not the coder, but the company. Or at least that's my experience. So many organizations still persist in viewing technology as a black hole of expense and yet, expect miracles to pop out of it with minimal investment. Then when code or systems go live with screwy results, the bitch fest begins that morphs into a witch hunt on "who to blame for this error that's costing us money." Rolling back to the beginning, if the company would: - Entrust those hired to do the job to do their job - Hire a TEAM to make the project effective and less costly (even if a temp hire from a external org) - Manage the business and projects therein properly (no draconian deadlines and unobtainable goals) - Invest in the proper tools to allow teamwork & quality to prosper - Require accountability and teamwork to promote employee & product development Looking at my current employer as an example, we have no reliable & functioning source control (and the developers typically code directly against live servers - no better test than a live one right?), no QA tools or test processing cycle, and no team or project management. The coders want to do the right thing, which is admirable - but they need better tools to deliver the goods. Takes money to invest on the infrastructure. Management isn't willing to go there as it requires money. It's miserable, but when I look out into the market place this is not an uncommon story. Organizations expect IT to deliver and all too often people want to take on the challenge only to realize they are effectively an army of one, ill equipped to do the right thing and forced/expected to deliver. In our environment, if coders could rely on teams equipped with decent tools, the review would be easy & effective. And our products would reach the market faster with better results... But instead, they write & review their own work.

My wife can't bear to watch the History Channel when it has any war time footage running simply because it bothers her to see people suffer or die. Accordingly, she changes the channel. Pretty simple concept and it serves her well... People that think the game is too extreme should move on and buy something else more to their limits/liking. If parents chime in and fear for the safety of their children's minds, it isn't much different. We need to realize the ills of war and making an interactive game of it is not any worse than watching the evening news or video clips depicting current events which is even easier to access than this game. Manage the content your children see as best you can and be prepared to answer questions as best you can. Burying one's head in the sand only makes the world a "safer" place by being uninformed and unrealistic while evil prospers in a wide open playground. And then there's the whole free speech debacle that I won't even go into... Ugh.

Our Barracuda gateway, in about two years of use, processed about 10 million messages. Of which just under 3.8 percent are deemed real. This is for an office of about 50 active users at any point in time. Of the messages that funnel through the 'Cuda, I get about two dozen annually that are daft enough to fool the gateway's checks. Conversely, I get no false positives. So the 'Cuda does its job well, but end users have no idea what goes on to make their mail client less encumbered and full of their personal junk. Spam blows. As does any prediction Mr. Gates may ever front...