Except for point one which is entirely ludicrous I can understand your school's position with computers. IT IS A SMALL PRIVATE CATHOLIC COLLEGE. Is that so hard for you to grasp? They don't get beaucoup cash from the state for networking equipment and internet access. There's no reason for you to be running servers on your school's network, that is not some right you incur merely for paying tuition. You also don't need a shitload of computers in your dorms. What use is having three systems all lying around plugged in. Oh yeah, back to your second point, you can't run servers which is one of the few reasons you'd need multiple systems in your room. I suppose you didn't read the article last month about the computer department hell week. Students coming in with shit network cards that end up taking portions of the entire network down or just plain causing grief to the already overworked IT staff. Complaining about trading MP3s goes back to my first point, a private school doesn't have the resources to let you max out their fucking T1 all day long.
And your problem with capitalism is exactly? You sound like you're pissed you don't know how to make it into the top 5%. Do you think that some other non capitalistic system is run by benevolent fucking people? That is a pretty ridiculous assumption. Your years of direct experience, observation, and the realities of capitalist dogma pin you at about 16 and you've just begun to question your social value system. Good job dude I hope your philosophies work out for you. Just remember though, I'm a fan of capitalism and I'm armed and I'm not the only one. So if you're looking for a change in lifestyle you should look into relocating. Lots of dudes throughout history have had similar rants about free markets being unfair, they were usually beneficiaries of said markets and didn't know the feeling of going from having nothing and with some ingenuity ending up with alot more than they started with. There's little mobility in a system with articially imposed demand for production. Greed is a much better motivator.
Surrey's technologies are still pretty experimental and rely in some pretty difficult formation flying. Nanosats don't carry much in the way of tranceiving equipment and if you read the datasheets they carry uncooled CMOS cameras and basically are good for inspecing other spacecraft they're in formation with. Other formation flying ideas are lots of small birds with one or two tranceivers each that fly in formation and can output at least 10 watts PEP. You could have one sat with an uplink receiver that beams data to the rest of the birds in formation and they downlink different pieces of the signal on their tranceivers. Basically breaking a single comsat into a bunch of small pieces so if one component fails you could deorbit it hopefully and replace it by pushing another bird into the formation or having a backup fill its place. Nobody's really done this yet because formation flying in orbit is still a complex procedure and until recently birds weren't smart enough to navigate themselves. Also keep in mind that Surrey's sats are still all experimental and are using equipment that hasn't been recognized as spaceworthy quite yet. Trying to sell someone a satellite that has a 10% chance of working after a good sized solar storm won't be too effective. I think it is sort of interesting and cool they're powering their birds with StrongARMs.
Microsats would be cooler if there were cheaper ways of getting them into orbit. Even if you get the bird's weight down to as little as possible you still need a deployment module. Then you've got this thousands of pounds of rocket to get a little bird into orbit. Your launch cost will still be in the order of a thousand dollars a kilogram if not more (especially if your rocket is wasting all of its power getting a tiny 100kg bird into orbit). Nearly all of the work being done at Marshall SFC has to do with the reduction of cost with any and all ground launches including getting birds in the air for alot less than they currently cost. They changed their site around or I'd put some useful links from there like the magnetic linear accelerator. It looks like a fucking brochure now. Maybe if a couple of us donate ten bucks to them they'll put some useful information back there. One can only dream I suppose.
What? I think you need to put your geometric scales back where you found them because I don't think you're using them correctly. Making smaller sats doesn't lower the launch cost of the rocket. A majority of the rocket exists just to get the rest of the rocket up to a point where the payload can be delivered. making the payload smaller just means you wasted alot more money getting it into orbit. Putting a bunch of small mini-payloads doesn't reduce the cost anymore because you need to include the mass and bulk of the delivery system for each mini-sat. Where the fuck do you come up with smaller sats not needing orbital maintainance equipment? All birds need attitude controls at the very least to point them the right way. The concept of disposable birds is ludicrous. Even if it costs ten bucks to build it costs thousands of dollars to get in the air. Nobody in their right mind would design a bird and send it up if they didn't plan on getting their money's worth out of it. And the dumb comment about building a transceiver bigger than VLA to manage mini-sats nearly made me piss myself. Increasing the size of the ground base tranceiver adds way too much to the cost of launching any sat. why should you have to pour the millions of dollars in maintainance of a VLA sized unit to talk to a sat that costs a fraction of a percent of the ground station?
Instead of using network based currency transfer systems that incur very large transaction overhead, why not use digital cash? You've got a public key of some finacial institution on the card and store digitally signed and encrypted dollars in the cards memory. To pay you stick the card in a reader/writer which verifies the integrity of the money and changes the amount of dollars you have on the card. The money is stored like an electronic cashier's drawer for summation at the end of a business day and later deposited into a bank by some physical means or even transfered over a dial-up or network connection. The banks can get each other's keys to verify the dollars depoited and transfered and those numbers eventually go back to actual serial numbers of what may have been at one point paper bills. There needs be no recordkept of who spent which dollar where, just that the dollars eventually match up to serial numbers on whatever country's national bank. You can eliminate a good portion of the clearing house infrastructure needed for current electronic fund transfer thus making transaction overhead negligible or virtually nil.
Game developers have to develop where the market is. Game developers aren't scratching their heads in a huddle making sure some vertex shader is going to work on a MIPS box as well as a Intel one. They also aren't wondering if they ought to code some API extensions used by a chip that is in a fraction of a percent of boxes. The ones clamouring for standards are the third tier and lower chip makers that have a fraction of the market penetration ATi and nVidia have. If you've got support for ATi, nVidia, and 3dfx you're set to go on just about everything. I'd bet the markets for the big three (now the big two) is fairly even considering the proliferation of ATi cards in OEM systems. Selling your game to a publisher doesn't necessarily entail providing support for every potential market, just the ones the publisher decides are important. A bulk of game developers and publishers won't bitch much about standards while they can hit an incredible percentage of the gaming market by focusing on one system. The developers and publishers look at it like this: what are the machines we're targeting being used for? If the answer doesn't involve the machine sitting idle with signifigant amounts of computing power (enough for the proposed game, aka most consumer Windows machines) the game probably won't be developed for the system. Macs enjoy a much wider market than linux systems and have vendor support for APIs and are still second tier for game developers because not enough of them are sitting on desks in the game purchasing consumer's home.
Portability's woes lie in the quality of the OpenGL implimentations as well as drivers for the specific device. Quake doesn't really ask alot of any relatively modern system, I used to play it with good framerates on an old Pentium 100 NEC. Performance differences between different OSes and OpenGl implimentations are hard to measure because the margins are so close on any modern system. It's good you mention the actual WORTH of porting code to different systems. Was Quake ported to a dozen and a half OSes when it was first released? No it brought in its megabucks and gained and lost popularity before you saw a highly portable version of it.
You fucking retard. FireWire chips just like all other periphrials are hooked up to the Southbridge of the fucking memory controller. The limits of the SB are the limits of the periphrial interface for the computer. Since the SB is running at 33MHz with either a 32 or 64 bit bus your onboard FW chip isn't going to have any better throughput than a periphrial card.
If you want to read some really cool shit head over to JPL and read the event log for the entire mission. Those boys down there are really impressive. Of particular interest to me was when they used the planetary telescope as a starfinder when the DS1's dedicated starfinder busted a nut. Crazy shit them NASA engineers. All of the mission logs are great reads though.
I was confused as to what you meant by Jython because I had a bit of a muddled understanding of it. Thats why I was sort of disparaging the idea of it in general. I meantioned Shockwave not for it's amazing use for applets (since ther is none) but it is a popular method of creating interactivity over various media. It's one you can count on in alot of situations just like Java. One thing about Jython though is it seems like you end up on the short end of the stick using it instead of just using Java. It's sort of cool for turning your Pythod scripts into Java Servlets but I don't really imagine it being terribly useful in an environment where there is alot of random activity like in a client side applet. You're compiling to Java bytecode and all the syntax structure of the language just isn't designed for the use. Are there any Python scripts that have been turned into full fledged applets that are actually usable?
One aspect to the slow GUI is alot of people seem to skip the chapter of their textbooks practically begging them to thread their programs properly. You can make your GUI very responsive if you lock it down inside a higher priority thread or thread each section of the GUI depending on the frequency it needs to be updated. I've seen far too many applets with everything from the AWT objects to all the functional methods confined to a single thread. AWT is slow enough but managing it poorly just gives your apps a bad reputation. If you thread it, they will come.
What code exactly are you going to trust? Without sandboxing you're left with the sort of security issues Microsoft gets bashed for ActiveX over. Also considering no one programs anything in "jython" for the client side it isn't more convenient then using Java or Shockwave which people actually use in the real world.
Java applets are also good for use in application hosting. If you build a bunch of applets that are going to replace some set of tools it's much easier just to write them in Java as you're able to run them on just about everything with no problem at all. Applix used to have a Java suite of their tools a couple years ago that worked pretty well IIRC.
I wasn't suggesting corporate development schemes were the greatest, just discounting the suggestion that open source is naturally superior to closed source development. Just because it is your personal favourite doesn't mean it's better. By the same token you can compare Japanese and American manufactured cars and spout off that one is inherently better than another. The fact that you and another dude had the same kneejerk reaction just makes me sad. Now I realize how many people sit back and believe the FUD open source developers use against the FUD of closed source developers. Pot, kettle, black.
Tens of thousands of people that work on Linux? Right. You can name lots of shitty closed source programs as well as open source ones. The original contention was that open source is somehow naturally superior to closed source. That's like saying your product is 100% more effective than sugar pill.
Unix is alot less like a true OS and more like a specification. There's the Bell Labs implimentation of Unix as well as the various schools'. Don't be so sure that lots of eyes works to find lots of holes. Alot of people can look at source code but only a handful of people actually understand what they're looking at. Do you think all of the open source zealots on here can do anything more than compile stuff from source? Not really. Systems are only as secure as you design them to be. Security cannot be added as an afterthough, into any system. As for C libraries with security holes in them, it just goes back to the axiom regarding security. It can't be added as an afterthought. You can't just patch libc and have it be secure, you have to write an entirely new library designed from the getgo for security. Since it has yet to make economic sense to do this and break compatibility with everything no one has gone out and done it.
Don't be a fucking moron by insisting that a bunch of developers looking at code is going to default make a better project. You seem to ignore all of the open source software which just sucks fucking dick. All of the core GNU tools were written by professional code writers who knew what they were doing. The more brains on the ball as you say solve no problems if none of the people know what they're doing. Where do you think people who know what they are doing get their experience from? Sorry but school don't teach you shit about real programming.
I really love the "my answer to a Linux exploit is apt-get update" posts. Nothing like trusting a completely automated process to solve all of your problems. All it would take is a nice little bit of malicious code in some header to fuck a bunch of people over. If you're not going to review the code before you install it why the fuck are you so anal about using open source software?
Are you related to the rest of the retards posting on here today? Your first point is just ludicrous. There is alot of Linux software but there is a ton of Windows software as well. Just like Windows, for every one good program there is a slew of shitty ones. So the number of apps a system has has nothing to do with its quality. Your second point lacks merit because you're comparing an OS originally written for 386 computers to Unicies that are designed to run on massively parallel systems with upwards of 64 processors and countless gigabytes of memory. As for point three, the architecture the system runs has little to do with system specific virii. Linux running on any ISA is going to have the same compiler which compiles and links shit the same way. This says nothing of logic exploits, if the same logic is shared on a bunch of ports the same exploit will exist. As for four, you're just a retard. That's all I can tell you. Windows NT has always had protected memory and support for multiple users. You can run whatever you want as whoever you want. Because you run around as administrator is not anyone else's fault.
Were you dropped when you were little? Your conclusions are pretty ridiculous. You're equating that open source projects must be of higher quality because there are more people working on them. Completely ignoring the fact that not all programmers have the same capabilities. To use your natural selection analogy in a correct fashion, corporate development houses have to operate within margins. This means they have to produce a product garnering so much return for so much effort. Thus the developers they have are very highly skilled because it does not make economic sense to have a bunch of shitty programmers. If good programmers produce bad software it is usually a management issue. Non-professional developers are a much wider swath of skill levels. Most aren't good programmers in any sesne while others are exceptional usually do to professional training and experience. The other aspect anyone has to regard is reliability. Are you going to wager mollions of company dollars on the work of volunteers with schedules that are impacted by their own jobs and even at times school? Well you probably would because you're mentally retarded.
More to the point, anyone with a semester or two of C and the ability to do first order differential calculus could write a good encryption algorithm since the basic principals are now widely known. It's kind of like the guy who build a replica of Sputnik1 for 100k in the late 90's, a feat that required the wntirety of the Soviet empire just forty years prior. The basis for encryption is now well known and fairly well explored which means anybody could write an encryption algorithm if they really wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for point one which is entirely ludicrous I can understand your school's position with computers. IT IS A SMALL PRIVATE CATHOLIC COLLEGE. Is that so hard for you to grasp? They don't get beaucoup cash from the state for networking equipment and internet access. There's no reason for you to be running servers on your school's network, that is not some right you incur merely for paying tuition. You also don't need a shitload of computers in your dorms. What use is having three systems all lying around plugged in. Oh yeah, back to your second point, you can't run servers which is one of the few reasons you'd need multiple systems in your room. I suppose you didn't read the article last month about the computer department hell week. Students coming in with shit network cards that end up taking portions of the entire network down or just plain causing grief to the already overworked IT staff. Complaining about trading MP3s goes back to my first point, a private school doesn't have the resources to let you max out their fucking T1 all day long.
Am I the only one with raised eyebrows over the term "credible sources on the internet"?
And your problem with capitalism is exactly? You sound like you're pissed you don't know how to make it into the top 5%. Do you think that some other non capitalistic system is run by benevolent fucking people? That is a pretty ridiculous assumption. Your years of direct experience, observation, and the realities of capitalist dogma pin you at about 16 and you've just begun to question your social value system. Good job dude I hope your philosophies work out for you. Just remember though, I'm a fan of capitalism and I'm armed and I'm not the only one. So if you're looking for a change in lifestyle you should look into relocating. Lots of dudes throughout history have had similar rants about free markets being unfair, they were usually beneficiaries of said markets and didn't know the feeling of going from having nothing and with some ingenuity ending up with alot more than they started with. There's little mobility in a system with articially imposed demand for production. Greed is a much better motivator.
Surrey's technologies are still pretty experimental and rely in some pretty difficult formation flying. Nanosats don't carry much in the way of tranceiving equipment and if you read the datasheets they carry uncooled CMOS cameras and basically are good for inspecing other spacecraft they're in formation with. Other formation flying ideas are lots of small birds with one or two tranceivers each that fly in formation and can output at least 10 watts PEP. You could have one sat with an uplink receiver that beams data to the rest of the birds in formation and they downlink different pieces of the signal on their tranceivers. Basically breaking a single comsat into a bunch of small pieces so if one component fails you could deorbit it hopefully and replace it by pushing another bird into the formation or having a backup fill its place. Nobody's really done this yet because formation flying in orbit is still a complex procedure and until recently birds weren't smart enough to navigate themselves. Also keep in mind that Surrey's sats are still all experimental and are using equipment that hasn't been recognized as spaceworthy quite yet. Trying to sell someone a satellite that has a 10% chance of working after a good sized solar storm won't be too effective. I think it is sort of interesting and cool they're powering their birds with StrongARMs.
You're the first person to ever make the correlation, I grant thee four thousand brownie points!
Microsats would be cooler if there were cheaper ways of getting them into orbit. Even if you get the bird's weight down to as little as possible you still need a deployment module. Then you've got this thousands of pounds of rocket to get a little bird into orbit. Your launch cost will still be in the order of a thousand dollars a kilogram if not more (especially if your rocket is wasting all of its power getting a tiny 100kg bird into orbit). Nearly all of the work being done at Marshall SFC has to do with the reduction of cost with any and all ground launches including getting birds in the air for alot less than they currently cost. They changed their site around or I'd put some useful links from there like the magnetic linear accelerator. It looks like a fucking brochure now. Maybe if a couple of us donate ten bucks to them they'll put some useful information back there. One can only dream I suppose.
What? I think you need to put your geometric scales back where you found them because I don't think you're using them correctly. Making smaller sats doesn't lower the launch cost of the rocket. A majority of the rocket exists just to get the rest of the rocket up to a point where the payload can be delivered. making the payload smaller just means you wasted alot more money getting it into orbit. Putting a bunch of small mini-payloads doesn't reduce the cost anymore because you need to include the mass and bulk of the delivery system for each mini-sat. Where the fuck do you come up with smaller sats not needing orbital maintainance equipment? All birds need attitude controls at the very least to point them the right way. The concept of disposable birds is ludicrous. Even if it costs ten bucks to build it costs thousands of dollars to get in the air. Nobody in their right mind would design a bird and send it up if they didn't plan on getting their money's worth out of it. And the dumb comment about building a transceiver bigger than VLA to manage mini-sats nearly made me piss myself. Increasing the size of the ground base tranceiver adds way too much to the cost of launching any sat. why should you have to pour the millions of dollars in maintainance of a VLA sized unit to talk to a sat that costs a fraction of a percent of the ground station?
Instead of using network based currency transfer systems that incur very large transaction overhead, why not use digital cash? You've got a public key of some finacial institution on the card and store digitally signed and encrypted dollars in the cards memory. To pay you stick the card in a reader/writer which verifies the integrity of the money and changes the amount of dollars you have on the card. The money is stored like an electronic cashier's drawer for summation at the end of a business day and later deposited into a bank by some physical means or even transfered over a dial-up or network connection. The banks can get each other's keys to verify the dollars depoited and transfered and those numbers eventually go back to actual serial numbers of what may have been at one point paper bills. There needs be no recordkept of who spent which dollar where, just that the dollars eventually match up to serial numbers on whatever country's national bank. You can eliminate a good portion of the clearing house infrastructure needed for current electronic fund transfer thus making transaction overhead negligible or virtually nil.
Game developers have to develop where the market is. Game developers aren't scratching their heads in a huddle making sure some vertex shader is going to work on a MIPS box as well as a Intel one. They also aren't wondering if they ought to code some API extensions used by a chip that is in a fraction of a percent of boxes. The ones clamouring for standards are the third tier and lower chip makers that have a fraction of the market penetration ATi and nVidia have. If you've got support for ATi, nVidia, and 3dfx you're set to go on just about everything. I'd bet the markets for the big three (now the big two) is fairly even considering the proliferation of ATi cards in OEM systems. Selling your game to a publisher doesn't necessarily entail providing support for every potential market, just the ones the publisher decides are important. A bulk of game developers and publishers won't bitch much about standards while they can hit an incredible percentage of the gaming market by focusing on one system. The developers and publishers look at it like this: what are the machines we're targeting being used for? If the answer doesn't involve the machine sitting idle with signifigant amounts of computing power (enough for the proposed game, aka most consumer Windows machines) the game probably won't be developed for the system. Macs enjoy a much wider market than linux systems and have vendor support for APIs and are still second tier for game developers because not enough of them are sitting on desks in the game purchasing consumer's home.
Portability's woes lie in the quality of the OpenGL implimentations as well as drivers for the specific device. Quake doesn't really ask alot of any relatively modern system, I used to play it with good framerates on an old Pentium 100 NEC. Performance differences between different OSes and OpenGl implimentations are hard to measure because the margins are so close on any modern system. It's good you mention the actual WORTH of porting code to different systems. Was Quake ported to a dozen and a half OSes when it was first released? No it brought in its megabucks and gained and lost popularity before you saw a highly portable version of it.
Where is the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
You fucking retard. FireWire chips just like all other periphrials are hooked up to the Southbridge of the fucking memory controller. The limits of the SB are the limits of the periphrial interface for the computer. Since the SB is running at 33MHz with either a 32 or 64 bit bus your onboard FW chip isn't going to have any better throughput than a periphrial card.
If you want to read some really cool shit head over to JPL and read the event log for the entire mission. Those boys down there are really impressive. Of particular interest to me was when they used the planetary telescope as a starfinder when the DS1's dedicated starfinder busted a nut. Crazy shit them NASA engineers. All of the mission logs are great reads though.
I was confused as to what you meant by Jython because I had a bit of a muddled understanding of it. Thats why I was sort of disparaging the idea of it in general. I meantioned Shockwave not for it's amazing use for applets (since ther is none) but it is a popular method of creating interactivity over various media. It's one you can count on in alot of situations just like Java. One thing about Jython though is it seems like you end up on the short end of the stick using it instead of just using Java. It's sort of cool for turning your Pythod scripts into Java Servlets but I don't really imagine it being terribly useful in an environment where there is alot of random activity like in a client side applet. You're compiling to Java bytecode and all the syntax structure of the language just isn't designed for the use. Are there any Python scripts that have been turned into full fledged applets that are actually usable?
One aspect to the slow GUI is alot of people seem to skip the chapter of their textbooks practically begging them to thread their programs properly. You can make your GUI very responsive if you lock it down inside a higher priority thread or thread each section of the GUI depending on the frequency it needs to be updated. I've seen far too many applets with everything from the AWT objects to all the functional methods confined to a single thread. AWT is slow enough but managing it poorly just gives your apps a bad reputation. If you thread it, they will come.
What code exactly are you going to trust? Without sandboxing you're left with the sort of security issues Microsoft gets bashed for ActiveX over. Also considering no one programs anything in "jython" for the client side it isn't more convenient then using Java or Shockwave which people actually use in the real world.
Java applets are also good for use in application hosting. If you build a bunch of applets that are going to replace some set of tools it's much easier just to write them in Java as you're able to run them on just about everything with no problem at all. Applix used to have a Java suite of their tools a couple years ago that worked pretty well IIRC.
I wasn't suggesting corporate development schemes were the greatest, just discounting the suggestion that open source is naturally superior to closed source development. Just because it is your personal favourite doesn't mean it's better. By the same token you can compare Japanese and American manufactured cars and spout off that one is inherently better than another. The fact that you and another dude had the same kneejerk reaction just makes me sad. Now I realize how many people sit back and believe the FUD open source developers use against the FUD of closed source developers. Pot, kettle, black.
Tens of thousands of people that work on Linux? Right. You can name lots of shitty closed source programs as well as open source ones. The original contention was that open source is somehow naturally superior to closed source. That's like saying your product is 100% more effective than sugar pill.
Unix is alot less like a true OS and more like a specification. There's the Bell Labs implimentation of Unix as well as the various schools'. Don't be so sure that lots of eyes works to find lots of holes. Alot of people can look at source code but only a handful of people actually understand what they're looking at. Do you think all of the open source zealots on here can do anything more than compile stuff from source? Not really. Systems are only as secure as you design them to be. Security cannot be added as an afterthough, into any system. As for C libraries with security holes in them, it just goes back to the axiom regarding security. It can't be added as an afterthought. You can't just patch libc and have it be secure, you have to write an entirely new library designed from the getgo for security. Since it has yet to make economic sense to do this and break compatibility with everything no one has gone out and done it.
Don't be a fucking moron by insisting that a bunch of developers looking at code is going to default make a better project. You seem to ignore all of the open source software which just sucks fucking dick. All of the core GNU tools were written by professional code writers who knew what they were doing. The more brains on the ball as you say solve no problems if none of the people know what they're doing. Where do you think people who know what they are doing get their experience from? Sorry but school don't teach you shit about real programming.
I really love the "my answer to a Linux exploit is apt-get update" posts. Nothing like trusting a completely automated process to solve all of your problems. All it would take is a nice little bit of malicious code in some header to fuck a bunch of people over. If you're not going to review the code before you install it why the fuck are you so anal about using open source software?
Are you related to the rest of the retards posting on here today? Your first point is just ludicrous. There is alot of Linux software but there is a ton of Windows software as well. Just like Windows, for every one good program there is a slew of shitty ones. So the number of apps a system has has nothing to do with its quality. Your second point lacks merit because you're comparing an OS originally written for 386 computers to Unicies that are designed to run on massively parallel systems with upwards of 64 processors and countless gigabytes of memory. As for point three, the architecture the system runs has little to do with system specific virii. Linux running on any ISA is going to have the same compiler which compiles and links shit the same way. This says nothing of logic exploits, if the same logic is shared on a bunch of ports the same exploit will exist. As for four, you're just a retard. That's all I can tell you. Windows NT has always had protected memory and support for multiple users. You can run whatever you want as whoever you want. Because you run around as administrator is not anyone else's fault.
Were you dropped when you were little? Your conclusions are pretty ridiculous. You're equating that open source projects must be of higher quality because there are more people working on them. Completely ignoring the fact that not all programmers have the same capabilities. To use your natural selection analogy in a correct fashion, corporate development houses have to operate within margins. This means they have to produce a product garnering so much return for so much effort. Thus the developers they have are very highly skilled because it does not make economic sense to have a bunch of shitty programmers. If good programmers produce bad software it is usually a management issue. Non-professional developers are a much wider swath of skill levels. Most aren't good programmers in any sesne while others are exceptional usually do to professional training and experience. The other aspect anyone has to regard is reliability. Are you going to wager mollions of company dollars on the work of volunteers with schedules that are impacted by their own jobs and even at times school? Well you probably would because you're mentally retarded.
More to the point, anyone with a semester or two of C and the ability to do first order differential calculus could write a good encryption algorithm since the basic principals are now widely known. It's kind of like the guy who build a replica of Sputnik1 for 100k in the late 90's, a feat that required the wntirety of the Soviet empire just forty years prior. The basis for encryption is now well known and fairly well explored which means anybody could write an encryption algorithm if they really wanted.