Updated 3/30/2011

Image Space Media has an interesting idea: overlay images with advertisements that appear only when users hover their cursor over the image. Try it out by hovering your cursor over the larger images on this site. They’re currently calling it beta, so there’s every opportunity they’ll improve over time.

It already seems to work well, though. Hover your cursor over an image (such as my picture of the New York City Skyline at night), and an advertisement rises up from the bottom, covering about one-quarter of the image, as shown here (scaled down to fit this page).

There’s also a sharing icon in the upper-left corner that you can turn off. If the user clicks it, a full-page overlay appears that provides links to sharing on Facebook , Twitter, and e-mail. Several ads appear on the page, too, and it shows you popular and recent images. This picture shows a scaled-down version of the sharing page, however, since I’m currently using ISM on this site, you can experience it for yourself by hovering your cursor over it.

Once you’re hovering, you can click the advertisement or just move your mouse away. Once you move your mouse, the advertisement shrinks back down to one line. You have to reload the page if you want the ad to completely disappear.

It’s smart enough to ignore small images, such as those you might use in menus. Occasionally, the advertisement wasn’t flush with the bottom of the image, but I’m sure they’ll work that problem at.

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I just bought a new Dell XPS with 2x700GB 7500 RPM drives (ST3750528AS) in a RAID 0 array, and I moved over my (very expensive) 2x300GB 15,000 RPM RAID 0 array. This seemed like a good time to compare the performance of 7500RPM  and 15kRPM drives.

Now, there is one big factor to consider besides the drive spin speed: The newer 700GB drives are more than twice as big as my older 300GB drives, which means their data is about twice as dense. Therefore, they should be able to read data about twice as quickly, if the RPMs were equal.

First, the older, 15k drives:

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Hi, Tony.
I have a copy of your 70-562 Self Pace Training Kit book.
What are the differences between 70-515 and 70-562 Self Pace Training kits books?

Heya, Russell.

The 70-515 Training Kit was based on the 70-562 manuscript, so you’ll recognize quite a bit of it. If you’ve already worked through the 70-562 TK, I’d tell you to skip 70-515 and spend a week working with jQuery, LINQ to Entities, Dynamic Data Projects, and every aspect of MVC.

If you haven’t yet read through 70-562, scrap it and use the 70-515 book instead. In addition to adding the topics I just mentioned, Mike and I added quite a bit of content to the previous topics and fixed lots of little nit-picky mistakes that always work themselves into a big complex book like this. Not that there were big problems with the 70-562 Training Kit; it got good reviews. We found minor errors like C# classes with the wrong capitalization, etc–stuff that managed to slip past our reviewers.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Tony