I'm neither cold fjord nor the AC, but you are entirely wrong. The current project that I work on is headed by Peter Neumann (one of the architects of MULTICS), and so I have a fairly good understanding of the environment that led to the creation of UNIX from conversations with someone who was there at the time. Pretty much everything that cold fjord said is correct. They got an old computer that no one else wanted and hacked up an OS in their own spare time. They didn't aim to take over the world - they just wanted something that had the bits of MULTICS that they liked (Peter has some frank opinions on their choices here) that they could use.

And they've been using it to explore some quite interesting ideas in kernel design. The fine-grained compartmentalism that a microkernel provides (at the expense of some performance) is starting to look more attractive in a world where computers run in very hostile environments and yet even a 50% slower kernel would have a negligible impact on user-perceived performance (or battery life).

I was 7 when I learned to program. We had one lesson a week taught by the school's headmaster on whatever he thought was interesting, and so he taught some programming in BASIC[1] on the BBC Model B. He also taught some geometry using Logo on the same machine. It was connected to a big TV (which, by modern standards, is a small TV), and he'd ask the class to describe the program and he'd type it. After school and at lunch and break times there were a few of these machines that we could use, and I learned a bit more. I asked my father to teach me a real language, and he taught me PL/M86 (which I still miss sometimes), and I then moved on to C[2].

When I got to university, I discovered how much of the theoretical side I was missing. The main problem with teaching programming at an early age is that it really needs to be accompanied by teaching logic and then game and graph theory. I've seen classes that do this well for under-10s, but they're very rare.

[1] The Dijkstra comment that teaching BASIC should be a criminal offence doesn't really apply to BBC BASIC, which had full support for structured programming, an integrated assembler, and direct access to memory-mapped hardware.
[2] Back then, you really needed makefiles because there was no equivalent to a modern compiler driver. Compilation, assembly, and linking were all separate, manual, steps.

The problem is that there's no well-supported way, for example in the DNS, for a server to say which certificate it will use. If HTTPS required two certificates, then that would just mean that you'd need to compromise two CAs (or one CA and get them to issue two certs), which given what we already know about the NSA program, has already happened. This is something that people like Ben Laurie at Google are working on with Certificate Transparency: trying to ensure that there is a recorded and verifiable chain showing that a certificate was issued to the real owner of the domain and that it is not being MITM'd.

The point of using control-alt-delete is that it's a key combination that can not be caught by any userspace process that does not have a special permission. This means that it's impossible to spoof the login screen on Windows without already having compromised the kernel. It doesn't matter what the key combination is, as long as it's one that is not delivered by the normal keypress event delivery mechanisms. Control-alt-delete is a reasonable choice, because no application author is likely to complain that they can't use this shortcut combination.

And what's the difference between that and

FOR i = 0 TO 9
PRINT i

Or

0 to: 9 do: [ :x | Transcript show: x ]

That's right, the difference is syntax and you've picked a terrible example. A better example would be method invocation. The differences between calling a C function pointer, a C++ virtual function, a Java method or an Objective-C method are significant.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

That makes sense. I get a couple of 'call for papers' emails a day from dubious journals, often with such broad titles as 'The Journal of Modern Research', so it would be completely impossible for them to rate articles. The research establishment in the UK has tried quite hard over the last decade to counter this 'publish loads of crap' incentive. The old Research Assessment Exercise and the new Research Excellence Framework by which departments are assessed requires a small number (about one per year) of 'research outputs'. These can be high-impact papers, books, and so on, and in computer science can include things like published open source software (which counts as technology transfer if you can point to people using it).

And it's a completely fucked-up policy, because the hoops that a US company needs to jump through to hire an Iranian national are insane. So you end up educating a load of people, then telling them that they're second-class people and sending them back home. Guess how favourably disposed they are to the USA after that...

No it isn't. NaCl is a great proof of concept. It shows that you can sandbox x86 apps using some static analysis of the binaries and a few other constraints (it also showed that segmentation support on modern x86 chips is pretty poor and terrible on Atom). The problem is that it only works on x86 binaries. What proportion of Web use these days is (ARM-based) phones and tablets? 20%? If you make something that only works for 80% (and falling) of your customers, then that's a problem.

PNaCl is promising, but it's currently in early draft stage. It hard-codes some things into the ABI too early and misses other important things (e.g. no mechanism for exceptions, and they're very difficult to implement correctly in a PNaCl model). And, unlike NaCl, PNaCl relies on a complex compiler being bug free for security, and we all know how well that worked out for Java...

Yup. It's a pretty horrible API to and has completely insane integration with both event delivery and drawing, which made sense when you were trying to squeeze the last possible bit of performance out of a 33MHz machine without double-buffered graphics but make absolutely no sense now. It definitely does need to be replaced, the problem is getting people to agree on what. Microsoft tried to make ActiveX a replacement, but no one else adopted it. The only reason NPAPI still survives is that it's the only way of making a plugin that all of the major browsers support. Maybe now Chrome market share is enough that they can make all of the plugin makers implement a new API. Or maybe plugins just aren't as important anymore...

My guess is that you weren't using Windows. On most *NIX platforms, installing either was pretty trivial. On Windows, however, MySQL had a point-and-click installer years before PostgreSQL worked reliably on the platform. For web developers working on Windows, this meant that if they wanted to install the same DB on their dev machine as on their deployment system, MySQL was a clear winner.

When I was a student, you could get a student license to Windows 2000 and Visual Studio for under £100. You can now get both the latest OS and dev tools for free under the academic licensing. You don't need to have lots of disposable income to afford free...

Your metric will end up with no computer books being available. It took about 2 days between my last book being published and it being possible to find pirate copies online, and yet people are still buying it so obviously some people would rather have the dead-tree edition, and I suspect that most of those would happily buy it at a fraction of the price in a charity shop...

Here the seasons go autumn, winter, spring, tourist.