Curse you, Steve Jobs!

[packbat]

Zee laptop, eet is kaput! All kaput!

You know, it could be my carting it about in the backpack every day, but I think Apple has lost quality since the old Mac Plus days. I have taken this in to replace the hard drive, to replace the monitor, to replace the logic board ... this stinks.

(Of course, the computer I want to replace it is a MacBook....)

Comments

[packbat.livejournal.com]

It makes me think of something I read in a history class. Have you ever seen the ASME Code of Ethics (http://files.asme.org/ASMEORG/Governance/3675.pdf) for engineers? Historically, this code, and many like it, were born of the movement by Morris Cooke and the like, sometimes described as the "revolt of the engineers," to insist that the first responsibility of the engineers was to society, not to their bosses.

Morris Cooke lost. The revolt of the engineers only lasted through the first couple decades of the twentieth century. By 1928, engineering schools were already talking about producing "a product which is saleable" to future employers.

Source: "American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870 - 1970", Thomas P. Hughes, University of Chicago Press. And technically, he didn't state it as baldly as I did.

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of any of that. Thank you.

My guess is that most engineers approach everything from a point of reason, and it's relatively easy to argue against designing things for very long lifespans. You might say that it's not cost-effective, or that it would outlive its thpractical application, and the engineer would be forced to say, "Well, yeah..."

Even given that admittedly lame excuse, I can't figure out why the movement would have died out.

I think engineers need their own version of the Hippocratic Oath just as badly as doctors. There is significant pressure on engineers to design products for the lowest possible cost, even in applications where lives are at stake.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I think "theoretical" would actually be correct, there – just from my own experience, a lot of people tend to keep things running much longer than that. ;)

Well, I don't think it was as much a matter of 'Morris Cooke et al. gave up' as 'Morris Cooke et al. failed to convince universities to teach the next generation that their first responsibility was to society, not to their employers'. I mean, we still get about one lecture's worth of 'engineering ethics' in the senior design class, and we still read ASME's code of ethics, but that's barely more time than we spent on, say, scheduling.

I think engineers need their own version of the Hippocratic Oath just as badly as doctors. There is significant pressure on engineers to design products for the lowest possible cost, even in applications where lives are at stake.

Well, I don't think it's as bad as all that. If an engineer screws up on a job that gets someone killed, even if the failure couldn't be predicted by theory ... well, ex-engineer is only the beginning of the possible consequences. When there's a risk of direct harm, engineers are extremely careful for a good reason.

That doesn't stop them from shipping the labor out to Chinese sweatshops to save a nickel a part, of course. (Hey, that nickel adds up to $50,000 if you sell just a million of 'em!)

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

No, no, haven't you heard of "thpractical" applications? <G>

I think that responsibility to society versus responsibility to one's supervisor is something that could become a part of the engineering culture; I wouldn't expect a university to adopt such an attitude officially because in the short run it would serve to make their students somewhat less employable than otherwise. So, the solution is to take those attitudes outside of the university; it's something that I would expect to see adopted in various journals, for example.

I'm somewhat more cynical about the effects of lowest-cost design and production. From what I've seen, design failures rarely publicly get traced back to the engineer, usually because it comes out that it was a management-level decision to do things that way, so the executive goes down instead. And, I'm not at all arguing that it shouldn't be that way, I'm just saying that engineers really aren't subject to the most severe professional consequences.

There may be relatively few circumstances where a product is actually life-critical, but then we should begin to look at the costs and benefits to society at large in robust design versus cheap design. Hell, look at the costs of replacement and disposal alone for everything in the consumer market.

Addressing the design of a thing may not keep it from being ruined during a production, but at least it's a start.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, we did discuss "Design for Environment" for about ninety seconds spread out between two or three lectures... ;)

But you're right – the universities have no incentives to try to instill these ideals. Although ... huh. Thinking about it, there's a lot of stuff offering implicit support for a societal ethic all through education – Silent Spring on the reading lists, for example – but it doesn't exactly get emphasized. It makes me think of The Gate to Women's Country.

Dang. Every time I think about it, the methods of education start looking cleverer and cleverer. :)