Straight up and full disclosure. I'm prejudiced. As a research assignment, the heading is a joke. I'll give you the answer in two words, and then tell you why.

How does HTML 5 compare with flash? Answer: it doesn't.

Lest you think I dislike Adobe's Flash, let's put the cards on the table. I loved Flash. Long before Adobe was Adobe, they had a competitor called Macromedia. Adobe bought that firm. That made my life simpler. I only had to work with one vendor.

Flash was a pretty compelling solution. I used it to mimic operations in Windows to prepare people for the CompTIA exams. The only bugaboo was that dang right-click stuff. A little bit of code from the Microsoft Visual Studio .Net let me flip the left and right mouse buttons so that the right mouse button instead of controlling the Flash player, emulated doing a right-click in the Windows operating system.

When asked for my pearls of wisdom on this topic, I was tempted to respond with the excuse: "Sorry, can't comment. My asbestos underwear is out for dry-cleaning."

It seems both the emotions and mis-information surrounding HTML 5 run high.

And some information is just plain scary. Consider this direct quote from the W3C.

"The following elements are not in HTML5 because using them damages usability and accessibility:

Learning SQL development can seem like an overwhelming task at first. However, mastering just a few key points will help ease your way through 80 percent of the day-to-day challenges when writing stored procedures and solving common problems. Here are three important SQL development factors to keep in mind:

Outer Joins
One of the most crucial things to understand in SQL server are joins. Joins are a way to retrieve data from two or more tables based on logical relationships between them. Joins dictate how Microsoft SQL Server ought to use data from one table to select the rows in another table.

In my experience inner joins are intuitive while outer joins can present additional hours of grief by overlooking associations in the other table(s). The outer join is the key to answering questions about what the database does not have. For example, if you need to make a query to display all the students who are without report-cards, you’ll need a left join to get all students coupled with a “where clause” to return the ones who have nulls for their report card table columns in the results.

Many talented Java script programmers have muddled through the SQL Server by deficient coding around the inner join. As a result, their queries can take five hours to run, whereas, properly written left joins, can take only two seconds to run.

Aggregation
Grouping results comes up in SQL a lot more than you might think. Knowing how to write a query when answering questions such as, “What’s the average grade for each teacher’s student list?” is invaluable. This kind of question cannot be answered with a single table or solely by joins.  You’ll often find you need to use joins in conjunction with group by statements. Always write the raw query first and then look at the results. Next, you have to figure out the best way to group them, rewrite your select clause and add a group by clause in the end.

Digging Through Data
I find this is the most lacking skill in many programmers. In fact, many otherwise-talented programmers holding Master’s Degrees fail to get jobs because they couldn’t analyze rows of data objectively during interviews. It’s just something that’s not taught but is crucial to get under you belt. Why? Eventually, some query is not going to perform as you may expect. And, the only way to find discrepancies is to look at rows of data, identify what join isn’t finding a match or where bad data is throwing things into chaos. Get familiar with how joins actually work, even if you have to manually walk through the logic of a large stored procedure’s tree of joins. It’s boring and time-consuming but absolutely necessary.

Take the time to master the core skills that will make you a successful SQL Programmer and avoid queries that run for five hours!

I remember the day like it was yesterday. Pac Man had finally arrived on the Atari 2600.  It was a clear and sunny day, but it was slightly brisk. My dad drove us down to the video store about three miles from our Michigan house. If I remember correctly, the price for the game was $24.99.  It was quite expensive for the day, probably equaling a $70 game in today’s market, but it was mine. There *was* no question about it. If you purchase a game, it’s your game… right?

You couldn’t be more wrong.  With all the licensing agreements in games today, you only purchase the right to play it. You don’t actually “own” the game. 

Today, game designers want total control over the money that comes in for a game. They add in clauses that keep the game from being resold, rented, borrowed, copied, etc. All of the content in the game, including the items you find that are specifically for you, are owned by the software developer. Why, you ask, do they do this? It’s all about the money.

This need for greed started years ago, when people started modifying current games on the market. One of the first games like this was Doom. There were so many third part mods made, but because of licensing agreement, none of these versions were available for resale. The end user, or you, had to purchase Doom before they could even install the mod.  None of these “modders” were allowed to make any money off their creation.