I seem to recall an Apple Store employee managing to connect using BacktoMac to her stolen Mac and remotely taking a picture. Only gotcha was the count down to the pic being taken appearing on the screen in front of the thief. She did recognise the guy as someone who came with friends to a party at her house, and duly got her machine back. At the time, needed MobileMe to work...

My wife is a Lush customer, ordered online in the time period described and did have 2 £15 charges (total just north of $40) for prepay mobile phone credit debited from her account. She spotted that virtually immediately; however, her bank just wanted to snail mail post a claim form to her to get her money back, and O2 (the mobile phone company providing the goods from the fraudulent two transactions) said it was an industry agreed procedure to wait until the bank got in touch with them before they'd do anything. So, bottom line, the thieves have 5 days to use the credit they stole, when O2 could have invalided the transaction immediately and/or aimed some trace to the person using that mobile handset. About as much use as a cow on stilts. We need a Bill Bratton methinks. Follow the money, get to the source.

I was at Cloudforce 2010 London when Marc Benioff said this. You can hear the comment yourself - videos of the presentations are on YouTube. It was a comment that he could see some of the interactions solving customer problems, and he could see some patterns at who were consistently the people who sorted customer problems out well and often. No sophisticated analytics. No big brother. Just a CEO who gained the ability to know what is really happening in his company and who's doing good work. Kudos to him. He and his company seem to be doing a spectularly good job, and Chatter (a sorta Facebook UI for business use) will keep it ahead. Ian W.

That's what Ray Ozzie said. The future is ubiquitous fast connectivity to any device, and speed is king. You don't want to wake up at night, think "must remember to buy some milk" and have to wait for the current generation of smart phones to boot up before you can tap that into your tablet. If Google do it right, client devices will be another market like pocket calculators in the '70's. The value is in the network, and the client devices will lower in cost relentlessly.

It's called HP iPrint. Works fine printing stuff from an iPod Touch to the little Deskjet D1470 hooked up on my iMac at home, so don't think the iPad will have much trouble...

annoyed here in the UK. All the announcements said end of April and they even went as far as blacking out vacation for Apple Store employees here for the weekend around April 23rd. The new pre-order date is May 10th with deliveries at the end of May, when i'll be in San Francisco anyways. At least we should have a firmware update after all the beta users in the USA have helped debug the WiFi issues for us. Ian W.

FWIW, the Queen has the Executive Power. She can choose to dissolve Parliament anytime she chooses. If a Primeminister wants it dissolved, then it's a quick trip down the Mall to ask her permission first.

I know my wife would happily cough up $7 or so per episode just to watch the latest edition of Nip/Tuck or Californication every week. She'd be quite happy if something like Hulu or Amazon allowed her to post her money to the content providers in exchange for this, rather than just buying the DVD set (at the end of each series screening) every time we visit the USA. Wholesale blocking doesn't do the industry any favours.

Didn't Techcrunch allege that Intel charge more for their chip if it's destined to a machine with a 12" laptop rather than A 10" one? Or that it was because the lowest spec Windows 7 distribution only works with screens up to 10" in size, so a 12" one, for cost reasons, would effectively be Linux only??

My mother died of Motor Neurone Disease at age 42. In the end, all the hospital would do was to "run tests" on her. Those appear to be the same words being used on the news bulletins in the UK atm.

I wouldn't wish this condition on my worst enemy.

Ian W.

Red Hat Directory Services over tens of thousands of users... so if you the pay-for-support option, you go to Red Hat, for the bleeding edge, "no paid support but tell us about or contribute bug fixes", go for the Fedora option.

One of my large bank customers has both Windows and UNIX (moving to Linux) active directories, with software from a UK company called Fortefi that syncs changes between the two as soon as either is updated. See http://www.fortefi.com/products/account-provisioning/index.shtml

Ian W.

I recall Scott Oki (International VP of Microsoft at the time) keying meeting notes into one of these things in May 1983 - around the same time Bill Gates was demo'ing a thing called Windows on a Compaq Plus sewing machine to us. Could still use one of these things today... Ian W.