Seriously, kids that age should be playing with other kids, not having their parents helicopter over them with a digital tether.

A few releases before I switched to Mint.

An open message to the Gnome Devs: We don't want a new interface! We are happy with our crusty old UI! Don't change it to attract new users, or to imitate Apple or Microsoft's UI's. We use X-Windows and/or Gnome because it is not like either of those platforms. You've already lost the desktop war; don't lose your user base as well through stupid changes. P.S. You don't need to revamp the start menu with each release; we're happy with it as it is as well.

Linux *is* Unix.

Rather than buying a book on programming for your son, you might want to start him with something real-world that he can make tangible changes with. At stores like Radio Shack and MicroCenter, they sell electronics kits featuring an Arduino microcontroller board. These things are *seriously* fun to play with because its so simple to write code for them. The language you program them in is actually C/C++, but the libraries provided make the C++ look more like javascript. There is a rather large community surrounding the platform, and a whole bunch of 3rd party add-on kits for making them do nifty things.

I think the most important thing at your son's age is for him to be able to write a small fragment of code & see its effect. Something as basic and accessible as an Arduino is perfect for this type of experimentation. To link you to a few resources, the main arduino site is http://arduino.cc./ You can find examples of some of the cool add-ons at http://sparkfun.com/

You might even have some fun with one of these things yourself!

I find this kind of interesting... While I haven't yet played with Android yet (or for that matter Windows on a netbook), this does seem to be an interesting development. I would *really* like to see a performance comparison between Android and Windows on the same netbook; both from a speed and resource consumption standpoint.

Overall, I really like the idea of Android, but think the platform is still too new for anyone to really pay it any serious attention. What really needs to happen is for cell phone manufacturers to have a compelling reason to use it on their cell phones.

That being said, I think Android is going to slowly whither away as a technological footnote over the next several years.

I'm a C++ developer, and I'm mixed on this decision... On one hand, memcpy is a function that you can really hurt yourself with. On the other, it maps to extremely fast assembly that most processors can perform very quickly. There is a time & a place for everything. I think that a memcpy inside a class' constructor or assignment functions is perfectly acceptable, yet doing a memcpy(&destclass, &fromclass, sizeof(destclass)) is fundamentally dumb for more reasons than I care to illucidate (read one of Stroudstrup's or Meyer's books on C++ if you want to know). Doing something like that *really* demonstrates that you don't know the language.

I guess Microsoft is trying to get people that don't understand C++ to program better in the language. IMHO, this will not solve fundamental problems with people programming C++, just cause them to learn the language slower by not having an experience working through a bastard of a bug. I think the world (and not just MS) needs to realize that writing a piece of complex software is difficult. Bugs like an errant memcpy of a subclass into a baseclass instance are *very* easy bugs to solve if you're looking for them. Memory overwrites are easy to detect if you are looking for them. Bad pointers are easy to detect if you're looking for them.

Such problems will always exist in software. I've found a fair number in my own code. What we *really* need to do is train a better caliber of programmer. OTOH, Microsoft seems hell-bent on trying to make writing software easy to do