Likely a simple brand licensing arrangement, where a unknown company (usually a Chinese company not known in the west) wants to sell their products in the western market and needs a familiar name to convince people to buy. What typically happens though is cheap rubbish has a well known brand put on it to make it sell only to eventually destroy the brand.

No shops any more but Tandy is still on-line http://www.tandyonline.co.uk/ although mostly electronic components. Tandy is now separate from Radio Shack but some of those components and part numbers are the same as 30 years ago so.

They were sharing their drives because they knew no better, it is what they did at home. Not only did this mean they were causing security issues they were also risking losing their files as they were not backed up. Providing a central server where there files were kept meant they were on a RAID array so they were always available and were backed up to tape every day. It also meant that when their PC let out the magic smoke or was being replaced with a newer model they could continue to work and access their files by logging in on any unused computer on the network.

The state of corporate IT can be shocking. When I took over the IT at the UK branch of an international technology company I couldn't believe what I saw. Regular office staff had file sharing switched on individual PCs, Software developers had systems operated as root or administrator. People routinely downloaded whatever they wanted and installed it on their computers.

The first thing I did was make sure that no computer had any file sharing or any other services running on it, instead users would have to share files by placing them on a properly managed server and printers had their own dedicated print server box or were replaced with network printers. All the PCs then had local firewalls enabled to effectively make sure that there were no open ports on them even if some errant software got installed.

All users were given regular user accounts, no admin access granted. Some users that were doing things like software testing who had to constantly install software were given admin access to a virtual machine so they could do all their testing on that VM.

It was decided that the offices around the world would be linked up so that direct access to the network could be obtained all over the world. Now every office just plugged their new router into the LAN and gave full access to everything. I however installed a firewall on the new WAN link that restricted remote offices to accessing only 2 servers on our network and only on specific ports to access the services that we wanted to provide access to.

I was so pleased I did all this as one day the WAN link seemed to be going slow, so I broke out the network monitor to see what was going on to find thousands of connection attempts coming from all of our international offices. As it turns out one of the US PCs had got infected with a worm and it was spreading over the whole global network. I could smugly say that apart from the slow WAN performance we were not effected at all. Our offices ran as normal while the rest of the company lost days of productivity trying to clear up the mess. It was at that point that finally the company started to listen to my calls for better security.

Highly Sophisticated; by who's standards, Symantec? What do they know about sophisticated software? Symantecs marketing department thought they would make it sound exciting by suggesting it was created by a government agency. Pathetic effort to try and boost sales of Symantec software.

Bet it won't let you turn off crap like Games You May Like and other rubbish forced on us by facebook.

For all the naysayers out there we can not help the fact that if we want to progress we must take risks. The people involved in this project knew the risk and their work will further our understanding of space travel. This person died doing something he knew was dangerous and presumably enjoyed doing. To stop would be the worst thing as his death would have been in vain.

It is about time the world stopped hearing the rubbish spouted by religion but banning it will not make that happen, they will just see themselves as victimised. By far the best thing to do is allow free speech so that such ideas are ridiculed by the world.

This is why I won't be switching to Lightroom, there is no way I am going to rent software from Adobe. The worst thing about this is that although other packages are available it was Aperture that put price pressure on Adobe. With a major low cost competitor out of the frame we can guarantee that Adobe will increase prices and kick back and watch the money come in.

The rapid increase in processor speed is running out of steam but fortunately processors are now fast enough and cheap enough to do most things reasonably well. Now we are seeing many more low cost small computers with more integration.

Simple, RPi is a project created by Broadcom Employees.

So what HP are telling me is that they have no confidence in their products so they are not prepared to take the risks of maintaing their products. Instead they are telling us that there are so many defects in their products that they want to shift the burden of maintenance on to their customers, in doing so they no longer have to worry about the poor quality of their products costing them money. It is great for me as I now know that the next server I buy will not be HP. Stand behind your products or take a hike is what I say.

It is funny how the media reports it as a sophisticated attack with criminal masterminds as they don't want you to know that it is something that pretty much anybody with a little tech understanding could do. They are only reporting this one because they were such clever criminal masterminds that they got caught doh! Anyone with the courage to go in to a bank masquerading as in IT contractor could plug such a device into a PC. In fact I'm sure many geeks could come up with a far less obvious solution fitted internally. The problem is banks; especially in the UK are living in the steam era and think of their buildings and therefore their internal network secure. Surely staff should be required to use some sort of NFC tag or similar so that the computer can only be operated while they are sat at it and locks when they walk away.

If only people would believe the evidence then we wouldn't be lumbered with all the paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today. There are clearly enough stupid people around though to make these cons pay.

It is quite simply impossible to preserve something for ever. What ever format you use to store the information assumes that the people in the future will be able to read it. Lets for example imagine that in the event of a catastrophic event that some civilisation other than America are the ones that service. Perhaps for example it is an obscure eskimo tribe that survives and it takes them two centuries to re-colonise the world to the point where they will discover your data left in America. How will they understand the English that has been written and even if they can translate it, what meaning will it have to them, the world might be a very different place by then. language changes so fast just try reading some Olde English from the 17th Century and see how you get on. We largely have translations of old languages like Ancient Greek and Hebrew used in the Bible as there has been an evolution of the language and so it has been possible to study the way the language has changed and work backwards, but translation is not an exact science hence why there are still disagreements over the exact translation of the bible to this day, hence the essence of you message may be lost. The best we can hope for is for institutions such as archives and libraries will continue to preserve information for the future and that enough of our civilisation survives to pass the information into the future. Hoping of corse that some religious nutters don't don't destroy it all like the Christians did with the library in Alexandria because the material didn't fit with their ideals.