Archive for category Windows
US Army will adopt Vista and Office 2007 by end of this year
Posted by The Right Guy in Software, Windows, Windows Vista on May 22nd, 2009
Corporate bodies, such as businesses and the government, have traditionally been rather slow when it comes to adopting new software and technologies. This is generally for security purposes, and because they don’t see the point in upgrading from something that works. This frame of mind is not going to change any time soon; Ars Technica is reporting that the US Army is going to finally be fully upgraded to Windows Vista and Office 2007 by the end of 2009, despite Windows 7 quickly approaching.
At the moment, Ars Technica believes that about half of the Army computers are running Office 2007, and 13% are powered by Vista. Marcus D. Good, who is the chief of the Army’s Information Technology Systems Support Division, has stated, “The Army has been testing Vista since its release and has run it through the Army Golden Master program. The Army Golden Master program is responsible for the release of the Army standard baseline configurations for commonly used computing environments within the Army Enterprise Infrastructure, the team responsible for making sure applications that ran on XP will run on Vista.”
It’s unclear how long it will take the Army to make the move from Vista and Office 2007 to Windows 7 and Office 2010 when they are released, but since the changeover will only be fully complete this year, expect it to take a rather long time. It’s not a bad thing, though; the Army is serious business, and they need to be 100% certain that their computers are secure and safe. Previews of Vista for members of the Army are available here and here, to help them get used to it, as well as more efficient.
Windows 7 is early Q4
Posted by The Right Guy in Software, Windows 7 on May 20th, 2009
Or late September
We’ve heard that the DirectX 11 capable, Microsoft-butt-saving Windows 7 operating system should be coming latest in Q4 2009. Some customers that depend on it have told us that they expect it either in September or October time.
Windows 7 brings high hopes, as everyone sees it as the next milestone and much better than Vista, but honestly we still don’t understand why so many people are against Vista as this operating system runs just fine, as long as you have enough memory.
Since RAM and storage memory are dirt cheap these days, we don’t think that people should worry that much. Just like the original Phenom K10 65nm, Vista was branded as broken from the day one, and this is tough to change.
This will be the first operating system in the history that will have lesser resource requirements than the previous version, but this is exactly what users have demanded, and since Microsoft is in the business of making the money, they won’t argue and they will give its customers what they want.
We still don’t know the fix date but out sources believe you can see the official Windows 7 either in late September or early October.
Windows Vista SP2 RTM is now on MSDN
Posted by The Right Guy in Software, Windows, Windows Vista on April 29th, 2009
As well as Windows Server 2008
It looks like Windows Vista Service Pack 2 RTM and Windows Server 2008 RTM just made their ways out of Microsoft’s closed testing environment and into the homes of happy beta testers. According to company officials, channel partners and MSDN subscribers are now able to get their hands on these fresh new releases.
“Today we are announcing the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. SP2 represents the latest step in Microsoft’s commitment to continuous improvement. It includes all updates that have been delivered since SP1, as well as support for new types of hardware and emerging hardware standards.”
Microsoft has mentioned that the key benefits of Vista SP2 include Windows Search 4.0 for improved searching performance, the ability to natively record data to Blu-ray in Windows Explorer, a Bluetooth feature pack to support the 2.1 specification (perhaps 3.0 as well?), more simplified Wi-Fi configuration with Windows Connect Now (WCN), and UTC time zone support in the exFAT file system.
The company has also stated that the SP1 Service Pack Blocker Tool is being removed today, as was announced back in January. Service Pack 1 will now be available in Windows Update, but we highly recommend skipping it and getting a download of Service Pack 2 when it is publicly made available.
It comes as no surprise to us that Windows Vista SP2 RTM version 6.0.6006.18005 is already circulating around torrent portals in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The majority of industry is expecting Microsoft to make the update publicly available sometime this week. While no plans have been confirmed, it is best to stay patient until an announcement has been made.
Another CUDA video editing app launches
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware, Nvidia, Windows on April 10th, 2009
LoiLoScope joins a growing group of applications
Japanese LoiLo Inc has joined the so far small group of companies making video applications that take advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA and GPGPU processing which helps speed up the whole process of rendering video, especially in the case of HD content.
We’d never heard of LoiLo Inc prior to this announcement, but we quickly downloaded the preview version called LoiLoScope Mars which allows you to check out most of the features of what Super LoiLoScope has to offer.
The user interface is very different from what we’ve come to expect from video editing software, but it only takes a couple of minutes to get used to. You simply drop all the files you want to use, alongside any of the fairly basic text or graphics effects on the desktop of the application. It’s easy to zoom in and out here and the CUDA acceleration really seems to help here. You can also add a few effects in real time to your videos at this stage. Once you’ve got all the content sorted out, you simply drag the files over to the time line editor and put everything in the order you want it to come out.
The free version doesn’t support HD output, but it will upload your content directly to YouTube for you. There are also presets for exporting your video to a wide range of devices such iPhone, iPod, phones, PSP, PS3, DVD etc. If you just want to save your work on your computer, then you can chose to do so in AVI, MOV, WMV and MPEG-4, although only MPEG-4 supports CUDA acceleration at the moment.
LoiLo claims that when you’re editing AVCHD content in 1080p the performance boost using CUDA is as much as 10 times compared to just using the CPU for rendering the video. However, Super LoiLoScope lacks many of the more advanced features most people would want for their video editing application these days and it’s really more of a “fun” application that something that could be used for serious video editing. However, at US$69 (€52/£47) it’s not terribly expensive and if you don’t have very high requirements with regards to what you can do with your home videos, but rather want a simple, easy to use application, then it might be for you.
You can find more details here, as well as download the free LoiLoScope Mars version here