Did you miss your chance to celebrate the holidays? That’s okay because with this festive theme you can enjoy the holidays year round on your desktop. Incredible detail in this wallpaper and great coordination of the taskbars and icons. Overall this is the perfect theme to get you in the mood for the holidays.
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I stumbled accross the Shipping Seven blog today… Its a blog from someone on the Windows 7 team who isn’t afraid to make their true feelings about Microsoft and Windows and general heard (all be it annomously )

 Check out this interesting post off the Shipping Seven blog: 

In almost every Windows OS release so far, we’ve changed something major in the OS subsystems, to improve the Windows infrastructure. And that generally screws up application or driver compatibility:
Windows 95
Long file names - Application developers had to fix their applications to support long file names. (A good thing, though: What is in 1NTINPRS.AVI?)
Windows NT
Driver developers had to write drivers for a new driver framework because of the hardware abstraction layer. Actually, most of them just stayed away, and supported Win9x only.

Windows 2000
A major annoyance for driver developers, who could ignore the NT driver models up to this point. Win2k ran on NTFS, and had locked-down permissions - developers couldn’t install their application’s files in \windows\system anymore.
We were telling corporations to set up their users as non-admins on their machines, and for the first time, corporate users in were logging in without admin rights, breaking all sorts of enterprise apps.

Consumers just sailed past, on to:
Windows XP
Installed on NTFS on default - breaking lots of applications that were used to the wide-open, unsecured world of FAT32.

We were telling the dads (or moms) of the world to run as administrator, and set up non-administrator accounts for everybody else in the household. Pretty much nobody did that - they all just logged on as Administrator. A situation that almost every bit of spyware exploited.

Which brings us to the OS everybody loves to hate (that isn’t actually that bad) - the fustercluck known as:
 

Windows Vista
This time round, punch-drunk from all our security issues, the Windows team said: F*** it, let’s just lock it all down:
AUC: All your applications will run as non-administrator, even if you have an administrator account. No excuses. We’ve been telling you that you should do this since 1999.
A new graphics driver infrastructure: We had to protect the system from video driver crashes, as graphics card companies care only about performance, not stability.
Session 0 Isolation: No system service can directly create a UI. Lots of drivers and antivirus apps broke, but we fixed up a major security design flaw in Windows.

Microsoft has just launched Microsoft Student Experience beta.
This site has a lot of features and useful information which is predominantly targeted at students.  
The site contains information from Microsoft internships, getting discounted software ( e.g. obtaining Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for just $600) to a set of How-To’s.

So if you are a student or just interested in the site-Check it out… 

… its a silverlight enabled site-although is still able to be browsed without it

In an earlier post, I said that you should install Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta if you’re getting error 61658 while trying to install the Integration Components in Windows Server 2003.

And you should.

But some people are still seeing it.  If you happen to be one of them, here’s why:

You probably didn’t really install Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta; you probably installed Windows Server 2008 RC1, which contained the Hyper-V CTP.

I won’t go into the reason behind having two similarly named releases so close together because I wasn’t involved in that discussion, so any attempt to explain it would be pure speculation on my part.  Needless to say, the situation we find ourselves in is that there is a Windows Server 2008 that has our beta bits in it, and one that has our old CTP bits.

If you’ve yet to install any build of RC1, you can get a link to download the one that has Hyper-V Beta here.

If you’ve already installed it and you’re curious as to whether or not you’ve got the CTP or the Beta bits of Hyper-V, you can easily tell.  If you had to double-click on any MSU files to get the role to show up in Server Manager, you have the CTP release.

After Blogging Mint:

I don’t know if anyone else out there ever saw these videos, but when I was in High School, my physics class had to watch some lectures given by a man named Paul G. Hewitt.  While describing miscellaneous laws of physics, he would commonly prove the law via some demonstration, then ask his class "HC?" which stood for "How come?"

My "Here’s why" series of posts wasn’t exactly inspired by Professor Hewitt, but I’ve yet to write a post without thinking about those videos in some way, so I consider them to be a sort of tip of the hat.

Now that CES 2008 has officially ended, I wanted to take a moment to do a round-up and wrap up post on CES coverage both here and from others.

Featured Community members did some coverage on their sites of CES this year. Josh Phillips from Windows Connected has Day 1 and Day 2 write-ups of his experience online. The folks from Neowin shot some excellent videos of Microsoft Surface. And Jason Dunn has a post up on his experience riding the Media Center Express CES Bus from San Francisco to Las Vegas as well as CES in general. It was also great meeting up with John Obeto, Michael Reyes from HardwareGeeks, Ash Nallwalla and Brad Wardell from Stardock. And special thanks to Robert McLaws from Windows-Now for spending a great deal of time on the Media Center Express CES Bus setting up a fantastic Windows Media Center experience.

Speaking of the Media Center Express CES Bus, blogger Robert Scoble shot a piece for Donny Duetsch’s show on CNBC on the bus with a group of other bloggers. Here is a video of some of the bloggers on the bus introducing themselves (including me!). Scoble questioned Bug Labs CEO Peter Semmelhack. You can read about Scoble’s experience shooting the segment here. Bug Labs won CNET’s “Best of CES” Award this year for Emerging Technologies. Check out the list of “Best of CES” awards for specific categories. You’ll also take notice that one of the “Fashion PCs” being showcased by Microsoft at CES this year - the Lenovo IdeaPad U110 - won CNET’s “Best of CES” award for Computers and Hardware. The Lenovo IdeaPad U110 is a pretty slick laptop.

For information on the announcements made from Microsoft at CES this year head on over to Microsoft’s CES Virtual Pressroom.

Channel 10 did extensive video coverage this year of CES. You can check out all their CES coverage here.  Channel 10’s Nic Fillingham shot a tour of the Microsoft Product Pavilion. JP Wollersheim, Senior Product Manager for Windows Live, demoed some digital photo features in Windows Live. Awesome stuff.

I’ve uploaded the final photos from CES I shot to Flickr using Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can check out my photo set here. I’ve got some great shots up from the Microsoft Product Pavilion. Here are a few of my favorites:

Lots more pictures here!

I posted about the Fashion PCs being showcased at CES earlier last week asking which of these PCs you would like to hear more about. I don’t know about you but I really like that HP Blackbird ;-)

While the CES excitement is over… we’ve got some pretty exciting things coming up post-CES I think you will enjoy. Stay tuned!

This Vista theme is out of this world. Literally. Amazing wallpaper of the planet Earth with the stars and clouds. The taskbar and icons are really cool too. Please read the instructions on the download page before you download this theme as you will need some free software for it to work.
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