By Justin James on
8/19/2008 10:38 PM
Looks like the 3G iPhone is truly "twice as fast"... twice as fast as paint drying:
J.Ja
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By George Ou on
8/18/2008 9:26 PM
I just spent an hour trouble shooting my mother's computer over the phone. Apparently, all the certificates were throwing up errors and giving the scary message that someone might be hijacking your computer session. One thing I forgot to check was the date on the computer which got reset and the date mismatch was forcing every secure website to report scary messages.
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By George Ou on
8/12/2008 6:28 PM
In his recent OPEC 2.0 op-ed, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu offered his vision of a broadband policy by declaring the broadband market a “bandwidth cartel” that has gouged the public like the energy market. While this bash-the-corporation rhetoric may have some populist appeal, Wu’s analysis is both factually and logically flawed. See rest of post here
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By George Ou on
8/12/2008 6:23 PM
My article on FedTech Magazine on achiving Green IT has appeared in print and online here. It has some informative tips so please check it out.
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By Justin James on
8/12/2008 11:53 AM
I tried to install the new Service Pack for Team Foundation Server 2008 today. Not surprisingly, it failed. It failed for the same reason that it took me quite a number of days to get it installed in the first place, which is the integration with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).
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By George Ou on
8/10/2008 4:15 PM
Photo credit: Jeff Gross/Getty Images
With the 2008 summer Olympics upon us, 8/8/2008 marks the dawn of a new era for China and for the Internet. China is experiencing massive growth economically and the Internet is becoming the next television platform. For the first time, I get to watch all of the Olympics events that I wanted to see because it’s available on demand from the Internet.
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By George Ou on
8/7/2008 2:01 PM
 
In May, Erratasec founder and researcher David Maynor sent out these pictures to a small security list beaming with joy as if to show off his new baby. He asked us to guess what it's for and a number of us made some educated guesses. He then tipped us off that the battery on the bottom of the box would run for 5 days and that it was intended to be shipped to a nonexistent person. Well that was all the clue
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By Justin James on
8/1/2008 10:06 AM
I went to Microsoft.com today to look some information up, and I discovered that they are giving away free (even S/H is free) 120 day evals of Windows Home Server. I've been curious about this product, but I didn't want to spend a cent without trying it first. Here's my chance, I guess. If you're interested, you can get this from:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/eval.mspx
J.Ja
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By George Ou on
7/31/2008 11:26 PM
If I was still blogging at ZDNet, I'd file this under my old Energy Efficiency category. It's been nearly a year ago since I covered the Green Grid at Linux World and I know the folks who head up that consortium pretty well and it's definitely a worthwhile cause. I recall raising the concern that many IT departments don't really pay energy costs and it doesn't factor in to their department's bottom line so it's good to see that they're championing the concept of some sort of corporate Energy Czar.
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By George Ou on
7/29/2008 12:17 PM
The following is a guest post from Erin Laing from CXTEC
Although Microsoft’s net profit in April to June was $4.3bn, 41% higher than a year earlier when Microsoft spent $1bn fixing faulty Xbox consoles, analysts expect the next three months to hit Microsoft’s earnings in a very harsh way. In the current quarter, predicted earnings of 47 to 48 cents per share are less than the expected 49 cents, and shares have tumbled 5.89% to close at $25.86.
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By Justin James on
7/29/2008 12:12 AM
A while back, I put my PC on a KVM. The moment I did that, its abilty to go into S3 sleep state (I use the hybrid mode, that does the hibernate trick too) stopped working. Searching around the Web, it looked like a common problem with this KVM. No worries, I accepted it for what it is. Today, I replaced a bad hard drive in the system, and did not touch anything else. Myteriously, the S3 sleep state works again. Odd, eh?
J.Ja
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By Justin James on
7/28/2008 11:53 PM
Last week I wrapped up the installation of our new Team Foundation Server 2008 setup. I had previously installed it in a single-server archtecture, but we decided to go to the dual-server configuration. Why? Because I am trying to consolidate everything by purpose into different VMs on our new app server. This means that I have 1 VM for SQL server, another one for SharePoint and other collaborative applications, and so on. When I went to install TFS into this, it was an incredible headache.
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By George Ou on
7/25/2008 2:53 PM
Like most people, I didn't know Professor Randy Pausch or ever heard of the man, but I saw his last lecture (via Slashdot) on YouTube and I wish I had known him. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it because it's heartwarming and inspirational.
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By George Ou on
7/23/2008 3:27 PM
 Dell will be launching a new family of Intel Atom "Netbooks" called the Dell "E". It's another entry in to the cheap tiny laptop market joining companies like Asus, MSI, and Acer. But Dell's latest entry is actually going outside of the traditional Netbook market with a 12.1" display which has traditionally - as if the market is that old - used 10" or smaller displays.
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By George Ou on
7/22/2008 4:29 PM
Betanews has a good article about Windows Search 4.0 which is now listed as "important" in Windows Vista Update. You can manually download a copy here for Windows Vista and Server 2008 and you can download Search 4.0 for Windows XP. Couple this with Microsoft's Read More »
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By George Ou on
7/19/2008 8:11 AM
Update 8/12/2008 - Robb Topolski has graciously apologized for the personal attacks.
I have to admit that I was surprised at the speed at which I've been attacked on my latest FCC filing "Guide to protocol agnostic network management schemes". Within hours of my filing, Robb Topolski who now works for Public Knowledge wrote an attack blog "George Ou: Protocol Agnostic doesn't mean Protocol Agnostic" which,
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By Justin James on
7/19/2008 9:20 AM
Ever since I put up an ISA Server 2006 deployment, we noticed that Web access through it was incredibly slow. When we connected test machines directly to the Internet connection (the FiOS line that I've mentioned before), it was blazing fast. But outbound Web access through the ISA Server was slow slow slow. Well, I fixed it!
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By George Ou on
7/16/2008 2:37 PM
This link to Google Video (WARNING - NSFW Not Safe For Work images) seems like it's been hijacked in some way by a foreign language site. I accidentally came across it when I was looking at some LCD monitor review videos on Google Video. I someone doubt that Google approves of the content and the avatar image and I sent in a complaint to Google but the page and profile hasn't been removed yet. I'm not sure what to make of it or what, if any, exploits are involved.
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By Justin James on
7/15/2008 10:54 PM
I just wanted to put this out there, I will be participating in a live Webcast on Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 1 PM EST. The topic is "Effective Customer Experience Management". It is a presentation of BNet. You can register for the event here:
http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=113085&s=1&k=05C2751AB6FCEB0D129C095AF6C803D6
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By George Ou on
7/14/2008 2:56 AM
After praising Tomshardware for doing a good job fixing their flash storage efficiency article, I must point out that Tomshardware's made another horrendous error by claiming that and Intel D945GCLF system with an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor consumes 59W idle power using an energy efficient power supply. It turns out that this claim isn't even remotely accurate.
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By George Ou on
7/14/2008 2:11 AM
The last time Tomshardware posted an article on SSD Flash drives versus HDD Hard Drive power consumption, I gave them a well deserved "F". They had botched the analysis badly and drew incorrect hypothesis because they didn't test their theories and it turned out that their theories were wrong. But to be fair, Tomshardware took the criticism and came back with a much better piece of work
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By Justin James on
7/7/2008 3:24 PM
For a long time now, I have been looking for a quality, affordable photo/image editor. This weekend I gave Microsoft Expression Design 2 a try. The upshot? It is missing some really critical features, the UI focuses a bit too much on form and not function, and the price point is poor.
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By George Ou on
7/7/2008 1:25 AM
Lots of people are talking about Tomshardware's latest claim that SSD (Solid State Disk) flash drives are less energy efficient than a conventional laptop hard drive. The problem is that the analysis is fundamentally shoddy.
We can pretty much throw this conclusion out the window because the SanDisk SSD5000 has a PEAK power consumption of 1 watt while the Hitachi 7K200 has an IDLE power consumption of 1.1 watt.
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By George Ou on
7/4/2008 8:36 PM
In an effort to build the cheapest computer I can build that plays Blu-ray DVD movies, I put the NVIDIA 7150 chipset with Intel Allendale dual-core 2.93 GHz (overclocked) test bed to work. I've already been having some problems with this inexpensive embedded NVIDIA chipset but I wanted to put it to the most challenging video load it can handle. Unfortunately, NVIDIA's 7150 integrated chipset failed miserably.
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By Justin James on
7/2/2008 4:12 PM
I (finally) wrapped up a 6 or 7 month long struggle with my video card. See, some time ago, some update or another did something... odd... with my video card (an NVidia 7600 GS, for the record, the best passively cooled, dual DVI output card I could find when I put this PC together). It started doing this "thing" where major portions of the screen would be transparent to the layer beneath. Oddly enough, it only occured when a game was running full screen. Let me tell you, it was quite odd going through Half Life 2 (I know, I am WAY behind the times) being able to see through walls if I get right next to them. In many situations, there would be some odd "snow" in areas too. To make it even more strange, the games would work fine the first time they were run after a reboot, or if I started the game in a window and then told it to run full screen. Needless to say, it really sucked.
(continu
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