The US claims to spread democracy, yet holds presidential elections so biased towards two near-identical candidates that the only thing separating them is how effectively they rigged the impossible ballots.
Utter nonsense. Including this with your otherwise excellent points is like accusing someone of being a murderer and then adding "I also heard that he might have smoked pot once." That ballot-rigging stuff is for the sorts of conspiracists who believe that we never landed on the moon, and to those of us who vote here, believe me, our candidates are far from identical.
Please note that the statements I provided were intended to represent the sort of biased, anti-US reaction that I've often seen to the pro-US statements above, not necessarily my own views. My point here is precisely that how the US is viewed from outside really matters, and that view isn't looking too great right now. With that caveat stated...
The last US presidential elections did have some very dubious results. In some areas, more people voted than were eligible, for example, while in others, there were widespread allegations of voter intimidation. Whether this truly affected the outcome we'll never know, but some of the official results are simply impossible.
However, the attack that's most often made isn't the ballot rigging, it's the two-party system. The whole election is set up so that only the Republican and the Democrat have any chance of election whatsoever. Consider things like the presidential debates (which we got to see televised in the UK, though obviously rather late at night) for example. While minor candidates expressed clear and distinct views on a number of topics during the campaigning, 95+% of the air time went to the Republican and the Democrat. To be fair, having watched one of the "debates", I agree wholeheartedly with this particular criticism: there was little debate in that presentation, and much of two insincere guys giving poor presentations of statements that ducked the question. When they started repeating the same not-quite-appropriate sound-bite for the third or fourth time in an hour, this became abundantly clear.
Here I only want to take issue with your second point, your little reference to the dropping of a few nukes on Japan. It is an action that has to be considered in context, and it doesn't really have anything to do with the reasons why the USA is the primary bulls-eye for terrorists.
Again, that may be true, but it's not the point of the objection. The US has repeatedly treated the potential threat of WMDs from other countries as justification for military intervention, yet while many other countries have them, no-one except the US has ever used one. That makes a position of requiring others to disarm for the safety of the US hypocritical to say the least.
Considering that there's also pressure from the other side (the "content industry") to include as much DRM as possible, though, it's gonna be interesting to see how things turn out.
It certainly will, but ultimately the market is a lot more powerful than the content industry. If no-one is prepared to buy a particular technology, the technology maker is toast, and so are any content providers who relied on that technology to distribute their content. From the technologist's point of view, the content providers are suppliers, not customers, and they don't provide a revenue stream.
In a sense, I'm the perfect consumer for the media industry, because I buy what I want to watch or listen to legally. However, I've now returned more than one not-quite-CD where the copy protection prevented me from playing my legitimately purchased content in my car and/or on my PC. I'm fast getting to the point where I will return a DVD as not fit for purpose, because I have to sit through several minutes of anti-piracy rants in multiple languages before I can watch my movie. I've heard rumours that certain brands now include can't-skip trailers for other stuff on the start of their DVDs; the first time I encounter one of those, it will be going back to the shop, along with a quick letter to the store manager and to my local trading standards organisation explaining why.
Now, I'm a geek at heart. If I wanted to download music and movies over P2P, or to circumvent the various copy protection schemes, it would take me about two minutes to set it up. I choose not to, because while I dislike the way the media industry are abusing it, I respect the basic principle of copyright. I prefer to object to their abuse by voting legally with my wallet and my word processor.
However, if the industry is losing me, it's probably already lost a lot of people. Some don't understand what DRM is all about and just know their CD/DVD didn't work properly. Some do know what DRM is all about, loathe it with a passion, and have no moral qualms about obtaining the content via alternative sources that don't provide a revenue stream for the media industry.
This is the realisation that that industry is slowing coming to: things like Macrovision worked because they didn't interfere unduly with legitimate uses; anything that does will fail. If the backers of one of these new, competing formats understand this, and the backers of the other do not, then the more enlightened group will be the only one left before long.
The real killer is that you criticize the one-sidedness of pro-US ignorance, but regard the one-sidedness of your anti-US ignorance as a "statement of fact."
Please note the use of "devil's advocate" in my post. I wasn't expressing my personal opinion. I was describing how (IME, obviously) the US is increasingly portrayed by outside critics. In the context of this discussion (the future of science and tech in the US), perception is what matters, for the reasons I described before.
In reality, there is more than a little truth to most of the claims on both sides of the argument. My point was that certain people only seem to acknowledge one side of it. This naturally leads to other people acknowledging only the other side, and thus to the silly limit we reach where everyone's position is extreme.
That said, it is fascinating that more than one respondent to my post has failed to read it properly, completely missed the point as a result, yet still leapt to the defence of the US. And they picked probably the worst thing to challenge as well: while the US may or may not be the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism as I often hear claimed, it's record in this area certainly is atrocious.
During World War II, for the official purpose of forcing the Japanese to surrender unconditionally, the United States military dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and August 9, 1945 respectively, killing at least 120,000 people, about 95% of which were civilian, outright, and around twice as many over time.
My apologies; I did misread my source. It correctly said "approximately 300000", which I read as "approximately 3000000".
I'm not sure that makes any difference to the case made by the devil's advocate in my previous post, however.
And yet somehow over the last 200 years America was at the fore front of science and technology.
The single biggest negative perception about the US that I experience here in Europe is the collective ego represented by the way the US government conducts itself, and the comments made by so many Americans in many an Internet forum. Here are a few claims I've seen in the past week alone:
The US is the only economic superpower in the world, and supports the economies of all the other nations.
The US leads the world in production of everyday consumables.
The US leads the world in production of luxuries.
The US leads the world in scientific research and invented everything from cars to the Internet almost single-handed.
The US is a world centre for the arts.
The US is the only military superpower in the world, and therefore has a responsibility to act as the world's policeman.
Now here's an alternative version, as seen by the devil's advocate:
The US is the biggest liability in the world economy, with an imminent crash brought on by a combination of personal greed and poor government that will leave millions economically desperate.
The US produces little except lawsuits, which it loves so much that it seeks to impose legislation to further its own business interests on other countries throughout the world.
The US refuses to accept its responsibility for global environmental damage, because it would hurt the pockets of its big business, which is responsible for much of that damage.
The US throws its military might around like a toy, and then complains like a spoiled child when someone fights back.
The US claims to spread democracy, yet holds presidential elections so biased towards two near-identical candidates that the only thing separating them is how effectively they rigged the impossible ballots.
The US is fighting a war on terror, yet has consistently been the biggest state sponsor of terrorism for decades, and remains the only nation in history ever to have actually used a weapon of mass destruction that cost millions of civilian lives.
The US claims to value the rights of individuals, yet flouts its own constitution on a regular basis for the benefit of big business, never mind the number of foreign citizens it still holds without charge or trial at Gitmo.
And here's the killer: the average US citizen is in complete denial about all of this, and considers saying it to be a personal insult rather than a statement of fact.
Seriously, this isn't meant to be a troll. That first list really is the impression a lot of Americans I've encountered give, and the second list is certainly how the US is increasingly perceived here in the UK.
The problem for this discussion, of course, is that being a world leader in scientific research depends fundamentally on three things: attracting good people, getting them in touch with everyone else's good people, and funding them well enough to do their thing. Pissing off the rest of the world and destroying your economy from within probably aren't the best ways to achieve any of those three critical things. Yeah, I'd say the US is pretty much toast for a while as far as leading the world in scientific research.
Of course, you'll need to live out of a DCMA state.
Or just download it from someone who does?
If you've purchased the material legally, and you're only downloading something identical to what you could watch in order to view it on your non-HDCP-enabled hardware, it would be a pretty tough PR sell for them to claim suing you was legitimate.
And indeed under similar legislation in many other countries -- at least, if you believe the media industry hype.
The thing is, many of these laws (including the DMCA, IIRC, but I'm sure someone will correct me on this if necessary) include a provision for circumvention where it's necessary for interoperability. Large numbers of people have slightly older HDTV sets (or even brand new ones, if they're not well-informed little consumers) which are technically capable of displaying 720p or 1080i, but don't have DHCP. If you have legally purchased HD content and a legally purchased HD-capable screen and the only reason you can't watch it is their copy protection, well, that's what interoperability exemptions are for in my book.
It isn't certain that it's barred by law until it's been tested in court. Tell me, if you were the media industry, would you want to bet your major revenue stream for the next five years and risk someone calling your bluff? Why do you think they're so keen to settle all these P2P music cases out of court?
I mean, she sings so well, why the sudden career change?
Because her publisher started using "copy protection" technology on her second album, meaning that I can't play it in my car CD player because it's not a real CD? It therefore became the first not-quite-CD I ever took back to the shop for a refund.
As a matter of fact, that would be a nice option for the Firefox installer: a checkbox that says something like "[ ] Help me manage my privacy rights online."
By all means provide good options for customising cookie behaviour, and set reasonable defaults. But please don't do the above: that wording will add more confusion than it removes. What are "privacy rights"? How do you "manage" them, and why do you need to anyway? Why does being "online" make any difference? What "help" are you asking for here?
If you're going to add this to the installer, provide a one- or two-line plain English explanation of what an option actually does. This is possible without using either technobabble or meaningless drivel. Obsequious yet ultimately unhelpful UIs are one of the curses of today's software industry, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better.
The neat thing about OSS is if you don't like the way a OSS Project handles security you can always help them do it better.
Well, one neat thing about OSS is that you can write things like the above, and then pretend it's someone else's fault if your project's security is crap. It's the ultimate blame transferral technique.
The reason you may download more patches for some OSS software has nothing to do with how many bugs may be in the software. It only shows that OSS is willing to say out loud when they fuck up and patch the holes as soon as humanly possible.
Sure. It's well known that when Microsoft or Apple sit on a serious flaw for more then a few days, there are no professional organisations who specialise in attacking their software and finding the bugs. Moreover, while those organisations don't exist, if they did they certainly wouldn't release the information publicly if they thought the commercial groups were taking too long over fixing it.
Here are my conclusions about the current Windows threat level:
Today, 173 users of Slashdot will post comments about how Windows security sucks, they've had enough, and they'll be switching their entire corporate network to Linux on Monday. None of them will.
Then I finally realized that in the years approving the updates, I haven't rejected a single one.
We've rejected two in the past year, both of which fixed a weakness in a protocol by effectively disabling all use of it -- and with it, most of the interconnection between Windows and UNIX boxes in our office that relied on SAMBA.:-(
The thing is, the whole claim that OSS has inherently better security has been exposed as hype for a long time now.
Some OSS projects have excellent security, because the project leaders place sufficient emphasis on it, and the coders code with that emphasis in mind.
Other OSS projects do not have good security, sometimes not even as good as Microsoft and co.
Consider this: I have downloaded patches for more security flaws in Firefox than for IE in recent weeks. Moreover, the IE patches were offered to me via automatic updates within minutes of being available on Windows Update, while the Firefox patches did not show up as automatic updates for several days after they were available from the project web site in some cases. They even had a whole version missed out of the automatic updates, because somehow a release was made that contained serious bugs of its own, and had to be withdrawn.
This is not intended to be a slam against Firefox; it's great software and the project seems to be run well, the vast majority of the time. Rather, this is intended to demonstrate that nothing's perfect. Trying to convert people from Windows to OSS alternatives, based on security fears, at a time when a worm is circulating, Microsoft has made a patch available, but people haven't bothered installing that patch yet, really is being a used car salesman in the most derogatory sense of the term.
Security left in the hands of Microsoft is security that should be questioned.
Security left in the hands of anyone is security that should be questioned. If the Internet-using population as a whole isn't educated in at least basic security practices -- even if it's only a one-minute checklist of things they should do and how often, and a thirty-second warning about how bad things can get if they don't pay attention -- then nothing any vendor does will matter. It doesn't make a difference if you're Microsoft, or Apple, or $LINUX_DISTRO_VENDOR.
To their credit, all recent versions of Microsoft operating systems have had an automatic updates facility built in. If users either configure this to download and install automatically, or do it manually but regularly if they're more cautious, then most users are protected reasonably quickly against most things. That's a big step forward from where we were a few years ago. With WinXP SP2, Microsoft have started making security big and obvious to the kind of user that previously didn't do this stuff, which helps a bit more.
I'm all for criticising security and encouraging anyone producing systems software to give it the emphasis it deserves, but let's be fair. Microsoft are the leader of the pack in terms of promoting downloadable, automatic updates, and whatever Slashbots might like to think, measured objectively Microsoft also patch the vast majority of reported exploits very fast. Within hours of a major worm breaking out, there's usually a patch available on Windows Update, and it's prominently advertised all over the Microsoft home page.
Remember, the exploits we're talking about here are for vulnerabilities Microsoft just released patches for. But that doesn't help if users don't understand that they need to install these patches or bad stuff will happen. The vast majority of Windows security breaches occur on unpatched systems, when a suitable patch was available at the time of the breach.
Almost any generic criticism that is made of MS security is also applicable to major OSS platforms/applications and to commercial competitors like Apple, so banging that drum every time the subject comes up doesn't really help anyone. If you want to make a noise, please go and find a friend or family member who doesn't use a personal firewall and anti-virus software. Then take a moment to educate them about why they should, and show them what they need to do. If we all did this instead of bitching about how Microsoft "don't write secure code" -- who does, exactly? -- that would help everyone a lot more.
I couldn't disagree more strongly with the parent post. This sort of approach is exactly why so many schools now produce CS grads who can't program for ****.
Firstly, you assume all students want to do back-end web work. Personally, I can't imagine anything more dull, other maybe than writing trivial front-ends for databases all day.
Secondly, you speak as if teaching OO from the start is a good thing. Again, nothing is further from the truth. OO is only one approach, and it's one that has a lot of theoretical and sometimes practical flaws. If you teach a beginner concepts like functions, control structures, expressions and variables, then they will soon pick up the ideas behind OO if they study it. If you teach a beginner that everything is an object, then bad OO is all they will ever know until they learn that you lied. Languages like Java and Ruby are the worst offenders in this respect.
Thirdly, the idea of introducing a complex, specialised framework like Rails midway through a first term course is shocking. There is no way that anyone at that stage has even grokked the basics of programming properly in a simple language yet. Turning the course into a user guide for your favourite toys is doing them a gross disservice. As the saying goes: give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Overall, I honestly can't imagine a worse approach than the one you're advocating. You place unnecessary specifics ahead of generalities, funky toys ahead of solid basics, and les fads du jour ahead of transferrable skills. It's perfectly possible to have a long and distinguished programming career while never using any of Ruby, Rails, OO, and web programming, yet these are the first things you think beginners should learn? That's no way to teach programming.
The thing is, giant rotating knives aren't dangerous if you've grown up with them around all your life, and staying out of their way is second nature to you.
On the other hand, walking into a room with giant rotating knives without knowing they're there or how to avoid them is a recipe for disaster.
The application of this analogy to Java's "safety" features is left as an exercise for the reader.
Java:
Is not too verbose (Hello World is not daunting)
Java is not verbose? You have got to be kidding me. Java has more clutter than almost any other language I can think of. If writing hello world takes more than two lines of code, your language is somewhat verbose; many can do it in only one.
Any algorithm can be reasonably implemented
Nope. The absence of simple tools like value semantics makes implementing a lot of algorithms a royal PITA.
Any structure can be reasonably represented
No low-level complications like pointers
Those two statements are almost mutually exclusive, and Java doesn't support any of the alternative tools that caused me to write "almost".
Supports modern programming techniques like functional and O-O
I assume from this that you don't know what functional programming is, becaue Java's support for it is negligible.
OO shouldn't be taught in a beginners course anyway. Teach it after they understand the basic concepts.
The last two points I'll give you, for a final score of: 3/7, must try harder!
You're right about the importance of understanding what happens under the hood, which it why I'm so surprised that you also recommended Java. Assembly and some very high level language I can see, but Java's always been a sort of bastardised half-way house between C's "portable assembly" and real abstraction and high level concepts. As a pragmatic tool, that might be fine, but as a learning aid, it's terrible.
YMMV, but for me, having whitespace be syntactically significant is just BAD!
That was my initial reaction when I first met Python: sacrilege!
In many other block-structured languages it's customary to indent but the {} or begin...end markers are the syntactically significant things. Unfortunately, when humans read the code, it's actually the indentation they use to parse the logic most of the time, as many a new C student has learned via the standard deviously indented if...if...else demonstration.
On reflection, that means having the indentation not be significant, yet using other markers that are, is a bit like putting a banner comment at the top of every function with the function name in it: it's fine if you copy it in properly, but it doesn't really help, and it's a maintenance hazard that can actually harm readability if it's changed incorrectly.
Punctuation in a programming langauge is good, exactly up to the point that it stops increasing readability and/or reducing errors. After that, it's just clutter. So IMHO the question is whether (from some objective, analytical point of view) ignoring whitespace and introducing {} or begin...end markers improves readability or reduces bug count for programmers using the language. I suspect the answer really is a matter of taste: for some programmers it will, and for some it won't.
This is why not everyone agrees on whether syntactic whitespace is a good or a bad thing. There just isn't a single, universal right answer to the question.
I agree with the suggestion of Python, but because you can write simple scripts in it at first without much clutter more than anything else.
IMHO, the fact that a language is object oriented should be a negative factor when assessing programming languages for beginners, and it should be more negative the more necessary the OO becomes. Beginners to programming should be learning concepts like data, functions and simple control statements at first. Then they should learn about more advanced concepts like indirection, abstract data types, etc. When that's all under their belt, then they can use OO, advanced module systems, yada yada.
Introducing window dressing like OO features any earlier is a recipe for producing crappy programmers. Far too many academic institutions that should know better have kindly demonstrated this for us in the past few years, by adopting possibly the most inappropriate teaching language in history as their default choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Please note that the statements I provided were intended to represent the sort of biased, anti-US reaction that I've often seen to the pro-US statements above, not necessarily my own views. My point here is precisely that how the US is viewed from outside really matters, and that view isn't looking too great right now. With that caveat stated...
The last US presidential elections did have some very dubious results. In some areas, more people voted than were eligible, for example, while in others, there were widespread allegations of voter intimidation. Whether this truly affected the outcome we'll never know, but some of the official results are simply impossible.
However, the attack that's most often made isn't the ballot rigging, it's the two-party system. The whole election is set up so that only the Republican and the Democrat have any chance of election whatsoever. Consider things like the presidential debates (which we got to see televised in the UK, though obviously rather late at night) for example. While minor candidates expressed clear and distinct views on a number of topics during the campaigning, 95+% of the air time went to the Republican and the Democrat. To be fair, having watched one of the "debates", I agree wholeheartedly with this particular criticism: there was little debate in that presentation, and much of two insincere guys giving poor presentations of statements that ducked the question. When they started repeating the same not-quite-appropriate sound-bite for the third or fourth time in an hour, this became abundantly clear.
Again, that may be true, but it's not the point of the objection. The US has repeatedly treated the potential threat of WMDs from other countries as justification for military intervention, yet while many other countries have them, no-one except the US has ever used one. That makes a position of requiring others to disarm for the safety of the US hypocritical to say the least.
"Screw early adopters, and late adopters will not come."
It certainly will, but ultimately the market is a lot more powerful than the content industry. If no-one is prepared to buy a particular technology, the technology maker is toast, and so are any content providers who relied on that technology to distribute their content. From the technologist's point of view, the content providers are suppliers, not customers, and they don't provide a revenue stream.
In a sense, I'm the perfect consumer for the media industry, because I buy what I want to watch or listen to legally. However, I've now returned more than one not-quite-CD where the copy protection prevented me from playing my legitimately purchased content in my car and/or on my PC. I'm fast getting to the point where I will return a DVD as not fit for purpose, because I have to sit through several minutes of anti-piracy rants in multiple languages before I can watch my movie. I've heard rumours that certain brands now include can't-skip trailers for other stuff on the start of their DVDs; the first time I encounter one of those, it will be going back to the shop, along with a quick letter to the store manager and to my local trading standards organisation explaining why.
Now, I'm a geek at heart. If I wanted to download music and movies over P2P, or to circumvent the various copy protection schemes, it would take me about two minutes to set it up. I choose not to, because while I dislike the way the media industry are abusing it, I respect the basic principle of copyright. I prefer to object to their abuse by voting legally with my wallet and my word processor.
However, if the industry is losing me, it's probably already lost a lot of people. Some don't understand what DRM is all about and just know their CD/DVD didn't work properly. Some do know what DRM is all about, loathe it with a passion, and have no moral qualms about obtaining the content via alternative sources that don't provide a revenue stream for the media industry.
This is the realisation that that industry is slowing coming to: things like Macrovision worked because they didn't interfere unduly with legitimate uses; anything that does will fail. If the backers of one of these new, competing formats understand this, and the backers of the other do not, then the more enlightened group will be the only one left before long.
Please note the use of "devil's advocate" in my post. I wasn't expressing my personal opinion. I was describing how (IME, obviously) the US is increasingly portrayed by outside critics. In the context of this discussion (the future of science and tech in the US), perception is what matters, for the reasons I described before.
In reality, there is more than a little truth to most of the claims on both sides of the argument. My point was that certain people only seem to acknowledge one side of it. This naturally leads to other people acknowledging only the other side, and thus to the silly limit we reach where everyone's position is extreme.
That said, it is fascinating that more than one respondent to my post has failed to read it properly, completely missed the point as a result, yet still leapt to the defence of the US. And they picked probably the worst thing to challenge as well: while the US may or may not be the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism as I often hear claimed, it's record in this area certainly is atrocious.
My apologies; I did misread my source. It correctly said "approximately 300000", which I read as "approximately 3000000".
I'm not sure that makes any difference to the case made by the devil's advocate in my previous post, however.
...It's the attitude that says this:
The single biggest negative perception about the US that I experience here in Europe is the collective ego represented by the way the US government conducts itself, and the comments made by so many Americans in many an Internet forum. Here are a few claims I've seen in the past week alone:
Now here's an alternative version, as seen by the devil's advocate:
Seriously, this isn't meant to be a troll. That first list really is the impression a lot of Americans I've encountered give, and the second list is certainly how the US is increasingly perceived here in the UK.
The problem for this discussion, of course, is that being a world leader in scientific research depends fundamentally on three things: attracting good people, getting them in touch with everyone else's good people, and funding them well enough to do their thing. Pissing off the rest of the world and destroying your economy from within probably aren't the best ways to achieve any of those three critical things. Yeah, I'd say the US is pretty much toast for a while as far as leading the world in scientific research.
Or just download it from someone who does?
If you've purchased the material legally, and you're only downloading something identical to what you could watch in order to view it on your non-HDCP-enabled hardware, it would be a pretty tough PR sell for them to claim suing you was legitimate.
And indeed under similar legislation in many other countries -- at least, if you believe the media industry hype.
The thing is, many of these laws (including the DMCA, IIRC, but I'm sure someone will correct me on this if necessary) include a provision for circumvention where it's necessary for interoperability. Large numbers of people have slightly older HDTV sets (or even brand new ones, if they're not well-informed little consumers) which are technically capable of displaying 720p or 1080i, but don't have DHCP. If you have legally purchased HD content and a legally purchased HD-capable screen and the only reason you can't watch it is their copy protection, well, that's what interoperability exemptions are for in my book.
It isn't certain that it's barred by law until it's been tested in court. Tell me, if you were the media industry, would you want to bet your major revenue stream for the next five years and risk someone calling your bluff? Why do you think they're so keen to settle all these P2P music cases out of court?
But is that a problem with those other languages, or with Perl?
You must be new here. Everyone knows the step before "Profit!" is:
Because her publisher started using "copy protection" technology on her second album, meaning that I can't play it in my car CD player because it's not a real CD? It therefore became the first not-quite-CD I ever took back to the shop for a refund.
Sorry, it's off-topic, but you did ask.
By all means provide good options for customising cookie behaviour, and set reasonable defaults. But please don't do the above: that wording will add more confusion than it removes. What are "privacy rights"? How do you "manage" them, and why do you need to anyway? Why does being "online" make any difference? What "help" are you asking for here?
If you're going to add this to the installer, provide a one- or two-line plain English explanation of what an option actually does. This is possible without using either technobabble or meaningless drivel. Obsequious yet ultimately unhelpful UIs are one of the curses of today's software industry, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better.
You haven't drunk much Russian vodka, have you?
Well, one neat thing about OSS is that you can write things like the above, and then pretend it's someone else's fault if your project's security is crap. It's the ultimate blame transferral technique.
Sure. It's well known that when Microsoft or Apple sit on a serious flaw for more then a few days, there are no professional organisations who specialise in attacking their software and finding the bugs. Moreover, while those organisations don't exist, if they did they certainly wouldn't release the information publicly if they thought the commercial groups were taking too long over fixing it.
Finally, a system GWB might understand!
Here are my conclusions about the current Windows threat level:
Today, 173 users of Slashdot will post comments about how Windows security sucks, they've had enough, and they'll be switching their entire corporate network to Linux on Monday. None of them will.
Threat assessment: hollow.
We've rejected two in the past year, both of which fixed a weakness in a protocol by effectively disabling all use of it -- and with it, most of the interconnection between Windows and UNIX boxes in our office that relied on SAMBA. :-(
It doesn't matter! Just equip the Patch of Unyielding +5, and you get immunity to worms as a special ability. :-)
The thing is, the whole claim that OSS has inherently better security has been exposed as hype for a long time now.
Some OSS projects have excellent security, because the project leaders place sufficient emphasis on it, and the coders code with that emphasis in mind.
Other OSS projects do not have good security, sometimes not even as good as Microsoft and co.
Consider this: I have downloaded patches for more security flaws in Firefox than for IE in recent weeks. Moreover, the IE patches were offered to me via automatic updates within minutes of being available on Windows Update, while the Firefox patches did not show up as automatic updates for several days after they were available from the project web site in some cases. They even had a whole version missed out of the automatic updates, because somehow a release was made that contained serious bugs of its own, and had to be withdrawn.
This is not intended to be a slam against Firefox; it's great software and the project seems to be run well, the vast majority of the time. Rather, this is intended to demonstrate that nothing's perfect. Trying to convert people from Windows to OSS alternatives, based on security fears, at a time when a worm is circulating, Microsoft has made a patch available, but people haven't bothered installing that patch yet, really is being a used car salesman in the most derogatory sense of the term.
Security left in the hands of anyone is security that should be questioned. If the Internet-using population as a whole isn't educated in at least basic security practices -- even if it's only a one-minute checklist of things they should do and how often, and a thirty-second warning about how bad things can get if they don't pay attention -- then nothing any vendor does will matter. It doesn't make a difference if you're Microsoft, or Apple, or $LINUX_DISTRO_VENDOR.
To their credit, all recent versions of Microsoft operating systems have had an automatic updates facility built in. If users either configure this to download and install automatically, or do it manually but regularly if they're more cautious, then most users are protected reasonably quickly against most things. That's a big step forward from where we were a few years ago. With WinXP SP2, Microsoft have started making security big and obvious to the kind of user that previously didn't do this stuff, which helps a bit more.
I'm all for criticising security and encouraging anyone producing systems software to give it the emphasis it deserves, but let's be fair. Microsoft are the leader of the pack in terms of promoting downloadable, automatic updates, and whatever Slashbots might like to think, measured objectively Microsoft also patch the vast majority of reported exploits very fast. Within hours of a major worm breaking out, there's usually a patch available on Windows Update, and it's prominently advertised all over the Microsoft home page.
Remember, the exploits we're talking about here are for vulnerabilities Microsoft just released patches for. But that doesn't help if users don't understand that they need to install these patches or bad stuff will happen. The vast majority of Windows security breaches occur on unpatched systems, when a suitable patch was available at the time of the breach.
Almost any generic criticism that is made of MS security is also applicable to major OSS platforms/applications and to commercial competitors like Apple, so banging that drum every time the subject comes up doesn't really help anyone. If you want to make a noise, please go and find a friend or family member who doesn't use a personal firewall and anti-virus software. Then take a moment to educate them about why they should, and show them what they need to do. If we all did this instead of bitching about how Microsoft "don't write secure code" -- who does, exactly? -- that would help everyone a lot more.
I couldn't disagree more strongly with the parent post. This sort of approach is exactly why so many schools now produce CS grads who can't program for ****.
Firstly, you assume all students want to do back-end web work. Personally, I can't imagine anything more dull, other maybe than writing trivial front-ends for databases all day.
Secondly, you speak as if teaching OO from the start is a good thing. Again, nothing is further from the truth. OO is only one approach, and it's one that has a lot of theoretical and sometimes practical flaws. If you teach a beginner concepts like functions, control structures, expressions and variables, then they will soon pick up the ideas behind OO if they study it. If you teach a beginner that everything is an object, then bad OO is all they will ever know until they learn that you lied. Languages like Java and Ruby are the worst offenders in this respect.
Thirdly, the idea of introducing a complex, specialised framework like Rails midway through a first term course is shocking. There is no way that anyone at that stage has even grokked the basics of programming properly in a simple language yet. Turning the course into a user guide for your favourite toys is doing them a gross disservice. As the saying goes: give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Overall, I honestly can't imagine a worse approach than the one you're advocating. You place unnecessary specifics ahead of generalities, funky toys ahead of solid basics, and les fads du jour ahead of transferrable skills. It's perfectly possible to have a long and distinguished programming career while never using any of Ruby, Rails, OO, and web programming, yet these are the first things you think beginners should learn? That's no way to teach programming.
The thing is, giant rotating knives aren't dangerous if you've grown up with them around all your life, and staying out of their way is second nature to you.
On the other hand, walking into a room with giant rotating knives without knowing they're there or how to avoid them is a recipe for disaster.
The application of this analogy to Java's "safety" features is left as an exercise for the reader.
Java is not verbose? You have got to be kidding me. Java has more clutter than almost any other language I can think of. If writing hello world takes more than two lines of code, your language is somewhat verbose; many can do it in only one.
Nope. The absence of simple tools like value semantics makes implementing a lot of algorithms a royal PITA.
Those two statements are almost mutually exclusive, and Java doesn't support any of the alternative tools that caused me to write "almost".
I assume from this that you don't know what functional programming is, becaue Java's support for it is negligible.
OO shouldn't be taught in a beginners course anyway. Teach it after they understand the basic concepts.
The last two points I'll give you, for a final score of: 3/7, must try harder!
You're right about the importance of understanding what happens under the hood, which it why I'm so surprised that you also recommended Java. Assembly and some very high level language I can see, but Java's always been a sort of bastardised half-way house between C's "portable assembly" and real abstraction and high level concepts. As a pragmatic tool, that might be fine, but as a learning aid, it's terrible.
That was my initial reaction when I first met Python: sacrilege!
In many other block-structured languages it's customary to indent but the {} or begin...end markers are the syntactically significant things. Unfortunately, when humans read the code, it's actually the indentation they use to parse the logic most of the time, as many a new C student has learned via the standard deviously indented if...if...else demonstration.
On reflection, that means having the indentation not be significant, yet using other markers that are, is a bit like putting a banner comment at the top of every function with the function name in it: it's fine if you copy it in properly, but it doesn't really help, and it's a maintenance hazard that can actually harm readability if it's changed incorrectly.
Punctuation in a programming langauge is good, exactly up to the point that it stops increasing readability and/or reducing errors. After that, it's just clutter. So IMHO the question is whether (from some objective, analytical point of view) ignoring whitespace and introducing {} or begin...end markers improves readability or reduces bug count for programmers using the language. I suspect the answer really is a matter of taste: for some programmers it will, and for some it won't.
This is why not everyone agrees on whether syntactic whitespace is a good or a bad thing. There just isn't a single, universal right answer to the question.
I agree with the suggestion of Python, but because you can write simple scripts in it at first without much clutter more than anything else.
IMHO, the fact that a language is object oriented should be a negative factor when assessing programming languages for beginners, and it should be more negative the more necessary the OO becomes. Beginners to programming should be learning concepts like data, functions and simple control statements at first. Then they should learn about more advanced concepts like indirection, abstract data types, etc. When that's all under their belt, then they can use OO, advanced module systems, yada yada.
Introducing window dressing like OO features any earlier is a recipe for producing crappy programmers. Far too many academic institutions that should know better have kindly demonstrated this for us in the past few years, by adopting possibly the most inappropriate teaching language in history as their default choice.