If modders make expansion packs, original developer can't rely on extra revenue
Oh yes they can. Both HalfLife and Battlefield 1942 sold many thousands of additional copies of the original game because people wanted to play the popular mods Counterstrike and Desert Combat.
It's only rarely that a game developer is lucky enough to have such a dominant mod released for his program.
In other words, techniques like this are unfeasable for largew modern games.
No they're not. The core skill any "software engineering" class should teach is managing complexity.
No matter how huge an MMPG might grow, it can still be subdivided into semi-independent chunks that are simple enough for one programmer to optimize thouroughly.
Actually, do I want to wait 20 minutes for the game to compute all textures at startup? Nope, I'd rather have static data ready to go.
Wrong. Computing a texture from a few input params can often be faster than loading it from disk. (The disk-based texture is probably in a compressed format, PNG prehaps, so it'll also take computation to load, beyond the actual IO delay)
Many recent FPS games have horrendously slow load times (50 sec even on a powerful PC) due mainly to all the high-res textures. This is especially bad if you're loading straight from optical disc (as with a Playstation2)
What is the subscription fee? Most of them are like $10 a month.
It's not the fee that matters here. It's the time investment that they care about.
Players don't like to spend 9 hours camping the zombie-lord for a bone-necklace +3 only to lose it when a higher-level PKer jumps out for a mugging.
In online Quake or arcade Tekken, the game world isn't persisent. When somebody kills your character, you've lost only 15-90 seconds of your life. The XP loss from an MMORPG death can equate to days of wasted leveling.
Only rare players will be competitive enough to enjoy zero-sum PvP play (and even then, they'll probably want the world to be reset more frequently than PvE MMORPGs do)
Mozilla history is stored on your local harddrive. You can easily delete it completely, or just disable the recording.
A visible history in the search engine will be something else- not only do you have no straightforward reliable way to delete the records, but the records could follow you around from home to job and back.
Remember, Microsoft is there to prove that it's possible to succeed brilliantly with crappy names.
Crappy like a fox. Names that seem excessively generic might hurt product adoption initially, but once past the initial rollout, the bland name is a help. If a product has a specific name (like Acrobat), then it's easy for customers to consider going to competitors (like a hypothetical PDFView). But if Adobe had called their PDF Viewer "PDF Viewer", then it'd become difficult for promoters of alternative software to even describe their products.
It's a 1984-ish use of language to control thought. Because Microsoft DOS was called "DOS", it was tough for buyers to even talk about getting an alternative DOS vendor.
And gee, even the name "micro-soft" is not exceptionally well chosen.
It is beautifully, perfectly well-chosen!
I can't think of any other name that would be better for the #1 software company. Nothing else can evoke the universality of "Micro-Soft". The name speaks for itself: "If it's software, and we don't make it, then you don't need it!"
If he'll go into a store and see a "Bolex" and think it's a Rolex...sorry, he is stupid.
Wrong. That's not the issue. A marketer can illegally trade on another brand and generate consumer confusion even if the buyers are never fooled.
If a man offers to sell a shopper a Bolex or a Lindows, she thinks "Aha! A cheap knockoff of Rolex or Windows! I'm cheap, and probably don't need the quality of the real thing anyhow, so I'll buy it"
Whereas if someone advertises a Siegler or a Linspire, the shopper probably won't even guess that they are products in the same category as Rolex/Windows.
Right. And Lindows came with PCs. (Their biggest target market was cheap $250 machines in places like Walmart, not people skilled enough to reinstall an OS). The "Lindows" name was an attempt to attract him as he was choosing the PC.
So Joe's in the shop looking at 3 computers on the table: "Ok, this one is Windows, I've heard of that. And this is Lindows, that sounds familiar. But WTF is Apple Osex? And Susie- that must be a new game console or something"
What are you trying to say? Microsoft's lawyers demolished Eolas. Patents hardly ever get overturned (no matter how stupid they are), but Microsoft did it.
(Winning the lawsuit was possibly a tactical error by Microsoft. It might've been better for them to buy Eolas's patent for $5 billion, and then use it to cripple all non-InternetExplorer web browsers for 1-3 years)
companies are required under law to defend their trademarks
No they're not. Companies are free to stand back and let others appropriate a brand-name.
I have no doubt that if Bill Gates had a time machine, he'd go back to that little company spreading Vaporware in 1983 and tell them to pick a less generic name than "Windows". But that's what they are stuck with.
Absolutely backwords!! Claiming generic words as product names (and filetypes) has been a key part of Microsoft's successful strategy! "Insert a Bitmap file from Microsoft Paint into Microsoft Word and then save the Document file"
The fact that Microsoft's product has a generic-sounding name makes it harder for customers to envision the existence of competitors. ("Microsoft DOS" was an earlier success at redefining a generic term "DOS" as a specific vendor's product)
it is blindingly obvious that it was chosen to draw fire from Microsoft
No, it wasn't meant to intentionally attract Microsoft.
It was meant to confuse consumers and trade on someone else's brand name (which is exactly what trademark law is meant to prevent). Much of the public only feels secure buying "Windows" computers, and the "Lindows" name was an attempt to reassure them.
"Oh, I'd better not buy any non-Windows computer, it might be new and scary! But this cheap one over here is Lindows... I guess that's how they're naming it, now."
Imagine if the same stunt was attempted in another industry: suppose there was a "Bepsi" soft-drink or "Satorade" sport-drink. Any company rolling out a product like that would be obviously attempting to borrow name-recognition from the advertising of an established major competitor.
In mainstream social situations (not the only feature, but an important one). Where a "nerd" is that *plus* very intelligent.
That is the traditional definition, going back more than 50 years. (Although the original spelling was "nurd")
However, in the past 5-6 years, the WWW has fueled a sort of "geek pride" uprising, and now people who self-describe as "geek" are trying to make that the more prideful term.
But originally, geek meant someone unacceptable in polite society- specifically for a habit of eating live animals. While a nurd was actually an ex-preppy who'd actually gotten into college and was trying to pass, but found the courseload was too heavy to allow time for daily hygiene.
Using just tokens opens your users to a wide range of physical attacks... especially if they're college students with roomates who can "borrow" things for a few minutes of infringement.
I wonder if Debian supports any of those systems yet?
Yes. RSA SecureIDs can be used with almost any computer system. (They are a combined physical-token + password solution, and have better hardware compatiblity than a usb-key, as the user reads an LCD screen on the card to see a passkey that expires every 60 seconds)
What to do? Seriously? Fine users for breaking rules?
Seriously, stop trusting the users. Don't leave systems running with local priviledge escalations open.
Your obligation is to protect users from each other, that means no local root holes. As a side effect, you can stop caring about users giving up their passwords, because then you're free to laugh at any damage they incur (they are ignoring your warnings after all, right?)
Such invocation of energy conservation law is, unfortunately, a common fallacy.
Applying conservation of energy theory to intellectual property concepts is indeed a fallacy, but not for any of the reasons you named. You go on to attack conservation of energy itself, which is invalid, as any physicist can effortless blast your "arguments" full of holes.
What's wrong with Gosling's argument is that software (like all intellectual property), is neither matter nor energy, but information. Normal conservation laws just don't apply to information.
If it was literally true it would imply that life is a zero-sum game - whatever you gain must be torn from something else and in the end everything turns to dust.
It is literally true. But life is not a zero-sum game; it is negative sum. (We'll still all turn to dust, though)
The energy is NOT conserved in open systems
Open systems are not systems; they are subsets of systems. A "system" for physical analysis must include whatever important components are interacting. By creating the fiction of an "open system", you selectively disregard the components which operate at a net loss, creating the optimistic illusion that a local increase is actually meaningful.
The very inevitable bleakness of such conclusion suggests there is a flaw in the argument (as most science is usually neutral whenever emotions are concerned).
Ha ha ha ha! You feel that an theory is "bleak", so you decide it must be false? That's emotion-based science for you!
can be "borrowed from vacuum" whenever quantum effects show up.
No. Because quantum effects can steal energy too. There is no reason to imagine borrowing from vacuum will do anything more than repay what the vacuum has stolen from you.
not even anathema to OSS any more (the source becomes available within a reasonable time period)
More importantly, the source becomes available as soon as the binary does- they can both decrypt at the same time. (Because until you recieve the key to decrypt, you don't really have the contents, in an intellectual-property sense)
My interpretation of the "slower release of synchronized encrypted patches" idea: Assuming that it's true that many exploits are written based on analyzing published patches, this may improve the security of lazy sysadmins who don't work hard to keep up with patches.
However, it will harm the security of obsessive, paranoid admins who check for new vulnerabilities twice a day, and pull down servers if a hole is announced before a patch is released. Those guys were already quite secure from known flaws. But for protection from unknown (zero-day) flaws, they rely on vendors publishing security updates ASAP.
In short, the plan will reduce the security of those people who care about it the most, by making them equal to the lazy guys whose data evidently isn't valuable enough to protect.
In my view, that's the wrong tradeoff to make. Reducing the best to improve the average... it's plain old un-American!
This guy doesn't even know the meaning of zero-day. Zero-day means that the programming bug has existed since the software was written.
No. Where did you come up with that odd definition?
That means that if you discover a bug in Linux 2.6.x kernel, that bug has been around since the Minix days!
By that interpretation, a zero-day bug would be so rare we wouldn't even need a word to describe them! (BTW: Linux has never contained any Minix source code)
Zero-day really means that the person running the exploit is the one who found the hole. Or a little more loosely, it means that some attackers are aware of the hole, but the software author or public at large is not (not truely zero-day, but appears that way to outsiders, as they don't know when the flaw was spotted).
By extension, an exploit that is used after the flaw becomes publically known might be a 2-day or 10-day rootkit, or however much time has elapsed since the disclosure.
Compared to script-kiddies who download rootkits from others, zero-day hackers are a threat that a sysadmin can't avoid by obsessively watching for security announcements. Zero-day approximately means "before there are any security announcements".
(Addington's article was incorrect about "zero-day" as well. He claimed it has something to do with not using trojans or viruses, which is actually irrelevant to the meaning)
Several posters have pointed out some valid flaws in Quicksilver, which overall is not as good as Cryptonomicon. I'll just mention a few specific problems (particularly in comparison to Cryptonom) that haven't been discussed. All of these are more minor complaints than normally deserve mention in a book review:
It's part of a series now. A book (or film) in a longer series is weaker in general than a standalone work. The effect is similar to how TV episodes are weaker than movies, because the obligatory continuity between installments weakens the author's freedom for each (He can't convincingly put the hero in danger in volume 2, when part 3 is still coming up).
Most importantly, the Enoch Root character introduced in Cryptonomicon is now the unifying factor of the Baroque Cycle. Whereas in just one book he could be accepted as a spooky, mysterious character, giving him a blatantly immortal lifespan moves the book more towards fantasy and away from semi-educational speculative history. (The fantastical parts of Crytponomicon, like the vowel-free isle of Qwflgm and the invention of the digital computer in Austrailia, were some of its weaknesses)
Written with pen. To "get the feel for the period technology", Quicksilver was written by hand instead of on computer. This has contributed to a less coherent and balanced flow than the predecessor book. I won't go into detail on the many small ways this has harmed the book... I'd need to annotate the text to fully explain.
Non-preemptive multitasking. Both Crytponom and QuickSilv contain 3 distinct storylines that become increasingly more related as the plot progresses. In both books, those storylines are "Waterhouse present", "Waterhouse past", and "Shaftoe past". But Cryptonom progressed through each line concurrently, with 5-20 pages of one plot followed by a switch to another, while QuickSilv can go for 300 pages following a single thread. That makes the book much less coherent, and creates a great discontinuity whenever the jump occurs.
Self-plagiarizing. That accusation is an exaggeration, I know. But still, both books concern the immortal Enoch Root's explorations into the secrets of national gold reserves, told from 3 threads of activity: Waterhouse the reserved mathematician, Shaftoe the iterinant warrior, and Waterhouse 50-years later (picking up the pieces).
Retelling the same story in a different era is a sign that an author is out of good ideas. (But hey, Ken Follett retells the samestory on the exact same date, and readers keep buying it)
Less detailed. Compared to Cryptonom, QuickSilv spends much less verbiage providing background information on the people and places visited. And since QuickSilv is set further back in time, historical detail is even more important. Most readers were passingly familiar with 1999 Seattle, and understand the overall flow of the Second World War. But going back centuries instead of decades, typical readers will have much less idea about what to expect, and so digressive introductions (something that Stephenson apparently enjoys) would've been more helpful to them.
But unfortunately, the two protagonists (Waterhouse and Shaftoe) are both willfully disconnected from the mainstream of society, and no supporting characters pop up to expound on backdrop factoids.
Genetic model of aptitude. A really minor point, but it's unimpressive to see characters from the same families pl
You'd be lucky to get a job at K-Mart. What division of NASA do you work in again?
I've faced some ex-NASA programmers who were interviewing for work, and have been strenuously unimpressed. The space agency prefers quantity as well as quality, so they hire tons of below-average software engineers.
Note that NASA's software is mostly not written by actual government employees, but by contractors from either Lockheed or Boeing. Google can find you multiple funny stories about the software flaws those guys have launched into space (the crashed and failing Mars probes are only some of them)
So have I. And while I agree that it's theoretically possible to write bug-free software (for a sufficiently small program), even sky-high military budgets can't afford that level of redundant effort. (By quantum physics, nothing is truely impossible. But some things are hard enough to be practically impossible)
Funny how those nukes don't go off by accident isn't it?
Just because you haven't observed any catastrophic bugs is no proof that bugs don't exist.
Serious bugs can be prevented if you just want to make the effort.
If you're now talking about "serious bugs" instead of "bugs" in general, then you've backed away from the stronger assertions made earlier.
But it can be done, and is done all the time in some industries.
Which industries, exactly? Aerospace and military software certainly isn't bug-free! They often try, but even they make publicized mistakes (and the majority of bugs found post-fielding are kept quiet for security).
You seem to have no idea what my argument even was.
As well as the abilities to raise the dead, cast a fireball, or call an insect plague, since no human being has ever been able to do any of these things.
You'll never win elected office in the USA with opinions like that!
Slashdot Mirror
If modders make expansion packs, original developer can't rely on extra revenue
Oh yes they can. Both HalfLife and Battlefield 1942 sold many thousands of additional copies of the original game because people wanted to play the popular mods Counterstrike and Desert Combat.
It's only rarely that a game developer is lucky enough to have such a dominant mod released for his program.
In other words, techniques like this are unfeasable for largew modern games.
No they're not. The core skill any "software engineering" class should teach is managing complexity.
No matter how huge an MMPG might grow, it can still be subdivided into semi-independent chunks that are simple enough for one programmer to optimize thouroughly.
Actually, do I want to wait 20 minutes for the game to compute all textures at startup? Nope, I'd rather have static data ready to go.
Wrong. Computing a texture from a few input params can often be faster than loading it from disk. (The disk-based texture is probably in a compressed format, PNG prehaps, so it'll also take computation to load, beyond the actual IO delay)
Many recent FPS games have horrendously slow load times (50 sec even on a powerful PC) due mainly to all the high-res textures. This is especially bad if you're loading straight from optical disc (as with a Playstation2)
What is the subscription fee? Most of them are like $10 a month.
It's not the fee that matters here. It's the time investment that they care about.
Players don't like to spend 9 hours camping the zombie-lord for a bone-necklace +3 only to lose it when a higher-level PKer jumps out for a mugging.
In online Quake or arcade Tekken, the game world isn't persisent. When somebody kills your character, you've lost only 15-90 seconds of your life. The XP loss from an MMORPG death can equate to days of wasted leveling.
Only rare players will be competitive enough to enjoy zero-sum PvP play (and even then, they'll probably want the world to be reset more frequently than PvE MMORPGs do)
completely open, distributed search enegine
Distributed search == slow.
Sorry, but that's just unavoidable unless you've got some really PhD-worthy algorithms cooked up.
Funny in all the 9 years or so that I've been
Google only opened 6 years ago, so what did you do before then?
If you've only been using the internet since 1995, then it's understandable you might not know that Yahoo was the first successful search engine.
(Back in 1991, the choices were "yahoo" or "yanoff". But REALLY nobody remembers Yanoff)
A9 is not live. Amazon still has it in beta. Hence the words, BETA next to A9 on its home page.
If it's RUNNING, and EVERYBODY can use it, then it's LIVE.
If you claimed it wasn't "Gold", you might have a point.
As if you couldn't find history in Mozilla...
Mozilla history is stored on your local harddrive. You can easily delete it completely, or just disable the recording.
A visible history in the search engine will be something else- not only do you have no straightforward reliable way to delete the records, but the records could follow you around from home to job and back.
it seems that X was created in the mid-80
But the "X Window System" was a reworking of the older "W Window System".
Remember, Microsoft is there to prove that it's possible to succeed brilliantly with crappy names.
Crappy like a fox. Names that seem excessively generic might hurt product adoption initially, but once past the initial rollout, the bland name is a help. If a product has a specific name (like Acrobat), then it's easy for customers to consider going to competitors (like a hypothetical PDFView). But if Adobe had called their PDF Viewer "PDF Viewer", then it'd become difficult for promoters of alternative software to even describe their products.
It's a 1984-ish use of language to control thought. Because Microsoft DOS was called "DOS", it was tough for buyers to even talk about getting an alternative DOS vendor.
And gee, even the name "micro-soft" is not exceptionally well chosen.
It is beautifully, perfectly well-chosen!
I can't think of any other name that would be better for the #1 software company. Nothing else can evoke the universality of "Micro-Soft". The name speaks for itself: "If it's software, and we don't make it, then you don't need it!"
If he'll go into a store and see a "Bolex" and think it's a Rolex...sorry, he is stupid.
Wrong. That's not the issue. A marketer can illegally trade on another brand and generate consumer confusion even if the buyers are never fooled.
If a man offers to sell a shopper a Bolex or a Lindows, she thinks "Aha! A cheap knockoff of Rolex or Windows! I'm cheap, and probably don't need the quality of the real thing anyhow, so I'll buy it"
Whereas if someone advertises a Siegler or a Linspire, the shopper probably won't even guess that they are products in the same category as Rolex/Windows.
Joe Sixpack uses the os that comes with his PC.
Right. And Lindows came with PCs. (Their biggest target market was cheap $250 machines in places like Walmart, not people skilled enough to reinstall an OS). The "Lindows" name was an attempt to attract him as he was choosing the PC.
So Joe's in the shop looking at 3 computers on the table: "Ok, this one is Windows, I've heard of that. And this is Lindows, that sounds familiar. But WTF is Apple Osex? And Susie- that must be a new game console or something"
Ahem....Eolas?
What are you trying to say? Microsoft's lawyers demolished Eolas. Patents hardly ever get overturned (no matter how stupid they are), but Microsoft did it.
(Winning the lawsuit was possibly a tactical error by Microsoft. It might've been better for them to buy Eolas's patent for $5 billion, and then use it to cripple all non-InternetExplorer web browsers for 1-3 years)
companies are required under law to defend their trademarks
No they're not. Companies are free to stand back and let others appropriate a brand-name.
I have no doubt that if Bill Gates had a time machine, he'd go back to that little company spreading Vaporware in 1983 and tell them to pick a less generic name than "Windows". But that's what they are stuck with.
Absolutely backwords!! Claiming generic words as product names (and filetypes) has been a key part of Microsoft's successful strategy! "Insert a Bitmap file from Microsoft Paint into Microsoft Word and then save the Document file"
The fact that Microsoft's product has a generic-sounding name makes it harder for customers to envision the existence of competitors. ("Microsoft DOS" was an earlier success at redefining a generic term "DOS" as a specific vendor's product)
it is blindingly obvious that it was chosen to draw fire from Microsoft
No, it wasn't meant to intentionally attract Microsoft.
It was meant to confuse consumers and trade on someone else's brand name (which is exactly what trademark law is meant to prevent). Much of the public only feels secure buying "Windows" computers, and the "Lindows" name was an attempt to reassure them.
"Oh, I'd better not buy any non-Windows computer, it might be new and scary! But this cheap one over here is Lindows... I guess that's how they're naming it, now."
Imagine if the same stunt was attempted in another industry: suppose there was a "Bepsi" soft-drink or "Satorade" sport-drink. Any company rolling out a product like that would be obviously attempting to borrow name-recognition from the advertising of an established major competitor.
In mainstream social situations (not the only feature, but an important one). Where a "nerd" is that *plus* very intelligent.
That is the traditional definition, going back more than 50 years. (Although the original spelling was "nurd")
However, in the past 5-6 years, the WWW has fueled a sort of "geek pride" uprising, and now people who self-describe as "geek" are trying to make that the more prideful term.
But originally, geek meant someone unacceptable in polite society- specifically for a habit of eating live animals. While a nurd was actually an ex-preppy who'd actually gotten into college and was trying to pass, but found the courseload was too heavy to allow time for daily hygiene.
Don't use passwords *at all*.
Wrong! Use tokens *and passwords* !
Using just tokens opens your users to a wide range of physical attacks... especially if they're college students with roomates who can "borrow" things for a few minutes of infringement.
I wonder if Debian supports any of those systems yet?
Yes. RSA SecureIDs can be used with almost any computer system. (They are a combined physical-token + password solution, and have better hardware compatiblity than a usb-key, as the user reads an LCD screen on the card to see a passkey that expires every 60 seconds)
What to do? Seriously? Fine users for breaking rules?
Seriously, stop trusting the users. Don't leave systems running with local priviledge escalations open.
Your obligation is to protect users from each other, that means no local root holes. As a side effect, you can stop caring about users giving up their passwords, because then you're free to laugh at any damage they incur (they are ignoring your warnings after all, right?)
Such invocation of energy conservation law is, unfortunately, a common fallacy.
Applying conservation of energy theory to intellectual property concepts is indeed a fallacy, but not for any of the reasons you named. You go on to attack conservation of energy itself, which is invalid, as any physicist can effortless blast your "arguments" full of holes.
What's wrong with Gosling's argument is that software (like all intellectual property), is neither matter nor energy, but information. Normal conservation laws just don't apply to information.
If it was literally true it would imply that life is a zero-sum game - whatever you gain must be torn from something else and in the end everything turns to dust.
It is literally true. But life is not a zero-sum game; it is negative sum. (We'll still all turn to dust, though)
The energy is NOT conserved in open systems
Open systems are not systems; they are subsets of systems. A "system" for physical analysis must include whatever important components are interacting. By creating the fiction of an "open system", you selectively disregard the components which operate at a net loss, creating the optimistic illusion that a local increase is actually meaningful.
The very inevitable bleakness of such conclusion suggests there is a flaw in the argument (as most science is usually neutral whenever emotions are concerned).
Ha ha ha ha! You feel that an theory is "bleak", so you decide it must be false? That's emotion-based science for you!
can be "borrowed from vacuum" whenever quantum effects show up.
No. Because quantum effects can steal energy too. There is no reason to imagine borrowing from vacuum will do anything more than repay what the vacuum has stolen from you.
not even anathema to OSS any more (the source becomes available within a reasonable time period)
More importantly, the source becomes available as soon as the binary does- they can both decrypt at the same time. (Because until you recieve the key to decrypt, you don't really have the contents, in an intellectual-property sense)
My interpretation of the "slower release of synchronized encrypted patches" idea: Assuming that it's true that many exploits are written based on analyzing published patches, this may improve the security of lazy sysadmins who don't work hard to keep up with patches.
However, it will harm the security of obsessive, paranoid admins who check for new vulnerabilities twice a day, and pull down servers if a hole is announced before a patch is released. Those guys were already quite secure from known flaws. But for protection from unknown (zero-day) flaws, they rely on vendors publishing security updates ASAP.
In short, the plan will reduce the security of those people who care about it the most, by making them equal to the lazy guys whose data evidently isn't valuable enough to protect.
In my view, that's the wrong tradeoff to make. Reducing the best to improve the average... it's plain old un-American!
This guy doesn't even know the meaning of zero-day. Zero-day means that the programming bug has existed since the software was written.
No. Where did you come up with that odd definition?
That means that if you discover a bug in Linux 2.6.x kernel, that bug has been around since the Minix days!
By that interpretation, a zero-day bug would be so rare we wouldn't even need a word to describe them! (BTW: Linux has never contained any Minix source code)
Zero-day really means that the person running the exploit is the one who found the hole. Or a little more loosely, it means that some attackers are aware of the hole, but the software author or public at large is not (not truely zero-day, but appears that way to outsiders, as they don't know when the flaw was spotted).
By extension, an exploit that is used after the flaw becomes publically known might be a 2-day or 10-day rootkit, or however much time has elapsed since the disclosure.
Compared to script-kiddies who download rootkits from others, zero-day hackers are a threat that a sysadmin can't avoid by obsessively watching for security announcements. Zero-day approximately means "before there are any security announcements".
(Addington's article was incorrect about "zero-day" as well. He claimed it has something to do with not using trojans or viruses, which is actually irrelevant to the meaning)
Most importantly, the Enoch Root character introduced in Cryptonomicon is now the unifying factor of the Baroque Cycle. Whereas in just one book he could be accepted as a spooky, mysterious character, giving him a blatantly immortal lifespan moves the book more towards fantasy and away from semi-educational speculative history. (The fantastical parts of Crytponomicon, like the vowel-free isle of Qwflgm and the invention of the digital computer in Austrailia, were some of its weaknesses)
Retelling the same story in a different era is a sign that an author is out of good ideas. (But hey, Ken Follett retells the same story on the exact same date, and readers keep buying it)
But unfortunately, the two protagonists (Waterhouse and Shaftoe) are both willfully disconnected from the mainstream of society, and no supporting characters pop up to expound on backdrop factoids.
You'd be lucky to get a job at K-Mart. What division of NASA do you work in again?
I've faced some ex-NASA programmers who were interviewing for work, and have been strenuously unimpressed. The space agency prefers quantity as well as quality, so they hire tons of below-average software engineers.
Note that NASA's software is mostly not written by actual government employees, but by contractors from either Lockheed or Boeing. Google can find you multiple funny stories about the software flaws those guys have launched into space (the crashed and failing Mars probes are only some of them)
Have you ever written military software? I have.
So have I. And while I agree that it's theoretically possible to write bug-free software (for a sufficiently small program), even sky-high military budgets can't afford that level of redundant effort. (By quantum physics, nothing is truely impossible. But some things are hard enough to be practically impossible)
The V-22? Lethal software bugs. The FA-22? Software crash every 2 hours.
Funny how those nukes don't go off by accident isn't it?
Just because you haven't observed any catastrophic bugs is no proof that bugs don't exist.
Serious bugs can be prevented if you just want to make the effort.
If you're now talking about "serious bugs" instead of "bugs" in general, then you've backed away from the stronger assertions made earlier.
But it can be done, and is done all the time in some industries.
Which industries, exactly? Aerospace and military software certainly isn't bug-free! They often try, but even they make publicized mistakes (and the majority of bugs found post-fielding are kept quiet for security).
By your argument
You seem to have no idea what my argument even was.
As well as the abilities to raise the dead, cast a fireball, or call an insect plague, since no human being has ever been able to do any of these things.
You'll never win elected office in the USA with opinions like that!