It's been about a month since I started a Bing experiment, and it's gone pretty well. Search results are about as good as Google, sometimes better. After a month, though, I've decided to go back to Google. The problem isn't with the search results quality; it's all the other things that Bing doesn't do -- and some things it does that I wish it wouldn't.

I sat down with my colleague Fritz Nelson and we talked about some of the big headlines this week: the release of a new version of Firefox, why the Snow Leopard operating system is more important to Apple than the iPhone 3GS, Steve Jobs's return to work after six-month health-related leave of absence, and Windows 7. Watch after the jump.

Skyfire has made some waves in the mobile browser market on Windows Mobile and S60-based devices. Its key feature is Flash, which lets users of those devices view embedded video content on Web sites such as YouTube and Hulu. Now, Skyfire is working on a better browser for BlackBerries and the alpha testing is underway.

Internet advocates have been saying for years that America needs policies to ensure "universal access," but that's a more complicated goal than just saying "everybody should have access to the Internet." A former Obama advisor says government needs to determine what levels of access should be universal—how fast is fast enough? And another part of universal access is making sure the Internet doesn't fragment into multiple, mutually incompatible networks.

This week Enterasys announced its NAC business had grown 317 percent year over year, which seemed unfathomable given Dark Reading's report (using Infonetics research) that NAC appliances have been hardest hit by this year's economic woes.

Storage compute is the amount of processing power that the storage system/array has to be able to handle storage I/O tasks. How powerful your storage processor is directly affects how many drives can be sustained by your system while maintaining full performance and how long it will be before you need to add an additional storage system. The flexibility and efficiency of storage compute engines can maximize the storage dollars you have in your budget.

According to a recently leaked internal AT&T memo, June 19, termed "iLaunch day 2009," was AT&T's best sales day ever. That's funny. Wasn't the iPhone 3GS launched on the same day? Oooooooh.....

A few months ago, Canonical and Eucalyptus Systems aligned their product development to create an integrated cloud-software-on-Ubuntu-Linux stack. The startups are now collaborating on service and support, giving IT departments a new option for creating internal cloud computing environments.

Two highly educated and accomplished sons join the United States Marines to defend their country. One is killed in Iraq; the other still serves there. The 61-year-old father – an orthopedic surgeon – gets an age waiver to enlist and now serves as a combat surgeon near his son. The mother – strongest of all – supports and prays for them from home. Meet the remarkable Krissoff family, whose story reminds us all of the debt we owe our military families.

Owners of the new iPhone 3GS have been reporting sporadic issues with the device since its release on June 19. One of the problems noted is that the device tends to overheat. Apple recently recognized the issue by publishing a warning on its iPhone support pages, but it claims "operator error" is the real culprit.

If you're an enterprise user of Google Apps, here's some good news for you. The biggest new feature is a user profile API that gives enterprise admins way more power to manage all the users within their own domain.

After installing 64-bit Windows on one of my test machines, I scurried around to see what 64-bit desktop applications are available in the open source world. Firefox is one of them, but not officially -- at least, not yet. The reasons for this are not what you might think.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether we really need real-time search, I'd like to dispense with the notion that Bing is now providing real-time search of anything relevant on Twitter.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a competition for developers to create apps out of 80 data sets from 32 city agencies. He wants to improve government transparency and accountability, and stimulate development of the digital media industry.

Normally we talk about phones and services related to them in this blog but today I'm going to mention a new website for gadget lovers called gdgt. The site is a mix of social networking, a wiki, tech forum and review site. What's not to love?

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has shown outstanding leadership in creating easy-to-use websites that let taxpayers see how their money is being spent (or wasted) by the federal government's vast array of IT projects. But after looking at outlays for $38.6 billion in "major investments, I almost – but not quite – wished Kundra had kept some of these ugly and depressing details out of sight and therefore mercifully out of mind.

Google has overhauled the way users can interact with their labels. The changes include a new location on the Gmail homepage for labels and as well as the ability to drag and drop emails directly into labels.

Paglo announced a new service that lets IT send and store logs in the cloud. Logs can be searched and analyzed on demand.

The latest version of Firefox is a solid upgrade, adding performance improvements, geolocation, better tab-handling, and a new privacy mode to help keep your addiction to Cute Overload a secret. Take a look at this video, where we put Firefox 3.5 through its paces.

Should CIOs join the boards of directors of IT vendors? By joining the board of Netezza, Merck CIO J. Chris Scalet will gain unmatched insight and input into the strategic plans of a key IT partner, and Netezza gets front-line customer expertise and cachet. But many vendor-customer relationships go through rough stretches or even dissolve altogether -- will Scalet be able to equitably fulfill both sets of responsibilities?

At the New Yorker, there's a review of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell. The points made in the article, while not aimed directly at die-hard open source advocates, might well have been. Free, as Gladwell puts it, is just another price.

Today Nokia made a new firmware version available for the Nokia N97. The update installs a huge list of fixes, including stabilized widgets, better photo gallery control, and fixed user interface transitions. Long story short, upgrade ASAP if you can!

Vice President Joe Biden is in Pennsylvania today to kick off the Administration's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program, announcing the release of the federal agency regulations, also known as the Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA), that set eligibility rules.

Before we pack up our laptops, Blackberrys, and various chargers for the holiday weekend, let's take a moment to reflect on what has come to pass over the last six months.

I've just posted a short video about SAP's deal with Jive Software, which lets you embed dynamic analytics widgets inside your blog posts. I mean "dynamic" not in the sense of multicolor whiz-bang (which usually aren't) charts. I'm talking serious Crystal Reports graphics, so you can showcase Business Intelligence (BI) with multiple data slices before your entire company, right there on the corporate Clearspace wiki.

In a rapidly changing IT market, Dell has stood pat for a while as competitors have jumped into virtualization, the cloud, software, networking, and services. A few financial analysts feel Dell needs to quickly regain the confident aggressiveness that made it a global powerhouse earlier in this decade, and here are some acquisition targets they think will enable Dell to make that leap.

A few months ago Barnes & Noble purchased Fictionwise, the owner of eReader.com, which is one of the most popular ebook stores on the internet. Pricing used to be similar to that of a physical book store, that is to say all over the place. Now they are matching Amazon's Kindle pricing of $9.95. In fact, they are slightly beating Amazon when you include the eReader reward program.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, finally got a little revenge. He wasn't in the least spiteful. Rather, he was only guilty of repeating something his former boss, Larry Ellison, said about software-as-a-service and cloud computing. An audience of cloud cognoscenti at Structure 09 loved the performance.

Today Apple began pushing out iPhone Software Development Kit 3.1 to developers of the iPhone platform. The new SDK has several new features that should make it easier for developers to create applications for the iPhone. The biggest new development is that the MMS feature is automatically turned on in 3.1.

I've been using the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials, (MSE) having been one of the lucky few to grab it in the first few days before Microsoft closed the beta. Here's what I think so far: It's not flashy, it's not feature-rich, and its not a replacement for enterprise-class workstation security. Because of that, it has the potential to be a great solution for consumers and small businesses.

There have been scattered reports that Palm's Pre smartphone is not holding up well. A few Pre users have been complaining that their screens are wobbly and can get easily cracked, the slider is poorly-designed, and the overall manufacturing is shoddy.

With bankrupt Chrysler about to resume production and as both it and General Motors struggle with huge losses and drastic new ownership structures, at least 30% and perhaps even 40% of the suppliers that feed the U.S. automobile industry will not be able to survive, says a restructuring expert.

Later this year, Dell is reportedly going to sell a pocked-sized gizmo that can access the Internet, but won't offer telephony. In other words, it's working on inventing its own version of Apple's Newton.

Bsquare says, "Pshaw!" No need to wait until the end of 2009 to get Flash on your Android device. It is already offering Android developers support for Flash Lite 3.1 on ARM-based devices.

Anyone trying to understand the cloud computing phenomenon need only look at how cloud services are being used to get a better picture. The following examples demonstrate the cloud being used for everything from marketing campaigns to space exploration and scientific research.

If the latest round of statistics are to be believed, the GPL -- the most popular license for open source software -- is undergoing a slow but fundamental shift. But if the same statistics are to be further believed, other licenses are also gaining ground on the GPL.

One of the most compelling attributes of Web 2.0 is that it transformed the static Interweb from something pushed at us to something that includes our inputs. The coincidence of Howard Dean's intelligent use of the Web, the rise of Facebook in public consciousness and Barack Obama's very technologically-savvy campaign has led to the expectation that Government 2.0 would quickly follow.

Indian IT services firms have been cutting their rates by 35% or even 40% as global clients continue to look for ways to reduce costs in the global economic downturn. The depth of this latest round of rate cuts is "unprecedented," according to an industry expert based in India.

Right on schedule, Mozilla Corp. shipped Firefox 3.5 about a minute ago, at about 11:20 am Eastern time. The new version adds performance improvements, privacy features, support for embedded video, and more. It comes into the world facing a more crowded and competitive market than before, as alternatives such as Google Chrome and Safari have emerged as viable alternatives to both Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The latest version of Skype for the Windows Mobile platform adds some nifty new features. Users will now be able to swap files back and forth, and can send text messages to other mobile phones directly from Skype.

If you've been hankering for some BlackBerry Tour action from Verizon Wireless, it's time to get excited. The nation's largest carrier has launched pre-orders for the Tour, which will be in stores starting July 12. It will come in two versions: one with a camera, and one without.

When the new application store for Windows Mobile, dubbed Windows Marketplace for Mobile, opens it will have 600 apps to start with according to a Windows Mobile product manager at Microsoft France.

Oh, sure, you may be a high flying enterprise architect, DBA, infrastructure engineer, or coder, but your friends and family all think: you work in IT. You love IT. And, "you must want to take care of my consumer grade tech needs because you love IT so much." Riiiight. How can you satisfy them and still have time for summer fun?

In the latest installment of what appears to an ongoing series in the technology press, criminals are using technology to commit crimes.

A leaked SAP strategy document says the company expects to reach an operating margin of 35% by 2014 and also expects current revenue to double during that five-year period. Right now, archrival Oracle has an operating margin of 51%, so it will be interesting to see how each side spins its profit story to its customers.

We all knew this was coming. As Social Networks gained in popularity, they'd become more juicy targets. Now we're starting to see some data.

IBM was awarded 4,186 patents last year to lead the Top 10 list, marking the 16th straight year IBM has earned more US patents than any other company in the world. IBM's achievement – that's more than 11 patent granted every single day for the entire year – also marks the first time any organization has been awarded more than 4,000 US patents in a single year.

The ball might finally get rolling tomorrow for the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds, not a moment too soon where operators and Internet-starved rural communities are concerned.

Till now, certification requirements for electronic medical records were pretty hefty, addressing hundreds of stringent criteria that comprehensive inpatient and ambulatory systems must meet in order to get a seal of approval from the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, or CCHIT, a non-profit federally supported group.

While all the Apple buzz is about the iPhone 3GS, Snow Leopard is looking like much more important announcement for Apple. Both were announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference a few weeks ago, they're both significant steps forward for existing products. While the 3GS is sexier, Snow Leopard has under-the-hood improvements in the operating system that will help carry Apple into the future.

Palm has issued another firmware update for the Palm Pre. The latest version, 1.0.4, offers some minor security improvements and one unwelcome change: some homemade apps no longer work.

Getting the most out of every storage dollar is critical in this economy and as we discussed in our last entry, viable options for optimizing file based primary storage are available now but as of yet solutions that can compress and deduplicate block I/O storage are not yet readily available. But all is not lost, there are things you can do to lower your primary storage block I/O costs.

Free software grand master Richard Stallman weighed in not long ago about Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET. He's not against it in principle, he just doesn't feel it's a good idea to depend on it for anything, especially not the core GNU tools.

It looks like the iPhone 3GS is a solid seller. Apple is reporting that the iPhone 3GS is out of stock at 29 of its retail stores (as of 6/26). Apple also recently launched a tool to let would-be iPhone buyers check the stock levels of the Apple Store near them.

I chatted up a group of IT pros running full tilt towards virtualization. They all seemed to have left their management hats at home... How 'bout you? We'd love to get your view on VM management.