"There's TONS of FPS games that have realistic damage models."

Of course. I've lost count of the number of computer games that actually injure or kill you.

"People are not principled enough to rigourously hold to boycotts. I tell people not to bother with them..."

Good job these helpless people have you around to do their thinking for them.

"In short: You fail web page design, so who the fuck cares if your page is 10K?"

As a normal human being possessing the ability to read, I found his site perfectly accessible, and it gave me a decent amount of information about the guy in a quick, concise manner.

If I was to be snarky here, I would say something like:

In short: You fail meaningful criticism, and who the fuck cares if his "anchors span multiple sentences rather than just a few semantically relevant key words"?

"If you can't make a point without insulting something then your point isn't that good to begin with."

"At the very least learn about whatever you are insulting so you don't look stupid and we could take you seriously."

Interesting two sentences to write next to each other.

"People were actually quite civilized, often more so than today."

"A vigilante hanging of people that wouldn't conform to the norms of society was often performed during a Sunday picnic, so the children would have an up close and personal experience....."

How very civilized.

"Except for the services part, Windows memory management has been improving a lot with each version."

Are you forgetting Vista? It's only two versions of Windows ago. Windows 7 certainly improved on Vista, but Vista's memory requirements were hugely greater than XP's, for seemingly little benefit (despite all the little tricks they introduced).

"The browser and OS reserves that memory because it speeds up things. If the memory is needed elsewhere, it can and will free it up."

I understand the concept of RAM caching - it's not exactly rocket science. But how does Firefox/Opera/IE free up memory when the OS needs it? What is the mechanism by which the OS tells the browser to free memory?

I hope you're not referring to paging. Excessive paging to and from disk as you switch between applications is not a sign of a well-performing system.

Part of what has made IBM and Apple so successful (and Nintendo too), is that they don't just "sell tech".

In Apple's case it's the whole experience of using a (usually portable) device to play music, surf online, communicate.....a whole range of activities that people are interested in doing. They don't just make those things possible, they concentrate on making the whole process a) simple; and b) enjoyable. Too many of their competitors have concentrated solely on selling the tech and letting the users try and work out the rest for themselves.

In IBM's case they've concentrated on selling business solutions. Yes, it's now a horrid buzz-phrase, but IBM decided early on that just selling tech wasn't enough. Most companies would rather not get involved in working out what they need for themselves, buying the appropriate tech, plugging it together and getting it to work. Getting this stuff right is hard. They would much rather have a company like IBM come in and just sort out the whole problem the company is trying to address by investing in tech. This is what IBM does, and companies pay big money for it, because the whole problem is taken off their hands - and IBM is one of the few companies left with enough reputation that companies would be prepared to trust them with something like this.

Us techies often forget that for the majority of people tech is a means to an end - not an end in itself.

How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?

Smartphones these days are close to general-purpose computers (albeit with mobile telephony hardware), but these companies have spent tens if not hundreds of man-years trying and failing to do little more than port an already-written OS to a new hardware platform and add a few simple apps (phone dialer/receiver, contact database, appointments/reminder app, and port a browser and media player).

Why is it so difficult?

Hell, RockBox is more impressive (OK, it's not for phones, but it IS for mobile audio hardware), and:
a) They had to write their own OS;
b) They're all part-time volunteers;
c) RockBox probably runs on a greater selection of hardware than all of the non-Android Linux mobile phone efforts.

The main challenges I can see with developing an OS+interface for a phone are the small form-factor and the power usage. So this latest attempt is going to run as much as possible in HTML5 in a browser on top of the actual OS, with all the extra CPU power and power-sapping mobile network comms that that implies.

Un-bloody-believable.

Perhaps you should try Cygwin's mintty

From that page: "Mintty is based on code from PuTTY 0.60 by Simon Tatham and team. The program icon comes from KDE's Konsole. Mintty ties directly into Cygwin and leaves out PuTTY's networking functionality, which is provided by Cygwin's openssh and inetutils packages instead. A number of PuTTY issues have been addressed."

They really should make it Cygwin's default terminal, if they haven't already.

Great attitude there. That would never foster any feelings of resentment against your country, oh no.

Too late: his credibility is lost :D

Interesting comment. Thanks.

I'd love to know whether there's something about the tech industry that makes it susceptible to this level of mismanagement, as so many tech companies seem to have been badly mismanaged over the years.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Andy Grove at Intel (and perhaps Lou Gerstner turning around IBM) stand out amongst the rest as inspired CEOs, even if some of their business practises have left a little to be desired at times. But so many other once-dominant-in-their-field companies have just seemed to crash and burn.

Maybe I'm wrong and all other industries suffer from the same level of management problems - it's just that the technology industry is the one I'm most familiar with.

Sounds like yet another (pretty poor) attempt to tell this old chestnut again:

Miracle Carburetor

Agreed. Was it really that difficult for them to hold their hands up and say "sorry guys, we goofed with that last idea about version numbers. Now we've listened to what people have been saying, and their reasons for saying it, and we're going back to the previous way".