Technology - InfoWorld

San Francisco - Misconceptions and misinformation have surrounded the Chrome OS almost since the day it was announced. This week's press conference at Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus helped to clear the air, but uncertainty about what the search giant's new OS has to offer still remains.

San Francisco - If it ever was a question, 2009 put an end to any doubts about the resiliency of IT.

San Francisco - Ruby, the popular open source dynamic language, is making headway not only on Java but also on the Windows and Mac platforms.

San Francisco - Microsoft is previewing extensions for .Net catering to asynchronous and event-based programming.

San Francisco - The Chrome OS is here -- sort of. This week, Google was kind of enough to give the world a sneak peek at its nascent desktop operating system. And after months of speculation (and more than a few bogus screenshot galleries), I can finally say that I've seen the future ... and it's not Chrome OS.

San Francisco - Vapor was in the air this week as rumors swirled around two products that exist only as pixels, not molecules: the Google Phone and the Apple Tablet. In its war over 3G ads, AT&T fired back at Verizon (and missed); Twitter got dissed; and Activision dodged a Kalashnikov bullet with its wildly popular Modern Warfare 2. Can you hit the bull's-eye with this week's quiz? Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer. Now: ready, aim ... fire!

San Francisco - Google unveiled more details about its much-anticipated Chrome OS at a press event at its Mountain View, Calif., campus today, but those who were hoping for a beta release of the OS were in for a disappointment. "We aren't launching the product today. There is no beta today," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management. "Our target is the end of next year. We want to be there for the holiday season."

San Francisco - Several years after open source began to take the world by storm, the question of how to make money in the genre still remains an issue, with a prominent Novell official Wednesday advising caution for those considering a move to open source.

San Francisco - Microsoft revealed on Wednesday ambitious plans for the next version of its Silverlight browser plug-in technology for rich Internet applications, including faster startup times and software development improvements as well as more capabilities for running applications outside of a browser.

San Francisco - Palm has stayed very quiet since its releases of the Palm Pre and Pixi devices this summer, which debuted the WebOS that was at one point seen as a key rival to Apple's iPhone. Other than back-and-forth fights with Apple on the WebOS's ability to sync to iTunes, which Apple has repeatedly disabled, and an announcement that the WebOS SDK would finally be opened up to rank-and-file developers in December, Palm has declined to talk.

San Francisco - They say you can tell a lot about a person by the tools they bring to the job. If you're a professional plumber or a carpenter, people will expect you to carry the right tools for the task at hand. The same holds true for IT pros. Those in the know will judge you by the depth and sophistication of the technical toolkit you bring to a support call.

San Francisco - Microsoft, which has been pursuing concurrent improvements for its Visual Basic and C# programming languages, plans to open up compilers for the languages and add capabilities for asynchronous programming and immutability.

San Francisco - Microsoft is set to move its Windows Azure cloud platform to a a commercial production stage, Microsoft officials said on Tuesday.

San Francisco - Large, global companies have eliminated 300,000 IT jobs in 2009, according to the consultancy Hackett Group. Back-office jobs in general fell 630,000 -- three times the average annual job loss from 2000 to 2007. The firm doesn't expect 2010 to see a turnaround for such positions, and instead forecasts an "extended jobless recovery."

San Francisco - JetBrains this week unveiled an upgrade to its IDE for developing Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications, adding more code refactoring capabilities.

San Francisco - SharePoint 2010, the newly announced upgrade to Microsoft's popular Web and collaboration platform, is receiving a thumbs-up from developers pleased with the product's capabilities, including its use of Visual Studio as a tool for building SharePoint applications.

San Francisco - Adobe Systems will offer on Tuesday beta versions of upgrades to its core Flash Player and Adobe AIR technologies, with Adobe touting mobile device accommodations for the Flash Player.

San Francisco - Microsoft announced on Monday the release and open-sourcing of its .Net Micro Framework 4.0, which provides a .Net-based development and execution environment for small devices. But the TCP/IP stack and cryptography stack were omitted  from the open source effort.

San Francisco - Klocwork will ship later this month version 9.0 of its Insight Pro product for source code analysis, which the company says offers capabilities for agile programming projects.