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Broken

tyler.io

171–180 of 571 posts

Re: Broken

#171
post #154

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

It absolutely isn't the individual employee developers job or responsibility to try to fix corporate culture. Almost anyone on here or reading this is a line worker developer and trying to take on the job responsibilities of C level staff is setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Any company larger than a few dozen people is entrenched - there will be a hierarchy and the top will dictate the order of thi…

I think the issue is that culture at Apple is very much not supposed to be this, and this probably isn’t what the C-suite is intending to push. So you’re not really going against them; rather, you’re going with them but against the current status quo.

Re: Broken

#172
post #90

> The final (well, first) Catalina release along with the outright awful public beta makes me think one thing. And that is Apple’s insistence on their annual, big-splash release cycle is fundamentally breaking engineering. I know I’m not privy to their internal decision making and that software features that depend on hardware releases and vice-versa are planned and timed years (if not half-decades) in advance, but I…

This reminds me of the fascinating NYT story about the lead up to the original iPhone announcement event: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s... . A choice excerpt: > The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it m…

Demos of new products always have golden paths, and even demos of production grade software have golden paths very frequently because maintaining complex software in a demo-able state is hard (i.e. historical reports need to show a plausible history without anyone actually using the system).

Re: Broken

#173

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

I feel like there are people who get around the secrecy/isolation veil, they just have long-standing friends in other projects and can rely on them to push features and bugs though the bureaucracy. If you don’t have that, well, expect your Radars to sit in “punted from this release” until the end of time.

Re: Broken

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I just want an off switch for TCC. (It can be in the Terminal-only.) I'm kind of surprised there isn't one—Apple is usually pretty good about providing this stuff on macOS (at least relative to that other platform). Even with SIP turned off, there's no way to just blanket dismiss the dialogues. (Although, I'm sure without SIP someone could use code injection, but no one has, and given the amount of work it…

With SIP disabled, it might be possible to directly modify the TCC database…maybe someone can write a script to do this so it includes all your applications already.

I once put a 200 point bounty on an Ask Different question for how to directly edit the TCC database (when SIP is off). No one answered. No one answered :(

Re: Broken

#175
post #92
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using a combo of xrandr and Xfce's hi dpi setting, I've managed to make my linux desktop more stable, functional and consistent across a 4k screen and a 1920*1200 screen next to it than Windows can manage. Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.

I would really appreciate if you could share some of your findings there.

Honestly I just had to switch window scaling to 2x in the Xfce appearance settings, then I run this to fix my layout on each login, giving me a consistent size and no weird rendering -

#!/bin/bash

xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1920x1200 --pos 0x100 --scale 1.5x1.5 --output DP-4 --mode 3840x2160 --primary --scale 1x1 --pos 2880x-150

AFAICT this effectively renders the smaller screen as if it had a much larger resolution (2880x1800), then downscales, giving a good quality image, and then positions the 4k screen to the right of it. The key is the scale factor compensating for different DPI on the different screens.

I tried scaling the other way first, by giving a sub-1.0 scaling factor to the 4k screen, but that meant rendering a lower res and then upscaling, which looked terrible!

The only annoyance now that I have this set up is that occasionaly driver updates change which output is which and I have to update the script so it works again.

Re: Broken

#176

I'm not sure if anyone has seen this yet, but Catalina is letting me login without entering my password! I have two users on my machine. 1. I "lock screen" from the Apple menu and close the lid. 2. I reopen the lid and it does not ask for password. 3. I start using laptop and lock screen suddenly pops up, but asks password for the wrong user. 4. I hit random key and the screen goes away, and i can continue working. A…

I've never seen a bug like that on Windows. Honestly, it feels like a lot of Mac users live in a bubble where Windows is a buggy pile of crap. Meanwhile most Windows users around the world are getting on with life on a stable OS with a great choice of hardware. While nothing's perfect, Windows is in a really good place at the moment.

Re: Broken

#178
post #164

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

From what I understand about Steve Jobs - he the great integrator. He got lots of disparate folks to work together. I mean, he got music folks talking to computer folks. But I think he did this on a smaller scale every day and that might have been his secret sauce for apple.

I worked at Apple for a few years and he was not running around bringing teams together. At the senior leadership team level sure. But not at the engineering or middle management levels.

It sounds quite similar to what OP was experiencing i.e. lots of siloed, secretive teams across a very large, 100K employee organisation.

Re: Broken

#179
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite having a lower quality than before since a few years, Windows has login and locking features that actually work (and I don't even really remember of bugs in there, like ever), so no, from what you describe it does not feel like Windows at all, it feels like some completely broken crap.

There were some good bugs in the login part of windows 2000/XP. Most of the ones I know of involve opening a browser while still on the login screen (my favorite was in the help for the screen reader), which is running as the System user that has complete control over the system.

IRC this was only possible on windows 95 and maybe 98.

Re: Broken

#180

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

When my friends at apple talk to me I feel any of them could write your post except...none of them would say "I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software" (well, maybe one would).

I'd like to work with these folks again* but the incredible secrecy would bug me. I understand that some things have to be secret, and I don't at feel I need to know what that group over there is doing but I'd like to talk with my (NDAd, same company) friends about what I work on! So I don't even apply for a job there. But some people seem to consider it OK.

* The subset of friends there who used to be colleagues of mine, I mean.

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