He sent it to the Live ID I use for my main email address, which for reasons of complexity is set to US locale and for reasons of me being a bear of little brain I can't remember the password for. I don't normally need to remember it because I have it linked to the Live ID I use all the time, which is my Hotmail address. After a couple of guesses I thought, 'let's see how smart Mesh is' and signed in with the main Live ID instead. Mesh accepted it. I could install the software (tiny) and see Simon's folder - but not his devices, so good separation. I added a folder that I don't have set up with SyncToy to replicate back to the server because the path isn't straightforward and as it has conference presentations it's useful for Simon on the road. But I didn't want to share it back to his Gmail account because I couldn't remember the email. He was in the process of linking his Live ID 's so I invited his main email account. And when he accepted the invitation while he was logged in with his other Live ID (still with me at the back?), it worked - all the linked Live ID 's have access to the Mesh they're supposed to have access to.
Now we have folders we can see and choose to sync from each other's machines. They sync quickly - and with placeholders for any files that haven't synced yet. Files are replicated into the cloud (up to 5GB) but if there's a direct path from my PC to Simon's the connection goes that way for speed and you can sync files over 5GB to another Mesh endpoint as long as it has the disk space.
If I don't want to sync the files to my PC because I don't need to have them, I just need to have access to them - I can see them online, through the Live Desktop - a browser window that shows me files and folders. I can open a file onto my PC or save it onto my PC or upload a file myself. This is the most idiot-proof syncing and sharing system I've ever seen and I speak as a bona fide idiot before my first cup of coffee.
I can think of so many ways to use this - and this is just the demonstration app. What matters is that underlying synchronisation layer. I want Flickr to be a Mesh endpoint so I never explicitly use an uploader again; I just mark a folder for sync and every image with a 5-star rating goes up (or maybe every image goes up but the rated ones go in a set). I want this to sync OneNote notes to my phone (Windows Mobile and Nokia clients are on the way). I'd quite like it as a way of doing posts from my mobile to LiveJournal - it would leave me an archive that could also be synced to the Semagic archive folder for local backup. It will mean that when Simon downloads videos he doesn't have to move them onto the NAS by hand. A universal list of the widgets I like and what basic settings I want them to have for every new widget platform to snarf up instead of me saying 'Weather: London, San Jose, Seattle, Christchurch' by hand every time.
Yep. There may be heartbreak and throwing of china in my future (What do you mean you don't like mapped drives? Mapped drives are very important to me!) but for now, Live Mesh is my new shiny.
Hey - I like it enough not to save all this until I get paid to write about it!
"We are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer."
To get your IMs to count, click the link above or the button below to go to the site, tell them where you live and install WLM. Then choose Tools > Options and after putting your name in for My Display Name add one of these text codes to choose which organisation you want to get a share of the money from the ads you see.
| *red+u | American Red Cross |
| *bgca | Boys & Girls Club |
| *naf | National AIDS Fund |
| *mssoc | National Multiple Sclerosis Society |
| *9mil | ninemillion.org |
| *sierra | Sierra Club |
| *help | StopGlobalWarming.org |
| *komen | Susan G. Komen for the Cure |
| *unicef | The US fund for UNICEF |
<a href="http://im.live.com/?source=WLM80x
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tanais's hand so I can't plug in headphone or microphone connectors or turn the wireless on and off any more, and now it keeps crashing with either hard drive failures or NTFS.SYS STOP errors (where the hard drive driver fails to cope with the hard drive failing). Losing the integrity of the case may be part of the problem; the duct tape isn't enough! Until I can buy the delightful new R400 I'm using an HP as my main laptop so I've been tweaking the Vista installation. Out of the box, Microsoft doesn't let Vista search network drives - but then Windows Desktop Search for XP doesn't do it out of the box either. The add-on for both is here - along with an add-on to search Internet Explorer history files.Microsft's official stance has been that searching remote drives slows things down too much; they have to fix that when Windows Home Server comes out. There's still no option to snooze or restart indexing in Vista the way you can in XP: a little too nanny-knows-best alas.
Windows Vista for mid-size business
Office 2007: software you'll recognise, productivity you won't
Outlook and Exchange: all-in-one communication
In the interests of full disclosure (and given some recent discussions), I'll say I am being paid for the Webcast because i am, after all A Business - but they know they're paying for my time, not my opinion. There are issues with all software and I already have a list of complaints and requests for the next version of Outlook and OneNote, and a few ideas for PowerPoint and I still want the Excel clipboard to work like the clipboard in every other application... but I can also honestly say that the new Office makes me more productive and if you can take advantage of the backend servers, your business can get a lot more out of it than a lone worker like me can. I want Exchange 2007 as soon as we can install it (for one reason I can't yet talk about and for several reasons that I can, but then it's
sbisson who'll get to beat that into shape. I don't think Vista is a panacea - and I think we should have had what it delivers two years ago, and would have had it if more people could tell the difference between an alpha and a Flash presentation. I haven't had time to upgrade my laptop (we've been travelling and my mother isn't well) but a dozen times a day I do things and think 'that would be easier in Vista'. Will I be criticising Microsoft in the Webcast? No. Will I be mentioning areas where there are issues to be aware of? Of course. And I have to say I love the bio line that the editor has given me. "Mary Branscombe has been reviewing hardware and software since computers ran on elastic bands and good luck".
You want more detail? Simon and I have reviewed them quite thoroughly for IT Pro from a business and IT admin perspective but it's also a general overview...
Office 2007
Windows Vista
No disrepect to Microsoft; language processing is hard and in most sentences 'be turned on' would be correct - just not here.
The research by Eric Horvitz's team that is behind the presence handling in Microsoft Communicator (and the whole unified communications thrust from Microsoft) is a lot more compelling than what Microsoft is putting into the next release of products, because it offers finer grain control, integration with applications and more features. It can do that because it only has to work on the internal Microsoft network, not every combiantion of network and phone system out in the real world.
A company to watch in this area might be iotum who is developing a relevance engine with the kind of tools and rules I crave (I love you all, but there are perhaps five people in the world from whom I want a 4am call when I'm in California and few of them are PR people back home on London time, but I don't want to have to remember to turn my phone to silent every night). I'm getting impatient for the services you can add to digital communications.
I wrote about this for the FT recently: VOIP is more than cheap phone calls.
( This is a longer version of the same piece )
But I became more of a fan of structured blogging in February after grabbing a set of micro-formatted events into Outlook - and having to update every single one by hand when they changed. I want microformats to include a Valid Until or Last Updated datum, so they don't shrivel and wither away in my diary.
But what I noticed on MapQuest this morning (checking out Leigh on Sea where my mum will probably move to) was what I think of as people-centered data. While the label that comes up when you hover the mouse is Zoom Level 3 the labels at the size of the zoom control show me that's actually the most detailed view I can get of this location as a place within a country, before I go down into region level. For the most detail at street level the icon is a person, for the least level at country view it's mountains (topographic data here I come). The icons get wider from top to bottom - a handy visual cue if I haven't spotted the plus and minus buttons - but it's the labels of Street, City, Region and Country that let me get information the way people think about it, not the way computers do. Like Today/Tomorrow/This Week/Next Week in Outlook 2007 or tags on a blog, it's data aggregated into a fuzzy structure rather than a strictly normalized data slice.
Use a discreet recorder. When casino security fusses about photography and recordings, a tablet PC or a memory stick recorder that looks like a phone is less likely to attract attention.
Water. You need more than you think.
Locate the restrooms. Due to Water and the coffee you need to stay attentive from 9am to 9pm.
Wear comfortable shoes. The Venetian was too pricey so we're at the Imperial Palace - only two casinos away but add in the size of the casinos and the fact that the conference space is behind the casino floor and it's a half hour walk from the room.
Put your camera, business cards and the other things you want to grab often in a pocket. Put them in the same pocket each time.
If the schedule is available in advance try to prepick sessions but expect them to change. Add the sessions you're interested in to your calendar and synch that to your phone. My Vario has the conference sessions in because I used the iCal links on the MIX site to put them in Outlook. I had to update the times by hand - RSS simple list updates now please! - but I have the descriptions to hand, and I get alarms for sessions.
Go party. I grab people at the end of sessions when I can but I also look for them at the party and in the labs and chat slots. And now - I shall go party
sethops, micheinnz - have you seen it for real?Profile
- marypcb
- Mary Branscombe
- Simon & Mary