Combine the built in firewall with Microsoft Security Essentials and keep with Windows updates and you'll generally have a secure system.

I've seen this response many times, yet I have never seen a reasonable explanation for the boycott. Do you hate Silverlight because it's Microsoft or is there something wrong with the technology that has made you stay away?

I have limited exposure to the Bing Video site, but with that limited exposure, I have had nothing but positive experiences. I've experienced no problem streaming HD content, for example. YouTube, on the other hand, struggled badly to stream 720P content through my FiOS connection running at 25 Mb/sec (both up and down).

From an architectural / security standpoint, Silverlight runs in a Sandbox, among other things, which greatly improve security (this most certainly isn't another Active X). Additionally, as a developer, I feel that C# is a better language than AS 3. I don't know any designers that have worked in Expression Blend, so I can't comment on their vantage point. I welcome their comments, however.

Exactly...it's the same thing I've seen over and over, again. I've worked on a number of projects, from commercial contracts, to government and health care projects. By far, the ones that have been the most difficult to work with are the clients that have strict bureaucracies (read government and health care). I'm sure hospitals are very similar, in this sense. It's incredibly difficult to convince streamlining a workflow with people that have become accustomed to a strict bureaucratic process. In many peoples eyes, the process is gospel: ye shall not challenge thy process. As such, when software replaces antiquated systems, they implement the same failed processes that existed before they got there.

In order for a new system to be successful, people need to learn to accept change.

You're a funny troll, and I'm going to feed you. Do you like Cheetos?

Not to say that this is a duplicate story, but am I the only one that remembers this Slashdot post from years ago? It's obviously a new patent, but is it not essentially the same patent?

Just out of curiosity, are there any modern file systems that are better at this? For example, rather than storing the entire content of a message in the database, what if sites like Facebook stored only a pointer to a file in the database and then saved the actual message content on disk? That way, the database can stay lean. Furthermore, it is my understanding (though I have no personal experience) that distributed file systems scale fairly well.

It's not that CAML and XML are beyond our understanding or ability to understand, it's that it adds undo complexity to a problem that can be solved far easier with other platforms.

Years ago (just out of high school), I developed a CMS that provided List-like functionality. The difference is that my design centered around creating database tables for each List. The columns were strongly typed and allowed for real-time calculations. SharePoint, on the other hand, stores all of the lists in a single database table as XML. The SharePoint schema is interesting in that sense, but it's so complicated that even MS failed to implement real-time calculations on data (calculated fields are calculated at the time the record is saved). Additionally, this hinders performance, greatly (list performance degrades substantially after 3-4k records, depending on schema complexity).

With the next release of SharePoint, I understand that each list will be stored in its own table. Under the covers, I'm not sure whether or not the tables will also be strongly typed --we'll have to wait and see. But at this point, SharePoint is so bad that it would require a substantial rewrite before my opinion would change.