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April 29, 2009 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
New Zones, Moderators, and Geniuses

Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts
For Multiple Users within an Organization

Microsoft MVPs
The list keeps on getting longer

All The World's A-Twitter
ericpete looks at the Latest Big Thing

More News and Notes
Will it take pictures of the puppy?

Nata's Corner
295 million breached, and it's not

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through April 25

Tips From The Moderators
It's spring -- and exam season

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Zones: Experts Exchange has pushed a healthy number of new zones:

We've also done some housekeeping on some of the zone names to make them more recognizable for people who aren't as ancient as Netminder, who would be using Windows 98SE if he had a choice. Check the AllTopics page for all the changes.

Help Wanted: In a few weeks, we will be pushing the long-anticipated Articles feature to the live site. A few weeks ago, we noted that the Zone Advisors and Page Editors will become separate functions, so we're looking for capable, dedicated people for both positions. If you think you have something to offer, please contact the Site Admins and let them know of your interest.

New Moderators: We have added two more people to the Moderators team: merry_mod and modularity. Please join us in welcoming them!

Apropos of which, the image at left is the work of an anonymous six-year-old artist depicting his Moderator father wearing on of Experts Exchange's t-shirts and drinking coffee from an EE mug. Father says that's his normal uniform around the house; we think it is a remarkable likeness.

New Geniuses: capricorn1 has earned his fourth Genius certificate, in SQL Query Syntax. boag2000's third Genius certificate came in Access Coding/Macros, while sdstuber has earned his second Genius certificate in Oracle 10.x, and Merete's second came in General Multi-Media Software.

Milestones:

• angelIII has earned over 4,000,000 points in SQL Server 2005. He is the first EE member to go over that mark in two different zones.
• capricorn1 has reached 13,000,000 points overall.
• objects is the sixth EE member to reach 12,000,000 points overall.
• leew has reached 10,000,000 points overall.
• byundt has earned 8,000,000 points in the Microsoft Excel zone.
• oBdA joined the ranks of members who have earned 8,000,000 points overall.
• rorya and BlueDevilFan both reached the 7,000,000 points overall level. rorya has also reached 7,000,000 points in the Microsoft Excel zone.
• Three members -- LSMConsulting, mplungjan and GrahamSkan -- all went over 6,000,000 points overall for their careers.
• DatabaseMX and chapmandew are the two most recent members to go over 5,000,000 points overall. DatabaseMX has also earned 5,000,000 points in Microsoft Access.

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Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts

Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts are multiple license accounts designed for those who use Experts Exchange as a part of their work. The following exclusive features are why a Corporate Account is superior to a standard membership when it comes to empowering your organization to solve technology problems:

• Account Administrator - An account administrator allows your company to manage your licenses. Add, edit and reassign licenses at your convenience via simple, friendly license management interface.
• Central Billing - Your organization pays for the access of all its licensees with central billing. No need for expense reports or reimbursements.
• Save 42% - On top of these great features, save 42% or more off the standard monthly subscription rate
• Pay by purchase order - Don't have access to a company credit card? Corporate Accounts can pay by purchase order. Contact us for details.

Of course, Corporate Accounts include all of your favorite Premium Service amenities including unlimited access to 2.5 million technology solutions and the ability to ask thousands of Experts your question. Save your organization time and money by making your technology work for you. Create your Corporate Account.

>> Learn More
>> Create Your Corporate Account

Tips From the Moderators

You can always tell when it's exam time; Experts Exchange gets a ton of questions that are pretty obviously classroom assignments or practice questions for an exam. So, here are the guidelines:

If you're asking a question: The Experts aren't supposed to give you the answer; they're supposed to help you figure it out. So, be honest about it; tell them what part of the issue you don't understand, and they'll do their best.

If you're answering a question: Simply put, help the student figure it out for himself. It takes patience, so remember -- you had to learn the first time, too. It's okay to tell someone how to multiply two times three; it's not okay to just tell them the answer is six.

If you don't know what to do, then click the Request Attention button in the question, or post in the Community Support zone.

Corporate Accounts Continues to Grow

Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts are multiple license accounts designed for those who use Experts Exchange as a part of their work. The following exclusive features are why a Corporate Account is superior to a standard membership when it comes to empowering your organization to solve technology problems:

• Account Administrator - An account administrator allows your company to manage your licenses. Add, edit and reassign licenses at your convenience via simple, friendly license management interface.
• Central Billing - Your organization pays for the access of all its licensees with central billing. No need for expense reports or reimbursements.
• Save 42% - On top of these great features, save 42% or more off the standard monthly subscription rate
• Pay by purchase order - Don't have access to a company credit card? Corporate Accounts can pay by purchase order. Contact us for details.

Of course, Corporate Accounts include all of your favorite Premium Service amenities including unlimited access to 2.5 million technology solutions and the ability to ask thousands of Experts your question. Save your organization time and money by making your technology work for you. Create your Corporate Account.

Learn More
Create Your Corporate Account

Microsoft MVPs at Experts Exchange

Microsoft starts sending out the emails to community volunteers around the world honoring them with their selection as Most Valuable Professionals. As a community, Experts Exchange is well-represented by the nearly seventy members who have been selected this year.

But to simply identify these members as having earned this recognition isn't really enough. It is our distinct honor to be associated, however minimally, with this extraordinary group. Congratulations to all of you; we're glad you are a part of the Experts Exchange family.

Editor's note: We have done our best to indentify all of the EE members who are Microsoft MVPs, but so far, Redmond hasn't seen fit to post EE usernames as part of their MVP profiles. If we have missed anyone, please let us know, and we will be pleased to add you to this list.

Access: capricorn1, LPurvis
Excel: BobUmlas, firefytr, kenpuls, rorya, matthewspatrick, jeverist, byundt, zorvek, RichardSchollar, Nate_Oliver, mvidas
Visio: scott
Outlook: BlueDevilFan
Powerpoint: GlennaShaw
Word: Dreamboat, JOrzech, dlc110161
Desktop Experience: lrmoore, Fatal_Exception, aa230002, sirbounty, garycase, LeeTutor
Visual C#: dstanley9, gregoryyoung
Exchange: Mestha, LeeDerbyshire, kieran_b
SQL Server: ScottPletcher, pinaldave, chapmandew, angelIII, aneeshattingal
Setup & Deployment: PeteLong, RobWill, leew
ASP/ASP.NET: tenanji
Device Application Development: Mikal613
Visual Basic: emoreau, Chaosian, Idle_Mind, VBRocks
Directory Services: LauraEHunterMVP, Netman66, mkbean, welive4theone, Jay_Jay70, bdesmond
Identity Lifecycle Manager: ctcald
IIS: meverest, sschofield
Mail: jcimarron
Forefront: jesperhanno, dshinder, keith_alabaster
Small Business Server: HANNAC, JeffM_MVP, waynesmall2000, TechSoEasy, jason-miller, TimBarrett, ncitech
Enterprise Security: sysexpert
Remote Desktop Services: tsmvp

All The World's A-Twitter

An editor by trade, a writer by avocation and an Expert by some cosmic practical joke, ericpete puts together the newsletter for Experts Exchange.

Gary Trudeau, author of the Doonesbury comic strip nailed it in last week's New Yorker, with the "unedited transcript of the complete G-20 Summit coverage of Roland Hedley, senior Twitter correspondent for Fox News". Hedley, for those who have not followed his journalistic exploits over the past 34 years -- okay, so we're showing our age -- has worked for ABC, "Yap!com", CNN and now Fox.

Twitter is done. Stick a fork in it. Find a big black plastic bag and put a toe-tag on it.

It wasn't that otherwise apparently intelligent people finally woke up to the fact that they had poured $57 million into a company with no discernible business plan other than taking as much money as they could from venture capitalists. It wasn't the huge growth in a website that provides no service other than allowing large numbers of people to snoop on other large numbers of people too insecure in the comparative insignificance of their lives that they find it necessary to broadcast that inconsequentiality to anyone with an equally exiguous life. It isn't the amounts of time lost reading the next tweet (the reason they avoided calling them "twits" should be obvious) sent out to you and 5,731 other people who are following Suzie From San Diego's (you know... the pink bikini where the shoulder strap has loose) every move. It isn't the potential security issues or the philosophical and moral consequences or even the sheer volume of 140-character ... stuff.

Everyone deserves to be entertained; what separates us from other species is that we are the only one on the planet, as Mark Twain said, that blushes -- and needs to. The foibles of others are a contributing factor to our own self-image; woe to the person who cannot laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel or (this one will never die) describing the Internet as a series of tubes. We are a self-centered species; just about the time, as children, we realize there are other people in the world besides us, we start figuring out reasons either that we're better than they are, that we don't like them, or both. Twitter enables that on a global scale; too bad nobody will pay for their indulgences -- but that's not our problem since we don't have stock.

What made this particular cancer inoperable is Oprah. Now, we're not arguing with success; the woman has turned a local daytime talk show into a media juggernaut. But as of this writing, her last half dozen shows have highlighted country music singers, a woman who says she was a sex slave at 13, a couple of 14-year-olds who say they're ready to hop in the sack, a mother getting out of prison, reruns of past interviews... and Twitter. To her credit, there was an Earth Day show thrown in there -- but the point is that someone who has been called the "most influential woman on earth" and a host of other accolades should be able to offer up some explanations for why the housing market crumbled, why the world's economy is in the tank, why it's okay (or not okay) for the governments to torture people, and why a couple of teenagers wanted to shoot up their high school ten years ago -- a discussion she canceled in favor of the afore-mentioned mom-getting-out-of-prison show. (Given recidivism statistics, one wonders if Oprah will also do a mom-going-back-to-prison show, too.)

There's no question that Oprah's twits gave the site's Alexa rankings a boost; traffic to twitter.com jumped 43 per cent and she has half a million followers. But it's not Oprah herself -- she's a symptom of a far more insidious situation: a lot of people will pay a lot more attention to one person's misery than to everyone's misery. You hear a lot about newspapers in trouble, but you don't hear that about supermarket tabloids. Why? Because everyone reads them; they're mainstream. And that's where Twitter is headed; there's nothing worse than being a company being twitted about and not twitting back. But how can you be cool if you know that Dr. Phil is just as cool?

What is curious, though, is the possibility that maybe the Internet will thrive with Twitter and the inevitable systems that will evolve from it. After all, the VCR business wasn't built by Hollywood; it was just legitimized by Warner Brothers, Paramount and the rest. Graphics cards improved because of the demand in the market for ... umm... high resolution images. Craigslist and Second Life are both working on major changes to what kind of content they'll allow -- not because of any moral commitment, but because it's profitable for them to do so.

It's pretty obvious what you get when you leave the W out of Twitter, after all.

More News and Notes

But will it take pictures of the puppy so they can be uploaded to Facebook? President Obama is getting a new, specially manufactured, tricked-out Blackberry. What's annoying about all this is while the President and his staff seem to have a clue, the people at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue are having a tough time with this whole file-sharing business.

Speaking of which, a couple of weeks ago the young men who ran the Pirate Bay file-sharing site were found guilty of copyright infringement by a Swedish court (they are appealing, of course), which was cause for dismay among the other torrent sites in Scandanavia, as many of them turned off the lights right aver the verdict was announced -- but not Pirate Bay (so much for a united front, right?). On the other hand, it was cause for elation among the record companies -- at least until the DDoS attacks started, and until the news came out that music pirates are more likely to buy music than the non-pirate population.

If there's anything really curious about the case, it was the juxtaposition of the recording industry's apparently persuasive argument that Pirate Bay's owners were getting rich off the advertising on the site (ignoring all available data), at the same time the recording industry has been getting rich forever off the artists whose creative works they sell. Never mind that the judge in the case is a lobbyist for an outfit that represents the recording industry...

Yes, we looked twice: The first chief technology officer for the United States is not Experts Exchange's all-time best Expert in the Adobe Flash zone.

Ooops, there goes another rubber tree plant: You're two of the Dow Jones Industrials. Your names are synonymous with computing the world over. So how in the world did both Microsoft and IBM manage to get blindsided by Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems? Was everyone waiting to read about it on Yahoo?

Speaking of which (we haven't for a while), the honeymoon -- those first 100 days or so when a new boss gets a free pass from critics -- is over for new chief Yahoo Carol Bartz, who has been cutting a wide swath through both the corporate culture and the purchases from payroll check vendors, as another 700 employees are dusting off resumes. The bad news: They are not likely to find work across the bay at Oracle. Anyone in need of some Java programmers?

Our far-flung correspondents: Either, as our favorite editor said, "It's not easy being green" or someone has figured out how to photoshop x-rays.

Not that we really have that much time to fritter away... but if there's any way to do it, Google's new News Time Line is the place to do it, and so you don't get caught, a compendium of tricks and tools to hide your dillydallying from your boss... and while we're here, does anyone have a Google profile?

Oh, what a tangled network we weave: MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, who as one of the founders of the site made a healthy chunk of change when he sold the site to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., is "stepping down", in the parlance of public relations departments of companies firing its founder because the company is getting waxed by its chief rival. What makes this item perversely amusing is that DeWolfe has been pushed out by Jonathan Miller, who was fired by AOL two weeks after their first positive earnings news in years and then hired by Murdoch's company. The other co-founder, Tom Anderson, is apparently also being eased out of his role, to be replaced by Owen Van Nata, who was first demoted, and then quit as the chief operating officer at Facebook.

Speaking of which, the results are in, and we now know why it's questionable to put major policy changes to a vote when it comes to one's website. Facebook, with something like 230 million members, managed to get about 0.003 per cent of them to cast their ballots on their new terms of service. The rest will do two things: complain about some part of them, and use the excuse that they never read them because "nobody reads them."

Lost in the iShuffle: Apple bucked a lot of trends when it reported its first quarter earnings, but one it didn't buck was a shrinking payroll. Among those whose bottom lines suffered significantly: Microsoft, which had its first quarter over quarter decline ever, and Yahoo, which saw profits drop 80 per cent.

Signs of the Apocalypse (four weeks worth): More Facebook members downloaded a bogus app than voted in the plebicite on the site's terms of service; that iTouch we got a couple of years ago can now be considered a concealed weapon; GeoCities is scheduled for massive urban renewal; the kid who wrote the Twitter worm got hired by a web development firm and promptly wrote another worm; and the FBI is using spyware to catch hackers.

Nata's Corner

I saw a report last week saying that in 2008, something like 295 million records of personal data were breached -- more than the previous four years combined -- and that doesn't include the information given up by people falling for scams on their personal machines. It's "just" the total of the large-scale database attacks by hackers and malware writers. Still, it's a little frustrating to read about a researcher saying, "We need to disrupt their business model", because that's obvious. I'm still waiting for someone to figure out how.

Obviously, there's a lot of nasty stuff out there just waiting for someone naive enough to jump all over it. But it's not just people using browsers that have to be wary; if you're building a website, here's a list of ten things you want to protect your site from having. And speaking of nasty stuff, maybe the way to get the spammers is to send Erin Brockovich after them, because according to a study commissioned by McAfee, spam consumes as much energy every year as 2.4 million US homes. Maybe the EPA can go after spammers as contributing to global warming -- it's just a thought.

Last summer, I was fortunate to attend Experts Exchange's Core Conference, along with about 45 other members including mbizup, the Zone Advisor for Access. She was out running one morning, and fell, breaking her jaw and causing her to spend the rest of the week communicating with pad and pen. The scary part, though, was that she didn't have any ID or cell phone with her. She told me last week that whenever she goes out running, she wears the interactive bracelet made by RoadID that's tied to a website where she can post up-to-date information about where she is running or scuba diving or whatever.

Finally, two things you need to see. First, what viruses look like. Second, if you haven't seen it, you have to check Susan Boyle. There are several versions, and as I'm putting my column together, they account for at least 30 million views. In about two weeks. The President's inauguration speech doesn't come close.

New Certificates