Re: There must be a live human at Apple?
Re: There must be a live human at Apple?
- Subject: Re: There must be a live human at Apple?
- From: Michael Crawford <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 17:28:16 +0000
David,
On 8/3/13, David E Blanton <email@hidden> wrote:
> Check in to a Portland mental hygiene facility … you need serious counseling.
I'm not sure I follow your argument.
Were I to but lift a finger, I could demonstrate that I represent the
true feelings of most Apple developers.
My constructive criticism has always aimed to set right the wrongs of
others. Everyone who knows _anything_ about me or the work I do,
knows that I have always done that, starting from the age of three or
so in 1967.
That's the specific reason I attached a fifteen-line remote rootkit to
an A/UX 2.0 Radar.
It simply never occurred to me that by doing so, I would defeat
Apple's $70M bid for an Air Force acquisition, but that someone on the
A/UX time would instead just alter the permissions of just one file in
their default install so as to be in compliance with just one CERT
Advisory.
It took me two solid weeks to go from that CERT Advisory to the
rootkit source, after having struggled for well over a month to get
anyone, anyone at all over at A/UX, to even understand what CERT was
meant for, let alone verify their compliance to CERT themselves. Such
verification was my own contribution to the A/UX 2.0 Beta Test; at the
time I was a System 6 and 7 MacTCP test tools developer.
When I was at Apple, from time to time Apple would hold an All-Hands
meeting at a big concert hall at nearby DeAnza Community College. I
expect that now they hold it in a bigger hall.
At the end of those meetings, anyone in attendance can ask anything
they please of the speakers, for the most part our top execs as well
as a few important internal developers, so I took my turn at the Mic:
"I was at one time an Apple third-party developer."
(Resounding crash as four thousand jaws hit the floor, after which one
could have heard a pin drop.)
"The experience of all us developers, not just myself, is that
Apple regularly
promises us the world, then fails to deliver. Quite commonly we
go to effort, time
and expense to meet Apple most of the way, only to find Apple then
does everything
in its power to defeat us, as if it regards us as having done
Apple wrong by doing
something Apple specifically requested of us."
Those weren't my exact words, but it was well understood that that was
what I meant.
The best Gil Amelio - 1996? - could come up with, was that he was well
aware of Apple's problem of abusing its own developers, and that the
company would endeavour to do better.
Not long after that, all but a very few Apple third-party developers
were thrown completely out of work as a result of the near-collapse of
the company. Apple was incapable of shipping Copland. Continued,
robust development of the Traditional OS (what would become Classic)
actually would have been better than what actually happened, but Apple
bet the farm on Copland.
Apple also has an internal-use-only discussion board. It specifically
supports anonymous discussions, but I never once posted anonymously,
despite posting stuff far, far more critical of my own employer than
I've ever posted to any list, anywhere, ever.
One time I explained what Cognitive Dissonance is, a form of Self-Justification.
Our Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is very, very real; in general
that phenomenon arises in every isolated community, in which there is
at least one quite charismatic person present.
I'd been studying such phenomena since 1974 or so, when I was ten, as
I puzzled over the very few, but very strange reports coming out of
newly Communist Cambodia, for example that everyone in the entire
country who wore eyeglasses, somehow all disappeared into the ether in
the space of a few days.
The Reality Construction Kit
https://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/18/153456/948#reality
That's perhaps two pages in hardcopy form. The arguments are not from
me but from Immanuel Kant, from the nineteenth century so, it's just
that mere mortals regard Kant's prose as impenetrable.
For ten years now I have advanced my thesis, that were the above link
read on a regular basis, in a modestly widespread way - I've found
that it's actually far more popular than I require - then such
problems as we discuss in this thread, all but a few forms of mental
illness, many kinds of serious crimes, bizarre cult phenomena such as
the Heaven's Gate Mass Suicide in San Diego in Spring 1997, all would
eventually become a thing of the distant past.
I discuss this quite a lot with those in the know - Anthropologists,
Psychologists, Law Enforcement Officers, Politicians, Military
Personnel, Business Executives, people from cultures quite unlike my
own. All but a few agree; those who don't, make clear they didn't
understand what I actually said.
For example it's commonly thought that the notion that we create our
own reality, means that we can work magic just by thinking about doing
so. No, that's not what I said. I often puzzle as to how anyone
could ever take me as having said that. What I meant was, that what
we actually experience, is not what's really happening.
Consider your own experience of the world around you, as compared to
that of your dog or your cat, as they occupy the same room as you.
I learned about Cognitive Dissonance in an Intro Social Psychology
course at UC Santa Cruz, taught by a graduate student of Eliot
Aronson.
Aronson's text "The Social Animal" is quite pricey, so I offered to
lend my personal copy to anyone - at all, anywhere, not just at Apple
- who wanted to read it. The only response I received, of any sort,
was someone griping at me for giving my own employer a hard time.
Despite all that, I continued received stellar performance reviews on
a regular basis, some raises, was offered an internal transfer to
Copland as a Performance Engineer, which job I would have loved, but
turned down as I regarded Copland as a product that would never ship.
My next job after that was as a founding developer, with a huge raise
and lots of options, at an electric medical records startup that went
on to become wildly successful. There's lots of those now; quite
likely we were the first to enjoy widespread use but I don't really
know.
My Question For You, David?
It's not like I don't know what the symptoms of mental illness are, as
I am a trained and experience telephone suicide hotline counselor.
Not only did I never lose anyone, I never once called 9-1-1, the
police, the ambulance nor the coroner. Nor did I ever request a
trace.
In what way am I symptomatic?
Please Elucidate.
Ever Faithful,
Michael David Crawford P.E., Process Architect
Solving the Software Problem
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/
email@hidden
+1 (805) 235-1267
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