©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Writing at TechRepublic, Justin James says we should teach programming to all students. He argues that it would help make them better prepared for the type of jobs that modern society has. I certainly agree that students should learn more about computers but I am not sure that programming is what students need. How about Internet safety?

Personally, I like to program but it’s hard to imagine that it would be everybody’s cup of tea. However, just in case you’d like to learn, I have a site for you. It’s programming for absolute beginners and it’s provided by Microsoft.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Let me spell this out for you. Some people out there used no fewer than six Windows botnets to go after this one guy. And, in the process, they knocked out, for hours at a time, most of the major social networks.

How did this happen? It happened because Windows is an insecure piece of junk. Anyone who knows anything about security knows that this kind of disaster was only a matter of time. Windows botnets are responsible for DDoS attacks and most of e-mail spam.

You cannot secure Windows. Microsoft keeps saying that they will, and they always fail. Period. Windows has been insecure since day one and it’s still going to be insecure when Windows 7 shows up.

As you can tell, Vaughan-Nichols is no fan of Windows and he is a little over the top. However, the kernel of his argument has validity. Of course, the situation is more complex than just blaming Windows security. It is true that, prior to Windows XP SP2, Windows security was a sieve. But defenders of Windows point out that Microsoft has worked very hard to upgrade security in Windows and that Vista and Windows 7 contain many security features. I think that a knowledgeable person who is careful can feel pretty secure with a newer Windows system. But that little phrase, “knowledgeable person who is careful,” is the catch.

What the technical professionals seem to ignore is that the Internet has hundreds of millions of users who are not knowledgeable persons and who are not careful. These are people who understand little or nothing about PCs or Windows. Furthermore (and this is what the technical professionals can’t seem to fathom), these are people who have absolutely no interest in learning anything about PCs or Windows. They won’t go beyond learning how to turn the PC on and memorizing a few icons to click on, no matter how much you preach to them. There are also myriads of PC users who do not understand how or do not want to be bothered with constantly applying the never-ending parade of security updates. In fact, the security firm Secunia says that the majority of PC users probably have unpatched applications. And these unpatched PCs are vulnerable to malware. Combine that with the large numbers of people who will click on anything or who download from dubious sites and you get botnets. So to some extent I agree with the Vaughan-Nichols comments. I see no possible end to the botnet problem until a simpler, consumer-oriented Web appliance is the choice for average Internet surfers.

I do think that Microsoft has been so oriented to the desktop that it has not understood what a big change occurred when hundreds of millions of technically unskilled users started using the Internet. Recent announcements about cloud computing indicate that Microsoft may be beginning to wean itself from the cash cows of Windows and Office. Now, if Redmond could only stop selling an operating system far too complex to hundreds of millions of users who haven’t a clue how to use it properly. It shouldn’t be hard for Microsoft to come up with a simpler, safer operating system designed for all those people who just want an Internet appliance and only sell the more complicated version to the enterprise and those who know something about Windows. Perhaps, the threat (slim as it currently is) of low-cost notebooks with a Google operating system or other Linux variation will spur Microsoft on. I hope so. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s reaction so far has been to try to limit netbooks as much as possible. For example, see this PC World post.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

For the past two years, a team of UCLA Egyptologists, digital modelers, web designers, staff and students has been building a three-dimensional virtual-reality model of the ancient Egyptian religious site known as Karnak, one of the largest temple complexes ever constructed.

The result is Digital Karnak, a high-tech model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history at the popular ancient Egyptian tourist site near modern-day Luxor, where generations of pharaohs constructed temples, chapels, obelisks, sphinxes, shrines and other sacred structures beginning in the 20th century B.C.

The only problem is that a Quick Time plug-in is required. The Web link to the Karnak site is here.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Welcome to the Phrontistery! I’m your host, Forthright. Since 1996, I have compiled word lists in order to spread the joy of the English language. Here, you will find the International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources.

Incidentally, the Oxford English Dictionary folks estimate that there are at least a quarter-million distinct words in the English language. And that doesn’t include the made-up words and neologisms that technology types keep coming up with. But then, is “tweet” an English word or part of an international Web language? In any event, if you include all the technical jargon and expressions from Asian and other regional users of English, it is estimated that there are around one million English words.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

A post at MakeUseOf recommends two sites that I am unfamiliar with:

There are a couple of great sites out there that are devoted to doing nothing other than providing simple answers to all of your questions – whether it’s meaning of OPEC or how a United States Presidential election takes place.

These sites provide video, articles and more to help you learn easily.

The first site:

CommonCraft is all about simple explanations. And frankly, CommonCraft does great work. The site features videos on tons of different subjects, from Twitter to borrowing money, all showing you how they work in simple, everyday terms.

The second site:

Got a question burning in your brain? Want to know what a Smoking Gun is? Either way, the Wise Geek knows the answer. WiseGeek is a site boasting over 40,000 articles covering a ridiculous range of topics, all answering the questions you may have.

Anybody tried these sites?

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

The best way to get an idea of what it does is to go to the site and try a few queries. Just to give a little flavor of what it does and doesn’t do, here’s some things I tried both at WA and at Google. First, I asked, “distance to Jupiter”. This is the sort of thing that is right up WA’s alley. Right away it told me the present distance from the earth to Jupiter and also gave the maximum and minimum distances to the sun in Jupiter’s orbit. Google, of course, doesn’t give the answer directly but gave me links. In fact, the top listed links contained similar information about Jupiter but that involved deciding which link to go to and then clicking on the link. This illustrates a strength of WA – answers can come directly.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things that WA doesn’t know about. I asked it how many computers there were in the world and it couldn’t answer. Google presented a raft of links and the first few did contain an answer. Actually, they all referred to the same estimate someone made in 2007 of the number of PCs. (If you care, it was one billion.) This estimate, of course, is out of date and illustrates a weakness of search engines; their listings are often not recent links. Also, there is no way to be sure about the reliability of information. The database at WA is said to be gathered by humans so when it does give an answer it may have been checked.

Then, I asked “origin of apple”. I was interested in the fruit but expected some reference to Macs or Steve Jobs as well. I got neither fruit nor computer from WA; it only gave me a very sparse note that the word “apple” first appeared in the language around 1400. I tried adding “fruit” to the query and then WA said it didn’t understand. Google gave me the usual myriad of links but the top listed ones were all about the history and origin of the fruit – just what I wanted. And that was without mentioning fruit in the search term. So Google won again.

Finally, I tried evaluating some integral calculus expressions and that worked like a charm. And that, of course, Google doesn’t do.

Try out WA for yourself and let us know what you think.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.