I was a systems programming on the CDC6400. This at one time was the world's fastest super computer and was released in 1964 (hence the model number.) I'm not that old. The machine was old when I worked on it. I did patches and custom modification to the operating system. We worked in asembly language so I did have to know the gory details of the hardware.
It was a highly parallel machine. At every level. It could execute 10 instuctions at once. There was a 10 way path to main memory so we could do 10 store or fetches at once. Some machine had multiple CPUs and all machine had at least 10 PPUs, there were smaller CPU where most of the operating system actualy ran keepping the main CPu free for user level tasks.
To this day I've not seen this level parallelsm. Ok the old Pentium had a long pipeline and Sun will sell you an 8-core SPARC but still nothing compared to the old CDC machines
The wiki article below has some details wrong but the ideas are describbed well. The machine was built at a time when electronics tachnology had hit a wall and couldn't be had faster. They had already gone to extreams like giing up on water cooling to use freon cooling where the refridgerent was plumbed directly into the guts of the CPUs card guides. The only option to go faster was parallelium. I think we wil see this again as we hit a wall with IC technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600
What specifically can you do in Photoshop that I can't do in Gimp?
I used to use Gimp too. Used it for years. But Photoshop is just miles and miles ahead. First off photoshop works in 16-bit per channel color and not just in RGB but in other color spaces. The fact that Gimp can't do this means it can't be used for any serious work. 8-bits just can't cut it. I could go on listing hundreds of tools that PS has but that is just picking nits.
The electronics and detonation systems used in nuclear bombs are very advanced, and very difficult to get right. A large portion of the time spent developing a nuclear weapon is devoted to the detonation electronics.
Mistakenly handing over a crate of said electronics would give a nation a significant shortcut toward developing their own nuclear weapons. This is not the eletronics that detonates the nuclear explosion. This is hard to design. This is the sensor that determine when the bomb needs to go off. Conventional bombs have fuses too, fuses tell the detonator when it is time to "go". THe fuses can be set to go off so that the bomb explode only after falling through a roof or whatever. On an ICBM the fuse might "look" at maybe deceleration due to air friction to know how high it is. The secret, I'm sure is where I said "maybe"
Why bother with an R/C aircraft? A hunting rifle with a scope would kill a drone a lot easier. A more sophisticaled attack would be to jam the drones's radio reciever so it could not be commanded from the ground.
Actually I think these will be used just like helicopers are used but maybe at 10X less cost.
When you look at a wire, or printed trace on a PCB it is not the resistance that limits how fast you can send a signal. It is inductance and capasitance that act like a low pass filter. We don't care how fact eletrons travel in wire what we care about is how fact we can change the voltage in the wire. We send data by changing voltages not by sending electrons.
It does help to pick the "right " school. There is nothing to stop a prospective student from talking with teachers and students and even sitting in o a class or skiming over the required text books in the student bookstore.
The real problem is that high school students are not realt qualitied or well enough informed to pick a school. I know I was not. I always thought that I wanted to go to UCLA. I don't know why I thought that but from the 8th grade on I did. Well I finally got there and reallt did not like it. Some very good insturctors and I did learn a lot but I didn't like the big campus and huge size of some of the classes. I transfered out to a small private school. Picking a school is hard.
I was a double major. Enginerring and Pihilosophy. With enginerring, what makes it hard is that you have to be correct so for example your computer program either works or it does not. but with other subjects it is mostly opinion and as long as you have references and some reasoning you can write anything
Geographically isn't what's needed -- Correct. All you really need to do is to prefer to exchange data with peers that are low latency. "latency" is a decent proxy for all kinds of things and it is easy to compute.
You need it all. To pass the Turing test you'd need to comunicate like a human and you'd also need to know a lot of stupid stuff like that shoe laces come in any color and a persons great aunt is female and you can see through (most) glass. You would nee the personal backstory too. because I might ask "what school did you go to?"
I don't like the test because the machine could be quite inteligent but not fool anyone
That business would be doomed to fail. Selling the power back at night? The price is lowest at night and hign durring the daytime. Air conditioning is the magor user of power. Solar power works well because you get the most power just when it is needed, on hot sunny days.
"Google has a finite amount of space!" Yes but there might be a million Googles.
I think the article is bunk. Let's say we can store a bit in the space of just one atom. As storage grows at some point the entire Earth is covered 1 foot deep in atom sized bits. Then in 100 more years the stacked of bits reached past the orbit of the moon. This will never happen.
I think when people look back at the 21st century they will see it as a period when storage grew fast and then ettled down to a stedy state. Exponential growth is never sustainable.
Try this experiment: Pump the air out of a small tank now open the valve. At first the air rushes in very fast but over time the rate slows and finally it stops. But a person looking at the inrush of air in the first few seconds might think that all of the air on Earth might get sucked into the tank and panic. What we have right now is the first stages of a "data vacuum" there is a big in-rush at present.
If I set up a deal to sell my cargo in 100 years. I won't live to see the results but I can sell a contract on the expected profit or maybe I can borrow using the future profits as collateral. In the past people spent 100 to build a cathedral from stones cut by hand. Historically humans have always planed for the far future. Now we seem to have stopped doing this but perhaps in a couple centuries we will go back to our old ways and go back to building things that we expect to stand for 1,000 years.
"It wouldn't be trade so much as gambling." Here is a senario for you. It is 1450 AD in Europe. An investor buys a few ships and hires a crews. He buys goods and fills the ships and sends them on a trip around the horn of Africa to China. He has instructed the crew to trade the goods for tea and spice and to return back to Europe with said tea and spice. Talk about "gambling." What were the odds? Those investors had huge fortunes on the table. each trip representd hundreds ood man years of labor. Yes labor was cheap but you had to pay at least the food a person would eat in a year to get a year's worth of work even for slaves. "hundreds of man years" has a huge sum of money then and now.
"Long lived traders" Yes. I strongly suspect the "traders" are robots. At some point in the future machine intelligence will surpass humans. The machines can simply shut down or greatly slow down during the long trip. The machine may not even think of it as a "trip"
But this is all silly. What would be worth transporting? Information is the only "goods" that would have enough value to be worth sending. For that what you need is not a ship but a powerful laser.
Let's use a example. I'm selling water in containers on the street corner. Some one wants to buy a bottle from me but I say No, if you want to buy my water you have to also buy a set of water glasses from me and this bag o ready mix cement too. You walk away laughing.
Now lets say I'm selling water but lets say the no one else has water for sale. I'm a mono[oly water seller. Now I bet you would buy that set of glasses and the cement.
The above is very clear cut. The real world is not but still it shows why the rules change. Being a monopoly gives a seller to much power over a buyer so most places try to place limits on mono[polies to limit their power.
I worked on the B1 project right durring the change over when they changed over to ejection seats. I think I did some drawing of pyrotechnic tubes used to blow a hole in the roof above the seats. --- The capsule thing did not work so well. Had it been used durring a lunch abort aerodynamic forced would have turned it into shrapnel in an instant.
When that SRB attachment failed and the shuttle yawed it was the aerodynamic forces of the yaw that caused the break up.
The bottom line is that there is no reasitic way to escape from a vehicle that is traveling at literally thousands of miles per hours. Hitting the air at that speed is like doing a belly flop into water off a tall bridge, the air, the water and a concrete sidewalk are all about the same thing
Ever stick you hand out the window of your car while going 60 MPH? They that at 600 MPH I think you'd break your arm or wrose. Now try at 6,000 MPH I think the car would explode. Now try replacing yu arm with a crew escape capsule. the capsule is much bigger then your arm.
The largest Christian church in the world, the one with 600 million members (remember, the population of the US in only 300 million) says that a conflict between it's teaching and science is not possible because they address different areas of knowledge. It is that same way that math and history can not be in conflict. It is only a few fundamentalist wackos that are complaining so vocally.
I think if they are going to pass a law that says teachers can tech pseudo-science in a science class they should also be allowed to tech pseudo-math in math classes. No, I'm not joking. My religious believe is that the Prime Factorization Theorem is wrong and integers do not really have a unique set of prime factors. An don't tell me pi and e are not rational numbers. There MUST be some ratio of integers that will make pi. No, No, No, don't give me any over your logical arguments or "proofs". What is logic and proof compared to the word of God?
"Seems to me like a wise person would look at the fact that religious modes of thought exist in every culture around the world, and understand that there is value in other thought processes"
So you are saying that EVERYthing that is wide spread and observed in many cultures has value. "X" is wide spread, therefore "X" has value. If this argument is true then it must be true for all values of "X", not just for "religious modes of thought". I think this was the very argument the Hitler used and maybe he was right. He observed a wide spread trend not just in humans but in nature where the strong and powerful would exploit the weak for their own gain. This seems to be THE single most wide spread and pervasive behaviour so it must have value.
I disagree. I bought a spool of fiber for some users who needed to deploy a temporary network and then roll it back up and use it again later. We bought a one kilometer roll on a wooden spool and they would just as you say pull it down stairwells through doors and toss it up in trees. Once they hung it over a freeway in Germany from some utility poles (had to hire local linemen for that one) and then after a few day rolled it back.
I told the fiber cable sales guy I was going to test their sample by placing it in the parking lot and letting cars drive over it for a while. The cable was tough basically it was a bundle of kevlar around a thin fiber strand. The kevlar absorbed all of the abuse. After all they lay fiber cable in the ocean. If it can take being dumped off a ship into the ocean it can take a dogs stepping on it. The trick is to specify the correct cable and don't just buy whatever is cheapest.
You are right that bannig sales would have the correct effect but that is hard to implement. What about existing invetory? and buyers will simply put off their purchace rather then cancelit.
This is what anti-trust laws allow for tripple damages. Tripple damages have an even better and more direct effect becaust it allows the sales to continue but the fine is based so that "the more sales the bigger the fine".
Re:It is all about the platform.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, Sun's entry level and mid-range computers are AMD Operon powered. They also continue to sell SPARC.
Remember the Kris Kristopherson song Janis Joplin make into a hit? It had a line "freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose"
That's the problem. These bottom of society gang bangers have nothing to loose. They have no education, no income not even the realistic hope of living to middle age. They are just in and out of prison until one day some rival gang member blows them away with an AK47. These are the only people who are truly free. They have nothing to loose. Us "normal people" are kept under control because we have things we don't want to loose. Things like a positive self image.
"what happens if someone is transmitting a signal when the balloon in your area pops? "
The ballons last for 24 hours and new ones are sent up ooevery 12 to 8 hours. So that means there are always two or three balons up in the air. The way your phone works is that it always connects to the "best" tower. So when a balloon pop you phone will then connect to the next-best balloon.
Towers can only be a few tens of feet tall and their service area is small. At the height of a tower the earth's horizon is only about 25 miles. The Ballon can see for many hundreds of mile so the square area covered is many hundreds of times larger.
Next qestion: If you own a cell tower how much rent do you pay for the space the tower takes up? is it $600 a month or $6,000 a month. Figure the balloon pays zero. next, hown many towers can a balloon replace. Maybe 100 towers. What is the rent per month for 100 towers?
The thing to remember is that rent money has a short lifespan too. You pay the landowner every month and the next month you have to pay again. Kind of like the balloon
The problem with Microsoft buying Yahoo. is that EVERYONE hates microsoft so much that after the sale the best enginerrs will quit and find other jobs. Microsoft would only get the company name, a pile of servers and the few enginerrs that could not find jobs elsewhere. If microsoft wants to play this game they are going to have to change their reputation. They are going to have to become one ofthe "good guys". But this would mean loosing their entire business model and becomming a different company.
"their beliefs are nuts even in comparison to other Christians, so let's just ignore them.."
I think this is a strong point that many people do not know. That it is only a small minority of fundamentalist Christians that see a conflict with Evolution. This minority is giving all Christians a bad name.
At one time Adobe offered a version of Photoshop that ran native on UNIX. It has not been on the markket for some time. But that would be ideal. The next best thing would be to develop Gimp so that it could do what Photoshopp does. All it needs is a much more streamlined and customizable interface and the abillty to handle color managed files, 16-bit color and color spaces other then just RGB. OK so it needs a total re-write.... Runing Photoshop in Wine is a band aid fix.
I'm a software engineer too. However I've worked on projects where a software failure could get people killed or destroy hundreds of millions of dollors of "stuff". For example the software might be processing radar data inside a little gadget that flays at mach four and caries an explosive warhead. In those cases to don't just say "the user will blame the bug on The Internet" and let it go.
The thing with software is that it is such a wide field. If you are wrinting a web based survey program, so what if it crashes 0.5% of the time. But then if the software is the primary flight control for a large airliners loosing one to two hundred airplanes is unacceptable.
for the most part, from what I've seen critical software does in fact get enginered using prety good techiques. While, yes a lot of the web is coded by just some guy working under presure to get it done. So the point is you can't lump all software together.
With all the trouble the space shuttle has had, has anyone every blamed the on-board software? I don't think so. The shuttle is often used as an example of about the only way to write bug free software. It was very expanive and few progect will sppend that kind of money but that is what it takes.
Comparing NASA to the Air Force is not fair. There is a HUGE difference in size. The Air Force has thousands of pains to keep up and tens of thousands of people to train. The Air Force needs to be able to launch a huge air offensive involving tens of thousands of people and thousand of misions on very short notice. NASA does a few mission a year and has the option to postpone or cancel anything that might have any risk of failure.
It is like comparing a NASCAR race crew to a city fire departmet. Yes the race car is more sophisticated than a fire truck but still it costs a LOT more to maintain a city wide fire department then a car car crew. NASA owns just four 1970's vintage race cars
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I was a systems programming on the CDC6400. This at one time was the world's fastest super computer and was released in 1964 (hence the model number.) I'm not that old. The machine was old when I worked on it. I did patches and custom modification to the operating system. We worked in asembly language so I did have to know the gory details of the hardware.
It was a highly parallel machine. At every level. It could execute 10 instuctions at once. There was a 10 way path to main memory so we could do 10 store or fetches at once. Some machine had multiple CPUs and all machine had at least 10 PPUs, there were smaller CPU where most of the operating system actualy ran keepping the main CPu free for user level tasks.
To this day I've not seen this level parallelsm. Ok the old Pentium had a long pipeline and Sun will sell you an 8-core SPARC but still nothing compared to the old CDC machines
The wiki article below has some details wrong but the ideas are describbed well. The machine was built at a time when electronics tachnology had hit a wall and couldn't be had faster. They had already gone to extreams like giing up on water cooling to use freon cooling where the refridgerent was plumbed directly into the guts of the CPUs card guides. The only option to go faster was parallelium. I think we wil see this again as we hit a wall with IC technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600
What specifically can you do in Photoshop that I can't do in Gimp?
I used to use Gimp too. Used it for years. But Photoshop is just miles and miles ahead. First off photoshop works in 16-bit per channel color and not just in RGB but in other color spaces. The fact that Gimp can't do this means it can't be used for any serious work. 8-bits just can't cut it. I could go on listing hundreds of tools that PS has but that is just picking nits.
The electronics and detonation systems used in nuclear bombs are very advanced, and very difficult to get right. A large portion of the time spent developing a nuclear weapon is devoted to the detonation electronics.
Mistakenly handing over a crate of said electronics would give a nation a significant shortcut toward developing their own nuclear weapons. This is not the eletronics that detonates the nuclear explosion. This is hard to design. This is the sensor that determine when the bomb needs to go off. Conventional bombs have fuses too, fuses tell the detonator when it is time to "go". THe fuses can be set to go off so that the bomb explode only after falling through a roof or whatever. On an ICBM the fuse might "look" at maybe deceleration due to air friction to know how high it is. The secret, I'm sure is where I said "maybe"
Why bother with an R/C aircraft? A hunting rifle with a scope would kill a drone a lot easier. A more sophisticaled attack would be to jam the drones's radio reciever so it could not be commanded from the ground.
Actually I think these will be used just like helicopers are used but maybe at 10X less cost.
When you look at a wire, or printed trace on a PCB it is not the resistance that limits how fast you can send a signal. It is inductance and capasitance that act like a low pass filter. We don't care how fact eletrons travel in wire what we care about is how fact we can change the voltage in the wire. We send data by changing voltages not by sending electrons.
It does help to pick the "right " school. There is nothing to stop a prospective student from talking with teachers and students and even sitting in o a class or skiming over the required text books in the student bookstore.
The real problem is that high school students are not realt qualitied or well enough informed to pick a school. I know I was not. I always thought that I wanted to go to UCLA. I don't know why I thought that but from the 8th grade on I did. Well I finally got there and reallt did not like it. Some very good insturctors and I did learn a lot but I didn't like the big campus and huge size of some of the classes. I transfered out to a small private school. Picking a school is hard.
I was a double major. Enginerring and Pihilosophy. With enginerring, what makes it hard is that you have to be correct so for example your computer program either works or it does not. but with other subjects it is mostly opinion and as long as you have references and some reasoning you can write anything
Geographically isn't what's needed -- Correct. All you really need to do is to prefer to exchange data with peers that are low latency. "latency" is a decent proxy for all kinds of things and it is easy to compute.
You need it all. To pass the Turing test you'd need to comunicate like a human and you'd also need to know a lot of stupid stuff like that shoe laces come in any color and a persons great aunt is female and you can see through (most) glass. You would nee the personal backstory too. because I might ask "what school did you go to?"
I don't like the test because the machine could be quite inteligent but not fool anyone
That business would be doomed to fail. Selling the power back at night? The price is lowest at night and hign durring the daytime. Air conditioning is the magor user of power. Solar power works well because you get the most power just when it is needed, on hot sunny days.
"Google has a finite amount of space!" Yes but there might be a million Googles.
I think the article is bunk. Let's say we can store a bit in the space of just one atom. As storage grows at some point the entire Earth is covered 1 foot deep in atom sized bits. Then in 100 more years the stacked of bits reached past the orbit of the moon. This will never happen.
I think when people look back at the 21st century they will see it as a period when storage grew fast and then ettled down to a stedy state. Exponential growth is never sustainable.
Try this experiment: Pump the air out of a small tank now open the valve. At first the air rushes in very fast but over time the rate slows and finally it stops. But a person looking at the inrush of air in the first few seconds might think that all of the air on Earth might get sucked into the tank and panic. What we have right now is the first stages of a "data vacuum" there is a big in-rush at present.
If I set up a deal to sell my cargo in 100 years. I won't live to see the results but I can sell a contract on the expected profit or maybe I can borrow using the future profits as collateral. In the past people spent 100 to build a cathedral from stones cut by hand. Historically humans have always planed for the far future. Now we seem to have stopped doing this but perhaps in a couple centuries we will go back to our old ways and go back to building things that we expect to stand for 1,000 years.
"It wouldn't be trade so much as gambling." Here is a senario for you. It is 1450 AD in Europe. An investor buys a few ships and hires a crews. He buys goods and fills the ships and sends them on a trip around the horn of Africa to China. He has instructed the crew to trade the goods for tea and spice and to return back to Europe with said tea and spice. Talk about "gambling." What were the odds? Those investors had huge fortunes on the table. each trip representd hundreds ood man years of labor. Yes labor was cheap but you had to pay at least the food a person would eat in a year to get a year's worth of work even for slaves. "hundreds of man years" has a huge sum of money then and now.
"Long lived traders" Yes. I strongly suspect the "traders" are robots. At some point in the future machine intelligence will surpass humans. The machines can simply shut down or greatly slow down during the long trip.
The machine may not even think of it as a "trip"
But this is all silly. What would be worth transporting? Information is the only "goods" that would have enough value to be worth sending. For that what you need is not a ship but a powerful laser.
The rules change when you become a monopoly.
Let's use a example. I'm selling water in containers on the street corner. Some one wants to buy a bottle from me but I say No, if you want to buy my water you have to also buy a set of water glasses from me and this bag o ready mix cement too. You walk away laughing.
Now lets say I'm selling water but lets say the no one else has water for sale. I'm a mono[oly water seller. Now I bet you would buy that set of glasses and the cement.
The above is very clear cut. The real world is not but still it shows why the rules change. Being a monopoly gives a seller to much power over a buyer so most places try to place limits on mono[polies to limit their power.
I worked on the B1 project right durring the change over when they changed over to ejection seats. I think I did some drawing of pyrotechnic tubes used to blow a hole in the roof above the seats. --- The capsule thing did not work so well. Had it been used durring a lunch abort aerodynamic forced would have turned it into shrapnel in an instant.
When that SRB attachment failed and the shuttle yawed it was the aerodynamic forces of the yaw that caused the break up.
The bottom line is that there is no reasitic way to escape from a vehicle that is traveling at literally thousands of miles per hours. Hitting the air at that speed is like doing a belly flop into water off a tall bridge, the air, the water and a concrete sidewalk are all about the same thing
Ever stick you hand out the window of your car while going 60 MPH? They that at 600 MPH I think you'd break your arm or wrose. Now try at 6,000 MPH I think the car would explode. Now try replacing yu arm with a crew escape capsule. the capsule is much bigger then your arm.
The largest Christian church in the world, the one with 600 million members (remember, the population of the US in only 300 million) says that a conflict between it's teaching and science is not possible because they address different areas of knowledge. It is that same way that math and history can not be in conflict. It is only a few fundamentalist wackos that are complaining so vocally.
I think if they are going to pass a law that says teachers can tech pseudo-science in a science class they should also be allowed to tech pseudo-math in math classes. No, I'm not joking. My religious believe is that the Prime Factorization Theorem is wrong and integers do not really have a unique set of prime factors. An don't tell me pi and e are not rational numbers. There MUST be some ratio of integers that will make pi. No, No, No, don't give me any over your logical arguments or "proofs". What is logic and proof compared to the word of God?
"Seems to me like a wise person would look at the fact that religious modes of thought exist in every culture around the world, and understand that there is value in other thought processes"
So you are saying that EVERYthing that is wide spread and observed in many cultures has value. "X" is wide spread, therefore "X" has value. If this argument is true then it must be true for all values of "X", not just for "religious modes of thought". I think this was the very argument the Hitler used and maybe he was right. He observed a wide spread trend not just in humans but in nature where the strong and powerful would exploit the weak for their own gain. This seems to be THE single most wide spread and pervasive behaviour so it must have value.
I disagree. I bought a spool of fiber for some users who needed to deploy a temporary network and then roll it back up and use it again later. We bought a one kilometer roll on a wooden spool and they would just as you say pull it down stairwells through doors and toss it up in trees. Once they hung it over a freeway in Germany from some utility poles (had to hire local linemen for that one) and then after a few day rolled it back.
I told the fiber cable sales guy I was going to test their sample by placing it in the parking lot and letting cars drive over it for a while. The cable was tough basically it was a bundle of kevlar around a thin fiber strand. The kevlar absorbed all of the abuse. After all they lay fiber cable in the ocean. If it can take being dumped off a ship into the ocean it can take a dogs stepping on it. The trick is to specify the correct cable and don't just buy whatever is cheapest.
You are right that bannig sales would have the correct effect but that is hard to implement. What about existing invetory? and buyers will simply put off their purchace rather then cancelit.
This is what anti-trust laws allow for tripple damages. Tripple damages have an even better and more direct effect becaust it allows the sales to continue but the fine is based so that "the more sales the bigger the fine".
Yes, Sun's entry level and mid-range computers are AMD Operon powered. They also continue to sell SPARC.
Remember the Kris Kristopherson song Janis Joplin make into a hit? It had a line "freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose"
That's the problem. These bottom of society gang bangers have nothing to loose. They have no education, no income not even the realistic hope of living to middle age. They are just in and out of prison until one day some rival gang member blows them away with an AK47. These are the only people who are truly free. They have nothing to loose. Us "normal people" are kept under control because we have things we don't want to loose. Things like a positive self image.
"what happens if someone is transmitting a signal when the balloon in your area pops? "
The ballons last for 24 hours and new ones are sent up ooevery 12 to 8 hours. So that means
there are always two or three balons up in the air. The way your phone works is that it always
connects to the "best" tower. So when a balloon pop you phone will then connect to the next-best
balloon.
Towers can only be a few tens of feet tall and their service area is small. At the height of
a tower the earth's horizon is only about 25 miles. The Ballon can see for many hundreds of mile
so the square area covered is many hundreds of times larger.
Next qestion: If you own a cell tower how much rent do you pay for the space the tower takes up?
is it $600 a month or $6,000 a month. Figure the balloon pays zero. next, hown many towers
can a balloon replace. Maybe 100 towers. What is the rent per month for 100 towers?
The thing to remember is that rent money has a short lifespan too. You pay the landowner
every month and the next month you have to pay again. Kind of like the balloon
The problem with Microsoft buying Yahoo. is that EVERYONE hates microsoft so much that after the sale the best enginerrs will quit and find other jobs. Microsoft would only get the company name, a pile of servers and the few enginerrs that could not find jobs elsewhere. If microsoft wants to play this game they are going to have to change their reputation. They are going to have to become one ofthe "good guys". But this would mean loosing their entire business model and becomming a different company.
"their beliefs are nuts even in comparison to other Christians, so let's just ignore them.."
I think this is a strong point that many people do not know. That it is only a small minority of fundamentalist Christians that see a conflict with Evolution. This minority is giving all Christians a bad name.
At one time Adobe offered a version of Photoshop that ran native on UNIX. It has not been on the markket for some time. But that would be ideal. The next best thing would be to develop Gimp so that it could do what Photoshopp does. All it needs is a much more streamlined and customizable interface and the abillty to handle color managed files, 16-bit color and color spaces other then just RGB. OK so it needs a total re-write.... Runing Photoshop in Wine is a band aid fix.
I'm a software engineer too. However I've worked on projects where a software failure could get people killed or destroy hundreds of millions of dollors of "stuff". For example the software might be processing radar data inside a little gadget that flays at mach four and caries an explosive warhead. In those cases to don't just say "the user will blame the bug on The Internet" and let it go.
The thing with software is that it is such a wide field. If you are wrinting a web based survey program, so what if it crashes 0.5% of the time. But then if the software is the primary flight control for a large airliners loosing one to two hundred airplanes is unacceptable.
for the most part, from what I've seen critical software does in fact get enginered using prety good techiques. While, yes a lot of the web is coded by just some guy working under presure to get it done. So the point is you can't lump all software together.
With all the trouble the space shuttle has had, has anyone every blamed the on-board software? I don't think so. The shuttle is often used as an example of about the only way to write bug free software. It was very expanive and few progect will sppend that kind of money but that is what it takes.
Comparing NASA to the Air Force is not fair. There is a HUGE difference in size. The Air Force has thousands of pains to keep up and tens of thousands of people to train. The Air Force needs to be able to launch a huge air offensive involving tens of thousands of people and thousand of misions on very short notice. NASA does a few mission a year and has the option to postpone or cancel anything that might have any risk of failure.
It is like comparing a NASCAR race crew to a city fire departmet. Yes the race car is more sophisticated than a fire truck but still it costs a LOT more to maintain a city wide fire department then a car car crew. NASA owns just four 1970's vintage race cars