eh depends on the vulnerability, and it's not a security firm cause they just lost access to MS detail information. Microsoft gives real / honest security firms added details / access to some of their underlying items, to try and ward off some of this stuff to begin with. When you bite the hand that feeds you, it stops feeding you. Not to mention exploits for sale have to be super deeply rooted or they rarely go anywhere, problem is exploits only work if the developer has no idea they are there. Once made publically aware you end the value of the exploit. Not to mention add so much risk one of Microsofts investigation teams which I hear are better than the CIA and FBI combined, will end up tracking you down, and sending you off to jail for long time. So... while it is probably a legit exploit that could of been a problem by taking the direction they did, it instantly lost all its possible value.

I tried the standing desk for about a month. Then had a break moved office, etc for about a month or so. Finally got one in at work, and been using it for about 2 months now. Granted I've been on a decent diet around 1800 calories a day, nothing hot but am keeping tabs on it. So far down from 220 lbs to about 200. I don't do any workouts outside of work. maybe cause work is a work out now lol. I need to do sit ups though, keep the extra skin toning up as I go. So it's not a huge instant OMG but it does do what it says it does. You do burn calories, and you do feel like you got a work out at end of day, but during the day you really don't notice it that much. There are a few cheap "laptop" style mounts that fit 99% of treadmills you can try that are usually much cheaper than the full deal, if you want to try it out. I talked them into a full sized unit though cause I code and need dual monitors etc. Overall though I feel much better and don't have that mid / afternoon sleepy daze. Which has helped keep me pushing through code faster. Which helps justify the costs some. But boss still comes by and says, we could of just bought you a coffee maker for your office for a fraction of the cost. I remind him while true, I hate coffee so that would of needed to been a fountain drink machine with lots of mtn dew instead. And my desk is cheaper than that. lol

Standing desk are starting to show signs where they can be bad for your knees, often people don't stand properly, so that creates problems, also most people have mal-aligned backs from decades of chair riding, so that doesn't help either. The first few weeks are also hell. Sorta like the first time you started working retail as a kid if you ever did, legs ack and you hurt, but burn through the pain for a week or so and it's second nature and you burn about 2-3x the calories just standing over sitting. For the treadmill desks they are better for your knees as they create motion, and that prevents compression and fluid build up around the knees. I have tried both, mostly at another company on a test run to say. It takes a bit of time to get use to typing and using a mouse while your body is moving but you get use to it. You will burn quite a lot of calories as well. If you trim your intake some you can get fit in a hurry. Problem is if you get one everyone else wants one cause it's cool. 90% will try it and hate it, so see if you can talk them into getting one and then putting it up as a "trial" / demo location. Let people test it out. But.... depends on where you work, most aren't designed for large bodied people, most aren't designed for the guy wanting to sprint walk against the motor, etc. So there is some learning on how to properly use the thing, without messing it up.

Eh depends on what I am doing, if it's just general screw around with some CSS stuff or check a value then yeah chrome, a bit faster. When I am drilling into sub arrays in my javascript to yank out / manipulate values, while cross referencing them to my back end values, IE9 a bit nicer. Also I use IE9 along with Visual Studio a bunch as it provides much greater detail than firebug and chrome do. Yes it's all about product tie in but hey it's superior cause of it, and doesn't cost me anything else. Granted I'm a .net programmer so it makes more sense to use debuggers built to handle the MS stack in more detail. So call it bias to some degree, but overall chrome (which I use very often for its fast debugger) does fail short on a bunch of things that IE9 debugger does wonderfully.

if all you going to do is simple in and out data moving / shuffling, javascript not all that bad, pop in some jquery and off you go. When you are creating that business application that is going to run on a windows machine anyways, requires file storage (real storage not the new web stuff), and needs to interface with Microsoft word to give the user a true text editor in their web application. Then yeah javascript not going to do you any favors. I feel your pain though, one of our vendors uses javascript and html5, as they transition their systems over, which is wonderful runs every where. They were so excited, till I spent 1 afternoon reverse engineering their code some, and sent a bunch of post commands, overloaded the database, and shut down the webservice. Oh and data mining that baby was pretty easy as well. After that they have spent 4 weeks trying to get the service locked down to the appropriate users, which is becoming a pain cause they don't have a security layer, so they had to build that in, and I still hacked it. Sorry but when it comes to sensitive business data, can't be playing around in javascript without knowing exactly what your doing and how to lock it down tight. nothing impossible or even terribly difficult to do, but....... 95% of the javascript is the way to go user group forgets to even care about that type of stuff, they look for the new jquery api released by some random person and go awesome, lets use it. Also while jquery is decently safe, I have found tons of free javascript on the web that pass data to lots of random locations. For example had a simple table sorta like jgrids. Was really well done, got to digging in the code it passed the json data from the get it received to a 3rd party URL for a post. So yes my table was forwarding all data collected from my servers to another server. It was a big pain to find as it was just 5 lines of code, buried deep in minimized javascript. But overall it really really depends on what the target audience is. I always build on the .net stack, and mix in javascript, silverlight, webforms, as needed. I never choose a single code to go with. I mix and match and build fail over. I get all the power of the .net stack, and code behind, have the "client side flexibility" of javascript, the graphics power and hardware integration of silverlight. Sure my customers complain a feature or such doesn't work on their phones as well as it does on their desktop. We reply what the hell you expect? no not really, but it's what we want to put.

It's just the standard window snapping that comes with aero. basically hang an application off the screen, then click and mouse drag near the edge and window's sends it back to the display area with its edge at the monitor. Can get same thing with window+left or right. window+Up for maximize, window+down for minimize, and the grand daddy thank you MS gift. window+shift+left or right to move application to different monitor in dual/triple monitor setups. But that is a bit different from what is described, but it's the same effect, mainly when you try to drag an application off the screen and the mouse hits the edge of the monitor it tries to ask if you want to see it half screen aligned on edge.

If you go full on javascript, local storage, and html5 for a full application then yes, you have failed, should be banned from keyboards and maybe even old yellered. Unless.... you sold 10 million copies of the application before someone caught on and the only downside is people get to unlock all levels. You do bring a valid point though while an average developer knows the dangers, as people look for cheaper, quicker ways to turn a buck HTML5 and javascript will start to replace tried and trued technologies. HTML5 opens a wondeful world of being able to do things in the browser much easier, but it has it's security and privacy issues. Not to mention as you point out steal ability. Had a friend write a wonderful web application, using html5, jquery, and jq-grid. When done I copied it down used find and replace and about 10 minutes later had "my version" up and running no problem. He was a little upset that I could steal his work so quickly. So no silverlight, WPF, and .net aren't going anywhere, they just getting some new tool sets to help them deliver a better final result with less "html hacking required" Not to mention they provide things html5 can't and won't provide for years to come. As far as your concern I worry mostly about bad programmers using a copy and paste method without understanding it and causing their customer's lots of grief doesn't take much to hack into local storage of html5, so it's use should really be eh a better replacement for cookies? To store things like site preferences, etc. It shouldn't be used for much else just too risky.

And latin has been around for eons, but most of the world speaks American English which is one of the newest languages. So....

Eh depends on the scale and scope of the project. If its a large project and has a bunch of complexities to it. Then I split the code, if its a table view of some data, or a basic IO database project then I'll "cheat" with MVC and go that route. Really just depends.

Have to say I have stuck with 3 layer programming for a long time and it does its job, of late with Linq and other abstraction layers that "sit off to the side" I find myself using 2 layers, technically its 3 layers, but my data layer is starting to merge at times with my business logic layer. Now the advantage you say? Oh lets see, this past weekend, I took 3 win form apps, altered the front UI's and put them on the Iphone via mono, did the same for android. As another example it was a life saver when a program I was writing needed to accept inputs from oracle, xml, or sql. I didn't have to do anything but build that bottom data layer out for each type. Rest of the code remained untouched. Now I do agree that a bunch of development teams start breaking things down way to much. I call them stick layers. It's when the developers want each layer to contain just a few uses, then if its too wide aka too many uses for a single layer it must mean its time for another layer. It's really ok for your business logic layer to be fat and plump with goodness. You don't have to have it split into 10 different layers. It's a fine line on when and what is the best OOP option and what layering or pattern you want to use. They all have pluses and minuses, it's knowing which one works best for the goal at hand that people fail on.

You may wonder why this site is offline, if you are reading the source then you are most probably a web developer that has been paid to change this. I put this here as the company in question broke our contract and left payments outstanding, as a last resort I put their site offline, what else could I do. Make sure you are paid up front, even if you have a contract, they aint worth shit. That is the basic comment at the bottom of the source code. It's super funny and I have had to do similar things. Once company had me build a huge database driven site with customer preferences stored in the database etc. Was a great site, users could log in choose a template, make color changes etc, then save it and be good to go. The company wanted it stored in the database so it would remain the same no matter what machine the user used. Well two things they forgot 1, I was the database host, and 2 they forgot to send the big check. I got some up front money etc, but the main part of the work wasn't paid for. They pulled me as the web host but left my database tied to the site. about 30k users had setup their templates etc. I guess they were hoping for me to forget about them using my database. Being kind and such, I let them continue to use my database, but just cause I could I setup random generators for various template fields in the database. One day suzzies template would be blue back ground white text, the next green back ground yellow text. Was hilarious to see the feedback the company got. Once again being my database and the feedback system being tied to it. I got to see the carnage. About 2 months of people complaining the site was broken, and things weren't working etc. I got a phone call, asking if I had any idea why the site would just stop working. I said no idea did they check the database? The phone hung up. I laughed a bunch, and the next day I got a phone call again, asking about where the database was. I told them it was still on my servers, and they put two and two together at that point, and asked if something had changed with the database. I said yeap, I use it as a test server for sql code now. It was at that point they had the guts to ask me to provide them with a copy of the database for free so they could host it with their new host. I said sure not a problem, just go to my google pay account and buy a copy of the database. I had setup an item in my store, named StupidPeople's database backup. I said once payment had cleared they would have the disk mailed to them. The payment was what t

I have to double up on the .net, I've done both, and what I keep finding is .net keeps improving at blazing speeds, so darn fast I can't keep up and I read and study it like a mofo. REally do they every unchain Scott and his team from their desks? Java seems to be the same language it was 10 years ago as it is today. Yes there are differences and improvements, but they are all community driven on values of open source, which in lamen turns, sometimes buggy and always way behind current technology. The thing I enjoy most about .net is anytime there is a task or a "feature" I find myself constantly writing custom code to do, it is usually about 1 year, before microsoft has an update or new release of .net that magically does all that custom writing for me and turns my job into drag and drop programming. It's not that I don't know how to do it, I just don't want to spend the time doing it. 5 mouse clicks for 160 lines of code is a heck of a time saver. Not to mention everything Microsoft now is built off the .net platform just about, you just use a different client language for presentation. The whole your stuck on microsoft stack is pointless as well, outside of the server technology. For front end, you build a html5 page that uses javascript to call your .net code on the server if you absolutely have to. Not always a solution, but as of to date there isn't a true cross platform development language that exists when you think about it. Java really only works when you have the "plug-in" running on your machine. They just have the plug-in written to run on most machine types. So long story short, pick what you enjoy, pick what gets you a job, and pick what is required of you, but if given a choice learn to enjoy the easy life of .net I mean takes me like 10 minutes to create a database, a web page with full account management (create,edit,delete,recover), a handful of forms, and reports to go with the forms. And I'm not lying, on the time. I use the demonstration to show my boss why we remain on the windows stack.

I put a 3rd vote in for XNA there are so many how to videos, and such its easy to pick up and learn, heck for about 60 bucks you can grab a book at the store to walk you through about 3 games and get you a hands up on it. Depending on your flavor you can use XNA for the computer, for xbox 360 and a dumbed down version for Windows 7 phone. Key thing is its the same concept / language just different amounts of code libraries you have access to. Also for those tech people that don't read much WP7 coming to Verizon early next year, possibly as early as late Jan / Early Feb. Another possible option I have started picking up is Silverlight games, mainly for the cross platform option, and the web based hosting options. Same thing watch about 10 videos for about 1-2 hours worth of time and you can create everything from tetris to othello, from there you can start making your way into more compelling games. If you fall in love with it, there are a few physics and 3d code libraries available that will take your game to the next level. Heck with silverlight you can create basic games without writing a real line of code, if your tricky / use behaviors well. Behaviors are reactions that objects preform when basic interaction happens. IE on mouse enter do this, etc. There are a few other good options around as well, if your looking for a good drag and drop option there are a few good game engines as posted above as well.

Worse I had to deal with was single letters that weren't related. for example Table names A_EmployeeInformation, B_EmployeePay, A_EmployeeSpouseInfo, C_PayHistory I asked the database guy um why the letters, he said it grouped them by function and I should know that being a DBA for 5 years, and then questioned if I knew anything about Database design. It was at that moment I had fears over the database, and I was right, cause then we started seeing AA, and BB for tables that were reference tables, and my favorites were the ABC tables reference table used by A, B, C tables. Was so glad when I was removed from that program for a bigger profile one.

Bingo, this is the biggest issue with flash / silverlight. Search engines just ignore the content presented in the flash / silverlight objects. Really annoying when trying to SEO. Right now the best option is to build html, and use object tags to run your various flash animations, and videos. Since actionscript ties into php / asp.net really well you can pass parameters call methods, and just about anything you want to do to the back end server, or just use the actionscript itself to do simple to medium tasks. Not to kick the bucket but you might want to look into silverlight if your doing a video intensive site, and your webserver supports IIS7+. Smooth streaming with Silverlight videos, really helps improve end user experience. Also silverlights built in privacy options are much much stronger than flash's as far as preventing copying of material. The main dislike I have with html5 is it's 100% insecure, you put it there the whole world knows about it. Think about this, all html5 video tags will quickly be indexed by google for their "video" search, and the whole world will know about every video posted on the web. Eh not a big deal right? well till a company training video ends up going viral cause of something stupid and costing the company tons of money in bandwidth charges, where as the video wouldn't been found by anyone outside of the company's clients viewable via a log in only option. Now you can code javascript to check for this or that log in status, and you can security setup your servers to only allow role based / logged in users to pull the video, but you still have to have a back end server to check against, server side coding, and such. So either you going to spend hours and hours coding security work arounds into your html5, or your going to be faced with Google causing your server to be spammable. Heck think about a simple script that runs google queries, finds the videos, and then opens and runs them all day long. Wouldn't take much time before things got slow on internet. I know cause we had a site in html5, public facing and someone sent out spam to all of his friends on facebook, to view this video. We usually had about 10 hits a month on the video. Next month we had 8,000 hits. Was a bandwidth nightmare for us to deal with. But to original question now my html5 security issue rant is getting long. If you build pure flash site forget any solid indexing with search engines, you can get some but not much. If you build half html and half flash, things will be pretty and you still get inde

The main problem with php and the reason you see bad database design associated with it is the "ad-hoc" nature of it. You want to do some feature / function no problem just slap it randomly anywhere in the code, and I mean anywhere really annoying in PHP. Oh and just throw something in the database randomly as well to store it. no problem, usually just append a column to the current table. Ok done, you can now store sub category into the database. problem solved. Oh wait sub categories need to be user editable. But only admin, now things start failing cause they just hard coded the values at the time. The database wasn't rationally built to handle it, and now you either rewrite the database breaking code all over or try to dynamically write the list. It's the do it at any time and it works method of PHP that is a problem. I have seen horrors of spagetti code in PHP. At least with .net there is a set struture, and while the developer has many options interfaces, classes, methods, etc its structured to the point I just click goto code and it can find it, and the debugger provides valid information. LOL VB6 is what caused people to dislike VB. A super easy language to learn / use that got the job done. Just not done right, and had no thoughts of being upgradeable / expandable. VB.net is no where the same language as VB6 just got screwed by same "last name" like how your cousin is a redneck, and people wonder if all your family is cause of same last name. Granted seems MS and .net have started to force vb.net out of existance by providing C# with more features and functions. VB.net programming is where I started, and while I have left it for C# I could go back to it and be ok, well I would have to turn off the semi-colon key and forget what brackets mean, but I would survive. Programming is an art, everyone can finger paint (PHP/VB) but not every can oil paint(.net c++, etc). Does that mean someone can't make a perfect piece of art with finger paint? No they can, it just means on average finger painting will look like crap. Same situation with programming.

Microsoft is shooting hard to recapture the fledgling coders, those that are in the start-up realm. Instead of the full ball and chain enterprise. Give the kiddies free, powerful, easy to use tools that are built on the Microsoft .Net stack, and what do you get in the return? ASP.net developers to push your product lines farther. Right now the push is for everything to go free open-source and MS is trying to trump that movement with webmatrix. Simple easy to use language built on the .Net stack that gives you a free file based database aka MS's version of MySQL, that is easy to code against. The key part is at any time you want though you can import a SQL CE4 database into a full fledged SQL instance and just keep trucking, since your razor code is pretty much built to support the calls it becomes easy to transition that start up company to a full enterprise if needed. However it is not the direction the web is heading. It is heading in the lines of blogs and simple web applications that are focus / task oriented, over full fledged web applications, Razor is the perfect fit for MS to offer what php and the open source community is / are doing. Also even though I have a full line of .Net history and applications under my belt I tested it out and well have to say its super fast to build quick light weight websites. Not cause the site build out is difficult, but the back-end configuration can just about in most cases be 100% automated for you. So to recap no real code beyond some .net script style lines in the html for database access, locally stored database, and super simple deploy options. It fits really well into taking care of the tasks I face everyday, create a 4-6 page website that has a customer contact / feedback form. I can throw that sucker up on my virtual server in about 20 minutes and walk away. Collect the pay check and enjoy not having to worry if my SQL server is stressed out over the fact I have 600 websites running against it, or the worry that someone will try and hack it with sql injection etc, no user accounts to worry about and little worry if I need to move the website to a different server later on. Granted my file IO might be my next worry but eh I won't lose sleep over it.