Why I’m done with portable hard drives
SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- I've owned six portable USB hard drives over the past 10 years, and all six of them have failed unrecoverably. Is it jus...

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Spammer jailed, ‘cos spam ain’t free speech (and 207 stiffs)
IT Blogwatch, IT Blogwatch, egg, beans, and IT Blogwatch: in which a huge spammer loses his appeal against a nine year jail sentence. Not to men...

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  • Oh, hi! Here’s Tuesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft reveals more details about Silverlight (née WPF/E). Not to mention baby diaper tracking graphs…

    Eric Lai reports:

    Microsoft Corp. kicked off its Mix07 Web development conference today by announcing that a full portable version of its flagship .Net programming environment will be fused to the next version of its Silverlight ‘Flash-killer’ rich media technology … can allow multimedia developers to juice their Silverlight apps with .Net — even on non-Windows machines.

    [Microsoft chief software architect, Ray] Ozzie also said that Web and graphic designers and developers will have free use of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, a Web storage service, to store, run and show off their Silverlight applications and videos. Microsoft also released the alpha of its Silverlight Streaming service, with which developers will be able to store up to 4GB of high-definition video and stream it out to Silverlight users.

    The beta of Silverlight 1.0, which was known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere until two weeks ago, was released today. The final version is due sometime this summer.

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  • Oh, hi! Here’s Tuesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft reveals more details about Silverlight (née WPF/E). Not to mention baby diaper tracking graphs…

    Eric Lai reports:

    Microsoft Corp. kicked off its Mix07 Web development conference today by announcing that a full portable version of its flagship .Net programming environment will be fused to the next version of its Silverlight ‘Flash-killer’ rich media technology … can allow multimedia developers to juice their Silverlight apps with .Net — even on non-Windows machines.

    [Microsoft chief software architect, Ray] Ozzie also said that Web and graphic designers and developers will have free use of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, a Web storage service, to store, run and show off their Silverlight applications and videos. Microsoft also released the alpha of its Silverlight Streaming service, with which developers will be able to store up to 4GB of high-definition video and stream it out to Silverlight users.

    The beta of Silverlight 1.0, which was known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere until two weeks ago, was released today. The final version is due sometime this summer.

    Comments Off

Shark Tank: You gotta admit, it’s certainly safe from you
This company outsources its data center hosting, which really doesn't mean much difference for a systems manager pilot fish. "The vendor ha...

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MySQL’s IPO and disruptive pricing (and g’astronomy)
Rabbits. White rabbits. It's IT Blogwatch: in which MySQL disrupts Oracle's game. Not to mention bad science on kids' food packages... Matthew Aslett talke...

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Shark Tank: For once, it’s a demo from somebody else’s hell
It's the early 1990s, and time for this IT shop using IBM System/36 minicomputers to choose a new direction. But it's a tricky task, because th...

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The tides of virtualization - are you ghosting your way to a mess, or building scalability? Fabric7 and the future…
I had the pleasure of talking with Sharad Mehrotra at Fabric7 for what amounted to a fairly lengthy discussion the other day. Fabric7 is a co...

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Shark Tank: Good Idea, but Not Quite Right
On-call pilot fish’s pager wakes him up, but there’s no number to call on the pager's screen — just "*******." Fi...

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Shark Tank: Because what could THAT have to do with it?
This user's ancient monitor is finally failing, so support pilot fish replaces it, adjusts the screen and makes sure everything is working pr...

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