http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200506.ars What is interesting is that the budget box solution is now based on AMD64 939 and PCI-Express. Hmmm... maybe it's just me, but I would prefer a more conservative solution based on the omnipresent...

The quest for more storage density continues... Fujitsu researches suceeded to develop a similar technology that would increase harddisks capacity to around 1 Tb per square inch. This seems to be similar with a previous research project on which I blogged...

Scott Guthrie has a great blog entry on several platform enhancements, code-name Atlas, that will address AJAX-style programming. At the same time, Charles Fitzgerald presented the Atlas technologies. Microsoft will release a technology preview of...

You are given two white cubes. You are asked to draw a digit (from 0..9) on every square of these cubes, such that you will be able to represent evert day in a month using these cubes in certain position. For example, "13" would require that a face on...

ITER is one the largest physics experiments ever attempted. In short, it should be the first research fusion reactor that actually will succeed to produce power. ITER attempts to operate in the 500 MW (thermal) range, which is around the output of a small...

The previous puzzle was solved correctly in the comments. So I thought to present with another prison-style puzzle: A warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, "You may meet today and plan a strategy. But after today, you...

A sneaky error The following post summarizes my personal experience with a subtle COM error. CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005) is an error which can be randomly returned by CoCreateInstance() if you are using an out-of-process COM server. As far...

Beyond3D has a very detailed article about Xenos, the GPU provided by ATI in XBox 360... http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/

Transportable shadow copies are another practical consequence of a new paradigm - the data is stored in the (SAN) cloud. The data availability is not anymore tied to your machine. This simple fact has far reaching consequences. One consequence is the...

Blue Hat summit seems to be a new type of events going on. It's a rare event when you start something from scratch and you get comments like: "I didn't know if we were going to end up with this massively adversarial experience or if this was going...

At first, I wanted to buy one to surprise my friends, but then I changed my mind and just posted the link on my blog...

You might ask what's next? FIFA will consider using an electronic microchip inside soccer balls at the 2006 World Cup finals if the technology proves successful. The microchip, intended to confirm whether or not a ball has crossed the goal line...

Unless you live under a rock, you already know XQuery as one of the newest and coolest standards in the XML world. Hey - it's in SQL Server 2005 too - in fact, Dennis just started blogging about it! Being one of the original XQuery designers, and one...

Max Feingold just started a blog! In the past, I knew him as one of the good COM experts around. Incidentally, one of my previous posts describes an intricate COM+ setup issue on which Max helped me to see the light... :-)

This is a very nice puzzle that kept me awake for a long time... :-) John and Dianne, two journalists (and experienced bridge players), are captured by some foreign government. The guardian says that he can free them, if they win the following game...

It looks like the new burst is set to happen in the real-estate market. Or, at least, this is the conclusion of two physicists at UCLA in their article . We analyze the quarterly average sale prices of new houses sold in the USA as a whole, in the...

There is more and more excitement building up on an upcoming physics hardware acceleration engine . If this thing succeeds, it's going to be big. Anyone remembers 3dfx that revolutionized the game industry with their cards? But, anyway, I just read...

IDC says: while the rate of growth is slowing down (to only 6%), it is still the eight consecutive quarter of continuous growth. "Storage spending is clearly trending upward as organizations strive to stay ahead of their information storage demands...

This is funny. I just blogged about the new perpendicular storage technology (which is estimated to give 230 gigabits per square inch - which is about 29 GB per sq.in.). Well, how about about a harddisk that stores four times more than that? Physicists...

Another storm in the harddisk industry is coming. Hitachi announced its commitment a few months ago. And now, Seagate quickly follows... The new products are expected to ship starting this summer. Seagate is preparing to convert between 70 percent...

According to Intel , Seattle is now the most unwired city: Seattle is now the most unwired city in America, according to Intel Corporation's third annual “Most Unwired Cities” survey released today. In a rapidly changing wireless landscape, Seattle...

The ultimate solution for hassle-free patching of Windows, SQL Server, Exchange and others is finally here. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/default.mspx If you are curious to see how Windows Server Update Services stacks...

New benchmark results comparing .NET 2.0 vs .NET 1.1 and J2EE platforms are now available. 1) Comparing XML Performance XMLMark (a benchmark created by Sun Microsystems) was used by Microsoft to compare the performance of XML operations between...

Hmm... interesting demo presented today at TechEd . A quote from http://www.e2ksecurity.com/ : VS2005 delivers System Definition Model (SDM) info; SDM will be consumable by MOM and SMS in "System Center wave 2" coming in future. Bill Anderson from...

According to Dare , start.com just got more interesting. Here is my new home page: http://start.com/myw3b