As a professional programmer, you will be learning throughout your entire career. You will be re-training yourself constantly and unendingly. ...
If you haven't learned *any* programming because you say "There wasn't a class". Then you should probably forget about it.

It's one thing to start from the background of a CS/Software Development degree and teach yourself a new language or programming techniques and another for a high school student without a good mentor to try to learn their first language well on their own. I'm not saying it's impossible, but they are very different. I can learn new languages with relative ease because I've studied and learned the classic algorithms in several languages; I have the experience to read online sites and forums to spot who is offering good advice and who doesn't know what they're talking about. That high school student doesn't have those advantages and while it's certainly possible to do so, it can also lead to many bad techniques and cargo cult approaches as well as utter frustration and failure.

First, flaws in the javascript engine are very often the source of buffer overflow attacks on the web browsers themselves. Perusing the security notes attached to changelogs would show you this.

Second, even within the allowed scope of the javascript specs, there's a *whole* lot of possibilities. Check out BeEF.

And third, and perhaps most important, once an attacker can run javascript on a system, they can find plug-ins and feed them content, and with as many of them out there as there are, chances are that the vast majority of users have at least one exploitable plug-in. It's generally not javascript itself that's the method of exploitation, just the handy way of finding and breaking something else.

I mean ... bought for $580M and sold for $100M

Sure, but consider that Google alone paid News Corp $900M during that time, News Corp still comes out ahead. Value and worth are funny concepts. MySpace might only have been "worth" $300 million to you if you were running a theoretical competitor at the time that News Corp bought it, but they turned around and made a nice profit on it, even at the higher price. And by buying it, they denied your company the ability to make that profit.

It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.

Small risk leads to small profit, large risk leads to larger profit. If you have perverse incentives that reward high risk behavior by financial people with little consequence for failure, that's what they're going to do.

investors in other companies will start asking the CIO to ensure security at any cost

Really? Any cost? There is no such thing as a completely secure network or computer (that provides a usable amount of capability) and getting to a high level can be very, very expensive. Are you willing to give up e-commerce? The ability to get government services online? Your gmail accounts? (Google, after all, quite publicly got hacked, yet you continue to use them.)

Are you prepared to pay three, four, five, ten times as much for your phone and network connections?

This is a major leak of personal information but it's nothing that should bankrupt a major corporation based on what's known now. The big reform that needs to happen is that identity fraud needs to get harder to do based on simple information like names, address, and DOB, significant amounts of which can already be found in public records.

If a candidate told me they think that possibility of Microsoft or Windows disappearing was a valid reason to not learn languages (at least ones designed for programmers rather than code monkies or secretaries), I would be unlikely to hire them. Companies of that size and importance don't just go away.

C# might not be the ideal language for some problems, but there will be work in it for a long time. And someone proficient in it would be able to easily move to other platforms.

Linux is worst

No, it's just that almost everyone has been exposed to Windows and have been desensitized to its quirks. Ever try to explain the lettered drive system to someone who's 50+ and hasn't used computers before? It's just (if not more) bizarre - skipping A and B (except for computers that still have floppy drives and unless a USB drive pretends to be a floppy drive), the difference in drive naming on systems that ship with recovery partitions, the semi-random drive letter assignment to different flash drives (or even the same one mounted at a different time)...

Or try explaining the registry to a newbie.

"I don't get paid for work I did two decades ago. Why should you?"

Because the express purpose of the constitution establishing the authority for copyright is to promote the arts and sciences. To do so, you must induce people and companies to take a substantial risk of failure by dedicating time to creating. Your job paid you a living wage; creative works does not. Copyright duration has become abusively long, but that doesn't mean the basic concept is wrong. Too short of a period of protection would cause the development of intellectual works to stagnate and choke the economies of the first world countries. If you work in anything related to computers, it's very likely that the fact you got paid a decade ago has everything to do with the same protections you're railing against, just the risk was undertaken by an entity other than yourself.

If copyright is an easy ride on the gravy train, why haven't you become wealthy with it? What great works have you chosen to contribute to the public domain?

(HEY Barnes and Nobel! If I could extend a nook account to include my Gentoo laptop as one of my five allowed clone devices, I would have bought the thing. Just Sayin...)

You do realize that the cost of supporting one of the more obscure and arcane Linux distributions probably outweighs the income it would bring in, right? If you want to advocate for desktop Linux, you'll be far more effective if you ask for Fedora or Ubuntu support. Even that isn't all that likely to happen in the near future, but it beats tilting at windmills.

There are many beneficiaries when flash eventually bites the dust and becomes a pariah like Java Applets.

The problem isn't just Flash, the problem is complicated and interactive ads, which is what advertisers push for (because they work). It doesn't matter which technology is being used, be it HTML5 or Flash, it's still going to suck up CPU time.

No, you need evidence to support your assertion, I don't need any to question it.

My point is that Apple considers the iPad to not be a computer. Again, I don't care either way.You didn't like the way I stated it the first time around; I clarified (APPLE DOESN'T CONSIDER THE IPAD TO BE A COMPUTER AND WILL FIGHT TO KEEP IT RESTRICTED RATHER THAN THROWING IT OPEN TO ANY OS, which is the assertation of the parent of my initial post), you presented nothing to the contrary. Either provide evidence to the contrary or go away. Apple's opinion is the main one that matters, because they control the firmware. Would you care to make a wager on whether Apple will happily allow alternative OSes to iOS on iPads? AGAIN, WHICH IS WHAT IS ASSERTED BY THE POST I REPLIED TO.

What do you believe are the definitions of those terms in this context?

Device - a thing made for a particular purpose; an invention or contrivance, esp. a mechanical or electrical one.
Appliance - an instrument, apparatus, or device for a particular purpose or use.

The iPad is designed for a specific purpose (to consume media and use apps per Apple's desire), as above, as compared to a general purpose computer. Apple will fight tooth and nail to maintain control over this.

I personally don't care, as I will never buy an iPad. If I want a tablet running Chrome OS, I'll buy one that's designed for it, not one that the manufacturer will engage in a running hostile battle with users over. I was responding to what I presume was an Apple fanboy's loving statement that Apple will happily allow Chrome OS on the iPad. Apple does not consider the iPad a computer.

Don't take my word for it, take Apple's:

A magical and revolutionary product - note that the word computer is never used to describe the iPad.
The Mac is designed to provide the best computer experience you can have.

See the difference?

Or from their meta description at apple.com: meta name="Description" content="Apple designs and creates iPod and iTunes, Mac laptop and desktop computers, the OS X operating system, and the revolutionary iPhone and iPad."

See how they have the iPhone and iPad away from the computer section and emphasize that they're different than anything else?

When Steve Jobs introduced it, he referred to it as a "third kind of device". It is not a general purpose computer, it is a device or an appliance - whatever new term you want to give it - that includes the fact that you WILL use it in the way to Apple says you will. My microwave and digital cameras could technically be called computers but that's not the way they're used. The iPad is like that - locked-down and specialized. My previous generation "dumb" phone had a faster CPU and more RAM than my college computer, but it wasn't usable in the same way.

Go read some of the billion articles that have been written about the shift that the iPad has caused. They're selling like crazy because people don't want a computer, they want something pretty to consume media on, and lock-down is part of how Apple provides that experience.

I'm quite familiar with Apple and their shift from a computer company to a media consumption/delivery company. Maybe you should have some evidence before you label something bullshit? Perhaps a quote from Steve Jobs referring to the iPad as a computer?

My car stereo has a CPU, memory, display, and I/O capability. So does my microwave. So does the Kindle and iPad. They are not intended as general purpose devices that the modern use of the term computer connotes. They are intended to be used exactly as the manufacturer says you're going to. You can hack some of these devices just like you can run MAME on some cameras, but that's going against the intended use and the companies that make them will fight to keep control over them. That's why they're not computers.

Don't take my word for it, take Apple's:

A magical and revolutionary product - note that the word computer is never used to describe the iPad.
The Mac is designed to provide the best computer experience you can have.

See the difference?

If you have to use an exploit to install your alternative OS, that means the vendor is not receptive to you doing so. And do you have a 6th generation iPod running Rockbox or the like?

You can run Windows or linux on Mac computers

The iPad is not a computer, it's a device. Apple has a much different attitude about their devices than their computers.

There's been a working version of Android in the iPhone since April and Apple has done nothing about it.

You are aware of what the term jailbreak refers to, yes? How about the long running battles to keep alternative OSes off of iPods or keeping iTunes as the dominant force for managing them?

I'm a little puzzled why your clients pay you for advice on Windows when you don't use or pay attention to it. PowerShell has close to 4 million hits with a Google search and was much discussed on slashdot.

NT derived Windows have some amazingly powerful command line tools that in some cases are far better than *nix tools. Check out Ed Skoudis' many articles and podcasts on command line kung fu.

Too bad they did not build on Xenix, and save everyone much grief.

As someone else noted, the NT kernel is really pretty good. It was buggy third party drivers and bad non-kernel decisions that created the vast majority of the problems. Any OS that allows a wide range of hardware is going to be vulnerable to buggy drivers.

Imagine where Apple could have been in the 90s, had they switched to Unix a decade earlier.

They did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX