I especially appreciated the Mojave Experiment that Microsoft recently shared with the world (where Vista-negative opinions were tested with a "new" version of Windows, code-named Mojave; it was then revealed to the participants after seeing the new version that what they were looking at was actually Vista). I've been using Vista since well before I came onto the market, and I can hardly stand to use WIndows XP computers anymore. Anyhow, check out http://www.mojaveexperiment.com if you haven't seen it, especially if you have a negative opinion of Vista today based on what you've heard from others. (Note: Scientifically speaking, the "experiment" would be badly flawed, but it's a marketing campaign and in that light it's pretty darned smart if you ask me. Plus, I've lost track of how may people who, never having seen Vista yet having a negative perception, decided to upgrade after trying for a couple hours (on my laptop) at my suggestion. With SP1 installed, for the record. Seriously, group think and manipulation goes both directions).

For those of us who are using Vista (or any other OS for that matter), it's nice to be able to fine-tune a computer system so it will perform the way we want it to. For Vista, Microsoft has released a document called Windows Vista Performance and Tuning as part of their Springboard series, which lets users know about a number of tweaks and decisions they can make to make the OS work well for their needs. It also effectively spells out in fairly plain language some relatively complex information.

Windows Vista and SP1 focus on delivering greater performance and overall system responsiveness. By striking a balance between speed and responsiveness, Windows Vista and SP1 deliver a level of performance that has the greatest positive impact on the system’s usability.This guide looks at the following areas of performance improvement:

• Making configuration changes that help a computer feel more responsive when you use it.
• Using hardware to boost the actual physical speed of a computer.
• Making configuration changes that help a computer to start faster.
• Making the computer more reliable may help increase performance.
• Monitoring performance occasionally so that you can stop problems before they get too big.

There are a variety of other guides out there as well, but this one hits a number of important nails on the head that the average computer user can easily understand and use.

Last week we published an interview that Richard and I did on RunAs Radio with my friend and former co-worker, Simon Goldstein. Simon's a real pro and is good at explaining complicated business relationships and processes.

We cover risk management for IT professionals: What is it, what do you need to know, and why does it matter? As with all of our weekly RunAs Radio shows, it's about 30 minutes long and we cover a lot of ground in that time.

RunAs Radio, Show 67 - Simon Goldstein on IT Risk Management (38 minutes)

Note: You can find all our podcast feeds in the table here, and you can also subscribe to get the show every week in iTunes by clicking here.

Over on the Internet Evolution site I recently wrote an article discussing the fact that MySpace is becoming an OpenID provider. Of note is the fact that they will be provider-only, and not a relying party, at least initially. This is a trend we've seen with other big companies like Yahoo!, and many of us are not-too-patiently waiting for these companies to start trusting and relying upon other organizations, so the utopia of user-controlled Internet single-sign-on can become a reality.

That begs the question, "What will it take to achieve the level of trust and confidence needed to make it easy for these big provider companies to join the relying-party crowd?" I'm certain there are plenty of detailed conversations and that things are being hammered out and actively discussed behind the scenes at all these major companies, but I tend to think about these things out loud anyhow.

So, I hope you'll read my article and thoughts over on Internet Evolution and that you'll take advantage of the opportunity to comment there. I'd be interested to know what you think.

The DNS vulnerability discovered earlier this year by Dan Kaminsky, and recently patched by DNS software providers in an unprecedented cross-vendor cooperation, has graduated from vulnerability to exploit-in-the-wild.

According to Kaminsky, 52% of the DNS servers on the Internet are still vulnerable, better than the number of exploitable systems just a few weeks ago when the patches were released by all the vendors.

Kaminsky has written up a plain-language helper guide to explain the problem to non-technical (read: management and decision-making) people. There's also a Black Hat webcast with Kaminsky available where he details the vulnerability and discusses the fixes.

Read more at Ars Technica.

On the Google blog, Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj posted an article today called "We knew the web was big..." which indicates Google engineers recently noted that the number of web pages on the Internet passed the one-trillion mark. That's 1,000,000,000,000 pages. For those who don't process the impact of adding that many groups of zeros at a time, think about this:

• Take 1,000 pages.
• Multiply that 1,000 times and think about just how big that is.
• Multiply that amount another thousand times, and stop to think about how big that is.
• Now, again take that huge amount and multiply it by 1,000. Now you're at a trillion pages.

That's freakin' huge, really. If you started counting from one to a trillion and counted one number per second, it would take you almost 317 centuries before you were done (and by the way I asked google to help me figure that out). That's almost 32,000 years. It almost completely boggles the mind. That's a lot of web pages.

Google also notes that every day, the number of pages on the web increases by several billion.

Alpert and Hajaj have another explanation to try to explain the sheer size of the Internet today:

Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

That's really just amazing to me. Wow. And now you know why we call this the Information Age. A lot of that information may be inaccurate, pornographic or otherwise useless, but some of it's good, and the sheer immensity of it is truly awesome.

TechCrunch has a slightly different take, calling the Google post misleading. The end of the TechCrunch post alludes to some news coming next week that might turn Internet indexing on it's head. Interesting - Is there some big search engine news in the works? Is it Microsoft's BrowseRank or something else? Stay tuned.

Apple has released a version of the iPhone 2 software (v2.1) to beta programmers along with an updated SDK. The firmware release supposedly includes additional core GPS features that allow computation and use of direction of travel and speed. This is good for those of us waiting patiently for turn-by-turn direction software for the phone.

Apparently there's also some functionality that enables apps to process push notifications in the background, as well. I, for one, hope for more background processing capabilities in general in the app arena. Would be nice to have Pandora keep playing music when exiting, or not to have to reload any of several twitter clients every time I click a Safari link and want to go back.

Read the story at Mac Rumors and Gear Live.