ReadWriteHack

Alan Wlasuk, CEO of 403 Web Security, has compiled a list of the top six dumbest hacks of all time. While hackers can be dangerous, Alan shows that not every hacker is a brilliant mastermind. Think of the always amusing Darwin Awards pictured in our icon at left. With many of these exploits, the hacker left unintended clues in their code to make them easier to be found.

Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more structured approach to Web programming.

Making Dart work will require a new virtual machine, which puts it on a competitive plane with Java, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight. But architecturally speaking, Dart will be more dependent on the browser, at least for now.

Microsoft earned a reputation for its "embrace and extend" development philosophy, which recalls a time when it assimilated existing ideas by hook or by something else. Adobe's plan with respect to HTML5 technology is more like "embrace and pummel." Although it's been telling analysts and reporters that Flash is embracing HTML5, the message Adobe's product managers gave to developers this week at its MAX 2011 conference is that the plug-in reigns supreme.

If last month's announcements from Microsoft on the new style of programming for Windows 8 made you think that the .NET platform had reached its peak, you might want to take another look at the IT workforce outside Microsoft's window. The latest data from career enhancement services provider Dice.com indicates that, over the last 90 days alone, calls for developers with .NET-related skillsets outnumber available candidates with .NET skills by nearly 7 to 1.

Is HTML5 a common platform for rich Internet applications, or a common toolkit for building rich applications on varying platforms? Oracle's response to that question came yesterday, and in typical Larry Ellison fashion, it essentially boiled down to, "We don't give a rip."

When Sun Microsystems produced the first go-round of JavaFX in December 2008, its aim was to build and promote an entirely new declarative language - not Java, not JavaScript - for describing the front-end UI of a distributed app. What developers needed at that time was a simpler, programmatic way to approach the contents of UIs. CSS looked under-developed, and although Microsoft's approach (XAML) was certainly thorough, it lacked the more conservative, procedural approach that veteran programmers were accustomed to.

Before any professional investor makes a play in a new market, she makes or acquires a reasonable estimate of its size. Not only does demand come into play, but the availability of resources with which a healthy level of demand may be supplied. You can't create a market simply by flooding it with products that people will decide, based on their wide availability, that they somehow want.

The very first pictures of "Longhorn," the development build of Windows that became Vista and Windows Server 2008, were characterized by a rich sidebar along one side of the screen. The moment Microsoft revealed pictures of these early builds, it told developers and members of the press that this sidebar constituted a new ecosystem - a garden where a wellspring of new, small, and useful apps will grow and flourish.

The most critical missing piece of Salesforce.com's emerging cloud service last year was filled with the acquisition of Jigsaw, a vast repository of crowdsourced data on companies and their employees. Keeping Microsoft's hands off of Jigsaw prevented it from possibly owning another majority stake in an emerging market - in this case, CRM.

But among the most promoted pieces of Salesforce's buildout strategy last August at its annual conference came not from the crowd at large, but from the research firm of Dun & Bradstreet. It promised to help Salesforce build Data.com into a service that fills all the little gaps that crowdsourcing leaves behind. Now, D&B is building out in a new direction, with a Web services API called D&B Direct.

Last week, Forrester Research tries to grok Big Data with a report entitled, Expand Your Digital Horizon With Big Data. And while it is somewhat amusing to see how they approach the topic as they would a new network router or new version of Office, ultimately the report falls somewhat flat, especially for those of us that have been using these tools and writing about the subject for many years now.

At the end of this discourse, to borrow a phrase from my hero, Edward R. Murrow, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. But if you've seen this nest recently, you know that if it was fouled to any considerable degree, it might not look all that different anyway.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

As one of the seven companies that participated in the Alpha release of this new Insights data, we've been very excited about the opportunities this new data presents for pages and their fans. Let's take a closer look at why.

While most discussion around social analytics slips and slides across the valley floor of a wide crevasse between practitioners and business leaders, there has been one metric everyone agreed was important: fans. Fans have been an obvious place to start because your number and everyone else's have been public for years. Also, there's a natural, implied value proposition in the metric because it's about affinity. Surely having a large number of people with expressed affinity for your brand is a good thing (especially if it's more than your competitor has).