Ramblings from another nerd on the grid
Fun stuff. Reminds me of all of the KINECT hacking taking place.
“SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 29, 2010 – Intel Corporation announced today the Intel® Solid-State Drive (Intel® SSD) 310 Series, an ultra-small solid-state drive (SSD) that delivers Intel® X25-class award-winning SSD performance, but in one-eighth the size. Measuring 51mm-by-30mm and only 5mm thick, the Intel SSD 310 is a fast, ultra-compact SSD that brings flexibility, ruggedness and scalability to innovative form factors and devices. It can enable highly responsive dual-drive notebooks, innovative single-drive tablets and low-power, rugged embedded industrial or military applications. When paired with a high-capacity hard disk drive (HDD) in a dual-drive system, the Intel SSD 310 can improve overall PC system performance by up to 60 percent.”
See the full announcement @ http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2010/12/29/new-intel-solid-state-drive-310-series-offers-full-ssd-performance-in-18th-the-size. See the product brief for more information.
Sounds like there are some interesting laptops and slates coming. Good!
Here’s a video from Lenovo on the subject. It isn’t the best announcement I’ve ever seen. You were warned.
This is one of those blog posts about hardware that makes you go hmmm. For those of us that spend an inordinate amount of time installing Microsoft products, traveling, and demonstrating capabilities to customers, there are several virtualization maxims. You can never get enough RAM in a laptop. You can never have to much disk space. Disks are never fast enough. You can never get enough CPU or GPU horsepower in a laptop.
If you manage to overcome some of the hurdles, the machine that does it won’t be small, thin, or light.
HP apparently has other ideas on the matter. If you’ve got the money, they have an interesting solution. Behold, the HP EliteBook 8440w. I’m linking directly to the specs for the machine because I could not believe them the first time I saw them.
Here’s what you can get on this little mean machine if you are so inclined. An Intel Core i7-840QM Quad-Core Processor, 16GB of DDR3 PC3-10600 RAM, 256GB SSD storage, a 14” 1600x900 native resolution LCD screen, and a Blu-ray drive (writable BD-R, BD-RE, BD-ROM).
You can of course opt for a 500GB primary drive, and a 500GB drive in the upgrade bay if enclosed portable storage is your thang.
What’s the baby going to cost? Well, if you have to ask you can’t afford it. But a loaded version of the above is going to set you back about $7700. Yea, those 8GB DDR SoDIMMs are about $2200 each.
The helmet features signatures from Star Wars creator George Lucas; actors Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Frank Oz, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Billy Dee Williams, Jeremy Bulloch and Warwick Davis; Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope and Episode V The Empire Strikes Back producer Gary Kurtz, director, the late Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back); screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (Empire and Return of the Jedi); and composer John Williams.
Details at http://www.efxcollectibles.com/p-101-make-a-wish-stormtrooper-helmet-auction.aspx. See the eBay auction @ http://cgi.ebay.com/Autographed-Stormtrooper-Helmet-/250742554358?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a616bbef6=.
As you are probably already aware, I recently shot a number of video interviews with various people involved in Microsoft’s security efforts. One of the interviews I thought was pretty interesting is the chat I had with Christian Seifert. Christian works on the Bing team as a Research Software Engineer. He and the Bing team do some fascinating work to prevent “drive-by downloads” of malware and other nefarious software.
I did of course ask Christian how we eradicate drive-by downloads from the planet. He was a good sport and had a very good answer to that question.
Christian Seifert Interview - 8 minutes
See http://www.microsoft.com/security/sir/keyfindings/default.aspx#section_2_1 for more information on drive-by download pages and other key findings in the Security Intelligence Report - Volume 9.
Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 enables businesses to align security and management to improve endpoint protection while greatly reducing operational costs. It builds on System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and R3, allowing customers to use their existing client management infrastructure to deploy and manage endpoint protection. This shared infrastructure helps reduce ownership costs while providing improved visibility and control over endpoint management and security.
Go get it @ http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/endpoint-protection/en/us/try-it.aspx.
More information at http://blogs.technet.com/b/forefront/archive/2010/12/16/announcing-forefront-endpoint-protection-2010.aspx
Its important to note that Windows Phone 7 devices only support a subset of the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) policies available with Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, and Exchange 2010.
A new Exchange TechNet Wiki page written by Microsoft MVP Henrik Walther contains information about using Windows Phone 7 based Exchange ActiveSync clients in an Exchange enterprise environment.
See the full article at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/exchange-activesync-considerations-when-using-windows-phone-7-clients.aspx.
Designed and priced for small businesses with up to 75 users, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard delivers enterprise-class server technology in an affordable, all-in-one solution. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard not only helps to protect, access, and manage your information from virtually anywhere, but also allows your business to be more productive by providing:
See the full announcement at http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2010/12/13/windows-small-business-server-2011-standard-releases-to-manufacturing.aspx.