And points out another point some Christians disagree on.
Some of us believe God allows us to make mistakes. In certain special circumstances, He corrects us more carefully than in others, but, in the end, He doesn't apply force. (Impossible to force a person to be saved.) So, even in the copying and translation of the scriptures, there would be some errors.
Possibly a bit off-topic, but, FWIW, there's this prophet guy, Nephi, in the Book of Mormon, that records a vision of the primary events of the New Testament in what would be the early 5th century BC.
Some people I talk with insist that it is more correct to call it the Revelation (singular) than to call it the Revelations (plural). I think there is meaning there, but I'm not sure the distinction is all that important to most people.
Yeah, the closer we can get to the original, the closer we can get to the Original.
But the King James version is itself considered to have been the work of inspired men, so there would be some point in putting more stock by the King James version than by random early texts whose authors may or may not be known to have been inspired.
(And then, there are some of us who believe that, even if you had the originals and were fluent in the original language, you'd still have to read under inspiration from God to get a full and perfect understanding of the text.)
Some of us cope by not believing in inerrancy in the first place.
And, for some of us, the idea that the copying and translation has introduced both unintentional errors and intentional variation is not particularly news.
The problem here is that the commercial CAs are selling an artificial trust substitute.
Do you remember something called Aspartame? Sacharine?
Wonder Bread? (Well, my dad called that a bread substitute, even though it isn't a sugar substitute.)
Substitutes don't work like the real thing, and often can cause damage when used like the real thing.
Certificates are set up in hierarchies. In most real hierarchies, I do not trust the guy at the top. In the real world, I (should) only trust the guys I know, and that maybe as far as I can throw them. I only trust each one in certain ways determined by my experience with her or him.
And, as we have witnessed in the current US political situation, when we start letting trust transit "up" a chain, we buy ourselves a world of hurt. That was what we/they were supposed to be getting away from when we/they wrote royalty out of the Constitution.
True? True.
Does that help explain why certificate use by browsers is so messed up?
There is no way for you to control the effective semantics of a certificate. That means that you effectively make the browser vendor your king.
Until that's fixed, the commercial CAs should, indeed, check all the information they say they check, but the end result is an artificial substitute for trust that is just barely enough to let your browser function meaningfully in the best of situations. Throw in a little malware, and there's not a lot of difference left between verisign and cacert.
I'd say more, but I think I'll go write a bolg about it.
I hate to tell you this, but your friends are not the middle of the bell curve.
Truth be told, your friends' friends, that think they depend on your friends for computer help, are the middle of the bell curve. They are precisely the ones Jobs is holding out for. A bit at a time, the see the hassles your friends put themselves through for exactly what it is, and recognizing that they don't need it.
And your friends are eventually going to come to their senses and either offload the technical periphernalia they don't need, or come to their senses and run Linux.
I myself want Apple to sell niche boxes, PPC powered NAS+ boxes, ARM powered ultra-portables in the eeepc class, dedicated word processors (laptop with built-in printer) for the Japanese market, router boxes you can load your own OS on,...
But that's not the way Jobs sees things, apparently.
It's a rather profitable battle to fight. Well, pwhateverstar is not so much so, but all the techs like yourself who think 10,000 computers is a large number of computers to sell are a prime source of ideas, and the war of words you (we?) engage in is a big part of where Steve gets his clues about which directions to head next.
I'm not sure Apple really wants to win this one easily.
Conventional desktops don't need expansion slots. In the current market, you are not a user of conventional desktops.
Everything your asking for is currently niche market. I'm not saying that's the way it should be. I'm not saying I don't wish Apple would through the niche markets a few bones.
Get the machine you want and load Fedora.
If you must have Apple's software, it's time to realize that, to a large extent, you're buying Steve's vision of a stylistic reduction of the human interface and the work environment. That requirements of such a reduction is by definition at direct odds with your desire to build a custom reduction that suits your own tastes. It's logically impossible to have both at once without having two computers.
I loathe it too, but primarily because Jobs "switched" without ever putting an MPC8641D in any model. (I'm not a fan of iNTEL, you see.)
As someone noted, the Mac mini sells pretty well. And they don't have a disproportionately large representation in the used hardware department.
So, your tastes are different from other people's tastes. No big deal.
However, if you look around the web, you can find people who tell how they do, in fact, expand the Mac Mini. Some people simply hang firewire drives on it. Yeah, yeah, 400MHz or something, but it's fast enough for most people who buy them.
Some people take the motherboard and electronics out of that little, stylized lunchbox, and install them in an ordinary whitebox case+PS. (I don't remember reading what such people do with the Mini's PS.)
You can expand the thing. You can even earn geek points doing so, although it's a bit harder than with x86 stuff.
The problem is not old or modified packages being supplied. That was somebody's early lazy reading.
This has been noted above, and I'll note it here to hopefully clog one loose parse.
The problem is the ability to harvest IP addresses of vulnerable machines, and the time it might (not) take to succeed in an attack.
In other words, before the package is updated.
1: Bad guys watch a perfectly good mirror sending updates out. They own the mirror, but they maintain it properly, so no one has reason to suspect the mirror is dangerous.
2: Bad guys have installed on the mirror a script that logs the IPs of machines downloading updates. The script probably analyzes the IPs, probes a little in a non-invasive way, then, when it finds something that looks like it has left the default port open to the internet, launches the attack. With a little luck (and a finite time to complete the update), the attack completes before the update.
It's a (well-known, really) window-of-opportunity issue, supposedly exacerbated by the volunteer nature of mirrors. Volunteerism is the so-called vulnerability.
The "workaround" is to (follow best practices and) shut down default ports. (This has also been mentioned above.) That will probably close the window of opportunity. And, then, there's also the technique of running incoming and outgoing ports on separate port numbers, etc.
If the attacker can't find your ssh port, it's going to bee difficult for him/her to take advantage of a vulnerability in ssh, etc.
Now, to consider why this is FUD against voluntarism, consider whether Microsoft's paid update network employees are paid enough to refrain from pulling a trick like this. Can money prevent this better than voluntarism can?
(There is also the issue of whether Microsoft can fix vulnerabilities in thei)r own update servers to avoid them getting owned between the vulnerability being discovered and the vulnerability being fixed..
The only way you can get the Linux version is to buy the MSWxp version. Then you install Linux yourself. Do you download Asus's version? No, of course not.
(Can you think of a reason geeks are buying the MSWxp version in Japan?)
Yes, maintaining personal freedom requires personal courage.
Yes, maintaining national freedom requires individuals maintaining personal freedom.
But there are limits. Particularly when the city manager or mayor is the boss that is checking your vote. He's not going to jail unless you can manage to get your situation and your evidence communicated up the line to a point where corruption has not taken hold. When the whole community has gone south, your defending your freedoms to death serves only as a lesson to others that, if they aren't prepared to die, they'd best abandon their freedoms.
There is a society where no one needs privacy, but that society is one where no one is still under the illusion that power over others can compensate for lack of self-control.
One of the things that keeps consumer prices high is that consumer oriented companies think that pushing the price below a certain point will ruin their profitability. (Sales channels, mostly, I think, but packaging and advertising, as well.) So they push the functionality up to keep the price up.
But, as far as used computers for the underprivileged, in yesterday's USofA, it worked because power is cheap and generally available. Also, the environment in the USofA tends not to be as punishing. (Although, in houses on the bad side of a West Texas town, you have cockroaches and sand and that mold in the dust from the refinery smoke, so it is not all roses.)
OLPCs are targeted at dirt floors and houses with essentially no power, or unreliable power at best.
I'm not sure why you figure the specs that were good enough for sugar last year are not good enough this year, but I've been ignoring the sugar lists for a while, so you might be right. The original intent was otherwise, however.
With Japanese, technical stuff in a field you're familiar with tends to be easier than newspapers, in my experienc. Japanese does have katakana, and Chinese doesn't have anything comparable, so when they convert technical words to Chinese, it's not nearly as straightforward. But you still have the advantage of context, that you probably won't have for most of the newspaper. So I suggest, if you've just automatically assumed and not bothered trying, give it a try.
Well, here's one data point against your assertion.
I hate plugins.
Of course, I'm also the kind of guy who, if his wife would let him, take the family to the mountains to live off the land. You know, the kind of guy who, when the TV broke, just never bothered to fix or replace it.
Freedom is just another word for knowing what you have to lose where, and for being having the will to sacrifice one thing for another.
Freedom does not mean you can have it all, have it now, and have it without paying the price.
You are free when you know the real costs and are willing to pay them.
But, when selfish and arbitrary humans decide to claim dibs on the right to force you to pay costs that have nothing to do with reality, freedom is the ability to tell them to go take a long hike off a short pier.
When the surrounding society supports those who attempt to assess such unreal costs against members of the society, that society is not free. Individuals who are willing to be martyrs are still free within that society, but the society is not free.
"Commercial" software tends to hide a huge component of the real cost of software. It always builds on things that have been built before, and it almost never pays its dues to those who have laid the foundations on which it is built. The value of the contribution cannot be assessed because the contribution itself cannot be legally and freely inspected. And it usually claims rights to be paid well in excess of the value of its contribution.
Free software, whether BSD/MIT persuasion or GPL persuasion, recognizes that its roots are in the common body of technology, and it returns value to the surrounding society in two ways. One is that it forestalls attempts to make unreal claims. The other is that it explicitly declares the rights of individuals to modify the software according to the individual's use.
One of the real costs is the effort and time to understand the software enough to modify it yourself. Another is the willingness to walk alone when the main projects want to do things differently from the way you want to.
What does any of that have to do with the police?
If you want to imply or infer that laws and source code are similar, you had better be able to explain why the current overburden of (unConstitutional) US law is somehow legitimate.
If you can't do that, you'd better be willing to go to the law yourself. Take bad laws to the courts, support candidates who actually work for the real freedoms, become a candidate yourself.
And, yes, that is a lot like the free software communities.
Does that mean we can expect countries that depend heavily on seafood to start going senile sooner? With the average life expectancy in Japan, that's not good news.
Bill Gates could have gone from DOS's partial imitation of Unix to actually implementing Unix underneath his OSses. But, no, he had to have his company re-invent every wheel, building an OS with checkboxes for tasks that didn't need to be done instead of building an OS that allowed users to get their work done.
Everything his company has done is like that. Give middle management something to do, instead of giving people tools to work productively so they wouldn't tend as much to migrate to middle management.
Security is a joke because of things like MUAs and web browsers (and file system browsers!) oriented more towards giving other people control of bits and pieces of the user's workstation. Outlook? Sure. It is built precisely for letting admins and advertisers dictate what the user sees. If the user can't control it, there's no way to secure it.
I am not jealous of a man who has succeeded at nothing more than polluting his own industry.
He founded and grew Microsoft from a small group of friends to one of the largest companies in the world.
And?
He brought computers to the masses.
I tend to thing rather that he has been doing his best to keep real computers out of the hands of the masses.
But, I admit, I may have a different definition of "real computer" than you. I tend to think of a thermostat as a real computer. It's a tool, not a mechanic circus act trainer.
He has donated billions to charitable causes.
Billions that some people say he never should have had.
He was named one of the most influential people by Time magazine numerous times.
And?
He has been featured as one of Time magazine's people of the year.
You like to repeat yourself. Is Time your scripture?
He was the richest man in the world for 12 years or so.
And?
He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire.
Some Americans would have politely refuse on principle.
At least, that should keep him from running for president, shouldn't it?
He was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle.
And?
He has been happily married for over 14 years and has 3 children.
Hmm. I have been (relatively) happily married for over 15 years, but I only have two children.
Okay, that's an accomplishment. Let's give both of us an award for it.
He is incredibly smart.
Well, as my wife sometimes says, there are a lot of dumb geniuses out there.
I mean, maybe he is smart. But what does that mean? Should it mean he should have been smart enough to (1) not foist the horrors of MSWindows on the world? and (2) not attempt to keep that cancerous monopoly?
And in the end, he really doesn't seem like a showy or arrogant person. I think that might say a lot more about what he has accomplished than anything else.
Showy?
Matter of opinion, I won't argue.
Ostentatious?
What kind of house does he live in?
Arrogant?... erm...
Now, what have you personally achieved?
Well, he re-implemented BASIC in 4K on an early ALTAIR. He made a lot of money.
I re-implement fig-FORTH on a late 6809. I didn't make a lot of money.
I mean, sure, fair use back then sort of allowed what they did with BASIC, but they sure were never anxious to give credit where credit was due.
Not on anything.
And if you think MSWindows was not "sincere flattery", well, you've never written apps in both Macintosh and MSWindows. (And MSWindows is such a pain to interface with. Unless you like copy/paste/chisel programming. I mean, yeah, the Macintosh system was all "framework this" and "framework that", but MFC? Copy, paste, chisel, repeat.)
Slashdot Mirror
And points out another point some Christians disagree on.
Some of us believe God allows us to make mistakes. In certain special circumstances, He corrects us more carefully than in others, but, in the end, He doesn't apply force. (Impossible to force a person to be saved.) So, even in the copying and translation of the scriptures, there would be some errors.
Possibly a bit off-topic, but, FWIW, there's this prophet guy, Nephi, in the Book of Mormon, that records a vision of the primary events of the New Testament in what would be the early 5th century BC.
FWIW, I believe it.
Some people I talk with insist that it is more correct to call it the Revelation (singular) than to call it the Revelations (plural). I think there is meaning there, but I'm not sure the distinction is all that important to most people.
Yeah, the closer we can get to the original, the closer we can get to the Original.
But the King James version is itself considered to have been the work of inspired men, so there would be some point in putting more stock by the King James version than by random early texts whose authors may or may not be known to have been inspired.
(And then, there are some of us who believe that, even if you had the originals and were fluent in the original language, you'd still have to read under inspiration from God to get a full and perfect understanding of the text.)
Some of us cope by not believing in inerrancy in the first place.
And, for some of us, the idea that the copying and translation has introduced both unintentional errors and intentional variation is not particularly news.
I was just posting in the article about ways of making certs work, and I see this.
Am I the only one who sees a connection between this and the problems we have getting certificates to actually mean what they are supposed to mean?
Actually, I see several connections.
The problem here is that the commercial CAs are selling an artificial trust substitute.
Do you remember something called Aspartame? Sacharine?
Wonder Bread? (Well, my dad called that a bread substitute, even though it isn't a sugar substitute.)
Substitutes don't work like the real thing, and often can cause damage when used like the real thing.
Certificates are set up in hierarchies. In most real hierarchies, I do not trust the guy at the top. In the real world, I (should) only trust the guys I know, and that maybe as far as I can throw them. I only trust each one in certain ways determined by my experience with her or him.
And, as we have witnessed in the current US political situation, when we start letting trust transit "up" a chain, we buy ourselves a world of hurt. That was what we/they were supposed to be getting away from when we/they wrote royalty out of the Constitution.
True? True.
Does that help explain why certificate use by browsers is so messed up?
There is no way for you to control the effective semantics of a certificate. That means that you effectively make the browser vendor your king.
Until that's fixed, the commercial CAs should, indeed, check all the information they say they check, but the end result is an artificial substitute for trust that is just barely enough to let your browser function meaningfully in the best of situations. Throw in a little malware, and there's not a lot of difference left between verisign and cacert.
I'd say more, but I think I'll go write a bolg about it.
It did not increase when Apple was making clones.
I hate to tell you this, but your friends are not the middle of the bell curve.
Truth be told, your friends' friends, that think they depend on your friends for computer help, are the middle of the bell curve. They are precisely the ones Jobs is holding out for. A bit at a time, the see the hassles your friends put themselves through for exactly what it is, and recognizing that they don't need it.
And your friends are eventually going to come to their senses and either offload the technical periphernalia they don't need, or come to their senses and run Linux.
I myself want Apple to sell niche boxes, PPC powered NAS+ boxes, ARM powered ultra-portables in the eeepc class, dedicated word processors (laptop with built-in printer) for the Japanese market, router boxes you can load your own OS on, ...
But that's not the way Jobs sees things, apparently.
They want to fight this battle.
Over and over and over and over and ...
It's a rather profitable battle to fight. Well, pwhateverstar is not so much so, but all the techs like yourself who think 10,000 computers is a large number of computers to sell are a prime source of ideas, and the war of words you (we?) engage in is a big part of where Steve gets his clues about which directions to head next.
I'm not sure Apple really wants to win this one easily.
?
Conventional desktops don't need expansion slots. In the current market, you are not a user of conventional desktops.
Everything your asking for is currently niche market. I'm not saying that's the way it should be. I'm not saying I don't wish Apple would through the niche markets a few bones.
Get the machine you want and load Fedora.
If you must have Apple's software, it's time to realize that, to a large extent, you're buying Steve's vision of a stylistic reduction of the human interface and the work environment. That requirements of such a reduction is by definition at direct odds with your desire to build a custom reduction that suits your own tastes. It's logically impossible to have both at once without having two computers.
Okay, so you loathe the Mac Mini.
I loathe it too, but primarily because Jobs "switched" without ever putting an MPC8641D in any model. (I'm not a fan of iNTEL, you see.)
As someone noted, the Mac mini sells pretty well. And they don't have a disproportionately large representation in the used hardware department.
So, your tastes are different from other people's tastes. No big deal.
However, if you look around the web, you can find people who tell how they do, in fact, expand the Mac Mini. Some people simply hang firewire drives on it. Yeah, yeah, 400MHz or something, but it's fast enough for most people who buy them.
Some people take the motherboard and electronics out of that little, stylized lunchbox, and install them in an ordinary whitebox case+PS. (I don't remember reading what such people do with the Mini's PS.)
You can expand the thing. You can even earn geek points doing so, although it's a bit harder than with x86 stuff.
The problem is not old or modified packages being supplied. That was somebody's early lazy reading.
This has been noted above, and I'll note it here to hopefully clog one loose parse.
The problem is the ability to harvest IP addresses of vulnerable machines, and the time it might (not) take to succeed in an attack.
In other words, before the package is updated.
1: Bad guys watch a perfectly good mirror sending updates out. They own the mirror, but they maintain it properly, so no one has reason to suspect the mirror is dangerous.
2: Bad guys have installed on the mirror a script that logs the IPs of machines downloading updates. The script probably analyzes the IPs, probes a little in a non-invasive way, then, when it finds something that looks like it has left the default port open to the internet, launches the attack. With a little luck (and a finite time to complete the update), the attack completes before the update.
It's a (well-known, really) window-of-opportunity issue, supposedly exacerbated by the volunteer nature of mirrors. Volunteerism is the so-called vulnerability.
The "workaround" is to (follow best practices and) shut down default ports. (This has also been mentioned above.) That will probably close the window of opportunity. And, then, there's also the technique of running incoming and outgoing ports on separate port numbers, etc.
If the attacker can't find your ssh port, it's going to bee difficult for him/her to take advantage of a vulnerability in ssh, etc.
Now, to consider why this is FUD against voluntarism, consider whether Microsoft's paid update network employees are paid enough to refrain from pulling a trick like this. Can money prevent this better than voluntarism can?
(There is also the issue of whether Microsoft can fix vulnerabilities in thei)r own update servers to avoid them getting owned between the vulnerability being discovered and the vulnerability being fixed..
Not in Japan.
The only way you can get the Linux version is to buy the MSWxp version. Then you install Linux yourself. Do you download Asus's version? No, of course not.
(Can you think of a reason geeks are buying the MSWxp version in Japan?)
Yes, maintaining personal freedom requires personal courage.
Yes, maintaining national freedom requires individuals maintaining personal freedom.
But there are limits. Particularly when the city manager or mayor is the boss that is checking your vote. He's not going to jail unless you can manage to get your situation and your evidence communicated up the line to a point where corruption has not taken hold. When the whole community has gone south, your defending your freedoms to death serves only as a lesson to others that, if they aren't prepared to die, they'd best abandon their freedoms.
There is a society where no one needs privacy, but that society is one where no one is still under the illusion that power over others can compensate for lack of self-control.
One of the things that keeps consumer prices high is that consumer oriented companies think that pushing the price below a certain point will ruin their profitability. (Sales channels, mostly, I think, but packaging and advertising, as well.) So they push the functionality up to keep the price up.
But, as far as used computers for the underprivileged, in yesterday's USofA, it worked because power is cheap and generally available. Also, the environment in the USofA tends not to be as punishing. (Although, in houses on the bad side of a West Texas town, you have cockroaches and sand and that mold in the dust from the refinery smoke, so it is not all roses.)
OLPCs are targeted at dirt floors and houses with essentially no power, or unreliable power at best.
I'm not sure why you figure the specs that were good enough for sugar last year are not good enough this year, but I've been ignoring the sugar lists for a while, so you might be right. The original intent was otherwise, however.
With Japanese, technical stuff in a field you're familiar with tends to be easier than newspapers, in my experienc. Japanese does have katakana, and Chinese doesn't have anything comparable, so when they convert technical words to Chinese, it's not nearly as straightforward. But you still have the advantage of context, that you probably won't have for most of the newspaper. So I suggest, if you've just automatically assumed and not bothered trying, give it a try.
Well, here's one data point against your assertion.
I hate plugins.
Of course, I'm also the kind of guy who, if his wife would let him, take the family to the mountains to live off the land. You know, the kind of guy who, when the TV broke, just never bothered to fix or replace it.
Freedom is just another word for knowing what you have to lose where, and for being having the will to sacrifice one thing for another.
Freedom does not mean you can have it all, have it now, and have it without paying the price.
You are free when you know the real costs and are willing to pay them.
But, when selfish and arbitrary humans decide to claim dibs on the right to force you to pay costs that have nothing to do with reality, freedom is the ability to tell them to go take a long hike off a short pier.
When the surrounding society supports those who attempt to assess such unreal costs against members of the society, that society is not free. Individuals who are willing to be martyrs are still free within that society, but the society is not free.
"Commercial" software tends to hide a huge component of the real cost of software. It always builds on things that have been built before, and it almost never pays its dues to those who have laid the foundations on which it is built. The value of the contribution cannot be assessed because the contribution itself cannot be legally and freely inspected. And it usually claims rights to be paid well in excess of the value of its contribution.
Free software, whether BSD/MIT persuasion or GPL persuasion, recognizes that its roots are in the common body of technology, and it returns value to the surrounding society in two ways. One is that it forestalls attempts to make unreal claims. The other is that it explicitly declares the rights of individuals to modify the software according to the individual's use.
One of the real costs is the effort and time to understand the software enough to modify it yourself. Another is the willingness to walk alone when the main projects want to do things differently from the way you want to.
What does any of that have to do with the police?
If you want to imply or infer that laws and source code are similar, you had better be able to explain why the current overburden of (unConstitutional) US law is somehow legitimate.
If you can't do that, you'd better be willing to go to the law yourself. Take bad laws to the courts, support candidates who actually work for the real freedoms, become a candidate yourself.
And, yes, that is a lot like the free software communities.
Well, at least it isn't quite as poisonous as Hg.
Does that mean we can expect countries that depend heavily on seafood to start going senile sooner? With the average life expectancy in Japan, that's not good news.
I should be posting this anonymous, of course.
Especially for a web server serving mostly static content?
Bill Gates could have gone from DOS's partial imitation of Unix to actually implementing Unix underneath his OSses. But, no, he had to have his company re-invent every wheel, building an OS with checkboxes for tasks that didn't need to be done instead of building an OS that allowed users to get their work done.
Everything his company has done is like that. Give middle management something to do, instead of giving people tools to work productively so they wouldn't tend as much to migrate to middle management.
Security is a joke because of things like MUAs and web browsers (and file system browsers!) oriented more towards giving other people control of bits and pieces of the user's workstation. Outlook? Sure. It is built precisely for letting admins and advertisers dictate what the user sees. If the user can't control it, there's no way to secure it.
I am not jealous of a man who has succeeded at nothing more than polluting his own industry.
He founded and grew Microsoft from a small group of friends to one of the largest companies in the world.
And?
He brought computers to the masses.
I tend to thing rather that he has been doing his best to keep real computers out of the hands of the masses.
But, I admit, I may have a different definition of "real computer" than you. I tend to think of a thermostat as a real computer. It's a tool, not a mechanic circus act trainer.
He has donated billions to charitable causes.
Billions that some people say he never should have had.
He was named one of the most influential people by Time magazine numerous times.
And?
He has been featured as one of Time magazine's people of the year.
You like to repeat yourself. Is Time your scripture?
He was the richest man in the world for 12 years or so.
And?
He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire.
Some Americans would have politely refuse on principle.
At least, that should keep him from running for president, shouldn't it?
He was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle.
And?
He has been happily married for over 14 years and has 3 children.
Hmm. I have been (relatively) happily married for over 15 years, but I only have two children.
Okay, that's an accomplishment. Let's give both of us an award for it.
He is incredibly smart.
Well, as my wife sometimes says, there are a lot of dumb geniuses out there.
I mean, maybe he is smart. But what does that mean? Should it mean he should have been smart enough to (1) not foist the horrors of MSWindows on the world? and (2) not attempt to keep that cancerous monopoly?
And in the end, he really doesn't seem like a showy or arrogant person. I think that might say a lot more about what he has accomplished than anything else.
Showy? ... erm ...
Matter of opinion, I won't argue.
Ostentatious?
What kind of house does he live in?
Arrogant?
Now, what have you personally achieved?
Well, he re-implemented BASIC in 4K on an early ALTAIR. He made a lot of money.
I re-implement fig-FORTH on a late 6809. I didn't make a lot of money.
He rode the wave. He got us out on the wave.
Then he got in his motorboat and left us behind in the undertow.
Get real.
I mean, sure, fair use back then sort of allowed what they did with BASIC, but they sure were never anxious to give credit where credit was due.
Not on anything.
And if you think MSWindows was not "sincere flattery", well, you've never written apps in both Macintosh and MSWindows. (And MSWindows is such a pain to interface with. Unless you like copy/paste/chisel programming. I mean, yeah, the Macintosh system was all "framework this" and "framework that", but MFC? Copy, paste, chisel, repeat.)