Design your application and implement your code to let it do exactly what it should do and nothing else.

Put more specificaly, if you want to add two numbers, make sure that there is no way the result could be out of the range of its data type. If you want someone to enter a name for something, define what that string can contain - maybe only a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9, and it must have a length from 1 to 20 bytes.

Write every function of your program so that it has deterministic behavior, and that it has a clearly defined result for every possible input.

By the way, I doubt that banking account management systems are as secure as people might feel comfortable to think they are. Most commercial systems have poor security, because companies prefer cheap but insecure mainstream IT systems over expensive but secure custom IT systems.

The IBM home page tells me about IBM's "responsibility" regarding things like:
societal issues
the environment
education
health
culture
(http://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/index.html -- also click the links on the left, for example about politics)

But what's more important, is how to be good friends with chinese dictators who don't give a shit about any of the topics mentioned above, so as to make more $$$ by doing business with china.

I doubt that acting like this is going to turn this world into a "smarter planet".

This is a more complex problem than what scripting language you are going to use. Automating things is about job management, process management, signals, connecting streams and terminals, setting device modes, filesystem permissions, modifying network settings, and many other things. Unix is designed in a way that lets you change almost every property of the system in numerous ways, following general principles of its architecture. It is a very logical and consistent system.

The problem is that Windows lacks such an modular, abstract foundation. It is a much more arbitrary and inflexible system, it is not designed for putting different pieces of it together in different ways for automation.
For example, on Unix you have numerous small utilities that work together nicely by piping the output of one utility into the input of another one. Windows is really bad at doing such things, and the output format of most of its utilities is not easily machine parseable.

I think, the question is not: How do I automate Windows? The question should be: What system should I use, which one is good at automation?
And the answer is definately Unix, not Windows.

I just tried to post that to MS' TechNet article, but it seems that the comment function has been disabled. So I am posting it here as an open letter to MS.

Two ot the most ridiculous so-called patents:

"Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received"
"Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection"

How is that a patent-worthy innovation? Just about EVERY application that has ever been created works like that, and any programmer that writes code different from what has been described in these patents should really look for a new job.

If Microsoft thinks that this is not "standard practice", but patent-worthy innovation, then this only proves that Microsoft's software designers and programmers must have below-average abilities.

I request that you folks stop trolling the rest of the world with such ridiculous claims immediately. If you want to compete, then work on increasing your skills instead of trying to forbid other people to make use of theirs.

I believe that is the difference between a US keyboard and an english international keyboard, at least with apple equipment. Here in .at you can actually select between those two and the german qwertz, since about a year I think.

FWIW, I kinda prefer the "vertical" orientation of the enter key.

"Learn how to create cutting-edge 3D animations like Pixar and Dreamworks in the next 2 hours or less..."

Well, if that IllusionMage homepage had slashdot's "score" feature, this statement would certainly deserve a "+5: funny". They can't be serious!? I've never seen anyone who has created something more exciting than a couple of textured spheres and cubes in no more than 2 hours after starting to use Blender for the very first time.

Then our experiences match, we just wanted different things. I wanted to use the incoming sip for being available where I have WiFi but no cell coverage (my flat). For outgoing calls I have europe wide free minutes. Oh well, I ended up using a X-link bttn to solve the problem at home. Other places I need to remember checking the sip status.

btw. The N900 sip implementation seems more reliable.

do you use the sip functionality exclusively for outgoing calls?

I have a E52 which I bought primarily for the sip client, but I've found that it's worthless for incoming calls, since it will get disconnected at irregular intervals and thus not available for incoming calls. I have been unable to find workarounds, even a scheduled reboot would help but seems require a signing certificate on my part.

Can it be that the earlier sip implementations worked better? (keeping an eye open for a cheap E71)

http://www.billiger-telefonieren.de/aldi-surfstick-flatrate-webstick/

Sorry, link is in german, maybe babelfish will help out.

I have the austrian "hofer" equivalent, which is a pure data prepaid. It seems to work slightly differently in germany, where it's an addition to a prepaid voice sim. I'd acctually prefer the german style, but oh well.

I'd recommend combining it with a S60(or Maemo) Joikuspot compatible handset, that way you can use the voice part as well.

I wanted the same thing and found this firefox extension

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

It lets you enter filters (with wildcards) for the search results.

Now I want this filter list update automatically (like adblock), Oh well.

True, sorry about the missinformation. In my defense, the homepage has way better route descriptions than I could hope to provide, and I did include a link =)

As many airplanes as you can shake a stick at.

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/london/index.cfm

http://www.livescribe.com/

It uses a bit of hightech and a special patterned paper to give a seamless experience. It's the same anoto technology as the Logitech IO, but now they let you print your own paper.

Are you quite sure about zfs working that way? When I bought my drobo a year ago it was not the case, zfs could not be expanded a disk a the time while maintaining redundancy (ie. expanding a zraid pool with a single disk). From everything I've read that feature will be added once the BPR (block pointer something) rewrite is done.

So again, have you actually done this, or have you (as I first did) concluded that it is possible from the feature list?