I’m watching the following Webcast by Ed Skoudis which was hosted by Core Security Technologies:
Ed talks about the importance of being aware of your ISP filtering policies at the time of conducting a pentest, which sounds obvious but then again it’s easy to forget.
He also discusses some techniques for replacing the netcat client in Linux and Windows, and provides examples for creating reverse shells using /dev/tcp and creating port scanners both in linux/windows, among other things.
In my personal opinion, the windows port scanning options are not worth it 
he sure works around the limitations imposed by Windows’ telnet and ftp clients, and I believe he mentions them for a specific case in which you may have no other ways of performing an automated portscan.
You can leave it on and hear him speak while you do something else, won’t be a waste of time.
