From “put a computer on every desk” to “in every desk” or “be every desk”

Posted on by wooway
Keywords: Surface Computing, Milan, Microsoft, touch screen computing, …
中文关键词: 表面计算, 桌面计算, 微软, 米兰, 触摸屏计算, 比尔·盖茨, 史蒂夫·乔布斯, ……
 
 
 
Once, put a computer on every desk and in every home was a dream of Microsoft, things like Bill Gates said in yesterday’s D5.  But things are changing dramatically, the tablet form-factor Bill mentioned yesterday in a talk with Steve Jobs became real today, the surface computing concept.  Bill Gates might want to revise the motto to "change every desk to be a computer in every home" or office, or bar, casino, everywhere.
 
How would that be, eventually, in several years?  What about the tablet PC Microsoft invented several year ago?  I can hardly remember anyone around me actually uses tablet PC on a daily basis.  There are Palms, pocket PCs, smartphones, or BlackBerrys, but I’ve never seen anyone carries a full-size tablet PC that running on Windows XP tablet version or whatever.  We’re using touch screen almost every day right now, in supermarkets, box offices, GPS’s, PDAs, smartphones…  but those are not full function, "rich" computers, as Steve and Bill defined in D5.  Steve already has his iPhone/iTouch, which is a small limited version of personal computer.  Will this Milan thing be end up like tablet PC, or something even older, maybe none of us even remember, the AST GRiD?
 
If more and more casinos, bars or restaurants start adopt this technology, or even for home entertainment, like the demo on CNet, than business offices do, it would become a machine for proprietary uses, another kind of XBox or DVD or cashier machine, not show the richness of a personal computer.  In D5, neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs successfully answered the question about full function, rich client and personal device like iPhone.  But anyway, this is the real concept of desk(top) computing.
 
In Chinese, there’s a word 桌面电脑=desktop computer for decades, but literally 桌=desk, 面=surface, 电脑=computer.  So we should change the translation of desktop computer to 桌上电脑, because 上=top; and use 桌面电脑 for this wonderful new baby – surface computer.  (I was little confused when I read this sentence again, let me make it clearer tomorrow.)

Talking about DOWNLOAD: Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 for Windows Server 2003

Posted on by wooway

 

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DOWNLOAD: Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 for Windows Server 2003

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is now available to users of Windows Server 2003.  A description of the technology is available at the product web site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/techinfo/overview.mspx but here’s a quick summary of what I think is pretty cool about it:

  • Templates for implementing blogs (also known as weblogs) and wikis (Web sites that can be quickly edited by team members—no special technical knowledge required)
  • Offline synchronization through Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 that users can use to manage document libraries, lists, calendars, contacts, tasks, and discussion boards even offline, and to synchronize changes when reconnected to the network
  • Ability to build workflows on the Windows SharePoint Services platform that address specific business processes or sets of tasks
  • Document storage, recycle bin item retrieval, and version-control features built-in
  • Enable security to be set as deep down as the item level

NOTE:  I can’t stress bullet #2 enough:  The ability to do offline synchronization of document libraries between a laptop user and the Sharepoint Service is absolutely phenomenal.  Have you ever received an email with a pointer to a document stored on a server, then realized that you couldn’t get the document you needed because you’re on an airplane?  If the resource was a common storage location like a Sharepoint service that you had synching with your machine, you’d have the document with you to peruse or edit, and be able to rely on the fact that the changes you made would be synched once you were back on line.

You can download Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 for standard (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions.

DOWNLOAD:   Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Talking about HOWTO: Relocate the menu bar in IE7 to the top of the window

Posted on by wooway

 

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HOWTO: Relocate the menu bar in IE7 to the top of the window

< from>http://www.veign.com/blog/2007/02/relocate-menu-bar-in-ie7-to-top-of.html>

Would you rather have the menu bar in IE7 to be more like IE6 in the sense that it will appear at the very top of the window? A simple reg hack will get that going for you.

1) Copy the bold text below into a text file (between the lines)
        ———————————————————–
        REGEDIT4
        [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser\]
        "ITBar7Position"=dword:00000001
        ———————————————————–
2) Save the text file with a REG extension (like toolbar.reg)
3) Double click the file and allow it to update your registry
4) Shut down IE7 (if open) and restart it.

(Download reg file to accomplish the above:  http://veign.com/blog/files/ie7menufix.zip)

Talking about HOWTO: Convert from VMWare (.VMDK) to Microsoft’s Virtualization format (.VHD)

Posted on by wooway

 

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HOWTO: Convert from VMWare (.VMDK) to Microsoft’s Virtualization format (.VHD)

There’s an interesting set of tools available at http://vmtoolkit.com/.  Here’s a brief description of each of them:

  1. VMDK to VHD Converter
    This is a tool that will convert the virtualized hard drives from VMWare’s format (VMDK) to Microsoft’s Virtual disk format (VHD) so that you can run virtual machines originally created for use with VMWare to run in Virtual Server 2005/R2, Virtual PC 2004/2007, and assumedly Microsoft Virtualization Hypervisor (the virtualization layer to be used with Windows Server Longhorn), which has been touted as using the exact same format as existing Microsoft virtual machine technology.

    One VERY interesting use of this tool has been to leverage VMWare’s Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) tools to virtualize existing servers, then convert the virtualized hard disks to .VHD format for use in Virtual Server R2.  Why would you want to do that?  Well, simply because there’s no cost associated with using Virtual Server:  Virtual Server has no licensing fees associated with it, unlike VMWare ESX, which makes it the perfect environment for infrastructure testing labs, software development environments, and web application farms.

    And of course, it positions an organization very well to take advantage of the highly performant Microsoft Hypervisor, coming with Windows Server Longhorn.

    DOWNLOAD:  http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2006/11/20/vmdk-to-vhd-converter-available.aspx
    (Requires .NET Framework 2.0)

  2. VHD Resizer
    This tool will resize your virtual machine hard drive files (VHD) and also allow you to convert them between Fixed and Dynamic file types by essentially doing a sector-by-sector copy from one type to another. 

    They originally called the tool the "VHD Expander" but soon discovered that they could actually shrink the size of the .VHD file if the partition size of your .VHD didn’t actually take up the entire disk, so they renamed it to the "VHD Resizer" to fit it’s ability to both expand and contract the size of the file.

    DOWNLOAD:  http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/02/28/vhd-expander-is-now-vhd-resizer.aspx
    (Requires .NET Framework 2.0)

Talking about INFO: Tips & Tricks on using Virtual PC 2007

Posted on by wooway

 

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INFO: Tips & Tricks on using Virtual PC 2007

Are you a user of Virtual PC 2007?  There’s a dozen reasons why Virtual PC 2007 should be the virtual machine environment you use, not the least of which being that Virtual PC’s .VHD virtual machine format is rapidly becoming the standard for virtual machines in both the Windows ecosystem as well as the Linux/Xen ecosystem.  Also, it should be noted that Virtual PC 2007 is not only free to use and univerally available for anyone to use but all Microsoft training is done in .VHDs making it a great tool to learn with.

So if you’re using Virtual PC, here are a set of tricks I’ve learned along the way. 

  • SHUTDOWN AFTER TURNING ON HARDWARE VIRTUALIZATION
    Sometimes you have to completely shutdown your computer for CPU/hardware-based virtualization acceleration to take affect; i.e. rebooting is not enough.
  • SLEEP MAY KILL HARDWARE VIRTUALIZATION
    Sometimes sleep will disable hardware virtualization on PCs, so be careful if you sleep your machine.  You may find your Virtual PC machines grinding at a slower pace.
  • SOUND ADAPTERS FOR WINDOWS VISTA
    Getting sound in Windows Vista virtual machines require that a special synthetic sound card be in place when setting up the virtual machine.  This can only be done in the VM wizard by selecting "Windows Vista" as the OS type to be used.  Every other OS type will use a synthetic sound blaster 16 ISA adapter which will NOT work with Windows Vista, seeing that Windows Vista no longer supports ISA adapters.
  • VIRTUAL SERVER SCSI WILL SWITCH TO IDE ON VIRTUAL PC
    Virtual Server 2005 .VHDs that are using synthetic SCSI adapters to improve performance, if moved to Virtual PC 2007 environments, will shift over silently to using IDE adapters slowing down performance.  Virtual PC does not support SCSI.
  • FULLY UTILIZE CPU FOR VIRTUAL PC ALL THE TIME
    Some laptops will shuttle down performance of their CPUs and putting them into low power modes resulting in environments not friendly (nor performant) for Virtual PC.  Here are instructions on how to maximize CPU utilization to ensure that the laptop doesn’t go into low power mode.
    – Stop running Virtual PC
    – Open notepad
    – Open %appdata%\Microsoft\Virtual PC\options.xml
    – Locate the section of the file and add this key:
      true
    – Save the file and exit notepad
    – Start Virtual PC
    Virtual PC will fully utilize the processor in order to stop the laptop from entering a low power state.  The upside of this is that you should see no performance issues.  The downside is that it will drain your battery power much faster than normal.  As such – you should only use this option after you have tried all other possible solutions.
  • FINISH BACKGROUND PROCESSES BEFORE WORKING ON HOST OR GUESTS
    By running this script on both the Virtual PC host & the guests then letting them settle, you will find that your machine’s UI’s will run much smoother.
            C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe AdvAPI32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
    All that this command does is have the background services complete at a high priority instead of splitting time with the UI.  This allows them to "finish loading" quicker.