|
It's late (usually well past midnight) and you've just finished an eight-page term paper due at eight o'clock the next morning. You scroll over to click the print icon and then it happens...total darkness. After countless prayers and even more curse words, you finally come to the realization that your paper has been lost forever. While it takes everything you have to start from scratch, you begin to wonder: what if I had seen the crash coming, or at the very least, have seen what caused the crash to avoid future occurrences?
Thanks to two researchers, this improbable concept has become a reality. While working together at a small Internet start-up company, two friends found themselves the victims of several computer crashes. Attempting to put an end to these annoyances once and for all, they soon found that they were chasing "ghost bugs" that seemed to disappear almost as fast as they appeared. (Source: nytimes.com) The friends mused over the idea of a TiVo system specially designed to catch these "ghost bugs" in the act. While family members offered their moral support, they also believed the task was too impossible to make a reality. For one thing, the friends had to account for everything that can affect a program, from keystrokes, mouse movements and other software applications to network traffic and programming instructions that are designed to occur at random. (Source: gadsdentimes.com) After six years of intense research, what started as an improbable idea has become a real product called ReplayDirector. The program works on the Xbox gaming platform and several other versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. The key selling point is ReplayDirector's ability to capture viruses that cannot be reproduced. In other words, once a "ghost bug" is caught, it will never harm (or crash) your system again. There is one minor setback in the program: there's no feature allowing users to fast-forward to the actual crash. Instead, victims must sit back and watch the entire sequence of events from the time the computer was turned on to the time of the crash. While a number of other programs available on the market have the ability to take snapshots of the problem, ReplayDirector is the only program that offers an entire full-length video of the crash itself. The current asking price for ReplayDirector is $50,000/project, which can only mean that the company is targeting major software developing companies. Still, if the product catches on in popularity, we could soon find similar programs available for the average user to purchase. (Source: nytimes.com)
-- Related newsletter articles:
2005/11/17 Crash (computing) (crash)
-- Recent articles (from all channels): 2008/05/15 Today in History: for Thursday, May 15, 2008
2008/05/15 [ShellX 20080515]: 'Commercial Games Released As Freeware', and '
2008/05/15 Outside Company Offers Smarter Wikipedia Searches
2008/05/15 Microsoft-Google Battle Goes Galactic
2008/05/15 Find it Over and Over Again in MS Word
2008/05/15 Hackers Find A New Hiding Place for Rootkits
2008/05/14 [ShellX 20080514]: 'Blend', and 'Dexpose2'
2008/05/14 Windows XP Service Pack 3 Gives Boot to HP, AMD Machines
2008/05/14 Stephen Colbert Among 'Webby' Winners
2008/05/14 Irony Strikes At Tech Conference
2008/05/14 Getting Closure in MS Outlook
2008/05/13 [ShellX 20080513]: 'Drive Spacio', and 'Youtube Batch Downloader'
2008/05/13 Congressman Calls For Second Life Ban In Schools
2008/05/13 Trying to Exit MS Excel 2007
2008/05/13 Problems Reported With Windows XP SP3
2008/05/12 [ShellX 20080512]: 'Remote Manager', and 'Cyber Bandwidth ...
2008/05/12 Video Gaming Trade Group Struggling
2008/05/12 T-Mobile Finally Joins 3G Phone Race
2008/05/12 Apple Slammed by Environment Watchdog
2008/05/09 [ShellX 20080509]: 'Advanced Run', and 'Diver Windows Manager'
2008/05/09 Texas Refuses Facebook Friend Request
2008/05/09 Photo-Enforcement Technology Replaces Officers On Patrol
2008/05/09 Cuban Government Says 'Ok Computer'
2008/05/09 Excel Can E-Mail Your Weekly Reports For You!
2008/05/08 [ShellX 20080508]: 'Shell Enhancer', and 'Lansweeper'
2008/05/08 Xobni: MS Outlook Social Networking Technology for your Inbox
2008/05/08 Music Companies Jump on GTA IV Bandwagon
2008/05/08 Fascinating: Memristor to replace Binary
2008/05/08 Adobe Hopes To Make Flash Master Of The (Mobile) Universe
2008/05/08 Spiffy Envelopes and Labels in MS Word
2008/05/07 [ShellX 20080507]: 'Winbin2iso', and 'Loop Typer'
|
