Even with all this new wave of .NET stuff, I still find myself in the XXI century doing good old COM programming - and I enjoy doing it... So is anyone still interested in blog posts around COM programming? (especially around COM servers, COM security...

It looks like Hotmail is slowly getting integrated with start.com. Go to http://mail.start.com for a quick test...

A few hours ago (one hour later than expected, at 4.00 PM PDT), Day of Defeat: Source was released in the wild. This is the first product from Valve that benefits from the HDR technology. The Valve engineers went to interesting challenges to make HDR...

Yes it does . This is Bernina Artista 200e and it runs Windows CE! The 200/200e models have some interesting features: among other thigns, an incorporated CD-ROM reader and a USB port. Also, it is able to connect to the internet. I saw it briefly...

Everyone knows how to write CMD scripts. And this is the reason why we have so many messy CMD scripts around. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anywhere some guidelines on how to write clear, maintenable batch files. So here is my take: 1) Think about...

Huge. Here is some data from a PDC Hotmail presentation : ~200 million active users 3.3 billion inbound emails a day 1.5 billion blocked at the router 1.0 billion deleted as spam (never hits the user's mailbox) 0.5 billion sent to the...

We are living in interesting times. First, WoW created the possibility of virtual economies. Now we have virtual diseases... Players of Blizzard's incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading...

WS-Management was just submitted to DMTF! WS-Management is a web-service based spec for system management tasks like resource discovery, events, executing of certain operations, etc: [...] this specification identifies a core set of Web service...

I can't wait to get it. In the meantime, interesting things on http://ageofempires3.com . AOE3 will use Havok physics engine, the same middleware component that powers Half-Life 2 (there is a link mentioning Havoc in this page , however, the link points...

There are two important events that happened recently in the blogosphere: 1) The launch of http://www.memeorandum.com/ - a web site to automatically generate a summary of "what's hot" in the blogosphere, and 2) The widely expected launch of the first...

The new Hotmail interface was presented at PDC - and here is already an ArsTechnica review . The UI seems clean and nice, and BTW it uses the Atlas framework under the cover. Speaking of e-mail, I just noticed that Yahoo also has its new Y! Mail interface...

Interesting - three more interviews with Bill Gates: 1) with CNet. 2) with Jon Udell. 3) and with Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Of course, his previous interview with Robert Scoble is old news...

Arguably, LINQ (Language Integrated Query) will be the next major revolution in programming languages. LINQ is a language-independent, platform-independent technology that solves an old problem - data queries in your code- in a very elegant way. First...

Several answers to my previous puzzle reminded me about an old result: Theorem: All horses have the same color. Proof : We demonstrate this by induction over N for all the sets of horses size of size N: - N=1: The proof is true for N = 1 (any...

It looks like it is possible to create your own start.com site, develop "gadgets" for it, etc. Go directly here: http://start.com/developer/ Here is also some documentation on the new Atlas runtime: http://start.com/developer/atlasruntime.aspx While...

Using nanotechnology, Rusell Cowburn and other researchers developed a new 3D architecture for memory chips. This latest research, however, has the potential to develop a chip that combines the storage capability of a hard drive with the low cost...

What is the value of this expression? If that was too easy, how about this one?

I mentioned a while back a weird-looking event log entry: Event Type: Warning Event Source: VSS Event Category: None Event ID: 12290 Date: 8/30/2004 Time: 12:37:19 PM User: N/A Computer: SomeMachineName Description: Volume Shadow Copy Service warning...

When I saw Fred's entry on eBay and Skype was "What? Skype is on sale on eBay?". Then, I quickly figured out that this is about eBay buying Skype... Intriguing move.

Robert Scoble did it again! The latest interview on channel9.com we have Bill Gates in person answering to various interesting questions (for example, his opinion on blogging at Microsoft). http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=111598

Samsung came with a brute-force solution to the HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate: it will launch a player that will support both formats! http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/07/content_3454461.htm Samsung said Tuesday it will introduce a DVD player...

I hope that the right people already know about this particular message for help: This message was noticed three days ago by Scott Stanfield, on the latest NOAA imagery released on the web on September 1, and posted by Jeff Atwood in his blog. ...

In reply to my "Start.com rocks" post , Dragos asked me the other day: >>> what is it that rocks if we compare it to google/ig for example? Or if we compare it to a web-based rss reader for that instance, since it plays a strong substitution...

In a recent post that I've missed until now, Eric Lippert describes a simple mental experiment: why a mirror reverses left and right, but not top and bottom. This weird property (called chirality ) has a fascinating history, and deep implications everywhere...

The VDS plugfest is almost done now... The most interesting part is the new VDS 1.1 feature set, which extends storage management capabilities to iSCSI and MPIO deployments. http://www.infostor.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=235991&p...