TechAgility

I noticed this very slim 11 inch screen from Sony on Engadget and it really looks the business, but at USD 1,700 I won’t be rushing out just yet?

It just goes to show that first-generation technology releases are still mighty expensive?

The Sony Drive XEL-1 OLED TV: 1,000,000:1 contrast starting December 1st

It’s here friends, Sony’s Drive teaser is none other than their 3-mm thin, 1,000,000:1 OLED TV, just announced official with a December 1st Japanese retail date. The 11-inch SonyDrive XEL-1 set features a 960 x 540 pixel resolution, terrestrial digital tuner, 2x 1W speaker, and HDMI, USB, and Ethernet jacks in a package measuring 287 x 140 x 253-mm and 2-kg (3.3-pounds). How much? Well, ¥200,000 or about $1,740 — That’s about $160 per inch of OLED. Rich indeed, but so it goes for first generation technology.

Gallery: The SonyDrive XEL-1 OLED TV: 1,000,000:1 contrast starting December 1st

written by dcaddick

So it was with interest I noticed the news about VDM (Virtual Display Manager)being released by iShadow and remembered I’d been asked about the same issues a couple of months back.

The cheapest solution is to make sure you are using the Vista TS Client as this supports monitor spanning - however there are a few caveats listed below

The other alternative is SplitView and this can be used on trial for 30 days?

But certainly VDM certainly looks like it will accommodate just about any need or requirment, as demonstrated here:

VIRTUAL DISPLAY MANAGER

MSTSC Spanning multiple Monitors

For example, this configuration is suitable for multi-monitor spanning:

 (-1024,0)         |
    --+--------------+------------------> x  

    |              |              |  

    |              |              |  

    |              |              |  

    |              |              |  

    +--------------+--------------+ (1024,768)  

                   | y  

                   V

You can access the functionality using command-line options, in one of two ways:

If you know the rectangle dimensions of your virtual desktop:

mstsc /w:2048 /h:768 /v:<servername>

or if you want mstsc.exe to figure-out the dimensions:

mstsc /span /v:<servername>

There are a few limitations of multi-monitor spanning:

* The maximum dimensions of the virtual desktop in a TS-Session is hard-coded to 4096×2048, regardless of the color-depth and the available resources on the remote machine.

* The remote session will see your virtual desktop as one giant display.This reduces the complexity of the multi-display implementation in the remote session, while still allowing the windowed mode of the TS-Client to

be functional and viable.

More at source:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2006/11/10/multi-monitor-support-in-the-vista-ts-client.aspx

written by dcaddick

Massimo has taken some time out to share his views on how Viridian is shaping up and has a detailed review below

IT 2.0 Main Blog

Viridian (version 0) is here!

A few days ago Microsoft released Release Candidate 0 for Windows Server 2008. Apparently, in a last minute rush before the final RC0 build was "cooked", they wanted to give the industry a taste of how Windows Server Virtualization (aka Viridian) will look like. I took the opportunity to get the build and give it a try in my lab. This is not going to be a detailed step-by-step guide on how to install Viridian nor a complete analysis of its functionalities (it’s still in pre-beta so it wouldn’t even make much sense). It’s really a "log" of what I have been playing with for about 4 hours and I wanted to share it…

The setup

While setting this up is not rocket science I found useful following a few hints that a good friend of mine (that is by chance) working at MS posted on his blog a few days ago (thanks Giorgio).

First and most important Viridian will not run on any computer out there. In order to enable it you do need to enable two technologies in the server BIOS to make it run:

• Intel-VT or AMD-V depending on the processor you are using
• No Execute (NX) or Execute Disabled (XD) bit again depending on the processor you are using.

In my test I have used an IBM HS21 blade with 2 x dual-core Intel processors and 16GB of memory so this is what my BIOS had to look like (this is a remote kvm session of the server through the Bladecenter Management Module):

You need to make sure your hardware supports this features before boiling the ocean with Viridian.

At that point you would just install Windows Server 2008 RC0 following the typical Microsoft next-next-next-done procedures. One important thing to notice is that the setup program will offer you a choice of installing Windows in a standard manner or in the so called "Core" mode (Core mode is a stripped-down install with limited services installed and no GUI). Do NOT choose this if you want to use Viridian afterwards because Viridian will apparently not work at this pre-beta stage in Core mode).  By the way it saved me some time having worked with Vista for quite a while. The Win2008 GUI is very Vista-like so… if you are not familiar with that it might take you a little more to get around in the GUI.

continued at source…
IT 2.0 Main Blog : Viridian (version 0) is here!

written by dcaddick