Clearly you aren't the target audience for those who are confused over which slash is which. I would venture to guess that most people who would be confused by slashiness have a fairly standard keyboard configuration where that pattern works, at least in the USA. OT (sorta): I can't stand it when I hear teevee or radio ads where they say "dubble-yoo dubble-yoo dubble-yoo dot stupid widget you don't want dot com BACKSLASH free thing" AGH! It just grates on my soul.

How I teach: BACK slash is near the BACKspace. Done.

I love the ribbon. It took a while to get used to it in Excel where I had memorized menu layouts, but now I can't go back. Using Excel 2003 is just painful. On any app I had not used menus in previously, the ribbon just feels natural and perfect. So few clicks to get where I want and do what I want. Plus, with ribbon customization in Office 2010, it meets my needs exactly. I'm a HUGE fan of the ribbon interface. Plus, it's touch-friendly, so it's forward thinking for the Windows-8-on-a-tablet strategy.

I agree. Anecdotally, most SysAdmins I know are well aware of this attack vector, but many developers I know still do string sanitation instead of parameterization. This is squarely in developer and QA's corners. DBAs are only involved if they are part of the code auditing process (MANY times, they are not). SysAdmins would rarely ever be involved except when they set up IPS rules because their developer colleagues can't write secure code.

If Apple was the one to demo this as the new UI on the iPad3, we would never hear the end about how innovative and awesome it is, and how nobody else can ever do what Apple does. Or some other garbage. Is for this UI as W8? Give me a break. It's amazing what people will read into things. At best (worst?), aspects of this project will end up as an app that runs on W8, but there is no way this is the main W8 desktop. Microsoft Research is always pushing the envelope. It's their job. How many times have you looked at a concept car and thought... what the hell are they thinking? It's the same thing with Microsoft Research. W8 will look like W7 will look like Vista will look like XP will look like 2000 will look like 98 will look like 95 will look like 3.1. What will be different are subtle aspects of the UI and a slightly different chrome and probably a lot more tablet friendliness.

I've been through several hosting companies and hosting solutions and have finally settled on the Virtual Private Server (VPS) option. Rather than just getting a slice of shared web space, you get an entire VM. But the best solution I've found, and the one I currently use, are Hyper-V VMs from Ultima Hosts. It is super stable and I'm very impressed with the performance. You have admin on the VM, so you can install any supporting software you need (SQL Express, etc.). USD $55 for base Hyper-V VPS, $35 for base Virtuozzo VPS. Note: YMMV with Virtuozzo. It's a different kind of virtualization platform and it has its quirks. Hyper-V, for me, has been awesome. Highly recommended.