The "try for free/generate" button didn't work for me. I uploaded a short video (15MB of White House press secretary) and tried to substitute various voices without success.
Yet, things could be worse. Back in the 80s & 90s it was possible to select a resolution/refresh frequency that would permanently damage (e.g. destroy) a CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor.
How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"?
What's gone wrong, is what goes wrong at most major corporations -- a focus more on "business" (which itself falls victim to fashion/fad such as image and perception of "fairness", KPIs, "mission statements", and other easy-to-measure-yet-made-up BS) rather than the main purpose : execution of engineering and ABSOLUTE INSISTENCE on quality. Boeing used to have an engineering-driven culture, but that has been destroyed. The CEO has deliberately driven the pendulum away from quality as #1 task to more concern over costs. Why is anyone surprised that they are now getting less quality?
It's not just Boeing, it's the buyers (the airlines). They are customers too. They want Good, Fast AND Cheap. But they can't get it. They're forgetting what the final consumers (the flying public, and the private airlines such as UPS & FedEx that fly packages) want -- a reliable aircraft that doesn't fall out of the sky. That decision to buy a crappier aircraft to save a few bucks is being made. By whom? Board of Directors? C-class decision makers whose bonuses are based on saving millions of dollars. Accountants? Middle management?
But the "savings" are a temporary sugar-high. Once the reputation is damaged, it will costs many times any savings to restore confidence, if ever.
No-one ever falls out of the sky in a shoddily designed/built aircraft coming apart mid-air and thinks "well at least they saved a few bucks on manufacturing." I just hope enough of the old-guard engineers are still around to try to restore the old culture and save this company from itself.
This "good, fast, cheap, pick two" thing is peddled often, but it skips over the fact that costs also come down over time as technology improves. As an aerospace example, SpaceX's F9 is better, faster and cheaper than the competition.
The issue at Boeing is allowing things to swing deep into maximizing profit margins rather than forward-looking investment in technology improvements which reduce costs while maintaining or improving quality.
They wouldn't have to be waiting for things to catch up if they were investing into R&D in the years leading up to the current failures. Boeing already isn't fast.
How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"?
The two of those that are easy to measure will always get chosen. It's not that people don't want "good", it just takes a lot of effort to figure out if you are getting something good or not.
Reputation is one way, but that can be, and often is, spent for short-term gain.
But you cannot apply any of Good, Fast, Cheap to the Boeing products.
And they know airlines are going to buy their planes anyway. What are the alternatives? To wait 10 years to get Airbus? And hire second set of technicians and maintenance bases for Airbus while have the same for existing Boeing fleet?
Following the "John Deere" style brand lock-in strategy: "Sure the Kubota is half the price and I can fix it myself, but all of my implements work with my Deere." And unless I switch over the tractor, the combine, the baler. I'll have to maintain both brands. I guess I'll just stick with JD one more season..."
You could absolutely write professional software in BASIC.
As a kid I wrote my first "professional" product in Applesoft. My family used to rent videotapes (Betamax!) from a little video shop on the corner. They kept records of who rented what on paper cards -- they literally wrote in the customer name and phone # on a paper card and put it in a box. They would go through that box each day and see what was overdue, calling the customer to remind them to return. I was a curious kid so I asked the owner "how do you keep track of everything? Do you really go through all those cards every day to see what is due? Does anything get lost?" I told the owner "I can put all this on a computer and make it so you'll never lose track of who has what" and he said "tell you what, you create that and I'll buy it!"
I wrote a little program in Applesoft basic, using a light pen, that could keep track of the customers and video titles -- what was available, what was out, what was due, and what was overdue. The owner LOVED it! Customers had a "membership" card with a bar code on it.The clerk just had to scan the member card, a barcode for "checkout" (taped to the side of the screen) and then the bar code on the tape. No keyboard. Happy beep meant success. Check-in was the same process. And once a day they could check the "overdue" screen to see who to contact. The customer name, phone number, and name of movie was right there.
They weren't crazy about entering the names of all the tapes and sticking the bar code stickers on them, but once complete business was so much easier & faster.
It took me the better part of the summer to write this and I was paid $200 (a fortune for a 12 year old kid!) and given "free movie rentals for life." The owner was good to his word, and even after he bought a movie rental franchise many years later (maybe Blockbuster?) my family still enjoyed free rentals though the apple 2 was long since retired.
This is a very good description of precisely what happened. People forget that Pascal & C compilers were not only unusual/academic, they were also very expensive - $300-$500 or more, and C was not ubiquitous then, pascal was more common, and (like C) there were several incompatible variants competing for marketspace. For a young person who has (perhaps only barely) been able to afford a Commodore, Atari 400/800, TRS-80 or the more expensive Apple ][, and additional huge expense for a compiler was very likely out of the question.
I was in a computer club and I remember a big bearded guy from IBM (one of the club founders) introducing a new programming language called "C", and thinking "why bother, when you can just code in assembly?"
We had 1Mhz. One "core". 48kilobytes of addressable ram (actually less, once the buffers for video space were subtracted). That's an extremely limited space.
Of course the workflow was awful. boot up. Open your editor. Edit your source code. Save to disk. Quit your editor. Run the assembler. No errors? quit and exit to DOS. Reboot & run your new code. (If the program were large, boot to DOS tools disc and copy the code from one floppy to another, then boot that new floppy.)
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Applesoft Basic and Assembly were enough for me, until I took my first professional programming job in the 80s and learned Pascal to code for the Lisa and then the Macintosh. I learned C in the late 80s for Windows 2.1, 3.0 and then C++ (beginning with the Microsoft C++ beta compiler distributed on something like 20 5.25" floppy disks. I moved to C# as soon as Microsoft introduced DotNet and others in the decades since, but I never had as much pure joy as the time I spent on my Apple ][. I still have it, and remarkably it still runs 100%, and most of my floppy discs (memorex! gorilla!) still work, even though I used a "nibbler" tool and used both sides. At $5 each (!!) for 80k of storage we had to stretch the budget.
Many people's (including mine) first experience with Pascal was with Apple Pascal on the Apple II. This was a port of the UCSD Pascal system by Apple itself and was basically its own operating system with its own editor and even disk format. It compiled to "P-code" which meant in theory you could run your compiled software on the various big machines UCSD was developed for (not that I ever tried that). Yes, it was pricey if purchased legally, but as with almost all Apple ][ software, that wasn't how people generally obtained software.
I also finally got to try out UCSD Pascal for the Atari 400/800. It was an awful experience using multiple floppies and having too many phases or whatever to edit, compile, run a program. That cured me of any programming language FOMO for decades. There was a cool Action![0] language cartridge for the Atari 8-bit which was awesome, it was lower level than C and felt like writing high-level assembly.
Using MS C (version 3 and onward) on PC and Megamax C on Atari ST were great though. I didn't run into C++ until the 90s on Windows, NT and OS/2.
Sadly this book makes me miss what I used to love about programming, and realize just how much programming has stratified into protected roles. The days of one person sitting down with customers, understanding what they need, and then building that solution, seem to be over. Now it's product owners, and business analysts, and testers and developers, and countless sprints and meetings and cargo cult nonsense to get in the way.
I had a discussion with a developer who cut his teeth on mainframes in the 70s. We had the same opinion about today's overly heavy process getting in the way of achievement and talented people. Scrum & Agile have become a quasi-religion and the idea of a programmer saying "leave me alone for a month and I'll give you some software that solves the problem" are long gone. For better or worse.
And before someone says "well, then you're doing Agile wrong." Yes. We are. As is damn near EVERY shop I've encountered in the past 10 years. That's the point. It's a mess and the culture is broken.
Wish we could just go back 20 years and Code at Work, build things that people want and need, and treat it as a craft again.
For anyone that enjoyed LoTR/The Hobbit and thinks this new story might be interesting or entertaining, allow me to assure you it is not. The writing is meandering, unclear, futile expository. In a word "amateurish". Being as generous as possible, it is a poor tribute. Less generously, one might call it a lazy attempt to cash in on the legacy of JRR's universe of Middle Earth.
The writing bears no resemblance whatsoever to the grand, Elizabethan style of Tolkien.
If you are looking for such things, I thought that "The Shadow of Angmar" by Steelbadger does a mostly-good job of telling a story in a Tolkien-like style. It's a LOTR/Harry Potter crossover fanfic that is well regarded in its little niche. Unfortunately, it's not finished. The author says he hasn't given up on it, but there haven't been any updates in a while. There is enough to be quite a good read though. I would say it was/is intended to have three main arcs. The first two arcs are completed and online. I can imagine what was intended for the third, and it seems very difficult to do, which might explain why the author hasn't yet attempted it.
Indeed! Daniel Lanois, musician and grammy award winning producer (U2, Neville Brothers, Emmylou Harris, etc.) uses the Omnichord extensively in his own music. He used it throughout the soundtrack for Slingblade. He even named one of the songs, Omni: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7HME3-TROg
