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Total News: 218

Economic Train Wreck Ahead

The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook published to...

How to Reform Social Security To the Chilean Model

Chilean Models Here's how they do social security in Chile according to Cato.org. Workers are given the choice as to whether they would like to stay in a pay-as-you-go plan (like we have in the U.S...

The Minimum Wage Myth

In a free market, demand is a function of price: the higher the price, the lower the demand. These rules apply equally to both prices and wages. When employers evaluate their labor and capital need...

The FED's Secret Bailout of Europe

America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of European banks. This operation is going pretty much unnoticed here in America. The Fed is using what is called a "tem...

Payroll Tax Cut Extension And You

Why would Democrats want the two-month cut instead of the yearlong cut? Because they didnt want to give the issue up as a political boon. It allowed them to criticize Republicans for hypocritically op...

What is a Job Creator?

There is considerable political noise surrounding the idea of job creation. The right wing uses the job creator argument to push the position that increasing taxes on the rich will burden job creators...

Liberal FUD Department Redux

This NYT Graphic keeps coming up repeatedly (it's been so widely reproduced, many don't even realize that the Times is the original source!) It's really emblematic of the mindless leftist FUD about ...

How to Really Analyze US Employment Numbers

Unemployment Rate vs Total Employment Yes - the unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November, but it also masks a startling shift in the job market. The Labor Department said Friday that emplo...

We're All Fascists Now

A couple of years ago, Newsweek had a cover story, We Are All Socialists Now.  The basic themes of huge stimulus package, ObamaCare, and government overregulation leading once-capitalist America ...

Those Obstructionist Republicans

Republicans stink. This, in a nutshell, is what Democrats are running on in 2012. Republicans are mean. They're obstructionists. They don't care about the elderly and they don't care about the middl...

My Response to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters

This is a great letter, and it is real. To All My Valued Employees, There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you kn...

Debunking Liberal Economic Myths

Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones, proposes 5 Myths about some common economic issues that he claims arent true.  Liberal writers often suffer from a kind of confirmation bias when making such ...

Developers, Start Your Endorphins! Petes Nuclear Bomb Salsa

Endorphins are among the brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters, which function to transmit electrical signals within the nervous system. At least 20 types of endorphins have been demonstrated in ...

New Silverlight Article

I posted a new article on Silverlight at eggheadcafe.com. This covers the use of Rene Schultes WriteableBitmapEx offering to create Hopalong Fractals. ...

Why GUIDs aren't so Good as SQL Server Primary Key

My informal poll of fellow developers reveals that by about a 4 to 1 margin, we are all using UNIQUEIDENTIFIER primary keys. Very Bad Idea. The GUID (UNIQUEIDENTIFIER) datatype is a wide column (16 b...

MongoDb NoRM MonoDevelop on Ubuntu Linux

  This weekend I spent some time setting up Ubuntu Desktop on my Oracle VirtualBox. I installed MonoDevelop, and MongoDb. I added an ASP.NET Web Application that uses the NoRM C# Driver, and af...

LINQ THINK

The more I use LINQ, the more I run into legacy code that can easily be improved. The nice thing about LINQ is that it can make your code more elegant and easier to understand, as well as, in most cas...

Dont Make Other Developers Test Your Code

Yep! I run into this all the time. Developers make changes and enhancements, and they think everything is fantastic. They push it up into source control, and go home for the night. But Its not fant...

Lean up Windows 7 with Msconfig

  Most people are blissfully unaware of all the absolute JUNK that gets run when Windows starts up, mostly due to registry entries installed by various programs, drivers, and what not. Much of...

Install Windows Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint 2010 on a VM

For a couple of months now Ive tried to install Server 2008 R2 (which only comes in the 64-bit flavor) and Sharepoint2010 on a virtual machine so that I could conveniently study Sharepoint without all...

Less is More Redux

In my short happy life as a developer, Ive run into all kinds of development efforts that include frameworks, libraries, web sites, and much more.The one thing that stands out as an irritant to me is ...

Upgrading to WCF RIA Services v1.0 and Ria Services Toolkit

The kind folks on the Silverlight and RIA Services teams have come out with v1.0 of RIA Services. However, the instructions they provide can be a bit misleading as to What does what.Heres the skinny:1...

Internet Explorer: Flash 1 item remaining- Movie Not Loaded

A couple of days ago I started having an issue where if Id go to Youtube.com to look at a Flash movie, Id get to see only a black screen in the movie area. A right click on the movie and Id see Movie...

Fix Uninstall Issues with Visual Studio Versions

Have you ever installed a BETA or CTP or an RC build of some Microsoft product such as Visual Studio, and then been faced with the unhappy situation that it could not find the installation sources whe...

Session and Cache are By Reference

Recently a colleague remarked that if he got a List of some type out of the ASP.NET Cache, and changed an item, the Cache item would also change.That is correct. Session (InProc) , Cache and Applicati...

String.Empty vs vs String. IsNullOrEmpty

I was reading up on this recently and a couple of interesting points came to light: myString = creates a new instance of type String. myString = String.Empty does not. The key item is doing compa...

Crunch Time for Visual Studio 2010

Just a note to beta testers, MVPs and others who are exercising Visual Studio 2010 RC: This is the time to get your stuff in to Microsoft Connect (or other appropriate venues) as quickly as possible...

SQL Server 2008 64-Bit vs 32-Bit Performance

Ive got an x64 machine I do most of my hard core development work on, that Im very happy with. Im running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and have had few problems. The box only has 4GB RAM, but I almost never...

ASP.NET MVC Do I Really Need It?

As a professional software developer, particularly of the Microsoft flavor, you get bombarded with new stuff. If you do not instill in yourself a certain discipline, you are sure to be brought down by...

SQL Server 2008 Fix: SP1 Install Failure

  For quite a while I could not install SQL Server 2008 SP1, as it reported a failed shared component installation in this case, Books Online. Problem is I could not find the source MSI to fix ...

Dont Break the Interface

Recently while contributing to a test suite that covers some 250 C# DAOs (Data Access Objects) I discovered a couple of issues:1) There was an implementation of PrimaryKey which is defined as a nullab...

The big Silverlight 4 Question

You get all this honking and hoopla and what not, but nobody seems to think about the big Silverlight 4 Question:Can I install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Silverlight 4 Tools, WCF RIA Services, The Nov...

Why the FED has turned the banking system into the Living Dead

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have denoted that the recession is over. Now that the DJIA has broken the 10,000 mark, we can expect to  have full confid...

When Unit Tests arent Enough

Unit Testing of your work is generally accepted as the mark of a professional developer. However have you thought about what happens when you make a boo-boo on the tests you create? You guessed it ...

Doomed to Repeat History?

William ONeil, in his excellent book How to Make Money in Stocks, has a chapter on the media, news, and market psychology. In this section he has taken the charts of the Dow Industrials from 1921 thro...

On Less is More

Thelonius Monk once said Wrong is Right. I say, Less is More. All too often we as software developers do data collection of one sort or another, often storing results in a database table or tables, an...

Acer Aspire One Windows 7 Restore

Recently my Acer Aspire One Netbook with Windows 7 on it crapped out. I have no idea why, but if youve got a netbook, then you know that to reconstitute everything you need to do it from a bootable US...

Acer Aspire One Netbook Restore Windows 7

Recently my Acer Aspire One Netbook with Windows 7 on it crapped out. I have no idea why, but if youve got a netbook, then you know that to reconstitute everything you need to do it from a bootable US...

Online Plagiarism and what you can do about it

Lazy, unethical people who republish RSS feeds and similar content and surround it with advertising for profit abound. In general this is an annoyance, but you probably cant do much about it.  Ho...

Wheres Reaganomics?

Washington has attacked the current economic downturn with Keynesian economics - the theory that you fight an economic downturn by pumping money into the economy to "encourage demand" and &q...

Windows Keyboard / Explorer Shortcuts

  Windows system key combinations F1: Help CTRL+ESC: Open Start menu ALT+TAB: Switch between open programs ALT+F4: Quit program SHIFT+DELETE: Delete item permanently Wind...

The Role of Government

In my Too Big to Fail? post, I talked a little about the unprecedented  monetary expansion we have entered. Perhaps its time to expand on this topic. In 2007, the federal deficit was 1.2 percent ...

Too Big to Fail?

The argument is familiar. Just like AIG and General Motors, California says it is too big to fail. And once again, I say: LET IT FAIL. Lets stop the bullshit, printing fake money so we can try ...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and Install Fix

Recently Microsoft made Visual Studio 2010 available to MSDN Universal subscribers, and will shortly make it available to the general public as well. Previously this had only been available as a close...

A Tour Through Microsoft Silverlight 3 RIA Services

The main focus of Silverlight RIA Services is to provide an easy-to-use infrastructure for service-enabling Silverlight Applications, sharing of common entity classes, and performing bi-directional wo...

PDF Portable Document Format, my butt!

I was trying to print out the Silverlight riaservicesoverviewpreview.pdf and, like so many other PDF files, it came out with missing letters that were blank and basically, thanks to Adobes bullshit ma...

Hacking and the Least Privileges Doctrine

Recently we had a forum moderator (which people we pay a nice monthly stipend) get into some issues with drug abuse problems. This individual had to be checked into a rehab clinic to get himself strai...

IIS 6.0, Compression, and Classic ASP Pages

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.   - Laurence J. Peter Well this one is a hoot. Enabled HTTP compression in IIS 6.0, and suddenly Classic ASP pages (yes, we s...

The Twittification of Live Messenger

Ive noticed this new Groups thing in the latest version of Windows Live Messenger, and it seems that the kind folks at Microsoft have really  started to get it about what Social is. If you enab...

Some facts about Silverlight 3 and where its going

Being an expert means having credibility. It doesnt matter how much you know if people dont trust your answers. Brent Ozar Silverlight 3 was first announced at the IBC 2008 show in Amsterdam on Sept...

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