Step 1) Get contacts and send them back to C&C servers
Step 2) Spam contacts a link to the app with a faked e-mail address matching the infected users e-mail.

It seems like the outcome/risk is the same to me. It's not like the malware can actually force the users in your contact list to install the app.

In the end the safety is the same on both iOS and Andrioid. It all depends on what they allow into the market, but it's not like they have the code for these apps so no number of tests can be enough to prove that an app is trustable. Android also has the added risk of the "Other Sources" option being easy to turn on which is needed to install this particular malware, but that is no different than jailbreaking an iPhone, which is fairly common as well.

Bottom line any device that allows you to install software, from your TV to your PC is at risk when you start putting untrusted software on them, and just because Apple/Google has done some tests doesn't mean that any app should be trusted. Unless you can read (and understand) the code then compile it yourself...

Well its a good thing that the Raspberry PI comes with both of those things!

Well the really cool thing about these clouds is the API that allows your services to manipulate the servers.

Imagine a couple of app servers behind a load balancer, that are monitored by another service. This monitor service can watch response times and as traffic grows and the response times increase the monitor service can hit the API and deploy another app server. Once the app server is running the monitor service can hit the API on the load balancer and add the new node into the spray. Once traffic dwindles down you can do the opposite and spin down the extra instances saving you server resources (or money if you are on the public cloud) that can be used for other things. Basically if you build your applications to scale properly you can use the cloud to use your resources where they are actually needed.

The cloud also makes deployments easier. Lets say you have updates to apply. You can simply apply the updates to your golden image, and deploy to dev. The image has automated scripts that deploy the services on the machine for the environment. You can then test the changes in dev/test and promote the new image to prod. Instead of applying updates directly to the currently running machines just add in new instances with the new image into the load balances and then remove the old instances.

Now imagine if this was all automated. Have your sysadmin install the updates during the week and test out that everything is working, dev automatically gets redeployed every day in the morning with the new image and any new code to go with it. QA during the week and then promote your image for the auto redeploy into prod on Sunday mornings.

It seems like a lot of people are scared of the cloud, or think that its all hype, but I think that if you can architect your environment properly the cloud can be a very powerful tool.

RAID certainly isn't a backup solution, however he is making a copy of his data to put onto the RAID array (aka a backup).

LibreOffice recently added support for importing vsd files. Not sure about exporting changes, but its at least half way there. http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-5-new-features-and-fixes/

Not sure what you use, but Citrix, RDP, and Cisco VPN all work great from my Linux machine... Citrix was a pain to install due to outdated libraries, but it still works.

There are lots of extra bills included with owning a house. Most rentals cover at least some if not all utilities, and even if your rent doesn't cover heating/cooling a house typically costs a lot more per month to keep warm/cool compared to a 2 bedroom in a complex. Add in various forms of insurance, taxes, appliances, and the possibility of random huge upkeep charges (i.e. pipe in the basement bursts). When you rent the landlord has to eat all of those expenses.

Its also a lot easier to have a roommate with an apartment to cut all of your costs in half. You could of course buy the house and rent out your extra rooms to friends, but living with your landlord tends to put a strain on friendships.

The GP mentioned that they were running a number crunching application. If that application were memory intensive freeing up every little bit of ram could help. Of course GDM is fairly light and RAM is cheap. I would guess that it would take a lot of time to see any measurable difference.

Also freeing up memory means that the kernel can cache more disk IO reducing disk accesses, so if no one is logging into the console why not shut it off.

The teachers have to constantly change their textbooks because all of the students get the teachers solutions manuals and pass them around even during class on jump drives. My CSci teachers would get around this by making their own homework instead of just using what the book gave them. They typically wouldn't change editions until the book store could no longer buy the old edition, and even then they would say if you have a old edition it will still work.

Even car insurance companies are basing their rates off of credit scores now. Progressive does a soft pull each time you get an insurance quote. Geico even did a hard pull which can hurt your credit last time I did a quote through them. Although that was years ago so this may have changed.