Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Okay… make that TWO comics.  This one is Exchange-flavored and is called "Squeaky Lobster".
[snicker]  "Facemail".  Hadn’t heard that one before. 

LINK: http://www.exchangeyourcareer.com/squeaky_lobster/

In celebration of Windows Server 2008’s upcoming release, we’ve apparently started an online comic strip.  I like it!  Especially the "Bring Back Pluto" t-shirt this guy’s wearing.  Where do I get one of those?

LINK:  http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/cool-stuff/comic/default.mspx

If any of you have ever been on one of Verizon Business’ conference calls and had to wait through the hold music, you’ll understand.  We’re on concalls all the time and this have to listen to the hold music everyday.

Here’s the introduction of Calista via the Terminal Services MSDN blog.

<taken from http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2008/01/22/microsoft-acquires-calista-technologies.aspx>

Hi, my name is Chandra Shekaran, and I am the general manager for Presentation & Desktop Virtualization at Microsoft. By now, you have probably heard about our Virtualization Deployment Summit today where we made several exciting announcements pertaining to some of our important virtualization strategies (you can find them at Microsoft PressPass). One of the announcements was Microsoft completing the acquisition of Calista Technologies, a leading provider of graphic technologies for the next generation desktop and presentation virtualization solutions. As many of you know, Microsoft has been a leader in the presentation virtualization space for more than 10 years with Windows Terminal Services. With the addition of Calista we will continue to provide the best, broadest and most affordable virtualization technology portfolio for customers and partners. For more read Neal Margulis’ post (Neal is the founder of Calista).

So, what’s so exciting about Calista? Calista’s products dramatically improve the end-user experience of 3D and multimedia delivery for Microsoft multimedia applications, virtualized desktop deployments, and server-hosted virtualized desktops or applications using Windows Terminal Services. Their technologies support all file and streaming media type available, and optimize Microsoft’s widely available Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to reduce the network bandwidth requirements for remote display of rich media content; thus, remote workers can receive a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware. As multimedia and 3D graphics are becoming more ubiquitous in business and consumer contexts alike, customers expect the full desktop experience regardless of their desktop deployment choice. With the addition of Calista technologies, Microsoft will enable users to enjoy a rich remote experience for server-hosted, virtualized desktops and applications, thus allowing an organization full flexibility in their choice to deploy centrally managed desktops or a local traditional desktop. In fact, in one of our other announcements today we talked about the concept of Windows Vista optimized desktop solutions; the idea behind it is to enable customers to use several Microsoft technologies, such as the rich user interface of Windows Vista, server based applications like Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services or hosted desktop technology like Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops, for personal computing scenarios that best meet their unique needs. Calista will be key in helping customers to make the right trade-off decisions among these deployment options, by helping to ensure a consistent, rich end user experience in those scenarios where users transition between a local and a server-hosted desktop.

There are many other product areas at Microsoft where we believe Calista’s technologies will be extremely beneficial in helping Microsoft to create a superior customer experience, and we are just starting to imagine the potential. More importantly though, I am sure you will want to better understand where in Microsoft’s product portfolio virtualization innovations such as Calista’s will start to materialize first, so please stay tuned and come back here to read our blog every once in a while for more details about the latest product plans and accomplishments.

Chandra Shekaran

Visit http://www.databasetastechallenge.com

cNet writes a interesting article that asks the simple question:
If there were 4 million iPhones shipped by Apple to AT&T according to Steve Jobs, and AT&T has only sold about 2 million according to their earnings conference… where’s the remaining 2 million?

LINK:  http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9857622-37.html?tag=nefd.lede

Report: iPhones piling up at AT&T stores
Posted by Tom Krazit

Is demand for the iPhone in America already starting to wane?

AT&T, the exclusive American carrier of the iPhone, activated just 900,000 iPhones during the fourth quarter, the company revealed during its earnings conference call Thursday. It wrapped up the year with "just at or slightly under 2 million iPhone customers," according to company executives.

Apple announced at Macworld that it has sold 4 million iPhones through the middle of January, and Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, thinks the gap between the figures means that Apple might have a demand problem. He released a research note Thursday after AT&T’s earnings saying that the carrier’s figures imply that an awful lot of inventory is building up at Apple’s channel partners.

(Article continues here.)

In case you hadn’t heard, Virtualization Summit 2008 took place at Microsoft in Redmond, WA the other week.  300 early adopters of Microsoft’s Virtualization Hypervisor technology (called ‘Hyper-V’, included in Windows Server 2008) were invited to this private affair to hear what Microsoft has in store in the virtualization space.  (Press web site for the event is located here:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/virtualization/default.mspx

There were a number of MAJOR announcements at this event – so many that I probably am missing a major one, but here are the ones that I was able to glean from the information I’ve been able to gather:

1) Acquisition of Calista Technologies
Microsoft acquired the 35 person company Calista Technologies, and with it, it’s patent pending presentation virtualization acceleration technology.  Basically, Calista’s patents:
– Create a Virtual GPU on the client system for doing client-side rendering
– Enable full motion streaming video using any codec on the market, animation, and 3D graphic rendering without lag or stutter
– Utilize a maximum pipe of 1Mbps
– Can be applied to any presentation technology such as Terminal Services or Virtual Machine Remote Control

2) VMBus Integration Agreement with Novell, Sun, Citrix XenSource
An agreement was established between Novell, Sun, and Citrix to engineer the full integration of Microsoft’s Virtualization technology directly into the operating systems and virtual machine architecture of each partner’s products. 

In particular, all operating systems in the partnership will take advantage of VMBus, the high speed connectivity that enables guest virtual machines of a Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor-based host system to leverage the drivers of the host operating system to provide I/O to the underlying system hardware, without the drivers existing in the hypervisor.

The resulting VMBus architecture keeps the hypervisor secure, maintains high levels of on-the-metal performance for guest VMs, while focusing the role of the hypervisor exclusively on CPU/memory management and true hardware I/O between the host OS’s drivers.

3) Citrix Virtualization Alliance
Citrix Systems will be establishing an alliance with Microsoft with the goal of supporting the Microsoft Hardware & Presentation Virtualization platforms through value-added add-on products & product integration.  This includes:

• Citrix XenServer integration with Virtual Machine Manager
  XenServer will be remotely & centrally managable using Virtual Machine Manager just as Hyper-V and Virtual Server R2 will be.
• Citrix XenServer VM converter from Xen-to-Hyper-V (Config, Drivers)
  Citrix will produce a VM converter to enable adminstrators to migrate virtual machines running on XenServer to Windows Server 2008’s Hyper-V.  The conversion process will include the migration of VM parameters from host to host including memory & CPU throttling configuration, as well as the retrofitting of drivers within the virtual machines themselves.  This will enable administrators to use Virtual Machine Manager to move VMs between hosts from a single pane of glass.
• Citrix “Dynamic Virtualization Services” for Hyper-V (“Charles”)
  Citrix will produce a product that runs over Hyper-V much in the same way that Citrix Presentation Server runs over Windows Terminal Services, to add functionality to the overall product, including functionality that focused on:
• Desktop Delivery
• VM Streaming (Provisioning)
• VM Storage Delivery
• VM Availability Services

Are you an IT Professional looking to increase productivity? Are you a developer seeking the latest tools? In either case, you need to be a part of the Tech·Ed U.S. 2008 experience.

For the first time, Tech·Ed U.S. has expanded from a one-week conference into two separate conferences held back-to-back in Orlando, FL:

• Tech·Ed U.S. Developers  June 3-6, 2008
• Tech·Ed U.S. IT Professionals  June 10-13, 2008

REGISTER:  http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/default.mspx

Imagine a Slingbox for your Windows Media Center…
…except it’s entirely based on software, requires just installing the module on your Windows Media Center, is completely free, and provides all the same functionality.

Admittedly I hadn’t tried this before and I’m a little ashamed.  This thing is gorgeous.

The story goes that this guy wrote WebGuide for the Windows Media Center and sold it on the Internet.  Then the Windows Media Center folks saw it, liked it, then hired him and as a condition of his employment, he posted the WebGuide software on the Internet to be made available for free.

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.asciiexpress.com/webguide/

Check out the new Forefront Security for SharePoint website!
http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/sharepoint/en/us/default.aspx

———————

Protection and control for collaboration servers – Help protect Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 deployments from malicious code, confidential information, and inappropriate content.

Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint integrates multiple scan engines from industry-leading vendors and content controls to help businesses protect their Microsoft SharePoint collaboration environments by eliminating documents containing malicious code, confidential information, and inappropriate content. The new Forefront Security for SharePoint with SP1 provides an improved user experience with file uploads, manual scanning, keyword filtering, and program administration.