Hmmm, picture-hanging capabilities aside, his house also looks incredibly claustrophobic, like the walls are closing in... He seems to have no conception of the value of space -- or lines for that matter! To be honest, I'd also say it's downright ugly; it seems fiddly and aimless.
I was gonna ask "is this guy really an architect?!?", but I see from his web page that he's actually an artist or something. There are certainly a lot of bad architects out there, but I suppose they do teach you something in architecture school...:-)
It's not clear what the OP meant by "a Carly", but as far as I can tell, her name is associated these days with the concept of completely and utterly fucking over a previously reasonable (if slightly stodgy) company, carefully leaving no part left unfucked-over, and selling off the only slightly fucked-over parts for scrap -- and then buying other companies and fucking them over completely too. Any CEO can screw up a company, but the essence of Carly seems to lie in the pervasiveness and scale of the cock-up.
Jobs has done his share of stupid things, but clearly in those terms, the comparison simply doesn't work.
Sometimes, Jobs acts like... well... a "Carly Fiorina".
Except of course for the part where Jobs has guided his companies to wild success and critical acclaim, and Carly's destroyed all that comes before her.
'cept for that part, yeah, definitely you have a point. Maybe.
Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 1
Yes! That seems sooooo much better than Google's attempt (though Google's interface is very elegant). Please mod the parent up.
My main complaint with maps.google.com is that the maps seem so "dead" -- they contain roads, major bodies of water, "parks", and bugger-all else. I don't feel like I'm looking at a real place, and many of the cues I apparently use when looking at paper maps aren't being triggered.
Granted Google's just starting out, and something as incredible as what map.search.ch does might not be easy for the entire U.S., but I certainly hope Google can do better than they are.
[My worry is that Google will deem such a "roads and directions only" approach acceptable because their main market is the car-obsessed U.S.]
A better technical solution already exists; switch from e-mail to instant messaging within a company and save all your instant messages.
You've got to be kidding...
That's like switching to pogo sticks because you're afraid of car-jacking.
How about instead: (1) use less brain-dead mail clients, and (2) educate your employees so they're not (quite) so brain-dead themselves. The advantage of being a company is that you can actually do these sorts of things.
[I know, I know, some companies demand brain-death. I suppose it's pogo sticks for them.]
There wouldn't even be much OSS (at least collaborative) without svn... OK, there is CVS but...
Wow, least insightful comment ever...
Subversion is trying, but it's at best a footnote right now; CVS firmly rules the roost (despite all it's problems).
Morever, Subversion isn't particularly innovative -- indeed, their stated goal is to provide a conservative update to CVS (getting rid of CVS's more annoying problems while keeping the same basic model)!
If you want a truly innovative free-software source-control-system, check out GNU Arch or Darcs.
Yes, although many SGI fanboys blame the symptom and not the disease. (Understandable because everything was hunky-dory and then 3-4 years later they're dead.)
The thing is that everybody knew they couldn't just keep coasting; the question was what they should change to adapt for the future. They chose just about the worst possible route: partner with microsoft.
SGI was a big enough company that a software project like Fahrenheit wasn't that big of a deal.
What I've heard said is that they delayed thinking about better solutions because they thought Fahrenheit was "the future", whereas microsoft apparently never took it seriously at all (and so continued full speed ahead with their proprietary interfaces), and basically just strung SGI along.
Granted this is as much SGI's fault as microsoft's: (1) always hedge your bets, and (2) always assume microsoft is out to screw you.
Another good example is SGI. Their unix workstation business was doing great. Two years later it had totally cratered and they were pushing WinTel out of despiration.
Is that the sequence of events though?
My impression was that although there was always some doubt as to how long they could keep up their previous business model, their flirting with Intel and Microsoft was a large part of the problem -- it distracted their attention when they should have been focusing on the future, and they were totally out-maneuvered by their "partners" (remember the "Fahrenheit" debacle, where microsoft pretended to be cooperative, and then pulled out and left SGI hanging, having wasted a lot of valuable time?).
[A key business truth: "microsoft is not your partner".]
I wouldn't worry too much. If OSX succeeds wildly what will happen is that free software will change it's goals to adapt. For instance, replacing the unfree parts of OSX with something just as nice.
The cool thing about free software is that there is no bottom line -- you can keep hacking as long as you want.
To be honest, it might be really nice: being a unix system, Apple's software interfaces are much closer to those already used by most free software. Much free software makes no attempt to use MS interfaces, even if there would be "market share" advantages in doing so, because it's just too painful, and the MS interfaces are simply too weird and alien. Apple has a much better record of creating elegant and functional software, not just externally (as with the GUI), but internally as well.
most people who use linux aren't going into the kernel to fix major vulnerabilities and you know this. I have yet to meet a single linux user who makes major fixes to this like libraries or kernel problems. I"m sure they are out there, but they are a very small group.
I guess you don't have much experience with the linux kernel community.
Of course the average "uncle joe" user isn't going to hack the kernel, but there are a large number of people who do -- almost certainly vastly more than the number who hack on MS's kernel.
If you read the linux-kernel mailing list, there's an entire spectrum of people on there, from the super-hackers doing the most innovative work, to research groups who have used it to implement their ideas (it's easily available, and offers a chance for your work to find a greater audience), to college students saying things like "um, I found a typo in this comment".
The key is that the barrier to entry is extremely low; with something from microsoft your gonna need security clearance, NDAs, and management approval up the whazoo, but with linux you -- anybody -- can just look. My old manager, who doesn't even write code for a living, plays with the linux kernel in his spare time, and is periodically coming to me and asking random questions about how it works. It's pretty likely he's not going to change the world doing this (or even likely to post to the kernel mailing list), but what the hell, it's a toddle.
More importantly, a percentage of the people playing about actually do go on to be significant contributors, or just become part of the pool of people out there with "something of a clue".
The user interface for search is a text box with a submit button. Google did not invent it, and Google cannot lay claim to having "innovated it."
I think they deserve due credit for the unstinting minimalism of their search page though. I used altavista for years before google came along, and while the essential "UI" may have been simple, the page it was on was always messy and cluttered (they eventually redid their search page to mimic google of course). Google's page is far more usable for first time users, as it doesn't distract you with lots of extraneous crap.
[Altavista returned vastly inferior results too, of course.]
I think mail in the UK is unusually fast, maybe because of the country's small size and somewhat linear layout; it also used to be case (at when I lived in the UK) that many areas had twice-daily mail pickup and delivery, which really smooths things along.
I once bought a plane ticket while I was living in Edinburgh, from a company located in London (this was long ago, before internet travel agencies and the like). I was to pay by check.
I sent my check off one morning... and received the tickets in return the next morning! That is, I sent the check, they received it, made sure it was valid, and then sent the ticket, all within the space of a day! All using the normal postal service.
I think that will never happen. Apple is like Microsoft in disguise. Why did they chose a *BSD kernel? So that they can close it whenever they want.
This is completely confused.
The reason apple chose a Mach kernel (containing much BSD code, but not "a *BSD kernel" in the usual sense of "Net", "Free", or "Open"), is simple: OSX was pretty much taken wholesale from NeXTSTEP (remember NeXT, Jobs' other company [er, besides Pixar]?), and NeXT had used a Mach kernel since its inception in 1987 or whenever; if I remember correctly, it used Mach-specific features fairly heavily too. It probably would have been quite silly for them to use anything other than Mach for OSX, given the circumstances.
I'm sure Apple has some of the typical corporate ambivalence towards Free Software, but they're much better than most -- at the least, they contribute many changes to the gcc/gdb/&c toolchain, and morever, do it properly, and generally act as a "member of the community" in this area.
[I say this with some envy, as an employee of another company that does much internal modification of gcc and other GNU tools, but drags its heels absurdly when it comes to letting those changes be distributed widely -- much to their disadvantage! But corporate conservatism and utterly clueless legal deparments are a sad fact of life at big companies... believe me, Apple is an angel, comparatively speaking.]
Yeah, the Chinese Room is a truly embarrassing piece of confused fluff. I've always wondered how something so transparently wrong managed to get published in a peer-reviewed journal.
I attended his keynote to the developer community this morning, and quite frankly, I was amazed at the casual atmosphere and the low level of security.
Hmmm, maybe he liked that pie 7 years ago, and was kinda hoping for seconds...
Your macMiniScore++ statement needs to be qualified by an: if (buildFunds >= appleFunds)
I'm not so sure... after the Mini was announced, I looked at a bunch of professionally designed small-sized PCs people referenced as Mac Mini alternatives (cappuccino whatever, that sort of thing), and they were all pretty sucky compared to the M.M.
Naturally they all looked pretty dorky -- you don't expect random Taiwan PC houses to compete with Apple on that front -- but they were also all rather lacking in features as well: all had slow CPUs (much slower than a 1.25GHz PPC), bad graphics, etc.
I'd say these sort of comparisons, though they generally seemed intended to demonstrate that the M.M. is "just pretty", usually end up doing just the opposite, and confirm how good the M.M. really is (and I'm no Apple apologist -- I've never owned a Mac, or even used one very often). It's not the fastest computer out there in absolute terms, but given its design constraints, it's a bang-up job.
Maybe it's possible to cram a similar feature-set using PC standards into similar-sized case, but it doesn't look anywhere near as trivial as many people seem to think. I think Apple has genuinely upped the ante -- hopefully competition from the M.M. will pressure other tiny-PC makers into improving their rather anemic existing products.
I think the main problem is that many people still want their projects to be pretty portable, at least among unix variants. Once you start requiring people to have "super-duper-make" (requiring pyperl version X.Y.Z) installed, they often just give up on your software rather than deal with the hassle of installing whatever your favorite tool is.
Traditional make is a lowest-common-denominator, however much it sucks. GNU make is slowly becoming widespread enough that it may be a viable alternative.
The autotools are widespread for a similar reason, in that they try very hard to produce portable configure scripts.
[I don't have much experience with autoconf alternatives, but those I've seen -- e.g. imake and Larry Wall's Configure stuff -- suck even more than autoconf. It's sort of like democracy: the worst system there is, except for all the others:-]
For instance, Macs have a 'Return' key to add a new line of text and an 'Enter' key to send information to the computer. These are two very different and distinct functions, but on PCs, the 'Enter' key does both. The Macintosh way, in this case, just makes more sense.
Many keyboards predating the Mac had this feature. For instance, IBM's venerable and widespread 3270 terminal (first introduced in the early '70s!) had both Enter and Return keys. The DEC vt100 also did, although the vt100's enter key was located next to the keypad, not the main area (the 3270 had an Enter key in both places, in addition to the Return key).
It's like the difference between drawing a picture (word) and writing a program to draw a picture (latex) -- word may seem easier at first, but as soon as you want to change something non-trivial, or ensure some kind of consistency across a large document, well, you're screwed if you used word.
I dread getting documents in word because I know that it will look crappy and be damn near impossible to change in any non-trivial way.
Unfortunately many people are so fixated on the initial learning curve bump of something better like latex[*] that they'll invest insane amounts of effort into maintaining their word document, and the result will still suck.
[*] Yeah, latex/tex is pretty horrible in many ways too (e.g., the macro language from hell, whose main design goal seems to have been efficient execution on computers from the 1970s:-), but the underlying concept is so superior to word that its flaws pale in comparison. There are interesting competitors to latex like "lout", but they all seem to have their annoying aspects (for instance lout's formatting language is rather too verbose and fiddly -- it insists that you explicitly mark each paragraph as a paragraph using @P -- and the author used !@#$ capital letters for even common formatting directives).
I would describe it more as a typical Kutaragi ego-spew: "I am a super-genius, how dare you question the shoddy products resulting from my complete disregard for anything except hype! Quality? I spit on quality!"
BTW, I've heard from people at Sony that everybody there hates Kutaragi too, but they just can't resist the money he makes them...
they used to make playing cards way back when (maybe they still do in Japan?)
Many stores in Japan certainly still sell Nintendo brand playing cards (e.g., Lawson). I wouldn't be surprised if the name recognition from their success in video games has helped them in that market too.
For some reason, I've ended up with a lot of Sony phones, from cheapo handsets to expensive zillion function wireless things, and every single one has failed massively after a fairly short time (I find it amazing that something as simple as a wired handset can actually fail!).
I understand that less fashionable Sony product lines like phones are made in Malaysia (e.g.) and not well constructed, but this definitely doesn't help their reputation -- I've owned similar "made in low-salaryistan" phones from other Japanese companies, and they've seemed quite sturdy and reliable. Sony's higher-end consumer stuff has also acquired a rather dodgy reputation, e.g. the "breaks after a week" reputation of their laptops has kept me from buying, despite the temptation of wonderfully small size.
Sony still generally has great industrial design, and research teams doing a lot of interesting work, but my impression is that they've all but discarded that linchpin of Japanese success, product quality. Sony's newest and most successful division, SCEI, emphasizes massive hype over everything else (even their industrial design sucks by Sony standards) in selling the playstation. Is SCEI indicative of "the new Sony" -- all sizzle, and no steak?
If being considered open-source requires that the ideology of RMS be accepted hook, line, and sinker, then it should at least be called by an ideological name. When I refer to open-source software, I mean it in a much more broad sense (as the term implies).
It has nothing to do with "the ideology of RMS" (note that RMS explicitly denies any connection with "open source"!), it has to do with using the term with the same meaning as others do, so (get this) they can understand you.
In other words, there's an existing meaning, "in the broad sense", of the term open source, outside of any formal definitions, and wacky "grandmothers only!" licenses by companies trying to con people into thinking they're open source companies, don't qualify.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, picture-hanging capabilities aside, his house also looks incredibly claustrophobic, like the walls are closing in... He seems to have no conception of the value of space -- or lines for that matter! To be honest, I'd also say it's downright ugly; it seems fiddly and aimless.
:-)
I was gonna ask "is this guy really an architect?!?", but I see from his web page that he's actually an artist or something. There are certainly a lot of bad architects out there, but I suppose they do teach you something in architecture school...
It's not clear what the OP meant by "a Carly", but as far as I can tell, her name is associated these days with the concept of completely and utterly fucking over a previously reasonable (if slightly stodgy) company, carefully leaving no part left unfucked-over, and selling off the only slightly fucked-over parts for scrap -- and then buying other companies and fucking them over completely too. Any CEO can screw up a company, but the essence of Carly seems to lie in the pervasiveness and scale of the cock-up.
Jobs has done his share of stupid things, but clearly in those terms, the comparison simply doesn't work.
Sometimes, Jobs acts like ... well ... a "Carly Fiorina".
Except of course for the part where Jobs has guided his companies to wild success and critical acclaim, and Carly's destroyed all that comes before her.
'cept for that part, yeah, definitely you have a point. Maybe.
Ok, you don't have a point at all. Never mind.
And unfortunately we can't forget:
insecure buggy software in redmond
Yes! That seems sooooo much better than Google's attempt (though Google's interface is very elegant). Please mod the parent up.
My main complaint with maps.google.com is that the maps seem so "dead" -- they contain roads, major bodies of water, "parks", and bugger-all else. I don't feel like I'm looking at a real place, and many of the cues I apparently use when looking at paper maps aren't being triggered.
Granted Google's just starting out, and something as incredible as what map.search.ch does might not be easy for the entire U.S., but I certainly hope Google can do better than they are.
[My worry is that Google will deem such a "roads and directions only" approach acceptable because their main market is the car-obsessed U.S.]
A better technical solution already exists; switch from e-mail to instant messaging within a company and save all your instant messages.
You've got to be kidding...
That's like switching to pogo sticks because you're afraid of car-jacking.
How about instead: (1) use less brain-dead mail clients, and (2) educate your employees so they're not (quite) so brain-dead themselves. The advantage of being a company is that you can actually do these sorts of things.
[I know, I know, some companies demand brain-death. I suppose it's pogo sticks for them.]
There wouldn't even be much OSS (at least collaborative) without svn... OK, there is CVS but...
Wow, least insightful comment ever...
Subversion is trying, but it's at best a footnote right now; CVS firmly rules the roost (despite all it's problems).
Morever, Subversion isn't particularly innovative -- indeed, their stated goal is to provide a conservative update to CVS (getting rid of CVS's more annoying problems while keeping the same basic model)!
If you want a truly innovative free-software source-control-system, check out GNU Arch or Darcs.
Yes, although many SGI fanboys blame the symptom and not the disease. (Understandable because everything was hunky-dory and then 3-4 years later they're dead.)
The thing is that everybody knew they couldn't just keep coasting; the question was what they should change to adapt for the future. They chose just about the worst possible route: partner with microsoft.
SGI was a big enough company that a software project like Fahrenheit wasn't that big of a deal.
What I've heard said is that they delayed thinking about better solutions because they thought Fahrenheit was "the future", whereas microsoft apparently never took it seriously at all (and so continued full speed ahead with their proprietary interfaces), and basically just strung SGI along.
Granted this is as much SGI's fault as microsoft's: (1) always hedge your bets, and (2) always assume microsoft is out to screw you.
Another good example is SGI. Their unix workstation business was doing great. Two years later it had totally cratered and they were pushing WinTel out of despiration.
Is that the sequence of events though?
My impression was that although there was always some doubt as to how long they could keep up their previous business model, their flirting with Intel and Microsoft was a large part of the problem -- it distracted their attention when they should have been focusing on the future, and they were totally out-maneuvered by their "partners" (remember the "Fahrenheit" debacle, where microsoft pretended to be cooperative, and then pulled out and left SGI hanging, having wasted a lot of valuable time?).
[A key business truth: "microsoft is not your partner".]
I wouldn't worry too much. If OSX succeeds wildly what will happen is that free software will change it's goals to adapt. For instance, replacing the unfree parts of OSX with something just as nice.
The cool thing about free software is that there is no bottom line -- you can keep hacking as long as you want.
To be honest, it might be really nice: being a unix system, Apple's software interfaces are much closer to those already used by most free software. Much free software makes no attempt to use MS interfaces, even if there would be "market share" advantages in doing so, because it's just too painful, and the MS interfaces are simply too weird and alien. Apple has a much better record of creating elegant and functional software, not just externally (as with the GUI), but internally as well.
most people who use linux aren't going into the kernel to fix major vulnerabilities and you know this. I have yet to meet a single linux user who makes major fixes to this like libraries or kernel problems. I"m sure they are out there, but they are a very small group.
I guess you don't have much experience with the linux kernel community.
Of course the average "uncle joe" user isn't going to hack the kernel, but there are a large number of people who do -- almost certainly vastly more than the number who hack on MS's kernel.
If you read the linux-kernel mailing list, there's an entire spectrum of people on there, from the super-hackers doing the most innovative work, to research groups who have used it to implement their ideas (it's easily available, and offers a chance for your work to find a greater audience), to college students saying things like "um, I found a typo in this comment".
The key is that the barrier to entry is extremely low; with something from microsoft your gonna need security clearance, NDAs, and management approval up the whazoo, but with linux you -- anybody -- can just look. My old manager, who doesn't even write code for a living, plays with the linux kernel in his spare time, and is periodically coming to me and asking random questions about how it works. It's pretty likely he's not going to change the world doing this (or even likely to post to the kernel mailing list), but what the hell, it's a toddle.
More importantly, a percentage of the people playing about actually do go on to be significant contributors, or just become part of the pool of people out there with "something of a clue".
The user interface for search is a text box with a submit button. Google did not invent it, and Google cannot lay claim to having "innovated it."
I think they deserve due credit for the unstinting minimalism of their search page though. I used altavista for years before google came along, and while the essential "UI" may have been simple, the page it was on was always messy and cluttered (they eventually redid their search page to mimic google of course). Google's page is far more usable for first time users, as it doesn't distract you with lots of extraneous crap.
[Altavista returned vastly inferior results too, of course.]
I think mail in the UK is unusually fast, maybe because of the country's small size and somewhat linear layout; it also used to be case (at when I lived in the UK) that many areas had twice-daily mail pickup and delivery, which really smooths things along.
... and received the tickets in return the next morning! That is, I sent the check, they received it, made sure it was valid, and then sent the ticket, all within the space of a day! All using the normal postal service.
I once bought a plane ticket while I was living in Edinburgh, from a company located in London (this was long ago, before internet travel agencies and the like). I was to pay by check.
I sent my check off one morning
I was very impressed...
I think that will never happen. Apple is like Microsoft in disguise. Why did they chose a *BSD kernel? So that they can close it whenever they want.
This is completely confused.
The reason apple chose a Mach kernel (containing much BSD code, but not "a *BSD kernel" in the usual sense of "Net", "Free", or "Open"), is simple: OSX was pretty much taken wholesale from NeXTSTEP (remember NeXT, Jobs' other company [er, besides Pixar]?), and NeXT had used a Mach kernel since its inception in 1987 or whenever; if I remember correctly, it used Mach-specific features fairly heavily too. It probably would have been quite silly for them to use anything other than Mach for OSX, given the circumstances.
I'm sure Apple has some of the typical corporate ambivalence towards Free Software, but they're much better than most -- at the least, they contribute many changes to the gcc/gdb/&c toolchain, and morever, do it properly, and generally act as a "member of the community" in this area.
[I say this with some envy, as an employee of another company that does much internal modification of gcc and other GNU tools, but drags its heels absurdly when it comes to letting those changes be distributed widely -- much to their disadvantage! But corporate conservatism and utterly clueless legal deparments are a sad fact of life at big companies... believe me, Apple is an angel, comparatively speaking.]
Yeah, the Chinese Room is a truly embarrassing piece of confused fluff. I've always wondered how something so transparently wrong managed to get published in a peer-reviewed journal.
I attended his keynote to the developer community this morning, and quite frankly, I was amazed at the casual atmosphere and the low level of security.
Hmmm, maybe he liked that pie 7 years ago, and was kinda hoping for seconds...
Your macMiniScore++ statement needs to be qualified by an: if (buildFunds >= appleFunds)
I'm not so sure... after the Mini was announced, I looked at a bunch of professionally designed small-sized PCs people referenced as Mac Mini alternatives (cappuccino whatever, that sort of thing), and they were all pretty sucky compared to the M.M.
Naturally they all looked pretty dorky -- you don't expect random Taiwan PC houses to compete with Apple on that front -- but they were also all rather lacking in features as well: all had slow CPUs (much slower than a 1.25GHz PPC), bad graphics, etc.
I'd say these sort of comparisons, though they generally seemed intended to demonstrate that the M.M. is "just pretty", usually end up doing just the opposite, and confirm how good the M.M. really is (and I'm no Apple apologist -- I've never owned a Mac, or even used one very often). It's not the fastest computer out there in absolute terms, but given its design constraints, it's a bang-up job.
Maybe it's possible to cram a similar feature-set using PC standards into similar-sized case, but it doesn't look anywhere near as trivial as many people seem to think. I think Apple has genuinely upped the ante -- hopefully competition from the M.M. will pressure other tiny-PC makers into improving their rather anemic existing products.
Bravo, Apple.
I think the main problem is that many people still want their projects to be pretty portable, at least among unix variants. Once you start requiring people to have "super-duper-make" (requiring pyperl version X.Y.Z) installed, they often just give up on your software rather than deal with the hassle of installing whatever your favorite tool is.
:-]
Traditional make is a lowest-common-denominator, however much it sucks. GNU make is slowly becoming widespread enough that it may be a viable alternative.
The autotools are widespread for a similar reason, in that they try very hard to produce portable configure scripts.
[I don't have much experience with autoconf alternatives, but those I've seen -- e.g. imake and Larry Wall's Configure stuff -- suck even more than autoconf. It's sort of like democracy: the worst system there is, except for all the others
For instance, Macs have a 'Return' key to add a new line of text and an 'Enter' key to send information to the computer. These are two very different and distinct functions, but on PCs, the 'Enter' key does both. The Macintosh way, in this case, just makes more sense.
Many keyboards predating the Mac had this feature. For instance, IBM's venerable and widespread 3270 terminal (first introduced in the early '70s!) had both Enter and Return keys. The DEC vt100 also did, although the vt100's enter key was located next to the keypad, not the main area (the 3270 had an Enter key in both places, in addition to the Return key).
Amen!
:-), but the underlying concept is so superior to word that its flaws pale in comparison. There are interesting competitors to latex like "lout", but they all seem to have their annoying aspects (for instance lout's formatting language is rather too verbose and fiddly -- it insists that you explicitly mark each paragraph as a paragraph using @P -- and the author used !@#$ capital letters for even common formatting directives).
It's like the difference between drawing a picture (word) and writing a program to draw a picture (latex) -- word may seem easier at first, but as soon as you want to change something non-trivial, or ensure some kind of consistency across a large document, well, you're screwed if you used word.
I dread getting documents in word because I know that it will look crappy and be damn near impossible to change in any non-trivial way.
Unfortunately many people are so fixated on the initial learning curve bump of something better like latex[*] that they'll invest insane amounts of effort into maintaining their word document, and the result will still suck.
[*] Yeah, latex/tex is pretty horrible in many ways too (e.g., the macro language from hell, whose main design goal seems to have been efficient execution on computers from the 1970s
Isn't Google the new Microsoft?
Of course not.
Google, unlike Microsoft, does almost everything they attempt extremely well.
And of course (also unlike microsoft), they're not evil.
I would describe it more as a typical Kutaragi ego-spew: "I am a super-genius, how dare you question the shoddy products resulting from my complete disregard for anything except hype! Quality? I spit on quality!"
BTW, I've heard from people at Sony that everybody there hates Kutaragi too, but they just can't resist the money he makes them...
they used to make playing cards way back when (maybe they still do in Japan?)
Many stores in Japan certainly still sell Nintendo brand playing cards (e.g., Lawson). I wouldn't be surprised if the name recognition from their success in video games has helped them in that market too.
For some reason, I've ended up with a lot of Sony phones, from cheapo handsets to expensive zillion function wireless things, and every single one has failed massively after a fairly short time (I find it amazing that something as simple as a wired handset can actually fail!).
I understand that less fashionable Sony product lines like phones are made in Malaysia (e.g.) and not well constructed, but this definitely doesn't help their reputation -- I've owned similar "made in low-salaryistan" phones from other Japanese companies, and they've seemed quite sturdy and reliable. Sony's higher-end consumer stuff has also acquired a rather dodgy reputation, e.g. the "breaks after a week" reputation of their laptops has kept me from buying, despite the temptation of wonderfully small size.
Sony still generally has great industrial design, and research teams doing a lot of interesting work, but my impression is that they've all but discarded that linchpin of Japanese success, product quality. Sony's newest and most successful division, SCEI, emphasizes massive hype over everything else (even their industrial design sucks by Sony standards) in selling the playstation. Is SCEI indicative of "the new Sony" -- all sizzle, and no steak?
If being considered open-source requires that the ideology of RMS be accepted hook, line, and sinker, then it should at least be called by an ideological name. When I refer to open-source software, I mean it in a much more broad sense (as the term implies).
It has nothing to do with "the ideology of RMS" (note that RMS explicitly denies any connection with "open source"!), it has to do with using the term with the same meaning as others do, so (get this) they can understand you.
In other words, there's an existing meaning, "in the broad sense", of the term open source, outside of any formal definitions, and wacky "grandmothers only!" licenses by companies trying to con people into thinking they're open source companies, don't qualify.
Sorry.