All in all… meh.

28% fewer pixels for 34% 42% fewer dollars (47% if you’re talking nano-textured) – so technically better value, if you don’t really care about screen real-estate. But that extra real estate is really valuable, and Apple have now apparently ceded the large display market to… well, mostly the tumbleweeds. Sure, there’s technically other 6k displays, like the LG, the Dell, or the Asus, but while they have some advantages – less than half the price, most notably – they have real big disadvantages – like low brightness and poor contrast ratios.

4⨉ the backlight zones is a significant improvement, I’ll grant Apple that. But it doesn’t eliminate the blooming that was problematic with the Pro Display XDR, merely reduces it. In an era of OLED displays – hell, my old LG TV from nearly a decade ago has an OLED display; this ain’t new technology – a brand new, ostensibly-high-end “studio” display still running on LED backlighting is just sad.

The extra brightness of the Studio Display XDR is merely nice – an extra 25% isn’t a big difference (certainly nothing like the +200% or so in going from a competing 6k display to the Apple Pro Display XDR). Props to Apple for the improvement, but it’s minor.

It’s interesting that the new, smaller, lower-resolution Studio Display XDR is nearly the same spatial volume as its big sister (and not as much lighter as its reduced resolution and screen dimensions would suggest). I wonder if that’s dictated by thermals?

I didn’t bother including the audio & camera aspects because I’m genuinely confused as to who, in the market for an expensive display, would care? If you’re doing photography there’s no sound anyway, and if you’re doing videography in this price range you should be using real speakers or headphones.

And the camera… sigh… I miss the iSight, which gave you a much better camera – thanks to physics – that you could optionally buy and use. And look at it – it was a beautiful design that functioned really well, that would have fit in perfectly with the Pro Display XDR!

I’m also choosing to overlook the firmware, which I assume uses the same weird, bastardised, glitchy version of iOS as the prior Studio Display model.

After more than six years, I was hoping for an improved Pro Display XDR, not merely a small version.

1. Only when used with Macs which support DSC (Display Stream Compression), otherwise the USB-C ports are limited to USB 2.0 (400 Mb/s). ↩︎

Circa 2011, not long after I joined Google, I pitched a 20% project idea to my boss. In a nutshell, I wanted to optimise traffic light systems to improve traffic throughput. My motivation was to reduce wasted fuel – and therefore pollution and cost to drivers. Granted I didn’t have much more than the goal at that point – with some ideas about starting with simulations and models, and working with the Google Maps & Streetview teams, if I recall correctly. In any case, my boss said no. That wasn’t relevant to Google nor something Google was interested in, I was told.

Well, apparently now it is – Google has a publicly disclosed project “Green Light” to do exactly that. Evidently as far more than merely a 20% project (although I’m curious if that’s how it started).

I always felt the denial by management was misguided. It seemed at odds with official company policy. But, contrary to what this post might seem to imply, it didn’t weigh on me. I was a bit miffed, but largely forgot about it until I happened to hear about Green Light and was reminded. Now it’s perhaps a sliding doors thought exercise.

Executive decrees, employee handbooks, even public promises, are all weak against undermining management.

Canary Wharf traffic lights photo by Martin Pearce, CC BY-ND 2.0.

1. The ambiguity there reflects the wildly differing opinions I encountered while at Google starting in 2010. Though there was some official guidance about 20% time (e.g. in the employee handbook), asserting in writing that it did in fact exist and was supposedly encouraged, in my first- and second-hand experience management were not at all keen on it. I met few Googlers who actually worked on a 20% project, and some kept it secret from management. ↩︎

If you’re too young to have personally lived that time, just know this key point: back then, buying or streaming music online was basically not a thing¹. You bought CDs in physical stores, or maybe by mail order from an online retailer if you were on the bleeding edge. Or you listened to the radio. Or, you traded pirated copies of CD rips via a plethora of file sharing apps, most famously Napster.

It was the opinion of quite a few people – my younger, more ignorant self among them – that if the music industry wasn’t willing to provide us the songs we wanted by the means we wanted and at the price we wanted, then it was their fault that we pirated their product.

Talk about entitlement.

Computer game pirates had – and seemingly still have – a similar attitude. “$70 for a game? Outrageous! I have no choice but to pirate it!”

Bullshit. You have plenty of choice: you can pay for it, or you can not have it. You’re not entitled to the work of others. That used to be believed, but not anymore.

A similar sense of entitlement seems to underpin many critiques of Apple’s business practices. While I’m no fan of some of Apple’s business practices – because it’s always a shame to see flaws in an otherwise good or promising product – I’m under no delusion that I’m somehow entitled to have Apple’s products at all, let-alone on purely my own terms.

1. I think it’s now largely forgotten just how big a deal it was when the iTunes Music Store was announced in April 2003, with five of the biggest western music labels onboard. ↩︎

e.g. I thought I’d give it a whirl as I was flying out of Houston, out over the Gulf of Mexico. Alas all I got was a blunt denial:

So don’t actually travel to remote places and expect this feature to work. 😔

When she says, “It’s your decision,” what she really means is, “You’d better know what I really want and give it to me right now.”

When she says, “Go ahead, do what you want,” she really means, “I don’t want you to, and you’re going to pay for this later.”

I can personally attest to those being cuttingly accurate translations. :/

I suppose this is the bit where I apply some revealing personal anecdote, but while I find the article interesting, amusing and – as noted – deceptively accurate, I don’t think the reality is necessarily as bipolar between the sexes as it indicates. I can be cagey and uncommunicative about some things, at times, I’m well aware. I also tend to ramble things and then actually follow through with something else. That stems from my tendency – some of the time at least – towards extroverted thought processes, although I do consciously take care to do as I’ve said I would, if I ever state as such; that I think is where the stereotypical female diverges, as the article indicates.

I must say though that I’ve had mixed reactions to being emotionally direct. More than once the simplicity is misunderstood, and the recipient starts manufacturing complexity and subtly that really aren’t there. Although it’s a tricky game, it does seem wiser in general to, when expressing emotion with women, purposely be evasive, and at least a little contradictory, otherwise the real kernel of meaning just won’t get delivered. Obtuse, yes, but functional.

Still, I don’t think about this often at all. This of course applies only to women my own age or thereabouts; family are different anyway. The only women I talk to relatively frequently are Bobo & Sket, and I guess we’ve known each other long enough that we can extrapolate meaning from history easily enough to fudge any immediate lack of comprehension.

As if that sentence wasn’t indication enough, this isn’t going anywhere comprehensible or meaningful, so I’ll quite while I’ve provoked only half my friends. ;)

In summary: employers are turned off by poorly written rants on the writers’ most recent drug & sex exploits, and associated pictures. No kiddin’, right? What is disturbing is when you extrapolate this out; once all employers are doing this, the only people who are going to get jobs are those who don’t [or can’t] use a computer. ;)

For those not familiar with MySpace and related sites, they’re basically just social-centric web hosting sites, where you get your own horribly designed page template, complete with disturbing midi background music (if MySpace isn’t a nail in the coffin against proponents of the BGSOUND tag, I don’t know what is), and the ability to add fifty-seven thousand random people to your Friends list. The theme is pretty consistent – “look at me! look at me!” – with a dash of attitude, leet speak, and whatnot.

Ironically, the most common patrons of MySpace – the wannabe-rebel, anti-“man” teenagers – are completely unaware that the site is owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Whoops.

This article reminds me also of an episode of Pure Pwnage, a parody of the glorious life of a professional gamer, where the protagonist’s girlfriend dumps him, so he goes to google.com, enters “easy girls attention whores”, clicks “I’m Feeling Lucky” and goes straight to MySpace. Sadly this now goes to some random “why don’t girls like me?” rant on some forum. Ah well. :)

Anyway, I digress. The original article recommends the most sure-fire way of ensuring you don’t embarrass yourself as thinking about your grandmother seeing everything you post. Since both my grandmothers at least occasionally read this, I think I’m safe. :)

Plus, I never seem to get invited to those sorts of parties. ;)

Lastly, I’ll refer the more liberal readers to Encyclopaedia Dramatica, a sarcastic parody of Wikipedia. I won’t link directly to some of the topics, ’cause I’ll get in trouble :D, but the adventurous can search for some of the keywords from this entry, and find something that [hopefully] tickles their funny bone. :)

Let’s be super conservative first up. Let’s say this logging merely requires the logging of a time and both IPs of a connection. We’ll presume we can fit that into 16 bytes. If the average person visits, say, 25 pages per day, each will require around, say, 20 individual connections. That’s 500 log entries per user per day; 8kB. So, 2.92MB per user per year. Easy, right? Well, if we have 10 million users in Australia, that’s only 29.2 TB per year. Pfft, no worries. We’ll just get a whole stack of Xserve RAIDs, the big 7 TB ones. That’s only $138,420 worth.

Wow, that’s nothing.

But that’s the conservative case. Here’s a few problems with that – it doesn’t take into account the need to mark the start & end of connections, so you’ve just doubled your log data right there. It also doesn’t account for the need to map local IPs to user accounts, which is another 20 bytes or so per session. And oh dear, it doesn’t scale very well for UDP… in that case you need to note the time of every packet… better hope some careless user doesn’t accidentally use UDP transport for some streaming video. Yikes.

So, let’s consider my own usage. I probably perform about 2000 HTTP requests a day, at least. Add in my iDisk syncing, checking of email, etc, and that’s probably another couple of thousand connections. Add in my BitTorrent traffic, that’s another ten thousand connections a day, thereabouts. I don’t even know how to consider my UDP usage… that could be on the order of tens of thousands of packets per day, some days.

So let’s just be conservative again and say I’m averaging 15,000 logs per day. At 32 bytes per log entry, plus let’s say ten 20 byte map records, that’s only 480.2kB per day. A mere 175 MB per year. Bah, that’s nothing, surely. Now let’s see what happens if I turn out to be the average case – 1752.73 TB per year. That’s quite a few more Xserve RAIDs… but only $6,948,684 worth. Hah, that’s nothing. When you consider the techs needed to run those 251 Xserve RAIDs, the actual purchase cost pales in comparison.

And of course, throughout this I’ve completely ignored the need to actually use RAID on these Xserve RAIDs. Even if you were living dangerously with the bare minimum single mirror, that only doubles the cost. And don’t forget we need two years of records, too.

So, in the context of Australia, this meagre little mandate only requires ISPs to spend a mere few tens of millions of dollars, to satisfy some ignorant troglodyte’s desire for 1984. Increase numbers by a factor of ten for the U.S.A. Increase by a factor of ten again for a more global cost. Who doesn’t want to spend a billion dollars or so tracking down that damn Nigerian prince?

It’s really hard to convey just how stupid this sort of legislation is. Most of it is completely impractical, even before you consider the ethical, morale and legal issues. And on the topic of legal issues… just associating a particular connection to a particular account is not going to cut it for many cases. There’s the fact that your average household has at least two or three people who share the connection. There’s also the problem of guilt by association – what, so because the logs say I connected to port 80 on some host which was running BitTorrent means I of course must have been downloading that latest Britney Spears classic, right?

Don’t even get me started on encryption. Gah!

Stupid, stupid governments. Bad government, bad! No more Schmacko’s for you, no!

Anyway, all the details are here, including photos and videos. I particularly like their encounter with the police; the ‘Agents’, as they call themselves, noted that it was completely legal for them to film inside the store, unless they were trespassing, which they weren’t unless they were asked to leave, which they hadn’t. The cops came back with the retort “I don’t come to your house and film you”, to which the agent replied “Who lives here?”.

Superb. :)

For example, the Documents and Settings folder has been renamed to Users.

Wow. That’s incredible. Where do they come up with these brilliant ideas. Oh, right, MacOS X DP4, circa May 2000. Awww, don’t feel bad Microsoft, six years late is looking pretty good compared to the Vista shipping date.

So, the real crunch of the article is this:

The Public folder is designed specifically for file sharing. If a user needs to share a document with others in the organization, he can place that document into the Public folder on his machine. That way users can collaborate on documents without having to actually create shares on their workstations.

Isn’t that just mind-blowing? Who would have thought about creating a shared folder in order to share stuff? The mind boggles. But wait… what a coincidence, MacOS X also has this crazy folder called “Public”… and hey, it’s shared… who’da thunk it?

I’m sorry, I just can’t help this one. Every article I read on Vista is ultimately just explaining how they’ve made it a bit more like MacOS X. And of course the wider world thinks this is all revolutionary. From the point of view of the Mac world, Vista is going to be the biggest anti-climax in history. That only makes it even sadder that it’ll probably still be inexplicably popular.

This reminds me of what Bobo was saying the other day, regarding shoplifting. Where she works at Sunglass Hut in Dandenong they have things stolen all the time. And Rob, actually, noted that he has the same scale of issue at Dick Smith (in Greensborough). But beyond that, Bobo was saying that some clothing stores in the big shopping centres (Southland or somesuch) have actually been hit especially hard, with thieves making off not with one or two items but entire ranges. Ultimately, she says, they appear again in dodgy markets in Dandenong, Springvale and such areas. Not to put too much of a racial profile on it, or anything. But as Bobo says, she’s allowed to be racist, because she’s… well, HongKongese, or whatever. Still Chinese? Dunno. It’s a cover anyway; she’s spent all of what, four years in Hong Kong? Pfft.

It’s funny how every story I ever hear of manufacturers and distributors in Asia, ultimately involves piracy, dodginess, deception and/or outright theft. Well, actually, it’s not funny. Despite my views on piracy in terms of immaterial cultural items (music, movies, etc), piracy for a profit is definitely immoral. And it screws over the customers, too. Case in point.

It’s worth noting that Apple are providing the hosting for all this. They’re hosting a colossal number of lectures, each very large. The bandwidth consumed must be incredible. Kudos to them.

Yes, you’ll need iTunes to access them.

And yet, despite all this apparent effort, Office still sucks. I’ve had to give up directly working on our EMT project, because:

1. The Mac & PC versions of Word are not compatible, in this case at least, and we’re losing hours of time whenever we cross that interface.
2. Office on any platform still sucks. Pages isn’t as zippy as I’d like, but version 2 is a big improvement, and it’s just so incredibly easy to use in comparison.

I’ve been doing my ADD write-up in Pages, alongside the EMT stuff in Word, and it’s just a world of difference – not only in ease of use, but also the result; Pages just produces much better looking documents.

Ah. This must be why my Ramblings section is the biggest. 🙂

Their web page (with example movies) is here. It’s really cool stuff. I wish I had one like that – it would have saved me quite a few lost photos. :)

For those who may still be in California, they’re talking about the camera at the March SIGGRAPH meeting, on March 16, 7:30pm, at Town Hall Auditorium, Apple Headquarters Mariani Drive, Cupertino. It’d be well worth it to go check it out.

One thing which I really jive with is the talk about tackling big projects. It’s so hard for most people because the risks are large, and the benefits may be distant in time. But it’s worth remembering, and it’s very true, that hard work always leads somewhere. It may not be where you thought you were going, or where you thought you wanted to, but it goes somewhere. Getting negative results is not bad science.

The next encounter was only a hundred metres down the road, where some daft woman was driving out of the service station. She didn’t even look in my direction… I slammed on the brakes and swerved, but I couldn’t have stopped in time… luckily she saw me at the last moment and did the same. It came down to a precious few centimetres, but I escaped. Not without being tooted by the crazy woman.

But anyway, I’m still here more or less. So, I took the camera shopping tonight. The result is here. Fascinating stuff. :)

It ended up costing about $470US, including a 1 GB SD card… that’s about $640AU. At a glance online, that’s about $300 less than what you’d be paying in Australia, so I guess I should be happy. It’s more than I intended to pay, but I got cold feet once it came time to pull out the plastic, and decided to go with something decidedly high quality, rather than taking my chances on some of the cheaper but less well reviewed ones.

The major competitor was the Canon SD500 or SD550, but in the end the Casio was a little cheaper.

Anyway, with that little widget now available, I’ve finally got some photos of this place for people to see – available here. Shiny. :)

And here’s my two housemates, Ashley & Brett (left & right, respectively).

Why yes, Brett is a cyborg. ;)

Since it’s nearly 1am now, and I do have work in a few hours, I’ll have to cut this short for now… but I’ll be back tomorrow with many more photos, and news (of what little there is).

When I arrived there today, at about 4, the place was packed with all Bron’s family and friends. More than yesterday, this time they really did take up every seat in the waiting rooms, and more… there must have been forty or more people there. I’ve never seen so much love and care in one place before.

Bron had an EEG (ECG?) or somesuch performed today… the results were given to the family in a private conference, and weren’t really detailed to anyone else… the test took a lot longer than expected, which I guess is the most obvious warning sign.

The decision was made to take her off life support tonight. Everyone who was capable was able to visit her briefly one last time, to say their good-byes, or whatever else. And I thought yesterday was emotional.

So, at around 7pm tonight, life support was disconnected. She passed away shortly after. The doctors promised to give her plenty of painkillers, so it would have been completely painless… but overnight she stopped responding to optical stimuli, and had started to swell, especially her head… I guess fluid retention, which is always one of the worst signs… I don’t know what the brain scan results were, but I suspect they confirmed what had already been whispered… that there was little or no activity… it may be that Bron, as we know her, passed away some time ago. As her mother says, she really died on Sunday, and it’s just been our privilege to keep her alive this long, so we could see her again and say our goodbyes.

I guess that’s something.

And though I faltered a little in the last hours, I never gave up all hope. I didn’t know how to say it then, but I guess I do now… I’d only give up when she did. She lasted longer than anyone expected – doctors, her family, everyone else… she was a fighter to the bitter end.

I’m not religious in any way, but if there’s an afterlife, I’m sure she’s happy now, in the best place anyone could be. I guess now we need to try to remember her fondly, for all the good times, and celebrate her life.

There’s a song that now comes to mind, which I’ll include here for anyone who cares to listen. It’s by Hootie and the Blowfish, called “Not Even the Trees”…

When he looks at me
Won’t you tell me
Does he realize he came down here
And he took you too soon

[edit: song removed]

Anyway, the best guess as to what happened at the beach was a heart attack. She was at the beach with her family and some friends, and with the help of two experienced nurses who were around at the time, they resuscitated Bron, and kept her going until the MICAs arrived. Another ambulance arrived, and then eventually she was airlifted to the Alfred. As far as I know, not having been told otherwise, she was unconscious pretty much from the start of all this, and hasn’t regained consciousness since.

Some time on Sunday or Monday they put her into a medically induced coma, in order to keep her stable. It appears her kidneys have failed, and her body started to react to that on Monday. The fear of course was that her internal organs would shutdown as a result. They weren’t able to put her onto kidney dialysis in her condition at the time, although she was put on it early this afternoon.

Additionally, some fluid in her lungs – possibly vomit – has caused respiratory problems – I believe leading to a lung infection. While there’s a lot of conflict, and the situation’s probably changing all the time, the common story seems to be that one lung has shut down, and the other is operating at well below capacity. This is clear when you see her – her body is heaving with each breath, clearly straining.

There has also been other problems, such as a rather high body temperature, and concern that she was losing muscle control in her hands and feet – leading to very minor spasms. She did seem to cool down over the day though, which is probably a good sign. She was still noticeably warmer than normal to touch when I left at about 7:30.

Apparently she was given a 1% chance to survive, yesterday, which may have just been the night. That she has survived is obviously a good sign, although the nurses are concerned that she’s not showing enough improvement otherwise. I overhead bits and pieces of Kim talking to her nurse, and it seems they’re allowing another 48 hours of observation before… something. I didn’t hear what. I believe it would be normal procedure, at this point in an older patient (e.g. 50), to conduct an MRI or somesuch to determine if there’s any brain activity… there’s clearly concern at this point that her brain has suffered irreparable damage – indeed, the nurse this morning told Laz that at the absolute best, even if she did survive she would have massive brain damage. But I think that’s conjecture at this point, since there’s been no MRI or similar test performed.

I would assume that an MRI can’t be performed while she’s hooked up to all the drips and various other machines. I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that they’re what’s keeping her alive at this point. From the way Bron’s mum talks – although I don’t know if it’s a derivative of what she’s been told by the nurse – she should “by rights” – whatever the fuck that is – have died on Sunday, and now she’s just living on borrowed time… I got so angry when her mum said that, going on about Bron’s journey and her journey and our journey, and when it’s your time it’s your time, and all that… I mean, some people think that’s just her way of coping, but I’m sorry, I’m not going to give up. And I don’t think she should bring everyone else down by spouting such negativity.

I mean, to be fair, obviously how I feel right now – which is pretty fucking awful as is – compares in no way with how Bron’s family must feel. And I can understand everyone’s more than a little emotional at the moment… but still… maybe I’m just good old arrogant me, but it ain’t over ’till it’s over, and I ain’t never giving up. I hope Bron doesn’t either.

My thoughts go out to her tonight, and her family. And also all her friends, who are understandably a little put out by all this. Especially Kim. She’s lost so much of late – she especially doesn’t need this right now.

I heard from Brons mum this morning. The word is, say your good byes, she can’t recover from this. I saw her this morning. it was heart breaking
I spoke with the clinical nurse when I was there, she said best we could hope for was massive brain damage.. but the update Crystal got today her body is shutting down, she is too injured.
I think Alcho is with her now, I am taking Steph and Angela with me tonight to see her
I so want her to wake up and bounce back, I really do… but its looking very bleak

I almost tried to brush this off, but it’s not looking good. :( Although, as Laz pointed out:

I wish that were so.. I am just comforted that the last thing she remembers is playing on the beach with her friends

There’s plenty of worse ways to go than that, I guess. Although, then again, there’s not much worse than going this early in her life. :(

I’ll be visiting her soon, today. I hope it’s not the last time I see her.

The story so far…

Bron was at the beach Sunday with Rachel and whoever else, and suddenly collapsed. Apparently something of a seizure, with a bit of turning blue and throwing up. Not long after, she’s in Alfred hospital in intensive care. Initially the thought was that it was something to do with her heart, given – from memory – her history there, but no… via Kim tonight I learn that both her kidneys have failed. She’s in a medically induced coma to keep her stable, but isn’t doing well… she can’t be operated on (i.e. a transplant) in her current condition, and even to be put onto dialysis has to improve overnight, tonight.

Although I don’t want to believe it or say it, Kim says the doctors have given her a 1% chance of survival.

But I don’t buy that. “Cynical” might be in the top three words people use to describe me, but I’m not going to believe that’s the way it is.

I really really hope I can laugh at this a week from now, when it all blows over and turns out to be nothing more than a big scare. ’till then, my thoughts and wishes are out to Bron. Don’t ever let go.

Oh wait, that’s because I am. D’oh. ;)

Although seriously, it’s an interesting discovery. I’ll be hanging out for further news in this area. I guess it makes sense… although to be honest I used to get sore fingers from typing many years before I slacked off… but then, I’m practically old now, so perhaps I don’t have the resilience I used to. :)

I mean, c’mon, for a start they have the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the top 25. That immediately throws all credit out the window. They put Goodfellas as the top movie, which is perhaps a bit much… but of course it depends on your tastes. Interestingly Vertigo made it in at number 2… interesting mainly because I’ve stayed at the York Hotel in San Francisco, the stairs there being those used in the movie. Stupidly enough, I never went to the top to see the view down; even from the third level it was pretty unsettling. Those stairs definitely have something in that way more than others. Very bizarre.

And then there’s Jaws at number three… well, I think Jaws is funny, but overrated. And like Babe, I think it’s done horrible things for people’s psychology towards it’s leading star, the Great White Shark. In Babe it was the pig. Don’t try and be funny via my poor grammar.

And fourth is Fight Club. Maxim was obsessed with that movie in high school… it’s funny because as soon as he showed me the front cover of the video, I knew what the big huge twist was. It was an interesting movie, but in an arty way… while it did prompt a bit of boxing amongst our group, it was short lived; beating the crap out of each other isn’t quite as interesting in reality.

Apocalypse Now ranked in at #20. Which probably isn’t too bad, in my own opinion. But when you look at some of the crap they thought was better, well…

But I guess most interesting is that they put The Empire Strikes Back at #8…. and yet the rest of the original StarWars trilogy are nowhere to be seen. What the?!? Return of the Jedi was by far the best of the trilogy. The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t too bad, but c’mon – what made StarWars was the cool light sabre fights and huge space battles, not watching Yoda shuffle around a puddle for three quarters of an hour. I mean, I love Yoda to death, but we need some action here.

Oddly enough, I think the newer StarWars trilogy cast Yoda better. He was still there, being all-powerful and wise and a smartarse, but without wasting any time on it. Quite well done, I thought.

As the article points out, most EULAs are thrown out with prejudice, because (my words) they’re utter bullshit. Unfortunately, particularly in the U.S., some courts get some really weird ideas, and actually do try to enforce them.

What this really highlights in my mind is the disconnect between law and reality. And the greater that disconnect gets, the less people care about law. It’s like all this public transport ticket infringement stuff; it’s so far removed from reason that no one cares about it anymore. I have no trouble not buying a ticket anymore; hell, the law is obviously so far off the end of sanity, how can I possibly hope to deal with it? It’s pointless.

I think EULAs are going to implode on themselves, under the weight of their own stupidity. Companies keep putting in these ridiculous conditions and rules, which everyone already ignores. Once a few are challenged big-time in court, it’ll set some very sweet precedence against the EULAs. They’ll become so stupid in so many cases – even moreso than now – that it will no longer be in any way legally binding even if a user does “Accept” the EULA; since it’ll be assumed that they never read it and have no care for it anyway.

The only time I’ve ever read a EULA, or provided one with my own software, has been when they’ve been satirical. I think one of my EULAs required users to forfeit their first borns to me, or somesuch. I had fun writing it, and from memory a few users emailed me and said they got a laugh out of it. :)

It’s a very controversial topic, especially amongst the programmers themselves – let’s face it, we all know how much our code can suck, and we sure as hell don’t want to cop the consequences of it. Unfortunately, saving face or legal liability is not a valid excuse in and of itself. From a user’s point of view, it’s pretty simple – someone from company XYZ sold them ABC which is buggy. Company XYZ is responsible for that bug. Any sale carries with it some presumption of reasonable quality – if you buy a TV from a store and it can’t tune in to UHF properly, you’d bloody well take it back; you don’t just say “oh well, it happens”. You hold the store selling it to you responsible (and they in turn pass the buck to the manufacturer or distributor, etc). Software really has no right to be any different.

Once you’ve narrowed the blame down to the company, where it is likely wholly deserved, the breakdown is no longer clear nor singular. The company should have processes in place to prevent errors. They should promote good design & implementation practices, perform appropriate quality evaluation and control on outgoing software, etc. They are partially liable for any one mistake made by any of their employees.

But ultimately someone screwed up to cause the error to start with. Now, to be fair, like any screw up it can be unintentional and – in fairness – unavoidable. If the programmer is insufficiently trained, was under ridiculous constraints (“I don’t care when you think it’ll be finished, we need it tomorrow”), etc… then yeah, fair enough, I think people can forgive them a bit. But being forgiven is a far cry from not being responsible.

Personally I don’t concern myself with code quality as much as I’d like, but more than most people. I like elegant, simple designs with as few code and data paths as possible, because that eases testing and promotes stable code. And I do test my code reasonably well, but primarily only on expected behaviours and blatantly obvious failures. It is of course the subtle test scenarios which reveal those tricky errors. The problem is balance – I want to produce something in finite time, and quality is, after all, just another variable to be traded around. 90% may be good enough for a little hack if it saves half the time of achieving 95%. If I’m going to write some code for the space shuttle, I’m going to insist on at least five 9’s, and damn the expense. The right requirements for the job.

But this doesn’t absolve me from responsibility. I make the trade off consciously, knowing full well the risks involved in less than perfect code. And I take it on the chin when things do go sour. There’s no way out of it. My code, my decision – whether I want to admit it or not – to trade off quality for something else.

As a final end-note, I found it extremely interesting that the ZDNet poll on this topic shows that just 5% of respondents think programmers should be responsible – nearly 60% think it’s the company’s fault, and the remainder think “bugs just happen”. Sorry… “some men see things as they are, and ask why… I see things that never were, and ask why not?” Okay, so that’s a slight misuse of that quote, but it’s a bloody good one, and it does carry some weight in this situation. The world is not changed by acceptance, it is changed by defiance. We must always challenge ourselves to better ourselves, and never accept mediocrity.