HN user
I'm contemptuous of his coding practice, not his writing or grammar. His writing is pleasant to read... but so what? where are the multiple layers of defense standing between a simple syntactical or semantic error and a full scale business-impacting technical fuck up. that is what I meant by being vigilant and paranoid.
> I for one would speculate, not to sound harsh, that if you haven't made silly errors like this then you haven't been around the block enough times.
on the other hand, those of us who have been around the block enough times have almost certainly encountered co-workers who were bright, talented, cute, whatever - but at the end of the day were just ... sloppy ... lazy ... careless ... in their approach. It's a personality thing - they had nice childhoods, they never learned to by hyper-vigilant and paranoid, and as a consequence... they write buggy code that can't be trusted.
Is it wrong to wonder about Dennis' personal life? Did he marry, have kids, take a lover? Like to garden, travel, read? He is such an important and influential figure in the history of computing, but it feels like we know little about him beyond his professional accomplishments.
Is it conceivable an organization like the CIA has deeply 'undercover' operatives, who are living in foreign countries, as citizens of those countries, working as teachers, doctors, milkmen, etc., but who could be pressed into service when circumstances required?
> It's hard for me to get the impression that his actions are anything but calculated.
but calculated to what end? are his motivations as crude as simply wanting to draw the world's attention towards him?
> Apple can't hurt Google by undermining it profits because it doesn't make the hardware and it gives the software away.
Apple can undermine Google's profits from mobile advertising, by giving the advertising revenue from iAds away (keep a small cut, give the rest to developers.) Google is trying to commoditize hardware, but Apple can do the equivalent with respect to advertising revenues. Apple doesn't need to make money from ads, google does.