Stories by: Kathleen Lau

Thursday's release of version 2.0 of Silverlight, a cross-browser runtime for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), from Microsoft has new features designed to enhance usability for the developer and designer, which will ultimately lead to a better end user experience, a company executive said.

While Microsoft realizes there is greater benefit to collaborating with the open source community from an interoperability perspective, it may prove difficult to change its pro-proprietary image, said an open source analyst.

A group of companies that build products to ease the integration of Macs in the enterprise had been separately championing a heterogeneous IT environment where both Macs and Windows can co-exist. Combining those efforts into an umbrella organization seemed like a good idea.

Open Text will release an integrated e-mail management offering targeted at law firms that aims to help boost the productivity of lawyers with capabilities that take advantage of users' existing Outlook folders.

Given the short history of mashups in the enterprise, IT departments likely don't entirely understand the technology's role in the business. Organizations can fall victim to mashup mistakes given the markedly different approach necessary to deploy and maintain them across the organization.

If calculating the maximum height at which an egg won't break when dropped while sacrificing the least number of eggs sounds like a worthy challenge to a programmer, then this year's Google Code Jam may be of interest. "

New York-based Linux company Xandros on Wednesday bought Linspire, another open source distributor in a bid to increase its presence in the enterprise, an executive said.

The Ontario Cancer Institute in Canada has deployed what it's calling Canada's fastest research supercomputer to help discover more effective cancer treatments.

The emergence of services-oriented architecture (SOA) from traditional object-oriented programming means that system design now requires a different approach, and therefore a new combination of skills.

EMC has announced storage products that executives said respond to the top-most areas of concern for enterprise customers in the data center.

NetGear's latest release of its centralized network storage technology for small and medium-sized businesses comes in a compact desktop form factor that the equipment manufacturer is calling an industry first.