Xbox One

Update #2 05.22.13

So What about Games?

You buy a game, then you use the activation code to activate it (online), once activated, you can play all you like. This of course includes all LIVE profiles on your console. If you want to bring it to a buddies house, only your LIVE profile can play the game for free, a friend would have to activate the game himself if he wants to use his profile. There will also be a way to trade games online, how and for what type of currency I am not sure. source article kotaku.com

Also check out this walkthrough on the new Kinect Sensor, pretty awesome stuff…

Update #1 05.21.13

click for larger image

Gizmodo has a big article on all the new features of the Xbox One. One things I read, which is slightly alarming for all you gamers out there, Xbox 360 games will not work on the new Xbox One.

The new architecture is what is responsible for the fast switching between apps and content. But it also means it’s not backward compatible with older Xbox games. Microsoft did not address this at the show, but it’s been speculated that it will use game streaming, like the PS4, to play older games on the new hardware. We’ll update you once we get a chance to shake down some Microsoft employees.

Kinect is “complete redesigned” to respond to you and your voice, and is made to be more conversational. It picks up motion at 13 billionths of a second, the time it takes light photons to bounce off of you and make it back for the sensors. source article

I am wondering if Microsoft will make available games you prove you own (maybe inserting the disc) available for you to download a copy that is modified to at least work on the new Xbox, lets hope they have something like that in the works.

Also note that the Xbox will always be on, and listening, pair that with an HD camera (lets hope its off most of the time!), can anyone say “privacy issues” lol? *Update : You will not require an always on internet connection, but obviously, for multi-player games, most xbox features etc. you will require connectivity.*

The Xbox One will be available later this year, I gather we will know more in a couple months at the next E3. As always stay tuned for more updates as they come in.

Are you going to pre-order it? I know I will…

Original Post

Well that was unexpected, Microsoft just showed off some crazy cool stuff… instant flipping from games to movies to TV and back, all instantly… the Kinect sensor can apparently read your heartbeat when you are exercising! 2GB of data per second are used by the Kinect sensor.

Time to look at the controller. “We’re taking the world’s best controller and making it even better.”

Google I/O 2013 is happening now!

If you weren’t aware Google I/O is in full swing.

Updates to Google Play, cross platform leaderboards, multi-player, developer enhancements, are just a few things.

OK, boys and girls. This is it. We’re live from the Google I/O developer conference this week in San Francisco, for all the developer/services/apps/hardware/whatever Google can throw at us.

Kicking things off today is the week’s only keynote, and it’s a 3-hour whopper. We’re all charged up and ready to go. The keynote starts at 9 a.m. PDT — that’s noon on the east coast and 5 p.m. in the UK.

So join us for the live stream, our photos and commentary, and basically the best Android coverage on the planet. source AndroidCentral.com

Looks like there is a huge update to Google Music (streaming audio! ; they call it Radio without rules, sounds awesome), also Google Play on the web will look just like your phone’s Google Play…

Go here to follow the live blog!

BBM jumps to iOS and Android!

Update 03/21/13

Confirmed features list on release, but still no release date…

In the first version of multi-platform BBM, iOS and Android users are expected to be able to experience the following BBM features:

• The immediacy of BBM chats
• Multi-person chats
• Voice note sharing
• BlackBerry Groups, where BBM users are able to set up groups of up to 30 people and share calendar, photos, files and more

Some BBM Quick facts you may not know.

• More than 60 million monthly active users
• More than 51 million daily active users who are connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day.
• BBM users send and receive more than 10 billion messages each day, nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps
• Almost half of BBM messages are read within 20 seconds of being received; indicating how truly engaged BBM customers are

They said pending Google Play and Apple Store acceptance we will be able to download BBM onto our devices… I can’t see Google or Apple blocking BBM from their app stores, but we have seen worse…

Original Post

This has been long overdue, but BBM will finally be available to iOS and Android users this summer, not sure of the actual release date but it should  be in the next couple months.

Initial released will only support chats and group chats, with added features on each release after that. BBM Voice and Video chat is said to be introduced later this year.

It has been a while since I have been on BBM and I cannot wait to get back to it!

It’s clear BlackBerry is finally waking up. They are no longer the big dog in the mobile war. If they are to survive, the company needs to forge new relationships and learn to work well with the two reigning platforms. This move to put BBM on Android and iOS is a big step forward. BlackBerry might actually have a chance. via TechCrunch.com

Stay tuned for more information as it’s released! What are your thoughts? Is this the right move for Blackberry? I think so.

Seagate joins the SSD Race

I was just browsing an article where Seagate is finally releasing SSD disks. Among the reasonable specifications for 120/240/480GB selections, they mention drives with dual-port 12G SAS Connectors! These guys are twice as fast as previous generation drives and will be available in capacities up to 800GB, in both 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch form factors, which will be ready for the enterprise.

Seagate 600 SSD: Faster Performance with 6Gb/s SATA

The ultimate laptop upgrade, the Seagate 600 SSD delivers faster boot up speeds, shorter application load times, and improved system responsiveness for the ultimate performance. Laptop users can boot up nearly four times faster and load applications more than two times faster than with a standard hard drive, greatly reducing the amount of wait time to access content.

Here are the official specifications from the 600 series of drives.

• 120GB: 500+GB/s read, 300+GB/s write, up to 80,000 IOPS read, up to 60,000 IOPS write
• 240GB: 500+GB/s read, 400+GB/s write, up to 80,000 IOPS read, up to 70,000 IOPS write
• 480GB: 500+GB/s read, 400+GB/s write, up to 80,000 IOPS read, up to 70,000 IOPS write

Also mentioned in the article is the Seagate x8 Accelerator

Seagate X8 Accelerator— Application Performance Turbocharged

The Seagate X8 Accelerator, powered by Virident, delivers memory-class performance and storage-class capacity with enterprise reliability and data integrity in a single, low profile PCIe card. Providing industry-leading performance, with up to 1.1 million IOPS, the X8 Accelerator boosts server performance with ultra-fast speed that is up to 2X faster than the closest competitor and closer to DRAM performance than storage.

No pricing for any of these drives was mentioned. Read more about the Seagate 600/1200 SSD drives here.

Android Apps on your PC and Mac

Are you looking to run Android applications on your PC? If you don’t know how, then you haven’t heard of BlueStacks.

BlueStacks, which makes software that lets users run Android apps on their desktops, laptops and Windows tablets,  has reached the 10 million user mark in just over a year. Possibly even  more impressive is that 4.2 million of those users started using the software in just Q1 of this year. CEO of BlueStacks Rosen Sharma also notes that active usage has increased exponentially, which in many ways is a more important metric to determining success of a product. BlueStacks is now being used in over 100 countries, due in part to the fact that it is now pre-installed on many manufacturer’s devices. source Android Central

Now don’t get too excited, it isn’t the full Android experience ported to PC. From the time I spent with the application, there is no home screen, syncing didn’t work the way I had expected it to, no “direct” access to Google Play, and I was unable to login to Facebook, I gather that is because BlueStacks isn’t supported with the Facebook API as of this time. If they fix these issues, and make it more akin to what we are used to seeing, including full syncing capabilities, a lot more people may be inclined to use it. I know I would.

All in all, it’s a great step forward, and the creators say that the biggest apps to be downloaded are the games, so maybe it’s not so much for the user experience, but for Android gaming, which has exploded onto the scene in the last while.

So how do you like your BlackBerry Q10?

Over in the UK the Blackberry Q10 outsold the Z10 by a large amount. The Q10 is supposed to be the phone to save Blackberry, although the Z10 has exceeded everyone’s expectations, people really love the physical keyboard, and pair that with a pretty hefty battery (2300 mAh) and you have yourself a pretty sweet phone.

The department store began selling the Q10 last Friday, but buyers were also able to pre-order the device from the store’s Web site since April 24.

Selfridges’ initial stock of 2,000 Q10 units sold out in a matter of two hours from the time store opened its doors last Friday. Additional stock was being delivered “Continually on the hour, every hour” to keep up with demand, according to a statement from Selfridges.

Read more at the source links below.

• Hands on review: BlackBerry Q10
  Canadian Tire to buy thousands of new BlackBerry
• Do huge Q10 sales save BlackBerry longer term?

You can also order the phone online from various retailers via Blackberry’s website.

VMware Mobile Knowledge Android/iOS Application

I posted earlier about a vSphere 5.1 Hardening guide available in HTML or PDF, I read that they recently made a mobile version. Curiosity peaked, and I went looking for it. While looking for it, the first thing to pop up was the VMware Mobile Knowledge app. Only problem with this is that you cannot download it to iPhone or Android Phones, I guess it has something to do with formatting… I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for me as I have a 1080p screen on my phone… better than most tablets out there! But I do hear that it seems to be formatted specifically for the 10″ Android screens… I wonder if it can be side-loaded? Anyways, onto the details.

AT&T Samsung Galaxy S4 is Bootloader Locked

Guys, when will you get it in your head that only the people that WANT to mess around with their phone will install a proper recovery platform like TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project 2.5, or twrp2 for short, is a custom recovery built with ease of use and customization in mind.) People who don’t know what I am talking about (90% of all phone users) really don’t care. But 10% is a lot of people, I am one of those 10%. I have an HTC One, and I already unlocked the bootloader and installed a custom ROM onto it, called CleanRom 1.5. What CleanRom does it remove the bloatware that companies like AT&T put onto their phones. So when my phone’s OS crashed and I cannot use my phone, I can use TWRP to restore my OS to a point in time when it worked properly, that easy, if its a hardware issue, as long as it boots and works as designed, they still replace the hardware, easy as pie… So as I mentioned, the 10% that know enough to unlock the bootloader and load their own OS, should know enough to take the proper precautions to protect themselves…

egzthunder1 over at XDA Developers states,

I can draw two conclusions:

1. You have some of the worst contract reviewers and negotiators on the planet when it comes to dealing with US carriers.
2. You are indeed turning a page in history and have started going down a path where developers and hobbyists are not really welcome anymore.

The path you are taking right now is likely #2, as you obviously can spend a pretty penny on half decent lawyers (based on recent wins against Cupertino’s finest). In fact, it seems to me that you are turning into what you claimed to despise the most. You have absolutely, positively, nothing at all to gain from locking the bootloader (and neither does AT&T for that matter), and in fact, you are simply losing a good stream of bug reviewers and people who can discover pretty serious flaws in your code.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Android is an open and flexible OS, stop locking people out of their right to modify and tweak as they please…

Frank Denneman leaves VMware for PernixData

Well this is some interesting news, Fran Denneman, one of the best know VMware employees is leaving VMware for PernixData.

Eric Sloof, “PermixData is a start-up founded by another ex-VMware employee Satyam Vaghani. Satyam, who’s one of the co-founders and CTO of PernixData, has spoken at TechfieldDay earlier this week, where he presented their new storage technology. A recorded video can be found here. I’ve conducted an interview with Frank this weekend about his jump to PernixData.” source NTPro.nl

Frank was quoted in an interview with Eric Sloof (another very well know VMware Expert,

When I attended a technical preview of the Flash Virtualization Platform at Pernixdata I got excited. I think just as excited as when I saw my first vMotion. Not only am I thrilled about the current benefits the platform offers, but also the strategic value the platform provides. It decouples the performance element from the capacity element of the storage architecture, allowing them to be separately managed. By turning the storage stack into a modular model it essentially changes the way virtualization infrastructures will be designed.  And think about the potential of such a platform inside the hypervisor layer. I think addressing latency of storage I/O to accelerate the application is only a fraction of the possibilities of FVP. As you notice I really get excited when discussing the solution, and this by itself made me realize that I wanted to become a part of this success story.

If you want to keep up with Frank, you can do so with the information below.

Via Twitter @FrankDenneman, or his blog site is: FrankDenneman.nl

You can also read about his journey away from VMware and into PernixData in this article – Embarking on a new adventure – Joining PernixData as Tech Evangelist

vSphere ESXi 5.1 Update 1 and vCenter 5.1 Update 1 Released

Well I knew all this was coming down the pipe a couple weeks ago, unfortunately I was under NDA. But here it is officially released!

“vSphere 5.1 Update 1 is now available. For those of you running 5.1, there are a lot of critical fixes and enhancements, so I’d urge you to review the release notes and consider scheduling a slot to upgrade your infrastructure to this new release. There are updates for both vCenter and ESXi in this release.”

Storage Enhancements and fixes specifically, the author urges everyone to update to ESXi 5.1 U1

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/04/new-storage-enhancements-in-vsphere-5-1u1.html

If you are not convinced make sure you go over the release notes, as there are a lot of resolved issues.

vSphere 5.1 Update 1 Release Notes.

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esxi-51u1-release-notes.html

Resolved issues in this release in the following subject areas:

• CIM      and API Issues
• Guest      Operating System Issues
• Miscellaneous      Issues
• Networking      Issues
• Security      Issues
• Server      Configuration Issues
• Storage      Issues
• Supported      Hardware Issues
• Upgrade      and Installation Issues
• vCenter      Server and vSphere Client Issues
• Virtual      Machine Management Issues
• vMotion      and Storage vMotion Issues
• VMware      Tools Issues

Mind you 5.1 in itself is a pretty solid build… better to do the upgrades sooner than later.