I should have probably blogged about this earlier, but this has been a really busy week for me on my project. Shortly after my latest post on passwords, I had several talks with associates. Quite a few of them were ribbing about how I'm too security conscious. As if there is such a thing as too much security. Then, right on que as if to prove my point, Sarah Palin's email account got "hacked". I say that in the loosest, pop-culture sense of the word, because it really isn't a hack. A hack is someone disassembling a backbone router's operating code...

"C#, .NET, Visual Basic, FoxPro, COM." "What are Microsoft technologies that should have died by now?" It's really interesting how the development community, in light of being a community of engineers, is so enthralled and passionate about subjective analysis and fortune-telling. I recently ran into a few online conversations with some long-time friends that lead me to think back to around 2001 to 2003 - a time rife with predictions about Microsoft technologies - and how most of those predictions never quite panned out. After the J++ lawsuit debacle, Microsoft decided to take Sun head-on with a brand new (yet another) C-derived...