I had an iPhone 3G up until just recently. I mostly used it for work email/calendar to an Exchange server, Facebook, LinkedIn and some occasional browsing. The 4 update made it unusable and, while recent ones broguht it back to life a bit, I was a bit over it.

I replaced it with a BB Torch and it is a revelation - great keyboard, great screen, great build quality, very fast, great FB/LinkedIn apps, great built-in RSS app, better Exchange inter-operability (invite attendees to appointments and see their availability, deal with recurring appointments properly, etc), better battery life and an alright mobile browser.

I never thought much of the berries in the past prefering geeky toys like the WM HTC phones back in the day. I have hit the age though where I want a simple workhorse device to get me the emails and updates I want and let me reply quickly where needed then put it away. This does that well for me. Don't count RIM out...

I forgot the link - here it is:
http://premnair.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/microsoft-exchange-server-remote-wipe-on-iphone-3gs/

I am not sure that many here understand this feature. Basically it is not a selective thing whereby it only removes certain data or administrators have any choice what it wipes - it has one option and that is to wipe the entire phone including the OS. The process leaves it in a state where it will not even boot up. You have to plug it into iTunes and download/install the OS/firmware back onto it before it can even be used again. See the link below on how the process works and what is required.

Basically it comes down to this - Blackberries have always had this capability and it is part of the reason why they have been popular with businesses. You have employees wandering around with devices that may well contain confidential employee information and/or have the capability to send messages on behalf of the company. The solution was to give the employer the ability to wipe the device remotely when the employee reported it stolen or if they had to quickly terminate an employee in the field. Microsoft was told by business that in order to be competitive with BES they had to offer the same functionality and thus require it as part of the ActiveSync API. Many other vendors (Microsoft, Palm, Nokia) implement the API call to only wipe the company data and leave the phone in a usable state but Apple, for whatever reason, implemented it in a way as to toast the whole phone. As such, this has to be Apple's fault as others do it better.

I've only done it once or twice when an iPhone was missing/stolen. In one case the person found the phone 10 minutes later (after saying they had searched everywhere) and they did lose quite a bit of personal info. It also took nearly an hour to even get the phone working again (reloading the firmware). That is the chance you take with these...

So if you work for an organisation that has been drinking the VMWare Koolaid and wants to virtualize everything from their servers to their dekstops to their network firewalls/appliances how does Solaris x86 play under ESX?

The old advantage of the IBMs and the Oracles of "it is our software, our OS running on our hardware supported by our services business" is being eroded a bit by the desire to drop anything and everything into the same ESX farm...

I have been seeing a scarry trend in employers like Google trying to run the lives of their employees. It goes something like this:

You get a student out of University where the University was like their parent (provided their housing, food, rules, activities, goals to achieve, etc) and you recreate that in coporate life so they don't have to adjust to being an adult. You provide their food, their housing, their banking (through your own employee credit union), their healthcare and their activities/goals. It is almost like a cult.

In the end, it makes it difficult to distinguish your personal life and your personal space from your work and it makes it that much harder to leave that job because you'd also need to find a place to live, a new bank, a new health plan/provider and all of the rest of living in the real world as part of the process.

Because that organisation may not have much in the way of Linux knowledgefor the setup/management/programming of the HPC cluster in-house while they have a wealth of MS experience. Microsoft has created a number of programming APIs for their HPC product that can just be called in .NET to extend existing software or to create new tools where staff members are already familiar with Microsoft programming tools/methodologies.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc853440(VS.85).aspx

In short it is a Microsoft solution to the problem written for organisations that use their platform for everything else and that makes it compelling for a variety of reasons - not the least of which being interoperability with the existing infrastrucutre and managability by the existing staff.

One of the big developments of late has been in data mining of the data from your ERP system / data warehouse to answer questions about your clients/business and to find interesting patterns in your data. Couple this with the fact that buisinesses are trying to retain more and more data in a live database to make this data mining more deep/interesting and the needs for massive database servers with the power to run some crazy complex queries/reports is on the rise.

The popular example of this sort of thing in Wal-Mart who retain everything in an electronic form and can do scary things like see pictures of you based on correlating their digital security footage with your credit card purchase at a point in time at a particular register or track the differences in sales of individual products during unusual events like Hurricanes etc.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/14/2057228

Many businesses run Microsoft SQL Server as the backend for their ERP system and/or as their primary database. This would allow them to build a nice little HPC system to do the sorts of scary things with massive amounts of data that they have been wanting to do. I end with this funny cartoon on the subject.
http://onefte.com/2010/09/21/target-markets/
 

What you are talking about is ACLs. Group Policies are made up of thousands of windows and application settings that are applied to computers and users on login that configure and/or restrict their environment in a multitude of ways. See here for details - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742376.aspx

+1 This

95% of the industry is using Windows and Exchange/Outlook. All of the peers that your management will run into use them. All of the vendors that provide possible software or tools for your industry expect you to have them. Also, if you can't properly and easily manage Windows 7, with all of the great management tools and Group Policies that are available and information online and from Microsoft Press, it is a failing on your part as it is a great OS and I've had a great experience with it in a very large company (~2500 desktops).

If you do this, I can guarantee they will be sold on or want to do something and then you'll have to tell them that it can't work in your environment. They may want to hire somebody and have a hard time finding a person with the requisite Linux experience and/or will have to pay a fortune compared to the army of people with MS experience. A customer or vendor will expect to interact with them via Office 2010 documents and it won't work right. Every new employee will stare at the PC with a strange look and say "this is different from what I know." They will ask why. You'll say it was because of your decision to switch to Linux to save a pittance on licensing. They'll reply that none of their peers at other companies have done the same thing so why did we do that again? It will be your fault. Over and over again. Forever.

At the very least, you need to quantify in your business case all of the flexibility that you are taking away of any future IT decision by dumping the Microsoft OS ecosystem so everybody understands that from the beginning and can't pretend like they didn't later.

People really don't get fired for choosing Microsoft - especially on the desktop. At the end of the day it is the industry standard and "best practice" and since everybody else does it they can't point at you in the event anything goes wrong and make out like you did something crazy/stupid choosing it which makes you grossly negligent in your job.

I've been looking for a good, detailed and high def video of the interface and finally found one.

The phone is in Italian but the review is in English. It really showcases the interface quite a bit when it isn't playing a questionable soundtrack...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvRNcYyx1E

I went through a steady stream of these - some with integrated DSL some without - Linksys, DLink, Netgear etc. They all had stability and speed issues or other niggly little things that required reboots and firmware updates. Finally I broke down and bought a Cisco 857W which is a real Cisco device running IOS including DSL, Wireless, Statefull Firewall and IPSEC VPN. I was studying for my CCNA so it was a good device to learn on and was how I justified the purchase to the Mrs.

It might cost AU$450 and have a pretty masstive learning curve to configure it properly but man is it solid and a great performer. It has an uptime currently of over six months with only 2 DSL activations (ie it has only had to reconnect to my ISP once in six months) and I do quite a bit of bittorrenting via wireless with hundreds of connections and with the firewall on getting over 16MBit/sec out of my ADSL2+ link.

There is a reason that you see them or their more expensive 877 cousins provided with the business links - because the telcos know they work and are stable as hell and will result in greater uptime and fewer support calls making the cost worth it.

Cisco may be overpriced, especially with it only being 802.11g, but you also get what you pay for. I'll never go back to the SOHO kit for my home.

Just upgrade the machines from XP to 7. 7 not only includes sysprep (the tool to give you that initial setup wizard to make each PC unique as far as SIDs etc) on every machine in c:\windows\system32\sysprep but they have re-written the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) since XP so that it is really good at re-detecting hardware differences on boot. You couple that with the fact that it also now installs every driver from the install DVD on the PC (along with all other install options) it means that you can do the following:
1.) Get a machine just the way you want it
2.) Run sysprep with the generalise option
3.) Clonezilla it
4.) Install that image on any piece of equipment forever more

I have taken images this way on desktops and used them on laptops and vice versa. It seriously just has the drivers for 90% of the hardware involved and I install a driver or two here and there when I need to after the rebuild when it doesn't.

So the answer isn't go to Linux or virtualise things - it is just update to the current version of Windows.

I recently installed Fedora 12 onto my Dell Mini 10v replacing the 7 starter that was preloaded. While the OS generally feels snappier than 7 did, the default Firefox was just soo slow to launch - it literally took ~10 seconds. Per a friend's suggestion, I got Chrome and it launches instantly and just feels faster once it is open. I havn't used Firefox since.

I don't know what has happened with Firefox but the difference between it and Chrome on a netbook is night and day...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/

Just replace blades with cores...