"InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard uncovered the fact that Microsoft is paying some organizations to adopt its Office 365 cloud service, mostly in funds that Microsoft earmarks for their customers' migration costs and other required consulting. Although this raised the eyebrows of some bloggers - and I'm sure Google wasn't thrilled - I think this is both smart and ethical. Here's why."

"One of life's minor annoyances is having to wait on my devices to connect to the network after I wake them from sleep. All too often, I'll open the lid on my EeePC netbook, enter a web address, and get the dreaded 'This webpage is not available' message because the machine is still working on connecting to my Wi-Fi network. On some occasions, I have to twiddle my thumbs for as long as 10-15 seconds before the network is ready to be used. The frustrating thing is that I know it doesn't have to be this way. I know this because I have a Mac. When I open the lid of my MacBook Pro, it connects to the network nearly instantaneously. In fact, no matter how fast I am, the network comes up before I can even try to load a web page. My curiosity got the better of me, and I set out to investigate how Macs are able to connect to the network so quickly, and how the network connect time in other operating systems could be improved." Yes, I'd love to have Windows and Linux reconnect as fast as Macs do. Alas, "Method to quickly reconnect to a wireless or wired network", as well as its completely different "Method to quickly reconnect to a wireless or wired network on a mobile device" are probably patented, so Windows and Linux can't reconnect too fast out of fear of violating a software patent. In case you haven't noticed: I'm joking. Sort of.

"Internet streaming music service Pandora announced on Tuesday that it is phasing out Flash in favor of HTML 5. The change means users won't have to rely on the Flash plug-in in their Web browser to listen to the service's music offerings, and the company claims switching to HTML 5 has improved overall performance, too. 'The front-end technology has been rebuilt in HTML 5 and together with a host of other improvements results in a much faster experience,' the Pandora Web site stated."

A recent Retrevo Gadgetology survey suggests that users are unclear on what exactly 4G means, don't know whether their current mobile service is 4G or not, and even if they do know, are unsure of the benefit. It also seems that mobile device owners' loyalty to their chosen platform is more important to them than higher network speeds.

This is a problem I hadn't yet heard of, so it fascinates me to no end. We all know VLC, right? It's one of the best video players out there, and while I myself generally just install the K-Lite Codec Pack, VLC is definitely a good alternative - and pretty much the norm on Linux. They're having a problem, though: malicious folk are bundling VLC with malware, offering it up for download as the official VLC, and misleading users in the process. Not only does this violate the GPL - it's pretty damn low, too.

"The Microsoft and ETH Zurich research teams have published the source code of Barrelfish, a multikernel operating system for the multicore heterogeneous hardware of the future. Today's operating systems have been adapted to work on multiprocessor and multicore hardware, but they were not initially designed with multicore in mind, and they are not ready for heterogeneous hardware with hundreds of cores that is to come in the following ten years. The main problem is the concept of shared-memory and the contention arising from accessing the same data protected by locks. This is the problem that Barrelfish wants to address."