Thanks to a couple of videos posted on YouTube (found via thinknext via Gizmodo) we also know that there’s a cool hover effect over the new Start button:

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And a substantially upgraded integrated calculator.
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The date-to-date measurement feature really is pretty nifty.

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Plenty of chuckles in the comment section on the YouTube page for the ad noting that the agency that made the spot uses only Macs. Gizmodo found that ironic, of course.
Good follow up that riffs on the stereotype meme, too:

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Here’s Ballmer. As Gizmodo notes with characteristic snark, “we’re convinced to run out and buy a few copies of Windows Vista (to distract The Ballmer should he charge us on the open plain).”

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Daniel Socco of DailyBlogTips offers a detailed explanation of where the idea for RSS Awareness Day came from and what it was intended to accomplish. Check out RSSDay.org for more information.

In honor of the occasion, we’ve made RSS our Word of the Day to help get out the word, so to speak.

For more information, check out:

• Dan Bricklin’s article, What is RSS?
• our RSS glossary
• our podcast explaining what you can do with RSS
• our definition for RSS reader
• Google Reader
• WhatIs.com’s RSS feeds, including the Word of the Day, the feed for this blog, the enterprise IT tips feed and the enterprise IT newsfeed
• The video embedded below from Common Cause, RSS in plain English

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UPDATE: Dave Winer wished everyone Happy RSS Awareness Day. I’m glad I tweeted him about it, as he hadn’t heard the news.

UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.

A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!

Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer that’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and many others. Download Wireshark here.

Wireshark is long since well-known to networking professionals, perhaps under its previous name, “Ethereal.”

In fact, our colleague Sue Fogarty posted about SHARKFEST over at The Network Hub, an event about protocol analysis specifically for developers and users of Wireshark.

Sue says that Vint Cerf wowed ‘em at SHARKFEST. No shock there — the “father of the Internet” is well-known for that sort of thing.

In his post on Download Squad, Ian Dumych also links to a white paper posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Detecting packet injection: a guide to observing packet spoofing by ISPs. Check in there if you want to learn more about the practice and how monitoring your own connection can help others.

Linking to ITKnowledgeExchange.com could be music to your ears

Over the course of April, our sister site will be running a promotion whereby anyone that links to them or adds them to a blogroll will be eligible to win an iPod Shuffle.

All you have to do is add ITKE and then send Brent Sheets an email to let him know about it.

Good luck!

“All told, I really like the idea of my brand new datacenter rolling in on the back of a tractor-trailer truck. It kinda reminds me of the setup the bad guys had in latest Die Hard movie. I just hope nobody buys one and hires only one person to run it.”

- Cliff R. Pearson

Project Blackbox (now officially called the “Sun Modular Datacenter S20“) is a modular virtualized data center housed within a shipping container.

For more, head over to our sister site, SearchDataCenter.com, whose writers and editors have been covering the development of Project Blackbox since its introduction:

• Sun renames, rejiggers Project Blackbox, a modular data center
• Prefabricated data centers offer modular expansion alternatives
• Sun Black box: A data center Winnebago

Yes, February 14th has rolled around again and if you’ve got (or want) a sweetie, you’d be well advised to show you care. And I found the perfect thing: Ironicsans.com has a lovely selection of valentines featuring our real heart-throbs: Scientists! In addition to the dreamy Carl Sagan *sigh!* there’s Darwin: “I select you, naturally!” Lots more on the blog as well as some excellent reader suggestions in the comments (e.g. Charles Richter: “I’m all shook up over you!”)

Ironic Sans began life as an idea for a font name. Until that dream is realized, photographer David Friedman is using it as the name for his blog.

Oooooh… New ones include Pavlov and Stephen Hawking. Decisions, decisions…

~ Ivy Wigmore

Vista and Leopard hit our desktops, the iPhone slipped into our back pockets and Google’s growth accelerated. Facebook created new connections and rebuilt old ones. Green computing became the IT term of the moment, though cloud computing looms on the horizon. The writers strike accelerated our move to watching video on our computers, whether it was offered on Joost, Hulu, Miro or, of course, YouTube. Next up: HD IPTV.

Viruses, worms, phishing attacks and good old spam all conspired to make cleaning out your inbox a dodgy proposition at best. Simply writing about the Storm Worm or Rock Phish could make you the target of a denial of service attack. We discovered new repetitive stress injuries with the Wii and rocked hard with Guitar Hero. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD recalled the format wars of the 80s. The Web 2.0 buzz moved towards a Web 2.0 bubble, even as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and AJAX all started to see meaningful adoption in the enterprise and beyond. Net neutrality became real, as stories of ISPs throttling P2P applications surfaced. Mobile broadband is now a legitimate, if pricey, option for connectivity.

In a mega-roundup of the best enterprise news, tips and stories for 2007, we’ve pulled together the stories and tutorials that mattered to you. As you look ahead to the new year, remember the news that mattered. Review the tutorials that helped you do your job better. Browse through the blogs and trivia that informed or entertained you. Read the first installment of the year in review here or surf on over to Overheard in the Blogosphere for a 2007 What’s In/What’s Out Technology Roundup.

Then, look ahead to 2008, where we promise to do it all over again.

Happy New Year from WhatIs.com!

-Alex

P.S. Please take a moment to let us know what you liked — and didn’t like — on our site this year. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Around this time year, I laid out the top 20 IT buzzwords of 2006. To be fair, calling some of these technologies “buzzwords” now looks like a bit of a stretch, in terms of the strict definition for buzzword. Virtualization is everywhere now, in the network, server, desktop PC, storage hardware and data center. Web 2.0 may have been massively overhyped, but blogs, RSS, Ajax, wikis, podcasting and social bookmarking have all made an impact this year too, in a wave of adoption that many have now settled down to term “Enterprise 2.0.”

“2.0″ itself could be the word of the year, were it not for the discussions of Web 3.0 that led to some buzz fatigue and gentle reminders of the Semantic Web. (See this list of semantic apps for some insight into how this space is evolving).

SaaS applications from industry giants continue to be important for CRM. And at the end of every year, IT admins and CFOs alike can’t help but think of SOX compliance. Mash-ups, VoIP, BPM, 3G SOA, XML and data mining all continued to be relevant too, with nary a buzzword to be seen.

Anyone who creates, markets or sells content or services online know the value and importance of search engine optimization (SEO) by now as well.

While they didn’t make the number one spot (you’ll have to wait for that one) there’s no question that IT became greener, as tracked by the surge in spending, research — and hype. Green data centers , green computing, LEED certification, and, unfortunately, greenwashing all make the trend list.

Dealing with Vista is also right at the top of any trend list. Microsoft’s new OS has met with slow adoption and a slew of backwards compatibility headaches, and, as SearchWinIT’s Christina Torode reports, “Few Windows shops had plans for Windows Vista migrations in 2007, and it appears that there may also be little interest well into next year. Of more than 800 responses from IT managers to an online survey conducted by SearchWinIT.com, 37% said they had no plans whatsoever in place to install Vista, while 8% said they would begin adding the new desktop OS in the first quarter of 2008, and 9% expect to begin the upgrade in Q2 2008.”

So what else is new? What else mattered? If I just pulled from the words on WhatIs.com that received the most attention from you, our audience, you’d think it was dialectric materials, FUBAR , chaos theory, IEEE, heuristics, nanometers and compilers — but there’s more to the year that that!

I won’t aggregate every 2007 list here (after all, Fimoculous.com has, yet again, done a great job of pulling together 2007 lists) but following are some of the best that cover IT. You’ll find great new Websites, tools and services — exactly what we promise to provide you in this space from week to week.

Enjoy the lists — and, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to to our newsfeed for the best enterprise IT news or subscribe to our tipsfeed for the best enterprise IT tools and expert advice to help you work better and faster.

Jason Hiner takes aim at hardware and software in The 10 most important business technology products of 2007, noting the i-Mate, Sprint Xohm, Salesforce.com, Vista/Leopard, LinkedIn, Zoho Office, Cisco Telepresence, Microsoft Office 2007, OQO and the Apple iPhone.Personally, I agree with the commenters that the XO of the OLPC project should be in the conversation, though perhaps not on this list, as Jason says. I’d add OpenOffice, personally.

PCWorld misses that one too — though not many others — in this immense roundup of the Top 100 Products of 2007.

This list is a grab bag of hardware, software, Web sites and services. Techies will find plenty to quibble with — can you really compare the Intel Core 2 Duo with Pandora.com, Guitar Hero 2 and Netflix without segmenting them out — but if you’re looking for a good list of what mattered to techies and netizens alike to discover the best of the best, you could do much worse.

PCWorld also featured a terrific list of the top 100 undiscovered Web sites in August, if you missed it, along with their top 100 classic Web sites.

Some of my favorites (and now bookmarks) include Wink, Footnote, Wikisky, DZone, Programmable Web, VideoJug and Zoho and Meebo. Happy surfing!Time Magazine, in much the same vein, offers up their 50 Best Websites of 2007.

My favorites here have to be CellSwapper.com, Last.fm, Newsvine.com, Tumblr, Twitter, GrandCentral and, for some of the best laughs of the year, the outrageous FunnyOrDie.com.

If you didn’t see Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord,” you missed out. StumbleUpon is, for my money, the breakout Web site of the year, though YouTube and Facebook fans may disagree.

(Stumble this blog and find out what I mean).

I liked Mozy.com for online backup, too.

It isn’t quite a 2007 roundup but Esquire’s six ideas that will change the world offered such intriguing suggestions that I couldn’t help but mention them:

• a low energy method for getting rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic for water purification in the developing world
• Internet “hacktivists” who use Psiphon to provide uncensored Net access to netizens stranded in regimes hostile to the free flow of information and ideas
• flexible circuits embedded in silicone skin that can be used for prostheses and wearable computers
• self-modeling robots who use the principles of natural selection found in evolutionary theory to arrive at the optimal model for a structure or mechanism
• CO2 sequestering in the deepest water of the oceans to force it to become a liquid heavier than water
• biodegradable plastic produced in an environmentally friendly way

For more in that vein, make sure to consult the pages of MIT’s Technology Review, where they list the following exciting emerging technologies:

• optical antennas and meta­materials
• peer-to-peer video,
• personalized medical monitors
• compressive sensing
• nanohealing and quantum-dot solar power
• single-cell analysis
• mobile augmented reality

On the other side of the coin, eWeek’s Brian Moore illustrated a list of technologies and services that flopped, floundered or aren’t quite ready for prime time in 2007′s Biggest Emerging Technology Disappointments. You’ll find virtual worlds, in the form of Second Life, ultramobile micro-PCs, home-based VoIP, mobile security for smartphones, IPv6, ebook reader (Hello, Kindle!), WiMax, BlueRay/HD DVD and MuniWiFi.

It’s hard to argue with the selections, though I do think that Kindle’s eInk technology offers the closest thing to a pleasant electronic reading experience yet.

Wired is calling for nominees for its 10th anniversary vaporware awards, too, if you want to get in on voting for what didn’t materialize this year.

Personally, and I know I’m burying the lede here, 2007 was the year that the network took a huge step towards being the computer, a trend acknowledged by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft in one form or another. (And yes, I’m talking about our word of the year again here.) Sun talked about that phenomenon ten years ago, though it missed an opportunity by not open sourcing Java. This model of Internet-based supercomputing, where vast stores of information and processing resources can be tapped into remotely by a laptop, PC, smartphone or other connected device is still building momentum..

2007 saw the introduction of more devices than ever before, including the gPC, iPhone and XO, that all move the user into this browser-based, Web application world, enabled and enobled by Ajax. Between open source operating systems, browsers, office productivity applications and inexpensive hardware, users and organizations can do more and create more than ever before, albeit in increasingly insecure environments.

We may take a stab at some predictions for the year ahead some time soon, once we finish digesting the year that was. Feel free to let me know what YOU think the most important trends and technologies for 2008 will be through email or in the comments.

Download link

If you like it, you can watch it online or subscribe with iTunes or RSS – or even via email. Folks, we’ve left the old ways of watching TV in our living rooms at a set time far, far behind.

The IT Room has ambitions to be more than just a series of webisodes created by Motiv Studios, written by a group of writers in a snark-laden conference room. The producers want the audience of IT geeks (and perhaps a few end users) to submit their own IT horror stories, which they can then use to create further episodes.

Is it a way of dodging the ongoing writer’s strike? Perhaps. We’ve had some luck with getting users to submit their own IT bloopers in the past, though we haven’t assembled a crack comedy team to make them into video shorts quite yet. The monkey promises to give the best written IT horror story a Dell Latitude, so there’s some extra incentive in there, too. The site gathers submissions in a transparent and decidedly techie way — you contribute the story as a blog post, visible to all.

Cleverly, there’s a Digg button next to each post, a move that the rather more old media Wall Street Journal just made as well, leading to wide spread speculation that Murdoch might be interested in acquiring the social news site. (That move also allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the WSJ’s content on Digg– neat!)

The cynic in me notes that Motiv works on marketing programs for Dell, though this is obviously more than just extended commercials. There’s no Dude getting me a Dell (instead, he’s offering me a pint), happily, but until I see a battery meltdown or a frustrating tech support mobisode focused on relentlessly calm Indian associates offering scripted responses, I’ll be a tad suspicious…. even as I snarf my coffee a bit when I tune in.