Category: Uncategorized

I enjoy listening to Sir Richard and find him to be refreshing and insightful.

Which is why I was interested to read his thought today Branson’s quote today at the World Economic Forum in Davos on the potential global impact of the Avian influenza A (H5N1), should it become a pandemic flu.

“Statistically, there is about a 6 percent chance that in any one year of the next 10 years this becomes a person-to-person problem, and we just have to hope it is not this year,” Branson said.

Tags: richard branson pandemic

When you need community assistance for a Microsoft product or technology, visit the Microsoft Community Web Site where you will find links to informative webcasts, community sites, technical chats and blogs. Some of the interesting technical chats coming up over the next month that I follow include…

And speaking of feedback (thank you, Toby), I received some good feedback that I had taken a consumer electronic tone over the holidays. Point taken. To clarify… I posted several entries over the holidays to the issue that most people emailed me about, the one that was apparently top of mind when it came to their satisfaction with Microsoft. In this case, satisfaction was impacted with the inability to find the Xbox 360 at retail in time for Christmas/ holiday gift giving. And add to that much of my free time December was spent working and thinking about our consumer efforts.

I will return to a state of balance and harmony. ; )

… and certainly the most mobile.

If you haven’t seen everything, read this article on how the new Nissan Urge can be used as a steering wheel and pedal controller for the in-trunk Xbox 360 (when in the park position). (Also see the press release from the end of December.)

My favorite quote from the article:

“The project was a joint effort with Microsoft, so the Xbox 360 beneath the boattail-shape trunk, one of a half-million consoles shipped since the game system went on sale Nov. 22, is different from the others: no one stood in line to buy it.”

As I’ve seen in Tokyo, in-car TV and DVD players are popular (especially in rush hour parking lots): I vividly recall a cab driver in the middle of a traffic jam putting his car into park and watching the news. Now gamers can drive when they’re not driving. A special edition of Project Gotham Racing is outfitted in the Urge concept car; one can only wonder if the Urge will be added to the car rosters in PGR and Forza Motor Sport.

I wonder how force feedback is incorporated into the car? ; )

Tags: microsoft, nissan, xbox 360

One item of note I saw in the coverage from Macworld last week was the Micromat Techtool Protégé. (I used TechTool on my own Macs.) The Protégé provides a UFD of sorts off of the FireWire port to help customers address technical problems and recovery issues.

Why am I talking about a Mac product here? I’m reminded that this same scenario has been possible for some time already with our own Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (aka Windows PE and WinPE). WinPE is a powerful tool used in deployment, testing, diagnostics and system recovery processes, for use primarily by PC OEMs, ISVs and IT Pros. It’s a minimal Windows system (based on Windows XP Pro and Server 2003) that can be used by IT Pros to customize systems via a customized WinPE CD or UFD for deployments in an organization; with Windows Vista, WinPE should help make custom enterprise deployments of the OS easier and faster.

For more on WinPE, see this overview of WinPE and this article on WinPE for Windows Vista.

Tags: microsoft enterprise WinSE UFD