OMG. What would we ever do if we had to memorize commands to get a machine to do something we want it to do?

The world might come to an end!!!

You've got to be kidding. That or you've never coded a single line of source or even a script in your life.

One man's "arcane" thing he has a hard time remembering how to do, is another man's bread and butter that pays the bills, and more.

The tool is not at fault in either case. Some people don't know how to run a nail-gun or air compressor either. Or fly a plane. Or drive a car.

And other unintended consequences would certainly ensue if they did.

Just because you have "leverage" doesn't mean you should necessarily use it.

So they all moved here and bought land and slaves.

Aww come on. IEEE needs the page hits. Sprint's paying them good money.

Bravo. Both of you, well-written. I'm currently cleaning up things developers did to servers almost 10 years ago. Yes, flattening them and reloading them while trying to make sure the god-awful mess they made including strewing Perl modules from CPAN all over the drives, still work afterward.

iPod was funded by the original iMac and strange but interesting designs like the Cube.

The real trick was in the tight integration of iTunes to the devices and making it simple enough for any idiot to get their chosen music, in a time when geeks were enamored with the user interface of WinAmp and were ripping their CDs with clunky interfaces and the command line.

Nailed it. People care about what they're incentivized to care about.

Change the incentives, change the behavior.

Most CEOs are compensated with stock options.

Great point. He was either proud of what his company made, or he killed it. (The leaked information about the berating of the MobileMe team also shows that he knew when his engineering staff was proud of something they shouldn't have been because it wasn't really all that great.)

There's a giant Foxconn logo inside my brand new HP server. Not sure that was anything special to Apple. Everyone uses them.

There's a never-ending stream of people predicting airliners will be automated, but not one who will volunteer to be the first passenger on a fully-automated airliner.

The pilot isn't there only to land the aircraft. They're there to make (sometimes tough) decisions.

It has been proven in the simulator that if Sully and Styles had turned immediately back to the airport upon loss of engine power, they could have landed downwind on the runway they departed from. Maybe the automation program would have known that, maybe it wouldn't have. But it's unlikely the automation would have chosen to land in a river, and done it smoothly enough that there were no fatalities.