The www.mori.us Web site, shown in Figure, features photos and stories from everyone in the Mori family, but there’s no question that the children are the stars of the show. In addition to a photo gallery and guest book, the Moris have included a section called Jared’s Anecdotes filled with fun stories about their son. Visit the site to see a great example of a clean, simple design, with lots of great photos and clever stories about the kids.

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Many parents wonder whether it is safe to put their children’s photos on the Web; others simply don’t want to share their stories with the world for fear that they may attract unwanted attention. Although there have been some highly publicized cases of children running into trouble because of someone they met online, such incidents are rare. I consider a child’s photo appearing on a Web page to be roughly equivalent to his or her image appearing in a school yearbook or in a sports team photo in a local newspaper.

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If you’re looking for an easy way to share photos online, but you still think it’s nice to have a physical, tangible photo printed on paper, you may be happy to discover the services listed in this sidebar, which provide both free online photo album services and an easy way for you — or anyone else with access to your photo album — to order prints.

To create a photo album, you just upload your images; they become instantly available on the Web to anyone with your user ID and password. (Passwords are required to ensure privacy so you can restrict who views your personal
images.) You don’t even have to optimize your images (optimizing involves reducing the file size of images so they download faster), so you won’t need an image program such as Photoshop. Indeed, sites such as Ofoto and Shutterfly encourage you to upload high-resolution images because the better the resolution, the better the print quality.

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As photo albums turn digital and e-mail addresses become commonplace, modern families are building their own Web sites, contributing to an increasingly popular part of the Internet where you can find everything from elaborate wedding invitations to vacation pictures to the first photo of a newborn.

You don’t need advanced computer skills anymore to create a family Web site. Today, sharing photos online is as easy as pressing the Enter key to upload images to a photo site. And you can create a wedding or baby site by simply filling out a form. Even if you want to create a customized Web site, the software programs and resources available now make it easier than ever to personalize the way you share family stories and memories over the Internet.

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A model is a simplified representation of the real world and, as such, includes only those aspects of the real-world system relevant to the problem at hand. For example, a model airplane, used in wind tunnel tests, models only the external shape of the airplane. The power of the airplane engines, the number of seats and its cargo capacity do not affect the plane’s aerodynamic properties. Models are widely used in engineering since they can be used to focus on a particular aspect of a real-world system such as the aerodynamic properties of an airplane or the strength of a bridge. The reduction in scale and complexity achieved by modeling allows engineers to analyze properties such as the stress and strain on the structural components of a bridge. The earliest models used in engineering, such as airplane models for wind tunnels and ship models for drag tanks, were physical. Modern models tend to be mathematical in nature and as such can be analyzed using computers.

This article takes a modeling approach to the design of concurrent programs. Our models represent the behavior of real concurrent programs written in Java. The models abstract much of the detail of real programs concerned with data representation, resource allocation and user interaction. They let us focus on concurrency. We can animate these models to investigate the concurrent behavior of the intended program. More importantly, we can mechanically verify that a model satisfies particular safety and progress properties, which are required of the program when it is implemented. This mechanical or algorithmic verification is made possible by a model-checking tool LTSA (Labeled Transition System Analyzer). Exhaustive model checking using LTSA allows us to check for both desirable and undesirable properties for all possible sequences of events and actions. LTSA is available from the World Wide Web (http://www.wileyeurope.com/college/magee). As it has been implemented in Java, it runs on a wide range of platforms, either as an applet or as an application program.

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Between June 1985 and January 1987, a computerized radiation therapy machine called Therac-25 caused six known accidents involving massive overdoses with resultant deaths and serious injuries. Although most accidents are systemic involving complex interactions between various components and activities, and Therac-25 is not an exception in this respect, concurrent programming errors played an important part in these six accidents. Race conditions between different concurrent activities in the control program resulted in occasional erroneous control outputs. Furthermore, the sporadic nature of the errors caused by faulty concurrent programs contributed to the delay in recognizing that there was a problem. The designers of the Therac-25 software seemed largely unaware of the principles and practice of concurrent programming.

The wide acceptance of Java with its in-built concurrency constructs means that concurrent programming is no longer restricted to the minority of programmers involved in operating systems and embedded real-time applications. Concurrency is useful in a wide range of applications where responsiveness and throughput are issues. While most programmers are not engaged in the implementation of safety critical systems such as Therac-25, increasing numbers are using concurrent programming constructs in less esoteric applications. Errors in these applications and systems may not be directly life-threatening but they adversely affect our quality of life and may have severe financial implications. An understanding of the principles of concurrent programming and an appreciation of how it is practiced are an essential part of the education of computing science undergraduates and of the background of software engineering professionals. The pervasive nature of computing and the Internet makes it also an important topic for those whose primary activity may not be computing but who write programs none the less.

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Ask any developer if he has ever hacked. Ask yourself if you ever been a hacker. The answers will probably be yes.We have all hacked, at one time or another, for one reason or another. Administrators hack to find shortcuts around configuration obstacles. Security professionals attempt to wiggle their way into an application/database through  nintentional (or even intentional) backdoors; they may even attempt to bring systems down in various ways. Security professionals hack into networks and applications because they are asked to; they are asked to find any weakness
that they can and then disclose them to their employers.They are performing ethical hacking in which they have agreed to disclose all findings back to the employer, and they may have signed nondisclosure agreements to verify that they will NOT disclose this information to anyone else. But you don’t have to be a hired security professional to
perform ethical hacking. Ethical hacking occurs anytime you are “testing the limits” of the code you have written or the code that has been written by a co-worker. Ethical hacking is done in an attempt to prevent malicious attacks from being successful.

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Notoriety, challenge, boredom, and revenge are just a few of the motivations of a hacker. Hackers can begin the trade very innocently. Most often they are hacking to see what they can see or what they can do. They may not even realize the depth of what they are attempting to do. But as time goes on, and their skills increase, they begin to realize the potential of what they are doing.There is a misconception that hacking is done mostly for personal gain, but that is probably one of the least of the reasons.

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