Widget Watch

  Rhino Linux takes an already fine Xfce desktop and blends in elements of the GNOME graphical interface to create a hybrid desktop design well worth experiencing. The combination does for me what few other new Linux distributions have done; it has me waiting very impatiently for the first non-beta release. However, since my initial interaction with this promising distro a couple of months ago, that wait has extended into the summer season. The resulting desktop retains the awesome flexibility of Xfce and adds some of the more useful conventions of GNOME with a few feature dashes based on in-house artistry. For Linux users clamoring for a touch of rolling release updates to a solid Ubuntu base, Rhino Linux checks all the usability and appearance boxes missing in other alternatives. Rhino is still a work in progress after resuming development where its predecessor — Rolling Rhino Remix — left off. That forerunner built by an otherwise nameless developer self-dubbed “http.llamaz” off...

  Share IMAGE SOURCE, VIRGIN MEDI Mr Williams is an apprentice at Virgin O2, one of around 740,400 apprentices across England. For school leavers who don't want to - or can't - go to university, apprenticeships offer an alternative route into many tech companies. Mr Williams joined Virgin Media O2 as a cyber security apprentice, a year and a half ago. Before that, he got A levels in IT and cyber security at college, and then went on to work at a different college in IT, primarily offering helpdesk support. Now, Mr Williams is responsible for setting up, maintaining and monitoring security systems at Virgin Media O2, for both network and data centre infrastructure. He's become a go-to-person if there is an problem in the Intrusion Prevention System, which monitors the network for unauthorised activities. "If there's an issue with that, they'll come to me or one of my colleagues," he says. "It's a lot of responsibility, but it's very exciting to...

  Over the past few decades, information technology jobs worked their way into the popular imagination as among the most stable, fast-rising, and lucrative ways to make a living, bolstered in the 1990s by the dot-com boom. What astronauts were in the 1960s, rock star programmers were early this century. The reality, it turns out, is a bit different when it comes to IT wages, according to new research. In all but the largest cities, wage growth in IT jobs has become relatively moderate following the dot-com boom, coming to resemble wage patterns seen in the broader STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) labor market trends. And in geographic regions where competition is fiercest for IT talent, superstar performers do not earn the same high premium they once did over their average-performing peers. In short, IT wages, while still high relative to many other occupations, have lost their “exceptional” luster. IT wage premiums today have more to do with where a job is ...