I recently attended the WTIA Fast Pitch Forum & Technology Showcase. The conference featured two dozen of the of the hottest technology companies in Washington presenting their business in a competition for "Best In Show". I Can Haz Cheezburger is well-known online for their hilarious LOLCat pictures.

Policy makers need to better understand the networks they regulate, but academic network research can be a tough task. Google, New America, and PlanetLab have created Measurement Lab, an open group of distributed servers meant to make research into Internet speeds, latency, jitter, and BitTorrent-blocking easier.

In the last few years Virtualization has gone from a buzzword to a platform of choice in the world of Information Technology. Consumers already reap its benefits on a day to day basis as Banks, Internet Service Providers, online merchants, and many other companies have adopted the technology all the while transparent to the end user. The reasons why virtualization is attractive to companies are many but, to put it succinctly, it all boils down to efficiency which then translates to lower cost and higher availability.

Small wonders: the 2009 Ars USB flash drive roundup Since our last roundup in 2005, USB flash drives have become ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that we wondered whether there was any difference at all among models. In our 2009 roundup, we find out the answer.

If you look at the SSD market today, you’d assume that it’s very different from what it was just six months ago when the X25-M launched. People are worried that the Intel drive has issues with degrading performance over time. Some vendors are now shipping “revised” JMicron drives with multiple controllers, supposedly fixing all of the problems I talked about last year. I hate to break it to you guys. As different as the world may seem today, it’s all very much the same. The Intel drive is still the best of the best. Yes, it, and other SSDs do get slower over time and later in this article I’ll explain why it happens and why it’s not as big of a deal as you’d think. The issues I complained about with the JMicron drives from last year are still alive and well today; they’re just somewhat occluded.