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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the old (rumored) exchange between GM and Bill Gates...

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/crash.htm

> For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

> Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.

> Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

And let us not forget that this one came true. (My Mazda, for example.)

> You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

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This reminds me of the classic Neal Stephenson extended essay on computer interfaces, In the beginning was the commandline, it’s too long to excerpt here, but the basic gist was if computers were cars, Windows was a station wagon that was practical but broke down a lot, Macs were expensive Euro sedans, BeOS was a batmobile for car enthusiasts who probably already owned the station wagon, and Linux was a free tank that took a lot of training to operate and wasn’t sold through dealerships, but given away by a ragtag group of volunteers in a field.

http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html

My boss 10 years ago had a Ford Fusion with a Microsoft dashboard. Sometimes it would just go blank and he had to power cycle the car.

How was he as a boss?

I liked working for him.

I don’t understand this question. It reads like my comment could be interpreted in some other way than I intended but I can’t figure out what that would be.

Don't get worked up about it : I meant to suggest he had poor judgement ( in choosing Ford _and MS ).

The implication is pretty overt, no? Asking OP to explain almost seems deliberately obtuse.

You mentioned, in a decidedly technical forum, that a superior at work made a somewhat questionable tech-related decision by owning a car with dashboard software by a company whose software is commonly joked to crash frequently and be less-than-reliable. I'm sure it was purely in lighthearted jest, but not exactly subtle given context. I'm sure your boss was/is a nice person.

I made no such implication and frankly I am astonished it would be interpreted that way, although others seem to have done the same. I'll try to avoid causing this kind of confusion in the future.

To clarify:

The context was the old jokes about putting tech in cars and how some of it is coming true. I cited an example of that happening. It happened to be my boss' car when I witnessed it.

I simply shared a personal anecdote that seemed relevant to the conversation. His car had a dashboard that crashed. He told me about it on the way to lunch. Then later when I was riding in his car it happened.

I made and make no judgement about him as a person, technologist or manager based on the kind of car he drove. Honestly that thought hadn't even crossed my mind. This is why I asked. I'm astounded I have to explain this on HN of all places but here we are.

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