S. Korea Pushing Gigabit Internet By 2012

By DustinPosted on

Who cares really that South Korea is going to have most of their internet customers on gigabit connections, the world is going to end in 2012, anyway… I care. I live in the US where internet speeds crawl compared to the rest of the world. 56k dialup is still a recent memory. Even our fiber optic connections are under 50Mb, and that is rare to find fiber unless you live in a MAJOR city. The MAX I can get is 7Mb DSL. No cable internet, no fiber. Previously, ironically in a much smaller town, I was able to get 10Mb. That’s not that fast compared to many other countries. The US is putting money into bailing out private business but has no plans on updating their communications infrastructure, which in turn would bring in more skilled jobs. Sorry to get political here, but with a lot of major technology companies in the US (Cisco, Microsoft, Intel), and the founding place of the Internet to begin with, we sure are lacking in the technology department lately.

It is not aiming at 100, 200 or even 500 megabits per second (Mbps). Instead it has devised a national plan for 1,000Mbps connections to be commonplace by 2012.

Inside Story On Kinect

By DustinPosted on

Wired has the inside story on how Kinect came to be, from Project Natal until today, just weeks away from being available. Kinect looks like a great accessory, even with the high price tag. You know it takes a lot of technology to get all this accomplished!

The problem wasn’t vision. It was the task’s sheer impossibility. Finding cameras that could map a living-room in 3D was easy. Getting one reliably to decode the flailing limbs and shouts of 40 million Xbox users was a whole other dream. To pull this off, the hardware would require software “brain” capable of interpreting what the team calculated was a crushing 1023 spatial and aural variables at any given moment. And it would have to do this on the fly, with no perceptible on-screen lag.

First x64 Rootkit in Wild

By DustinPosted on

The TDL3 rootkit was labeled “the most advanced rootkit ever seen in the wild” several months ago. That in itself was bad news. Now, the rootkit has been found in the wild with an x64 variant. Make sure to keep your anti-virus updated, and don’t go to sites that normally drop these kind of attacks.

The dropper is being dropped by usual crack and porn websites, but we soon expect to see it dropped by exploit kits too, as happened to current TDL3 infections.

Microsoft Kinect Supplies Running Low

By DustinPosted on

Fears of a Christmas holiday shortage of Kinect devices for the XBox 360 comes as many retailers are sold out of their pre-order allocations. While Microsoft is surely trying to keep up with demand, shortages usually cause a lot more hype for a product, and people want it more. Very similar to WiiFit, Elmo, and many others, regardless of the quality.

The high price of the system – which retails for around £130 and doesn’t include an Xbox 360 console – was expected to put many consumers off, particularly those who had already invested in a “casual” gaming system such as the Nintendo Wii, or Sony’s rival format, the PlayStation Move.

Pirates Crack Windows 7

By DustinPosted on

Pirates have finally cracked and created an installation disk for Windows 7. They have tested it on computers from 28 OEM’s. They come pre-activated, no key required. They also come with new, unsupported security vulnerabilities. I never trust a program that comes from a pirate, as they use their own code to hack it to do what they want. That code could be malicious, or just sloppy, introducing a new security hole. You never can tell. Microsoft is probably cooking up a Windows Update to patch the hack.

It appears that users can simply download the pirated Windows 7 Ultimate SKU, extract the ISO, burn it onto a disk, and then install it, without ever being required to enter a product key, or to activate the platform.

More Ray Ozzie Docs

By DustinPosted on

Ray Ozzie has added some new documents on his webpage, this time some personal notes from Windows 1.01. Some nice little notes there, and some proof that they were using Macintosh as their inspiration. These blasts from the past are pretty awesome to look at.

Your response to my previous post was overwhelming; thanks.  While on the subject of 1985 nostalgia, I’ve uploaded one more final scan – some personal notes of mine from that era related to Windows.  I frequently traveled to Microsoft because I’d known Bill since my Software Arts days.  Our startup, Iris Associates, had also been doing very early work with Windows as one of its first ISV’s.

XBox Live Friends List to Stay At 100

By DustinPosted on

Earlier today, a German site had posted that XBox Live was going to up their maximum friends count to 1000, up from 100. Major Nelson has denied that is the case, at least in the United States. We’ll see what is going on in Germany, true or false, and let you know.

The 100 friend limit on Xbox Live was mostly due to gamers who were still playing Halo 2. The original Xbox only allowed for 100 friends and that bled over into this generation. Now that online support for all original Xbox titles has ceased, we expected to see a significant change in the number of friends we can have. Hyrb says Microsoft is always looking for ways to make Xbox Live better through customer feedback, so let’s take him up on that. If you start bugging Microsoft to give you higher friend cap now, maybe it’ll be placed in the November update.

Windows 1.0 Documents Found

By DustinPosted on

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, is back to blogging. His first post includes some Windows 1.0 launch documents. I remember drooling over Windows 1.0 and wanting it. I didn’t get into the Windows game until 2.0, however. Been loving it ever since (although, I did skip over ME and went straight to Win2K), and will continue to use it for many years to come. Sometimes, I really kinda miss the old CGA monitors…

Inside a sealed packet I found a wonderful artifact from decades ago – a folder of collaterals from the Windows 1.0 launch event.  It was possibly handed to me at that time by Pam Edstrom, whose business card was enclosed.

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It’s also a reminder that we’re nearing a key milestone:  November 20, 2010, the 25th anniversary of Windows.

Microsoft Anti-OpenOffice Video

By DustinPosted on

I’ve recommended OpenOffice to several people looking for a free alternative to Microsoft Office. While I wouldn’t use it in an enterprise quite yet, or with any VBA/Macro type environment, it is still a good alternative for basic word processing and spreadsheet duties. For anything more, MS Office is definitely the product to have. It is any wonder that OpenOffice brags about MS Office compatibility and interoperability?! Why would you claim that your product is almost as good as the competition, but not quite? Hmmmm…. Free does have it’s costs.