Twitter worldwide trends shows how passionate people are about Dennis contribution to computer science. From the usual quotes he's remembered for, to the witty one-line C programs to say "good bye". After all, the first example we all remember when learning to program in C was to output "Hello World", which has now become the de facto example for any other programming language.
A few of his quotes:
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
I owe a lot to Dennis Ritchie's genius. My whole career is based on his contributions to the computer science community.
Kudos to Apple for not installing Java by default on Mac OS X 10.7 aka Lion. This should be the mantra by which we go from now on. With the horrible security record for Java and other software, having less of this crap on your system by default makes me feel a little better. That said, some websites still require this legacy software (yep, I said it. Java is just bad on consumer systems and it is going to disappear very very soon. Think HTML5 and JavaWECMAScript!)
Recently there have been an explosion in websites that track your behavior online from what you shop, to who you talk to, everything is being tracked. Some use very dishonest, or borderline dishonest, methods and there is almost no way for you to opt-out from these pesky sites. The only choice we have is to take control of our browser and be very vigilant. Essentially this boils down to blocking everything and only allowing the ones you care. I do that by:
I know this is counter-productive a bit, but we need to setup a cookie in order to tell sites not to track us. This will have to be honored on their end, but it's better than not having the choice.
