I disagree- Being exposed to how early x86 or other platform programmers worked around limits of the time teaches new programmers how to innovate and think outside the box (in addition to the very valuable insights on performance tuning & optimization on physical hardware mentioned by many others above).

Go down some sketch back alley, find a guy in tattered clothing and ask him to film stuff for you. This technology is readily available under what I like to call the Night Train Agreement.

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for" society to build a better solution, they will. A massive number of IT professionals around the world have clearly demonstrated that when the world of business takes an industry down a path not in the best interest of consumers, consumers are ready, willing and able to manufacture their own solution. If book publishers (E- or otherwise) take the publishing industry in a direction unsatisfactory to the majority of readers, they may eventually find themselves in a position of irrelevance.

The reason why people downloaded Flash is not because it was the only game in town, it was because a large # of content producers chose to deliver content in Flash. The same can't be said of Silverlight.

Hilarious. Truly. But back to reality- are you saying that the bar hasn't changed with the advent of the Web and the removal of virtually all costs and barriers to publishing to a global audience? Because that hasn't been my experience. I've observed a marked change in the signal-to-noise ratio since the web went mainstream.

With neither providing any visibility of the thin layer of fact in the middle.

Isn't that what "New Media" means; sensational?

If you're not the author of and haven't read, run right out and buy "Stuff White People Like." I think you'll appreciate it. Then again you might have already have had 'nuf-o-that particular humor.

The engine is more "organic chemistry" then it is the brain. The brain is the result of dropping the genome (data) into the engine (the reality of organic chemistry). It's tough to make complexity comparisons of binary systems (ie. von Neuman machines) to analog systems such as organisms; the latter has a much more robust signalling system and so comparisons of data capacity are not very helpful... or relevant.

Maybe it's not a computer problem as much as it is an expression problem. Given a formal language (ie. a deterministic, machine-readble one) computers can generally deal with the problem expressed but, to my knowledge, there is no formal language for expression of abstract concepts.

It's only fear mongering if somebody is afraid. Are your own beliefs that shaky that you actually give a crap what this guy does? I suggest a whit of tolerance my friend. This is solely a copyright or trademark issue; it doesn't matter whether he's selling iced cream or evangelizing Linux out of his Bug.

So, and I'm just spit-ballin', strong typing is the major benefit? There are a fair number of dynamic languages that support strong type checking - maybe that's the appropriate direction for web dev. I certainly enjoy RAD IDEs and would hate to give that up. Maybe I'll dust off an old APL or Erlang reference this weekend... I've a friend that did web dev in Smalltalk 10 years ago - maybe there was a method to the madness I thought it was at the time.

I'd settle for less bloat-ware. Back in the day amazing things were done with extremely limited CPU resources by programming closer to the wire. Now we have orders of magnitude more resources but most programming is done at a very high level with numerous layers of inefficiency which negates, possibly more than negates, the benefits of increased CPU resources. Yes, yes- I wax a little "in my day/up hill both ways, etc." but do the benefits of high level programming and efficient use of resources have to be mutually exclusive?

The point of a new architecture would be for it NOT to be a one shot deal and that it would give you ample room for evolution before hitting physical limitations at least for a few "generations". The problem of stepping sideways is the risk. You don't have to look too far on /. to find other examples of civilization being irrationally tied to a legacy they're unwilling to walk away from even if by doing so they accept mediocre technology.

If static languages are better, why is the bulk of web development done with dynamic languages? I'm not picking a side, just interested in your response.