Is it a second coming for Apple?

Recently Apple announced that it is building up its capability to build its own chip. Is its Apple's second coming or another case of Deja Vue.

Jim Carlton in his book has documented Apple's first foolish attempt between 1986 and 1989 that ended up flushing down the drain $20 million as follows:

...an Advanced Technology Group engineer named Sam Holland, who in 1986 convinced Gassee that Apple should design its own microprocessor chips.
[...]
Believing that Gassee and the engineers knew best, Sculley gave Aquarius his unequivocal support, to the extend that he even bought the engineers a $15 million Cray supercomputer they could use to perform their design work on.
[...]
The underlying motivation behind the Aquarius project was Apple's fear that the Motorola line of microprocessors that it was dependent on would soon run out of steam and be surpassed by the rival line from Intel.
[...]
Holland proposed that Apple design not only a new chip but one that would incorporate four microprocessors onto a single piece of silicon.
[...]
The only problem was that this had never been attempted before in a computer as small as a desktop.
[...]
"Aquarius was an example of the willingness of the top management of Apple to embark on grand projects that skilled technical management would have known was unfeasible," Alcorn [Al Alcorn was an Apple Fellow] says.

The italics emphasis is mine.

The project was shut down after a chip expert called Hugh Martin was recruited to help with the Aquarius project and this exchange between him and Sculley led to the cancellation of this bold & foolish attempt:

"He said, 'What do you think about Aquarius?", Martin recalls. "I said, John, that's ridiculous. Apple has no fab or chip experience. How do you compete with Intel and Motorola?"

Within 6 month after that conversation, the project was canceled.

Let's hope Apple management can still remember this secret project and learn from the history. Now Motorola is effectively out of the contention and Martin's question to Apple in 1989 was as appropriate to Apple as it is now, except that you can substitute Motorola with AMD.

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"Apple - the inside story of intrigue, egomania, and business blunders" by Jim Carlton, 1997, Time Business a division of Random House. Page 86-90

Open Office Plan leads to lower productivity

Recently an article cited some research concludes that:

"In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.

"The high level of noise causes employees to lose concentration, leading to low productivity, there are privacy issues because everyone can see what you are doing on the computer or hear what you are saying on the phone, and there is a feeling of insecurity.''

This is not a startling result because Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister had reported similar finding way back in the '80 and they concluded that:

Workers who reported before the exercise that their workplace was acceptably quiet were 0ne-third more likely to deliver zero-defect work.

Furthermore, Tom and Timonthy discovered, at that time,

The advocates of the new format produced not one shred of evidence that effectiveness would not impaired.

One digging around published data, they found the following justification for open plan office:

The fundamental areas of consideration in designing an open-plan office within an information processing environment are: the system's electrical distribution capabilities, computer support capabilities and manufacturer and dealer service.

In other words, open-plan was not designed for the benefit of human and is still is not even today!

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"Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Edition" by Tom Demarco & Timonthy Lister, 1999, Dorset House Publishing Co. Inc. Part II, Chapter 9

Setting the language in Word

It was an issue bugging me for a while when I went to spell check in Word (Office 2003), it defaulted to English-US even though the English-Aus was also checked in the list.

I went to use the Office's Office 2003 language settings tool to no avail as it was already correctly saying the default language is 'English (Australia)'. I use the Word's Tools | Language | Set Language... menu including setting English-AUS as the default in Normal.Dot, via the 'Default...' button. Again with no success.

Being a experience Internationalisation programmer and with detail knowledge of how Internationalisation issues are handled by the operating system, it dawn on me that the fix is not in Word or Office suite. They merely follow orders or hints.

A check on the default input locale revealed that I was using 'English - US' as the default input rather than 'English (Australia) - US'.

Once that is corrected, Word automatically defaults to use English (aus) spell checker and date.

Always be vigilant about security even at places you feel comfortable - the office

The recent article on WSJ only brings home the truth that you must always be vigilant with online security, particularly on a terminal that's not yours and that your privacy is taken at lip service.

Any USB drive or your own materials that reside on company's machine must be protected using suitable encrypting device, such as TrueCrypt. If you suspect keyloggers are planted, use keyfiles with your TrueCrypt volume designed to foil keyloggers from capturing your password.

Any passwords that you need to submit to a site must be managed securely, using tool such as Password Safe, and never allow that to be cached on that machine. If it is convenient to you, it is also convenient to your attacker, who could be your supervisor, as confirmed in the WSJ article. It is important to use this kind of tool that avoids exposing the password to preying eyes.

Always use strong password and if you use things like Password Safe, you should always use the generated password by this tool.

E-Mail communication through the company's channel must be suitably protected. You can use Password Safe's command-line operations:

  pwsafe -e filename

To encrypt the file and

  pwsafe -d filename

To decrypt the file. It is advisable to perform these operations on a TrueCrypt volume to avoid residues being picked up.

A better option is to use the field and time tested free PGP, commercial version or GNU PGP.

Trust no one, no matter how warm the smile appears to be, and treat all environment as hostile are the best advice.

The truth about office life - shallow and fake

Alain de Botton documented this artificial environment:

"A lot of these firms, in a downturn, having spoken about love and friendship and all that, don’t lose much sleep about getting rid of 20 per cent of the workforce," he points out.

"And that really fries your head, to be told ‘we love you, we love you’ and then to be got rid of."

Office life exists on a level of "shallow cheerfulness", and talking about a crisis of meaning or any other deep feeling is strictly frowned on.

How strong is your password?

Check your password strength here.

What can you do to make it harder for Conflicker?

A very good article mentioning what Conflicker attempts to do and how one could make life harder for Conflicker. Good advice:

First and foremost, if the user of the desktop that is being attacked is NOT a member of the local Administrators group, the worm will have a tough time infecting the computer

Even in Vista. Many advice in this article is for the Vista. To turn off Autoplay please refer to this support article.