Potentially toughening the competitive landscape for its own Silverlight rich Internet application platform, Microsoft will expand support for the HTML5 specification in its Internet Explorer 9 browser, under a plan revealed Tuesday.

Microsoft today unveiled a public sneak peek of its newest browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), aimed at Web developers and the technically brave of heart.

Microsoft confirmed Monday at the company's Mix 10 developers event that native applications will not be allowed on Windows Phone 7 devices. Only applications running in the Silverlight runtime environment, or games in the XNA Game Studio runtime, will be allowed.

That was the answer by Todd Brix, senior director for Mobile Platform Services Product Management, to a question from U.K.-based technology journalist Tim Anderson.

IBM will soon offer software development and testing services through its public cloud, adding to a private cloud option launched in June 2009, the company said Tuesday.

Big Blue also released a list of cloud partners Tuesday, including RightScale and Kaavo, which make cloud management software; security vendor Navajo Systems; performance monitoring software maker AppFirst and application development vendors Aviarc, Corent and Wavemaker.

Open source ain't what it used to be. It's both more and less.

On the "more" side of the equation, let's start with a big number: 19,000. According to Black Duck Software, that's the approximate number of open source projects started in 2009. As Peter Vescuso of Black Duck told me, "While the economy and IT budgets were declining, the open source community was busy coding."

In the year since Intel released the Nehalem-EP quad-core Xeon CPU, all the hubbub surrounding that chip and its new design has proven accurate. Bigger, better, faster, more -- a whole lot more than anything that Intel had ever released before. But that was then, this is now, and as they say, what have you done for me lately?

It seems that every few years, IT settles down somewhat. While processors get ever faster, storage gets ever bigger, and bandwidth grows exponentially, the workloads these technologies support seem to stabilize to a certain degree. Not long ago, Windows Active Directory domain controllers required their own dedicated server for even small shops, while now they're almost an afterthought in terms of performance. Where Microsoft Exchange used to be the 800-pound gorilla in most organizations, it can now generally be relegated to a VM, or at least a middle-tier server.

One of my clients was recently hit (again) by the Conficker worm. The company's systems were all fully patched, yet the malware still managed to infiltrate hundreds of machines. It was evident that worm was able to spread rapidly via a network share vector. But the real question remains: How did the worm infiltrate the network in the first place, given that all the systems were patched?

An old supervisor of mine once told me that patience is a virtue and the customer is always right. On occasion, it has helped to remember this advice; however, nine times out of ten, I had to rely on my patience in situations where the customer was, in fact, wrong.

When I worked on the help desk as a desktop support tech, I had a myriad of different quick-fix calls that I would get done without leaving my station. Most of the calls were password resets, keyboard/mouse issues, and the good old "check the nut behind the keyboard" fixes.

In the days of the first Android G1 phone, a patch to the Android 1.0 OS circulated among developers to enable the multitouch screen on the device. The word was that it was a little buggy, there were no applications for it, and normal users should avoid it.

Sixty percent of virtual servers are less secure than the physical servers they replace, the analyst firm Gartner said in new research Monday.

This state of affairs will remain true until 2012, but security should improve substantially after that point, Gartner said.

Microsoft at its Mix10 conference on Monday showed off application capabilities for its Windows Phone 7 Series platform and offered a release candidate for its upcoming Silverlight 4 rich Internet application plug-in technology.

Windows Phone 7 Series leverages Silverlight and the XNA gaming platform for application development. Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend are positioned, respectively, as development and design tools for the phone OS, which features graphical capabilities akin to the Apple iPhone.

I just received an email from Wikileaks editor Julian Assange that's pretty wild. It accuses the U.S. government of deliberately trying to take down the whistle-blower site [PDF] two years ago.

The Apple iPad has been available for pre-order for more than 48 hours now. Initial demand seems promising, although not everyone has embraced the concept of dedicating $500 or more to be an early adopter of a device that nobody really has all the details on just yet.

Microsoft at its Mix10 conference on Monday will introduce a framework enabling Web analytics to be performed for Siliverlight rich media applications.

The open source Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework will debut in a beta form at the conference in Las Vegas, said Michael Scherotter, Microsoft media experience evangelist. The framework, which will be released on the company's CodePlex site for open source projects, will work with third-party analytics services from companies such as Preemptive Solutions.

Technology drives just about everything we do, and not just at our jobs. From banks to hospitals to the systems that keep the juice flowing to our homes, we are almost entirely dependent on tech. More and more of these systems are interconnected, and many of them are vulnerable. We see it almost every day.

After Apple announced the iPad, a lot of details got passed over in the media frenzy that Apple had whipped up, details such as whether the iPad would support Microsoft Exchange -- a fact that Apple's Web site did not address and that the company did not respond to when I and others asked. That was nearly six weeks ago.

Amazon.com has apparently lost its corporate mind. I say "apparently" because it hasn't really -- but it has suffered the consequences of being entrepreneurial, as evidenced by its pricing policies for Kindle e-reader titles.

As I write these words, Amazon has priced the Kindle edition of Michel Roberts' "Strategy Pure and Simple II" (2001) at $15. It asserts you save 40 percent off the list price of $24.95.

Microsoft promises to finally reveal full details of the Windows Phone 7 operating system, at its Mix conference this week, traditionally a venue for Microsoft's Web developer community. There's a lot riding on these details.

The endless variety of enterprise storage solutions means that you can find pretty much exactly what you need -- if you have your requirements straight. The trick to avoiding overspending or under-specification is knowing what questions to ask when you're deciding which option is right for you. Here are three questions I seldom see asked or answered with enough care or thought: