Hero: UI Psychologist Working On Dropbox Icons

If you experience joy when you identify a Hero - and what user of Objectivism doesn't? - today's information systems are a mine of Joy.

The problem (or, if you like Herakles, the Labor:)

The out-of-buffers bug. Born of some deadline-or-other in the original source of Bell Labs Unix, by 1999 it infected every operating system on Earth. Then it was discovered by criminals, who used it to spread denial-of-service attacks. By 2003 the good guys removed it from every serious OS, including Windows XP. But the out-of-buffers bug survived, silently, in Windows Phone. And then... Windows Phone was injected into Windows 7 to make Windows 8. Applications on Widows 8 were being screamlessly castrated by the out-of-buffers bug as it thrived again. Users of Dropbox thought that their worthy-of-Dropbox files were being immortalized in Dropbox, when they weren't, and would not be until Windows 8 was started anew.

The Hero's Victory, PWN:

Make It Visible. The Hero made the connection visible as a circle in the lower-right quadrant of the Dropbox icon. The circle spun like a hero's shield when the connection was busy with work. When it was idle because everything had been (at least for the moment) won, it displayed the V checkmark of victory. And when the out-of-buffers bug struck it down, it fell, like a hero waiting for the user to invoke Panakeia to bring him again to his feet, and to victory.

Our descendants will envy us, for living in an age when it was possible to be a giant.

Hero, PWN.

H/T Homer.