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Apple Businesses

Apple Ending Engineering Credits in Products 280

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-kinda-sad dept.
JChris writes "Apparently Apple is ending its tradition of allowing team members to take named credit for products." It also talks about the end of easter eggs and changes in the Apple corporate with Jobs back at the helm. Its an interesting bit. Makes me kinda sad. Easter eggs are one of those things that I always enjoyed, and just seeings credits... well, it only seems fair.
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Apple Ending Engineering Credits in Products More

Apple Ending Engineering Credits in Products

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  • As a onetime Mac user (I still have a small MacOS partition on my LinuxPPC [linuxppc.org] box, this strikes me as sad way for Apple to usher in the new year.

    While quite different on the whole, parallels can be drawn between Apple's software and the kind we're now used to in the open source world -- the spirit of fun, and healthy pride. Happy as I am to see Apple doing better, and turning out new and interesting hardware, I can't help but think that if this is the new attitude, they've lost something, and are not the same company that I once enthusiastically supported.

    Farewell, Secret About Box!

    John
  • We have names on the credit screen for our World War II online flight sim, "Air Warrior", that go back to the original Macintosh program from circa 1987-1988.
  • That's typical in a corporation that has lost contact with its roots and no longer values its engineers.

    The best advice when that happens is: abandon ship. There are plenty of companies out there that value technical work sufficiently to offer credit where credit is due.
  • I own Apple hardware, but I don't use any of their software. Just because they're spending their time fighting over the order of bits in the show_about_box() function doesn't mean the G4 isn't a monster of a chip. Throw LinuxPPC or Debian or something on it.

    --
  • Yes, it indeed is so. 99% of people do not look at the credits. But does it not make the little guy, whose name scrolled by in the end if the credits happy? I bet it does. And who does it bother? Nobody. So why remove it if it makes somebody much happier and doesn't bother anybody?

  • There is an incredible difference beween the "bloat" introduced by a list of developers in 7-bit ASCII and a program that simulates the physics and visuals of flight over a modeled terrain!

    --

  • Re: Grip credits (Score:3)

    by LMariachi ( 86077 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @04:23PM (#1488780) Journal
    As a grip/electrician myself, I certainly do care about the names of my co-workers, but beyond that, being listed in a movie's credits is often the only way to have a confirmable resume. Production companies often don't exist for more than one movie, so the only way to know if someone really worked on what they say they worked on is those credits.

    Anyway, what do you care if there are 40,000 names scrolling by after the movie's over? No one's forcing you to sit there and read them all, and it doesn't make your ticket more expensive.
  • Ad Majorum Corporation Glorium.

    Your opinion is evil. That individual acheivment
    is not important, reeks of feudalism. You are
    probably a Democrate, promoting ideoligies that
    are designed to insure that no one can climb high
    enough to threaten the old order.

    Wallstreet has been trying to remove creativity
    and individuality from the workplace for decades.
    This is contrary to the image that is promoted
    with the fawning over a few "pet celebrity"
    inventors. Creativity and individuality are too
    difficault to predict. And a person with no identity is easier to control.

    And since when does identity and team membership
    become mutualy exclusive. I think you just want
    to insure that all programers become disposable
    interchangable components, living to please there
    sharholders. Secure in the knowledge that there
    meager insignifigant efforts, though lost in a sea
    of ananimity, still adds to the glory of the
    Corporation whos true splender is beyond the
    understanding of a simple programer.


    ... gota go... All code compiled succesfully ...
    hurrah....

    P.S. I read to much Ayn Rand as a kid. Does it
    show?
  • Yup, I like BeOS more every day. Glad someplace still thinks credits are important.

    Leilah
  • Actually, including that many credits in the movie WOULD increase ticket price, seeing as the credits do take up film, and studios always bitch about how expensive film is. But, that's pretty well offtopic.

    Including people who aren't involved in acting, directing, or creating sets/effects, distracts from the listing of the people who actually affected the movie/couldn't be replaced with temp workers.

    It may be cool for you to have your name listed, but do you honestly expect people to believe that you affected the final movie in any way? If those cords hadn't been taped a certain way, that scene just wouldn't have worked?

  • I agree wholeheartedly. Most software is obsolete 6 months after its released. Its not like you're building the Great Pyramids of Egypt or something.

  • I did 3d text in win98 se and got this easter egg:

    RUNDLL32 caused a general protection fault
    in module USER.EXE at 0003:00006c50.
    Registers:
    EAX=00000000 CS=17b7 EIP=00006c50 EFLGS=00000206
    EBX=00632f34 SS=116f ESP=000085d6 EBP=000085d8
    ECX=bff53ce6 DS=16bf ESI=00028656 FS=2db7
    EDX=00010000 ES=112f EDI=00020e2a GS=0000
    Bytes at CS:EIP:
    1f c9 ca 0c 00 66 58 5b 66 50 e8 59 fb 55 8b ec
    Stack dump:
    85f2492f 4b1f07df 492f0092 116f8656 00000000 0000116f 116f036f 6d2a8610 865617b7 0000116f 16bf0000 0e2a52a8 00000002 112f0002 864c0000 17af1a8f

    see how fun windows is? who needs this linuz anyways!
  • I guess the sad thing about this is that we HAVE been slipping into an Orwellian society. Not just your wonderful US of A, but elsewhere, as well.

    To me, the biggest non-violent crime out there is the stealing of intellectual property. But can anyone tell me who invented the mouse? The OS? Fridges? Washing machines? Digital clocks? Scanners? etc. etc. - the list goes on.

    We wax lyrical about our sporting heroes. But what about the people who REALLY changed society for the better? It's not Logitech (or whoever), it's the guy who thought up the first mouse! THESE are the guys we should be worshipping on national TV. THESE are the guys that should be getting prizes, international recognition, lots of money, etc. After all, THESE are the guys that deserve it! Who cares if somebody can hit a ball over a net very fast?

    If you work at a University, anything you think up and/or do is automatically the property of the University. And these organisations are supposed to be more free than commercial ones!

    And this IS one of the concepts of an Orwellian society! If we didn't know that it was Linus Torvalds that designed Linux (ie if a company had released it), do you think it would attain the same "alternative" or "rebellion" status that it has today?

    -Shane Stephens

  • Yeah you start your own company and name it after yourself, if is that big a deal. If not, like most things aren't that big a deal in software develoment it has generally all been done before, you get paid by your employer. If I were the employer, and someone demanded credits for things they do on my time and my equiptment, I would show them where the door is so they can start their own company.
  • When you write code, do you really care if Granny Smith in Minneapolis can read your name in an About box?

    Or, do you care if other developers, other programmers, and other clueful people know that you wrote the code, and that you wrote it well?

    Litter your code with tons of useful comments, and sign them, and anyone who touches the code forever after will know exactly which portions of the code you wrote, and they can decide for themselves how well you wrote it.

    If your name just appears in the About box, maybe you just brought coffee to the real developers. Who can tell the difference?

    -JTB

  • You know what it really is? Jobs is just trying to protect the feelings and egos of all his programmers. How would you feel if you poured your heart and soul into one of the many ill-fated apple projects (i.e.: Copland), only to have it killed? By taking out the easter eggs and credits, the programmers are less likely to become personally attached to future development projects that get the axe.

  • I was wondering where that "J.S." on my left ass cheek came from...

  • This is a sad day... (Score:3)

    by T.Hobbes ( 101603 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @11:33AM (#1488797)
    That's too bad. I've always had fun hacking into programs with ResEdit, and adding my name to the credits... ahh, now I'll actually have to work in order to get credit.

    (P.S. - 1st Post?)
  • Huh?

    Apple's stock has gone up over a hundred yesterday, its highest ever.

    What do you mean?

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • Hmmm...Apple's famous commercial (Score:3)

    by TheFitz ( 113719 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @11:35AM (#1488799)
    In Apple's famous commercial, they are fighting against "Big Brother" (then IBM). It seems as though the Mac is trying to emulate that Big Brother attitude in saying that no one person deserves the credit for something, all credit goes to your glorious employer, Apple. Kinda scares ya when you think about it.
  • This is yet another plot to suppress engineers. Or, should I say, "knowledge workers." Paying them peanuts is not enough. Now, the mental-inferiority-complex-suffering managers have taken away even these benign HIDDEN credits.

    Engineers revolt. Remember, you're smarter than The Man.

    _.......................__
    ||.....__...._._||_..||-\\..._...._._||_
    ||......_\\.(/_'..||....||-//.//.\\.(/_'..||
    ||__((_||_,_/).||_..||....\\_//.,_/).\\_
    HAHA! LAST POST! Anything following is redundant.
  • Ermm...corporations function through heirarchies and PRETEND to employ teamwork.

    -Shane Stephens
  • This is really too bad. Easter eggs are so much fun. I remember the "peter peter cheater wimp" one in A-Train, that gave you $10^6, and the well-known Shift-F-U-N-D one in SimCity.
  • Here's how you do it (I still have a Win3.1 box at work :P .... ):

    You must hold CTRL-ALT-LEFT SHIFT through out this

    1. Click Help then About
    2. Double click one of the panes in the Windows logo
    3. Click OK

    Once you've done steps 1-3 and then repeated them again, you will be greeted with a waving MS flag. Repeat 1-3 one more time, and you will see one of the Microsoft head hanchos (at the time), or the Microsoft Bear, introducing each of the programmer's e-mail address names (i.e. billg for Bill Gates, etc) broken down by development section.

    --------------------

  • now only if Micro$oft stopped doing that, it'd make their products about 300 megs smaller and more stable :P -motardo
  • The main problem with this line of reasoning is that if your engineering team is that susceptible to being poached, you have other (major!) problems. Being listed in the credits does impart a certain sense of pride in the work... pride which might actually keep workers from taking other places' offers. I would think more companies would try to encourage that... the ones that do certainly seem to keep their employees longer.

    Leilah

  • Microsoft Credits (Score:3)

    by Decker ( 4953 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @11:38AM (#1488807) Homepage
    I know I'm being picky, but the article states that Microsoft has never included credits in their products. Well, in IE4, not only was there an easter egg, but it included credits for the people who worked on the program. I don't know about other Microsoft products, but I know that that one definitely had credits in it.

    Again, just nitpicking....
  • The mb in an SE is flat against the bottom. The sigs are in raised plastic inside the rear of the case. BTW, the same ones are in the PLUS and all earlier machines. They stopped after the SE however. The Mac II has sigs on a metal plate indside the case, but that's the absolute end of sigs in an Apple.
  • No, it is true. You have to go to the about box three times without releasing CTRL+ALT+LSHIFT, but the third time you either get a pic of Gates, Balmer, or a Bear that points at the credits.
  • If it wasn't for the opportunity to importalize themselves in the software, would all those developers work such long hours? Admittedly, the money's good, but you don't think that's the real reason they went into this field, do you?

    Mike Eckardt [geocities.com] meckardt@yahoo.spam.com
  • Maybe when microsoft bought 10% of apple they were also changing their ethics. The great thing about apple was always that they were fun and actually acknowledged the hackers working for them. This was a lot like what OSS is now. In my eyes this culminates a series of changes that makes them just like Microsoft. Now they care more about selling their colorful computers than anything else. I think that Jobs was better on acid.
  • This reminds me of my favorite RMS quote [gnu.org]:

    Those who benefit from the current system where programs are property offer two arguments in support of their claims to own programs: the emotional argument and the economic argument.

    The emotional argument goes like this: ``I put my sweat, my heart, my soul into this program. It comes from me, it's mine!''
    This argument does not require serious refutation. The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes. By contrast, consider the great artists and artisans of medieval times, who didn't even sign their names to their work. To them, the name of the artist was not important. What mattered was that the work was done--and the purpose it would serve. This view prevailed for hundreds of years.

    According to RMS, those Apple employees should just be happy that the work was done, and shouldn't be concerned with having their name on it. After all, getting credit for something is like saying you own it, and we all know* that owning software is evil.

    ---

    * yes, that's sarcasm

  • Well, there are credits in Excel 95, which you can get to after playing an Easter Egg that's like a 3d maze, and there are credits in Windows 95, or in Excel 97 if you press F5, type X97:L97, press "TAB," and press "make graph option." So, yes, M$ does put credits in lots of their products. I bet that if you went through, probably all of their software has some sort of credits in it.


    Brad Johnson
    Advisory Editor
  • The world's best software creations required neither millions of dollars nor millions of hours up front.

    Linux.
    Unix.
    C.

    The list goes on. And regardless of any so-called "symbiotic" relationship between a company and an individual, BOTH are required. Hence, when an individual isn't recognised for his contribution, then this is theft of intellectual property.

    I'm not saying DON'T recognise the company, I'm saying recognise the individual.

    -Shane Stephens
  • while Looking for eggs in system 9 I found that in the system file at STRs -16096 is the name of the owner of the Machine
  • Oh please. I remember that mars.exe program that was only a few K. It would have taken less than 100K to do that small flight simulator. Less than even one clipart that comes with office.
    The code for that sort of thing won't be that large....what makes things like flighsimulator 2000 big is the data for all the cities etc. Randomly generating a little terrain you fly around is not bloat, far from it.
  • The official Microsoft stand point on easter eggs is that it shouldn't happen.

    Easter eggs tend to be put in by engineers in the weekends and on their spare time (so they say).

    I think cause of he relaxed attitude at Microsoft, noone really minds about the easter eggs, most probably think it's fun. But officially they have to say they don't support it (ofcourse).
  • I hope that this answers your questions.

    >Why don't they just write their names down on a >piece of paper?

  • When I see the Easter Eggs that those fun-loving wacky light-hearted minions of the Dark Side over in Redmond toss into their products, I immediately wonder "how many of the fscking bugs in your fscking products could you have fixed while you were programming that fscking pinball game!?"

    If Microsoft, Apple, etc. had an official place for credits, then there'd be a lot less incentive for programmers to spend lots of time creating fancy easter eggs. Besides, I'll bet that practically all Easter Egg programming is already done off the clock anyway.

  • Sure. If they're free, why the hell not.

    But they're annoyingly PC. Gone are the days of credits being for people who actually did something. Now you've got to include everyone in the department, if not their families.

    The grips of the world, and their office counterparts, who do jobs that need to be done, but who don't have any effect on the final product simply don't need to be listed.

    If the movie or software credits were carried into other fields, you'd see companies crediting their janitorial staff alongside their engineers for new consumer electronics.

    Maybe it's a great way to pacify the workers, but that doesn't mean it makes sense.
  • Jobs does have a few valid points, I suppose...

    1) It's not feasible to truly give proper credit in an Easter egg for an operating system. The text of the credits along would bloat the OS by a nontrivial amount (up to several megs). Individual teams are pretty small (usuallt about six people) but you have lots of teams.

    2) Easter eggs reduce stability. Why? Because engineers have an annoying tendency to put them in before everything's stable yet.

    3) Easter eggs violate specification documents. In other words, technically they're bugs.

    Note that I'm not agreeing with Jobs entirely. I do agree about that first reason; you can't give truly proper credit to everyone, therefore it's not fair to give credit to only a few. Even so, though, it's a shame to see the Easter eggs going away. I've always liked them. I hope they'll be snuck into the OS in the future.

    If someone wants to prove that first point wrong, be my guest: put an Easter egg into the kernel which lists everyone who's worked on it (and then we'll see if Linus lets it in).
  • The fact I have done it. It is a scrolling box they point at, but that does not significantly change anything I said before.
  • Rubbish. You are in effect saying that techies should put up with crap and like it. Are you a PHB yourself?

    There are two main reasons for a skilled technical person to stay in one place in this time of plenty, and those are the people with whom he or she works, and job satisfaction. Sure, you can almost certainly get more money elsewhere, but abandoning one's colleagues (usually good friends) is only for those that like you say are only in it for the money, and that's rarely the main consideration.

    But if you're in it for job satisfaction and for the people, and some of those people (eg. petty policy managers) show less and less appreciation for what you do and your job satisfaction drops, what then? Heck, maybe you still stay if you're in it just for the money, but if not then abandon those that have abandoned you instead of wasting your life just to line someone else's pocket..
  • -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 55979 Oct 20 07:24 CREDITS

    That's not too much to ask from Apple, is it?


    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org].

  • Wanna get into Marx? Separating the individual from what they produce? Making people feel worthless?

    Ever think that maybe, just maybe, the credits aren't there just for you? Maybe they're for the people who worked on the movie, members of their family, their friends, people who can say "See that? I know that guy." Which would make "that guy" or "that girl" pretty cool.

    I can't believe you're chasing this as a valid argument. Give credit where it is due. If you don't personally care, don't read them, leave the theatre, don't run the Easter eggs...
  • um... sorry..

    but its not a rumor.

    I have a friend who is currently in a Apple software About box.. and he said that when version 1.1 ships, no names will be in it.

    It is true, it is real, and i don't really have a feeling on it one way or the other...
    ___
    "I know kung-fu."

  • Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, has never included credits. The company has always considered its name to represent the work of all its internal teams, said company spokesman Adam Sohn.

    I think that they overlooked some famous MS Easter Eggs of past that did, in fact, include a roster of credits for Windows (3.1? 95?) including some artistic renderings or pictures of some members, IIRC.

    Yeah, here they are...

    1. Create a new folder on the desktop and title it "and now, the moment you've all been waiting for"
    2. Rename that folder to "we proudly present for your viewing pleasure"
    3. Rename it the folder to "The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!"
    4. Open the folder, and the credits should be displayed.

    [Courtesy of http://www.htsoft.com/easter [htsoft.com]]

  • I'm sorry to see the tradition of credits ending. Even easter eggs are sometimes ok, although embedding flight simulators in spreadsheets is a bit extreme. While at the CGE in August I listened to the original Activision guys talk about how credit for their work at Atari was important. Atari didn't like giving its programmers credit, and even got upset at easter eggs. (Pay was certainly a factor too, but I'm not sure where Apple stands on that issue right now.) They left Atari and founded a company so that they could enjoy life again, while also getting financially rewarded for their efforts. You gotta wonder if the engineers at Apple are feeling the same way right about now.

  • Re:Microsoft Credits (Score:3)

    by darkshadow ( 102598 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @11:51AM (#1488889)
    Got this from a mailing list a while back.
    Try it, it works.

    ---

    http://www.insanely-great.com/news/98/5/news04.htm l#excel97 [insanely-great.com]

    "FLIGHT SIMULATOR" HIDDEN INSIDE EXCEL 97

    It's pretty basic. Check the credits on the "hillside"

    Ever wonder why Microsoft applications become slower with each new release?
    Apparently the constant rain in Redmond has driven Microsoft to obsessive flights of fancy. Below are instructions on how to access a little flight simulator that was inexplicably hidden by precipitous programmers deep inside Excel 97.

    1. In Excel 97, open a new blank work sheet.

    2. Press F5 (go to function) and type X97:L97 in the 'Reference' box.

    Then click OK

    3. Now hit your tab key once (you should end up in cell M97).

    4. Here's the tricky part: press CTRL + SHIFT while clicking once on the 'chart wizard' icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart).

    5. After a few moments, you should be flying.

    6. Steer with the mouse, accel and decel with the left and rightmouse buttons respectively, and look for the monolith with the program credits. You can exit the screen by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.

    7. Steer with the mouse. Moving it sideways moves you sideways.

    8. Acceleration depends on mouse acceleration. Left Click to zoom in, right click to zoom out. You can hit ESC to quit. But then, you must restart EXCEL and do it all over again to get back.
  • I once heard that if its not good enough to put your name on it, then it shouldn't be released. Will this bring an end to the tradition of quality which Apple software has had?
  • You write: The inclusion of such things is not part of the Apple image and it's just a dictate that it shouldn't be in there.

    But that's precisely the point: the management has, for no good reason, raised the importance of image over the importance they attach to their technical staff, even if it is in respect of such a small thing as a credit.

    When a company ceases to value its people, it's on a hiding to nothing, a slippery slope, and a mixing of metaphors. :-)

  • So, you include 40,000 names. Wow. That's going to be exciting to read. Nobody, not even the obsessive types who've posted in this thread, would stay to read that, it'd be like reading a phonebook.

    And are the names meaningful? Are they simply an alphabetic listing of everyone who worked at the company during the product development, or do you list people in order of importance?

    Listing actors above grips is appropriate in a movie because actors (unfortunately) are a commodity. People pay to see films starring a certain actor even if they wouldn't have watched the film otherwise. The same isn't true about the grip, the makeup staff, etc.

    But, with software (with the exception of some people buying anything John Carmack writes for instace...) you buy the product because of what it is (or what it does) not because of who wrote it.

    In this case, the lead programmer (who probably spent most of his time in meetings) is less important that the grunts who slaved away writing the actual thing. So how do you justify listing the lead programmer above the grunts? There are no accurate ways to determine who to list. (Look at the argument surrounding how to judge a programmer's output.) So you either piss off half the staff by listing some ass-kissing management guy first, or ruin the list by simply making it an alphabetic list of names.

    The alphabetic list of names might work for small projects, less than a hundred or so people, when the people listed could easily point their name out to friends. But what about a product like MS Office, or Mac OS X... I wouldn't doubt that five or ten thousand people helped in some way to make those products.


    So, lacking a fair and interesting way to list the credits, I agree with the decision to scrap them.

    Or, as I said earlier, replace them with a 'team credit', where the particular dev team gets to make their own logo and display that...

  • Read first (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Before this continues and this becomes "Slashdotted", you need to read some of their possible reasoning towards this. "Others say the ban may also mask Apple's increasing paranoia to keep the identity of its key people under wraps. Engineering teams highlighted in credits are at times believed to be the source of leaks of confidential company information and are increasingly the target of poaching by other companies and search firms in the fierce high-tech job market." If you ask me, they have every right to keep their engineers to themselves. Who the hell spends time reviewing the credits anyway, maybe to find a version number!

  • > In my opinion, listing grips and other people in movie credits
    > is ridiculous. Their influence is insignificant, and doesn't
    > take any 'art', they could be easily replace by anyone else
    > trained in the field and the work wouldn't suffer.

    apparently you're not a stagehand. i am. you probably don't know how few people there are who are actually well trained for each job. you probably don't know what a best boy is, let alone that there's no practical way to become one wihtout the patronage of someone already placed in the industry. you probably don't know that _Casablanca_ is rated as one of the greatest movies of all time because of the miracles the focus puller was able to bring off. you probably bitched that the Star Trek movies looked like TV episiodes without ever knowing why (answer: zero involvement by the focus puller). you probably don't know that _Titanic_, that CG tour-de-force, had a scene that couldn't be shot with the latest & greatest programmable cameras, and that the production company had to fly a 70-odd year old, retired focus puller to Mexico to do half a day (for him) of work that *no one* else could do.

    you probably wouldn't even be able to say what shot it was if you watched the movie.

    you probably have no idea how much skill is being lost in the industry because the people who know how to do all these things are retiring without passing their lore on to a new generation.

    movies are hard work, and everyone.. right down the the gofers.. has to do their job right, or it shows. you may not be able to see the effects of their work, but that's strictly because you don't know what to look for. granted, i can't look at a 30-second clip and tell you whether the catering was good, but i can tell you a lot about the production environment. shitty catering, disorganized bookkeeping, techinical glitches that mean one more take at the end of a long day.. all of those are visible in the way the performers move. there's a lot of information about the making of a movie, right there in the product, as long as you know how to find it.

    if you don't happen to like sitting through the credits, that's fine. it's your call, and it would be stupid for me to say you're 'robbing the workers' of their credit. just don't take the extra step into pointy-haired-boss logic and assume that anything you don't understand has to be easy. *that's* a disservice to skilled workers in any field.

    as programmers, we owe our colleagues in other trades the same respect we want for ourselves. the best way to get it is to show some of our own.

  • To me this just seems an awful large bother over such small things that don't cause any problems. I always enjoyed the little Easter eggs in programs, they are fun. Not that I think anyone reads the credits, but I always enjoyed having my name somewhere on the few programming jobs I've worked on.

    The fact that Steve Jobs took the time to come up with a memo telling people that such things are banned seems a waste of time. Maybe Steve has too much time on his hands? Perhaps the same amount of time on his hands that the programmers have when they create such little eggs?
  • I feel bad to see Apple pulling all the 'fun' out of their products. But if the eggs and the credits have to go, I feel it is only fitting for the man who started them, Jobs, to hand down the decree.

    Let's all power up the old LC or IIfx we have in the closet and hit it one more time for the guys and gals at Apple. We appreciate your effort, even if you don't get your name etched in.
  • Back in the early 80s, there was a good deal of competition for videogame programers. Companys were known to poach each other's talent. Mattel Electronics (Intellivision) attempted to avoid this by not listing the names of their developers. Instead, the group was referred to as The Blue Sky Rangers [webcom.com].
  • Ok, I'll clarify a little.

    I still don't think most of the work is 'art' and I don't believe that what 95% of people do couldn't be done by a replacement just as easily.

    I'm sure there are a few jobs that the public wouln't recognize that are a black art, that you can't train someone in, they have to apprentice and pick it up by osmosis, and I'll even grant that some of these jobs might be important to the final quality the film.

    But, I'm sure these are few and far between. For every focus puller there are ten assistants to the stars, who are being listed more and more often, and caterers, etc.

    Why am I sure? What's my vast experience in the theatre industry? Zip. I admit that. But I've worked a lot of jobs and seen that it's very rare more then 10% of the people in a company actually work on the final product, everyone else just supports the people who do. I don't imagine hollywood, which is about money, not art, at least at any big studio, is any different. (At least, this is how the money end sees it, I'm sure the workers usually see it as more than just another movie.)

    I've even had a gopher job. I did incredibly dull stuff and waited on my boss. I took phone calls, did minor paperwork, got coffee, etc, all so she could keep working. And I'm sure she got more work done because of it... But, I don't think that I influenced the quality or design of her work, just the ammount of it. And I could have been replaced by any equally trained gopher who would have been just as helpful to her. If someone had asked about her work, should I have volunteered that I helped make it? Should it have been in my contract with her that I must get mentioned?

    And I'm not making the assumption that because I don't understand it, it must be easy. Some of what I did took months before I could do a single task as well as she could. And I also wrote custom tracking software, and did many other non-trivial things. But, I still didn't produce the final product. She did. If I was sick, work went on. When I eventually left, work went on.

    And it's not like this is an amateur play where the support staff does it out of the good of their hearts. This is payed work. The same thing almost everyone else does every day.

    To me, credits are a way of finding out who did something in the movie that you saw and liked. Actors names are listed so you can identify them. The director is listed, as are many of the important FX people so you can identify their work. But, if a job doesn't affect the quality of the movie directly, it is unimportant to the audience.


    It doesn't really matter. The contracts are already written, and the film cost is negligible compared to the length of the movie. I'm not campaigning to wipe out credits, just to explain why I, and obviously a lot of other people, feel the way I do about them.

  • And what happens to ex-employees? (Score:5)

    by Wee ( 17189 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @11:56AM (#1488927)
    So if you start putting credits in software, what happens when a new version comes out but some of the people who have worked on the software have moved on or left the company altogether? Do they stay in the credits? After all, some portion of the software is a result of their efforts. It's a sticky question, and the list of credits can get really huge depending on your answer.

    So you have to draw the line somewhere. When an engineering effort gets big, it can become unwieldy just to list all the current workers, much left those who've moved on. What do you do: list them all, just the current people, or nobody at all? It's easiest to list nobody.

    Take a look at the credits for Eudora Pro sometime when you're bored (and if you're really bored, hold down the ctrl key while the list of names is scrolling by). Some of the people listed there haven't worked at Qualcomm for years. But they've been left in because some part of themselves went into Eudora.

    Leaving them in is fine by me -- they were all part of the same big family. But maybe Apple doesn't think that way anymore. Maybe Jobs is just making sure he has one less thing to worry about. Either way, it's not much of an issue.

    -B

  • >Maybe what they meant was that credits were never directly listed from Microsoft.
    >If you wanted to see the credits it was related to a easter egg that you had to find.

    Since so many people know that, I wonder why they didn't put it that way.... Even non-computer geek friends of mine know about these, instructions are all over the web on how to get at them.

    Ah well, journalism, what can I say? :)
  • I am not a lawyer, but I thought that the author of a work has the right to be identified as the author. Unlike other copyright powers, this cannot be assigned or given up - it is an inalienable right. That's why books say 'All rights reserved.' but also 'The moral right of the author has been asserted.'.

    (This is for the UK, I think - I don't know how it works in other countries.)

    Would this mean that software companies are obliged to give credit to people who wrote code, and that any contract signing away this right is not valid?

  • More Microsoft Credits (Score:4)

    by Ralph Bearpark ( 2819 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @11:58AM (#1488935) Homepage
    Funny old world ain't it? When Apple talk about dropping their Easter Eggs we get all dewy eyed ... but when the subject is Micro$oft's Easter Eggs then the talk is of software bloat.

    Anyway, more of this stupidity can be found at The Easter Egg Archive [eeggs.com].

    Regards, Ralph.

  • While I agree that it is kind of a shame, when you look at it realistically they have literally hundreds or thousands of people working on their biggest projects. The question is where do you draw the line at who gets included? Does the guy that came in from another department for an hour to help fix a bug get on the list?

    I remember the easter egg in IE4 that listed the developers working on that project. It seemed to have around a thousand names in it. To store that would take maybe 20 or 30k which would not otherwise be needed, plus the likelihood is that this amount of new code will introduce bugs and take people away from what they are really supposed to be doing :)

    I find myself wondering what I would do if I was the boss. On a medium to large project (maybe less than 100 people) then the benefits of including a credits listing (namely improved staff morale and maybe increasing the products "fun factor") would outweigh the costs.

  • You press the "programmers switch" (gotta love that phrase) and type G <some address> and 3 photos loop over and over endlessly every few seconds. Unfortunately, I've forgotten the address.

  • Programmers have egos, too, you know (especially at Apple). If executive staff can't or won't acknowledge that, then they're further down the path of their own demise than they suspect.

    I remember back during Atari's golden years, when they were run by Warner Communications. The edict was that no credit was to be given to any programmer, ever. Individuals who incorporated easter eggs were fired and, occasionally, sued (as Mark Riley, author of AtariWriter, will attest. There were extenuating circumstances in this particular case, but the lawsuit was just gratuitous).

    Hell, Electronic Arts was, in part, founded on the idea of giving programmers credit for their work. On the box. With a short bio and photo! The first products out of EA clearly demonstrated the pride these people took in their work. Programmer credit continues at EA to this day.

    There is no legitimate reason for them to impose this rule, especially after all these years. It's just mean-spirited.

    "But if we put the names of our programmers in the product, our competitors will know who they are and hire them away!"

    I've heard this argument before, and it's impossibly lame. If you treat your people well, pay them well, offer a good work environment, and offer the opportunities to work on seriously cool sh*t, this problem does not exist.

    Schwab

  • Interestingly, I got this from the same http://www.htsoft.com/easter site.

    If you are stuck behind a NT 4.0 box at work, you can also try changing the screen saver to 3D Text and then set the text to be displayed to "not evil" (all small caps, no quotes) and you get to see the names of the NT developers. I just tried this on my NT Workstation 4.0/SP6 and it worked.

    AFAIK, this is pretty much what Apple used to do. I remember back when I had an Mac II CX (a while ago)on my desk, you could hold down a certain key combo when your machine booted and you would get a picture of the entire development team.

  • Yeah, good point. It didn't say whether or not they have credits, just that the Microsoft spokesperson said they didn't. I wasn't implying any blame on the journalist, anyways, but whatever....

    We do tend to get a lot of interesting statements from Microsoft spokespersons, now don't we? :)
  • In the SJMercury article, the point is made that individual credits make the technical contributors more visible and thus more likely to be recruited away. It seems only fair -- the managers are already visible because they're the ones who get quoted in company press releases. "FooBar 3.1 is the greatest advance in technology since sliced bread," said P. H. Boss, Manager, Advanced Products. You know that Mr(s). Boss had nothing to do with the actual technology.

    One of the supposed reasons for dropping individual credits is that the lists have become too large, but that doesn't seem like a valid excuse. I work on software used by the motion picture industry, and while I don't get a credit in the software, the people who use the software usually get a credit in the movie, even if it's buried among thousands of credits and falls somewhere between the credit for the caterer and the obligatory 'no animals were harmed' statement.

  • The next thing you will hear is... (Score:3)

    by cowmix ( 10566 ) <mmarch.gmail@com> on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @12:08PM (#1488951) Homepage
    "Today Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs announced the end of 'credits' at the end of Pixar feature movies..."
  • Everybody seems to be so upset for the programmers. I agree it is kinda cool to see your name in the credits of something. But personally I don't code so I can become famous. I do it because I enjoy it and because I can create some tools that I need or want. The Apple people still have this, they still enjoy what they are doing and probably don't care about the credit situation.
    I mean think about it, when you go to a restaraunt it doesn't say on the menu, the food is prepared by so-and-so. When you buy a car there isn't a pamphlet that says this car was assembled by so-and-so. Heck when you buy jeans all you get is the number of the inspector (it almost always seems to be 11).
    I think we are all getting too worked up for nothing. The programmers can still put food in their family's mouth and a roof over their head. I think that is what is really important to them.

  • There's a quicker way to do that.

    Just create a new folder, and Copy & Paste the following as the new name of the folder:

    Win95.{869DADA0-42A0-1069-A2E7-08002B30309D}

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Re:And what happens to ex-employees? (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @12:12PM (#1488957) Homepage Journal

    So if you start putting credits in software, what happens when a new version comes out but some of the people who have worked on the software have moved on or left the company altogether?

    Here at Be, we move their names to a section of the credits entitled, "Gone but Not Forgotten."

    You can see the BeOS credits by bringing up the "About BeOS" box, and then clicking on the logo.

    Schwab

  • I believe this only applies to the version 3 ROMs (with the updated motherboard).

    Hit control-apple-option-N any time there's a "sliding apple" system error screen up and it'll print out a complete list of names on the team and a sample of the team yelling "Apple II!" will play.

    Ahh, the good old days...

  • It seems as if the description of an article posting on /. determines the tone for the response here in the forum. The description made note of how it made him "sad" to see the credits go, but if you read the aricle, Steve chose to eliminate the credits because only a small number of people were gettting credit for work that several people did.

    Rather than list thousands of people in a credits list and acknowledge everybody who helped support a product launch (which would be stupid) Steve did the wise thing and took the whole thing out. He took it out, not because he didnt want to offer credit, but instead to insinuate a notion of teamwork, rather than individuaality.

    If you recall Apple's darkest years, you'll remember that everyone took the company to a downward spiral that seemed never ending. This was because nobody was working towards a common goal, and instead sought out what they felt was of the utmost importance.

    Now that Apple is on track, with everybody working towards a common goal, people should realize that TEAMWORK is what matters, and not getting credit for your individual part.

  • I mean think about it, when you go to a restaraunt it doesn't say on the menu, the food is prepared by so-and-so.

    Actually, depending on the restaurant, the name of the head chef will appear on the menu (and, if they have one, on their Web site as well).

    Schwab

  • Steve's rationale for this, according to a buddy of mine who works at Apple, is that the credit lists are never complete and are generally dictated by whoever is writing the credit code, so some deserving people get left out. Appearantly Steve sent all the employees a memo to this effect.

    Course, the OS 8 credit easter egg with the names of the engineers who laid off in the massacre of '96 was pretty damn cool.

    Don Negro

  • Interesting... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's interesting how the quote listed at the bottom of this page is, (or was at the time I looked at it):

    The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -- Emerson

    On the other hand, as some may have noted, sometimes it just feels good (or at least, I should say better) to have your name displayed on something you have created, so you can be proud of your work if you have put substantial time and effort into it.

    When you write the software yourself, in your own time, you make the rules (licensing, credit). However, all that changes when you get into the commercial world. Here it's not about pride... it's not about credit... respect... face it! wake up! it's all about the money. Companies market to end-users and other companies, and if they can do something or say something that will make them or their products look better, THEY WILL! Note that saying they will remove Easter eggs allows them to claim that their products will be smaller in size. It follows quite logically: when you remove code, program becomes smaller. The purchasers at other companies may like this, or they may not. And also, let's not forget: your average Joe could CARE LESS about all the programmers who wrote his favorite word processor. Why? He's not a programmer, he doesn't know many (if any) people who are, and generally tries to spend as little time with the computer as possible. What does it matter to him? But... if the company can say "program smaller, will run faster" Joe may be happy, because he can understand that much. He may not have the appreciation for Easter eggs or the coding that goes behind it, he just wants to type his annual reports up, print them out, and go home at the end of the day. Why bother?

    So this will upset programmers. GUESS WHAT? Do you know just HOW many programmers there are? Apple surely knows that if some quit, there are quite many more others who are either seeking better-paying jobs than they have now, or just a job, period! And they will be willing to take this job, knowing they can't see their name in the credits, because, heck, everyone needs food/clothing/shelter, and some have to support FAMILIES as well!

    I guess what I am trying to say is that:
    a) Apple doesn't care, it's a win-win for them,
    b) Programmers come and go, corporations generally stay, and finally,
    c) one may conclude (from the Emerson quote) that if something isn't worth doing FOR THE HELL OF IT (ie. without getting credit/award for it), then it just may not be worth doing it. However, do not forget, there are plenty of other hungry programmers out there who won't think twice about filling your job.

    The moral of the story is perhaps this:

    When you are your own boss (read: your own startup!! :)), things are better because you can make your own rules, but hey - if you don't want to work on, say, a video driver because your name won't be displayed every time the driver is loaded... well... that's perhaps your loss.

    When, however, someone else takes care of everything else besides the coding (contracts, equipment, management (yeah, it may actually be useful. sigh.)), then you have a price to pay for that. Your peace of mind == less control. Your own business => opposite.

    Same thing as with individuals living under a common set of laws and a government (sacrifice individual freedom for the good of the society or something to that effect). Not that I'm advocating either, or neither, it's an observation.

    Sorry to digress, but I just noticed the quote and the rest followed as a stream of consciousness..... :)

    -- another speck of dust on the face of planet Earth

  • I'm curious, with many people claiming credit should be due to the hard working employees, where do the support staff fit? I imagine there are PR people, human resources folks, janitors, and maybe an IT staff that all helped to make that product successful. Are their names in the products?

    I know the products at my company are credited to the entire company. Of course, NASA, banning any type of advertising on the products, helps this policy.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • IIRC, behind the motherboard (which was vertical near the back) was a protective metal sheet of some sort. It had the signatures (reproduced, of course) of everyone who worked on the SE.
  • Perhaps Apple management thinks it's eliminating credits but I somehow suspect they'll only be driven underground by this policy decision. At any rate it seems like a petty step to take at this point in time and I don't understand the reasoning behind it at all..

    Regardless, let's all observe a moment of silence in honor of "Fred Burst -- the only man whose name is a complete sentence," and other classic Apple credits.

  • After reading about the control-apple-option-n thing, I tried it on OS 8.6, while going into the Apple menu, and I found "About the MacsOS 8.5 team" - in fact, you only need to press "control-apple-option". Anyway, enjoy!
  • In Apple's famous commercial, they are fighting against "Big Brother" (then IBM). It seems as though the Mac is trying to emulate that Big Brother attitude in saying that no one person deserves the credit for something, all credit goes to your glorious employer, Apple. Kinda scares ya when you think about it.

    For the officially sanctioned word on this, please see MacPravda [turnleft.com].

  • I can maybe see some possible reasons... (Score:5)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @12:38PM (#1488995) Homepage Journal
    An "easter egg" is, by definition, a non-specified part of the program flow. This makes it less likely to be tested properly, and therefore more likely to contain serious bugs, or harbour potential side-effects.

    It's also bloat, and can potentially be a political hot potato. (Although no company ever acted on it, any company with a no-games policy would either have to ban Excel or scrap the policy. In the end, the compromise of everyone shutting their eyes became standard practice.)

    But what if a company stood firm? Can you imagine the publicity that could generate? I doubt much of it would be favourable to the company, either.

    Credits, though, are another matter. There's no real risk of bugs (it's mostly text), there's no real space consumed (text compresses to around 1/10th uncompressed size, which is often small, anyway. A few 10's of K, tops.)

    There is no justification for omitting credits, either in terms of stability or space. As for ex-employees, keep 'em in. If they've earned the right to be there, they've earned it. Taking it away, merely because they've moved, quit, been sacked, etc, is churlish.

  • I must be losing my memory. I remember a II ci and a II VX, but no II CX.
  • I don't see credits indicating that a team of programmers is putting their egos "above" the rest of the company - I see it as being proud of their achievements.

    To deny those people primarily responsible for a product recognition smacks of the type of reasoning where people in large organizations seek to obscure the source of information or of a decision in order to prevent responsibility from being attached to any particular individuals.

    There were two issues which kind of made sense:

    1. Too many people contributed to each product, making it impossible to credit everyone.

    I guess this is a possibility, although I suspect that if you don't include the people outside of the main project (such as administration or the people who did tools & toolkits), then the number of people involved in generating an individual product is probably not too big. Certainly not any larger than a large Hollywood movie production - and they have people up the wazoo listed on the ending credits.

    2. Competitors using the credits to target the developers for recruitment.

    This is probably a valid concern - although it could probably be argued that if a competitor is able to entice a developer away from a company, then that company either didn't compensate the developer enough or the morale was too poor to instill any loyalty for company. By "hiding" the names of their developers from the public, the company is trying to keep their labor costs lower by keeping their developers from temptation.

    I'm wonder if a company could use a clever marketing ploy and actually play UP the reputations of the developers involved with popular products, so that people would feel that products associated with that developer are "higher quality" than something which is generic. (I guess this kind of fits what Transmeta is doing w/Torvalds reputation.

  • bloat isn't what pisses me off... (Score:3)

    by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @12:42PM (#1489004)
    When I see the Easter Eggs that those fun-loving wacky light-hearted minions of the Dark Side over in Redmond toss into their products, I immediately wonder "how many of the fscking bugs in your fscking products could you have fixed while you were programming that fscking pinball game!?"

    (Funny, I tend to use the phrase 'fscking' an awful lot when it comes to our pals at Microsoft....)

    I suspect that people are coming to realize that unless you have a nearly airtight application, you'd better not trumpet the fact hat you let your programmers goof off and do silly things with their time. Now, minor little quirky easter eggs, such as the little taxi that zips across your screen in some version of the Pilot OS, are less harmful along those lines. I don't believe the Apple folks were every guilty of the excesses of the Microsoft folks. But, programmers being programmers are always going to try to outdo each other, so... perhaps it's better to nip it in the bud.
  • The article sounded insufficiently researched; the phrasing of that paragraph, logically, states "MS doesn't have easter eggs" and "an MS spokeman said... pride in product blahblahblah." So presumably the spokesman is just speaking the party line, and the first sentence is Ms. Claymon making a mistake. One big easter egg that comes immediately to mind is the long and elaborate win95 credits, which entailed making a folder on the desktop, renaming it a bunch of times, then opening it, which yielded a ~5m animation of a lot of names, teams, departments, etc., that made the thing. And while I regard win95 as a festering pile of badly engineered manure, I strongly feel that engineers should be able to include easter eggs, so long as they're made so you have to be deliberately looking for them to find them.

    The flight simulator in Excel comes to mind also.

  • I know that this is probably not a popular move on Apple's part. However, this is how I see it: Programmers should (ideally) speak with the quality of their code. I enjoy Linux partly because of the humility of its developers. Aside from their sometimes tongue-in-cheek talk of world domination, most don't pat themselves on the back or search for approval. They speak with their code, as do many anonymous or near anonymous contributors to the Open Source library.I would much rather have Apple employees speak with tight, efficient code than with some fancy flag graphic no matter how neato.
  • You must not have seen the hilariously funny parking memo from back when Steve first reascended to the throne at Apple. To explain, Steve had just eliminated many perks in order to bring costs back in line. But what really broke the camel's back, and triggered the memo was that he started parking his car in the closest space to his office, which happened to be a handicapped spot.

    The memo was:
    An Even More Entrepreneurial Apple
    As you can imagine, many of you have expressed your displeasure with our decision regarding the sabbatical program. All I can say is, "You ain't seen nothin' yet." You've all become lazy, and only contribute to Apple's current situation. The only way to save this company is to drive out the loyal employees who have not yet realized their inadequacy.

    We are following up with additional steps which will take Apple back to its roots as a more entrepreneurial company. They are:

    1. Lay-Offs
    In lieu of laying people off, we are redeploying unneeded workers as janitorial staff. Salaries will be adjusted accordingly.

    2. Sick Time
    It will not longer be possible to call in sick. Any employee who cannot make it into work due to illness will need take a vacation day or go without pay.

    3. Weekly Hours
    Pay checks will now be issued monthly for four 30-hour work weeks. However, each employee is required to work diligently on Apple business for at least 60 hours each week. Not meeting this requirement is a terminable offense.

    4. Parking
    A daily fee will be charged for parking your car in any Apple lot or garage. Parking garages will cost $5 per day, and parking lots will cost $3.50 per day.

    Only I will be allowed to park in handicapped spaces. Any other vehicle found parked in an Apple handicapped parking space will be towed. Persons who are physically disabled will receive a $5 reimbursement for towing expenses upon convincing the Executive Team that they are actually disabled.

    Thank you for your support.

    Steve and the Executive Team

    Steve's reply was not as funny:
    While we all enjoy a good joke, the email sent to every Apple employee titled "An Even More Entrepreneurial Apple" was not sent by me. And it was not very funny.

    Fraudulently using someone else's name is not a joke, and any employee found doing so will be immediately terminated.

    Thanks,

    Steve

    However, it seems that Steve no longer parks (AFAIK) in the handicapped spot. Instead he got a helicopter which ferries him from his house to work. At least that's what I heard. So maybe Steve came up with the idea while cruising over the valley ;) Any Apple employees willing to discuss this (anonymously perhaps)?

  • Your forgetting the mother of all Apple eggs. Ever cracked the case on a 128k or 512k? All the egineers signatures, including Jobs', are embossed in the case's plastic.

  • I've said it before... (Score:3)

    by NII Link ( 45533 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @12:48PM (#1489019)
    [ROFLOL - trying to control myself...]

    I first saw this bit several days ago in a rumor column. That's all it is, a rumor. Then, as happens quite often these days, some news agency decided it sounded like a fact and reprinted it. Then Slashdot people saw that story, and now this thread is open.

    Am I the only one who is sick and tired of how the media takes rumors as fact (especially those that are Apple-related, it seems)? Now thousands of people believe it's really true because it's been in the news. Let me reiterate, it's only a rumor.

  • This is not the first time Apple has tried to institute such a policy. It happened at least twice before that I know of, although in those cases it probably didn't come down from the CEO.

    On those occasions, Apple's SCM (Software Configuration Management) organization, which was chartered with doing all offical software builds, had their engineers scouring the source code looking for easter eggs and credits. It became a game for development engineers to find creative ways to hide them such that SCM couldn't find them. In one case the credits were stored in a block of hexadecimal data. In another, thousands of characters of source code for an easter egg were present in the source code, but indented hundreds of spaces so that the MPW editor wouldn't normally show them (unless you scrolled right).

    The super-secret about box in the first release of Multifinder was done despite management efforts to eradicate such things. If they couldn't do it then, I doubt that they can do it now.

    Where is the "Steve Capps Memorial No-name Burrito Joint", anyhow? I don't think it is La Costena, although they make damn good burritos.

  • Re:This is why Atari progrmrs quit 2 form Activisi (Score:5)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @01:24PM (#1489024) Homepage
    Do you read them all, caring about the name of the grip, or do you do it looking for the odd joke, and waiting till the theatre empties?

    Movies have the same problem software is starting to have. Way too many people to list. You either list just the big names, thus pissing off people who didn't make the cut, or you list everyone, drowning out the names of the important people, or you go with the minimum, ie those people whose union contracts require them to be listed.

    In my opinion, listing grips and other people in movie credits is ridiculous. Their influence is insignificant, and doesn't take any 'art', they could be easily replace by anyone else trained in the field and the work wouldn't suffer.

    If you start listing everyone in software projects, either you get insanely long lists, which have to be alphabetically sorted (to avoid fights over priority) and include everyone from the lead programmers down to temporary data entry staff, or you get arbitrarily short lists and piss people off.

    A company like id software can do it, because they have few enough employees, and all of them (even, so they say, their secretary/mom) have enough influence on the project that listing them isn't a joke. But this is because they have less than twenty people involved in actually making the game.

    And even then it's a stretch. They aren't mentioning any of the testers, famous ones like Thresh, or anonymous ones at Activision, or (I think) the guy who now maintains the eiting tools, etc.

    So, being that any attempt to list credits in a company with more than 20-30 people is going to be flawed, I think it's something that should best be left out.


    What they could do, if they make feel team spirit, is to code some cool effect, and use the team's internal codename (if they have one.) Thus getting an easter egg, and team pride, without the task of having to name each and every person at all responsible in such a way that wouldn't piss anyone off.

  • Re:microsoft owns 10% (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Microsoft does not own 10% of apple. Microsoft bought $150mil of _non-voting shares_. Purely a PR deal.
  • You're talking about that thing that was later included in the MS screensavers, right?

    The 2d maze with 90 degree walls and low-res textures?

    That's a long way from a doom client.

    Any decent demo coder could whip something like that up in under 4k, 8k if it required textures.

    Alright, so MS probably did it in VB and took a few megs, but it's not like they actually stuck Doom in there.


    As an example... I saw a 4k demo with music (only on a GUS I believe) which was basically a flyby of the first level of Descent 1, without robots or the reactor, and some level simplification. But it didn't use 90 degree walls, wasn't 2d, wasn't slow...

    It was a really cool example of demo coding, and was one of the best examples that demos aren't irrelevent. They basically duplicated the rendering loop of Descent in 4k of assembly. (portal rendering systems are fairly easy to do.)

    If anyone has this demo, maybe they can uuencode it and post it, it's small enough to not cause a problem.
  • This doesn't sound like the legendary Steve Jobs to me. Sounds more like a Corpro-Tron 6000. Sure there's alot of people that go into making software, but there's alot of people that go into making a movie too. (Hell Hollywood even credits the damn caterer.) It's a tradition. It encourages pride in your work.

    Sure someone may go after your talent if yopu publish their names. But killing your corporate culture doesn't exactly make people want to stick around.

    What has happend to the guy that said once asked, "Do you want to change the world, or do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"?

  • Silly... (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    I knew apple had gone over to the dark side a long time ago, but this is still ridiculous...

    For those of you worried about software bloat, side effects, etc., etc.: shut up! This is only an issue if you can't code well in the first place. As long as you have a simple, well-written, 'credits scrolly' type module, all it does is take up disk space until it is executed. Therefore, no real extra bloat (oh no, it calls a library function...) and no side effects. And geez, if you can't figure out how to compress a *text* file, go to jail, do not download mini-lzo, do not write a credits scrolly...

    If Jobs had told Woz this back in the day, do you think there would even *be* an Apple? Of course, Hertzfeld had to fight to get the frickin' puzzle game in [byte.com], so what do we expect...

    (incidentally, the article I linked to has a *real* list of hacking feats. I'm gonna have to save that page...)
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    pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • Microsoft owns 4% of Apple stock, and it's non-voting. The investment was done largely as a favor to Apple by MS, as part of a deal in which Apple agreed not to sue MS for patent infringement, and to bundle IE and OE as the default web and mail/news clients. MS made the investment, paid Apple an additional undisclosed sum (rumored to be $400M), and agreed to maintain MS Office on the Macintosh for a minimum of 5 years.

    Though the investment paid off well enough for MS. They bought $150M worth of stock at something like $20 a share. Apple stock closed at $103.062/share today.

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  • Here is my take... If anyone cares. MacOS X and from what I gather, all future version of thier OS are based on BSD varients. Apples programer's might or might not be credited in the commented source just like everybody else... ? or not?

    How would the OpenSource community feel if Apple took the source and put their programer's names in the credits of a graphical front end? If your code was running something like that would you like to see somebody at Apple taking the credit?

    Could this be meant to protect Apple from taking credit where it isn't due?

    Just a thought.
  • Holding down option changes "About this Computer" to "About the Finder". Until quite recently that got you the original black and white about box from Mac OS 1.0. In Mac OS 8 it got colorized. In Mac OS 9 you get a picture of the Apple campus.

    Here's one of the best: in Mac OS 7.5.x, drag the text "secret about box" from any app that supports drag-and-drop to the desktop. The secret about box that pops up is a playable pong game, with the name of each programmer written on a brick.

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