And the danger of dropping anything from schools is that these skills are much, much easier to pick up as a child. I think I'd find it almost impossible to learn how to play an instrument now because I never did as a child. Same with sports. Most of my motor skills were picked up as a child or teenager - so I can type (even though I started on a ZX Spectrum!) and play pool to a reasonable standard. And, er, that's about it.

I'm not too proud to admit I got the reference :)

What it boils down to is whether the cloud service is more reliable than doing it in-house - which has more downtime? Can you do it better than Azure? The cost then comes into it - can you do it better for less money? The only no-brainer is the service that is both more reliable and cheaper, otherwise you're looking at tradeoffs.

For some small businesses, cloud solutions may be both cheaper and more reliable than doing it in-house, especially if the core business is not IT related.

Of course, that assumes that customers of cloud services have done a proper analysis and aren't just jumping on a bandwagon.

I assume something better than the 520 has come out at that price point then, because I've got one of those for work and it's dire.

That's a feature that appeared officially in 4.3 and disappeared again in 4.4. Yes, it can be done now, but it means rooting your device. I was comparing default functionality between Android and iOS. Obviously if you root/jailbreak then almost anything is possible.

Those limits work both ways. The sandboxing is great for security, but at the expense of flexibility.

On Android I can't have the Facebook app and refuse it access to my SMS messages. On iOS I don't have the option to give it access.

I'm not in a hurry if the look of the new gmail app is a sign of what's coming.

I'm late to this, so it probably won't be read, but I think towards the end it was possible to sync over a network. Even if there was no official way, there were open source sync tools that understood the data format, so it would've been possible.

The thing is, the Palm Pilots predate ubiquitous data networks - serial/usb tethered sync was pretty much the only viable option. They were just slow to adapt. Their first couple of phone offerings were OK, decent stabs in the pre-iPhone era, but the Palm Pre was awesome - just a little late to market. It was a great OS - to my mind better than the competition, but it sort of ended up the Phillips v2000 to the VHS vs. Betamax of Apple vs. Android.

Or "B logically follows from A. Therefore B is true if I want it to be. Unless I do really but don't want to tell you I do, or I can make a drama out of it not being true."

I'm trying not be misogynistic but sometimes it really is hard to follow the logic. Maybe it's just the one I'm seeing. I sort of assume attacking the logic of a certain action is somehow preferable to simply saying "I don't want to".

I should just accept that logic and relationships are non-overlapping magesteria.

Meh. Bad weekend.

True. I cringe if I forget a password and the password recovery actually emails me my password rather than sending me to a link to enter a new one. Not many do that now, but at least one large shared hosting provider does and if anyone should know better...

Why not have a default password and have it force a change at first logon? Ideally before the device can connect to the wider net, so there isn't a window of vulnerability to someone locking out the device as soon as it's switched on. Have a physical factory reset button on the device itself to deal with lost passwords. That doesn't require a sophisticated userbase.

Mind you, these cameras require the user to take steps within their home router config to allow external access anyway - they'll pick up an IP from the router's DHCP, but action is required on the router to allow external connections. If someone is savvy enough to configure that, they ought to be savvy enough to know to change the password.

You joke, but our weather has been getting less predictable. We had a fairly hot summer overall, but August was fairly wet and dull. September, on the other hand, was the driest on record, and October has mostly been warm. It's forecast to reach 20 degrees in London on Friday - if that was one day later, on the 1st of November, it would be challenging the record for the hottest November day recorded in the UK.

Monday and Tuesday were warm enough to sit outside on my lunch break, today it's raining and chilly, tomorrow it's back up to 19 degrees apparently.

And is it "sift"... if so, best typo ever :)

I get between two and four days from a Nexus 5, depending on usage. My take on it is that it's a smartphone only when I need it to be. Most of the time I'll use it for no more than email, sms and calls which I agree could be handled by a feature phone (although not as easily for sms and emails - the larger screen and keyboard come into play there).

The difference for me is that it has all the features when I need them - better browsing capability, gps and a good screen for maps, half decent camera (within the limitations of the form factor, obviously) and all the other stuff.

I have considered the alternative of a feature - or even dumb - phone for battery life and then taking a tablet when I need more, but the phone does it all for me at a convenient size. The battery lasts long enough, and I know the trade off when I use the features that make it "smart".

I'm about 80% deaf in one ear, so instead of higher frequencies I get permanent tinnitus, which is basically exactly that - it varies according to things like heart rate. It's like listening to an old modem, or something like a ZX Spectrum loading a game. 24x7. It came on as an adult, so it took a bit of getting used to - some people can't cope and suffer depression or even become suicidal over it.