Windows Home Server Preview

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows Home Server Preview

This looks like the next wave of home networking. Our family of 3 now has 6 computers running on the network, and no clear backup plan for each computer. We will be an early adopter of this technology once it become available.

Windows Home Server (WHS) is not about streaming digital media around the home, though of course it does include Windows Media Connect technology and can be used in this fashion. No, WHS is about storage first, and remote access second. WHS's storage features are innovative and will likely blow people away: The product moves the notion of backup from the PC level to the family level, and lets you backup all of the machines in your home seamlessly. Best of all, you can add storage however you'd like, and WHS will simply aggregate all of that space into a single, drive-letter-less storage pool.

WHS's remote access features will allow users to access any of their home PCs from anywhere online, duplicating functionality that people today associate with products like GoToMyPC. Microsoft will even throw in a free domain name, making this access easier than ever. Note that remote access requires Windows XP Pro or higher, or Windows Vista Home Premium or higher.

Finally, in a nod to enthusiasts, WHS will be available in both pre-made server appliances from companies like HP, and as a separate software product that you can install to any PC or server. WHS is based on Windows Server 2003 R2, and not Longhorn Server as rumored. It features a super-simple tabbed-based interface that beginners and advanced users will both enjoy, and will ship in late 2007. HP will show off a cool and compact WHS design, as will original device manufacturers like Inventec and Quanta.

"Let Are Kids Walk"

Image of protester seeking to allow Texas students who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam to be allowed to act like they graduated and walk across the stage.

Is the future a six stroke engine?

INVENTION AWARDS Six Strokes of Genius - Popular Science

This sounds like a cool idea. Harness the heat loss of an engine by creating steam to power an extra power cycle. Could increase efficiency in gas powered engines as much as 40%.

A typical engine wastes three quarters of its energy as heat. Crower's prototype, the single-cylinder diesel eight-horsepower Steam-o-Lene engine, uses that heat to make steam and recapture some of the lost energy. It runs like a conventional four-stroke combustion engine through each of the typical up-and-down movements of the piston (intake, compression, power or combustion, exhaust). But just as the engine finishes its fourth stroke, water squirts into the cylinder, hitting surfaces as hot as 1,500°F. The water immediately evaporates into steam, generating a 1,600-fold expansion in volume and driving the piston down to create an additional power stroke. The upward sixth stroke exhausts the steam to a condenser, where it is recycled into injection water.

You Don't Have to Be Einstein to Get Rich: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

You Don't Have to Be Einstein to Get Rich

Ohio State economics professor Jay Zagorsky suggests different factors: "Staying married, not getting divorced, thinking about savings." Wow

The New Religion

Greenpeace Builds Replica of Noah's Ark

Climate Change is the new religion of the collectivists.

Who Are the Merchants of Fear?

Who Are the Merchants of Fear?:

More from Cockburn. If he's not careful he'll be branded as a conservative, like they did Imus:

"By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the 'challenge' of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988 it gave us the IPCC.

The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not long before some new UN moot, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis. The cry is taken up by the IPCC and headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's WMDs.

When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating factors are 'discovered,' such as the sulfate aerosols popular in the 1990s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or inconvenient data are waterboarded into submission, as happened with ice-core samples that failed to confirm the modelers' need for record temperatures today. As Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, 'Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable.'"

Is Global Warming a Sin?

Is Global Warming a Sin?

On our recent trip to the Dry Tortugas the family had an epiphany. When the sun comes up, the temperature rises. When it sets, the temperature drops. Based on this intriguing data, we have come to the conclusion that it's possible the sun may have an effect on climate change.

Uh, make that "Climate Change" which is the world's latest mass religion and clearly has nothing to do with the sun.

The link is to an Alexander Cockburn article in "The Nation." This heretical piece concludes that the sun has an effect on "Climate Change." How ridiculous. It's been proven beyond any doubt that global warming is 100% caused by mankind. What's wrong with "The Nation"? They have always been so reliably leftist.

We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO₂ in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO₂ changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth's increasingly hot molten core.

Clearly, Cockburn has a death wish to even think of publishing something so ludicrous.

Happy International Communist Labor Day

In honor of May Day, the international (communist) celebration of labor, let's take a moment to wish that Fidel Castro rots in hell.
Here's hoping that Cuba finds it freedom soon. There are infinitely better ways to travel in the free world.

Taking Apart Tenet

George Tenet's disgraceful new book. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

The money quote:

To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

It makes me believe the U.S. would best be served by abolishing the CIA (and the State Department for that matter) and replacing it with something more... competent.