While your IDE can certainly see which functions are called by your RPC handler, unless client projects share their RPC external references with your IDE, it can't know which functions are actually used by any particular client project.
Funny, his experience at the boys' school was very similar to my experience at a school for smart kids - a co-ed school. I'm not saying he didn't benefit from the all-male environment. I am saying he probably benefited more from a school that gave him a real challenge. I started at a public school and was very bored. Fortunately, my teacher recognized I truly was way beyond "See dog. See dog run" and other kindergarten stuff. After talking with my parents, she arranged an interview with the private school. 2 weeks later, I started at that school under a full scholarship - at 2nd grade level (the school covered grades K through 12). It was both very demanding and relaxed. We could "cut up" with out being disciplined (yes, girls "cut up", too) - as long as we as settled down quickly. We had more subjects (like music and drama) than the public school, and school-sponsored after-school activities. All the students - girls and boys - did very well. And I am happy our daughter earned a scholarship to a similar school.
A few years ago, there was a Slashdot discussion of a town that started to implement a plan where each home owner would own a fiber link to a central data center where any ISP could install equipment to provide service to any of the home owners with fibers terminated in that data center. The residents voted overwelmingly in favor and made down payments toward thos fiber links. Unfortunately, one of the incumbant companies managed to stall the plan in court long enough to deploy its own FTTH infrastructure, so mooting the project before deployment could start.
Where I currently live, there was a local, minority ownwd cable company that had an exclusive franchise with the county. The company was bought by a much larger company that was neither local nor minority owned, so the exclusivity clauses of the franchise automatically expiired. Since then, the only "compettition" to deploy in our area has been the phone company with their DSL service. For maybe a year, the 2 companies were actually competing - because a lot of people switched over because of the promotional rates offered. The cable company put out some promotional rates, too. Then the cable company deployed some low cost equipment upgrades in their local data center and neighborhood and pushed out firmware updates to the subscriber modems, doubling the data rate. Very quickly, all the customers who wanted the higher data rate switched back, but the phone company did not and still hasn't upgraded its service, claiming it would have to upgrade the "last mile" drops in order to increase data rate (they even said that if a subscriber was willing to pay them $300 per hour for technician time, they would upgrade those customers who chose to do so). So, effectly, the 2 companies have apportioned the market into a "high" and "low" segments. Since the cable company does offer low data rate plans (and the phone company offers high rate to hose willing to pay for last mile upgrades), there is no way to prove collusion, even if they did collude.
I am accross the street from a block that is served by 2 cable companies, so I have asked the other cable company why they have not extended in to my block, they cited the high cost of deploying new infrastructure. They also said that if I had neighbor in the block they did serve, they'd be happy to provide "second unit" service to that neighbor's house, billed to me, but I would have to arrange my own means to bridge the service to my house (easily done using an extra wifi router and 2 directional 2.4 GHz antennae. Unfortunately, that neioghbor has since moved out so I no longer have that option). Presumably, they would not have offered this sneaky way to get service to me if they weren't confident there was no longer an exclusitivity provision "protecting" the incumbant cable company.
Interesting. I've always had lots of trouble with Intel graphics, but never any trouble with Nvidia. My current (2 year old) Dell laptop has an FX 1800. It really kicks tail compared to the newest ones some of my coworkers are using. Their (also Dell) laptops have Intel graphics (don't know which).
We skipped Vista and only started using Win7 in March of this year. Similarly, we started using XP in 2004. If we follow the pattern, we might be using Win 9 about 3 years after it becomes available - assuming we stay with MS Windows.
One of my coworkers used to work in one of those sweat shops. Then, when she was 30, she met an engineer (electronics) from a customer of my company's. She's been working here for over 2 years, now, and is very happy - has learned a lot more, is paid much, much more and only works 8 to 10 hours per day (like the rest of us SW people in my company).
I also liked the G4 Cube. And I still get a laugh out of one reviewer's comment on how fast it was compared to other PCs at the time: "Where's the drama?"
I liked the Newton, but it was too expensive for me at the time. Fortunately, I had a friend who had one, so I got to play with it. I really liked the "graffiti" writing-to-text feature. Palm also had a similar writing-to-text feature. I still have an old Palm T3, that I used for many years. I'd still be using it except the only way to exchange data between it and anything else is with SD cards (well, it does have IR communications, but nothing else I use does.) I am mostly happy with the Android tablet I now have, but I really miss the writing-to-text feature that worked so very well for me on the T3 and the Newton.
Difficult is relative. An admin trained on Linux is going to have (some) difficulty retaining to admin Windows. It won't be as easy for her/him as for someone starting fresh (and has nothing to unlearn).
Whatever the "tool", there is always the perception that the "other tool" is harder. And there is always the perception that learning even a radically different new version of the "same tool" is easier than learning the other tool, even if the other tool is lot more like the current tool than the new version compared to the current tool.
Emulate an x86 or supported ARM on a 6502. Of course, performance would likely be seconds (or minutes) per FLOP. Aside from the slow instruction cycle rate of the fastest made 6502, all your "emulated" RAM would have to be on disk.
However - a more pertinent question arises: Does that mean that anyone selling ebooks via Amazon's store do not own the copyright to those books? I'm pretty sure Amazon stores those books "in the cloud" as well.
It's Amazon's cloud, so Amazon might own them. Depending on how the government interprets the contact between Amazon and the authors.
(In the brief on EFF's website,allegedly a copy of the government's brief, the government is presuming that the combination of the contracts between Carpathis and MegaUploud, and between MegaUpload and Mr Goodwin sufficiently restrict Mr Goodwin's ownership rights to the data that he effectively has surrendered his rights to that data. This is not quite as the same as saying Mr Goodwin has automatically lost his ownership rights in said data. Rather it is saying that Mr Goodwin effectively and voluntarily surrendered his rights.)
Realistically, what might end up happening is that some startup gets off the ground whose sole function in life is to provide an in-house encryption appliance similar to a HSM. Data goes in to the module, encrypted data gets stored in the cloud. All keys are kept in a "physically secure" 1U rack module with a USB port in front so one can back up the keys stored in the device.
I saw one of those 1U rack modules like you described a few years ago. It had a tiny LCD display and a 2x13 keypad on the front so you could do your key management with out relying on any external equipment. (it also supported SSH and direct serial plug-in) According to the network admin at the office where I saw it, it had 2 Ethernet ports - one for local clients on an isolated LAN, the other connected to the insecure, internet connected LAN. Clients on the "secure" LAN could upload sensitive files to it and specify where the encrypted copies would be sent (mostly to backup storage, both on- and offsite.) or where to fetch an encrypted file and download the decrypted copy.
Also, years ago, I used an USB-key based encryption engine. I forget who made it, but it was amazingly easy to use. It used a USB-to-serial converter profile. For text files (including UTF-8 encoded), a program could use it by opening the device file, write setup commands, then the text followed by either control-D (aka EOF) or control-Z. At same time, you read the encrypted/decrypted text (or read signature or verification after all the input text is wriitten). Non-text data required padding the input data to a multiple of 8 bytes and telling the device the padded length. You would then write/read that amount.
For example, if you develop an SMS app, besides permissions on reading/writing/editing/sending messages, you will need access to contacts data, phone state and identity. Looks scary, but no SMS/MMS app can function properly without these
The app itself should not need to know about Phone State.* The OS's SMS_API support should be able to queue messages and hold them until the state allows sending. Ideally, the SMS_API should allow the app to specify Cell Only, WiFi Only or Either, then only send queued messages when the appropriate connection is available (and via the appropriate connection).
As for Identity, an app could maintain it's own identity. Not as convenient, but some people would be willing to make this trade off. Of course, over a cell connection, the network is going to know the ESN of the phone that sent the message. I suppose SMS-over-WiFi would also have the ESN, but for other IM protocols, that could be avoided. (This assumes the OS itself doesn't unnecessarily leak personal information)
Likewise, an app could maintain its own contacts data. Again, less convenient, but some people would be willing to make the trade off.
* For apps that want to pause while a phone call is in progress, the OS could handle that for apps that request being paused.
I don't know about all of the stuff being proposed, but I kind of like the idea of shifting the costs back to mega corporations like Google and Facebook. Maybe then, they would few the users as customers instead of the product to be sold to others.
No. They'll either start charging for their services or figure out more ways to monetize the users. (or both)
What they didn't grok was that the audience who kept this business going was very specific. It was composed of people who liked the sandwiches because they were high quality, at a decent price, and reasonably convenient. By raising the price and lowering quality, the shop squeezed out this audience, and transitioned to the same people buying other types of fast food. In doing so, they've lowered the quality of their brand as perceived by the general public, and set themselves on a course for being unexceptional and thus not particularly sought, where before they had a die-hard constituency.
This seems to happen a lot. Why, I wonder.
Economy of scale. Get a larger audience by morphing it into something they think will appeal to the masses. Product uniformity reduces unit cost. The sales pitch for cable TV was hundreds of channels so there will be something special for everyone. That's not what we got. We got hundreds of channels of slightly different flavors of the same old same old. Why? Because it's cheaper to produce 10 shows that differ only in the cast and the names of people, places and things in the scripts than it is to have even 5 truly different shows. If a new little guy comes along and does something truly different,fine - as long it stays little. But once it gets large enough to start taking away audience share, it either gets assimilated and homogenized, or it gets quashed. Of course, any that dont get that big will likely run out of money and die.And even if you don't get assimilated or quashed, you will feel the pressure to homogenize.
No, you can easily come up with empirical measures to determine whether something should be tolerated. Does it materially harm anyone other than the person doing it?
There is also where part of the problem lies. If you burn something that is owned by some one else, you could be guilty of a crime. Said crime being comesserate with the value of the thing burned. There are Christians who consider burning a Christian Bible an act of blashemy.
At least if you're talking about in the US, I think you're overstating the number quite a bit.
Perhaps because the US has some famous, well regarded scientists who are people of religion?
For example, Vactican astronomer Brother Guy (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno). I've talked with him - both in a group and one-to-one. He's an excelent sciencetist. He was part of one of the best discussions of science and religion I've attended. It was a panel at a convention. The panel was about the social implications of first contact with a nonhuman, space faring civilization. The poor guy who orginally organized the panel arrived to find not only Brother Guy, but all of the guests of honor had joined as panelists. I don't think I could have handled that as well as he did. The ensuing discussion was fantastic and could have gone on much longer except all the panelists were scheduled for other panels the next hour.
I would think there would be fewer and shorter time outs. But. my impression is that most of the benefit comes the code being inspected as it's being typed, so there are fewer typos to bog down the compiling process.
But this is speculation on my part. Where I work, it is hard to program in pairs. Since we are developping software for controling machines, our cubes are crowded with equirpment. We each have an in-circuit debugger (controlled by a PC application), 3 test boxes (one for operator controls and indicators/displays, another for sensors (both real and simulated) and the third for actuators (both real and simulated)), power supply, oscilloscope and 4 monitors (2 1920x1080 and 2 1400x800) (to display the debug application, communication simulator, logic analyzer. code editor and various documents).
(Years ago, I used to use the Codewright IDE. It had a feature where 2 people could "link" their Codewright sessions and be able to collaboratively edit the same file, each one seeing what the other was typing in real time. I don't know of another code editor with this feature (except maybe Google Documents, which is not appropriate for our needs.).)
You wipe the box and start over with a clean install, fully patched, with a firewall and AV. Anything less is really just asking for whatever happens next.
Be sure to completely wite the hard drive or SSD, including the Master Bot Record (MBR).
Also, you need to replace the BIOS flash-ROM (which probably means replacing the motherboard). You can't simply re-flash the BIOS ROM in place because the infected BIOS will infect anything you boot, no matter what kind of media you boot from - and no matter what OS the re-flashing tool uses. (with the right equipment, it might be possible to re-flash the BIOS in place. This involves connecting an in-circuit debugger to the CPU's debugging interface. Or plug in a CPU emulator in place of the CPU (assuming the motherboard uses a socketed CPU).)
My one-click solution is, as I mentioned in another post, to provide a "Call Max" icon or Start Menu item. Clicking the icon/item sets up a connection to my personal server. Where ever I am, I can connect to my server, then to my relative's PC via the SSH tunnel. I'm sure this could be done via an URL in the web browser, but this works. My relatives only have to either go to the desktop or click on "Start", then click on an icon or menu item. Everything else is automatic. (Ok, so it's really 2 clicks, including getting to the desktop or opening the Start Menu.) I set this up for them. Nothing special they have to do.
I simply pin Remote Assistance to the start menu and its as easy as "Hit start, see that thing at the top that says remote assistance? Yeah click on that, hit next, see my name? Yeah click on my name...hold on...okay I'm hooked up, see that little box that popped up that asks if I can have full control? Just click yes...
How about pinning a "Call Max" script to the Start Menu? Just one click and will execute what commands are needed to establish a remote control session with the remote PC in control. Works for Mac OS and Linux, as well as Windows. (MacOS gets an icon, but I configured a "Start Menu" for those relatives I have running Linux.) (Works for my family - as long the problems don't require a real IT person. I 'm a software developper, so am an IT person's worst nightmare.)
Work for a company that does software that controls mechanical systems. Often requires a lot of time working with prototypes of the actual hardware your software will be controling. (and lots of walking between your desk and the lab)
Slashdot Mirror
While your IDE can certainly see which functions are called by your RPC handler, unless client projects share their RPC external references with your IDE, it can't know which functions are actually used by any particular client project.
My girlfriend had this to say:
Funny, his experience at the boys' school was very similar to my experience at a school for smart kids - a co-ed school. I'm not saying he didn't benefit from the all-male environment. I am saying he probably benefited more from a school that gave him a real challenge. I started at a public school and was very bored. Fortunately, my teacher recognized I truly was way beyond "See dog. See dog run" and other kindergarten stuff. After talking with my parents, she arranged an interview with the private school. 2 weeks later, I started at that school under a full scholarship - at 2nd grade level (the school covered grades K through 12). It was both very demanding and relaxed. We could "cut up" with out being disciplined (yes, girls "cut up", too) - as long as we as settled down quickly. We had more subjects (like music and drama) than the public school, and school-sponsored after-school activities. All the students - girls and boys - did very well. And I am happy our daughter earned a scholarship to a similar school.
A few years ago, there was a Slashdot discussion of a town that started to implement a plan where each home owner would own a fiber link to a central data center where any ISP could install equipment to provide service to any of the home owners with fibers terminated in that data center. The residents voted overwelmingly in favor and made down payments toward thos fiber links. Unfortunately, one of the incumbant companies managed to stall the plan in court long enough to deploy its own FTTH infrastructure, so mooting the project before deployment could start.
Where I currently live, there was a local, minority ownwd cable company that had an exclusive franchise with the county. The company was bought by a much larger company that was neither local nor minority owned, so the exclusivity clauses of the franchise automatically expiired. Since then, the only "compettition" to deploy in our area has been the phone company with their DSL service. For maybe a year, the 2 companies were actually competing - because a lot of people switched over because of the promotional rates offered. The cable company put out some promotional rates, too. Then the cable company deployed some low cost equipment upgrades in their local data center and neighborhood and pushed out firmware updates to the subscriber modems, doubling the data rate. Very quickly, all the customers who wanted the higher data rate switched back, but the phone company did not and still hasn't upgraded its service, claiming it would have to upgrade the "last mile" drops in order to increase data rate (they even said that if a subscriber was willing to pay them $300 per hour for technician time, they would upgrade those customers who chose to do so). So, effectly, the 2 companies have apportioned the market into a "high" and "low" segments. Since the cable company does offer low data rate plans (and the phone company offers high rate to hose willing to pay for last mile upgrades), there is no way to prove collusion, even if they did collude.
I am accross the street from a block that is served by 2 cable companies, so I have asked the other cable company why they have not extended in to my block, they cited the high cost of deploying new infrastructure. They also said that if I had neighbor in the block they did serve, they'd be happy to provide "second unit" service to that neighbor's house, billed to me, but I would have to arrange my own means to bridge the service to my house (easily done using an extra wifi router and 2 directional 2.4 GHz antennae. Unfortunately, that neioghbor has since moved out so I no longer have that option). Presumably, they would not have offered this sneaky way to get service to me if they weren't confident there was no longer an exclusitivity provision "protecting" the incumbant cable company.
Interesting. I've always had lots of trouble with Intel graphics, but never any trouble with Nvidia. My current (2 year old) Dell laptop has an FX 1800. It really kicks tail compared to the newest ones some of my coworkers are using. Their (also Dell) laptops have Intel graphics (don't know which).
We skipped Vista and only started using Win7 in March of this year. Similarly, we started using XP in 2004. If we follow the pattern, we might be using Win 9 about 3 years after it becomes available - assuming we stay with MS Windows.
One of my coworkers used to work in one of those sweat shops. Then, when she was 30, she met an engineer (electronics) from a customer of my company's. She's been working here for over 2 years, now, and is very happy - has learned a lot more, is paid much, much more and only works 8 to 10 hours per day (like the rest of us SW people in my company).
I also liked the G4 Cube. And I still get a laugh out of one reviewer's comment on how fast it was compared to other PCs at the time: "Where's the drama?"
I liked the Newton, but it was too expensive for me at the time. Fortunately, I had a friend who had one, so I got to play with it. I really liked the "graffiti" writing-to-text feature. Palm also had a similar writing-to-text feature. I still have an old Palm T3, that I used for many years. I'd still be using it except the only way to exchange data between it and anything else is with SD cards (well, it does have IR communications, but nothing else I use does.) I am mostly happy with the Android tablet I now have, but I really miss the writing-to-text feature that worked so very well for me on the T3 and the Newton.
Difficult is relative. An admin trained on Linux is going to have (some) difficulty retaining to admin Windows. It won't be as easy for her/him as for someone starting fresh (and has nothing to unlearn).
Whatever the "tool", there is always the perception that the "other tool" is harder. And there is always the perception that learning even a radically different new version of the "same tool" is easier than learning the other tool, even if the other tool is lot more like the current tool than the new version compared to the current tool.
Emulate an x86 or supported ARM on a 6502. Of course, performance would likely be seconds (or minutes) per FLOP. Aside from the slow instruction cycle rate of the fastest made 6502, all your "emulated" RAM would have to be on disk.
However - a more pertinent question arises: Does that mean that anyone selling ebooks via Amazon's store do not own the copyright to those books? I'm pretty sure Amazon stores those books "in the cloud" as well.
It's Amazon's cloud, so Amazon might own them. Depending on how the government interprets the contact between Amazon and the authors.
(In the brief on EFF's website,allegedly a copy of the government's brief, the government is presuming that the combination of the contracts between Carpathis and MegaUploud, and between MegaUpload and Mr Goodwin sufficiently restrict Mr Goodwin's ownership rights to the data that he effectively has surrendered his rights to that data. This is not quite as the same as saying Mr Goodwin has automatically lost his ownership rights in said data. Rather it is saying that Mr Goodwin effectively and voluntarily surrendered his rights.)
Realistically, what might end up happening is that some startup gets off the ground whose sole function in life is to provide an in-house encryption appliance similar to a HSM. Data goes in to the module, encrypted data gets stored in the cloud. All keys are kept in a "physically secure" 1U rack module with a USB port in front so one can back up the keys stored in the device.
I saw one of those 1U rack modules like you described a few years ago. It had a tiny LCD display and a 2x13 keypad on the front so you could do your key management with out relying on any external equipment. (it also supported SSH and direct serial plug-in) According to the network admin at the office where I saw it, it had 2 Ethernet ports - one for local clients on an isolated LAN, the other connected to the insecure, internet connected LAN. Clients on the "secure" LAN could upload sensitive files to it and specify where the encrypted copies would be sent (mostly to backup storage, both on- and offsite.) or where to fetch an encrypted file and download the decrypted copy.
Also, years ago, I used an USB-key based encryption engine. I forget who made it, but it was amazingly easy to use. It used a USB-to-serial converter profile. For text files (including UTF-8 encoded), a program could use it by opening the device file, write setup commands, then the text followed by either control-D (aka EOF) or control-Z. At same time, you read the encrypted/decrypted text (or read signature or verification after all the input text is wriitten). Non-text data required padding the input data to a multiple of 8 bytes and telling the device the padded length. You would then write/read that amount.
For example, if you develop an SMS app, besides permissions on reading/writing/editing/sending messages, you will need access to contacts data, phone state and identity. Looks scary, but no SMS/MMS app can function properly without these
The app itself should not need to know about Phone State.* The OS's SMS_API support should be able to queue messages and hold them until the state allows sending. Ideally, the SMS_API should allow the app to specify Cell Only, WiFi Only or Either, then only send queued messages when the appropriate connection is available (and via the appropriate connection).
As for Identity, an app could maintain it's own identity. Not as convenient, but some people would be willing to make this trade off. Of course, over a cell connection, the network is going to know the ESN of the phone that sent the message. I suppose SMS-over-WiFi would also have the ESN, but for other IM protocols, that could be avoided. (This assumes the OS itself doesn't unnecessarily leak personal information)
Likewise, an app could maintain its own contacts data. Again, less convenient, but some people would be willing to make the trade off.
* For apps that want to pause while a phone call is in progress, the OS could handle that for apps that request being paused.
But I haven't heard any case these companies paid for their wrongdoings.
Pay the victim? Probably not. Paid their lawyers. Most certainly.
I don't know about all of the stuff being proposed, but I kind of like the idea of shifting the costs back to mega corporations like Google and Facebook. Maybe then, they would few the users as customers instead of the product to be sold to others.
No. They'll either start charging for their services or figure out more ways to monetize the users. (or both)
What they didn't grok was that the audience who kept this business going was very specific. It was composed of people who liked the sandwiches because they were high quality, at a decent price, and reasonably convenient. By raising the price and lowering quality, the shop squeezed out this audience, and transitioned to the same people buying other types of fast food. In doing so, they've lowered the quality of their brand as perceived by the general public, and set themselves on a course for being unexceptional and thus not particularly sought, where before they had a die-hard constituency.
This seems to happen a lot. Why, I wonder.
Economy of scale. Get a larger audience by morphing it into something they think will appeal to the masses. Product uniformity reduces unit cost. The sales pitch for cable TV was hundreds of channels so there will be something special for everyone. That's not what we got. We got hundreds of channels of slightly different flavors of the same old same old. Why? Because it's cheaper to produce 10 shows that differ only in the cast and the names of people, places and things in the scripts than it is to have even 5 truly different shows. If a new little guy comes along and does something truly different,fine - as long it stays little. But once it gets large enough to start taking away audience share, it either gets assimilated and homogenized, or it gets quashed. Of course, any that dont get that big will likely run out of money and die.And even if you don't get assimilated or quashed, you will feel the pressure to homogenize.
No, you can easily come up with empirical measures to determine whether something should be tolerated. Does it materially harm anyone other than the person doing it?
There is also where part of the problem lies. If you burn something that is owned by some one else, you could be guilty of a crime. Said crime being comesserate with the value of the thing burned. There are Christians who consider burning a Christian Bible an act of blashemy.
At least if you're talking about in the US, I think you're overstating the number quite a bit.
Perhaps because the US has some famous, well regarded scientists who are people of religion?
For example, Vactican astronomer Brother Guy (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno). I've talked with him - both in a group and one-to-one. He's an excelent sciencetist. He was part of one of the best discussions of science and religion I've attended. It was a panel at a convention. The panel was about the social implications of first contact with a nonhuman, space faring civilization. The poor guy who orginally organized the panel arrived to find not only Brother Guy, but all of the guests of honor had joined as panelists. I don't think I could have handled that as well as he did. The ensuing discussion was fantastic and could have gone on much longer except all the panelists were scheduled for other panels the next hour.
I would think there would be fewer and shorter time outs. But. my impression is that most of the benefit comes the code being inspected as it's being typed, so there are fewer typos to bog down the compiling process.
But this is speculation on my part. Where I work, it is hard to program in pairs. Since we are developping software for controling machines, our cubes are crowded with equirpment. We each have an in-circuit debugger (controlled by a PC application), 3 test boxes (one for operator controls and indicators/displays, another for sensors (both real and simulated) and the third for actuators (both real and simulated)), power supply, oscilloscope and 4 monitors (2 1920x1080 and 2 1400x800) (to display the debug application, communication simulator, logic analyzer. code editor and various documents).
(Years ago, I used to use the Codewright IDE. It had a feature where 2 people could "link" their Codewright sessions and be able to collaboratively edit the same file, each one seeing what the other was typing in real time. I don't know of another code editor with this feature (except maybe Google Documents, which is not appropriate for our needs.).)
You wipe the box and start over with a clean install, fully patched, with a firewall and AV. Anything less is really just asking for whatever happens next.
Be sure to completely wite the hard drive or SSD, including the Master Bot Record (MBR).
Also, you need to replace the BIOS flash-ROM (which probably means replacing the motherboard). You can't simply re-flash the BIOS ROM in place because the infected BIOS will infect anything you boot, no matter what kind of media you boot from - and no matter what OS the re-flashing tool uses. (with the right equipment, it might be possible to re-flash the BIOS in place. This involves connecting an in-circuit debugger to the CPU's debugging interface. Or plug in a CPU emulator in place of the CPU (assuming the motherboard uses a socketed CPU).)
My one-click solution is, as I mentioned in another post, to provide a "Call Max" icon or Start Menu item. Clicking the icon/item sets up a connection to my personal server. Where ever I am, I can connect to my server, then to my relative's PC via the SSH tunnel. I'm sure this could be done via an URL in the web browser, but this works. My relatives only have to either go to the desktop or click on "Start", then click on an icon or menu item. Everything else is automatic. (Ok, so it's really 2 clicks, including getting to the desktop or opening the Start Menu.) I set this up for them. Nothing special they have to do.
I simply pin Remote Assistance to the start menu and its as easy as "Hit start, see that thing at the top that says remote assistance? Yeah click on that, hit next, see my name? Yeah click on my name...hold on...okay I'm hooked up, see that little box that popped up that asks if I can have full control? Just click yes...
How about pinning a "Call Max" script to the Start Menu? Just one click and will execute what commands are needed to establish a remote control session with the remote PC in control. Works for Mac OS and Linux, as well as Windows. (MacOS gets an icon, but I configured a "Start Menu" for those relatives I have running Linux.) (Works for my family - as long the problems don't require a real IT person. I 'm a software developper, so am an IT person's worst nightmare.)
take off the headset before going to the ATM :)
This might be less of a problem: http://science.slashdot.org/story/04/03/18/0132222/nasa-develops-tech-to-hear-words-not-yet-spoken
Work for a company that does software that controls mechanical systems. Often requires a lot of time working with prototypes of the actual hardware your software will be controling. (and lots of walking between your desk and the lab)