benway.net » Microsoft

Dungeons & Dragons on Microsoft Surface

jayb — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:50:21 +0000

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

Wow, this is Uber geeky.

the D&D takes me back to middle school days and the Microsoft surface is just sweet.

Thanks to majornelson for the link

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Clear Virtualization Licensing from Microsoft

jayb — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:41:05 +0000

Here’s an update to my previous post about Microsoft licensing on virtual infrastructure.

Mark Wilson has posted an outline of the current Microsoft licensing stance when it comes to virtualization. Thankfully it just reaffirms what I’ve thought to be the case all along, but it’s great to get it confirmed like this.

Check out markwilson.it and particularly the post called A clear virtualization licensing and support statement from Microsoft

Basically it is just a better presentation of my own analysis of the licensing terms back in December 2006.

Clear Virtualization Licensing from Microsoft (h0bbel)
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:51:21 GMT

[tags]microsoft, vmware, licensing, virtual, esx[/tags]

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Search for Free! Search Server 2008 Express Announced

jayb — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:45:53 +0000

Looks like this could be a free option instead of the Google appliance. I’m still trying to tell if it requires SQL 2005.

Today Microsoft released a new Search offering – Search Server 2008 Express. This is on top of the recently announced Search Server 2008, and of course Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

"Express? Does this mean, like in so many other products with that moniker, that this is free?"

Yep. Free.

"So.. it’s scaled down, I bet. Probably some limit on the number of items you can index, right?"

Wrong. From what I’ve read, it’s pretty much the same product as the Enterprise version Search Server 2008 – only without the enterprise-class high availability and load balancing options that you get in MOSS 2007 and Search Server 2008. Check out this comparison page for more details on the three main search offerings from Microsoft.

And here’s the press release that came out today, also.

Search for Free! Search Server 2008 Express Announced
KevinRemde
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:25:24 GMT

[tags]microsoft, search, freeware[/tags]

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Reinstall Windows and outfit your system with all freeware programs

jayb — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:37:58 +0000

After just coming back to XP (link) This is a great list of new free software to try.

Description: I recently clean installed Windows XP on my laptop, and this meant that I had to re-install all the essential software that I use. It also presented an opportunity to write a posting about how you can outfit your computer with all the essential (and non-essential) software you need using strictly 100% freeware and/or [...]

Reinstall Windows and outfit your system with all freeware programs
Samer
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:48:54 GMT

[tags]free, freeware, XP, software[/tags]

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Can your backup solution do this?

jayb — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:44:02 +0000

We’ve been looking for a new backup solution. I think we’ll have to take a look at this.

No?

Well then you need to head on over to the DPM Team blog or Jason Buffington’s blog and start learning about Data Protection Manager 2007 and the other magic he has up his sleeve. In fact, Jason just posted a nice screencast at http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/archive/2007/08/20/how-dpm-filter-technology-really-works.aspx on the VSS writers that are used to backup the workloads we expect to be important to you. Check it out!!!

Can your backup solution do this?
Keith Combs
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:03:24 GMT

[tags]windows, backup, DPM[/tags]

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Hacking SAM database on offline Windows

jayb — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 03:25:26 +0000

I found too much good information on my 600 feeds in feed demon to not pass some of them onto you…Here’s a nice tool to reset the local admin account if you forget it.

Today I had presentation for my colleagues – they had to prepare few vmware machines for me to test some functionalities…

However there was old local administrator password on these boxes – the one that no one was able to remember…

So I tried to use one of my "oldies goldies" tools called Offline NT Password & Registry Editor. This utility (or should I say Linux distro? ) is using known security issues of windows with local SAM file (hope so it is fixed once and for all in Windows Vista).

You can download it here: http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/

You download CD image (you can burn it or mount it to virtual CD drive), boot from it, hit enter few times (default configuration) and voila – you local administrator password is empty – and you were able to do it in few minutes….

I know that I shouldnt be happy about such security bug (specially if even SysKey is not able to protect you), however it helped me too many times… And hope so it will help you too

Hacking SAM database on offline Windows
martin
Wed, 23 May 2007 21:14:00 GMT

[tags]hacking, windows, admin, password[/tags]

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Recommended Audit Policy

jayb — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 01:35:13 +0000

I?m frequently asked what the best audit policy is Windows. As you know there are 9 different audit policies you can enable for Success and/or Failure. While I recommend some of those policies be enabled no matter what …

Recommended Audit Policy
Thu, 17 May 2007 13:22:00 GMT

[tags]windows, security[/tags]

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Daily Cup of Tech » Server Failure Lesson #10: Useful Active Directory Tools

jayb — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:44:58 +0000

DCoT has a great list of AD tools. This list is a keeper, add it to your bookmarks!

Daily Cup of Tech ? Server Failure Lesson #10: Useful Active Directory Tools

[tags]active directory, windows[/tags]

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Active Directory Explorer v1.0

jayb — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:32:39 +0000

On the Sysinternals page over at Microsoft, there’s a new tool called Active Directory Explorer. You could describe it as ADSIEDIT on steroids. An interesting feature is the ability to save snapshots of Active Directory and compare them. A similar snapshot feature will also be part of Windows Server 2008. A nice overview of the Windows Server 2008 snapshot feature can be found here.
Get Active Directory Explorer v1.0 .

Active Directory Explorer v1.0
rastix
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:15:05 GMT

[tags]microsoft[/tags]

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Microsoft details Windows licensing for 3rd party virtualization platforms

jayb — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:50:27 +0000

After reading this article is sounds likes like using the datacenter version of windows is the cheapest method using ESX. As I read it you can license one copy of datacenter and run as many VM’s as you want on that machine, including on ESX…..anyone else read this the same way?

Finally Microsoft takes a clear and official position about application of Windows licensing on virtual machines hosted on 3rd party virtualization platforms (including hardware virtualization solutions like VMware ESX Server or VMware Server and OS virtualization solutions like SWsoft Virtuozzo).
In a brand new whitepaper Microsoft covers all these scenarios, including special features like VMware VMotion and client-side licensing terms, detailing:

Microsoft details Windows licensing for 3rd party virtualization platforms
Alessandro Perilli
Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:15:00 GMT

[tags]vmware, microsoft[/tags]

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