A senior IT and banking security expert said yesterday:
"The Postbank network and security systems are shocking and in
desperate need of an overhaul. This [theft ] was always going to be a
very real possibility."

Source

After some internal discussion we all agreed that rather
than imposing a statistically meaningless measurement and hoping that
the mere measurement of something meaningless would cause it to get
better, what we really needed was a process of continuous improvement.

Link

The real question is, why are Joel's articles so darn good?

If Windows Marketplace was a real market, it would be
filled with tat. From floor to ceiling, boxes of extension cords,
stolen mobile phones, car radios with the wires hanging out and bits
of glass still visible in the crevices. They should probably rebrand
it something like 'Windows Car Boot Sale' such is the quality of the
goods on sale.

Visual Studio does its job well. Its still the best .NET IDE out there. Unfortunately there's a lot of day-to-day stuff that it just doesn't do. This is where third party tools come in.

Here are my favorites. The great thing about these tools is that they have all been around for a while, and have tons of support and documentation, so there's very little chance of them being abandoned. Best of all, they're all free.

WinMerge

WinMerge is a really easy to use Open Source Diff tool, that can be used to compare both specific files and directories (which is great for merging project branches, hence the name). It comes bundled with a few useful filters (such as "exclude source control files"), which are easily modifed for your own purposes.

Tortoise SVN

Tortoise SVN is a front-end for Subversion, the installer includes both Tortoise and SVN. Mercurial is also becoming quite popular as Distributed Version Control Systems are taking off, but most companies I know of still use SVN. There's a Tortoise GUI for Mercurial as well.

Nunit

Nunit is an open source unit testing framework for .NET. It works really well, and is quite easy to use.

Test Driven .NET

Test Driven.NET allows you to run a specific unit test within Visual Studio, and even allows you to "run with debugger" which is very useful. There's a free personal version available.

Notepad++

Visual Studio is a great IDE, but is definitely overkill for simple tasks like editing an XML configuration file. Notepad++ is very lightweight replacement but has a few important features like syntax highlighting and support for plugins. The Zen Coding plugin is absolutely essential if you're a web developer, it makes writing large amounts of HTML very quick and easy.

Five years ago today, the PlayStation 3 arrived in America
with a Blu-ray player, user-replaceable 60GB hard drive, backwards
compatibility for both original PlayStation and PS2 games, and the
ability to boot Linux — at the time, that was all a pretty big deal at
a somewhat controversial price of $600 ($673 inflation adjusted). That
was only the beginning of an exciting ride

A LOT has happened in 5 years, some bad but mostly good, and some
amazing games. Thankfully, some things never happened at all.

Some might say the Google home page is already minimalist. I hardly ever use half the stuff on it. "I'm feeling lucky" can be accessed via the search popup box, and a search can be done by hitting enter. The menu bar at the top of the page could be a drop down. The footer is mostly advertising for Google. Take all that away and you're left with this.

Netflix was a Wall Street star until the jarring July 12 announcement about its prices. Its stock rose from about $50 at the beginning of 2009 to more than $300 in early July.

Since backlash to the price increase, investors have grown disillusioned. Netflix's market value has plummeted 53 percent from its high, wiping out about $8 billion in stockholder wealth. On Monday, the stock shed more than $11 to close at $143.75.

The new ribbon UI for the explorer window is so cluttered with different-sized buttons, labels, multi-part icons, and tabs that I can barely parse it. It’s more like a hall of mirrors than a task-oriented workspace. Is this really the new, streamlined Windows?