Apple to think about

After Steve Jobs, Does Apple Still Innovate Like It Used To? : The New Yorker - http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/10/apple-after-steve-jobs.html

How low can you go?

With a little fear, skydiver ready to leap into record books - http://pulse.me/s/dZCwC

Apple says sorry

They were forced to apologise due to a huge number of complaints. I can't help but wonder if we would have had the same apology if he was still around.

I remember the fallout from the 'Grip of Death' saga and the users were told that they were holding the phones wrong and were then belatedly offered free covers.

Would we have seen something similar if Jobs was in charge?

Apple says sorry for iPhone maps app - IOL SciTech | IOL.co.za

Debugging...

You do not need a can of Doom anymore in order to debug your pc, but once upon a time they did.

The term was popularised by Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper when she was working as a computer technician on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer in 1947. It was built for the US Navy to do something with, Wikipedia just say calculations and test programs.

The computer was so advanced that it could do calculations in 0.125 seconds. This gave it a speed of 8 Hz, the machine I am typing this on is rated for 2.5 GHz, which makes it 3125 million times faster, provided my maths is correct. But even today sometimes you still get problems that require you to open the box up and remove stuff and put it back, and replace and test, until it works again.

This is still called debugging, and we get to do it on hardware as well as software. You have to test and play and try different options to see what happens. There is no time frame if you don't know what the problem is, once you have identified that, you can start testing the solution.

We are lucky though that modern computers are a lot more robust and the software is no longer dependent upon magnetic tapes and vacuum tubes, so cracking it open is not that common anymore. But we still use the same term.

At the time in 1947 they saw something was wrong and started tracing the fault, to discover a moth stuck in a relay switch, which prevented it from functioning correctly.

Grace Hopper quipped that they are 'de-bugging the system', and the rest is history. They then taped the now dead moth into their logbook, probably on a whim.

To view the actual page from their logbook with the remains of the moth (which is on display in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History), click here.

I reckon even back then, the IT people were a bit strange, with different ideas, from there the odd terms that we have carried over from our grandparents in the industry.