Friday tends to be a good day for techinical talks at Microsoft. Today I went to two talks. The first was a dry run for a PDC talk “Visual Studio Whidbey: Advanced Debugging Techniques“. Some pretty neat stuff there. The second was the technical details to a smart solution to a networking problem I’ve been living with for a while. The fact that the feature won’t hit the world until Longhorn is sorta sad. It’s days like this that I wish Microsoft had a much tighter ship schedule for it’s operating systems.

This brings up a question for all three blog engine bots currently reading my site, What networking problems do you have that we can work on fixing?

Intresting points:

• MSN had it’s first profitable quarter, with advertising revenues up 50%.
• Biggest P&L group growth was Mobile and Embedded Device
• Microsoft has $51 billion in cash, Cash + Investments = $65 billion
• Unearned revenue is down to $8.2 billion, which is down more then what we expected. Some of that has to do with security. Security hits the bottom line (and hence the stock price).

Today the windows networking group had it’s quarterly meeting. Something in an email that I missed a month ago was the fact that appletalk inventor Gursharan Sidhu has joined networking as a Architect.

Joel points out that Amazon now searches the full text of books. It’s always really cool when a company suddenly blows your expectation of what they can do. “Everyone” does community, “everyone” does reviews, “everyone” does recommendations. Nobody does full text searching of the books they sell.

Bush shakes up economic team. O’Neill and Lindsey are out. But critics of White House policy might not like what comes next. [Salon.com]

BetaNews: “AOL has disbanded the Magic Carpet product team and refocused limited resources on its core subscription and advertising businesses. This leaves the Internet giant with no viable alternative to Microsoft’s Passport authentication service in implementation, which currently boasts 200 million accounts.” [Scripting News]

New Economic Policy. There are nine things President Bush should do to combat the current beat of the doldrums. By William Safire. [New York Times: Politics]

The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq. Why is the Vietnam generation not marching against Iraq? The answer has something to do with Bosnia. By George Packer. [New York Times: Politics]

Trustworthy Computing does Moon Walk (but not yet). One small step for man, one giant leap for Windows XP [The Register]
The thing about “Trustworthy Computing” is that it’s not about just Microsoft fining buffer overflows, it’s about making computing itself more secure. I suspect that it’ll be less about inventing new protocols, as getting world wide deployment on some of the stuff we already have.

What to read in December. From a delicious satire of literary ambition to a futuristic mystery by a Nobel laureate, we pick the month’s best new books. [Salon.com]