I send an email to every webmaster of a page that is "designed for IE" and breaks when I change the user agent string in mozilla. Invariably webmasters responded (I was surprised by the % of responces I got) that they design for the vast majority.
Then I wised up and started including some more facts:
That IE has a %95+ share today, that is no reason that it will be in five years. I'll throw in the expansion rate for the Gecko browsers.
Two, most statistics only state who can use IE, not those who do. When people using Mozilla on windows have a problem, they switch to IE, thus negating their statisical contribution.
Three, when you program towards a browser, you will offend somebody. If you program towards the standard you will offend nobody.
Now I get responces I get are generic, "Thanks for your input";)
You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.
I agree about the echo() or print() statement. It's always good to have a very simple HelloWorld program. But for the very introductory programming stuff, why care about OOP and file/DB support? If all you teach are expressions, flow control (loops etc.) and functions then that would be good.
I've tutored people that have a lot of trouble with for loops, if/else stuff, and why you would put stuff into functions. If there was a good reference on only the how and why for these things it's a good thing.
This isn't a book for CS people but for people that haven't yet learned how to think programmatically. Most intro books go too far in depth for non-computer people. Those who write computer books think the elementals are rather trival, but I can tell you for a significant portion of the population they aren't. If there was a whole book whose advanced section only got to functions, I would recomend it to people.
Yeah because you don't use variables, conditionals and types in assembly. Right. You just have to think harder about it.
Also, you can use object oriented principles in assembly, just like you can in C. There aren't any convenient keywords or enforced methodologies (ie everything is an object), but you can gather sections of code that tie data and associated functionality together. You learn the advantages of modular programs. You learn how to count in binary. It forces you to not code carelessly. You learn good coding principles that you can apply to higher languages. In general you get another tool in your tool box.
I'd say there are different flavors of programming and they aren't mutually exclusive. ie:
Maybe that worked for you, but for a lot of people a gradual transition works better. If cold-turkey was always best, then we wouldn't have the nicotine patch now would we?
You don't need the staff on hand because it's all in the 'hands' of the rover.
I think you underestimate how many people are involved with the operation of the rover. Even to recieve the transmissions, you need a very powerful reciever, because the transmissions from the rover are on the order of a Watt. This means time at a radio antenna must be spent. Furthermore, you must carefully craft the intructions to be sent,you must monitor the status of the rover (without human intervention Spirit would have been dead), not to mention all of the support staff for these people to get their job done.
The rover wasn't designed to do much more than very menial tasks without further instruction. I doubt that the rover could operate autonomously for more than a couple days. If there was a way that they could cost-effectively get additional data after the primary mission, wouldn't you think that they would do it?
Yes but space-based nuclear power supplies yeild little electricity. IIRC all space-based NPSs work just off of the natural decay of radioactive material. The cost of putting a hot water reactor (what most nuclear plants are) into space are cost prohibitive and even breeder reactors are far too big for a rover (unless you made them submarine-sized)
AFAIK, even without considering evironmental issues (and evironmentalists), nuclear power was not even considered for these reasons.
Ah, but the Vikings only had a very small power requirement. The only things electricity were needed for were the intruments. The rovers need to move under their own power. Futhermore solar panels are cheaper and simpler and lighter.
At lastly, since they only have enough money to pay people to run them for a couple months, why design a rover to last years?
The Qt Free Edition is distributed under the Q Public License (QPL). It allows free use of Qt Free Edition for running software developed by others, and free use of Qt Free Edition for development of free/Open Source software. There is more information about the QPL at the Trolltech web site.
Note that the Qt/Embedded Free Edition is not distributed under the QPL, but under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
For development non-free/proprietary software, the Qt Professional Edition is available. It has a normal commercial library license, with none of the special restrictions of the QPL or the GPL.
I have zero sympathy for people who want to take the hard work of others, use it for their own gain, and not contribute one damn thing back.
I incorporate some free software systems into a propriety product (apache,libxml both MIT like licenses). Any changes I make to the open source stuff I'll contribute back, but I'm not going to open my whole, unrelated, specialty product.
To me (at the current moment) open source software is meant to commoditize utility software (OSes, toolkits, office suits, editors etc.) to help writers of speciality software produce higher quality code. I'd say that this is a primary driving force to develop open source software. To say that I could free the software and just provide services just isn't an option for me right now. Any utility software I create, I'd open source, but doing so takes time, and therefore money. There may come a time when the business model of producing GPLed software becomes more tested and could apply to us. But not right now.
Also what would the benefits to us be? We only have a few thousand users, and 99% of those are non-programmer types. And it's not like it would be useful to just anybody, it meant to be used in a very specific type of plant and is useless elsewhere. The thousand users that use my product are probably a significant fraction of the people in the world who would derive use from it.
Should open source software not be available to me as a writer of commerical closed source software? Should MIT, BSD, Apache and lGPL licenses be destroyed?
Oh, except for the Qt library, which is only free for open source purposes (free-as-in-beer). Not that I don't like Kde, but you can't say that's its completely software libre. Yes I know that kde doesn't develop Qt, but it does use it in most of the GUIs.
Good point, chalk up another reason to get a lawyer and have the employer indemnify him against any suit that may be brought up. If he doesn't give the e-mail, the employer may well sue because it's more their data than his. I think the chance of this is much greater than a 3rd party suing him for release private information.
Thus: get a lawyer, they may suck sometimes, but they are good to cover your ass.
While experience does help, it in itself is *not* a valid argument.
er... I think it is, especially in software development. In school, I never wrote anything longer than 5K lines, and never worked with more than 2 other people on the same code base. Since I've started working, I've been on servals projects each with 5+ people and 100k lines.
The difference in design techniques for the two are utterly incomparable. Unless someone in college had experience designing something that big, then they really don't have enough experience to judge XP when XP is meant to solve problems in big projects.
You are right in saying that XP isn't good for every situation, as it is just another tool in the toolbox. Experience, however, in the different sizes of code base and team members is necessary in making a good judgement on the effectiveness of XP.
You are assuming that the employer intends to infringe on their privacy. As post above states, you don't know their privacy policy, and it is standard today for companies to let their employees know that their e-mail can be monitored. Furthermore, if they are the ones paying for it, then it is their property, and if they abuse it then it is their fault.
As a postmaster you have no right to withhold the information. It doens't matter that they may ask for complete control over e-mail in the future. It's their e-mail which they effectively lease to their employees, and they can demand that you do anything they want with it. The legal consequences of them looking at e-mail, are squarely not on your sholders.
Even from a moral standpoint, there is no ground to refuse them access. What if they lost a document whose content was contained in an email by that person and they are just trying to recover it?
Bottom line, they provided the account, through you, to their employee, and you don't have any right to control access to what they paid for. If it is illegal, then it's the employers fault.
er... in the major nuclear fuel and services company I work in (but IANA Nuclear Engineer), there is more than using nutrons to smash into stuff. There are lots of chemicals that are use inside a nuclear reactor. Boron, for instance, is used as a burnable absorber. People have to study Boron concentrations in water to make the reactor more efficient. The are many other chemicals involved in the day to day operation of a nuclear reactor.
We call the people that handle and think about the non-fuel stuff here Nuclear Chemists.
Which video card are you using that has an open source driver?
I find it hard to believe that the card will be any good.
Since I don't have any mod points, I'll say that I agree with the AC here. What card do you use? AFAIK, there is no major vendor that releases an open source driver, or the specifications of their card so that others may do so. You might say, "oh I use the GNU nv driver", well then why don't you support it?
Instead of saying "Nvidia pretty please OS your driver?", you could say, "Nvidia, i'm working on nv, could you please tell me how the open gl subsystem works so I can implement it myself?". I'm pretty sure the second question will get an answer long before the first.
Ok, now that I think about it, it wasn't spammers that they were tying to stop it was peoples own e-mail clients. But AFAIK, don't e-mail viruses use thier programs default SMTP server, which for most of the users would be the ISP anyway!? How stupid. And I'll refrain from answering myself for a little while.
Why block port 25? How much of that 25 traffic do they know is SPAM? If I were a spammer, I could just get a co-location somewhere in asia (or just about anywhere else), ssh over, and do my dirty work from there.
The only people they are hurting are people that like to run their own mail servers.
People like me. And I am not a spammer.
Why can't people understand that you can't block certain kinds of traffic by blocking ports? All it takes is another computer outside the blockade to ferry them along. The only way this would be effective is that if every ISP everywhere blocked port 25, and co-located servers had to register to use port 25. But since that will never happen, then one ISP doesn't make a difference.
MySQL is making strides towards all of the 'enterprise' features of db's like Oracle. (side note: why do people say enterprise when they mean 'scales well'). Stored procedures and the like will be available in MySQL probably in a year.
In my experience, JBoss fares really well against Weblogic, and offers similar support levels. Use Eclipse as your dev. platform, as its features and plugins (as well as ease of plugin development) surpass commericial offerings.
So thus far the only thing we are paying for is Oracle, and it's not that expensive, especially for the quality support that you get. So for a small to medium sized company, get a couple of quality admins, forgo 'enterprise' workstations in favor of a decent Fedora setup. Of couple of good admins should be handle this, without the need for external support. Get enterprise support for the servers and network infrastructure.
Thus with F/OSS you are saving (per workstation) probably in the nieghborhood of $1000. Multiply by 100 workstations, and you can buy yourself another admin.
The problem with comparing a certain offering against Linux/BSD/and OSS, is that with the latter there are so many different possible solutions (which I admit can be a problem) that you can probably find one that will save you significant money, solve your problem, and do it well.
If you call yourself a professional, then you go to the interview dressed like one. You are trying to put your best foot forward for them not for you. Wearing a suit does this. I have worked for numberous places where business dress isn't required, but always have gone to the interview wearing a suit.
You won't offend anybody by wearing a suit (except maybe if you are applying for cowboy), and given enough interviews you will insult people by not wearing one. If even you do get the vibe that you are overdressed you can always ditch the tie and the coat.
One time a friend of mine got salty slush all over his suit so he had to borrow a change of clothes that happened to be jeans. The IBM rep. he came to see refused to interview him, even though he was early. Thankfully we got him to reschedule, but whether you like it or not, suits are pretty much required for 'professional' level interviews unless stated otherwise.
That said, I've heard from some hiring managers wear something non-boring, like a red shirt or non-black, non-dark blue suit. People get tired of looking at black suits and white suits with blue ties all day long.
I kinda like their present plot, and enterprise is one of two shows I watch with any regularity (the other being West Wing). If they continued with traditional plots people would complain about them only rehashing already explored subjects. That said I would like the see more of the relationships between the Big-Three Species (Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans).
They have, however created a plot line that could easily extend for some number of years. The time-traveler plot has taken a back seat to the Zindi excursion, but I suppose that will be tied back in by year's end.
There is a lot of good plots out there though, so much stuff to cover in pre-Federation human society. Come on UPN, don't you realize this is the only show some people watch on your network?
Seriously though. I didn't get the lawsuit until I actually read in the article that the supposed infraction was mearly phonetic. How many people pronouce things online?
And seeing as this Mike Rowe has ownership over his name and plans to study computer science and makes no mentions to MS on his site, the case seems pretty clear to me. It usually takes a lot for WIPO to overturn ownership on a website, and I don't see any clear evidence that Mike Rowe was cybersquating. Come on, phonetic spelling in a written medium? And I'd just like to know how MS found his site in the first place. Do they have a phonetical analyzer?
What a misinformed arrogant ass. Tell me what is in FTP or DNS that allows for root exploits for those running implementations of those standards. What? You mean there is nothing in the standard that is inherantly insecure? You mean you are confusing systems that aren't encrypted and equating them to systems that aren't secure?
Yes people can intercept data from those implementations. But oh, you can run them through a secure tunnel a la ssh. Oh, you mean you didn't realize it's a good thing to have separate standards for encryption and, say, file transfers? That hacking into two different binaries that just happen to be listening on the same port can require vastly different attack techniques?
Grandparent had a good point, too bad you were too far into yourself to see that.
must be done with... an object orientated programming language
All that object "orientated" (east facing objects?) languages do is to try to enforce OO principles. There is no reason that you can't design OO into languages like perl, or c. If fact I'm giving a talk on object oriented design in C later this month at my employer.
Now it's hard/combersome to do stuff like inheritance, reflection and access modifiers, but encapsulating data with its associated methods and a lot of discipline will get you many of the advantages of a full blown OO language.
Its a mark of the novice programmer to choose java or ruby just because it is OO. There are many other advantages/costs to the languages you list and there are an arbitrary number of reasons why you would use one above another.
OO languages are not the silver bullets of software design. There are still situations where 'low' high level languages like C still fit into the application level program. The silver bullet solution is to remember there is no silver bullet solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I send an email to every webmaster of a page that is "designed for IE" and breaks when I change the user agent string in mozilla. Invariably webmasters responded (I was surprised by the % of responces I got) that they design for the vast majority.
;)
Then I wised up and started including some more facts:
That IE has a %95+ share today, that is no reason that it will be in five years. I'll throw in the expansion rate for the Gecko browsers.
Two, most statistics only state who can use IE, not those who do. When people using Mozilla on windows have a problem, they switch to IE, thus negating their statisical contribution.
Three, when you program towards a browser, you will offend somebody. If you program towards the standard you will offend nobody.
Now I get responces I get are generic, "Thanks for your input"
You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.
I don't know. Ask Larry Wall.
I agree about the echo() or print() statement. It's always good to have a very simple HelloWorld program. But for the very introductory programming stuff, why care about OOP and file/DB support? If all you teach are expressions, flow control (loops etc.) and functions then that would be good.
I've tutored people that have a lot of trouble with for loops, if/else stuff, and why you would put stuff into functions. If there was a good reference on only the how and why for these things it's a good thing.
This isn't a book for CS people but for people that haven't yet learned how to think programmatically. Most intro books go too far in depth for non-computer people. Those who write computer books think the elementals are rather trival, but I can tell you for a significant portion of the population they aren't. If there was a whole book whose advanced section only got to functions, I would recomend it to people.
Yeah because you don't use variables, conditionals and types in assembly. Right. You just have to think harder about it.
Also, you can use object oriented principles in assembly, just like you can in C. There aren't any convenient keywords or enforced methodologies (ie everything is an object), but you can gather sections of code that tie data and associated functionality together. You learn the advantages of modular programs. You learn how to count in binary. It forces you to not code carelessly. You learn good coding principles that you can apply to higher languages. In general you get another tool in your tool box. I'd say there are different flavors of programming and they aren't mutually exclusive. ie:
Object Oriented
Procedural
Event-Based
Interpreted
Managed Memory (garbage collection)
Assembly
To leave one of these out of a CS program leaves me wondering how good the program is.
Maybe that worked for you, but for a lot of people a gradual transition works better. If cold-turkey was always best, then we wouldn't have the nicotine patch now would we?
You don't need the staff on hand because it's all in the 'hands' of the rover.
I think you underestimate how many people are involved with the operation of the rover. Even to recieve the transmissions, you need a very powerful reciever, because the transmissions from the rover are on the order of a Watt. This means time at a radio antenna must be spent. Furthermore, you must carefully craft the intructions to be sent,you must monitor the status of the rover (without human intervention Spirit would have been dead), not to mention all of the support staff for these people to get their job done.
The rover wasn't designed to do much more than very menial tasks without further instruction. I doubt that the rover could operate autonomously for more than a couple days. If there was a way that they could cost-effectively get additional data after the primary mission, wouldn't you think that they would do it?
Yes but space-based nuclear power supplies yeild little electricity. IIRC all space-based NPSs work just off of the natural decay of radioactive material. The cost of putting a hot water reactor (what most nuclear plants are) into space are cost prohibitive and even breeder reactors are far too big for a rover (unless you made them submarine-sized)
AFAIK, even without considering evironmental issues (and evironmentalists), nuclear power was not even considered for these reasons.
Ah, but the Vikings only had a very small power requirement. The only things electricity were needed for were the intruments. The rovers need to move under their own power. Futhermore solar panels are cheaper and simpler and lighter.
At lastly, since they only have enough money to pay people to run them for a couple months, why design a rover to last years?
From doc.trolltech.com/3.3/license.html
The Qt Free Edition is distributed under the Q Public License (QPL). It allows free use of Qt Free Edition for running software developed by others, and free use of Qt Free Edition for development of free/Open Source software. There is more information about the QPL at the Trolltech web site.
Note that the Qt/Embedded Free Edition is not distributed under the QPL, but under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
For development non-free/proprietary software, the Qt Professional Edition is available. It has a normal commercial library license, with none of the special restrictions of the QPL or the GPL.
I have zero sympathy for people who want to take the hard work of others, use it for their own gain, and not contribute one damn thing back.
I incorporate some free software systems into a propriety product (apache,libxml both MIT like licenses). Any changes I make to the open source stuff I'll contribute back, but I'm not going to open my whole, unrelated, specialty product.
To me (at the current moment) open source software is meant to commoditize utility software (OSes, toolkits, office suits, editors etc.) to help writers of speciality software produce higher quality code. I'd say that this is a primary driving force to develop open source software. To say that I could free the software and just provide services just isn't an option for me right now. Any utility software I create, I'd open source, but doing so takes time, and therefore money. There may come a time when the business model of producing GPLed software becomes more tested and could apply to us. But not right now.
Also what would the benefits to us be? We only have a few thousand users, and 99% of those are non-programmer types. And it's not like it would be useful to just anybody, it meant to be used in a very specific type of plant and is useless elsewhere. The thousand users that use my product are probably a significant fraction of the people in the world who would derive use from it.
Should open source software not be available to me as a writer of commerical closed source software? Should MIT, BSD, Apache and lGPL licenses be destroyed?
Oh, except for the Qt library, which is only free for open source purposes (free-as-in-beer). Not that I don't like Kde, but you can't say that's its completely software libre. Yes I know that kde doesn't develop Qt, but it does use it in most of the GUIs.
Good point, chalk up another reason to get a lawyer and have the employer indemnify him against any suit that may be brought up. If he doesn't give the e-mail, the employer may well sue because it's more their data than his. I think the chance of this is much greater than a 3rd party suing him for release private information.
Thus: get a lawyer, they may suck sometimes, but they are good to cover your ass.
addendum to this rule: ...unless the cheesesteak vendor is actually located in eastern Pennsylvania (and also not McDonald's )
For evidence see Pat's Steaks & Geno's Steaks.
While experience does help, it in itself is *not* a valid argument.
er... I think it is, especially in software development. In school, I never wrote anything longer than 5K lines, and never worked with more than 2 other people on the same code base. Since I've started working, I've been on servals projects each with 5+ people and 100k lines.
The difference in design techniques for the two are utterly incomparable. Unless someone in college had experience designing something that big, then they really don't have enough experience to judge XP when XP is meant to solve problems in big projects.
You are right in saying that XP isn't good for every situation, as it is just another tool in the toolbox. Experience, however, in the different sizes of code base and team members is necessary in making a good judgement on the effectiveness of XP.
You are assuming that the employer intends to infringe on their privacy. As post above states, you don't know their privacy policy, and it is standard today for companies to let their employees know that their e-mail can be monitored. Furthermore, if they are the ones paying for it, then it is their property, and if they abuse it then it is their fault.
As a postmaster you have no right to withhold the information. It doens't matter that they may ask for complete control over e-mail in the future. It's their e-mail which they effectively lease to their employees, and they can demand that you do anything they want with it. The legal consequences of them looking at e-mail, are squarely not on your sholders.
Even from a moral standpoint, there is no ground to refuse them access. What if they lost a document whose content was contained in an email by that person and they are just trying to recover it?
Bottom line, they provided the account, through you, to their employee, and you don't have any right to control access to what they paid for. If it is illegal, then it's the employers fault.
er... in the major nuclear fuel and services company I work in (but IANA Nuclear Engineer), there is more than using nutrons to smash into stuff. There are lots of chemicals that are use inside a nuclear reactor. Boron, for instance, is used as a burnable absorber. People have to study Boron concentrations in water to make the reactor more efficient. The are many other chemicals involved in the day to day operation of a nuclear reactor.
We call the people that handle and think about the non-fuel stuff here Nuclear Chemists.
Which video card are you using that has an open source driver?
I find it hard to believe that the card will be any good.
Since I don't have any mod points, I'll say that I agree with the AC here. What card do you use? AFAIK, there is no major vendor that releases an open source driver, or the specifications of their card so that others may do so. You might say, "oh I use the GNU nv driver", well then why don't you support it?
Instead of saying "Nvidia pretty please OS your driver?", you could say, "Nvidia, i'm working on nv, could you please tell me how the open gl subsystem works so I can implement it myself?". I'm pretty sure the second question will get an answer long before the first.
Ok, now that I think about it, it wasn't spammers that they were tying to stop it was peoples own e-mail clients. But AFAIK, don't e-mail viruses use thier programs default SMTP server, which for most of the users would be the ISP anyway!? How stupid. And I'll refrain from answering myself for a little while.
Why block port 25? How much of that 25 traffic do they know is SPAM? If I were a spammer, I could just get a co-location somewhere in asia (or just about anywhere else), ssh over, and do my dirty work from there.
The only people they are hurting are people that like to run their own mail servers.
People like me. And I am not a spammer.
Why can't people understand that you can't block certain kinds of traffic by blocking ports? All it takes is another computer outside the blockade to ferry them along. The only way this would be effective is that if every ISP everywhere blocked port 25, and co-located servers had to register to use port 25. But since that will never happen, then one ISP doesn't make a difference.
MySQL is making strides towards all of the 'enterprise' features of db's like Oracle. (side note: why do people say enterprise when they mean 'scales well'). Stored procedures and the like will be available in MySQL probably in a year.
In my experience, JBoss fares really well against Weblogic, and offers similar support levels. Use Eclipse as your dev. platform, as its features and plugins (as well as ease of plugin development) surpass commericial offerings.
So thus far the only thing we are paying for is Oracle, and it's not that expensive, especially for the quality support that you get. So for a small to medium sized company, get a couple of quality admins, forgo 'enterprise' workstations in favor of a decent Fedora setup. Of couple of good admins should be handle this, without the need for external support. Get enterprise support for the servers and network infrastructure.
Thus with F/OSS you are saving (per workstation) probably in the nieghborhood of $1000. Multiply by 100 workstations, and you can buy yourself another admin.
The problem with comparing a certain offering against Linux/BSD/and OSS, is that with the latter there are so many different possible solutions (which I admit can be a problem) that you can probably find one that will save you significant money, solve your problem, and do it well.
If you call yourself a professional, then you go to the interview dressed like one. You are trying to put your best foot forward for them not for you. Wearing a suit does this. I have worked for numberous places where business dress isn't required, but always have gone to the interview wearing a suit.
You won't offend anybody by wearing a suit (except maybe if you are applying for cowboy), and given enough interviews you will insult people by not wearing one. If even you do get the vibe that you are overdressed you can always ditch the tie and the coat.
One time a friend of mine got salty slush all over his suit so he had to borrow a change of clothes that happened to be jeans. The IBM rep. he came to see refused to interview him, even though he was early. Thankfully we got him to reschedule, but whether you like it or not, suits are pretty much required for 'professional' level interviews unless stated otherwise.
That said, I've heard from some hiring managers wear something non-boring, like a red shirt or non-black, non-dark blue suit. People get tired of looking at black suits and white suits with blue ties all day long.
I kinda like their present plot, and enterprise is one of two shows I watch with any regularity (the other being West Wing). If they continued with traditional plots people would complain about them only rehashing already explored subjects. That said I would like the see more of the relationships between the Big-Three Species (Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans).
They have, however created a plot line that could easily extend for some number of years. The time-traveler plot has taken a back seat to the Zindi excursion, but I suppose that will be tied back in by year's end.
There is a lot of good plots out there though, so much stuff to cover in pre-Federation human society. Come on UPN, don't you realize this is the only show some people watch on your network?
Seriously though. I didn't get the lawsuit until I actually read in the article that the supposed infraction was mearly phonetic. How many people pronouce things online?
And seeing as this Mike Rowe has ownership over his name and plans to study computer science and makes no mentions to MS on his site, the case seems pretty clear to me. It usually takes a lot for WIPO to overturn ownership on a website, and I don't see any clear evidence that Mike Rowe was cybersquating. Come on, phonetic spelling in a written medium? And I'd just like to know how MS found his site in the first place. Do they have a phonetical analyzer?
Sorry wrong answer, thanks for playing.
What a misinformed arrogant ass. Tell me what is in FTP or DNS that allows for root exploits for those running implementations of those standards. What? You mean there is nothing in the standard that is inherantly insecure? You mean you are confusing systems that aren't encrypted and equating them to systems that aren't secure?
Yes people can intercept data from those implementations. But oh, you can run them through a secure tunnel a la ssh. Oh, you mean you didn't realize it's a good thing to have separate standards for encryption and, say, file transfers? That hacking into two different binaries that just happen to be listening on the same port can require vastly different attack techniques?
Grandparent had a good point, too bad you were too far into yourself to see that.
must be done with ... an object orientated programming language
All that object "orientated" (east facing objects?) languages do is to try to enforce OO principles. There is no reason that you can't design OO into languages like perl, or c. If fact I'm giving a talk on object oriented design in C later this month at my employer.
Now it's hard/combersome to do stuff like inheritance, reflection and access modifiers, but encapsulating data with its associated methods and a lot of discipline will get you many of the advantages of a full blown OO language.
Its a mark of the novice programmer to choose java or ruby just because it is OO. There are many other advantages/costs to the languages you list and there are an arbitrary number of reasons why you would use one above another.
OO languages are not the silver bullets of software design. There are still situations where 'low' high level languages like C still fit into the application level program. The silver bullet solution is to remember there is no silver bullet solution.