Silverlight 3 Beta Arrives

Microsoft 16 Comments
"As expected, Silverlight 3 was announced today at MIX09, this year's iteration of Microsoft's annual conference for web developers, designers, and enthusiasts. While the keynote that just finished was full of little announcements that were handed out faster than the audience could swallow them, the one that stood out the most was the third iteration of Microsoft's Flash alternative, Silverlight. Links for the first and last beta of Silverlight 3, and the many development tools surrounding it, went live earlier today."
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Dell Unveils Adamo

Hardware 34 Comments
I'm not often wowed by a computer's design, probably because most of them appear to be designed by people with no sense of style and class whatsoever. The only (relatively) recent examples of decent design that I personally find to have a "wow factor" are Apple's MacBook Air and the PowerMac Cube from the same company. Yesterday, however, I was wowed again by a product from a company you wouldn't expect it from: Dell.
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Google Chrome for Linux On Its Way: Take It for a Spin

Google 33 Comments
In addition to the Chrome 2.0 beta, work for the Linux version of Chrome is on its way. Its official name is currently "Chromium," and Google Chrome for Linux doesn't officially exist yet. For the sake of argument, however, Google Chrome for Linux is on its way whether it's currently in a Chromium and pre-alpha state or not, and now Ubuntu users can get a hold of Chromium to take for a spin. In this article, learn how to install the current build of Chromium to test on your Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based system and see several screenshots of the budding browser.
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Reverse Engineering Apple’s OS X

macOS 8 Comments
"A number of folks have asked me what tools and techniques I use to reverse engineer Cocoa executables. I thought it would be worth taking some time out from documenting undocumented APIs to show you how easy it is to do the same thing for yourself. With all these tools in your arsenal, reverse engineering Cocoa executables is actually very simple. In fact, it's a good deal more straightforward than most Windows executables, with the exception of Delphi and .NET where - like Cocoa - a good deal of runtime type information is contained within the executable."
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Commission Repeats Call for Single EU patent

  Submitted by Adurbe Office 4 Comments
"The European Commission has reiterated its demand for the creation of a single European patent. It said the absence of such a protection is hindering the growth of technology companies in the European Union. The Commission has published a strategy aimed at increasing the benefit to be gained in the EU from technology research and development. It announced an increase in research funding for technology research of over 50 per cent between 2010 and 2013. It will increase spending from EUR 1.1bn to EUR 1.3bn, it said."
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Game Review: Left 4 Dead, XBox 360

Games 27 Comments
Recently, I learned that there are two types of zombies. You have the undead ones, that have arisen from the grave, probably a little disappointed in the afterlife, and who come back to eat your brain (which indicates that the afterlife really must suck if it compares unfavourably to eating brains). Then there's the virus type of zombie, you know, from Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Left 4 Dead sports the latter variety, but really, does anyone even care? Zombie mayhem!
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Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop Available, Makes Hadoop Easy

Databases 1 Comment
Hadoop, the same software that lies at the heart of successful companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others, has been proven time and again with said companies to be a successful data management server, keeping data secure and fault-free spread across multiple servers. It isn't the easiest piece of software to configure, however, which is why the Cloudera company has just announced a freely downloadable and easier to use custom distribution of Hadoop to bring the power of entities like Google to smaller businesses.
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New DRM Low: iPod Shuffle Has Headphone DRM Chip

Apple 44 Comments
Just when you thought that DRM was on its way out, with various music stores abolishing the practice, some company will implement DRM in yet another way that will affect lots of customers in a very negative way. The most recent case of idiotic DRM comes courtesy of a gadget maker from Cupertino. Update: MacWorld provides nuance to the story, with comments from Apple and third-party manufacturers.
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Side by Side: UI Changes from Windows 7 Beta to Build 7057

Windows 8 Comments
"Over the weekend, I put Windows 7 build 7000 on my desktop and Windows 7 build 7057 on my laptop, and went through trying to spot as many changes between the two as I could. Although I go deeper than I did with build 7048, this is still not a comprehensive list. There is almost three months difference between the two builds: the beta was compiled on December 12, 2008, at 2:00pm and the leaked build 7057 was compiled on March 5, 2009, at 8:00pm, so there's a lot of work to cover. This post is about tracking every noticeable visual change; although I do mention some fixes here and there, I'm mainly focusing on tweaks that are "tangible" as opposed to the thousands of bugs that have been fixed."
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Cisco Serves Up Unified Computing Push

Hardware 3 Comments
As was widely expected, Cisco Systems on Monday unveiled its Unified Computing effort, including the company's move to offer its own server hardware. The networking titan's Unified Computing System targets data centers, facilities where enterprises locate a hefty number of servers that host and run the technology side of their operations. It is designed to unify networking, computing, storage, and virtualization resources in order to streamline a company's resources, to reduce its total cost of ownership, and to "radically reduce" the number of devices requiring management, power/cooling, and other labor and financial expenditures.
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