one of my development guys has suggested PERL well so im going to give it and C a look
Ah, I would recommend you reconsider. I like Perl, I program in Perl, I program professionally in C, but in my opinion these are not a good "learning language."
What makes a good learning language?
Clean, modern design that encourages good programming technique. I suggest you look at languages like Python, Klyix/Delphi, and Java.
You may not choose them in real-world development, but in my opinion they are nice clean designs which encourage good programming habits rather than Perl and C that can be nice and clean, but do not encourage or require good habits. BTW, you can get started in two out of three of those languages for free, which is a bonus for anyone learning to program.
Visual C++ is a Microsoft product, a C and C++ compiler, and is typically used in referring to meaning to develop within their environment, i.e. Win32, Platform SDK, MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), etc.
C itself is just a language, it is platform independant, and highly portable, from embedded processors and smartcards to vector supercomputers. Often people refer to ANSI C, which contain the last major changes to the language (as in The C Programming Language), while minor changes were made in ISO 1989 and 1999 international standards.
My only concern with the article is that it seems to suggest that you can't make contributions without being a "hard-core" programmer. This seems to contradict much of what I've heard from other Free and Open Source projects. They generally take the position that if you can write a decent bug report (what happened and under what circumstances, not 'it broke!'), or create documentation, you can be helpful too by using the software and doing the above.
Another good way to get involved in a project is testing. If you some limited programming or scripting skills you can write unit tests, and test scripts to help find bugs. In the process you'll help the project, learn more about the project, and hopefully improve your own skills. Adding test routines that detect old bugs can help to prevent them from creeping back into the code, and help look for similar bugs elsewhere.
My first programming job was doing maintance on a large system, and it taught me some key concepts that young and inexperienced programmers don't always take to heart, myself included. I learnt the benefit of defensive programming, of useful code comments, of writing proper documentation and of testing.
Many (nearly all) people new to programmer get distracted or become obsessed with "which language/tool/platform/etc."
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the techniques are basically the same. You want to learn the concepts of programming, of abstractly representing information, writing a series of logical statements. Concepts like structured programming, modular programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, and software engineering are vastly more important then whether you use GKT+ or KDEfoobar.
For ground-zero programming experience, I think Deitel& Deitel ___ How to Program books are a good choice.
The part that scares me is the enforcement angle Microsoft has gotten into over the last 5 years through the moniker of BSA, which is really just driven by Microsoft. I cannot remember ever hearing of the BSA ever taking action on non-MS software piracy.
I think it is a disturbing trend of Microsoft and BSA "enforcement", which sounds more and more like a racketeering organization (Mob) than a Neighbourhood Watch group. Pay up the "compliance license" fee or Vinnie will do an "inventory" on you.
I am also puzzled how Microsoft and the BSA can compel such inventory actions. Up until the DMCA copyright violations were resolved in civil court, not a criminal offence. So I don't see how the MS goon-squad can force access to these schools.
Just another day of, "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)" at the Evil Empire?
Hopefully school boards can look at using Free Software/Open Source where they can, easily. For example for servers. Why buy Win2K Server with heaps of CALs which costs big dollars over a Linux or BSD server with Samba, Apache, and Postfix/Exim/Qmail?
They might use JDK/Kaffe, Cygwin GCC, DJGPP for their programming needs rather than VB or the rest of the Microsoft expensive "learning" suite.
This might have the side-effort of even more young people getting started in Open Source development.
Serious consideration of StarOffice might be more common within school districts I suspect.
As far as I know because of their historic french ties, I suspect they have a strong helping of French civil law rather than English Common law at the state level.
There were hundreds of copyright cases in the 18th century, which one in particular? Lot of rip-off publishers were taken to court for not paying royalities to the original author/ creator.
The US founding fathers didn't take a law used for censorship and make it into something good. They took contempory law of their day (200 years after Tudor), British stance of copyright and embedded it into their federal government.
The US founding fathers had a lot of deep thought and did a lot of good with their stance on copyright, balancing public good, and promote the progress of science and useful arts. It seems silly to imply that they did so without some previous basis.
Ah, the requiste whining about how America ain't that great
No, that was not my point at all. Sorry if you thought it was.
My point was the author felt free to misrepresent the facts of history in an attempt to drum up pro-American stance for an 4th of July article. Though at the expense of producing an anti-British setiment, as displayed by your post.
Yes, but the statements, [a]t its birth in England, copyright was an instrument of censorship. and, [i]n contrast, the American copyright system since 1791 has reflected American republican values mislead the reader into believing that copyright as we know it today, is a US invention, which it is not.
News articles shouldn't misrepresent the truth, period.
I love how they gloss over pre-USA history of copyright, implying that it was solely used for the purpose of censorship in England. No mention of the rest of Europe, or the rest of the world for that matter. A lot of early copyright notations came from the Old World in the battle of copyright over sheet music if I remember correctly.
Good fluff article for Americian, rewriting history to suit thier egos.
Anonymity is a tool to help permit the freedom of unpopular speech, a person has no obligation to be accountable to the "mob rule" of the general population, only to a fair government, and honest legal systems. In fact it is questionable if there is a moral or ethical obligation to abide by the laws of undemocratic countries.
Limited anonymity is a better balance between unrevokable anonymity and no freedom of speech.
The US Supreme Court has upheld that anonymous speech is important to free speech.
Unfortantly many people want to shoot the messager (Mr. Gielda) when his users send annoying or unpopular messages.
If you haven't heard of it before, get your browser over to
RISKS digest or comp.risks. Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems
I discovered the RISKS digest when reading the about software engineering, and it has certainly helped me think about failures and recovery when designing and building systems.
There is also the underlying thesis in the article about how complexity, whether in a bungled redundant network connection or just a large poorly documented, poorly tested, and poor configured system is your enemy in building reliable systems. A lot of systems were built like Slashdot during the dot.com IPO craze, I wonder how many of us rely on such poorly built systems?
Building complex, reliable networks is hard, and expensive. About 3 times what your estimate is, which is about 2 times what you boss expects to spend.
I think you are referring to the programme that was called Science of Secrecy, which originally aired back in October 2000. You can see the Channel 4
web site about the programme.
Simon Singh has
his own web site
with details about his books and the Channel 4
programme. Including his book and BBC TV production about Fermat's Last Theorem.
The Code Book is referring to Simon Singh's book entitled, The Code Book : The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
. ISBN: 0385495323
It's a gentle introduction to the history of cryptography. A more though introduction is given in The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet.
Slashdot reviews:
The Code Book
reviewed by stern, or
The Code Book
reviewed by JonKatz. I don't see a review of the Codebreakers, but it is an encyclopedia reference of crypto history, weak about progress since the 1960s.
I prefer the Codebreakers, but that is because I like the comprehensive nature of it, and
Crypto
by Steven Levy is a good supplement for the details since 1960s.
It's not an article on Slashdot. It's just a link to somebody else's article.
To be pendantic there is an article on/., pointing to an article on System Logic about multithreading.
I want to see more articles on/. about technical topics, not editorials, which I feel are often poorly constructed. Whether the/. article is a "pointer" or not is secondary to me.
So you're complaining about the demise of Linux support, from a commercial company, that you admit you never paid anything to?
Give me a break.
You whine about not being smart enough to compile the kernel patches, if that their fault too?
They provided prebuilt binaries for one platform, and source code for anyone else. I don't see why you expected anything more from them. I think that is pretty generous for a young fledgling commercial company to try and provide their "crown jewels" in open source. They at least tried to run a company with open source. Admitily you never paid them for anything.
I don't like sendmail, or LaTeX, yet you don't see me writing rants about it. If you don't like the software, the company, or their colour scheme, write your own free GNU or BSD licensed version then. Otherwise, just keep quiet.
Free software is
about freedom, not about price. I think people got the two mixed up again.
trivia: Zero-Knowledge is a reference to advanced interactive cryptographic protocols that protect information from disclosure, while fairly comparing information. E.g. Two mates at a bar want to compare slaries, to figure out who should pick up the tab, but they don't want to tell each other want their exact salery is. Using a Zero-Knowledge Proof, they can determine who pays for the beer, without telling each other their own salery.
So to those in the know, it's a pretty good name. When a user doesn't need to disclose their personal information, they don't have to.
I don't see Usenet (personal favourate comp.risks) or well run mailing lists (say
Interesting People ) disappearing any time soon.
The mistake Jon Katz (and Salon, Suck, etc) makes is the thinking "new media" will look similar to old media. New media is different. Just as print media is different from broadcast media.
It is pretty ironic for this Jon Katz spiel to be posted to a true "New Media" site like Slashdot, which couldn't exist in traditional medias, yet seems to continue without too much worry AFAIK of running out of money.
It would silly to wonder why a radio station that only updated their news once a day, like newspapers did, why they would be driven out of business; they are working within a different system with different capabilities and their competitors will embrace those advantages.
I like SSL/TLS, a few years ago I used it while writing a web based interface for a legacy information system since the info system did not run a web server, I needed to securely transport the data to the secure web server.
Using SSLeay and later OpenSSL, it wasn't that hard, but the interface in my case was quite limited. I can imagine that writing a larger scale client-server system might need a handy reference like this book, I didn't find writing a simple very hard based on Eric Young's example code.
Does it cover digital certificates (X.509) used to verify the players (client, server) are whom they claim to be? If so, does it deal with everyone's favorite security buzzword, PKI?
SSL was not developed as a black art, Netscape published white papers about it right from the beginning. Probabilly still on their site, though I don't know where any more. And the open-source of SSLeay, later OpenSSL (after Eric and Tim joined RSA-Austrilia) had source code and example code, while not the easiest, quite manageable if you understand client server programming and cryptography.
SSL/TLS is not very hard if you know the bits, I take it this book helps those who aren't familiar with those bits.
It is nice to see someone take the time to dissect a DDoS attack.
In a previous life I was the green (read: my first month on the job) sysadmin who had a unix machine trojan'ed to become a zombie for a DDoS attack. It saturated our measy internet connection and proved how useless our security (policy) guy was.
I didn't have time to look into it at the time, busy fixing that and a dozen other problems. So I was enlighted to know more about what had happened.
There is a lot of accessible security information at SANS, though they get annoying at times by trying to sell their conferences and course; which I understand are worth going to.
Thanks for the numbers. I had forgotten about the alternative audio soundtracks. Normally I just used the "director's commentary" track.
Though that only provides access to Hollywood movies (Region 1 encoded), you still cannot get and watch movies from Europe (Region 2), or Aisa (Region 3?), which produce lovely movies that are a refreshing break from Hollywood style flicks.
Slashdot Mirror
The usual good source of thoughful and insightful comments, is RISKS / comp.risks, and in particular Vol 21 Issue 14.
Ah, I would recommend you reconsider. I like Perl, I program in Perl, I program professionally in C, but in my opinion these are not a good "learning language."
What makes a good learning language?
Clean, modern design that encourages good programming technique. I suggest you look at languages like Python, Klyix/Delphi, and Java.
You may not choose them in real-world development, but in my opinion they are nice clean designs which encourage good programming habits rather than Perl and C that can be nice and clean, but do not encourage or require good habits. BTW, you can get started in two out of three of those languages for free, which is a bonus for anyone learning to program.
Visual C++ is a Microsoft product, a C and C++ compiler, and is typically used in referring to meaning to develop within their environment, i.e. Win32, Platform SDK, MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), etc.
C itself is just a language, it is platform independant, and highly portable, from embedded processors and smartcards to vector supercomputers. Often people refer to ANSI C, which contain the last major changes to the language (as in The C Programming Language), while minor changes were made in ISO 1989 and 1999 international standards.
Another good way to get involved in a project is testing. If you some limited programming or scripting skills you can write unit tests, and test scripts to help find bugs. In the process you'll help the project, learn more about the project, and hopefully improve your own skills. Adding test routines that detect old bugs can help to prevent them from creeping back into the code, and help look for similar bugs elsewhere.
My first programming job was doing maintance on a large system, and it taught me some key concepts that young and inexperienced programmers don't always take to heart, myself included. I learnt the benefit of defensive programming, of useful code comments, of writing proper documentation and of testing.
Interested people might find this article about getting into QA work from Software Development magazine useful.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the techniques are basically the same. You want to learn the concepts of programming, of abstractly representing information, writing a series of logical statements. Concepts like structured programming, modular programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, and software engineering are vastly more important then whether you use GKT+ or KDEfoobar.
For ground-zero programming experience, I think Deitel& Deitel ___ How to Program books are a good choice.
Practice what you learnt in step zero.
Step two, I would strongly recommend reading comp.risks, The Mythical Man-Month, Code Complete, Programming Pearls, and The Practice of Programming. These focus on high-level knowledge, which is more important that low-level details. Other requirements include understanding computers, see Computer Architecture : A Quantitative Approach by Patterson and Hennessy. A hard-core introduction to programming, used at MIT, is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman.
Honestly the details will become clearer and easier if you have a good understanding of the big picture first.
I think it is a disturbing trend of Microsoft and BSA "enforcement", which sounds more and more like a racketeering organization (Mob) than a Neighbourhood Watch group. Pay up the "compliance license" fee or Vinnie will do an "inventory" on you.
I am also puzzled how Microsoft and the BSA can compel such inventory actions. Up until the DMCA copyright violations were resolved in civil court, not a criminal offence. So I don't see how the MS goon-squad can force access to these schools.
Just another day of, "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)" at the Evil Empire?
Hopefully school boards can look at using Free Software/Open Source where they can, easily. For example for servers. Why buy Win2K Server with heaps of CALs which costs big dollars over a Linux or BSD server with Samba, Apache, and Postfix/Exim/Qmail?
They might use JDK/Kaffe, Cygwin GCC, DJGPP for their programming needs rather than VB or the rest of the Microsoft expensive "learning" suite. This might have the side-effort of even more young people getting started in Open Source development.
Serious consideration of StarOffice might be more common within school districts I suspect.
I am curious to know if there are results available anywhere from other surveys about open-source or similar developers?
Difference between civil and common law
see this comment for more insight than I can give.
The US founding fathers didn't take a law used for censorship and make it into something good. They took contempory law of their day (200 years after Tudor), British stance of copyright and embedded it into their federal government.
The US founding fathers had a lot of deep thought and did a lot of good with their stance on copyright, balancing public good, and promote the progress of science and useful arts. It seems silly to imply that they did so without some previous basis.
No, that was not my point at all. Sorry if you thought it was.
My point was the author felt free to misrepresent the facts of history in an attempt to drum up pro-American stance for an 4th of July article. Though at the expense of producing an anti-British setiment, as displayed by your post.
Next on slashdot, USA invented the republic, democracy, government, freedom of the press, Karma Sutra, and the printing press.
Reading the article, one would think that copyright, as we know it, was an American invention, which is is not. Therefore I think it is relevant.
Yes, but the statements, [a]t its birth in England, copyright was an instrument of censorship. and, [i]n contrast, the American copyright system since 1791 has reflected American republican values mislead the reader into believing that copyright as we know it today, is a US invention, which it is not.
News articles shouldn't misrepresent the truth, period.
Good fluff article for Americian, rewriting history to suit thier egos.
Anonymity is a tool to help permit the freedom of unpopular speech, a person has no obligation to be accountable to the "mob rule" of the general population, only to a fair government, and honest legal systems. In fact it is questionable if there is a moral or ethical obligation to abide by the laws of undemocratic countries.
Limited anonymity is a better balance between unrevokable anonymity and no freedom of speech.
The US Supreme Court has upheld that anonymous speech is important to free speech.
Unfortantly many people want to shoot the messager (Mr. Gielda) when his users send annoying or unpopular messages.
I discovered the RISKS digest when reading the about software engineering, and it has certainly helped me think about failures and recovery when designing and building systems.
There is also the underlying thesis in the article about how complexity, whether in a bungled redundant network connection or just a large poorly documented, poorly tested, and poor configured system is your enemy in building reliable systems. A lot of systems were built like Slashdot during the dot.com IPO craze, I wonder how many of us rely on such poorly built systems?
Building complex, reliable networks is hard, and expensive. About 3 times what your estimate is, which is about 2 times what you boss expects to spend.
Simon Singh has his own web site with details about his books and the Channel 4 programme. Including his book and BBC TV production about Fermat's Last Theorem.
It's a gentle introduction to the history of cryptography. A more though introduction is given in The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet.
Slashdot reviews: The Code Book reviewed by stern, or The Code Book reviewed by JonKatz. I don't see a review of the Codebreakers, but it is an encyclopedia reference of crypto history, weak about progress since the 1960s.
I prefer the Codebreakers, but that is because I like the comprehensive nature of it, and Crypto by Steven Levy is a good supplement for the details since 1960s.
To be pendantic there is an article on /., pointing to an article on System Logic about multithreading.
I want to see more articles on /. about technical topics, not editorials, which I feel are often poorly constructed. Whether the /. article is a "pointer" or not is secondary to me.
more technical content, please.
Give me a break.
You whine about not being smart enough to compile the kernel patches, if that their fault too?
They provided prebuilt binaries for one platform, and source code for anyone else. I don't see why you expected anything more from them. I think that is pretty generous for a young fledgling commercial company to try and provide their "crown jewels" in open source. They at least tried to run a company with open source. Admitily you never paid them for anything.
I don't like sendmail, or LaTeX, yet you don't see me writing rants about it. If you don't like the software, the company, or their colour scheme, write your own free GNU or BSD licensed version then. Otherwise, just keep quiet.
Free software is about freedom, not about price. I think people got the two mixed up again.
So to those in the know, it's a pretty good name. When a user doesn't need to disclose their personal information, they don't have to.
The mistake Jon Katz (and Salon, Suck, etc) makes is the thinking "new media" will look similar to old media. New media is different. Just as print media is different from broadcast media.
It is pretty ironic for this Jon Katz spiel to be posted to a true "New Media" site like Slashdot, which couldn't exist in traditional medias, yet seems to continue without too much worry AFAIK of running out of money.
It would silly to wonder why a radio station that only updated their news once a day, like newspapers did, why they would be driven out of business; they are working within a different system with different capabilities and their competitors will embrace those advantages.
Join the Cluetrain.
Using SSLeay and later OpenSSL, it wasn't that hard, but the interface in my case was quite limited. I can imagine that writing a larger scale client-server system might need a handy reference like this book, I didn't find writing a simple very hard based on Eric Young's example code.
Does it cover digital certificates (X.509) used to verify the players (client, server) are whom they claim to be? If so, does it deal with everyone's favorite security buzzword, PKI?
SSL was not developed as a black art, Netscape published white papers about it right from the beginning. Probabilly still on their site, though I don't know where any more. And the open-source of SSLeay, later OpenSSL (after Eric and Tim joined RSA-Austrilia) had source code and example code, while not the easiest, quite manageable if you understand client server programming and cryptography.
SSL/TLS is not very hard if you know the bits, I take it this book helps those who aren't familiar with those bits.
In a previous life I was the green (read: my first month on the job) sysadmin who had a unix machine trojan'ed to become a zombie for a DDoS attack. It saturated our measy internet connection and proved how useless our security (policy) guy was.
I didn't have time to look into it at the time, busy fixing that and a dozen other problems. So I was enlighted to know more about what had happened.
There is a lot of accessible security information at SANS, though they get annoying at times by trying to sell their conferences and course; which I understand are worth going to.
Though that only provides access to Hollywood movies (Region 1 encoded), you still cannot get and watch movies from Europe (Region 2), or Aisa (Region 3?), which produce lovely movies that are a refreshing break from Hollywood style flicks.