Back when my wife was working for Lotus on quality assurance issues, she issued a bug report on April 1st, bug number THX-1138, flagged "Critical: security issue", about the fact that there was a reactor exhaust port, which, if hit, could start a chain reaction destroying the station. She then put in discussion back and forth on the issue, that the OTHER defensive measures would keep ANY capital ship from getting close enough to take a shot at it, and, eventually, in exasperation, they added ray-shielding to the port, and marked the issue "CLOSED/RESOLVED."
That's good, but what I thought was brilliant about Lis's take was the idea that, whatever, dude, we'll throw in the ray-shielding if it'll shut quality assurance up.
'Cause, well, the port WAS ray-shielded. Just not projectile shielded, or actually fixed. Which really DOES suggest that someone brought up the problem in design or quality assurance, and somebody else just did a half-assed job of fixing it.
Absoluely not -- because it was part of the actual QA/bug report database, it was company confidential. And since it was probably ten years ago, now, and BEFORE Lotus was acquired by IBM, I doubt it's there anymore, either.
"Eek! the Cat" used to have a show-within-the-show about the wonderful Squishy Bears. They were setting up an episode with the professor explaining that the rocket ship control switch needed to be set to "Uranus" and not to "Heart of the Sun" for the ride to be a success. One of the bears tried to ask why he'd even have such a horrible thing, and he brushed her off with "no time to explain!"
("Here's your problem! Somebody left this switch set to 'Evil'!")
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zvi and
no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 05:00 pm (UTC)Here's my take on the change request
no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 06:52 pm (UTC)'Cause, well, the port WAS ray-shielded. Just not projectile shielded, or actually fixed. Which really DOES suggest that someone brought up the problem in design or quality assurance, and somebody else just did a half-assed job of fixing it.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-10 03:30 am (UTC)Yep, that's so how it happens in the real world. Is the whole thing on the net anywhere?
no subject
Date: 2007-04-10 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-10 12:00 pm (UTC)Here ya go: http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/media/THX1138.pdf
no subject
Date: 2007-04-10 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 02:01 pm (UTC)("Here's your problem! Somebody left this switch set to 'Evil'!")
no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 04:53 pm (UTC)Right up there with the LOTR very secret diaries!
no subject
Date: 2007-04-09 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 12:40 am (UTC)http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/1023_zl/zlsSetup_65_737_000_en.exe