diskzero

Parenting is hard and there are multiple approaches that lead to successful outcomes. Your approach worked and I am happy for you. Congratulations on your successful approach.

I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.

When you say “we need to fix this” no one can agree what “this” is. There is no one “this” and it becomes a morass of generational systemic issues, localized problems, competing views on economics, morality, government and more. It reminds me of when tech people show up to “fix” education. It just isn’t a single issue.

I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels futile and I have been involved in efforts for decades.

https://archive.org/details/DarkFiberWindowsMac/(WIN+MAC)%20...

We talked a lot but I resisted asking him to help with the plot of the game. I probably should have!

My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom for her students.

I went through a previous thought experiment about what would happen when we moved a paid up front feature behind a subscription. This was the outcome I came to. Unless the user bought and installed a physical app, on the desktop, outside of an app store, they were going to get the rug pulled out from under them.

My wife had a very agressive triple-hit lymphoma and CAR-T was eventually suggested. Fortunately, the medical team was very honest about how hard it impacts your body, with very likely chance of death. My wife decided to do it, and it almost killed her. The team actually had to "shut down" the process, so she didn't benefit completely from the treatment. The suffering was pretty immense as well. She died a few months later regardless.

We are (were) both engineers and we did wonder how many might get streamrolled by the whole medical process, where you do get this odd combination of extreme indifference and optimistic exuberance.

Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be. She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile, some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.

Some people left early, like Don Lindsay. Don was instrumental in bringing Aqua to life, along with Bas of course, and led the team up and through the release of Cheetah and more. This task wasn't easy at all. To me it seems like he was finally going to receive some reward of those hard years of work. But instead he chose to leave to go to Microsoft. This boggled my mind, as leaving to Microsoft to me seemed incomprehensible. Maybe Don had enough of the abuse? Maybe he was sick of the increasingly crowded commute? The daily visits from Steve pointing out every detail of the UI that bothered him? Did you know the UX designed many of the big banners and posters for the WWDC events. Steve didn't want any old graphic designer to do those, so Bas, Imran and others would work on them. Don had to deal with that too.

When Steve left to receive cancer treatment in 2004, he still had influence, Bertrand Serlet was running engineering, Jony Ive was focussed on industrial design. We were working on Tiger with the brushed metal interface and there was a lot of activity on that. Tim Cook was running the business, but Bas and others were keeping the ball rolling on the UX with remote input from Steve.

I wasn't around for the next two leaves of absence, the last one being final, but heard that things were becoming increasingly fractious with camps emerging around Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall, Jony Ive and general politcal unpleasantness as Tim Cook was given various ultimatums about "I won't work with this or that person." Everyone was trying to say that they represented the vision of Steve and somehow knew what would Steve do given any sitution. Geez, if we knew what Steve would do or wanted, there could have been a lot of really distressing confrontations avoided over the previous years.

This type of internal sniping didn't happen with Steve around, or if it did, it wasn't very effective. I think it would have gotten you fired. Tony Fadell pushed it to the limit with Steve and Scott. I remember someone once asking Steve about getting free lunch at Apple, like you could get at Google and they were told "If all you want is free lunch, then you should be working at Google."

For me, there was a certain amount of clarity that came from Steve's abusive behavior. It could wear you down on one level, but also brought focus and drive to getting things done. I think it was very unhealthy one one level and very exciting on another. There weren't endless meeting on calendars discussing minutia. It also meant that the obvious horrors of the Tahoe wouldn't happen. Steve himself would have grabbed the windows with different corner radii, stacked them up and excoriated whoever was responsible. Some of my work was called "real bottom of the barrel shit", "the worst he has ever seen" and told "this is not the way we do things at Apple." I assure you, what he was complaining about was nothing remotely close to what we are seeing in Tahoe.

It would be nice if veterans of the post-Steve era would post on here. Maybe they are scared, bound by NDAs or could care less. Like I said, I need some mental health treatment about my time(s) at Apple I was there working on Final Cut Pro after Be, went to Eazel, and then rejoined Apple as part of Steve's mass hiring of Eazel employees at the behest of Andy Hertzfeld.

The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.

Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.

I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.

My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.

Even with complete attention to detail, the final renders would be color graded using Flame, or Inferno, or some other tool and all of those edits would also be stored and reproducible in the pipeline.

Pixar must have a very similar system and maybe a Pixar engineer can comment. My somewhat educated assumption is that these DVD releases were created outside of the Pixar toolchain by grabbing some version of a render that was never intended as a direct to digital release. This may have happened as a result of ignorance, indifference, a lack of a proper budget or some other extenuating circumstance. It isn't likely John Lasseter or some other Pixar creative really wanted the final output to look like this.