so is it impossible to extend png to include more aggressive (but still lossless) compression?

i'm getting tired of the tower of babel.

egads. i know a few gods. none of them write assembly or opcodes. they may write their own microcode compiler for the processor they're designing to solve what ails them, though :)

seriously, these are a few things i know most grad-student CS guys have never been exposed to but which should be taught:
. source code revision control systems
. debugging techniques (vs. broken hardware, not software)
. platform integration (e.g. where do i store preferences!?!?, etc)
. multi-programming in event-loop schemes
. techniques for gaining understanding of a large body of code, relatively quickly
. Makefiles/code build environs
. packaging
. testing, with large systems/moving parts.

i do device drivers so i don't often come across people who'd rather code in java. but the rest are widely applicable, i think.

I can get things done with it which were a complete pain before STL started to work w/o too much thought.

I don't write Perl scripts any longer. But, I never really try to use things like exception handling, inheritance, multiple or otherwise (unless seriously shallow), non-trivial const correctness, operator overloading, etc. There are weeds in there you're not likely to recover from brushing against.

Long story short: now great for simple, "get it done" jobs which were sending me to scripts before. If I were writing a modern library (e.g. Qt or the like) I'd stay way away from it.

slashdotting is apparently still easy :)

Yes, teach it to them for historical purposes. So they see how awful it is and no one makes that same mistake again :P