As promised you can use the free online Seadragon (deepzoom) viewer for the Hyper-V Component Architecture Poster at http://bit.ly/bX1AbA.
Very handy for those of us without a $10K color plotter. Plus, you can pan and zoom around the poster to see fine details without having to cross the room to your office wall :-)
The IT Pro content folks here at Microsoft are trying to change the way IT Pros and developers interact with content. You may have noticed that we have started a wiki…
and I hope you didn’t miss the terrific new free-as-in-beer Windows Server 2008 R2: Hyper-V Component Architecture poster.
We will be at TechEd NA 2010 in New Orleans next week- stop by there an tell us what you think in person. I can tell you feedback from satisfied customers, like the email below from Gary, have impact inside the company. I’m not going to sugar-coat – Microsoft is an engineering-based culture, and engineers are always looking for the negative feedback, for the bug reports, for the perf optimization. However, humans respond to stories, and anecdotal feedback does matter.
Let us know what you think. Leave feedback, see you in NOLA next week.
From: Gary Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 6:05 PM To: Virtualization UA Subject: My customers thank you....and so do I. Hello Microsoft Team, I’m a senior IT Professional working with large enterprise customers on numerous virtualization consulting assignments. I have just downloaded your Hyper-V architecture poster and wanted to pass on my congratulations. This has so much detail, its just incredible. VMWare have nothing like this. The information is very practical and really useful. I think I finally get how storage works. :) Thanks for this great reference. I have at least a dozen customers I’ll be delivering printed copies too. Thanks again. Regards Gary London, UK.
Traditional media images of ninjas depict them as solitary and good at doing things some (especially pirates) would term anti-social. The TechNet Wiki Ninjas are a community of TNWIKI users that are social, and care about sharing their cognitive surplus with the IT Pro and Dev world audience. If you are in New Orleans this week, stop by TechEd 2010 and say hi to the wikininjas in the community lounge.
The Wired magazine article casts the wiki contribution value proposition this way:
When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one.
The wiki ninjas and other TNWIKI contributors are on the way to 1000 articles.
Why do they do this? What’s in it for them? Microsoft higher-ups are interested to learn “how do we motivate these people?”
I say, first do no harm. Next, trust them. Get out of their way, let them do what they do best. On the wiki this is expressed as “Don’t do things that destroy community.”
More interesting insights from the Wired article…
Pink: We have a biological drive. We eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re thirsty, have sex to satisfy our carnal urges. We also have a second drive—we respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. But what we’ve forgotten—and what the science shows—is that we also have a third drive. We do things because they’re interesting, because they’re engaging, because they’re the right things to do, because they contribute to the world. The problem is that, especially in our organizations, we stop at that second drive. We think the only reason people do productive things is to snag a carrot or avoid a stick. But that’s just not true. Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.
Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.
It is “no cost to you as long as you first watch this ad…and log in every 30 minutes…and watch the ad again every time…and give up the top 1/5th or so of your screen to an ad rotator that you cannot close…”
Just thought you should know.
Oh, and, it is all well and good to give up your seat for a traveler in obvious and lachrymose distress, but, when the airline says “we’ll get you on the next available flight” – word of advice? Check the fine print. In my case, I feel good the crying lady got my seat, but bad that I am wandering the terminal for 8 hours, instead of building community at TechEd 2010.
Lesson learned.
TechEd 2010 starts tomorrow – oversubscribed with more than be over 10,500 guests, speakers and event staff in New Orleans this week.
LAISSEZ LES BON TEMPS ROULET
Posting this from 37K feet, 14.5 hours into my epic journey to TechEd 2010. Southwest Airlines has in-flight wifi!
Salty goodness.
One strange thing, they haven’t established the pricing yet. It’ll be somewhere between US$N and US$n, but you don;t know the price when you sign on midair. At least it appears to be all you can eat, and they do say in the info sheet:
“As is common on many other public networks, we will attempt to filter indecent content.”
Whew, guess I am safe from my neighbor’s porn viewing, but I wonder if they filter both ways?
Now, let’s see, how long to download a wardriving app and snoop the rest of the plane’s traffic???
Oops, just got my e-mailed rcpt – price is $5 for the 2.5 hours from Denver to NOLA. A bargain!
Now, where’s the jetpack we were promised?
Breaking news from the TechEd 2010 according to the Super Site blog…
“Someday, Task Manager will look like this on all our PCs. :)”
“
I’m posting this from 37K feet on a SouthWest Airlines flight with WiFi pilot (and human pilot too). The flight attendant just asked for the Lakers score, and I got if off Bing in about 2 seconds. how James Bond is that?
Now, about those dinky tray tables – need more space for a laptop that sucks up that pay-for wifi, y’know? You listening airline industry?
I have a chance to record this short booth demo of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and Remote FX with Principal VM Vijay Tewari at the busy Hyper-V booth in New Orleans this morning. Click the link to view the video.
To read more about DM and Remote FX check the product team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/
Toasters are in the air today. I had two separate conversations about toasters with attendees at TechEd 2010. I’m paraphrasing:
1: “Look, just because you skillfully operate a toaster, doesn't necessarily mean you can make breakfast" "Making breakfast" calls for a number of integrated skills, of which "operating toaster V.N" is only one. Concentrate all your documentation on the operation of the toaster and you will not ever get breakfast served!”
2: “To learn how to operate a toaster, you don’t start by reading the schematics. You start with the operations procedures. Why do these always seem to get written last, in haste, by people who do not make toast, much less serve breakfast?”
Even in the future, when toasters can talk and have AI…
…we still ain’t getting breakfast till we get the point that the customer is not that interested in grilled bread products. The customer has spoken.
One of the more pleasant lunches I’ve had in a long time – cochon muffalleta at cochon swinebar 3 blocks from the NOLA convention center where my TechEd mates are complaining about no-protein breakfasts and long meal lines. Best mufalleta evah! Bonus points - ++Good handmade spicy cucumber pickle spear.
Conventioneers – 3 blocks outside the center, the deli attached to the restaurant - 930 Tchoupitoulas St.
There is a wiki how-to to topic on tools you can combine to help you stay on top of wiki content of interest: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/wiki-how-to-monitor-content.aspx.
To example, you can “subscribe” to a wiki topic using email, and when the topic is changed you get an email that looks like this:
Now there is an RSS feed for each page on the wiki:
if you subscribe to the RSS feed, the item that comes to you on update also shows the stuff that got changed in either red or green so you can see right away what changed…
Handy.
Please check out a proposed new innovation for IT Pro content “Customer Feedback Requested: Canonical Topic TOC” at: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/customer-feedback-requested-canonical-topic-toc.aspx
We'd like to know your reaction and feedback. What's missing from the table of contents (TOC)? We're proposing a new type of TN topic specific type of topic would be written for a Server Role and it would contain all of the basic information about a server role. Thanks in advance.
TechNet has launched a beta on the MS Connect site that allows you the “early adopter experience” that you have enjoyed for products, only this time it is for content/TechNet.
Join the fun. Make yourself heard. NOTE: Windows Live ID and Connect user account required.
Great buzz around Soumya’s TechEd preso Hyper-V Backup Deep Dive: A Look Under the Hood. Check it out. Click the image to play the presentation.
When you use the RSS Feed for a TechNet Wiki article,
on change you get an email notification with a link to the article history.
Clicking this link allows you to quickly go straight to what changed and make a judgment about any action you might need to take.
Additions are highlighted in green, deletions are in red.
What a time saver! Now, if only the TN/MSDN library had such a thing…
…saith Wm.Gibson. The future of IT Pro documentation is here – colleague Jim Holtzman shows you how to setup your Windows Home Server router on the TechNet wiki.
What’s especially fabulous about this article? 8 Different OEM routers are detailed, and anyone can add to it! One URL, all OEM router setup instructions, with and RSS feed for all changes/updates to the article. If that ain’t the future, I don’t want to go.