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So government commitee? The MPAA? These laws open the door for corruption and lobbying by groups that want to govern what you can see. Perhaps we should let free markets and parents govern this issue instead.

Gloryhoundz has a good write up on this: http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

Yes because as developer I love bugfixing and regression testing way more than implementing cool new features.

Not the most fun activity, but at the same time, serious Software Engineers usually take pride in what they do and are embarrassed about handing off defective software. The quarterly time pressures in a corporation are typically what gets them to compromise on quality.

Care to explain why OSS projects frequently have long lists of unpatched bugs if your point was even remotely close to accurate?

Likely because they're doing it in their spare time, so the project moves much more slowly. My point was that with open source projects, you see them starting at very low version numbers and it'll take them a very long time to reach 1.0. By the time they reach 1.0, the quality might be something like a 1.4.7 release of a commercial product.

http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

In a company run by Software Engineers, bugs would be fixed before new features are added and we'd see life cycles similar to open source projects that produce typically stable and largely bug free 1.0 releases.

The reality of Corporate America, however, is based on quarterly results. Getting that next release out the door and being able to sell is everything. That means that all clean-up work (bugs, exploits, refactoring) will be prioritized along with new features and unless it's really critical will likely not get done for a long time, because they are lower priority since they bring no customer sales.

Unless and until those bugs affect the bottom-line, the company won't do a thing about them. A good recent example would be Sony's rootkit problem, which it turns out was pointed out to them before the public release on sysinternal's blog.

http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

I've switched to using http://asterisk.org/ along with http://www.broadvoice.com/rates_compare.html. I think you'll find this Wiki to be a very useful resource: http://voip-info.org/

The plan I'm using is BYOD-Lite which costs me only $6 a month and there was no activation fee, since I had my own VOIP equipment in the form of an Asterisk PBX installed on Linux. From what I can tell, they are one of the few providers who allow the use of customer supplied VoIP hardware/software, in my case Asterisk.

Something you'll have to research is what technology you want to use for hooking up individual phones to Asterisk. One possibility would be to use hardware from Digium: http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=product_categ ory&category=hardware or any other Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), or you could use Softphones installed on employee PCs such as X-Lite (free), or similar.

Good Luck!

http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

This is not a challenge unique to Microsoft, of course.

Any hardware manufacturer has to properly plan lead times and coordinate parts supplies. At the same time, parts obsolescence is a big challenge to any manufacturer. Every one of those thousands of parts needs to be tracked and if obsolescence is pending, a suitable replacement needs to be identified and validated.

So the article simply points out the obvious: the more complex a piece of hardware, the more can go wrong with the supply line.
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http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

It's amazing that the mainstream media don't cover the coming era of DRM more. A true failure of the press in my opinion. Their responsibility would be to cover this topic in laymen's terms to make it understandable to the masses. This should make the nightly news instead of a review of your latest and greatest toothpaste. As it is, the public doesn't know about this and lawmakers don't understand it, so the content companies have a relatively easy time pushing their legislative agendas.

Personally, I can't wait for DRM to become widely used so that consumers are faced with a limitation of their rights.

Content companies need to learn that people like to consume. DRM is a barrier to consumption and thus doesn't make business sense. A great early example of this was Circuit City's Divx system which flopped very quickly.

Once consumers realize what's happening, DRM as we know it today will hopefully go the way of the Dodo.
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http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

Unfortunately Windows looks at an HT CPU as if it had multiple cores (true SMP). If Microsoft would change the Windows Scheduler to properly treat an HT CPU by adjusting the way it distributes threads and processes to the two virtual CPUs, then there should be a performance gain and no penalty.

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http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

In this context, P2P is really meaningless, since it offers no advantage to me, the consumer. The only advantage it offers is for content providers, because they can serve more costumers because customers bear part of the bandwidth cost.

So since I'm providing bandwidth, do I get a download credit? If I keep files in my share long enough, I should be able to download more files without cost to me, since I'm providing a service to the content providers and they should be compensating me for it.

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Innovation at play: http://www.gloryhoundz.com/