I meant to post that as ME, not as an AC

Unless of course he is playing a double bluff.

It appears the study you refer to says that even with PCI compliance, 30% of companies experienced some form of breach.

That is frightening. Do I missunderstand the figures?

Mine did too - but it did quite a lot of damage to the electronics when doing so, so a replacement power supply did not revive it.

You should use DVD+R for data and refresh every decade or so ago

I just re-read my entire CD archives from 10 years ago (actually between 1998 and mid 2004) and thinned them down and put them on to DVD+R. I could read all of them, although one or two had difficulty with a couple of files. I took the opportunity to thin them down (removing duplicate copies of files) and compressed 51 CDs into 4 DVDs

I also have offsite backups on standard 3.5 inch sata drives of what I would regard as my current "live" data - I have about 200GB covering all the family - music, images, documents and spreadsheets, software I wrote etc etc. A simple USB/sata external chassis for the drive was all I needed to take a backup. I have two sets and attempt to rotate them monthly.

When I went to University in the UK (late 1960s), only a handful of not very prestigious colleges taught the new subject of "Computer Science". I ended up doing Electrical Engineering, because that meant I could go to one of the London colleges (Oxford and Cambridge were out because I couldn't pass Latin - was needed in those days) despite knowing from the age of 11 that I wanted to have a career in computing. Shortly afterwards, it became more important and my brother (9 years younger than me) did a Computer Science course at the same college as I (Imperial College).

In those days, the subject was not very broad - algorithms were immensely important because the libraries that embed these algorithms were not widely available and software packages (as we know them today) did not exist. For some time, my career after university was programming large chunks of what I did in Assembler language (although to be fair, I was writing device drivers for the operating system RSX-11M on a PDP/11 - not mainstream commercial programming) and it wasn't until sometime in the 1980's that the computer languages had progressed far enough to use something like C universally. I remember at the time wanting to get hold of a book on compilers and how they work, because that was the 'in' subject area for modern computer science. Similarly databases, particularly relational databases, was another subject area that was broadening. We hand developed in Assembler some database engines for a large commercial database project I undertook in 1974, and in the early 1980s the company I worked for started to develop a relational database which competed with Oracle. It was only when we had to invest in an SQL parser that the business case required us to sell a 1000 copies that we chickened out - asking the question if that was possible. And if we can all remember it was during the 1980s that GUI's became prominent - the Apple Lisa was the first I experienced, but MS Windows followed soon afterwards. And then again in the late 1980s, Software Engineering, along with all the various methodologies (I remember having fierce debates about which methodology was correct) and Object Oriented programming (again fierce debates over the mindset change needed to use an object oriented language properly). The final point was brought home to me by watching Tron the other day. In the time of that film, programs were written by Users. That was indeed the norm, and it wasn't until the mid 1980s and the explosion of the PC as both an Office and Home Device that users where people who didn't write the programs, but instead went out and bought "Software Packages". It was at this point that a new subject area of "how do I use this program" and "how do I configure this system" became a subject that required teaching to more than just a few specialists.

The point I am trying to make, is that since its inception the field that was historically named computer science has grown to a point where it has too much subject content to be covered completely with a single undergraduate degree. Specialism is required and therefore you would expect different colleges to offer different combinations.

The article mischaracterises the term "business" to mean the selling of software. In the sense that the GPL prevents one from making a varient and then selling it under a proprietrary licence that is true.

But what if your business is a user of software and not selling software (which I think is more true of business as a whole), then the GPL actually helps you, because it discourages (prevents) small proprietary forks, instead encouraging an ecosystem in which the majority of the effort goes into improving the public common base of software. So as a business user of software that business benefit more than it would if effort were drained of into lots of incompatible proprietary versions.

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