Why the blog is of interest:

Bloggers from Microsoft are shining behind-the-scenes insights on to a vast range of subjects pertinent to financial services pros (and others.) These bloggers hail from a variety of different walks of life, too. On the Windows Live Spaces Web site, Kurt Shintaku, a Microsoft principal systems engineer in southern California, gives us insider glimpses into Vista pirating, the new Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, and Silverlight Streaming, an emerging technology, now in alpha, for delivering multimedia without worrying about bandwidth scalability or storage capacity.

Kurt also posts content of specific importance to the financial services crowd, including descriptions of Microsoft's current series of Financial Services IndustryCasts.  Upcoming Webcast topics will include Windows ATMs, grid computing for .NET, and more. 

In one of the many other entries in his copious blog, Kurt tells about a letter from a customer asking for suggestions on whether to use an apparently pirated copy of Vista, which the customer has received from China. The Microsoft engineer warns that, without a genuine edition of Vista installed, you can't download either reliability, performance, or functionality fixes or add-ins such as Powershell for Vista and Windows Mobile Device Center components.
 
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