"At APC we've been running the Beta 2 edition of Windows Home Server for the past two months and it's acquitted itself surprisingly well - no doubt a reflection on the time this 'server for the rest of us' spent in the Redmond skunkworks. There's still some 'fit and finish' to appear before it hits the Release Candidate milestone around Q3, prior to the platform's debut towards the end of this year - but from what we've seen so far, we'd rate Windows Home Server as one of Microsoft's most polished and most impressive 1.0 releases to date. Here's a walkthrough gallery of screenshots from the Beta 2 build of Windows Home Server." There's also a screenshot gallery for Longhorn Server Beta 3.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Let me try to quell your concerns.
I'm not particularly concerned about WHS, because it doesn't do anything as far as I can see.
WHS stores your movies and music.
I don't see any way of sharing those films and music out in a useful jukebox kind of way, it doesn't do what Myth does and it doesn't do what something like a SlimServer does in streaming your music.
That's probably because they don't want it to be a threat to Windows Media Centre or something ;-).
It backs up your computers so you can recover if they break.
People can buy software, cheap external hard drives, USB sticks and even full blown easy to use RAID backup boxes today to do that - and they do.
People use web mail.
WHS is supposed to have remote access, right?
They don't want an Exchange server. They don't even know what an Exchange server is.
I didn't say they should run Exchange. I'm just saying that for WHS to be even moderately useful to them then it should really provide some way to keep easy access of their mails, back them up and give them something more personal and useful to them that web mail can't provide. It's just a suggestion for WHS to be moderately useful to someone, because at the moment, it isn't.
Single-digit megabytes of patches per year is not a bandwidth problem.
Windows updates are not by no means in single digits, and you'd be surprised how bandwidth sapping occurs (the backup would do this as well). WHS just needs to handle this differently than a normal Windows (or even Linux) server and look at the practical issues.
If you are concerned about 14.4kbps modem users, have no fear -- they can turn automatic updates off.
This is a fully automated headless server for the home we're talking about here that should need no set up (or at least a simple step-by-step guide set up).
Edited 2007-04-30 17:44
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2007-03-30
Let me try to quell your concerns.
WHS stores your movies and music. It backs up your computers so you can recover if they break.
People use web mail. They don't want an Exchange server. They don't even know what an Exchange server is.
Single-digit megabytes of patches per year is not a bandwidth problem. If you are concerned about 14.4kbps modem users, have no fear -- they can turn automatic updates off.