This week Andy and I spent several days at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas. We discovered many new things while we were there. Bill gates gave his farewell speech as he goes off into the sunset later this year. The hotels gouged its customers so badly that CES is threatening to move to another city. There was over one million square feet of floor space at the show which made it almost impossible to see it all. That’s equivalent to over 3300 football fields stuck end to end. The monorail...

Bob_McMillen

This week is the beginning of the end for old fashioned rabbit ears. The government is giving away coupons for $40 off digital converters for TVs that are using analog signals.
They will then take the spectrum that this type of dinosaur has used for the past sixty years and sell it with proceeds going to the FCC. The FCC will then keep that money and use it to control our lives and what we can see and hear. How much money am I talking about? Anywhere from $10-15 billion dollars.
Part...

Bob_McMillen

Convergence is the new buzzword as computers are headed more and more into living rooms just as Bill Gates predicted in the late 90's.

He may have been off by a decade but it's a fact that the home office is becoming less relevant than the home theater. The advent of the large flat panel television at an affordable price has driven this new reality. It wouldn't have been possible ten years ago with the PC's weak processors and slow speeds along with the rounded TV screens to do what's...

Bob_McMillen

Yesterday one of my technicians and I installed active directory on a server for a dentist. The server wasn't new per se, but the previous company who serviced the customer couldn't figure out how to configure AD so they just flat out didn't.
It didn't take long to configure the server but then we came across a new problem we hadn't seen before. When we tried to join the computers to the domain we were denied. The error was pretty generic so we didn't have a lot to work with.
We decided...

Bob_McMillen

Well its Christmas Eve and even though everyone called me a Grinch for having them show up for half a day, we got a lot done.
I signed the lease for the new office, had a meeting about the moving plan and got some billable time in. Merry Christmas to me.
We also moved the rest of our customers email to the fiber connection. Our FIOS connection is 30 Mb which is roughly the speed of 20 T1's all for the cost of less than one T1.

Starting in two weeks we will have a new...

Bob_McMillen