I once lost a contract to an East Indian firm, underbid by about 30% (cheaper leabour, less insurance issues, etc.). At the time I remember feeling like hell, because I...

My only surprise when reading today's editorial is that anyone would doubt employees are the main security risk. Even before hackers started to steal identities, etc., the main way to...

Maybe its a feature to keep the job interesting.

I have a similar exciting and apparently inexplicable feature in Visual Studio 2005. When I open the Help system and it crashes...

The short answer: We use a mix of automated test scripts and manual scripts, plus what I call the "real user experience" approach to testing. (The latter consists of clicking all...

Avoiding any defence of Microsoft here, because a lot of the XP problems were oversights that probably would have been caught before release if they had a different focus then,...

I stand by my skewed belief that the value of data decreases exponentially as the scale of the data increases. Anything that increases at 4PB a month must be collecting...

The Internet seems to breed ignorance. Or, maybe it's just that ignorant people feel less inclined to bite their tongue when they think their are no consequnces.

But imagine if everyone...

Defining code quality is never simple.

I've worked for clients who follow strict guidelines for quality, implementing a series of required variable forms, structures of choice, etc. The end result is...

In twenty-plus years I avoided a project failure (where I was actually in a position to affect the outcome), but currently I am wrangling a project that seems like it might just...

Another mark fo a great leader is an ability to constantly learn, and an acceptance to learn from anyone. Only those managers seem able to resist the impetus to slip...

I prefer to write any and all data access code by hand, which extends from a bad experience I once had entering a shop where no one was sure how...

Not 100% on-topic, but related...I actually know people who can't keep Windows XP running reliably for more than a few weeks. Of course, they tend to have a thousand awful,...