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

[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. :)