Information at Your Fingerprints, Take 17
Nearly 17 years ago, Bill Gates first spoke of information at your fingertips.
(
Here's
a great review of that speech.)
The idea is that one should be able to get information whenever and wherever
they need it. Now that a small fraction of the world has realized that dream,
Gates has moved on to his next goal -- connecting everything to everything.
At his annual keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, Gates restated the
vision and bragged about the progress he and his partners have made. Gates also
showed
off a few new tricks, including a new server system so all our devices can
have a central place for backup, storage of photos and such, and -- through
a Windows Live Internet address -- the ability to get to this content from anywhere.
Hey, isn't that what servers were defined for in the first place?
Hard Flash Drives
Hard drives are great; they're cheap and getting bigger every year. Flash drives
are cool, too: cheap, convenient and fast. So, what if we could have the best
of both worlds? That's exactly what Toshiba, Seagate, Hitachi and others are
working on. The vendors are grafting
a flash front end onto a hard drive -- all to make Vista PCs and laptops
that much faster.
New Longhorn Beta Bows
There’s a new
test version of Longhorn, which has been in beta for about three-fourths
of a year. This is still a pretty exclusive test, so if you're not yet part
of the program, start working your contacts now.
Virtual PC 2007 Virtually Here
Virtual PC 2007, set to ship this quarter, is now
a release candidate, which means it is in the very final stages of testing.
The new rev supports hardware virtualization tweaks built into the latest Intel
and AMD high-end chips.
For the true virtualization aficionados, the software can run up to 32 virtual
machines at the same time. I guess it's time for a few more megs of RAM, eh
what?
About the Author
Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.