AT&T dives into cloud computing. With the launch of its AT&T Synaptic Hosting, the telco enters the cloud computing realm. Akin to offerings from Amazon, IBM, and Google, AT&T’s worldwide service is based on a virtualized storage and server pool to manage resources, which users can access via an AT&T portal. Related: Dell tries to trademark cloud computing. The tide just might be turning for Windows Vista as demonstrated in our latest snapshot of the Windows Sentinel community: Microsoft’s much-maligned OS has gained nearly 12 percentage points versus our previous sample earlier in Q2 — while XP has simultaneously dropped 10 percentage points.Adobe, meanwhile, is warning of bogus Flash Player installers and telling users to avoid links on social-networking sites that lead to other Web sites claiming to host Flash Player because they often have malicious software instead. RIA vendor Curl is set to make available Curl Development tools for Eclipse on Tuesday, a move it says was inevitable. But one analyst wonders, particularly when compared to Adobe Flex, if Curl offers the RIA capabilities users want.And this programmer’s tale goes back some 40 years to a time when it took one program 45 minutes to run. Our Off the Record author managed to reduce that to 20 minutes by optimizing the slowest thing. And taking that tact again, this time to streamline the manual card sorting operation, he made two days of that long process vanish. Not that everyone was pleased. Optimizing the slowest thing. Technology Industry