Oh, how we lament the lack of savvy users in the IT industry! Everyone who has been in IT for a while has a story about users, bad users, dumb users, arrogant users, users with bad smells, and users who sleep through meetings and drool on their keyboard. We’ve all heard about the user who used the CD tray as a cup holder and the call to tech support about why the unplugged computer wouldn’t work. And yeah, there are some users that probably shouldn’t even be allowed to touch a computer. There are...

"Never having been able to succeed in the world, they took revenge by speaking ill of it." -Voltaire I've got a new term for people who flock to sites like Digg, but don't really comment on the content of submitted stories or headlines. Instead, they comment on the post itself, complaining about duplicate submissions or wording. I call these people Diggnats - (pronounced 'Dig - natz') because that's the impression I get- little whiny flies buzzing around and offering nothing substantive. It's not...

Since the proliferation of client-server architecture, enterprise developers have generally learned to develop in a specific language for application code and another for database manipulation. Application code might be Java, C#, VB, C++, PHP and so on, but for databases it’s pretty much a flavor of SQL. I’ve written in three flavors of SQL: Oracle, MSSQL and MySQL. Well, four flavors if you consider MS Access’s own special blend. Project LINQ, Microsoft’s Language Integrated Query, is supposed to...