I was simplifying the process to make a point, they did that too. I actually felt sorry for the verification people who had to sign off on a screen capture that every pixel was correct. Thats the brute force testing for every possible combination of inputs, for over a dozen analog and digital inputs. Which results in thousands, if not tens of thousands screen shots to be hand verified as correct with those inputs. And that the failure conditions were all displayed accurately since old data can be much worse than no data while flying a plane, and so on. The point being that even with all that process, there are still bugs which have not been tested for.
You're right, that was technically a hardware bug, but they fixed it with a software patch to change the bus timings. Not the optimal solution of course, but a board respin costs much more than a software update. It may not have been the best example, but the point remains, you can't prove the non-existence of bugs. Anyone thats trying to tell you otherwise is either a genius or more likely an idiot.
To answer your question, I was trying to illustrate that the metrics while a good starting point are merely metrics and only look for specific types of bugs which have frequent occurance and have been well quantified. Since that specific problem ended up categorized ultimately as a software bug, the metric being applied didn't have a chance in hell of finding it. And while new metrics could be put in place to find that sort of low occurance bug, the expense of development would increase accordingly. There then comes a point where the decision has to be made what metrics to use, and how much they cost to implement across the board. This of course cuts into profits which is why I said regulations like DO-178B are a starting point, but not proof that a device will operate flawlessly under all conditions it may be rated for. Its also the reason not all avionics equipment is certified at level A, the effort to obtain that certification is much more costly than the effort required to obtain a level C certification.
The goal of course is to find faster, cheaper ways, to meet these minimum requirements. Or if your field is not regulated, implement best practices which can improve overall quality at a minimum of cost. I made my initial post because while a lot of people who read slashdot are very technically adept, there may be some who might not realize 100% code coverage is not the same as bug free code, or like my example, a defect free product.
Three types of code coverage are required for safety critical airline applications:
1) Line Coverage - Has every line been tested 2) Branch Coverage - Has every branch been tested 3) Boolean Coverage - Is EVERY possibility on a truth table for each logical operator explicitly defined
These tests alone don't certify that the code is ready for an airplane and that it is indeed "bug free." My software engineering professor said it best when he stated, you can only prove the existence of bugs, you cannot prove the non-existence of bugs. These guidelines as adopted by the FAA for the certification of safety critical code, don't prove the non-existence of bugs, but they do go a long way towards proving the existence many bugs and provide a MINIMUM standard to which code must be exercised before being allowed into an airplane.
Software Engineering is a science, methodology has been pioneered to help us ENGINEER the software we develop to be as defect free as we know how to make it. As in other disciplines of engineering, there will always be things not yet quantified. Take architecture for example, an architect would design a bridge to withstand an earthquake of a specific magnitude, winds of a specific speed. Does that mean the bridge is safe? What if the materials used weren't rated for the temperature range needed for the locale, etc...
As much as we do to ensure quality, there is no silver bullet. The company I interned at which will remain nameless made a multi-function navigational display for airforce one. It rebooted during a touch and go at 40 degrees farenheit. Wasn't it tested you ask? Of course it was, it was tested at -40 degrees and 140 degrees, but the timing on one of the buses was off at 40 and the hardware watchdog took it into a reboot at a very critical time. It was DO 178B Level A certified, had 100% code coverage of course, but there will always be bugs. Don't trust tools to tell you otherwise, because you can never prove the non-existence of bugs.
(For those who don't know, a touch and go is where the plane starts landing and takes off again)
You're right, it was 1.2_rc1. I think you're crazy running entirely ~amd64, I just unmask packages on demand. I know I'm a little off-topic, but I would like to find a bit-torrent client for Linux which wont crash after reassembeling 25 GB of torrent files over the course of a week like Azureus.
When I tried ktorrent a couple weeks ago it couldn't finish a download without locking up. Of course it I did need to unmask it from the amd64 experimental branch in gentoo's portage system. It probably works a bit better on 32 bit systems. I was about to post this anonymously, but Karma be damned, it has a long way to go before primetime, but I would like a program that wasn't such a memory hog like azureus. I fully intend on checking out the next major ktorrent release, this last one just didn't work for me.
If you read what I said more carefully, I mentioned that Microsoft is planning on adding the HD-DVD to the 360, which is exactly what you said. I really should have edited that comment better, it always seems more coherent before you post.
I probably should have titled that better too, since I was half trolling about the article title, while trying to bring up the real issue at hand. Which would be can the laws against anti-competitve practices be extended to partnered companies rather than the company actually producing the product. After the amount of time/money MS has invested in HD-DVD I highly doubt they will want to license Blu-Ray technology for the 3rd gen XBOX console. So it makes perfect sense Why they are doing this, the real question is "Can they get away with it?"
Microsoft has been backing the HD-DVD format from the beginning. In related news Microsoft is considering HD-DVD for the next hardware revision of the XBOX 360. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this isn't news, the anti-competitive practices are news. Isn't this what AMD is sueing Intel about at the moment?
However this is not quite as clear cut as the Intel case since Microsoft manufactures neither HD-DVD Drives nor Media, while Intel actually made the chips for which they were offerring discounts.
IANAL, but is it illegal for Microsoft to leverage the product of a consortium of companies in this manner? Though Microsoft does have a large stake in the technology already, if they tried this with Windows I'm sure they would get smacked down by the courts.
I wonder how the authors would have analyzed the current state of affairs with Nessus, a popular security scanner tool. So many Nessus frontends are being sold as products by their competitors that they have gone the other way and closed their source. They even took the time to poison the codebase in the last free version to make their competitors look like fools for simply repacking their software.
I'm not trying to troll, but I'm just wondering about the cases where there are a multitude of other companies interested in selling products in your space.
Having just graduated in '03 with an Engineering Degree in Applied Sciences (thats how they categorized CS), let me say I have never had to look for work. It finds me, and the hiring managers lament that there just aren't enough qualified applicants looking at the moment and they wated to staff the position months ago.
The best thing your son can do is intern and/or co-op to build experience while in school, I had ~2 years experience graduating as a result of internships and co-ops from my sophomore year forward. Many of my peers had higher GPAs than me, but my lower GPA was on account of release deadlines for my software job during the school year. They consistently made the deans list and graduated on track (4 years not 5), but they could not find a job for the life of them. The reason for this is no company wants to pay wages consistent to someone with a 4 yr degree on someone with no real world experience. I learned more about how software is made on the job than can ever be taught in a classroom. That was the edge I had over my peers who regretted not getting experience when it was already too late.
Just my 2 cents (I've also don't have any friends who did intern or co-op and couldn't immediately find jobs).
Who do you want to control the firewall for your connection? I would rather have full control over my home network, let everyone else be damned. What if they start blocking port 21 (no ssh for you), then they block 80 (you shouldn't be running a webserver on a non-commercial line anyway), and so on.
Sorry, good idea, but there's no real standard between OS's on reserved ports in the sub 1024 range. Ports which you may not want exposed to the world on a windows box could run a perfectly secure service on a *nix box. I don't think that is the case at the moment, but you get the idea.
Your ISP is a common carrier, they are not liable for what is transmitted over their network. I believe they are looking into attack mitigation for large scale DDoS and worm traffic, but if they start requiring me to use a firewall configured by them, I'll switch ISPs.
Its not that I don't trust the intermediate hops, just the source and destination networks. I work in a company where EVERYONE knows how to use tcpdump and ethereal, plus a lot of the servers I access are on home networks of friends who have roommate who also know their way around a packet sniffer.
Lets just say the next time you telnet into your server from a coffee shop's wireless network or better yet, airport wireless, you better hope your DHCP lease can from an access point and not my laptop.
While that is true is will be a long while before the developers make full use of the hardware. I remember reading an article saying the first generation XBOX 360 games will for the most part be using single threaded engines and have poorer graphics quality than their XBOX counterparts. Since the original XBOX is now beig fully utilized and pushed to the limits of the hardware. My point being that with disappointing game quality (if you want me to look up the articles I will but I'm sure I read them on slashdot), and the lack of an HD-DVD rom in the firs hardware revision of the 360, the HD-DVD format has a lot of catching up to do for the marketshare considering the PS3 will put a blu-ray player in milions of homes off the bat, and even if the games are initially distributed on DVD media, the manufacturing of Blu-Ray drives has a big headstart on becoming cost effective compared to the HD-DVD counterparts. And thats assuming Sony does not have game makers contractually obligated to use Blu-Ray media for distribution.
The fact that there will be no HD-DVD player in the XBOX 360 means XBOX sales will not drive HD-DVD sales further illustrating your point. Though it will be interesting to see how fast they get HD-DVD capable XBOXs on the market and how much HD-DVD sales may be lost to the early adopters not having an HD-DVD player built-in.
The most ludicris part is how many games will come out on HD-DVD when 90% of the XBOX market does not have an HD-DVD player in their system already? How many people will be willing to upgrade after the initially disappointing performance of the single threaded, next-gen console games, when stacked next to games like Doom 3 on a new PC?
Sony has a huge advantage by making its initial release with Blu-Ray already included. The console market will decide this format war, because by the time the major studios have upgraded to delivering HD Content, the rest of the unwashed masses wont be voting with their dollars, and Microsoft has already surrendered while looking to boost marketshare for their system by beating Sony off the starting block.
I graduated college in '03 with a few years experience from my various internships and coops. I did consulting for a year after school, and now I'm happily employed full time. I was not been able to stay unemployed between jobs either, the head hunters find me.
What I have found to be true with the whole years of experience thing is this: Those are not actually lower bounds, in fact its usually an upper bound. The fact of the matter is, experience costs money, and training someone also costs money. If you can do a job, apply for it. If your resume speaks for itself, they will call you. There is a lack of quality programmers out there, HR departments usually struggle to staff projects. They put more experience than they expect to find, hoping that the perfect person for the job is actually looking for work, odds are, they aren't. I got a call from a head hunter about a position requiring 10 yrs of experience, could I have gotten the job? Probably. Did I apply? No, I have a great job already. (I have 4 yrs experience, 2 not counting experience while in college).
The only times I've ever paid for sci-fi short stories were for collections of them in books. This business model would not deprive the writers of my money, assuming they are good enough for me to want to buy.
Permanent electronic rights means nothing to me as well. I have never read an e-book, though I have tried several times. There's nothing quite like a paper book, I don't think they'll ever replace that. I would never buy an e-book anyway, what if the reader program is no longer supported and none of the new programs support the old DRM scheme? I will always be able to read a book, assuming I don't lose my sight in a horrible accident.
The LocalSystem user is severely restricted. I was doing embedded development and wanted a headless device (no monitor or keyboard) to be able to install a printer as instructed by the Http Server accessed from a web interface, this service would have to go find the drivers from the printer server and pull them down and install them. All my prototype code worked flawlessly, then I tried to add that to a service which ran as LocalSystem and nothing worked. I was on the phone with MS Enterprise Support and after a week of raising hell with the lower parts of the heirarchy, eventually I actually got to speak with one of the guys that wrote the GDI. He said "We designed it not to work that way." and "I think the problem has too many constraints to be solved."
Eventually we had to create a new user for our service to run as and everytime it was invoked it would have to load the registry hive from LocalSystem and switch users. You have no idea how involved that process is to automate something which just works if there's a user logged in and running the program.
Phil Zimmerman was talking about encrypted VOIP at DefCon. It seemed like an obvious thing at the time that I watched and blew off, but when I thought of the social ramifications later, I realized what a fundamental change that was.
Voice Communications protected with Strong encryption, sounds like a one time pad a secret agent might use to report in, soon we might be chatting with our relatives over a medium which cannot be tapped without first compromising the sending or receiving computer. Maybe Echelon and Carnivore will have a new friend.
Its going to be hard for this to gain momentum in non-geek circles with so many other IM clients already entrenched. Most people I know run MSN bc of smilies/nudges/"winks"/etc... And they have problems running a second client because MSN is prone to crashing. While Gaim is great for me since I get peace of mind knowing my IMs are not travelling across the internet in plain-text, most people won't give up their custom smilies etc to use Gaim.
I think the range of emotes will make or break any new IM client, because without that, the masses will not switch, though most of us will just add another acct to Gaim.
Does every "good" programmer have a degree in computer science?
No, I've known some excellent programmers who have been in the industry for 30 years, though they were formally trained as musicians.
How can a programmer who might be "average" GET to be a "good" programmer?
When playing pool you'll never get better without opponents who are better. I think that also applies to programming, in the sense that you learn from your coworkers. However, as I noticed in school some people just don't get it. They memorized a lot and could regurgitate enough to get a degree, but they never really understood it all.
Having worked with some very talented people since I learned to program as both an intern and participating in engineering coops, I grew a lot more than my peers who were not doing similar activities. Thats the difference between having a job when graduating and not having one. No one wants to train someone from scratch after college at college graduate wages.
That still does not address the other main problem with BitTorrent, people who restrict their clients from uploading. I have started to loathe having to use BitTorrent to acquiring anything for the simple fact that a majority of the peers listed by the tracker are hacked clients which download only. If commercial entities start using BitTorrent to distribute any form of media they would need to create a proprietary client which would prevent this from occuring.
You're side stepping the question there. Why should I pay for something twice. Once for whatever the file is I'm downloading and once for the bandwidth to host that same file to others.
I think people have also overlooked the advent of hacked clients which will download only as well. The bittorrent system is not perfect, when selfish people refuse to upload then everyone loses out, its just as bad as trying to download from an underpowered ftp server.
While some people might prefer the anonymity of that solution, as long as you're down there hacking we might as well write a program which can extract the code from a scanned document and have the driver or firmware be able to write an arbitrary identification array, making it possible to spoof people's printers.
My guess is the serial number is assigned during the manufacturing process, as opposed to derived from serial numbers of the various chips inside, so there need to be a command to set it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was simplifying the process to make a point, they did that too. I actually felt sorry for the verification people who had to sign off on a screen capture that every pixel was correct. Thats the brute force testing for every possible combination of inputs, for over a dozen analog and digital inputs. Which results in thousands, if not tens of thousands screen shots to be hand verified as correct with those inputs. And that the failure conditions were all displayed accurately since old data can be much worse than no data while flying a plane, and so on. The point being that even with all that process, there are still bugs which have not been tested for.
You're right, that was technically a hardware bug, but they fixed it with a software patch to change the bus timings. Not the optimal solution of course, but a board respin costs much more than a software update. It may not have been the best example, but the point remains, you can't prove the non-existence of bugs. Anyone thats trying to tell you otherwise is either a genius or more likely an idiot.
To answer your question, I was trying to illustrate that the metrics while a good starting point are merely metrics and only look for specific types of bugs which have frequent occurance and have been well quantified. Since that specific problem ended up categorized ultimately as a software bug, the metric being applied didn't have a chance in hell of finding it. And while new metrics could be put in place to find that sort of low occurance bug, the expense of development would increase accordingly. There then comes a point where the decision has to be made what metrics to use, and how much they cost to implement across the board. This of course cuts into profits which is why I said regulations like DO-178B are a starting point, but not proof that a device will operate flawlessly under all conditions it may be rated for. Its also the reason not all avionics equipment is certified at level A, the effort to obtain that certification is much more costly than the effort required to obtain a level C certification.
The goal of course is to find faster, cheaper ways, to meet these minimum requirements. Or if your field is not regulated, implement best practices which can improve overall quality at a minimum of cost. I made my initial post because while a lot of people who read slashdot are very technically adept, there may be some who might not realize 100% code coverage is not the same as bug free code, or like my example, a defect free product.
Three types of code coverage are required for safety critical airline applications:
1) Line Coverage - Has every line been tested
2) Branch Coverage - Has every branch been tested
3) Boolean Coverage - Is EVERY possibility on a truth table for each logical operator explicitly defined
These tests alone don't certify that the code is ready for an airplane and that it is indeed "bug free." My software engineering professor said it best when he stated, you can only prove the existence of bugs, you cannot prove the non-existence of bugs. These guidelines as adopted by the FAA for the certification of safety critical code, don't prove the non-existence of bugs, but they do go a long way towards proving the existence many bugs and provide a MINIMUM standard to which code must be exercised before being allowed into an airplane.
Software Engineering is a science, methodology has been pioneered to help us ENGINEER the software we develop to be as defect free as we know how to make it. As in other disciplines of engineering, there will always be things not yet quantified. Take architecture for example, an architect would design a bridge to withstand an earthquake of a specific magnitude, winds of a specific speed. Does that mean the bridge is safe? What if the materials used weren't rated for the temperature range needed for the locale, etc...
As much as we do to ensure quality, there is no silver bullet. The company I interned at which will remain nameless made a multi-function navigational display for airforce one. It rebooted during a touch and go at 40 degrees farenheit. Wasn't it tested you ask? Of course it was, it was tested at -40 degrees and 140 degrees, but the timing on one of the buses was off at 40 and the hardware watchdog took it into a reboot at a very critical time. It was DO 178B Level A certified, had 100% code coverage of course, but there will always be bugs. Don't trust tools to tell you otherwise, because you can never prove the non-existence of bugs.
(For those who don't know, a touch and go is where the plane starts landing and takes off again)
You're right, it was 1.2_rc1. I think you're crazy running entirely ~amd64, I just unmask packages on demand. I know I'm a little off-topic, but I would like to find a bit-torrent client for Linux which wont crash after reassembeling 25 GB of torrent files over the course of a week like Azureus.
When I tried ktorrent a couple weeks ago it couldn't finish a download without locking up. Of course it I did need to unmask it from the amd64 experimental branch in gentoo's portage system. It probably works a bit better on 32 bit systems. I was about to post this anonymously, but Karma be damned, it has a long way to go before primetime, but I would like a program that wasn't such a memory hog like azureus. I fully intend on checking out the next major ktorrent release, this last one just didn't work for me.
I probably should have titled that better too, since I was half trolling about the article title, while trying to bring up the real issue at hand. Which would be can the laws against anti-competitve practices be extended to partnered companies rather than the company actually producing the product. After the amount of time/money MS has invested in HD-DVD I highly doubt they will want to license Blu-Ray technology for the 3rd gen XBOX console. So it makes perfect sense Why they are doing this, the real question is "Can they get away with it?"
Microsoft has been backing the HD-DVD format from the beginning. In related news Microsoft is considering HD-DVD for the next hardware revision of the XBOX 360. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this isn't news, the anti-competitive practices are news. Isn't this what AMD is sueing Intel about at the moment?
However this is not quite as clear cut as the Intel case since Microsoft manufactures neither HD-DVD Drives nor Media, while Intel actually made the chips for which they were offerring discounts.
IANAL, but is it illegal for Microsoft to leverage the product of a consortium of companies in this manner? Though Microsoft does have a large stake in the technology already, if they tried this with Windows I'm sure they would get smacked down by the courts.
I wonder how the authors would have analyzed the current state of affairs with Nessus, a popular security scanner tool. So many Nessus frontends are being sold as products by their competitors that they have gone the other way and closed their source. They even took the time to poison the codebase in the last free version to make their competitors look like fools for simply repacking their software.
I'm not trying to troll, but I'm just wondering about the cases where there are a multitude of other companies interested in selling products in your space.
Having just graduated in '03 with an Engineering Degree in Applied Sciences (thats how they categorized CS), let me say I have never had to look for work. It finds me, and the hiring managers lament that there just aren't enough qualified applicants looking at the moment and they wated to staff the position months ago.
The best thing your son can do is intern and/or co-op to build experience while in school, I had ~2 years experience graduating as a result of internships and co-ops from my sophomore year forward. Many of my peers had higher GPAs than me, but my lower GPA was on account of release deadlines for my software job during the school year. They consistently made the deans list and graduated on track (4 years not 5), but they could not find a job for the life of them. The reason for this is no company wants to pay wages consistent to someone with a 4 yr degree on someone with no real world experience. I learned more about how software is made on the job than can ever be taught in a classroom. That was the edge I had over my peers who regretted not getting experience when it was already too late.
Just my 2 cents (I've also don't have any friends who did intern or co-op and couldn't immediately find jobs).
Who do you want to control the firewall for your connection? I would rather have full control over my home network, let everyone else be damned. What if they start blocking port 21 (no ssh for you), then they block 80 (you shouldn't be running a webserver on a non-commercial line anyway), and so on.
Sorry, good idea, but there's no real standard between OS's on reserved ports in the sub 1024 range. Ports which you may not want exposed to the world on a windows box could run a perfectly secure service on a *nix box. I don't think that is the case at the moment, but you get the idea.
Your ISP is a common carrier, they are not liable for what is transmitted over their network. I believe they are looking into attack mitigation for large scale DDoS and worm traffic, but if they start requiring me to use a firewall configured by them, I'll switch ISPs.
Its not that I don't trust the intermediate hops, just the source and destination networks. I work in a company where EVERYONE knows how to use tcpdump and ethereal, plus a lot of the servers I access are on home networks of friends who have roommate who also know their way around a packet sniffer.
Lets just say the next time you telnet into your server from a coffee shop's wireless network or better yet, airport wireless, you better hope your DHCP lease can from an access point and not my laptop.
Not trolling, but you use FTP??? I use scp for all my file transfer needs. I avoid programs that transmit your username and password in plaintext.
While that is true is will be a long while before the developers make full use of the hardware. I remember reading an article saying the first generation XBOX 360 games will for the most part be using single threaded engines and have poorer graphics quality than their XBOX counterparts. Since the original XBOX is now beig fully utilized and pushed to the limits of the hardware. My point being that with disappointing game quality (if you want me to look up the articles I will but I'm sure I read them on slashdot), and the lack of an HD-DVD rom in the firs hardware revision of the 360, the HD-DVD format has a lot of catching up to do for the marketshare considering the PS3 will put a blu-ray player in milions of homes off the bat, and even if the games are initially distributed on DVD media, the manufacturing of Blu-Ray drives has a big headstart on becoming cost effective compared to the HD-DVD counterparts. And thats assuming Sony does not have game makers contractually obligated to use Blu-Ray media for distribution.
The fact that there will be no HD-DVD player in the XBOX 360 means XBOX sales will not drive HD-DVD sales further illustrating your point. Though it will be interesting to see how fast they get HD-DVD capable XBOXs on the market and how much HD-DVD sales may be lost to the early adopters not having an HD-DVD player built-in.
The most ludicris part is how many games will come out on HD-DVD when 90% of the XBOX market does not have an HD-DVD player in their system already? How many people will be willing to upgrade after the initially disappointing performance of the single threaded, next-gen console games, when stacked next to games like Doom 3 on a new PC?
Sony has a huge advantage by making its initial release with Blu-Ray already included. The console market will decide this format war, because by the time the major studios have upgraded to delivering HD Content, the rest of the unwashed masses wont be voting with their dollars, and Microsoft has already surrendered while looking to boost marketshare for their system by beating Sony off the starting block.
I graduated college in '03 with a few years experience from my various internships and coops. I did consulting for a year after school, and now I'm happily employed full time. I was not been able to stay unemployed between jobs either, the head hunters find me.
What I have found to be true with the whole years of experience thing is this: Those are not actually lower bounds, in fact its usually an upper bound. The fact of the matter is, experience costs money, and training someone also costs money. If you can do a job, apply for it. If your resume speaks for itself, they will call you. There is a lack of quality programmers out there, HR departments usually struggle to staff projects. They put more experience than they expect to find, hoping that the perfect person for the job is actually looking for work, odds are, they aren't. I got a call from a head hunter about a position requiring 10 yrs of experience, could I have gotten the job? Probably. Did I apply? No, I have a great job already. (I have 4 yrs experience, 2 not counting experience while in college).
The only times I've ever paid for sci-fi short stories were for collections of them in books. This business model would not deprive the writers of my money, assuming they are good enough for me to want to buy.
Permanent electronic rights means nothing to me as well. I have never read an e-book, though I have tried several times. There's nothing quite like a paper book, I don't think they'll ever replace that. I would never buy an e-book anyway, what if the reader program is no longer supported and none of the new programs support the old DRM scheme? I will always be able to read a book, assuming I don't lose my sight in a horrible accident.
The LocalSystem user is severely restricted. I was doing embedded development and wanted a headless device (no monitor or keyboard) to be able to install a printer as instructed by the Http Server accessed from a web interface, this service would have to go find the drivers from the printer server and pull them down and install them. All my prototype code worked flawlessly, then I tried to add that to a service which ran as LocalSystem and nothing worked. I was on the phone with MS Enterprise Support and after a week of raising hell with the lower parts of the heirarchy, eventually I actually got to speak with one of the guys that wrote the GDI. He said "We designed it not to work that way." and "I think the problem has too many constraints to be solved."
Eventually we had to create a new user for our service to run as and everytime it was invoked it would have to load the registry hive from LocalSystem and switch users. You have no idea how involved that process is to automate something which just works if there's a user logged in and running the program.
Voice Communications protected with Strong encryption, sounds like a one time pad a secret agent might use to report in, soon we might be chatting with our relatives over a medium which cannot be tapped without first compromising the sending or receiving computer. Maybe Echelon and Carnivore will have a new friend.
It would be really cool if for say a family car you could have unique keys, one for each kid of driving age, and a master key, issued to the owner.
Then have it configurable that certain keys only work during certain times of the day, and track car usage stats based on the key used to start it.
Which of your children speed? Which key is used when putting in gas?
I think the range of emotes will make or break any new IM client, because without that, the masses will not switch, though most of us will just add another acct to Gaim.
Actually if your diabetes is severe enough, even Diet soda has to be given up since non sugar sweetners can cause it to act up.
Having worked with some very talented people since I learned to program as both an intern and participating in engineering coops, I grew a lot more than my peers who were not doing similar activities. Thats the difference between having a job when graduating and not having one. No one wants to train someone from scratch after college at college graduate wages.
That still does not address the other main problem with BitTorrent, people who restrict their clients from uploading. I have started to loathe having to use BitTorrent to acquiring anything for the simple fact that a majority of the peers listed by the tracker are hacked clients which download only. If commercial entities start using BitTorrent to distribute any form of media they would need to create a proprietary client which would prevent this from occuring.
I think people have also overlooked the advent of hacked clients which will download only as well. The bittorrent system is not perfect, when selfish people refuse to upload then everyone loses out, its just as bad as trying to download from an underpowered ftp server.
My guess is the serial number is assigned during the manufacturing process, as opposed to derived from serial numbers of the various chips inside, so there need to be a command to set it.