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You had a keyboard box to live in, a hard disk, and you worked on edlin?! You lucky so-and-so!
We had to find out own lodgings, had nothing but mouldy EBCDIC to eat, and had to provide our programs on punched cards (which we had to pay for). We would have been delighted to get a whole fourpence every six years!
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Right.
We had to get up in the morning at 10 o'clock at night, half an hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of cold stackfaults, beta test twenty-nine hours a day, and pay for permission to do the testing, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah".
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Aye. And you try to tell that to the young people of today. Will they believe yer? Nooooo....
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Love the comment from "Filipe":
"Windows10 is the best Windows ever! What other OS is developed with the help of millions of people around the world"
Um, someone should tell him that his box is dual-boot with Ubuntu, and he keeps clicking the wrong one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The Apple fanboi thing always rubbed me the wrong way, but I do love their hardware*. Their software is a mess: buggy, complicated Frankensteins, with UIs that lock up, and a "find me if you can" approach to feature discovery. However, their hardware is slick.
Except when it stops working.
My iPhone 6 started getting hot. Really hot. So hot that I couldn't leave it in my pocket. Naturally the battery life went from a couple of days to a few hours, and for the life of me I couldn't work out what happened. I removed apps, I factory reset, I turned off every single thing that could possibly be using power. It still ran hot and died.
I took it to an Apple Genius (I'm sure they appreciate irony) and the guy held my hot phone and says "it's normal", runs some diagnostics and says "no, there's nothing causing the battery to die. The battery is in perfect condition and there's no history of apps running that could drain it". That's because I closed and deleted all the apps, genius. He suggested all the standard stuff (turn off background stuff, turn off notifications, keep it in a dry dark place and try not to actually use it) but I'd done all that. So instead of saying "your phone's dead" he said "this is normal". Which clearly it isn't.
So my backup phone is a backup phone because the battery goes from 40% to 0% instantly. Given that my main phone is unusable I figured $99 for a new battery for the old phone while I wait until the new phones come out in September is my best bet. So they take my old phone, slap a new battery in it, give it back and say "plug it in to iTunes and do a restore and it'll be good as news". Except it isn't. It's a brick locked in restore mode and nothing - not even those "get out of restore mode for free" apps can fix it. It's completely cactus.
So. I book another genius bar visit. Except I clicked the wrong time and you can't go backwards (you get an error if you try). So I wait for the email confirmation to arrive and figure I'll just change the time. Except the link to "Manage your reservation" doesn't work: it says my case ID (which they sent me) and me email (which they sent it to) don't match.
So stuff them. I'll book again, ignore my first booking, and then try and explain how they bricked my phone, misdiagnosed my other phone, and can't manage a simple appointment booking app to a young energetic kid who will assume it's this poor, sad, confused user's fault, and not the fault of a company that has completely lost it's focus, it's passion, and it's unbending commitment to having things Just Work.
An Update
I took my phone 6 and phone 5 back today to get them to look at it. Phone 6 is the one with the power issue. Again the genius said that because I'd wiped it it had no history. "Except the 2 days I've been charging it and watching it go flat every 6 hrs"? Yes, he said, but that's not app history, "Maybe if you install some apps and use them then we'd have some app history".
I'd actually installed an app: a battery meter that showed a neat and steeply jagged graph of battery charge over the last 2 days.
Me: "So we have graph of battery charge clearly showing it's dying quickly. You can feel in your hand how hot it is. And you want me to install some apps to help burn up the battery faster? Sure: but what will that tell you?"
He finally admitted the phone was busted. Deeply, irreparably busted. For a mere $380 + tax I could pick up a brand new 2 year old iPhone 6.
I stared at him for some time so he could replay in his head what he'd just said.
iPhone 5, on the other hand, is also properly busted. The other hand being that they understand this one shouldn't be busted (as opposed to iPhone 6, I assume) and so will replace it. With a brand new 4 year old iPhone 5. I was graceful and puzzled over that one using my inside voice.
* I loved their hardware better when they had focus. See this video of Steve Jobs[^] 8 weeks after returning to Apple. "Apple has pockets of greatness but has drifted away from doing the basics really well. [...] There's way too much stuff and not enough focus [...] I couldn't figure out the damn product line".
cheers
Chris Maunder
modified 31-Jul-16 21:04pm.
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And here I was thinking of getting an iPad Pro. Maybe not.
Sometimes the true reward for completing a task is not the money, but instead the satisfaction of a job well done. But it's usually the money.
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Being thoroughly stuck in the MS space I have never considered any of apples gear for no other reason than bigotry.
The wife, who is pretty close to being a luddite, took the advice of a girlfriend and bought an ipad mini, much to my disgust. When I got my samsung pad I found the screen to be dramatically brighter and sharper and cost less. I feel my bigotry is justified!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I've been lucky to have the used the gamut of devices out there. My experience with Samsung has been suboptimal to say the least - especially in regards to their policy of OS updates (or no updates, as is often the case). I've also found the android tablets a little too plastic-y for my liking.
I wish the Surface would thin out, lighten up and get better battery life (yeah, I know, I know...). However, even dumb things like the ridiculous rotation animation (pause...screen shrinks...screen rotates...screen expands...pause) bugs me in ways that are irrational.
Apple gets the hardware right (except when they get it wrong, cf. single USB-C plug on Macbook). Their software needs some to just bite the bullet and fix it.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: bugs me in ways that are irrational
I begin to see our problem 
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Prejudice does serve a very useful purpose at times!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Chris Maunder wrote: It's completely cactus.
My guess - you have been hacked. Probably by the Russians and we will soon see your personal emails on the wicked leaky site. 
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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But not the photos!
PLEASE not the photos!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It's okay. Chris got a third party to take Sean's publicity photos. They aren't on his phone.
This space for rent
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That was my thought too. I mean, I am kinda a big deal...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well, yes you kinda are.
While I was reading your post, I imagined you standing in front of the A-Genius as he told you there was nothing wrong with your phone. You must have frozen for a second or two as images of the dozens of phones, tablets, laptops and desktops you have used over the years ran trough your mind - not to mention the server farms at CP.
Don't these guys ask the customers a couple of questions to get a feel of their technical experience?
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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Yeah - I'm a legend in my own lunchtime 
I've learned that I need to approach these guys carefully. I list everything I've tried, referencing their online docs, and use precise terms. I didn't "reset the phone" I "put the phone into DFU mode and did a full firmware restore via iTunes". That seems to switch their mode of thinking into a more sensible and efficient discussion.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Cactus is Aussie slang for dead, kaput, "pining for the fjords", etc....
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Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Where I live, a cactus is a cactus 
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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I've owned one Apple product, an Apple IIc, and I'll never own another. Pure crap, hardware and software.
Will Rogers never met me.
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A lot of people who bought Windows 8 as their first Microsoft product share your perspective. Odd thing is that things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
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The simple fact, that you need a service call to replace a battery of your phone shows that something basically wrong with Apple...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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There are many point to criticize Apple on, but I'm not sure this is one of them. There are plenty of Android and Windows phones out there with non user replaceable batteries.
It boils down to a design decision; there are advantages to having all metal/glass phones, but it's hard to design one with an open-able body that the typical end-user won't bend, break, or mangle while trying to open it.
I find it is sort of like vehicles that are ridiculously difficult to work on or repair without specialized tools only the dealership possesses. I enjoy doing my own auto maintenance and repairs, so a late-model BMW would be a bad choice for me because doing something like replacing the battery also requires reprogramming the ECU, so an expensive trip to the dealership is necessary.
This doesn't mean that the vehicles are bad, or that the company is bad; I really like BMW and its vehicles, and they usually have good reasons for designing things the way they do. So in spite of being being a good company with good engineers and vehicles, their vehicles are a bad choice for me because I value being able to service things myself. Most vehicle owners could not care less.
Similar trade-off for phone battery replacement. Most people just don't care, and so companies bake in non-replaceable batteries so they can add more of what most users really want...like shiny glass and metal phone bodies.
I agree with Chris. Apple's problem is that they've lost their focus and are trying to do too many things at once. They're moving toward having too many product lines they way they did in the early to mid 90s.
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There is a difference between two... apple made it a decision - regardless of design - to not let ANY part of the phone replace by the user. In those Windows/Android phones it non-replaceable by user, the decision came to make the phone better...
(And Apple phone lost hardware superiority like 5 years ago)
An I picked the battery intentionally - a battery for a phone is like a tier for a car - to create a car with non-replaceable tiers you (the manufacturer) have to come up with a very ,very good reasoning...
2/3rd of the Apple phones made with non-replaceable battery to ensure Apple can charge you the absurd price and not for the reason of better hardware performance...
And I too, do agree with Chris, Apple lost the focus between serve and between make profit...
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Chris Maunder wrote: I loved their hardware better when they had focus.
I wanted to have an Apple ][ as well.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Apple is essentially a one-man company (if not in reality, then in the eyes of the public).
How much that is real and how much comes strictly from customer belief (I had to force myself not to put "idolatry") is hard to say, but whether it's real or implied-by-belief isn't all that relevant.
The view has been heavily reinforced by the facts that: a. the company took a nosedive when he left, and b. it soared to the heavens when he returned -- and there's no point trying talk sense to people who believe in gods and miracles.
So it's not too much of a surprise that now it is spiralling down, again. Fact or faith, it will still make the company (and therefore its customers) suffer:
- N% of customers lose faith in the company
- The company inevitably responds by providing worse customer service (people is people)
- The number of lost-faith customers increases to N+M%
- etc.
- etc.
- etc.
- Welcome to Oracle.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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