I worked on a research project that was part of the Ada 9X Real-Time initiative - the main users were aerospace and military vendors - particularly embedded systems. There you do need to know about concurrency and distribution - along with hard performance deadlines and often a slew of safety and mission-critical issues you need to consider to do a good job.
Unless you are a professor in India or China, I can always get newly graduated Java programmer from an offshore vendor for less than your students can ask for. The thing is that because military-aerospace tends to stay onshore. Military people guard know-how and for aerospace they prefer to maximise their control of the development of real-time systems.
However, I fail to see the general relevance of Ada to a commercial market that is primarily interested in "simple" information systems, getting information out of a database and/or putting it in - with some processing on route.
If you know languages such as Ada, then you have a lot more awareness of the issues of concurrency. This makes you better equipped to write in other languages when implementing modern commercial systems, which increasingly are real-time or quasi-real-time in their architecture. A language with the right abstracting capabilities and a good DBMS can help but without an good understanding, it is too easy to produce code that doesn't work.
I am a headhunter for high end roles at investment banks,
What a coincidence, I work as a freelance across many investment banks at the higher end. I have worked in very big banks as well as small broking houses (as well as some exchanges).
and we are close to classifying CompSci as a "non degree", along with media studies, languages, etc.
A degree at best shows that someone can study something. For any modern subject, the field changes quickly over the time of study so you can't necessarily take away much in the way of absolute practical skills, just a way of learning. If you are recruiting for high-end roles then you are not recruiting 21 year old graduates, you are generally recruiting someone who has ten ore more years experience. At that end there a few people who are architects, the rest of us have broadly moved away from day to day contact with the technology and more concerned with the overall of getting requirements and managing their conversion into IT tooling to help the business. Yes, I work as a BA and project manager. Some basic skills are taught at Uni, but nothing relevant from my day. Yes, in a way Comp Sci is a little bit like having done German at university, except that German is only obsoleted if you don't use it but otherwise it is helpful when working at a German bank. I learned stuff like COBOL, Fortran and ALGOL at university. Not much call for that now. Luckily, I studied at a university which mixed academic training with real work and I learned a little of what I use now there.
Again back to languages, many people studying modern languages (my daughter is one) learn a lot about the job of interpreting and translating as opposed to the theory. For CS, it is different. I still see too many people with precious little knowledge of projects and precious little of any practical subject area unless they have gone on to do something like an MSc in computational finance (for investment banking).
I don't program in Java as by the time it became popular, I was mostly writing specs or running projects, but I would agree that someone who doesn't understand 'the iron' in the way a C programmer needs to is going to have issues when writing in a constrained environment. Abstraction is great, but the further from 'the iron' it takes you then the danger increases of doing something fundamentally brain-dead and crippling the implementation. The appropriate use of Java, multiprocessing and threads is one place this comes to mind.
But I am entirely convinced you need to hack your way through a "real" system.
I totally agree with this. The problem is that real systems are *BIG*. One issue that we had was that so much of the business logic became embedded in systems (and subsequently forgotten by the business) that we had to regularly to dig around in the software to find out what really happened. This needed the ability to navvigate around the code as well as a knowledge of the underlying business model.
I agree, I had a 2K server license and a couple of 2Kpro licenses and was extremely happy for several years. I didn't even consider XP on the desktop until SP1 and now only after SP2 do I use it as a matter of choice (and the fact that 2K support was quickly going).
A lot of DELL's business machine range are being shipped with a choice of XP preloads rather than Vista. The only issue is that they can't ship XP drivers for some newer hardware like the draft-N cards on the notebooks. However, if you are imaging them yourselves, why not order them without O/S as they are covered under your site license. Actually, the machines normally don't arrive bare, they have something like freedos on to run diagnostics but mostly to bypass Microsoft's restrictions to OEMs on selling bare machines.
Given the current interpretation of software sales agreements, you never own it, you are only licensed to used it and you may have no right to resell to a third party which means that the book value of the software becomes zero.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
The WYS is not WYG feature of word is a problem somewhere between the word processor and the printer driver which don't seem to quite agree what a page should look like. I was working on small documents, maybe 8 sides but with an interesting layout as a newsletter for our ski-club. Generally speaking, it would have a banner headline, contents in the left margin and then run to a series of articles expressed mostly in double column format. A typical problem would be that the article text would sometimes flow around an article header (which were graphics) rather than the header staying anchored to the front of the text. Quite often, although the correct printer was selected, the column breaks on screen looked nothing like what I would get on the print layout and as mentioned, sometimes text would flow past the headers. Often, I would want to do background images behind text and again, they would forget their position so text over a graphic would become text around a graphic. No, Word does not do layout very well. LAter I moved back to using proper publishing software and the job became much easier.
But, once the basic engineering problems are solved, anyone with manufacturing and marketing resources can compete in this market.
But nobody is at the moment. Take the Asus Eee, a wonderful little gadget and rightfully well though of. Whilst it is reasonably compact (more so than the OLPC) and has solidstate disks, it looks like it would be more at home in Starbucks than an African school. I wouldn't see them lasting that long in a Western elementary school. I would agree that the keyboard seems a tad small for an adult but so is the Eee's. The any color as long as it is Lime Green things seems to try to make it less of something that would appeal to adults thus reducing the diversion of PCs to adults.
Your market suddenly expands beyond far beyond the elementary grades.
In many of these countries many kids don't study past 12 anyway. You must remember that rather than try for a general purpose solution, the OLPC is going for a niche, but a pretty big one.
You can install a Windows, Linux, or OSX distro that can run pretty much everything written for the core OS.
Quite true but you need some apps as well rather than just a pure OS. In Windows terms wee would be looking at a Windows Mobile type distribution with a min-office rather than XP. The issue with XP is that first you have to shrink it and then you need an application suite. Ironically enough thats why most of the low-end laptop type devices are using Linux as standard with XP only available as an extra if you go for the increased memory models.
"The Economist" had some tough words for OLPC and Negroponte last week:
The Economist is a very good source of information about politics and economics, and yes, I have met people that write for it. On IT, frankly, it does tend to suck. I still read it because the CIO/CTO of a company is more likely to get their information from The Economist than somewhere useful.
The fact is that it seems that kids find these devices fairly intuitive. I would agree that perhaps teachers are missing out on how to integrate it with their curriculum, but sorry the government bureaucrat is the purse-holder but not the ultimate customer. Actually the OLPC is less about being a computer and more about propagating information. Some people are uncomfortable with that. The system it runs is criticised for not being Windows, but then what do they need Windows for? Are we training MSCEs or people who can write a few letters and do a budget and look up corn prices. Most of the competition at the low end isn't running Windows either. Lets forget about the software and look at the hardware. There are a lot of tough PCs around but they start around $2K. I've been to Africa. Yes, there are pristine classrooms but often they are like the towns they are in, sometimes dry and sometimes humid and sometimes without proper walls so the sunlight readable display is also useful.
Not as simple. There were two companies, Cargolifter AG and a separate company used for raising finance and running the treasury, something like Cargolifter Finanz or something. The original concept was a good one and they had a lot of interest from oil companies and relief agencies amongst others. For whatever reason, Cargolifter sat clear of the markets with high-transparency requirements in Frankfurt and stuck to the 'official' unregulated market. They collected a lot of money both as startup aid from the part of the former East-Germany where they established their construction hangar and also from investors. What was happening to the money remains a mystery, but perhaps their financial management company was too busy doing other things in the market, although there was never anything that came out of the insolvency hearing.
On another note, configuring the router for administrative access only via ethernet would completely stop the problem.
There is a German company, AVM shipping routers mostly in Europe that does the right thing. The router is shipped with a random WPA key and admin password which is distributed on a label stuck on the box. Not only that, they are also now choosing the optimal channel based on least interference. With such a device it is usable out-of-the-box for almost anyone sensible enough to use a computer.
..if we live in the simulation, I doubt we'd be able to find out. We'd have to find the simulation's Godel statement...inside the simulation...and that would be impossible.
Thats only if we live in a perfect simulation. Programs can detect if they are being virtualised by checking for error conditions and timing.
Content publishers are less worried about the analog hole. There real worry is people getting hold of HD video feeds. Their problem is that it wouldn't be feasible to have a key per disk. Your device must somehow get the key into the TPM. The issue there is that it may be very difficult to get that first key but once you have it, then all content published until the key is revoked has been compromised. Getting the HDMI recorded aain is, I agree a possibility even though there is some kind of setup conversation to validate the display device, you would always be able to intercept it but that would need some interesting hardware and if manufactured, the content publishers could go after the manufacturer and seller, just as has happened with console mod chips.
In a perfect world, I'm saying that you could get something to probably work. In reality, I agree that it just ain't going to happen.
Thats what the TPM is for. Compromising that is quite difficult, although admittedly not impossible. It is the TPM that can tell what booted, whether the original trusted system or a VM hypervisor. The only way to get at the key would then be to sniff the datalines. The Vista approach is put everything up in ring 0 with protection (and a nice big CPU cost to run it). Of course, that is with an ideal world. The reality is that no computer can be a sealed black box, with all those updates coming down from Microsoft, maintain the trusted signatures across all elements that need to be trusted would be IMHO very, very difficult.
As for the so called black box, well we already see it with systems that wipe the key should you attempt to open the case. Unless the kit is military, this is possible to get around but not trivial.
Not quite. Bob does not need bits, they only want a picture and sound. Eve needs the bitstream, if they want a good copy. One way is to limit digital access to the device so it becomes just a playback machine. If it happens to be a general purpose computer, then expect someone to use some kind of hardware/software combination to lock Eve out, hence trusted platform concept and the trusted playback channels being introduced by Vista.
If done correctly, the key would have to be distributed in such a way that it can't be easily captured. A secure way would be for the playing system to establish its integrity with the content publisher, and use an encrypted channel to download the key and then store it in the TPM. Any time you want to play, you need to validate the integrity of the entire A/V channel and then the TPM will release you the key.
This is all feasible and some steps have been taken with Vista. The final step would be to lock us out of our systems. However, every time we get an update from Microsoft, it may cause the signature of the OS to change so the TPM stored signature must also change. Theoretically possible, but I don't see it as being practical.
This isn't family law, it comes down to the law regarding freedom of movement of EU nationals and right to live and work in other countries. An EU person is entitled to bring their non-EU spouse plus any non-EU dependent children to any EU country except their own. If they bring their spouse to their own country then local immigration law trumps freedom of movement. In practical terms it means that if an EU citizen marries a non-EU person outside the EU citizen's country of residence and then brings them there to settle, they will enjoy the same rights to live and work as the EU citizen with the only condition being that the EU citizen must be able to show that he or she can support their spouse financially. Once settled and with a full residence permit, the non-EU citizen is entitled to all the benefits that an EU citizen can get. Once you have such a EU 'dependent' permit for a Schengen country, then you can travel throughout Schengen countries without a visa, but if you want to visit a non-Schengen EU country, such as Ireland which demands visas for nationals of your country then you are theoretically entitled to a more or less free one when travelling with your EU spouse, but you still have to apply for it!
Thats where this trusted platform stuff comes in. You never get the data, only an audio or visual feed. The platform hardware validates the OS and only divulges the key to the AV DRM decoder which is running in protected mode. If you change the OS, or heaven forbid, compile your own then you do not validate to the trusted platform firmware. Note that it would be quite hard to completely protect a piece of code as large as a typical desktop OS, and certainly we have seen how easy it has been to subvert consoles. However, real DRM does imply some kind of Trusted Platform and we really don't want that.
Ah, you must have been working at one of my last banks and add to that as the bank had gone through outsourcing hell, there were different vendors involved. The things is that it didn't help. You still ended up with multiple high-load databases sharing a single SAN.
One of my former clients in one of the major OpenVMS sites still existing. They have been running VMS and Galaxy. The clusters are very stable (should be, the VMS guys has 25 years experience of clustering) and their systems are standing quite solid, which for a an electronic trading system, is rather important.
Yes, it may be harder to find someone who knows what SYS$ENQ does or even SYS$QIO, but that part of their system at least was well encapsulated and a very small team is required. Even simple I/O calls are encapsulated (I never saw a single printf in use away from debugging) so very little specific knowledge is needed by the average applications programmer these days. Retargeting based on rearchitecting the middle ware has been actively looked at but it tends to be too slow and not so reliable. When you have been stress testing a system for twenty odd years, any other system is painful to move to unless it has faced a similar stress test. Interestingly enough, VMS development roles don't seem to pay any better than a standard commodity system such as Java these days.
In the end, the system costs a lot of money to run but it makes a whole lot more money when it is running. Reducing costs looks great but when downtime costs you your job then switching platforms doesn't seem attractive. If other exchanges seek to attract market share, then they too will face the volume problems.
I have done this with some other databases and as long as you enable some kind of snapshotting, the most you lose are the open transactions. You do need to be sure that all tables are flushed back and that plus the transaction log is enough to get the database back to the point where the snapshot was made. Note that it does pay to check this works out of the box and you are not missing some call somewhere as I once to a copy of a database plus journal but the tables weren't all properly up to date so it was problematic to recover.
...or indeed any compiler or interpreter. Actually, even some editors too as their macro language facilitates OS calls (which would expicitly mean anything supporting VBA).
For $1K, you can buy nmap from me. For $10K, I may consider you for a site license. For $100K, well maybe an enterprise license. That will solve your problem and even make the tool look respectable.
seriously, if you have such tools and are working for a major consultancy (which has probably already made its contributions to the electoral slushfund, then you will have no problem. If you are a smaller company or an independent you need CYA paperwork for the entire period that you are using the toolset.
Funny thing is, Copy & Paste can be abused. Just remember all those redacted government/miltary documents published in the US where you select text that had been blacked out in the PDF and to copy it into another document. Definitely a tool being used for hacking, and even worse into information potentially embarrassing for the Government.
I have a new DELL laptop with XP SP2 on it (no way was I going to get Vista on it). Silverlight crashes both in Firefox and in IE7, even on a system that is has almost no other apps. I have pulled silverlight as something that may work someday, but at the moment is a pile of donkey poo.
El Al security and that at Israeli airports is very good. Their methodology is to get two people to talk to you and then confer as well as a 100$ baggage search. I've even had them compare my dive log with that of my buddy to compare notes (we admitted to a night dive near Eilat). However, it is also extremely expensive. The people doing the screening are not the TSA or whoever and go about their job very professionally (I understand that some of them are Israeli military/intelligence). This is only possible for Israel and isn't for the US or elsewhere unless someone decided to increase the ticket cost massively.
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A degree at best shows that someone can study something. For any modern subject, the field changes quickly over the time of study so you can't necessarily take away much in the way of absolute practical skills, just a way of learning. If you are recruiting for high-end roles then you are not recruiting 21 year old graduates, you are generally recruiting someone who has ten ore more years experience. At that end there a few people who are architects, the rest of us have broadly moved away from day to day contact with the technology and more concerned with the overall of getting requirements and managing their conversion into IT tooling to help the business. Yes, I work as a BA and project manager. Some basic skills are taught at Uni, but nothing relevant from my day. Yes, in a way Comp Sci is a little bit like having done German at university, except that German is only obsoleted if you don't use it but otherwise it is helpful when working at a German bank. I learned stuff like COBOL, Fortran and ALGOL at university. Not much call for that now. Luckily, I studied at a university which mixed academic training with real work and I learned a little of what I use now there.
Again back to languages, many people studying modern languages (my daughter is one) learn a lot about the job of interpreting and translating as opposed to the theory. For CS, it is different. I still see too many people with precious little knowledge of projects and precious little of any practical subject area unless they have gone on to do something like an MSc in computational finance (for investment banking).
I don't program in Java as by the time it became popular, I was mostly writing specs or running projects, but I would agree that someone who doesn't understand 'the iron' in the way a C programmer needs to is going to have issues when writing in a constrained environment. Abstraction is great, but the further from 'the iron' it takes you then the danger increases of doing something fundamentally brain-dead and crippling the implementation. The appropriate use of Java, multiprocessing and threads is one place this comes to mind.
I totally agree with this. The problem is that real systems are *BIG*. One issue that we had was that so much of the business logic became embedded in systems (and subsequently forgotten by the business) that we had to regularly to dig around in the software to find out what really happened. This needed the ability to navvigate around the code as well as a knowledge of the underlying business model.
A lot of DELL's business machine range are being shipped with a choice of XP preloads rather than Vista. The only issue is that they can't ship XP drivers for some newer hardware like the draft-N cards on the notebooks. However, if you are imaging them yourselves, why not order them without O/S as they are covered under your site license. Actually, the machines normally don't arrive bare, they have something like freedos on to run diagnostics but mostly to bypass Microsoft's restrictions to OEMs on selling bare machines.
Given the current interpretation of software sales agreements, you never own it, you are only licensed to used it and you may have no right to resell to a third party which means that the book value of the software becomes zero.
The WYS is not WYG feature of word is a problem somewhere between the word processor and the printer driver which don't seem to quite agree what a page should look like. I was working on small documents, maybe 8 sides but with an interesting layout as a newsletter for our ski-club. Generally speaking, it would have a banner headline, contents in the left margin and then run to a series of articles expressed mostly in double column format. A typical problem would be that the article text would sometimes flow around an article header (which were graphics) rather than the header staying anchored to the front of the text. Quite often, although the correct printer was selected, the column breaks on screen looked nothing like what I would get on the print layout and as mentioned, sometimes text would flow past the headers. Often, I would want to do background images behind text and again, they would forget their position so text over a graphic would become text around a graphic. No, Word does not do layout very well. LAter I moved back to using proper publishing software and the job became much easier.
But nobody is at the moment. Take the Asus Eee, a wonderful little gadget and rightfully well though of. Whilst it is reasonably compact (more so than the OLPC) and has solidstate disks, it looks like it would be more at home in Starbucks than an African school. I wouldn't see them lasting that long in a Western elementary school. I would agree that the keyboard seems a tad small for an adult but so is the Eee's. The any color as long as it is Lime Green things seems to try to make it less of something that would appeal to adults thus reducing the diversion of PCs to adults.
In many of these countries many kids don't study past 12 anyway. You must remember that rather than try for a general purpose solution, the OLPC is going for a niche, but a pretty big one.Quite true but you need some apps as well rather than just a pure OS. In Windows terms wee would be looking at a Windows Mobile type distribution with a min-office rather than XP. The issue with XP is that first you have to shrink it and then you need an application suite. Ironically enough thats why most of the low-end laptop type devices are using Linux as standard with XP only available as an extra if you go for the increased memory models.
The Economist is a very good source of information about politics and economics, and yes, I have met people that write for it. On IT, frankly, it does tend to suck. I still read it because the CIO/CTO of a company is more likely to get their information from The Economist than somewhere useful.
The fact is that it seems that kids find these devices fairly intuitive. I would agree that perhaps teachers are missing out on how to integrate it with their curriculum, but sorry the government bureaucrat is the purse-holder but not the ultimate customer. Actually the OLPC is less about being a computer and more about propagating information. Some people are uncomfortable with that. The system it runs is criticised for not being Windows, but then what do they need Windows for? Are we training MSCEs or people who can write a few letters and do a budget and look up corn prices. Most of the competition at the low end isn't running Windows either. Lets forget about the software and look at the hardware. There are a lot of tough PCs around but they start around $2K. I've been to Africa. Yes, there are pristine classrooms but often they are like the towns they are in, sometimes dry and sometimes humid and sometimes without proper walls so the sunlight readable display is also useful.
Not as simple. There were two companies, Cargolifter AG and a separate company used for raising finance and running the treasury, something like Cargolifter Finanz or something. The original concept was a good one and they had a lot of interest from oil companies and relief agencies amongst others. For whatever reason, Cargolifter sat clear of the markets with high-transparency requirements in Frankfurt and stuck to the 'official' unregulated market. They collected a lot of money both as startup aid from the part of the former East-Germany where they established their construction hangar and also from investors. What was happening to the money remains a mystery, but perhaps their financial management company was too busy doing other things in the market, although there was never anything that came out of the insolvency hearing.
Content publishers are less worried about the analog hole. There real worry is people getting hold of HD video feeds. Their problem is that it wouldn't be feasible to have a key per disk. Your device must somehow get the key into the TPM. The issue there is that it may be very difficult to get that first key but once you have it, then all content published until the key is revoked has been compromised. Getting the HDMI recorded aain is, I agree a possibility even though there is some kind of setup conversation to validate the display device, you would always be able to intercept it but that would need some interesting hardware and if manufactured, the content publishers could go after the manufacturer and seller, just as has happened with console mod chips.
In a perfect world, I'm saying that you could get something to probably work. In reality, I agree that it just ain't going to happen.
Thats what the TPM is for. Compromising that is quite difficult, although admittedly not impossible. It is the TPM that can tell what booted, whether the original trusted system or a VM hypervisor. The only way to get at the key would then be to sniff the datalines. The Vista approach is put everything up in ring 0 with protection (and a nice big CPU cost to run it). Of course, that is with an ideal world. The reality is that no computer can be a sealed black box, with all those updates coming down from Microsoft, maintain the trusted signatures across all elements that need to be trusted would be IMHO very, very difficult.
As for the so called black box, well we already see it with systems that wipe the key should you attempt to open the case. Unless the kit is military, this is possible to get around but not trivial.
Not quite. Bob does not need bits, they only want a picture and sound. Eve needs the bitstream, if they want a good copy. One way is to limit digital access to the device so it becomes just a playback machine. If it happens to be a general purpose computer, then expect someone to use some kind of hardware/software combination to lock Eve out, hence trusted platform concept and the trusted playback channels being introduced by Vista.
If done correctly, the key would have to be distributed in such a way that it can't be easily captured. A secure way would be for the playing system to establish its integrity with the content publisher, and use an encrypted channel to download the key and then store it in the TPM. Any time you want to play, you need to validate the integrity of the entire A/V channel and then the TPM will release you the key.
This is all feasible and some steps have been taken with Vista. The final step would be to lock us out of our systems. However, every time we get an update from Microsoft, it may cause the signature of the OS to change so the TPM stored signature must also change. Theoretically possible, but I don't see it as being practical.
This isn't family law, it comes down to the law regarding freedom of movement of EU nationals and right to live and work in other countries. An EU person is entitled to bring their non-EU spouse plus any non-EU dependent children to any EU country except their own. If they bring their spouse to their own country then local immigration law trumps freedom of movement. In practical terms it means that if an EU citizen marries a non-EU person outside the EU citizen's country of residence and then brings them there to settle, they will enjoy the same rights to live and work as the EU citizen with the only condition being that the EU citizen must be able to show that he or she can support their spouse financially. Once settled and with a full residence permit, the non-EU citizen is entitled to all the benefits that an EU citizen can get. Once you have such a EU 'dependent' permit for a Schengen country, then you can travel throughout Schengen countries without a visa, but if you want to visit a non-Schengen EU country, such as Ireland which demands visas for nationals of your country then you are theoretically entitled to a more or less free one when travelling with your EU spouse, but you still have to apply for it!
Thats where this trusted platform stuff comes in. You never get the data, only an audio or visual feed. The platform hardware validates the OS and only divulges the key to the AV DRM decoder which is running in protected mode. If you change the OS, or heaven forbid, compile your own then you do not validate to the trusted platform firmware. Note that it would be quite hard to completely protect a piece of code as large as a typical desktop OS, and certainly we have seen how easy it has been to subvert consoles. However, real DRM does imply some kind of Trusted Platform and we really don't want that.
Ah, you must have been working at one of my last banks and add to that as the bank had gone through outsourcing hell, there were different vendors involved. The things is that it didn't help. You still ended up with multiple high-load databases sharing a single SAN.
One of my former clients in one of the major OpenVMS sites still existing. They have been running VMS and Galaxy. The clusters are very stable (should be, the VMS guys has 25 years experience of clustering) and their systems are standing quite solid, which for a an electronic trading system, is rather important.
Yes, it may be harder to find someone who knows what SYS$ENQ does or even SYS$QIO, but that part of their system at least was well encapsulated and a very small team is required. Even simple I/O calls are encapsulated (I never saw a single printf in use away from debugging) so very little specific knowledge is needed by the average applications programmer these days. Retargeting based on rearchitecting the middle ware has been actively looked at but it tends to be too slow and not so reliable. When you have been stress testing a system for twenty odd years, any other system is painful to move to unless it has faced a similar stress test. Interestingly enough, VMS development roles don't seem to pay any better than a standard commodity system such as Java these days.
In the end, the system costs a lot of money to run but it makes a whole lot more money when it is running. Reducing costs looks great but when downtime costs you your job then switching platforms doesn't seem attractive. If other exchanges seek to attract market share, then they too will face the volume problems.
Not funny. Sad but so, so true! Oh and replace that last additional with incremental, so it reads "small, tiny, insignificant incremental cost".
I have done this with some other databases and as long as you enable some kind of snapshotting, the most you lose are the open transactions. You do need to be sure that all tables are flushed back and that plus the transaction log is enough to get the database back to the point where the snapshot was made. Note that it does pay to check this works out of the box and you are not missing some call somewhere as I once to a copy of a database plus journal but the tables weren't all properly up to date so it was problematic to recover.
...or indeed any compiler or interpreter. Actually, even some editors too as their macro language facilitates OS calls (which would expicitly mean anything supporting VBA).
For $1K, you can buy nmap from me. For $10K, I may consider you for a site license. For $100K, well maybe an enterprise license. That will solve your problem and even make the tool look respectable.
seriously, if you have such tools and are working for a major consultancy (which has probably already made its contributions to the electoral slushfund, then you will have no problem. If you are a smaller company or an independent you need CYA paperwork for the entire period that you are using the toolset.
Funny thing is, Copy & Paste can be abused. Just remember all those redacted government/miltary documents published in the US where you select text that had been blacked out in the PDF and to copy it into another document. Definitely a tool being used for hacking, and even worse into information potentially embarrassing for the Government.
I have a new DELL laptop with XP SP2 on it (no way was I going to get Vista on it). Silverlight crashes both in Firefox and in IE7, even on a system that is has almost no other apps. I have pulled silverlight as something that may work someday, but at the moment is a pile of donkey poo.
El Al security and that at Israeli airports is very good. Their methodology is to get two people to talk to you and then confer as well as a 100$ baggage search. I've even had them compare my dive log with that of my buddy to compare notes (we admitted to a night dive near Eilat). However, it is also extremely expensive. The people doing the screening are not the TSA or whoever and go about their job very professionally (I understand that some of them are Israeli military/intelligence). This is only possible for Israel and isn't for the US or elsewhere unless someone decided to increase the ticket cost massively.