The URGE to pu<-<-merge

A little while back I posted about a nice money making platform for MS. Seems I was wrong. According to both of these articles from Real's Rhapsody Music Service and BetaNews, URGE will be merged into Rhapsody. Microsoft and MTV will be partnering with Real instead of continuing URGE which will be shut down.
While I didn't like being forced to have URGE in Windows Media Player 11 it was mostly unused. Rhapsody came with my Insignia Portable Media Player and other than signing up for a free account it too has been mostly unused. I find that the online stores tend to be pretty slow. I think it is mostly due to all the whiz bang graphics they have to load in oder for people to pay attention. Which brings me to my point. It's sad that MS and MTV, two of the largest media movers, can't figure out how to do an online store correctly so they could both make a ton of cash. MS had a fantastic opportunity with 90% of the computing landscape, a gaming machine that they control (XBOX and XBOX 360) which can connect online, and their own PMP in the ZUNE. Maybe it failed because they only focused on supporting the ZUNE instead of all PMPs.

Windows shell games

My Cousin was asking me about PowerShell from MS and if I had any info on it. Well, of course I did I thought and was going to send him over here to the blog post that I had about it. Whoops! I thought I had a post about it anyways. :)

Now I will. :)

Here is a good introduction to PowerShell from Microsoft.
Here is a blog pretty much dedicated to PowerShell.
Here is the Channel 9 Wiki page for PowerShell.
And here is the PowerShell portal page.

That's a pretty good starting point for most people. I know it was for me. If anyone knows of some other places let me know I would love to have more references for this kind of stuff. :)

YUI

I've been playing on and off with learning Javascript for quite some time. It's not that I have been putting it off or that I want to jump on the "WEB 2.0" bandwagon or anything, but I never really seen the point other than a few simple animations and entry validation. The idea of using javascript just didn't appeal to me as much as doing it in just PHP or Perl or C# (ASP.NET). Then Yahoo! started redoing their mail website with a new slick interface much like Google's GMail. Then they released the code they were using as open source libraries that everyone could use as YUI.

I began playing with YUI as an attempt to learn javascript and get better web experience for users of the websites with which I am in charge. This was before the 2.2 versions of YUI and I didn't really put much effort into it. I recently had a little more time to devote to it and have upgraded to the new 2.3 version of YUI and I have to say it is slick. I like the fact that the entire library set is all in javascript. The fact that the components are relatively small helps too. Since the library is in javascript it allows you to embed it all in standard HTML pages. This lets you have a good gui while still having complete control of your backend. You aren't forced into using ASP.NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Java/JSP you can use whatever you want on the server side.