Gartner have just released details of their predictions for IT budget growth in 2009.
Will It Blend? is a superbly constructed viral marketing campaign. Whilst a number of items they choose to blend might not take your fancy, who could resist feeding Spam into a really powerful blender. It's only a pity they couldn't find a spammer to feed in too!
Alternatively, is your iPhone 3g giving you trouble? They've blended one of those too.
Perhaps a defence contractor could take this idea to its logical conclusion...
Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) spoke in London about the companies online software as a service strategy, specifically targetting the developer community, refering to it as "Windows Cloud". The implication, as noted in an InfoWorld article, was that this would be a toolset although InfoWorld rather odly refers to it as an OS. We suspect this may turnout to be an online environment, similar in some senses to Microsoft Popfly, but presumably considerbly more heavyweight and business rather than consumer focused.
Microsoft are clearly concerned about the end-around of their entire technology stack offered by products such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Strata may be the name given to this hybrid strategy/toolset solution, as it was released presumably accidentally (On the PDC website) and subsquently expunged and replaced with the less exciting moniker of Cloud Computing. We await developments from PDC with some interest.
According to reports from Computer Weekly Microsoft has once again extended the timspan that OEM customers can offer their purchasers the option of using XP via "downgrade" rights.
While we don't have confirmation from Microsoft as yet, if this turns out to be true and we see no reason it shouldn't, it highlights just how concerned larger customer are about adopting Vista. The greatest benefit to upgrading Microsoft client software often only comes in conjunction with upgrades to backend server software, which in these times of ecconomic concern have slipped down the priority list for many larger companies.
Courtesy of the University of Nottingham, UK check out the Periodic Table of Videos. See all the chemical reactions that local laws prevent you from enjoying and play hunt the *real* professor. Hint real professors have Ensteinien hair cuts!
If you believe all pocket calculators require batteries or at the very least transistors, then prepare to be amazed. The Curta calculator is a mechanically elegant, physically compact, numerical computing marvel. However given their relative rarity and price while you may not be able to get you hands on one physically, you can experiment to your hearts content virtually with the Curta Simulator.
With the LHC moving ever closer towards finally colliding particles, if like us you'd like to see what's going on at CERN try LHC Webcams. We think you'll be surprised!