Entries for Cider

Blimey! Scoble's on Newsnight! [Blimey! Scoble's on Newsnight!]

Cider — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 21:41:29 GMT

This should be "fun"...

EDIT: Screen marked as "Robert Scoble Strategist, Microsoft"...

in reply to Blimey! Scoble's on Newsnight!

Interview here with Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer soon [Interview here with Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer soon]

Cider — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:54:58 GMT

Apparently, Bill Gates is stepping down from his fulltime role at Microsoft. Ozzie to be new Chief Software Architect. More soon...

in reply to Interview here with Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer soon

local.live.com - Microsoft mapping UK [local.live.com - Microsoft mapping UK]

Cider — Thu, 25 May 2006 21:26:16 GMT

Microsoft has put some SERIOUSLY high res pictures of parts of the UK up on http://local.live.com, including many bird's eye views in London.

Pretty neat seeing places in Edinburgh with great aerial photography.

in reply to local.live.com - Microsoft mapping UK

Microsoft to buy Softricity? [Microsoft to buy Softricity?]

Cider — Sun, 21 May 2006 23:22:44 GMT

http://channelweb.com/sections/allnews/article.jhtml?articleId=188100613

If this happens, this will be the best purchase that Microsoft have made in a very long time.

As most don't know them, Softricity's main product is Softgrid, which allows the best application-level virtualization on the market. Softgrid, along with Altiris' really excellent Software Virtualization Solution, is a truly innovative product area that offers a totally different model for application deployment and maintenance.

For example, you could have several different versions of Office of your machine and they will wont ever see each other, let alone have problems with DLL Hell, because each application is "virtualized" on the platform

I've been dealing with these companies for last few months and its, by FAR, the most interesting area in system architecture/administration at the moment.

The rumour is that Microsoft will acquire them and announce a product called Virtual DLL at WinHEC - which allows virtualized registries for each application.

This stuff is very cool (still prefer Altiris's SVS though, and its free for personal use!)

in reply to Microsoft to buy Softricity?

Scoble: Star of Tech ed Europe [Scoble: Star of Tech ed Europe]

Cider — Wed, 17 May 2006 22:18:21 GMT

Got an early bird notice for Tech Ed Europe today. Couldn't help but click on the link which mentioned featured speakers - the Stars of Tech Ed Europe.

Apparently, the closing keynote (ie. the one where everyone thinks "I'll miss that to get to the airport early") is some bloke called Bill. However, one of the other 2 Featured Speakers is our very own Robert Scoble, creator of "educational and evangelist mini-films".

Bigger biography than that Bill chap as well.

http://www.mseventseurope.com/TechEd/06/Pre/Static/Developers/TopSpeakers.aspx

Unfortunately, I'm more likely to go to the 2nd part of Tech Ed - the IT Forum.

in reply to Scoble: Star of Tech ed Europe

Re: Windows and the Internet: Unsafe at any speed revisited [Re: Windows and the Internet: Unsafe at any speed revisited]

Cider — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 19:50:30 GMT

heh, this place just wouldn't be the same without "ze shoobs". I was worried because he hadn't been around for a while, and all his sites were down.

I thought maybe, the Gates Foundation had got to our most Machiavellian of posters here

in reply to Re: Windows and the Internet: Unsafe at any speed revisited

"Eolas" Patch in next Patch Tuesday? ["Eolas" Patch in next Patch Tuesday?]

Cider — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:59:05 GMT

I've seen conflicting reports that whether this patch (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/912945 ) is going to be shipped as part of an April 11th IE Cumulative update.

Any Microsoft type (Bruce, Dave, or even Stepto - if he's not too busy poking the Apple fanboys with sticks on his blog) comment on this?

Anyone notice any major issues/broken sites with it?

in reply to "Eolas" Patch in next Patch Tuesday?

Tech Ed Europe Cancelled [Tech Ed Europe Cancelled]

Cider — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 01:24:33 GMT

More details here: http://bink.nu/Article5955.bink

Tech Ed Europe merges with the IT Forum, becomes 2 events: Tech Ed: Developers & Tech Ed: IT Forum. Moved to Barcelona, in November.

I think its both a good thing and a terrible thing. End of June/Early July was always difficult for me because the summer is my main development period, and going to Tech Ed was a week lost, and coming back to not really have enough time to play with the stuff I had learned. On the plus side, Amsterdam was a great place to be at that time of year.

Realistically, it should be a good thing, but WHY did Microsoft only make this decision now? For a whole lot of people, July and November are not 4 months apart - they are two entirely seperate financial years. Indeed, for people who want to go to Tech Ed, funding was probably already something they had looked at allocating this year. If this was something they announced after last year's event, that's enough time to change plans, but now, things might not fit financially.

Also, one of the joys of Tech Ed was that I could go to a development track event, then go to a IT Pro track event, etc - as fits my job. This has effectively been stamped on. Oh, it does say you can go to both with Special Packages, but what bets the cost is only just under the cost of two tickets.

in reply to Tech Ed Europe Cancelled

Bizarre Channel 9 Error [Bizarre Channel 9 Error]

Cider — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:31:47 GMT

Every so often, when I come to Channel 9 in Internet Explorer, it crashes on me on the frontpage.

Its absolutely the tell-tale sign of a corrupt temporary internet file, as once I clear the cache, the error goes away (until it happens again, at irregular intervals of anything from 2 hours ago to gap of 2-3 weeks).

Anyone else seeing this?

in reply to Bizarre Channel 9 Error

Re: 3000 MS Jobs Moving to India [Re: 3000 MS Jobs Moving to India]

Cider — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:10:59 GMT

shooby wrote:
Yeah, well, sure, just because they hire 6000 Indians doesnt mean they will hire 6000 less Americans. So it's a lie.

Why stop there? Why stop at keeping jobs for Americans just because Bill Gates is an American? He's also white, y'know. Should Microsoft therefore only hire white people?

in reply to Re: 3000 MS Jobs Moving to India

Re: Channel 9 From Outer Space Hit Count [Re: Channel 9 From Outer Space Hit Count]

Cider — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 02:06:05 GMT

Tel, I get that you are about attention seeking, but why not get involved in the conversation?

After all, isn't that more productive? It seems you live a very schizophrenic lifestyle. Does your job, after all, not rely on Microsoft technologies to an extent? Or are you living a psychotic wish?

Most people here are not Microsoft zealots, but we live in the REAL WORLD, y'know the world where we get paid to do this technology stuff. We discuss, we criticise where necessary, praise where necessary. You do too. Why not join the real world and join the conversation, as opposed to being a middle aged dickhead who lives a fantasy world of being a rebel (which, clearly, you do).

in reply to Re: Channel 9 From Outer Space Hit Count

Re: Microsoft shows off new Vista features [Microsoft shows off new Vista features]

Cider — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 18:12:23 GMT

shooby wrote:
like, 100 million for jobs in India -- taking jobs away from Americans who can do the work, but who'd want to make a living at it.

So "free like me?" doesn't include free trade? Or only refers to white people? I love how the race card is always played in arguments like this.

Exactly how are jobs being taken away from Americans? Why do Americans have a right to these jobs? Microsoft, as with other global companies, sell their good and services worldwide. Why shouldn't they hire worldwide?

This is the classic "them and us" argument. Beer tried this as well. You think that because Indians are paid such a low amount comparitive to western prices, they do a poorer job. Sorry, doesn't work that way - anyone who knows simple economics will tell you that. They get paid less but it works out to be a good wage in their society. Unfortunately, due to people with attitudes like yours (closed minded, the utter opposite to "free like me"), too many jobs in India are call centre level which means that that there are people in call centres who are very intelligent, often moreso than myself or you.

Indeed, if everything was free and open and you were into a scenario where "better software is King", we should beencoruaging MORE offshoring of development jobs...

in reply to Microsoft shows off new Vista features

Erk, Firefox 1.1 Scrapped! Becomes 1.5... [Erk, Firefox 1.1 Scrapped! Becomes 1.5...]

Cider — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 02:14:10 GMT

They are going directly to a September release of 1.5!

This is due to "the significant increase in features and stability that the versioning deserves an increase".

Firefox 1.5 becomes Deer Park, 2.0 "The Ocho" (Q1 2006).

Massive change...

EDIT: The roadmap, graphics not yet updated:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html

in reply to Erk, Firefox 1.1 Scrapped! Becomes 1.5...

Finally - The Knowledgebase Article for Forum Etiquette [Finally - The Knowledgebase Article for Forum Etiquette]

Cider — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:56:38 GMT

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555372

So now the kids will know how to ask for wallop invites...

EDIT: Oh and choice comment...

"Another symptom of this error is getting the following answer:

          "RTFM"
          "STFW"
          "Google is your best friend"

and others.

Other variations of the same answer exist, all depending on the forum/newsgroup quality and percentage of hackers or open source enthusiasts on the forum/newsgroup members list.
"

in reply to Finally - The Knowledgebase Article for Forum Etiquette

Longhorn Deployment [Longhorn Deployment]

Cider — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 22:24:58 GMT

I was just reading these really interesting slides from WinHEC:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWAR05003_WinHEC05.ppt

First concrete thing I've read about the Windows Image format (WIM). I'm also interested in the slide which seems to suggest that Longhorn is built of very customisable WIMs (via an unattend.xml), going as far to seperate out the Shell and Media Player as seperate "components" in the example, meaning you can have some very highly configured builds from media centre to Tablet to Kiosk using different mixes of the same core components. Am I reading that right?

If that is how its going, I congratulate Microsoft. Good steps.

in reply to Longhorn Deployment

Deploying Tablet PC components seperately [Deploying Tablet PC components seperately]

Cider — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 22:32:09 GMT

Anyone know if this is even possible?

OK, the scenario is this. We have a standard image for XP. This is now a standard XP SP2 image. Its possible we may be looking at a big move towards Tablet PCs, so, can we take our standard image, install that and then install the Tablet PC 2005 components over this as an MSI or something?

Anyone?

in reply to Deploying Tablet PC components seperately

The Most Sought After Microsoft Release EVER! [The Most Sought After Microsoft Release EVER!]

Cider — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:58:58 GMT

ummm, or maybe not...

in reply to The Most Sought After Microsoft Release EVER!

The entire X-Box 360 Specs! (C&P-ed) [The entire X-Box 360 Specs! (C&P-ed)]

Cider — Mon, 09 May 2005 21:44:13 GMT

Hope this is OK to post:

Now, it seems a full list of Xbox 360 specs and Xbox Live details has been leaked. This list comes from a thread on the Team Xbox forums (the thread has since been deleted), and the TXB poster originally got it from another un-named forum.

2 types of Xbox Live:
Xbox Live Silver (no subscription required)
Xbox Live Gold (subscription benefits)

Features for Gold service
(S) Also for Silver
(O) Also for Offline

- Seamless transition to Xbox Live account from Xbox to Xbox 360
- Access to MMOs (additional fees may apply) (S)
- Free Xbox Live weekends (S)
- Multiplayer online gameplay
- Avatar for gamer profile(S)(O)
- Motto for gamer profile (S)(O)
- Personalized look for Xbox System Guide (S)(O)
- Offline achievments (S)(O)
- Online achievements (S)
- Access to other players' Gamer cards via Live (S)
- Cumulative gamer score (S)(O)
- Location/language profile (S)(O)
- Reputation (S)
- Enahnced matchmaking using above
- Skill level matchmaking
- Gameplay style profile (casual, competitive, etc.)
- Recent players list (S)
- Free and premium download game content(S)
- Free and premium downloadable movies, music, tv (S)
- Downloadable demos/trailers (S)
- Microtransactions (S)
- Custom playlist in every game (S)(O)
- Play music from portable devices (S)(O)
- View images from digital camera (S)(O)
- Strem media from Windows XP (S)(O)
- Interactive screen savers (S)(O)
- Track info for CDs (S) (O)
- Communication with voice, video or text (S)

The Hardware:
1. Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 cd, JPEG photo CD
2. All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
3. Customizable face plates to change appearance
4. 3 USB 2.0 ports
5. Support for 4 wireless controllers
6. Detachable 20GB drive
7. Wi-Fi ready

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 500 MHz
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MHz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
- Multichannel surround sond output
- Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels

To sum up the important stuff regarding XBL:

There will be two versions of Xbox Live. Silver is free (everyone gets it), and Gold is a paid subscription, like the current XBL. It looks like Xbox Live will be free on the weekends for everyone; Gold members will get it all the time, obviously. Current Xbox Live accounts will carry over to the 360 and become Gold Xbox Live accounts. Both Gold and Silver members will be able to download demos, trailers, and other content through XBL.

This info seems pretty legit, and some insiders have confirmed that this is indeed a real leak. At this rate, you have to wonder if Microsoft will have anything left to reveal at the MTV unveiling on May 12.

in reply to The entire X-Box 360 Specs! (C&P-ed)

Scoble will be pleased [Scoble will be pleased]

Cider — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:45:49 GMT

A Microsoft web-based RSS feed reader:

http://www.start.com/1/

Its very good, and all.

in reply to Scoble will be pleased

FirefoxADM [FirefoxADM]

Cider — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 01:29:32 GMT

Hi,

Just thought I'd advertise my blog and all sorts.

Basically, FirefoxADM is my attempt at fixing a major maybe-unseen issue with Firefox, which is, controlling it in a major rollout over hundreds or thousands of desktops. Anyway, I see this loads and loads of times as an issue connected to articles about Firefox within organisations...

This is aimed at people who use Active Directory and Windows and would really like to be able to set all the settings within Firefox using group policies.

Its a bit long and verbose, as I plan to use it as a kind of teaching tool even if my idea is rubbished and doesn't fly!

Anyway, comments appreciated:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/in-cider/

in reply to FirefoxADM

Bill pulls! [Bill pulls!]

Cider — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:34:18 GMT

"Mischa, What attracts you to multi-billionaire, Bill Gates?"

in reply to Bill pulls!

Channel 9's Wiki Goes Open Source!!! [Channel 9's Wiki Goes Open Source!!!]

Cider — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:19:40 GMT

I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned it yet, but...

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5385807.html

This is really good news and is surely the Channel 9 code project that many people have talked about on here!

I wonder what other developments the guys have...

(let one of them not be close down this forum!)

in reply to Channel 9's Wiki Goes Open Source!!!

Interesting Little Article About Longhorn, XNA and The Future of PC Gaming [Interesting Little Article About Longhorn, XNA and The Future of PC Gaming]

Cider — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:09:51 GMT

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/09/22/news_6108247.html

I know how eager everyone is to get even the slightest bit of information about Longhorn, so thought this was an interesting article to link to.

EDIT: Well, that URL ain't gonna work, is it?

EDIT * 7!: I give up!

in reply to Interesting Little Article About Longhorn, XNA and The Future of PC Gaming

And For Some Light Relief [And For Some Light Relief]

Cider — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:38:08 GMT

This, kids, is how you sell Windows:

http://www.energyradio.fm/content/ballmer.asx

in reply to And For Some Light Relief

Windows Messenger and .Net [Windows Messenger and .Net]

Cider — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:39:26 GMT

I am interested in making an application for my work which is basically a Remote Support Centre.

The reason for writing this is that the functionality for Asking For Remote Assistance in XP is not enough to work in an environment where the user will not know the "experts", which experts are online and you want the users to only get Remote Assistance from an expert. As an added catch, the users do not have Outlook or OE and they do not have Passport accounts.

At the moment, what I have is basically a Call Management System which allows the user to submit a call asking for help giving details, and then the expert can then Offer Remote Assistance to the user on their system.

What I would really like to do is to extend the functionality so that instead of only being able to communicate via Remote Assistance, the expert could also communicate via Windows Messenger to get more details before doing a Remote Assist. My initial thought was this wasn't going to be possible without at least a passport account but I got thinking about this "Offer Remote Assistance" option. In order to offer Remote Assistance, all you need is to be an allowed expert (set via Group Policy) and put in the name of computer/IP address and user ID to activate the Remote Assistance process. Functionality which uses Windows Messenger and also brings up a chat window similar to Windows Messenger on both machines.

So, my question is, is there a way to send a Windows Messenger message to a remote user on their workstation in C# or VB.NET to invoke a Windows Messenger chat session without using Passport?

Also, any advice on this application or an alternative approach to what I am trying to achieve is welcome! I haven't ruled out I am missing something blatantly obvious...

Mark

in reply to Windows Messenger and .Net