UNBELIEVABLE!!!! How many articles have I written about the importance of *regular* backups?! Then I buy a new MacBook Pro with a piece of #$%^% Fujitsu hard disk and I don't back it up for four weeks straight because I'm waiting for a new storage toy from NDA-vendor-X. Now I've lost a month worth of emails, articles and BitTorrent music. Just enough to be really annoying, but not enough to warrant the $1000 it UNBELIEVABLE!!!! How many articles have I written about the importance of *regular* backups?! Then I buy a new MacBook Pro with a piece of #$%^% Fujitsu hard disk and I don’t back it up for four weeks straight because I’m waiting for a new storage toy from NDA-vendor-X. Now I’ve lost a month worth of emails, articles and BitTorrent music. Just enough to be really annoying, but not enough to warrant the $1000 it would cost for bit-by-bit disk recovery. There are days when you just feel like kicking your own butt.Rant over. SMB news like this:* Yahoo opens Panama ad platform. Yahoo started its Google-competing ad platform, codenamed Panama, back in February. But it just went live to third party. Yahoo’s being a bit more open in how Panama works than Google is with its AdSense. They’re also basing ad results on other things besides bid price–like search relevancy. Sounds like more targeted advertising for your SMB marketing buck. (Source: CNET) * Intel provides sneak peek at 2008 laptops. At its recent developer conference in Beijing, Intel showed off next year’s trends in mobile computing. Top of the list was mobile quad-core. Want one of THOSE! (Source: PC World)* There *is* money in open source. According to a new market research study, open source software revenue topped $1.8 billion in 2006–and that’s supposed to go up to $5.8 billion by 2011. Certainly something to think about for SMB development houses. (Source: Techworld)* Xandros joins Novell in MS deal. Could be good news for SMBs using Linux, especially Xandros’ new SMB server package. They’ve now entered into the same kind of joint licensing deal with Microsoft as Novell. Should cut down on any upcoming IP litigation nonsense for those users. (Source: InfoWorld) Technology Industry