I have noticed a very interesting reaction recently to the way Apple has been throwing their weight around controlling who and what can be put in the appstore. Until a month or so ago there was a legion of companies and developers in my own circle, figuring out how they would enter the market and what they would develop, but that has changed dramatically in light of Apples series of what I consider large mistakes if not outright blunders. Pulling the storm trooper card on the guys that got the prototype phone, pulling the rug out from under Mono Touch, going to war with Adobe and also seeming to persecute all those that raise a voice in protest has put an enormous chill on most of those that I know that were looking to build applications for the iPhone and iPad. I own an iPhone and have bought an iPad so I am not a hater, just not a blind supplicant. I do not have any products launched or targeted to the AppStore (and have shelved those plans myself for the reasons many others I talk to are), so I really don't see how I can be punished for speaking my mind (Sad that I now believe that if Apple had a way of punishing me, I now fully believe they would use it).

I think this is an example of Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. If you grip power too tightly you lose it and unless the groupies really do outnumber the rest of us this is a dangerous way for Apple to do business. How can we trust developing on a platform where the rules seem to change on a whim and which is controlled by those whose friends are treated no better than enemies...

I was recently asked how to cost effectively do backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) for a 50 or so person organization.

Here is what I have found to be a pretty good way to go that won't break the bank.

For an organization this size I use Backup Assist (http://www.backupassist.com). It leverages Windows Backup and has agents for Exchange and SQL.

I then break things into three categories and treat each slightly differently.

Level 1
The things you call critical such as active email, source code, CRM, financial data, etc.
This stuff gets backed up daily and depending on my level of paranoia (how screwed we are if we lose X days) I copy it offsite either to an alternate office or if none exists (your scenario) to either a hosted server at a datacenter somewhere (max on the disk and bandwidth and min on all else which is much less than you $750 per month) or to a server connected via VPN to the company principle's house (poor man's hosted server).

Level 2
The things that change often, but just aren't level 1 such as home directories, business shares and other data.
Data in this category gets weekly backups and usually gets posted monthly to a large USB drive which gets rotated with its twin monthly. The drive with the current data is brought offsite for storage (again maybe to the company principal's house or maybe a safe deposit box). When the new drive is delivered the old one comes back to be used for the following month's backup.

Level 3
These are the unchanging files like images, email archives and stuff.
You can either burn these to optical media (if you do muliple copies with one going to the company principal's house(s) and a copy to the safety deposit box if you got one) or you can lump this onto the USB drive shuffle.

Hope this helps those who might be looking for this kind of insight.

The latest security threat as outlined here has hit over 100,000 people already and if you read through the details of how organized the attack is you will understand why it has been so successful. The problem is that while we have to protect ourselves from every threat, the bad guys only have to find one vulnerability to lay your plans to waste.

Security is a war, and the hackers are not slowing down their attacks.

It seems that everytime the government gets involved in high tech, things go wrong. Today I found out that there is a looming intervention that I think could potentially screw up one of the biggest successes in US based high tech, namely processor technology.

If you get time soon check out the petition here.

I would really like to see this kind of meddling prevented.

Lately I have been helping customers find talented developers. As the topic of many books, courses, web sites and numerous other sources (many of which I have read or used) it is a problem that I find keenly interesting.

There are of couse many, many ways to look at it, but I think I have found the single most important strength not just for technical talent. So take this as advice for your own advancement or as the thing to look for and test for when you are hiring. The key strength is to be able to accept feedback and objectively recognize it for truth when it is true and then have the strength of character to actually try to work to improve as a response.

It sounds easy, but it is not. It is also very much at odds with being an ego maniac (in other words those people can't do it). If someone passes this test then the sky is truly the limit, they will be able to improve, move up the ladders of responsiblity and will likley only be limited by the strength of their intellect.

Try it yourself sometime by asking someone for honest feedback and see if you can act on it. Repeat.