As first reported by CNET News last week, Microsoft will use its Professional Developer Conference here to show off browser-based versions of its Office programs.

In an interview, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said that the browser-based editing capabilities are being developed in conjunction with the next version of Office, known as Office 14. [...]

I finally have a new receiver to replace my accursed broken Sony (but that’s another story). In any case, I also needed an additional HDMI cable to connect my
Xbox and TiVo through the receiver. I ordered one online, but the receiver got to my house before the cable did.
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Here are some theories and related thoughts. [...]

It’s unclear now if customers can still somehow retrieve their photo archive or will get money back for the undelivered services.

Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.
If my eyes serve me right, you are gone.
On [...]

However, Eich said in his post that the TraceMonkey team is addressing the particular issue that hobbled TraceMonkey compared to Chrome.

“We’re very much in the game and moving fast–’reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,’” JavaScript pioneer and TraceMonkey coder Brendan Eich said in a blog. And noting Firefox’s higher score, he said, “Maybe we [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an open-source, cross-platform program designed to track your packets and determine if your ISP is throttling your connection to torrents, VoIP, and other legal, high-bandwidth consuming communications. Called “Switzerland” and licensed under the GPL, it’s very much in an alpha state and is only a command-line tool at the [...]

No more. With software as a service, the focus has become whether the tool is good enough on day 1 and how well it will adapt over time. Take, for example, the Family Service Agency of San Francisco, which replaced its ailing paper-based system with SaaS donated by the Salesforce.com Foundation, improving productivity and accountability [...]

Netflix has won accolades for using technology to wrest market share away from big brick-and-mortar video renters, such as Blockbuster. The company has amassed 8.4 million customers and ships more than 2 million movies per day.

The bad news for the company is that Netflix can’t yet prevent these system outages. While a piece of [...]

Unfortunately, Babel requires calling a local U.S., U.K., or Australia local access number to access it, as there’s not currently one for China. The good news is that if you’re in the depths of a local Chinatown in one of these supported countries, you’ll be able to ask for directions or order a dish off [...]

Though the die (the actual processor inside the chip package) is the same for both the Atom Z5XX series and N270, the packaging and chipsets are different (see graphic). The N270 will use the 945GSE and 82801 (ICH7M) core logic. A version of this chipset (with 950 integrated graphics) is used in low-cost notebooks and [...]

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Large swaths of open source have become mainstream–to the point of invisibility.
Jay Lyman summed this up well in the context of the last LinuxWorld. We’ve also seen large vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, generally de-emphasizing Linux and open source as businesses in their own right.

Even when open source hasn’t displaced proprietary alternatives, it’s [...]