About Me
- Name: Sushant Bhatia
- Location: Tempe, Az
I work at CUbiC, the Center for Ubiquitous Computing at ASU. We are developing applications and devices for individuals who are blind. I personally am in charge of developing the iCare BookReader. This device will allow individuals who are blind to have print material read to them. The interface is intuitive and accessible. The process is much faster than using a scanner and our BookReader is quite feature rich. On a personal note, I love coding especially in .Net and C#.
My blog is about coding in .Net and about my interests in general. I love to read, esp Discworld novels by Terry Prattchet. I will post items about work, school, cool stuff and ideas for projects I have. If your ever interested in any of them, let me know as I would love to work on some of them.
Archives
Ankh Morpork's Finest Coder
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs
This is so enlightening...:-)
Bug #7
Bug Name: The Disk Drive Nazi
Duration: >25 Years
Supplier: Apple Computer Inc.
Slogan: "No computer for you!"
Product: Lisa & Macintosh
Bug: "Unauthorized" removal of floppy or hard disks is punished severely
Class of error: "You're not in charge; we are"
Principle: The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals
Discussion:
In 1979, the Lisa development team decided that users would not be permitted to remove disks without permission, saving the team from having to work out a way to recover from such an unplanned event. While this was a sharp reversal from the Apple II philosophy, given the Lisa team's RAM limitation (around a thousandth of what many people enjoy today), it was a reasonable compromise.
Let's move forward a quarter century or so. I now use a PowerBook computer. For backup, I've connected an external hard disk using Firewire or, as it's known in the human-oriented world of Windows, IEEE-1394. Periodically, I drag a few newly-created files onto the external disk. Otherwise, it just lays there humming.
In October of 2004, 25 years after the Lisa team's short-cut decision, I put my PowerBook into sleep mode, unplugged my auxiliary hard disk, and travelled 3000 miles to Europe to deliver a series of talks driven by slides from my Macintosh. When I attempted to wake the computer up, however, it failed. Nothing, including an emergency start-up CD-ROM, would allow me to reboot and recover.
Two weeks later, when I returned to the USA, I plugged in my auxiliary hard disk, pressed Power, and the computer started up normally.
Microsoft's GUI has, from the beginning, given users the freedom to remove their disks without notice, recovering quite smoothly from the surprise events. A solution exists. Heaven knows, Microsoft has copied enough from Apple. Turn about is fair play.
Immediate Proposed Fix: Repair boot routine so the system doesn't permanently hang if a previously-used auxiliary disk is not found.
Permanent Proposed Fix: Copy Microsoft's approach, giving Mac users the freedom to plug and unplug without punishment.
Bug first observed: 1979
Observer: Tog
Bug reported to Apple: 1985 (once we had enough RAM to handle a fix: 512k)
Bug on list since: List inception: 1 Dec 2004