I’m heading to NY for about a week Thursday night.

I’ll probably end up doing repairs on my parents’ computers. Again. I guess my SLA includes an annual maintenance clause.

Is there a Fry’s or a Central Computing like store in New York? I suspect I’ll need hard drive mounting screws…

Ray Ozzie: V3

As in the past, it’s not my intent to be pitching our products here. We’ve got plenty of mechanisms – old school and new – that work well for that sort of thing. But to the extent that I’m excited about something, or I think there might be a different angle that you might be interested in, I’ll chime in.

Mostly, though, it’s my intent to use this as a channel through which to reply and converse with you in a manner that scales. Not on all topics; it’s clear that the nature of my role at this large, public company dictates that I should and will stay silent on certain matters. At times there will be controversies I just can’t or won’t engage in. Many years ago at Groove we developed an early blogging policy. Things may have evolved quite a bit since then, but this policy continues to give reasonable guidance that I’ll continue to apply to my own comments here.

Ray is blogging again. And apparently, he doesn’t like the Yankees.

Microsoft and CableLabs Announce Agreement to Enable High-Definition Digital Cable Programming on Windows-Based PCs: Future versions of Media Center PCs to receive digital cable programming without the need for a cable set-top box.

Microsoft Corp. and Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs?) today announced they have reached an agreement that will allow Microsoft and PC manufacturers to bring to market digital-cable-ready Windows? Media Center-based PCs in the holiday 2006 time frame.
These Media Center PCs, capable of supporting a CableCARD™ module, will allow consumers to enjoy one-way cable programming, including premium high-definition cable content, on their personal computer and throughout the home on compliant network-connected devices, such as Xbox 360™, while protecting cable operators’ investments in high-value content in a digital environment. Microsoft is working closely with CableLabs to document final approval of Windows Media? Digital Rights Management (DRM) as a content protection technology for OpenCable™ products that receive one-way cable content under the terms of this agreement.

Holy cow. This is big big news. Finally! The ability to decode cable signals in something other than a underpowered set-top box!

My team and I have just shipped a new version of MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search. By colleague Brandon Paddock has done such a good write up that I’m going to copy it outright!

New version of Windows Desktop Search!

Well, sort of

Tonight we’ve officially launched the Enterprise editions of Windows Desktop Search and the MSN Search Toolbar. Unlike the current consumer release, there are 2 seperate installs (one for WDS, one for MSN Toolbar). Unfortunately, the consumer version won’t be updated right away. But we’re working hard to deliver a new version for consumers that will upgrade the current “MSN Search Toolbar with WDS” package. That way everyone can enjoy the latest and greatest we have to offer

So what’s new in the Enterprise release of WDS?

1) First and foremost, this new version has been enabled for management via Group Policy and deployment via SMS.
2) A lot of work was done to make sure that WDS meets the needs of IT administrators at even the largest of companies.
3) WDS now features light-weight integration with Intranet search services (like SharePoint, or a Google appliance).
4) This version of WDS can replace the “Search Companion” functionality on Windows XP, and provides UI for advanced search queries.
5) Lots of bug fixes and improvements all around.

What’s new in the Enterprise release of the MSN Search Toolbar?

1) The Toolbar is now group-policy enabled just like WDS.
2) It also features light-weight Intranet search integration.
3) An enhanced Outlook bar provides optional integration of search results into the Outlook 2003 window if WDS is installed.
4) Numerous enhancements to tabbed browsing and other functionality.

Both the WDS and MSN Toolbar teams have worked very hard to bring out this release.

Hard work indeed! It’s been a wild ride since I joined back in May! Wheeeeee!

Jim Kunstler : True Blue

Now Hruska has been reincarnated in Senator Charles (“Chuck”) Grassley of Iowa, who said the following a few days ago:

“You know what? What makes our economy grow is energy. And Americans are used to going to the gas tank (sic), and when they put that hose in their, uh, tank, and when I do it, I wanna get gas out of it. And when I turn the light switch on, I want the lights to go on, and I don’t want somebody to tell me I gotta change my way of living to satisfy them. Because this is America, and this is something we’ve worked our way into, and the American people are entitled to it, and if we’re going improve (sic) our standard of living, you have to consume more energy.”

That certainly doesn’t sound like a very solutions-oriented way at looking at our global energy use issue. If anything, it sounds like a kid saying “gimme gimme gimme”. The part of this quote that gets me the most is this: Because this is America, and this is something we’ve worked our way into, and the American people are entitled to it

It sounds like there is recognition that we have a problem… but then the problem is simply ignored or wished away. Fortunately, this helps explain why this doesn’t make sense to me:

But the psychology of previous investment is a curious thing. It compounds itself insidiously, and now we not only suffer from our misinvestments in an infrastructure for daily life that has no future, but we also suffer from the political investment in continuing to pretend that everything is okay.

Ah, that would explain it indeed.

But then again this Senator has been in office for over 24 years. I guess this must make sense to someone.

Update 1: This book comes to mind – Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.

Amazon.com
Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society’s response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist’s diatribe. He begins by setting the book’s main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity.
Because he’s addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it’s exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. –Jennifer Buckendorff

Are we choosing to fail or succeed?

FolderShare – FolderShare Accounts

I paid for FolderShare’s premium service and now you are only offering the free service. Will you refund my money?
Yes. Paid FolderShare customers will be contacted and advised of the changes and next steps with regards to the refund.

How much money will I get back if I am a paying customer?
Paying customers will be refunded their pro-rated subscription fee the week of Nov 7th. Customer can expect the refund to show up on their credit card statements in approximately 60 days.

It looks like FolderShare is now free. Give it a try!

Hey PC Vendors (you know, Dell, Soyo, ASUS, Apple, HP, etc):

As you may (or may not) know, VOIP is absolutely taking off. Products like Skype and, my preferred, Gizmo Project are exploding in popularity. Other products from Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Google are jumping into the fray. Cell phone buyers are asking if phones come with WiFi so that they can use VOIP.

Cool! More reasons to use a computer, and more reasons to buy hardware!

So here’s my idea that will help differentiate your product (for a little bit anyway): make it easy to use VOIP on your hardware. How? Either add a RJ-11 port so that landline phones can be connected to it, or add a headphone jack that has a separate path from the regular speakers.

Typically if you plug a headset into the PC (and headsets are practically essential for VOIP), regular music and etc is routed to the headset as well. A skanky hack that I use is to have a USB audio adapter and tell my VOIP apps to use the USB audio channel – this doesn’t seem to work well on all my machines. Why not have a separate audio channel (with drivers) so that the software can dedicate that special jack to VOIP? And while you’re at it, please put the microphone jack in front.

Why not go one step further and add a RJ-11 phone plug so that people can connect their existing landline phones to your computer. Bundle some nifty existing software so that people can dial from their phones, and out through the computer. See? Adding more value to the PC!

On top of it all, you could bundle software with your computer so that your customers can call your customer support with the click of a mouse. If that’s what you want.

Just a thought.

Bungie.net : Top Story

First things first: Thank you for supporting Bungie, Halo and Halo 2. You guys rock, and we love you. It’s the anniversary of Halo 2, the game that launched on November 9th, 2004 and forever changed the way we curse.

A year after Halo 2 arrived in stores, and almost four years since the original Halo, it seems only logical that we should make them prettier right? Although that prettiness has a relatively high entry point – the arrival of a new generation of hardware in the shape of the Xbox 360.

A while back, Microsoft announced that the 360 would have some level of backward compatibility. A handy feature for folks with big Xbox collections moving into the future. We worked closely with that team to ensure that Halo and Halo 2 both performed according to plan. That meant a lot of work for our test team.

To clarify, the “new” version of Halo or Halo 2 is simply the disk you have already. Pop it into your 360 and it’ll load up just like before. You will have to log into Xbox Live to enable Halo 2′s online functions, but both games will work immediately.

But here’s another bonus – the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn’t look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they’re running on a PC at those resolutions.

Holy cow!