Agree. I've hired dozens of programmers and I've never put any stock in certifications. I'm much more interested in the projects you've worked on and the level at which you can talk about them. If you've spent years working through hard problems those will be seared into your brain and you'll have a grasp on them that's much deeper than what you get from passing a certification.

Totally agree. The expressive languages that let you do a lot with relatively few lines often count on implicit behaviours that are not at all obvious unless you are familiar with them. It's a drag on coming into someone else's codebase and understanding what's going on. "Oh, I see, you're counting on this to fail in *this* certain way such that *that* happens."

You need a customer to drive the production of those displays. If no one steps up and demands them, no one will bother building them. Apple deserves credit for that, don't you think?

I totally agree. The "solution" he describes at the end is actually formalizing the fragmentation and accepting it! It does help the end user by hiding it, but it doesn't really solve the fundamental issue.

I think Steve was actually noting that Flash is closed in a way similar to Apple as a counter to arguments Adobe (and friends) have made about Flash being "open." It's more of a "they aren't any more open than we are" kind of argument. Not a "closed=bad" argument.

You're absolutely right on the misspelling of "Blu-ray", except you spelled it wrong too! Check it out:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=blu-ray%2C+hd-dvd&c tab=0&geo=all&date=all

Now who can say HD-DVD has the uncontested Google Trends lead (however much that means), looking at that graph with both terms spelled correctly?