Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Joost is a very interesting new offering, where you get to watch free streaming TV over the web.
And it’s not some tiny little 300×300 pixel viewing box (similar to watching YouTube videos)….We’re talking about full screen video at a quality I’ve not seen before for streaming video.
You would be surprised at how many channels are already available, and they keep knocking up deals with more and more big production houses all the time.
The Playboy channel isn’t on the list just yet, but we can always keep our fingers crossed….
I’ve been a member of the private beta for a while now, but they are now opening the beta up quite a bit more.
It’s not yet a public beta, but if you go to this page you will be able to sign up for a free invitation. That page has a quota of 10,000 invites, but it’s a very popular site; so go in and get access while you can.
Filed under: tools |
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Posted on May 4th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
If you use Windows Server 2003, then you may or may not be aware that there are various free downloads (tools and feature packs) that are available to you, which can provide very useful services to your users.
One of these is Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) v3.
WSS allows you to easily create an intranet/extranet or even various pre-built web applications for you to use.
And let me repeat once again, that this is absolutely free. So there’s no good reason to not give it a go.
Here are some videos that will introduce you to the technology and features available. Note that these videos are from mid-2006, prior to WSS v3 being released; so the people on the videos will say that “the product will be released soon”, etc. You can safely ignore that, since the product is fully available today.
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Filed under: Microsoft, Office, Sharepoint |
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Posted on March 23rd, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Windows Vista has a new feature called User Account Control (UAC). The premise is that if you are running as a local administrator of the machine (which is very common) you could have your system compromized by software running under your user context.
Since you’re running as an administrator, then malicious software can completely take control of your systems. Not a good thing.
Unix admins have known for many years that you would have to be crazy to run your day to day user tasks as a local admin (called “root” in Unix-speak). Unix admins always make sure that they run their day to day tasks on a separate user account with diminished priviledges. If they need to do something where they need admin rights, then they simply temporarily elevate their security level, do the admin task, and then revert to their normal lower priviledge account.
This is a standard practice for all Unix admins everywhere.
Windows admins and users almost never do the above though, partly because doing so was not only impractical but also almost technically impossible….at least with Windows versions up to Windows XP.
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Filed under: Fun, Microsoft, apple |
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Posted on March 18th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
I’m currently preparing for a Microsoft Roadshow conference (to be held in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne), where I’ll be presenting on the new Exchange Server 2007.
In looking around for screenshots to use for my presentation, I stumbled upon a Microsoft developer blog, which had a link to a detailed demo on the new features of Outlook Web Access 2007.
Now that Exchange 2007 has been officially released, Microsoft have posted a number of good demos showing all of the main new features of Exchange. But there’s no comparison between the official demo of Outlook Web Access 2007 shown on that prior link versus the demo shown at the Exchange developer blog. The latter version blows away the official one.
I warn you though. If you have any degree of tech-geek syndrome within you, you’re about to be very impressed….
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Filed under: Microsoft, Exchange |
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Posted on February 9th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Here are the 8 videos of the CES 2007 presentation by Bill Gates.
If you don’t feel like watching all of the videos, then you can have a skim read of the transcripts as well.
Bill’s presentation (yes, Bill and I are on a first name basis 
) covered the following technologies:
Here are the videos. Read more »
Filed under: Microsoft |
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Posted on February 8th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Speech recognition in Windows Vista has been vastly improved, when compared to prior editions of this kind of technology by Microsoft.
The question is: does it work?
There’s a lot of “Vista bashing” going on at the moment, and it certainly didn’t help matters when Microsoft did a public demonstration of the speech recognition technology where the results were absolutely terrible (see the second video below). Read more »
Filed under: Windows Vista, Microsoft |
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Posted on February 7th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
With many online services (such as Flickr) providing the ability to store and share you digital images online, there are now literally millions of digital images and photos stored online.
Microsoft are working on a new technology called Photosynth. This technology is capable of recreating entire 3D environments by aggregating many individual related images together.
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Filed under: Microsoft, Photosynth, Digital photography |
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Posted on February 5th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Here’s a guy that can demonstrate how to install Windows Vista in under 5 minutes.
Somehow I doubt that Microsoft would be very impressed though.
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Filed under: Windows Vista, Fun, Microsoft |
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