Opscode boosts scale, adds Active Directory support to Chef
Striving to make Chef more enterprise-friendly, Opscode added Microsoft Active Directory and Solaris support to the automated configuration management tool. It also says that its Private Chef version can now wring three times as much work out of the same old hardware.
Amazon updates CDN for dynamic content
Amazon says its updated Cloudfront content delivery network will better handle dynamic, interactive web content. To date, Cloudfront handled static web pages while Amazon left a lot of the heavy lifting of dynamic content to partners like CDN market leader Akamai.
Amazon adds billing alerts to cloud services menu
Amazon cloud services may be cheap, but they can add up. Following a raft of third-party companies that offer AWS monitoring services, Amazon has stepped up to offer its own proactive billing alerts for Cloudwatch customers that enable it. 
SAP cuddles up with Amazon, but what about Azure?
News that SAP and Amazon will All-in-One business applications to run in production on Amazon's public cloud raises a question: what's going on with SAP and Microsoft Windows Azure? News on this could come next week at the Sapphire 2012 show. Or not.
Amazon and SAP put All-in-One in the cloud
SAP All-in-One business applications will now run in Amazon's cloud -- another step that could make Amazon Web Services more enticing to risk-averse businesses that stress over entrusting their life-blood applications to a public cloud.
Microsoft search guru outlines big Bing changes
Microsoft's top search guy took to the web today to show off a refreshed interface for Microsoft's Bing search engine, that he said better incorporates the user's social media contacts in a new sidebar which brings in their Facebook and Twitter contacts relevant post
HP puts OpenStack cloud into public beta
The OpenStack army marches on. On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard put its public cloud to public beta. The services had been available to a limited number of customers up till now. The news comes a week after Rackspace launched its own OpenStack cloud.
Amazon launches Vegas trade show for AWS developers, users
Save the date: Amazon will host its first-ever partner and customer conference at the Las Vegas Venetian in late November. With this move, Amazon looks more like an old-school IT vendor than ever. It recently announced an official partner program, another sign of IT maturity.
Dell tests open-source laptop for developers
With its Project Sputnik laptop, Dell hopes to lure Linux-loving developers back into its camp and perhaps even get some who defected to Mac OSX to return to the open source fold. The laptop bundles Ubuntu, tools and an on-ramp to github repositories. 
Why memes matter (or what I learned at ROFLCon)
It's easy to write off Internet memes -- Double Rainbow Guy, LOLcats -- as trivial entertainment. But then a funny thing happened at ROFLCon where I learned that seemingly silly memes say a lot about us as a culture and they definitely bear examination.
Shocker: ROFLCon’s last stand
The big news out of ROFLCon is that this is the last ROFLCon. So if you want to catch your favorite "Famous on the Internet" stars -- Tron Guy, Double Rainbow Guy, the Nyancats -- you better get to MIT Building 26 in the next few hours.
MIT and Harvard say open-source edX can educate a billion people
Charles River neighbors Harvard and MIT are working together on technology to power free, online coursework for students. The two schools will share ownership of the new $60 million edX initiative but the underlying MITx technology will be open-sourced for use by other schools.
