Silverlight costs 50 jobs at Netflix. "For those of you who watch movies instantly on your PC or Mac, you may have noticed our player is much easier to install and use now with Silverlight," wrote Steve Swasey, VP of corporate communications, on the Netflix blog Saturday Sunday. "The good news is fewer problems for you. The bad news is that we are now overstaffed with technical specialists in our customer service (CS) group." (Via WSJ's Business Technology blog.)

"Malicious software is spreading faster than ever." That's the scary conclusion of another story on Internet security, by John Markoff at The New York Times. "Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge they cannot get ahead of the onslaught," he wrote this weekend.

"[A]s we go through this economic period, [advertising] probably won't have a big material impact on us or on the industry, frankly." That was Shane Kim, Microsoft's video games business strategist, talking to Reuters about the future of in-game advertising. The comment stands in contrast to the excitement with which Microsoft game advertising unit Massive touted its customer wins and video game "upfronts" last week.

"More than half - 53% - of all American adults play video games of some kind". That's the latest from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Not terribly surprising. More details here. One thing that did jump out at me: "Among older adults 65+ who play video games, nearly a third play games everyday, a significantly larger percentage than all younger players, of whom about 20% play everyday." I'm looking forward to retirement, when I can play games everyday.