It's not specifically named holidays like Christmas, but rather a cultural behavior to take one's vacation days during August, come hell or high water.

As somebody that sold the Motorola "book" cell phones back in the early 90's, I find it funny calling these tiny things "huge and heavy".

IETab just runs IE; if your application is bloody-minded about only allowing in IE6, then Firefox plus IETab running IE8 will still get bounced.

Agreed. A number of forensic power supplies exist, ranging from full-PC units to ones that just manage the hard drive, and can be engaged without interrupting power.

Considering the massive loss that Apple mandates the carrier eat on each unit sold, yes, they probably would prefer no direct sales.

Apple's not going to move many direct-to-consumer iPhones for the amount they charge the carriers, though. The end user is conditioned to think their subsidized price is the real price.

It doesn't provide evidence of log tampering, so no - it's not the same thing.

$5K per laptop?

What world are you living in?

Try an order of magnitude less.

When somebody says "I need my device that I carry with me at all times to connect to the company's mail server", they're saying "I want to do more job more efficiently."

Yes, and they think that's the best way - but they're also not solution architects.

However, the IT guy isn't denying things for shits and giggles. His job is to make sure the entire infrastructure stays up, secure, and available to everyone.

If he allows every Tom, Dick, and VP of Marketing to connect their new shiny to the network without doing his due diligence, who do you think is going to have his balls in a vise when that device goes insane and screws with the infrastructure? Not the VP of Marketing, that's for damn sure.

It's a balance. Everyone wants their new shiny, but they can't always have it. The IT guy wants a simple monoculture, but he can't have that.

I don't think it'll be too hard.

If you keep your passwords securely in a master storage system (IE: KeePass or the like), and keep the master password for that in a physical location that your siblings will be able to get access to in the event of your demise, then they can use that to get access to all the accounts you held.

Think along the lines of those "snap cards" that were in 1980's cold war movies. The sibs have to break it open to get the master password paper, so you know it continues to be secure. There could even be instructions on the paper along with the password.

No, no, they have to demonstrate that they're making progress towards a robot that can play football.

I suspect the AC confused "flaunt" with "flout". Not too surprising, as it's a rarely used word these days.

Speaking as a team lead for tier 2 support group, that's part of the premium service desk for managed IT outsourcing (ASA 30 seconds, 70% FTR kind of thing), this made me laugh my butt off.

Yes, we get crap-tons of calls from users about mobile devices. Tom is out of touch with "real" users, he's suffering (benefiting?) from massive selection bias here. His sample base is nowhere near representative of your average corporate IT user.

Roadmap? Why not a starchart?

Sure, and those comments are just as applicable to the mini-USB mounts. Hell, probably more applicable; the entire unit of a surface-mount USB it taller, and therefore applies more force to the solders through leverage, assuming the same insertion force.

How, exactly, can we get that cool comparison-slider, without using something like Flash or HTML5?