I wish I knew more about this stuff. I really ought to cobble together a server and try some of these things out.

Which search product is right for you?

Compare Microsoft's enterprise search products using the table below. Click on the product features to learn more about them.

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007*

Product Features:

Search Center
No Pre-set Document Limits
Extensible Search Experience
Relevance Tuning
Continuous Propagation Indexing
Federated Search Connectors
Indexing Connectors
Security-trimmed Results
Unified Administration Dashboard
Query and Results Reporting
Streamlined Installation
High Availability and Load Balancing
People and Expertise Searching
Business Data Catalog
SharePoint Productivity Infrastructure

Looking at Microsoft Expression Studio and Silverlight, it seems to ME at least that Microsoft is taking careful aim at the entire line of Adobe products as they relate to web development specifically.

...up until now, Adobe has had a free hand at the wheel with their visions of the future regarding Rich Internet Application development.

Those days are over, methinks.

Expression Studio includes:

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Expression Web

Microsoft® Expression® Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web.

(This is the product that Front Page evolved into)

Standards-based Web Sites
Create CSS-based, XHTML 1.0 Transitional-conforming Web sites by default. Work better across browsers, simplifying deployment and maintenance. Configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML, XHTML, Strict, Transitional, Frameset and CSS 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1 plus browser-specific schemas. Validate your site with compatibility and accessibility reporting and against Section 508 and W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

CSS Based Layout
Generate elegant, modern CSS layouts with state-of-the-art surface design tools. Directly manipulate positioning, sizing, margins and padding. A sophisticated CSS rendering engine inside gives you the confidence to make design decisions on the fly. Try out CSS styles on the page with drag-and-drop style management, and migrate them to a central repository. Typing aids and IntelliSense® in the Code View make your process efficient and fast.

Rich Data Presentation
Build and format views of industry-standard XML data using drag-and-drop tools for quick visualization. An XPath Expression Builder allows you to create complex queries, and XSL Transform (XSLT) support gives you the flexibility to present data any way you want. XML data can be retrieved and presented via live RSS feeds that match your site's formatting.

Powerful Server Technology
Harness the power of ASP.NET 2.0 to transform your sites into dynamic, interactive Web applications. No code data binding required with integrated support for server and user controls. Inserting and configuring ASP.NET controls is a snap with the controls toolbox, properties grid, and on-control "action menus." ASP.NET Master Pages make site-wide changes quick and easy.

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Expression Blend

Microsoft® Expression Blend™ is the professional design tool to create engaging web-connected experiences for Windows.

Efficient Collaboration
Work together in a friction-free environment, sharing projects, code, and designs for better productivity and quality. Quickly build stunning prototypes, and then turn them over to developers with confidence. Your designs can be used intact in the final product so you keep creative control. Developers no longer have to try to recreate them; play the hero and rid the world of "developer art." Open existing Visual Studio projects to re-design and re-skin the applications.

Tools for Creativity
Expression Blend opens the door to creating elegant and compelling user interface designs using a full spectrum of media types, including vector and pixel art, video, audio, text, 3D content, and animation. Work inside a rich, real-time design environment optimized for creative professionals to shorten the distance between idea and execution.

Codeless Interactivity
Add interactivity to your designs without writing code-just add fully customizable controls, from simply-styled buttons to sophisticated custom listviews. Easily connect interface elements to each other or to live data. Layout interfaces using containers that adapt your content and interface to various screen resolutions and form factors. Just drag and drop to add developer-written custom code or controls to your application.

Deliver Better Experiences
Deliver applications that are more usable and achieve greater end-user satisfaction and productivity. Leverage the full power of the desktop and Internet to provide your audience with big-impact, high-performance user experiences that drive brand recognition and repeat use. Easily create localizable and accessible applications for global audiences.

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Expression Design

Microsoft® Expression® Design is a professional illustration and graphic design tool that lets you build compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces.

Flexible Vector Drawing
Use Expression Design's powerful vector drawing and editing tools to explore new artistic possibilities and create compelling graphic designs and illustrations. Integrate your vector artwork and bitmap images in the same document to create hybrid compositions.

Dynamic Live Effects
Take advantage of Live Effects to apply high-quality effects and filters such as Bevel, Emboss, and Gaussian Blur to any vector or bitmapped object. Then change the effect, or change the object, with the confidence that Live Effects are always non-destructive and fully editable.

Expanded Workflow
Bring your existing vector-based artwork from other popular graphic tools into Expression Design along with JPEG, PNG, and GIF bitmap files. Then export in a wide variety of formats, including XAML code that you can easily use when building next-generation software with Expression Blend. Or seamlessly copy and paste your images into Microsoft Office while preserving transparency.

Innovative Design Environment
Deliver applications that are more usable and achieve greater end-user satisfaction and productivity. Leverage the full power of the desktop and Internet to provide your audience with big-impact, high-performance user experiences that drive brand recognition and repeat use. Easily create localizable and accessible applications for global audiences.

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Expression Media

Microsoft® Expression® Media is a professional asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation.

Effortless Organization
Make digital asset management easy—just drag and drop to import more than 100 different media formats, including digital RAW files. Start working with your files right away, while Expression Media quickly creates full-screen previews. Store your files anywhere: shared folders, CDs, hard drives, or DVDs; and use integrated search tools to find them in seconds. Wherever they are, Expression Media will keep track of them all. Even when your originals are offline, visual catalogs allow you to browse, search, and annotate your assets.

Seamless Workflow Integration
Stick with the workflow that works for you and Expression Media will fill in the gaps. Support for RAW formats from the most popular cameras and industry-standard metadata formats means that your metadata is already there. Keep keywords consistent with custom dictionaries—just drag and drop to quickly tag thousands of files. Rename an entire folder of files or change their format easily with batch conversion. Use flexible scripting tools to get tedious tasks out your way. Make sure all your precious digital assets are protected with built-in archiving and backup features.

Image and Video Editing
Save time by taking care of basic image editing tasks, like rotating, cropping, and resizing, from inside Expression Media. Color management profiles are preserved throughout. You can quickly adjust levels, sharpness, brightness, or color balance yourself. With Expression Encoder, re-encoding video is as easy as converting images. Apply filters or add watermark logos to your video files, or re-encode video for optimized playback on the Web or Windows Media™ handheld devices.

Professional Presentation
Impress your audience with slide shows, videos, and Web galleries. When it's time to deliver, Expression Media can export your assets in exactly the format and size your clients need, with dozens of professionally designed presentation templates. With Expression Encoder, you can convert and publish video to reach a broad, cross-platform audience.

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Expression Encoder

Microsoft® Expression® Encoder, a feature of Expression Media, offers encoding, enhancement, and publishing of rich media experiences to Microsoft Silverlight.

Flexible Encoding Workflows
Encode a wide array of file-based media content, including QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, WMV, and more using the designer friendly Expression-standard user interface. You can also control the Expression Encoder engine from the command line. Produce live webcasts with multiple live and file-based sources that can be mixed and switched in real-time for streaming and on-demand viewing.

Richer Media Enhancement
Customize your media assets to match your brand or target your audience. Add leaders and trailers, watermarks, crop, scale and trim. Add Metadata and enhance your content with chapter markers, event markers and captions.

Publish Perfect Experiences
Deliver high quality VC-1 encoded content wrapped in a Silverlight player template directly from Expression Encoder. Dial in your encoding settings, save every aspect of your Expression Encoder job as a preset and then take advantage of third party hardware acceleration to get the highest quality result in a hurry.

This is interesting, yes? makes me wish I had a TiVo instead of my Dish DVR, actually. There's some funny stuff on YouTube.

TiVo to put bring YouTube videos to TV screens

NEW YORK (Reuters) - TiVo Inc said on Wednesday that it would deliver videos from Google Inc's popular Web site YouTube directly to television screens via its digital video recorders.
TiVo said the service would be available later this year for high-speed Internet subscribers who have TiVo Series3 DVRs. It said that users would be able to log onto their YouTube accounts directly from their TiVo boxes.

From ZDNet:

Microsoft is planning to add a new, opt-in "super standards" mode to Internet Explorer (IE) 8 - a move of which some developers are critical.

IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson shared the details of how Microsoft plans to provide the greater standards compatibility, which it has promised for its next browser release via a January 21 posting to the IE Team Blog.

Wilson said Microsoft is planning to offer developers three modes in IE 8: the existing quirks mode, which will be compatible with current IE pages and applications; a "standards" mode, which will be the same as what's offered by IE 7 and "compatible with current content"; and a third, super standards mode that will require the insertion of a element to guarantee the highest level of standards compatibility.

More on this from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect

and Aaron Gustafson, member of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force.

OK. I can see the writing on the wall. Can you?

From ZDNET

Reminder: Microsoft to push Silverlight to business users this week

"...but this week - specifically on January 22 - Microsoft will make its Adobe-Flash-alternative Silverlight available via WSUS, as well as via Microsoft Update (MU). In order to have Silverlight 1.0 pushed to users, admins will need to select it; it will be an optional, not automatic, download."

From the Silverlight Home Page

Microsoft(r) Silverlight(tm) is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Some of that writing we were talking about, over at WikiPedia.

California and several other U.S. States have asked a District Judge to extend Microsoft's antitrust case settlement for another five years,[35] citing "a number of concerns, including the fear that Microsoft could use the next version of Windows [expected in approximately 2010] to 'tilt the playing field' toward Silverlight, its new Adobe Flash competitor", says a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article.

The "White Space" between your digital TV Channels seems to be Prime Real Estate for the uber-tech-companies.

This exploration of the white spaces is part of the general-spectrum "land rush" that is taking place as American TV evolves. As TV stations transition from their current analog signals to digital by early next year, there will be spaces between channels. These spaces are not currently regulated or licensed, and Microsoft, Google and other companies want to mine it for wireless broadband service.

The companies interested in the white spaces have formed an alliance, appropriately known as the White Spaces Coalition. The group includes Dell, Earthlink, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Philips.

I didn't expect to read this today:

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.

From VNUNET:

Microsoft is reminding IT managers that the scheduled 12 February rollout of Windows Server Update Service will include an automatic upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.

Companies wishing to remain with IE6 have been offered guidelines explaining how to prevent the automated update taking effect.

If the update service is configured automatically to approve Update Rollups, IE7 will be downloaded and installed to workers' PCs when the release becomes available.

IT administrators will need to disable the auto-approval rule before the deadline to prevent the download.

Microsoft claimed that the move was prompted by security concerns.

Many companies will choose to remain with IE6 as some web-based applications experience issues running with IE7.

This is just plain eerie. (from Discover Magazine, via Gizmodo)

"We set up a situation common in nature - foraging with uncertainty," Floreano says. "You have to find food, but you don't know what food is; if you eat poison, you die." Four different types of colonies of robots were allowed to eat, reproduce, and expire.

By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate - lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they'd found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved "cheater" robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. "Sometimes," Floreano says, "you see that in nature - an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away - but I never expected to see this in robots."

From the Tech Blog over at the Houston Chronicle:

Remember how fast ME was swept under the rug? Think it might happen again with Vista?

Microsoft's executives insist the company listens to its customers. Many of those customers have indicated they'll skip Windows Vista and consider Windows 7 when it comes out.

Their wish is apparently Redmond's command.

Wolfgang Gruener at TG Daily says he's obtained a leaked road map for the next version of Windows, and it shows Microsoft has put the operating system on a faster track:

Several industry sources have confirmed to TG Daily that a very early version of Windows 7, previously code-named Blackcomb Vienna, already has been shipped to "key partners" as a "Milestone 1" (M1) code drop for validation purposes. A roadmap received by TG Daily indicates that the new operating system will be introduced in the second half of 2009.

Via Wizbang

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War icon by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.

Fisher died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday. There was no immediate word on cause of death.

Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.

Garry Kasparov, the former Russian chess champion, said Fischer's ascent in the chess world in the 1960s and his promotion of chess worldwide was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game. But Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.

"The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.

From NEWSFACTOR.COM, by way of the InstaPundit

Publishing in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the Stanford researchers have shown that by using silicon nanowires as the battery anode instead of today's graphite, the amount of lithium the anode can hold is extended tenfold.