My god, you are really serious. You're implying that Europeans are technologically backwards, bigoted, ultra-nationalistic and racist. Some of us are, for sure. From my experience, Americans are much more nationalistic than European. The technology revolution started in America? Is that right? Galilleo, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Darwin, Babbage, Lovelace, Tesla (Serbian father, Croatian mother, born in Croatia), Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Turing ... all European. Without these people much of what you take for granted (if not all) would not be possible. Guilt politics and white guilt. Yeah well sure, you still burnt lynched people in the South well into the 20th century. American companies do make great products, but most of that is manufactured in China. Without China, America would be in a poor shape. Technology wise. FYI mobile phone, first commercial network launched in Japan in '79, first computer made in England (had it been finished we might have seen computers about 50-60 years before they first appeared). The man who basically started the Computer Age (Turing) was an Englishman. You Americans should stop thinking that you're god-given. You're not. Fact is you're one of the world super-powers, but you're not the only relevant country.

PL/1 was used extensively in Croatia when my folks went to college, actually the first computer they got on campus (first computer in the country at that time, for public/acad use anyway) knew only PL/1. And of course the mandatory stacks of cards... That's one of the languages I'll have to learn someday, just so I can be smug and condescending :)

My linux > your linux

Your logic is flawed. It's perfectly acceptable to be a jerk as long as you can suffer the consequences. That said, RMS is a jerk, but to be fair, Jobs was also a jerk. I'm a jerk too :) Basically all you need to do to be famous is to write some crappy software that is beyond outdated now, and is maintained because everybody is too lazy to make an easy switch to something way better, and then go preaching about software freedoms. He's not just a jerk though, he's an egomaniac too ;)

What most people fail to recognise is that Steve Jobs and RMS are the opposite sides of the same coin. Both are a product of 60's counter-culture, but wound up in radically different roles. One was a "perfect capitalist" and a marketing genius, with a knack for choosing good people to do the hard stuff for him, other one was a true hippie freedom fighter in the newly emerging Information age.

Steve Jobs made a lasting impression on the IT of the 80's, late 90's and 00's. He wasn't an innovator, he was a motivator. A driving force. He was also an obnoxious ass, rude, and many people disliked him. Rightfully. RMS shares those same characteristics. He's also an obnoxious ass, driven and rude. But he's also more akin in some ways to that other Steve (Woz) in that he was a technical person. Operative word being WAS. Both men saw, and one still sees, the world in black and white. So you can rightfully apply idiot and genius to both of them.

FSF that RMS created is a plague upon the software freedom. That's now, things were very, very different back in the day. Insisting on GPL3, hard copyleft licensing, delusions about people wanting to be free from chains of proprietary software, that's his legacy. If people wanted to be free from the "chains of copyrighted software" they would be. Thing is, some stuff is closed source and rightfully so. I like open-source, and support the free software movements for the most part, but I can't stand zealotry. For all the good that he's done with envisioning GNU in the right moment in time, making some great software (namely GCC and Emacs), he made FSF purely for the sake of his ego. Not principles, and not your or my freedom.

I do web development now mostly. I've been a sysadmin in a bank, managing Linux/UNIX systems for the past 8 years. I've changed back to thing that I love most, and that's coding. Started a company and we're doing fine for now. In all my time with computers (first PC when I was 6, now I'm 28, and no, I didn't finish college), coding some stuff I needed was always eating at my free time. In my high-school days I discovered Linux, by the end of high-school I was using only Linux. Now I'm working on a Mac, because I like the workflow (well to be honest it's dual-boot machine with Arch). I also have 2 Linux machines as VM hosts that run my firewall, testing web/db servers and various other stuff.

Point is I use GNU software because I must (and because I'm lazy) (actually I use BSD variants of the same utils, being on a Mac mainly, but point still stands). GNU just isn't relevant anymore. All of basic GNU utils could be replaced with better quality software in a matter of months. If you are choosing software that's "free", over software that's good, then frankly you're an idiot. Most of my friends/coworkers agree with me on this, because choosing GPL3 licensed software is essentially taking away your freedom to modify it with better, but not hard-copyleft, software part.

My freedom isn't for someone to choose for me. My freedom is my own. I am not evil, or even misguided. I don't hate RMS, nor do I bear him any ill will, I just think his ego got the better of him. This is most visible in insisting on calling Linux GNU/Linux, even though the GNU part is, well most of it, outdated and comes with a stench of decay, and for the most part will be replaced in the following years with better software. Yes, even the venerable GCC which is being phased out in most BSD flavours in favour of LLVM/Clang (again because of the idiotic move towards enforcing GPL3 at all costs). I bet this will happen with Linux too in the following years, distro by distro (or even Linus and the Penguins make another bold shift toward Clang when it matures a bit more, LLVMForLinux is a good start). I shudder to think what would have happened hadn't Linus said no, RMS, FO, I'm not going to use the new more restrictive license. For one, no Android. No Steam on Linux. ...

More examples of replacement software that's better than gnu... Grub, yeah, well syslinux is kind of much better. If simply for sticking with KISS principle in software design/config. Grep... no, I use ack. Glibc... eglibc (not so big a diff) Gawk... Mawk Sed... lol, hm, any text editor. hell you can just do away with most of gnu coreutils by linking busybox ... Arch is doing base2heirloom in parallel with base2busybox so...

GNU isn't that relevant anymore, and FSF is an outlet for one man's ego. Just check out the latest rants from GNU software maintainers and you'll see what I mean... Gnu Grep and Sed maintainer quits because RMS and FSF are harming GNU@/.. That's the latest one, check out prior ML postings for more such rants. Sorry for the long comment, but I'm quite irked at how RMS presents himself as a Jesus figure.

Greets from Croatia

Well he need to earn a pay check somehow. I mean seriously, this is a patent-troll lawyer wannabe. He doesn't give a shit about privacy, he just want's to have a new car and a boat.

LIAR!!! My dad's colleagues do not post as ACs :P And these days were were 15 years ago :)))

Just the example I was going to use. When I was in elementary I borrowed the first edition of K&R from dad's colleague. It's still sitting on my shelf. It's still relevant, and it taught me C. It's the standard on C, been standardised by ANSI, and I'm really considering buying a new one.

Relatively small book, about 300 pages, but it tells you everything you need to know to write C. Everything. When writing docs for my own software I always use this book as a guide. Small, short and to the point. Don't shy away from explaining the implementation, but don't skip on the part how to use it also.

Also Douglas Crockford's, Javascript - The Good Parts, which is also a great book. And Demistified C++ from Kent is also very good (half of my country developer workforce literally learnt C++ based on that book). On the broad coverage scale, Java - The Complete Reference. Both as a murder weapon (1000+ pages), and in the detail of showing various features and quirks of the language and the platform.

And yeah, there was this great book about Pascal I read as a teenager, but I hated programming in Pascal (since I did a lot of C back then), so I forgot the author of the book :( Book was great, the language was not.

The flexibility in hours being the strong point. Exactly why I started my own company. I get to choose when I work, and how much I work (that tends to be more work, but I'm happier doing it, because well I reap the rewards). People like to be respected for their work. I know a lot of developers (beside myself), that get really pissed of when they do this excellent piece of software that generates $$$ for the company and don't get even a pat on the back in return, bonuses, massages and such are SF to bossess/managers that are like that. So the bottom line is, respect your people, value their knowledge and resourcefulness and give them money. Share the profits, or give them raises, but it has to be cash in these times. Teambuildings don't put bread on your table.

Fewer lines NE fewer bugs. In my experience developers who strive to do an algorithm or just a function in as few lines as possible, tend to do all sorts of mistakes and thus spend more time in debugging. This is particularly awful if you develop for the web and do stuff in PHP/JS. As ugly as Perl syntax is, you can make sense of it, and all is good. But if you have a dev who does like not naming the variables in line with their use, not commenting, and self-documenting programming is a sort of an anathema to those... I don't like such characters on my team. They are often brilliant, but writing code no one can read easily (spending time to make sense of somebody' coding is wasting time) and for superficial reasons like, well I save ten characters per line, and that makes my program run faster... Makes everybody but them miserable. In response to other questions, CS is a subset of Mathematics. Programming is not a subset of CS, nor is it exclusive to CS. Programming, like math, is trying to describe the material world (and most of our programs do this, you just have to think about it) in a standardised way, but unlike math, who does that for other humans, programming does it for the machines. This has nothing to do with CS, because programming is older than CS. It is more closely related to linguistics, and logic and ofc mathematics. All programming languages are tools that take a abstract or a physical object, or a sequence of objects, and describe it in meaningful and logical way to the computer. Then they "teach" the computer how to manipulate those objects. Mind you, I'm not talking about objects from OOP. I'm talking about objects in a dictionary way ( [object] a thing, person, or matter to which thought or action is directed), one might argue that this is not dissimilar from class-based programming objects... And it's not... And that should be a thought too ;)

Cough, cough, user-friendly, popular. Ubuntu is crapware and we only use it because idiots think good marketing = good distro. I'd use SUSE over Ubuntu any day, and I'd use Arch over any of those if I could. Linux = kernel + hardware supporting software + basic user-land tools, distro is a software distribution. A collection of packages that make your life more easy. Valve doesn't need a new distro. That is utter bullshit. Valve needs to find a way to integrate into user-land properly, and refrain from using any proprietary code beyond user-land. And even in user-land be selective what they implement with proprietary code, on what do they use public APIs and so on. Ring 3 DRM and they should not have a problem with anything.

Thumbs up. Although I find GPL good and proper. It is good and proper for some things only. As somebody here said, Valve/Steam should use public APIs to implement DRM and then lay fault on community for breaking the software, in the form of well now, I respect your policies, can't you respect mine.

half of .NET is half-baked crap. Do you remember how many GUI API-s they've gone through? With every single one promising better desktop/mobile integration. Last partially completed and then abandoned is Silverlight... I could rant about that till morning :)

Dude... For about 20-ish years, for stuff like Garage Band you'd be better off buying a dedicated USB MIDI controller/keyboard. Any professional/semi-professional musician has and uses one. Games and music are a hobby, and in rare cases lifetime profession. And if it is a profession, you use various IDE tools/DAW tools + controllers, respectively. Unless your name is Johnathan Wendel and you use Mouse and WSAD for getting paid :) For someone like me, who is a developer more/sysadmin less (but the same goes if you are more sysadmin) by trade, taking away keyboard and mouse is akin to amputating one's foot so you coud get an less usable artificial one.

Besides, Win8 doesn't do anything revolutionary, everything MS does is TAKE A PROVEN concept (Touch optimised UI, walled garden security for apps, and "new and improved" API for general purpose system programming) and POLISH it. Mark my word Win8 will be practically unusable for anyone until at least SP1, and used rarely in corporate environments. And that is where the big bucks are.

Calling it not even a remotely good is solution is proper and correct if you use computers to make money. Although I've switched away from Windows years ago, I still stay in touch with the technology, as I have a few servers that I maintain, that serve Windows Platform software. Windows 8 will bring only pain and misery. It'll be even worse if they push it to servers. Which they might.

The kids will be grateful later on for the opportunity to break out of MS lock-in, and Python is a fun, easy language to learn, though surprisingly powerful. Design the classroom so that a pair of students (as in pair programming) sit opposite each other so they can look each other in the face, not each others monitor. Give assignments per pair, not the same assignment to the whole class. Use source-code control. (So you can check on their progress after class). Give them assignments that span several school-hours, to occupy them. Not just stupid hello world/word counter programs that are too boring and don't do anything useful. Design the classroom so the pairs all see the whiteboard/projection place, yet have space enough to stretch out. Award collaboration (not cheating kind of collab), but also award individual flashes of insight. Do base your CS class on programming as it is a useful skill even for those who won't work as IT people. Meaning really, most of these kids today know how to use word processing and/or spreadsheet software, and if you captivate them with something interesting and fun, they'll be less likely to cause havoc in the classroom. If you must use Windows, somebody mentioned Faronics ... good choice. If you want to go with some fancy stuff like VDI or Thin Client enviroment (which I highly recommend) ... use something like https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/ or even better the SUSE version http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP because of Yast (management tool, not all powerful, but just enough). Configure thin clients with LXDE or some hybrid containing Awesome WM, deploy Firefox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, OpenOffice (apps that use local workstation resources, but boot over network) and you're be set for another 4-5 years. If you must use Windows, everything here applies but you change the server from Linux Terminal Server Project to this... http://www.xpunlimited.com/ ... and deal with the clients accordingly ... probably with WPKG (http://wpkg.org/). You can do everything, even on a tight budget, you just have to have some imagination, and a good working knowledge in tinkering with various open-source software.