some observations to be taken into consideration too ... little companies like VSL also have to carefully watch the direction hardware vendors are going.
for myself years ago it has been disappointing to notice apple turned away from motorola and later obviously ran into some discrepancy with IBM - we have never seen the power 6 processor (introduced 2007) in a mac what would have been a quantum leap in processing ... it took intel until now to catch up with this amount of processing power ... anyway ...
on the other side apple acquired 3 *heavyweights* in 1) processor design and technology development as well as 2) a whole chip development company during the past year and they still have advertised a lot of jobs related to chip development.
time will show if those activities will focus on computer development or just bring new iphones, tv-sets and similar toys to us ...
as soon as product policy is noticed to be changing it makes sense again to reconsider software development.
christian
1) Bob Drebin (CTO of ATI), Raja Koduri (CTO of AMD), Mark Papermaster (IBM chief technology developer)
2) P A Semi (specialiced on power processor development)
and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.