I wrote a rather long post on my blog a few months ago on this exact issue. After doing some research, I couldn't really find a language or technology that would meet my needs, but I did come up with a better idea of what I would consider to be an ideal educational program.
http://angrymen.org/uncategorized/towards-an-educational-programming-language-for-children/
LiveCDs would work for many cases, but target disk mode has been really useful in tech support cases when the computer will not boot, even from a CD. Customers who send their computers repaired under warranty are told that their data will be replaced. If, for example, the screen is broken and the external display port is non-functional, then target disk mode is the easiest way to make a backup of the files.
Windows isn't exactly innocent in this regard either. I'm getting tired of cleaning out thumbs.db files from my pictures folder every time Windows users access it.
The antivirus software for OS X just isn't of the same quality as the antivirus software for Windows. I'm not going to make any judgments on the overall quality of Windows antivirus software, and I'm not saying this to disparage those who write antivirus software for OS X, but I don't think the antivirus vendors treat security on OS X seriously. I can't really blame them for this. After all, the OS X market is much smaller than the Windows market, OS X users are less likely to purchase antivirus software, and they're barely keeping up with the current Windows malware as is.
As a result, the OS X antivirus products tend to be buggy. A few years ago I was supporting customers who were running Norton on OS X. I commonly ran into two problems with the software. First, the uninstaller which shipped with the software didn't work. It failed to detect the presence of Norton on the system, even though it had been installed using the installer program on the same CD. Luckily the manual removal process wasn't that hard. This wouldn't have been a problem if I didn't have to uninstall it so often. The software would occasionally decide to take up all of the available RAM and CPU time. I can only assume that it was scanning either network traffic or running processes, because this did not correspond to hard disk activity. In one particularly nasty case, a user with both Limewire and Norton set to open at login on an iBook could not use the computer at all. It took an excess of fifteen minutes to log in, open a Finder window, navigate to the Utilities folder, and open Activity Monitor. Turns out that Limewire was doing something that Norton didn't like, but it was Norton that was causing the problem.
Norton also had a particularly nasty false positive which hit many of my users. Most of them kept their cool and called in for advice, but some of them hit the panic button and started reformatting their systems. Because of the performance problems, the fact that the users didn't really see any benefit to the antivirus software to begin with, and other small problems like this one, users would frequently install Norton and then come back a month later and ask it be uninstalled because it kept slowing down their system.
Switching them to McAfee didn't really resolve the issue. McAfee would launch at login and try to update the current virus definitions. More often than not, this would fail. McAfee initially claimed that this was due to their update servers' poor availability. The Windows version of McAfee was having update issues as well, so it was a plausible explanation. However, the OS X machines continued to not get new updates for months after the availability issues subsided. Turns out that updating didn't work correctly in what was then known as Virex. A few months later, McAfee issued a patch which had to be manually installed to fix the issue. The uninstaller for McAfee actually works, but isn't very user friendly. It's just a shell script which uses sudo to perform some actions. From a tech support point of view, I love how quick and easy it is. If I have remote access to a machine, I can uninstall McAfee. However, it's not a very good soloution for normal users. I've had to field a fair amount of support calls which basically boiled down the users, not seeing bullets being displayed when they entered their passwords, assumed that their passwords were not being entered. So while McAfee doesn't have as many annoying problems as Norton had, they didn't throughly test their updating code, took a long time to come out with a patch, and didn't bother to put together a GUI installer.
Because OS X antivirus software just isn't a priority for the antivirus vendors, it's hard to advise a user to install an antivirus product on their Mac. Considering that every solution I've tested seems incomplete, I find it hard to believe that the designers of these products have sat down and had a hard look at how malware would take advanta
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The Firefox codebase definitely has some huge issues, but does anyone remember the big Netscape rewrite for version 6? Joel does. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
I wrote a rather long post on my blog a few months ago on this exact issue. After doing some research, I couldn't really find a language or technology that would meet my needs, but I did come up with a better idea of what I would consider to be an ideal educational program. http://angrymen.org/uncategorized/towards-an-educational-programming-language-for-children/
If these particle detector scientists watched TNG, they'd know that there's only one ratio of matter to antimatter.
LiveCDs would work for many cases, but target disk mode has been really useful in tech support cases when the computer will not boot, even from a CD. Customers who send their computers repaired under warranty are told that their data will be replaced. If, for example, the screen is broken and the external display port is non-functional, then target disk mode is the easiest way to make a backup of the files.
Windows isn't exactly innocent in this regard either. I'm getting tired of cleaning out thumbs.db files from my pictures folder every time Windows users access it.
The antivirus software for OS X just isn't of the same quality as the antivirus software for Windows. I'm not going to make any judgments on the overall quality of Windows antivirus software, and I'm not saying this to disparage those who write antivirus software for OS X, but I don't think the antivirus vendors treat security on OS X seriously. I can't really blame them for this. After all, the OS X market is much smaller than the Windows market, OS X users are less likely to purchase antivirus software, and they're barely keeping up with the current Windows malware as is.
As a result, the OS X antivirus products tend to be buggy. A few years ago I was supporting customers who were running Norton on OS X. I commonly ran into two problems with the software. First, the uninstaller which shipped with the software didn't work. It failed to detect the presence of Norton on the system, even though it had been installed using the installer program on the same CD. Luckily the manual removal process wasn't that hard. This wouldn't have been a problem if I didn't have to uninstall it so often. The software would occasionally decide to take up all of the available RAM and CPU time. I can only assume that it was scanning either network traffic or running processes, because this did not correspond to hard disk activity. In one particularly nasty case, a user with both Limewire and Norton set to open at login on an iBook could not use the computer at all. It took an excess of fifteen minutes to log in, open a Finder window, navigate to the Utilities folder, and open Activity Monitor. Turns out that Limewire was doing something that Norton didn't like, but it was Norton that was causing the problem.
Norton also had a particularly nasty false positive which hit many of my users. Most of them kept their cool and called in for advice, but some of them hit the panic button and started reformatting their systems. Because of the performance problems, the fact that the users didn't really see any benefit to the antivirus software to begin with, and other small problems like this one, users would frequently install Norton and then come back a month later and ask it be uninstalled because it kept slowing down their system.
Switching them to McAfee didn't really resolve the issue. McAfee would launch at login and try to update the current virus definitions. More often than not, this would fail. McAfee initially claimed that this was due to their update servers' poor availability. The Windows version of McAfee was having update issues as well, so it was a plausible explanation. However, the OS X machines continued to not get new updates for months after the availability issues subsided. Turns out that updating didn't work correctly in what was then known as Virex. A few months later, McAfee issued a patch which had to be manually installed to fix the issue. The uninstaller for McAfee actually works, but isn't very user friendly. It's just a shell script which uses sudo to perform some actions. From a tech support point of view, I love how quick and easy it is. If I have remote access to a machine, I can uninstall McAfee. However, it's not a very good soloution for normal users. I've had to field a fair amount of support calls which basically boiled down the users, not seeing bullets being displayed when they entered their passwords, assumed that their passwords were not being entered. So while McAfee doesn't have as many annoying problems as Norton had, they didn't throughly test their updating code, took a long time to come out with a patch, and didn't bother to put together a GUI installer.
Because OS X antivirus software just isn't a priority for the antivirus vendors, it's hard to advise a user to install an antivirus product on their Mac. Considering that every solution I've tested seems incomplete, I find it hard to believe that the designers of these products have sat down and had a hard look at how malware would take advanta