I think there could be a little bit of a language barrier due to this, especially after reading your example of an app vs. a program. We need to educate the layman if they make mistakes thinking they are separate things. App, program, application, widget, are really all synonymous, but I would qualify that a widget could describe a mini-version of a full-fledged program, but it is a program nonetheless. Google Docs is simply a program that runs on a remote server, in the cloud, and it doesn't make it less of a program, app, or what have you.

You and Neal both made some good points. I do think that path dependency and lock-in are very much present in the space industry, at least in my experience, but some of the changes he's proposing may be in fantasyland at this point. Space missions have a certain objective in mind, whether it's to sell phone time, sell imagery, or study geysers on a moon. The group that wants to do these things usually don't overly care how it's achieved as long as the objective is achieved, and it's as cheap as possible.

Rarely are aerospace companies in the business of trying out radical new designs because of the huge expense involved (typically). They want to make their shareholders happy, because it is a business after all. One word that is hugely important in the space business is the word legacy. When some satellite, rocket, or component has legacy, it means that it has flown before with mission-accomplishing results, and thus instills confidence in the product, and it will be a lot cheaper to build than the alternative. Program managers and board members would love nothing more than to have your spacecraft, rocket, and overall mission to be completely legacy-based. When something is completely legacy-based, it lacks innovation.

I think Neal's point is that rockets and satellites do not see huge amounts of innovation because of the crazy expense for the customer, so we tend to be path-dependent and locked-in to tried and true designs.

The real innovation is going to come from an ambitious young group that can find someone crazy enough to back them for years on end and make a business out of it. It's not going to come from big aerospace companies since all of those are held accountable by their shareholders. So yeah, this is in the sci-fi fantasyland category for now... until it happens.

I wonder...

On my m15x, there were no stickers below the keyboard, unlike one you would buy from Best Buy or NewEgg. I think there's a Windows ID sticker underneath that is ugly and likes to flake off over time. Alienware's laptops aren't quite as sleek as Apple's, nor are they quite as robust-feeling, but they are doing some things right. The amount of crapware loaded on the laptop was also very minimal, akin to Apple's method, which I appreciate wholeheartedly. I still put Ubuntu on it though. ;)

Finally, the vacuum cleaner will actually do what it says it's going to do.

This tells me that the /. crowd is still heavy on the power-user side of things. I was expecting to see more 15-17", or smaller, votes here since I figured there would be a high number of laptop folks.

I will second this, from experience. Being a games tester really sucks. It was one of my first jobs after college, and I got paid 20k a year to test an MMO to get it ready for prime time. What could be better than that (besides the money), right? Well, it turns out that I'd rather do manual labor out in the hot sun than do that job again. The environment was cool, not unlike a big frat house, but actual work really sucks because the monotony set in on me quickly after the novelty of the cool game ideas wore off. You have to continually try to break the game (which was highly broken anyway), and document your findings so the engineers can use the info and fix the code. Rinse and repeat, a lot. You don't get to play the game as would want to play it, as Sycraft said, but you do get some creative freedom in "how to break it" in the beta stages of the game. I had a dick boss who literally sat behind me literally looking over my shoulder, so that made it all the more unpleasant. After the game was released, I would pull shifts doing online tech support. After the game tanked, I luckily was one of the first to get laid off. This turned out to be a blessing, as I believe it steered me toward my career doing space operations. Now I troubleshoot real problems with real spacecraft in orbit, and thank god my video game career didn't pan out. It is such a brutal industry (competing for consumer's purchases), looking back on it. I still love playing games, but I laugh every time I see Sony advertising "The Tester," a reality show on the PSN competing for the next game tester position. Those poor poor sods... Ha!

Most systems engineers in the space industry know that it's difficult to completely use metric for space missions. There are usually many components and subsystems that are designed by different vendors that have their own paradigms set up. These paradigms are usually kept do a legacy of proven use, and engineers will agree with me that if a product works well on-orbit, why on earth would you want to change a product simply due to unit conversions. You simply take note of the units and move on. I never thought I'd have to deal with microinches, to be honest, but it's no big deal since everyone knows 1 uin = 0.0254 microns.

Do they allow you choose whether the baby will have red irises, pre-painted black fingernails, a perm that needs no hair spray, and "Whitesnake" pre-tattooed on its chest?