Blogs

Again from the Trends Blog . Big, color e-paper E-paper Still Coming Soon: LG.Philips LCD Teases World With A4 Color Electronic Paper “This is their all-new, world-first A4 electronic paper, a 4,096-color flexible 14.1-inch page made using “metal foil and plastic substrates rather than glass.” They only use power when the image changes and since they are reflective like real paper, they can be seen perfectly from any angle. Even under direct sunlight.” Slightly-flexible displays LOLED: Sony Flexi-OLED Screen Is Trouble Waiting to Happen “Today Sony showed off some 2.5-inch OLED screens that are capable of being slightly bent. It is made out of a glass substrate and is only .3mm thick. Supposedly the display has been created for lightweight, bigger and “softer” electronics” Interactive paper Digital paper with interactivity and sound “By combining paper with printed graphic codes and electronically conductive ink that is engineered to be sensitive to pressure. When the paper buttons are touched, the sound is played...

Microsoft Announces Product Offerings and Customer Early Access Program for Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM - This could be huge - $44 per calendar month per user for Professional CRM and $59 for Enterprise edition (Professional Edition plus offline support)!!! Then, when you thought it was not so good for partners, look at the models: With the new Live service, partners in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM ecosystem will have new opportunities to deliver value to their customers and to drive revenue for their businesses by developing and deploying solutions across the three deployment options — Live, on-premise and partner-hosted models . For revenue in the new Live model, partners will be compensated on a recurring basis, not a one-time basis; each year they will receive 10 percent of the yearly Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription revenue for each customer for whom they are the partner of record. During 2008, a special incentive will allow partners to receive 15 percent of the SaaS subscription revenue for that year...

I saw on the OneCare blog that a new beta is out this can be signed up for at Windows Live OneCare 2.0 Beta . I like OneCare - while it has it cranky moments (like I have to manually remove the old product to install the beta) it works better than some others I could mention without killing my machine or network. It is the product that I have bought for my home to protect it. According to the sign up site, this is what OneCare does. Windows Live OneCare 2.0 Beta - All-in-one security and performance for all your PCs Windows Live OneCare is an automatically self-updating PC care service that's on whenever your PC is on, helping provide persistent protection against viruses, hackers, and other threats. It also performs regular tune-ups to help keep your PC running at top speed, and helps you back up important documents. Runs quietly in the background, providing anti-virus, anti-spyware, online identity and scam protection (anti-phishing) and firewall protection Updates itself to help you keep ahead of the latest...

The Video I have delivered a number of Vista and Office demos over my time, so I decided to record a number of them for others to borrow, use, learn from or anything else they choose. This video covers the following subjects in enough detail for people to hopefully understand what they need to know on how to use these features in Windows Vista and understand how to be a little safer online: Phishing protection in Internet Explorer ActiveX blocking in Internet Explorer Windows Defender in Windows Vista To see the video played using Silverlight (just try it) click here *. I am hoping that in the near future that the WMV file will be available at new bCentral - the UK Small Business Center on MS.com. At the moment it is not available there, but a copy can be found here * it will take a few moments to open if you have Silverlight installed and require you to download Silverlight if you don't, but it is a 1MB download How I made it I simply ran through part of my normal demo talking as I went. When presenting to...

M icrosoft Windows Vista: Doing Deployment Right! This one-day session is a combination of presentations that focus on growing services opportunities for partners, and a series of new technical exercises that highlight some of the compelling new design enhancements in deploying Windows Vista desktops. Click here to enrol. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Vista , Deployment , Training

[updated to correct grammar in title - thanks to Warren Jacobi for pointing it out to me] I have been hearing about these at work - I don't have them yet, so can't comment on them, but apparently they will be going to trial soon and then out via updates. 938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are: • Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver. • Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista. • Resolves an issue...

Hi folks, this is a really simple one - I had the pleasure of answering some questions at a TechNet chat a few weeks back - that chat has now had a polished transcript published on the web at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/sbs/07_0713_tn_sbs.mspx . thanks David Technorati Tags: SBS , SBS 2003 , SBS 2003 R2 , Technet , Chat

From the register I saw the article " Virtualization Software to Crush Server Market " and it sort of made me laugh. Last year saw a dramatic drop in growth of Server shipments, both Microsoft and non-Microsoft. One explanation given is that virtualisation has increased so much that less servers are being bought, but the growth was still strong, just not in actual servers. I have seen the growth of virtual servers, but don't think it really accounts for the hundreds of thousands of servers that fill the gap that appeared in the research last year. VMWare's growth does not account for this, nor does the impact on Windows licensing that would be seen. Analysts and executives came out this week and declared that x86 server shipments will likely decline as VMware, Microsoft, and a host of startups push their virtualization wares at speed. In a rare feat, Schwartz and Sacconaghi also happen to agree about another trend that virtualization will drive. They're claiming that customers will buy larger...

Security is always a big subject area. Over the last two months Technet have published the following items that will help understanding and delivery of secure systems base do Microsoft technology. Windows Vista TechNet Magazine: Inside Windows Vista User Account Control Mark Russinovich explains that User Account Control (UAC) is one of the most misunderstood new features in Windows Vista. But its goal -- to enable users to run with standard user rights -- can solve many security issues. Get an inside look at the problems UAC addresses and see exactly how this new feature works. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6803653 Network Security Internet Protocol Security Enforcement in the Network Access Protection Platform This white paper describes the Network Access Protection (NAP) platform, how IPsec protects traffic, and how IPsec Enforcement in NAP provides system health policy enforcement for IPsec-secured communication. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=144cc69f-790f-4f52-8846-3f3b8584d7cd&DisplayLang...

Here I am on holiday, but I just had to comment on this. SKYPE claim a sudden reboot of client PCs caused their network to fail and that this reboot was caused by Windows Updates. I've done some checking and the WU this month caused reboots like it did any other month, yet no other month has this process caused any SKYPE issues. Since there was nothing different this month, the only conclusion I can come to is that this is rubbish. What is more is that WU staggers updates to avoid a world wide reboot and internet load problem. Given the total collapse of SKYPE I think they are trying to avoid the fact that they have a problem. If rebooting PCs can bring their network to a grinding halt then I would say they have a major architectual issue! Just my opinion, but I think this story smells a bit. ttfn David Published with BlogMailr

I've read the two articles - Computer-Chip Makers Pick Up Pace in Multicore Race - WSJ.com and BetaNews | AMD: Will More CPU Cores Always Mean Better Performance? and realised they were both harping on about the same thing - the need for better use of mutli-core / multi-processor technology. In a former life I helped people make their software take advantage of many cpus and the scheduling of tasks, sharing of information and understand how many processes can put load onto the memory, disk and internal buses is a huge area of learning. Whether it is a 8-core or a SMP 8-processor box, the problems are the same. If 8 cpus all demand a disk read from different regions of the disk, then you have 8 disk seeks, which could mean 1-8 x 8ms wait for the processes. In computer terms, waiting for 64ms for a disk read (as the 8th cpu would do) is almost an eternity for a cpu. What is more, if the disk regions are on 8 separate disks to stop I/O bottlenecks then the i/o bus and front-side-bus might not be able to take...

I like new ways to visualise my web searches and the new tafiti beta from Microsoft is a great example of looking at things. Not only does it search books, web, rss, images and news sources, but it is also presented really well, you can easily save items and finally you can see a tree of relationships between the items found. To understand more about what it can do, have a look at http://www.tafiti.com/faq.html . Below is a sample search and the interface and some searches saved on the shelf that I can come back to at any time. Below is a sample tree view of a search. The amount of details can be controlled by the slider bar at the bottom of the screen ttfn David Technorati Tags: Search , Tafiti , Microsoft , Silverlight

I just saw these in my inbox (post holiday processing) and thought I would pass them on. 19 September, Edinburgh : MSDN - Introduction to .NET Framework V3.0 (& sneak preview of v3.5 changes) 20 Sept 07, Bradford : Introduction to .Net Framework V3.0 (& sneak preview of v3.5 changes) 25 Sept 07, Reading : Building Dynamic Web Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 26 Sept 07, Birmingham : OVERVIEW OF VISUAL STUDIO 2008 AND .NET FRAMEWORK 3.5 27 Sept 07, Bristol : OVERVIEW OF VISUAL STUDIO 2008 AND .NET FRAMEWORK 3.5 ttfn David Technorati Tags: MSDN Events , .Net 3.0 , .Net 3.5 , Visual Studio 2008 , Developers