Linux is very convenient, I keep a DVD of my favorite distro around so I don't need working internet access to set it up. In fact I often install Linux while I'm at work, without my personal system connected to the corporate network (as that violates company policies).

Linux runs like a champ on old Mac hardware, which is also very cheap (affordable). And tends to breath some new life into an old system that has started to feel a bit sluggish. I still run Linux on my Mac Pro, but have moved to PCs for laptops because I wasn't that happy with the Air. I didn't need thin and lightweight, only that it was small enough to fit in my backpack and was reasonably upgradable.

There are a hundred different flavors of Linux. There is bound to be one that suits each person the best. There is only one OSX, if you don't like it, then I guess try Windows, if you don't like that, then you're SOL.

A free market would permit everyone to operate freely on equal footing, where the biggest players don't automatically get a cut on top of what they already charge.

Actually you don't need to use a comma in English. It depends on which style guide you choose to follow.

(I did it again, enjoy!)

These are my peers, as I am also an engineer (nearly everyone is at my company). My job is to verify that the documented solutions are architecturally sound, then verify that the implementation matches the documentation. My reports up to management are relatively simple, as they amount to predicted completion dates and a vague estimate on risk. It's gloriously concise.

There is more to life than STEM.

Often I wish the E stood for English, usually that thought occurs when I am reading status reports and documentation from Engineers.

It's usually the assholes telling everyone else that they need to be nice.

Danger UXB, It Takes a Thief, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, ... and that's just the stuff from the 1970s I can think of that is still worth watching.

I should switch to one of those drought-tolerant lawns, and plant San Pedro cactus, Peyote, etc. Then I will finally be prepared to invest in the latest web 2.0 start ups.

Sorry if you missed it, but my post tried to point out that x86/64 is not really different from "1980s" CPU architecture. It's an 8085 with harvard cache, out-of-order execution and RISC translation instead of microcoded (not that that is a significant difference in my opinion)

x86 will eventually get transactional memory, making it competitive with a 1970s cray. And x86 has gotten hardware visualization, making it competitive to an 1960s IBM.

Everything old is new again!

low-skill immigrants don't usually come on an H1-B Visa. In many cases they are working here illegally.

I might hire those US tech workers to do my lawn, if they'll take less than an illegal immigrant. I'm assuming working at a desk all day doesn't make them particularly qualified to work in the fields or do a proper job on my lawn.

indeed, the architecture of stream processors is quite a bit different than the general purpose processors we are used to programming. It's kind of exciting that programming stream processors through shaders, openCL, and CUDA has gone mainstream. And for a few hundred dollars a poor college student can afford to build a small system capable of running highly parallel programs. While not equivalent in performance to a super computer, has structural similarities sufficient for experimentation and learning.

20 years ago I wouldn't have believed that a poor programmer could buy a system that had 1000+ execution engines in it.

I'm not sure SIMD really falls outside of a "1980s" model of a CPU. Maybe if your model means Z80/6502/6809/68K/80[1234]86/etc, rather than including things like Cray that at least some students and engineers during the 80s would have been exposed to.

von Neumann execution, but Harvard cache become common place in the 1990s. Most people didn't need to know much about the Harvard-ness unless they need to do micro-optimization.

Things don't get radically different until you start thinking about Dataflow architecture and Transactional memory. I'm not sure if Dataflow will ever come back, but transactional memory is here and pops up from time to time and I think it will get big pretty soon as moves beyond being some small obscure part in a processor core.

(Transport Triggered Architecture is equivalent to von Neumann for software when abstracted out in a macro assembler, so I don't count TTA as something new, plus it was pretty uncommon)

Even 25 years ago we would see various ads selling "C++ Frameworks" and "Toolkits" being sold in the back of the programming magazines. These would range from a library of GUI controls that may or may not be extended and that often featured the ability to to be added on to an existing application without altering its basic flow (so caller gets to drive the activity instead of the library/framework, not very frameworky). You might be placing a narrower definition on the word "framework" than exists in the software industry as a whole. Perhaps a definition that is more specific to the industry that you work in.

An example of something that I consider a framework that others do not is GLUT. (yes, it's very old. and it's C not class-based).
A less controversial example in C would be Athena Widgets (aka Xaw). It has most of the properties people associate with modern frameworks, even if the way it goes about things is terrible. (nor very C99-friendly)

I've had similar experience in the past. (Linux, Solaris and NetBSD user for soon to be 20 years now). I keep the Windows box around for a few bits of software and games. I have a lot of games that run natively on Linux now, thanks to Humble Bundle and Steam.

The whole MS Office substitute has been a solved problem for 5-10 years for most people. Most of my engineering documentation work is done on a wiki these days anyways.

I feel that software has been moving slowly away from Windows of the last few years, and that by the time I will feel compelled to upgrade that there will be no need for Windows for me, or really for the vast majority of computer users. Windows will just be a choice that people make based on preference rather than technical reasons like hardware support or the available software.

Agreed there are a lot of tools at a developer's disposal. The original point was why not use web development for this project. Linux's GUI is not great in my opinion (long time Xlib, GTK+, XForms developer), but web GUI is mature, fairly easy to develop and can be combined in new and interesting ways.