Microsoft learned valuable lessons from the Windows Vista experience, even though the company spent much of 2008 pretending that nothing was wrong with it and that the market hadn't given it a fair shake.

The world's first Open Storage appliances, the Sun Storage 7000 family features three products in its initial release: Sun Storage 7110, 7210 and 7410 - each is the first in a new and broad family of Unified Storage Systems. In conjunction with today's launch, Sun also announced a new Open Storage Partner Specialty Program and a series of new professional services to help customers take advantage of Open Storage technologies.

Code maintenance is an important aspect of application development, one that is often ignored in favour of a faster time-to-market. For some applications, this may not pose a significant problem, since the life span of those applications is short or the application is deployed and never touched again. However, embedded systems applications may have life spans that are measured in decades, which means some early mistakes can result in significant costs later.

Microsoft showed off new Windows 7 innovations at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this week. The focus was how the upcoming version of Microsoft's flagship product will make it easier for hardware partners to create new experiences for Windows PC customers.

Windows senior vice presidents Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan rallied hardware partners, encouraging them to begin testing their current products and building new products on the application programming interface (API).

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IBM today is making available a new social networking tool called Pass It Along to help organizations take a more user-friendly, collaborative approach to knowledge sharing. The new technology expands the notion of social networking for employees and learners -- and includes advanced features such as learning paths, visual mapping and expertise profiling.
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Through an innovative evaluation process, iMap delivers a customized, comprehensive analysis by focusing on several key areas, including navigation; search engine compatibility; site design and layout; conversion path resolution; site copy; shopping cart; and accessibility. iMap provides detailed recommendations for how clients can reduce expense, improve search engine visibility and user contentment, and create more business opportunities with new and existing customers.

With an ever increasing online population - 41 million users in the UK alone (source: Internet World Stats) - computer security and user authentication have never been more vital. Unusable security is expensive as well as ineffective. According to Password research, two-thirds of users had to reset their passwords/PINs three or more times in the last 2 years.

Don’t miss SQL Server Magazine Connections Conference, the premier event for Microsoft developers and DBAs, in Las Vegas, November 10-13. Every attendee will receive a copy of SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition with one CAL.

Virtualization.info, the most popular and trusted news source about virtualization technologies since 2003, invites you to attend its premiere conference: the Virtualization Congress. On a truly independent stage, you’ll see the top technical speakers from the biggest industry players presenting real products, side by side with newest startups, who will be announcing for the first time breakthrough technologies. Join the entire virtualization ecosystem for three days and meet the people that are changing forever the way we deliver IT infrastructures.

View this web seminar to see how you can virtualize the connections between servers and storage creating a shared pool of resources, and is a flexible and highly available platform for consolidating SQL Server infrastructure. Thus seeing no degradation in performance and management is streamlined making this an ideal solution for mission-critical SQL Server databases running SAP applications.

Join Microsoft for the 2nd Annual Microsoft BI Conference from October 6-8th in Seattle, Washington. You’ll gain insight from industry thought leaders; learn about how other Microsoft BI customers are having success; discover best practices and gain product insight from Microsoft’s product experts. Visit www.msbiconference.com for more information.

IndyTechFest is the premier Developer/DBA conference in Indianapolis. Hosted by IndyPASS and IndyNDA, this years' conference includes over 30 sessions to fill your day with training from product experts and Microsoft MVPs. Admission is free!

This two-day course will be most valuable to medical device software engineers, engineering managers, scientists, and quality engineers (particularly in product development). This course will also be beneficial to quality assurance and regulatory affairs personnel who are new to the industry or their current position and do not have an in-depth knowledge of Medical Device Software requirements.
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Complex, Trusted Systems (Guest Lecture by Professor Hal Abelson)

San Francisco is being forced to overhaul security measures on the computer network that controls data for its police, courts, jails, payroll and health services, as well as other crucial information, after the technology administrator entrusted with the system blocked access for everyone but himself last month and for days refused to reveal the password, even from jail.