http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/cda7d603-fdd6-4a48-b045-89adac6e519e1033.mspx?mfr=true

Pretty low key - first I knew of it was when checking for updates and it came up on the list

Includes SBS 2003 R2. Thurrott gives a good explanation of the changes

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/sbs2003r2.asp

Probably not a compelling upgrade for me. Of more interest is the fact that the full version of XP Professional is no longer offered - only the upgrade version.

http://www.nogeekleftbehind.com/2006/10/09/bittersweet-october-2006-actionpack-update/

http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189401599

This will help people trying to roll out .NET 2.0 across to their customers - .NET 2.0 isn't supported on XP SP1

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,67354eb5-9e30-485a-9498-83a97d2c2bb7.aspx

Mine arrived yesterday - I will install 2003 R2 in the next couple of weeks

http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/nealw/archive/2006/04/05/1105.aspx

https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40009848

Various UK venues

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techroadshow2006/msdn/default.mspx

The beta service is now available

http://www.live.com/

It offers the ability to search through the results without having to click "next" to get the next lot of results. Doing some initial testing, I search for "Noel Watson Consulting" (without quotes).

Windows Live didn't return anything I wanted in the first 10 results - nor did Google. However, yahoo bought back my website as the first result - the winner. Searching for "Noel Watson Consulting" with quotes and Windows Live does a lot better, bringing back only one result - the correct one. Google brings back only one result - the wrong one whereas Yahoo brings back a few results - all relevant. If I had to rank the search engines based on this simple test it would be

1. Yahoo
2. Windows Live
3. Google

I tried this out recently

http://preview.local.live.com/

and drove round some of San Francisco. Unfortunately the images don't extend to the windy part of Lombard Street

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street,_San_Francisco

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.8019,-122.4189&spn=0.001507,0.002494&t=h

(I once cycled down this on a tandem). However, I hope given time they will be able to extend this to include London.

It reminds me of a computer game called The Getaway

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000197Z4Y/qid=1141291395/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_11_3/026-0058056-7028455

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6041804.html?part=rss&tag=6041804&subj=news

I have been satisifed with MS server products since Windows 2000 server and now use 2003 Server on all my machines. The argument that MS products don't scale has long gone. 

• 3rd best non-clustered TPC-C score

http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster&version=5&currencyID=0

• Support for up to 1TB of RAM

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/64bit/ipf/enterprise.mspx

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1925504,00.asp

in response to

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/default.mspx

I'm surprised that the Linux side rose to the MS bait

$50 per annum, $19.95 if you sign up in April. This license covers up to 3 P.C's

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/feb06/02-07OneCarePricingPR.mspx

It's a shame that you have to pay extra for this service rather than get it as part of the O/S, but I guess MS have been burnt so many times in the past (IE, Media Player) for bundling services with the OS, they felt they had to charge

http://www.techspot.com/news/20278-vistas-onecare-not-to-include-antivirus-says-microsoft.html

At present, this is only on offer to US XP users.

Norton offer protection for £45, so I expect MS to undercut this when it becomes available in the UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000B69T1O/qid=1139470510/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/026-0058056-7028455

This only works on some graphics cards, and I discovered it by accident on my Dell laptop

Ctrl+Alt+Arrow key rotates the screen.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/technet/itsshowtime/

Requires passport login

Microsoft announced this today

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-01PreviewSoftwareBasedPR.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/misc/11-01LiveSoftwareFS.mspx

I'm sure I've seen this in development - the following link looks familiar

http://www.live.com/

At the moment all that is on offer is a customizable homepage and a replacement for Hotmail. Seems a bit early to be launching  a beta - guess they are worried about Google and co getting too much publicity.

On its way is OneCare - I talked about this previously

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,8f69e4f8-de2c-4c2a-90d0-bf16932fa013.aspx

I wonder how much of this will be free - I reckon it will be a monthly pricing structure for apps such as OnceCare.

XBox Live arcade looks pretty interesting - I love the retro gaming

http://www.xbox.com/en-us/livearcade/default.htm

It's interesting to see Microsoft now starting to offer some of its services over the web. In the past Office was seen as too monolithic to be offered over the web - maybe Office 12 will be different.

Here

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/r2/default.mspx

Prerequisite is to have SP1 installed. It installs .NET Framework 2.0 so I may hold back on installing in case it affects my VS and SQL 2005 installations.

In terms of pricing, MS are classing this as a full release rather than a service pack, meaning than everyone not on software assurance will need to pay to upgrade - can;t really see many people taking this one up.

I had to remove my USB wireless key from my server the other day to help build a friend’s machine. When I put it back in my machine I noticed that it had assumed another IP Address. When attempting to set the IP back to what it should be so that the router will forward web requests, I was given the conflict of IP addresses message. Initial investigation led me to this KB article.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=269155

I attempted this on my machine (Win 2003) but I couldn’t get any of the hidden items to show – I’m assuming that the KB article doesn’t apply to Windows 2003. The only solution I could think of at the time was to modify the IP address that the router forwards to, and modify the IIS configuration to listen for a different IP address. Another solution would be to remove and add TCP/IP – I cannot do this at present because I don’t have a screen to plug in.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsahome.mspx

As can be seen from ther KB article, version 2.0 supports many more applications than the previous version

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;895660