract Script Monkey for MacTCP 1.0.1 in 1989, I was able to get sign-off to debug the test tool because, as my Newfie ex-wife would say, "strm_echo was a piece of work." I went on to find a code generation bug in the MPW C compiler; while regressing it I found that increasing the number of characters in certain source code symbols led MPC C to crash. To be clear: my program didn't crash, MPW C crashed while building my source. A couple years later I received a developer CD whose MPW release notes clearly explained my bug then said "Don't do that". By then I was with Working Software; it was on the ropes when I hired on, and ultimately failed because my predecessor made a piece of work out of QuickLetter, sued Working Software for failing to pay his ransom but lost, stole the source code then shipped a competing products with many of the exact same bugs as QuickLetter had at the time he left the company. In 1993 I wrote data analysis code for a particle physics experiment at CERN. I required seven weeks to come to grip with CERNLIB and its associated tools such as PATCHY, sort of like a cross-platform JCL only undead exhumed and reanimated. I required three days to write my own patch then four days to run my Monte Carlo simulation that calculated the acceptance, or sensitivity of our detector. Particle physicist require all manner of software but are hardly ever to actually obtain any. Every law of physics other than general relativity - gravity - is to be found in CERNLIB yet despite decades of wandering its Gordian Labyrinth I have yet to actually find any. When my own patch was cooked and so ready to serve I asked my collaboration's grad students and postdocs to have a look at my source. At the time I was still an undergraduate but had worked in the software industry for six years. They were all stunned at my FORTRAN source's eloquence and beauty. "The reason particle physics software is so hard," I growled angrily, "is that YOU PHYSICISTS MAKE IT HARD!" After Vietnam my father left the Navy, studied for his MSEE at the University of Idaho in Moscow then worked as a Civil Service engineer at Mare Island Naval Shipyard until he retired at thirty. He wrote test plans. Nothing but test plans, by hand on paper with a ball-point pen. Here's what happens if you don't get your test plans right: The Sinking of the USS Gitarro http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/16.52.html#subj2.1 (Actually "Guitarro") What I usually tell people is that "Someone sunk a submarine at the height of the Vietnam War because he didn't read the instructions". In reality, someone sunk a submarine because his test plan failed to provide the instructions. There is lots more I could say but I will write up a more compelling argument than post it at: Solving the Software Problem a Taxonomy of Error http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-problem/ However I will close with the mail I sent to Richard Stallman just now. He is quite diligent with his email; in 1990 I had the idea he could tell me how to get connected to the Internet. His reply? "If you don't have a place to just plug in I really don't know." ********** Richard, The ancient Greek play "Lysistrata" portrays some women who put a stop to a war by refusing to make love to their men. This has actually been done several times, once recently in south america but I don't recall the details. I would be happy to produce the [needed citation] but not just now as my dialup doesn't really work. The problems I see with poor quality - not just in software but hardware as well - are not specific to any one codebase. It is widespread in Free Software, Open Source and proprietary software. For years I have worked diligently to advise others of ways they can fix their code, as well as why they should do so. My articles, essays as well as mailing list and message board posts are quite popular but also controversial in that there are many who do not welcome my message of quality. Quite a serious problem is that some of these faults are in systems used by law enforcement. For example some clever fellow escaped from prison by sending an email to an employee at his prison. Again I don't recall all the details but would be happy to dig them up. Similarly innocent people go to jail or even prison because of software faults. My jocular outlook on life frequently leads to my own arrest. Not the last time I was in the slammer but the time just before that, I was promptly ordered released on my own recognizance - that is, without bail. Even so I was detained for five more months before my case was completely dismissed. I think the world of the Clark County, Washington Sheriff's Deputies but they were unwilling to release me until they received my release order themselves, which somehow got dropped on the floor. No doubt you've seen Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". That's happening in real life this days and with increasing frequency and severity. I could detail the problems I experience but there are so many. It's not just me; consider that Mozilla stored its email in a proprietary, compressed database. I lost my email database when my filesystem filled up. I did report the bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ but when I did so I found many other reports as well as gnashing of teeth because that bug had been reported years before but not fixed. While the Mozilla developers - not just the Mozilla corporation but its unpaid volunteers - are among the more-egregious offenders there are many others. Other problems are the introduction of "features" that I and others regard as bug, and the deprecation of features that I and others depend on for our livelihoods. I am well aware of the Free Software community's opposition to Apple's proprietary code, vendor lock-in and other evildoing but at least at one time, Apple Computer produced very high-quality products. But no more, and not for a long time. I discuss this in: Apple's Deep Insight Into User Interface Design http://www.warplife.com/mdc/essays/jump-the-shark.html The bug I found in 2012 was trivial to reproduce, however the steps to reproduce it are quite obscure. While I could help Apple fix just that one bug by filing a report at http://bugreport.apple.com/ what I really want is for Apple to clamp down on all the hookers and blow that are readily available within Infinite Loop. Again: these are widespread problems. I find examples almost everywhere I look. Free Software is no exception. However: My satirical writing and my harsh, confrontive criticism in meatspace aren't doing the job. Recently I attempt gentle diplomacy. To some extent that seems to help, but I'm just one person. Can you help in any way, or recommend something or someone else who can? Ever Faithful, Mike -- Michael David Crawford, Consulting Software Engineer mdcrawf...@gmail.com http://www.warplife.com/mdc/ Available for Software Development in the Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
