For $99 a year you can publish to the app store for a year, so you can give it to any number of people. After which the apps disappear of course. Boo.

I have owned both (and used a number of ICS devices) and feel far more comfortable in iOS. Maybe that is familiarity, but most of it is fluidity. I have to use crappy Windows and Linux environments all day. Something that feels more fluid, consistent, and integrated is most welcome when I finish work and am reunited with my mobile devices.

I actually find it works quite well (caveat: I have a 1920x1080 and 1280x1200 monitor side by side at work).. You can have two source files open side by side just fine along with other auxiliary views. Sure, 1920x1200 would be nice, but its ok.

That said, I've got a 2048x1152 monitor at home, and the extra height comes in useful from time to time, Not sure I could justify spending another 300 quid for an extra 48 pixels though.

Awesome paper on password patterns - http://www.usafa.edu/df/dfe/dfer/centers/accr/docs/schweitzer2009a.pdf

The attack boots an alternative firmware onto the device. I doubt an unsuccessful attempt lock is much use...

The iPhone. The summary even explains that... The article and video demonstrate even more. It loads alternative firmware onto the device and uses that to crack the passcode stored on the device. Most of the time is spent loading the code onto the device, not cracking the code.

I wonder how well it works with a complex iPhone passcode though (if at all?) - I confess to not watching all of the video or reading the article properly.

Sorry, I wasn't concentrating! :)

Yeah! Err. Oh yeah. Down with DC! Except the single AC supply into the building is already a single point of failure. There is no reason you can't have all the redundancy you have with AC phases / UPS / circuits, and have n redundant efficient PSUs powering m-racks, whatever works most efficiently.

Like the single, bottle-necked, AC power supply then?

The vulnerability is in the protocol, not that it is a remote GUI protocol. The fact it is a gui protocol is moot in this case - the attack allows someone (using a terminal, a gui, whatever) to send crafted packets to the RDP service (note, service) on a Windows machine that may allow them to run arbitrary code remotely, in just the same way that someone (using a terminal, a gui, whatever - see the consistency here?) to send crafted packets to XYZ service (note service) on a Linux/BSD/whatever machine that may allow them to run arbitrary code remotely.

The nice thing with this attack failed attempts supposedly result in a BSOD too :-)

Ouch. How's that going? Has your doctor been able to cure you yet? ;-)

My last employer, a UK civil service dept, sent me (and various colleagues) to Exeter University and Oxford University for data-mining / statistics / pattern recognition courses. They sent me on Oracle University courses. They sent me to conferences. They sent me on high quality developer courses hosted on the premises by skilled professionals, with other similarly minded candidates - I learnt a lot.

While Quark->InDesign training might have been offered to publishers internally, it certainly wouldn't have been offered to "technical" staff. Training was proportionate to their role.

I left because for numerous reasons - but partly because they offered 30-50% less than local market rates, and much less than working as a contractor for them. I've learnt far more since I've been in the real world too (a large part of this is because I no longer have to use the productivity sap known as "ClearCase").

In response to your last question: there are plenty of trainers offering high quality training. They just tend to offer it in highly specialised subjects at high cost.

Those generalisations work both ways: I wouldn't want most SQL developers to go near real programming languages. To be fair, I probably wouldn't want them to go near the SQL queries either, though.

You miss out the key fact that they need people with the skills that the training would provide. This means they either need to recruit them, outsource, or do a bodge job. The latter two options seem to be the preference.

Outsourcing is an attempt at managing costs which nearly always increases overall cost to the business - have a look at the John Seddon "Rethinking IT" talk for a reasoned rant about this.

Bodging is the only other option. The IT industry (in this I include IT, software development, networking) really likes bodges. It helps them manage their costs. Their managers are happy. Then it all goes wrong and costs more than it would have done to do it properly in the first place. Managing costs. Sigh.

The summary also makes the point that staff are receiving training that isn't relevant to their job. This seems like the biggest issue - waste money on fluffy business/management crap (that the managers should be doing rather than delegating down to their tech staff) rather than spending money on useful training that the staff would actually use to be more productive.

Of course, the department that came up with the idea of making the rest of the staff do the fluffy business/management crap as well as their own jobs (HR, bid centres, whatever) is doing great - they've increased their productivity, decreased their costs, and probably reduced their staff numbers. In terms of the bigger system (the entire company) this has just increased the costs for the business however. But that's fine - the targets look great!

The sooner businesses stop trying to "specialise" and "outsource" (whether that means out of the company or within it) as a means to manage costs (why else do you outsource?) the better. They should be concentrating on value, wherever that may be gained. Managing costs seems to always result in costs going upwards...