Depends on how many versions of the damn thing you are willing to upkeep in the same or different code base. Good luck integrating a moderately complicated bug fix in multiple branches of different code bases.

Because unlike yourself, I have worked with many, many thousands lines of (current, not ancient) code. Doing so requires discipline and good skills by all team members to be able to be productive and keep the project streamlined and on time. It is a good read for all professionals involved in the software industry. If you don't care about either the company or code, why the funk are you reading this and posting here???

Except your analogy imho is wrong here. We are not looking for a shortcut to some route that takes months to travel...

A Space Race is usually a race to be the first at something, like going to the moon was. Unless they plan on racing to put a human on Mars, there is no Space Race worth devoting billions to.

I'm curious to hear why, what are your examples?

Most folks that build their own machines or upgrade them are gamers and enthusiasts that need PCs. You can't replace a PC with a tablet for gaming or development for example. There are those that just want to play with the insides and change them around. I don't consider myself a true modder yet I have toyed around with upgrading my video card a couple of times, adding hard disks and adding an extra fan that I'm not too sure helps or not.

Uhhh...you haven't even done one google search have you? For Windows 7, you use the free version of Visual Studio for WP7...with integrated WP7 emulator and use C#. I paid a one time fee of $100 and have developed and published 5 apps so far. Developing for WP7 is very easy and enjoyable I would say (integrating ads using the Microsoft's ad SDK is soooooooo easy).

Greenhopper, custom reports, etc. Not all is straighforward.

That is called sick days...and guess who pays? ;)

Hmm, I went and read some stuff about writing in one of these languages (functional languages like Smalltalk and Haskell). This means that you can prove the correctness of the code, presumably automatically, so presumably very quickly...no need for peer reviews and test deployments. Interesting.

No peer reviews and/or staging deployments before going to prod? This sounds fishy...

Boy was I such a fanboy of such a mediocre game...it was my first MMO (ahhhh, first love, no wonder)...so this study must be true.

The Kinect for example is pretty techy...

I wonder how many bitcoins this monster can mine per hour lol?

Cool, thanks for your time and explication.