Having built a software development team from scratch for a venture-funded startup, and having done tech vetting for years on consultants, I fully understand the difficulty in determining who's actually talented and who isn't. But I just don't buy that the 'puzzle' approach translates into 'great software engineer'. You may well get a bunch of bright and clever people who are good at puzzles, and it's good to have some folks like that around, but I suspect if everyone is that way, you'll end up with a bunch of engineers trying to out-clever each other -- and that doesn't translate into well-designed and readily-maintained software. IMHO. ..bruce..

(What do I think is necessary? See here and here.)

That's what my friend and boss Wayne Holder said about Turbo Pascal when I demo'd it for him back when it first came out in the early 80s. It wasn't just that TP was vastly smaller than any other Pascal (C, FORTRAN, etc.) compiler out there, it's that it compiled much, much faster -- in some cases, an order or two of magnitude faster. ..bruce..

The original version of WordPerfect was developed by Bruce Bastian while a grad student at BYU (with Alan Ashton as his faculty advisor). At that time, it was a screen-oriented editor that ran on Data General minicomputers. I know because I shared an office with Bruce during my senior year at BYU (1977-78) and used his existing version of the editor to write several papers for my classes. :-) Bruce & Alan went on to sell a (DG) version to a local city government (Orem, UT) and then founded Satellite Systems Int'l to commercialize the product and ended up owning the MS-DOS word processing market. Word Perfect still might be dominant were it not for Microsoft's brilliant head-fake with OS/2 and Windows 3.0, but that's another story. ..bruce..

I was out to lunch with a group of people and the subject of space exploration came up. Having worked at NASA and LPI (albeit 30 years ago), I expressed my various opinions (e.g., the Shuttle was a mistake and we lost 30-40 years by NASA's hindering private enterprises from space launch systems). The subject of mining asteroids came up; I said that it could provide some long-term benefits, but I would be very, very leery about moving an asteroid into near-Earth orbit, for all the obvious reasons.

That said, moving a 10-meter asteroid into earth orbit carries (IMHO) relatively few risks. ..bruce..

OK, I'm at my laptop, laughing out loud. Well done. ..bruce..

You know, the ones where the character (usually a young, bright geek) rips the cover off the card swipe/keypad unit, shorts a few wires, and opens the door? ..bruce..

"...pick two."

If you're lucky or very good. In lots of projects, you get to pick just one. ..bruce..

I worked for Oasis Systems/FTL Games back in the early 1980s; we had software than ran on the Osborne 1 ("The Word Plus" spelling checker; "Punctuation + Style" grammar checker). In fact, if I remember correctly, we used a utility package running on the Osborne 1 to create most of our other 5.25" CP/M disk formats; there was no standard 5.25" disk format for CP/M, and so we had to create different disks for most different computers running CP/M.

Adam Osborne was actually a columnist for InfoWorld who, after complaining about the state of the personal computing market, decided to take action and start his own computer company. The Osborne 1 was a success (within the scope of the tiny nascent PC market at the time), but he pre-announced the Osborne II too far in advance of being able to ship it, saw his Osborne 1 sales dry up, and ended up having to shut down the company due to lack of cash flow. If you've ever heard anyone refer to "the Osborne effect", that's what they're talking about.

Not much nostalgia here, though -- I'll take my modern laptops, desktops, and digital devices (iPhone 4, iPad 1) over an Osborne any day. ..bruce..

The Atari port happened after I left FTL - and, I'll note, it was a great improvement over the Apple version - but I did do a fair amount of 68000 programming over the next few years. A great processor, and it's a shame that the IBM PC reference architecture wasn't based on it.

I have fond memories of the 6502. I co-designed and did most of the coding for a computer game for the Apple II (Sundog) and so did a lot of 6502 assembly coding. A few years later, I taught assembly language coding to CS students at BYU, and we use 6502-based systems there as well (which was a vast improvement over the IBM 360 assembly + JCL on punch cards that I had to learn on a decade earlier as an undergrad myself).

...I have to ask: doesn't NASA have anything better to do with its time (and our money)? ..bruce..

I wrote for BYTE back in the mid-1980s. Nowadays, if I mention that to most people, they look at me curiously -- probably get the same reaction if I told them I had published articles in Colliers.

And, no, any current incarnation won't be the same as back then, but the personal computing industry has changed massively since then; it's been through at least two crashes (1988-90 and, of course, 2000-2004), and the technology is on a whole different level now -- both the hardware and the system software is less accessible than it was back then. The real barrier, though, is the advertisers. BYTE in the mid-80s sometimes got up to 600 pages per issue total size, because there were so many advertisers willing to chase after its readers. (Cf. the 1988-90 tech crash.) Trying to create an updated version of that BYTE might be possible, but I'm not sure who would advertise in it. ..bruce..

There are already plenty of alternatives to the Mac Apps Store: Amazon, Best Buy, Fry's, and anywhere else you can buy Mac software. As the person says, get a grip.