Last summer, I attended a social media conference and met Mila Araujo after attending one of her talks. Before parting ways with her, she gave me a really neat looking business card/contact card. Not even really a business card per se, more like a personal trading card. 

You can actually see Mila’s card (as a sample) here

I go to a lot of conferences/events lately, and I don’t want to hand out my actual business card, as I’m not there on company business. So something like this seemed perfect. It was quirky, fun, casual, yet also contained my contact information on one side, a little bit about me on the other side, and a hosted link to my social media network profiles. People can scan the QR Code on the card, or got to the short, easy to type URL And get links to my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts.

“But Aaron, why would you pay someone to host that?” Well, the card’s design is nice, I wouldn’t have to mess with web hosting, their customer service looked great, and it came recommended by someone I had met and trusted. And I can’t remember exactly how much I paid, but it was less than $30 from what I recall. The cards arrived and I was quite happy with them, and gave quite a few out.

And then, on March 8th 2013 I received an email from MeetMeme. They were discontinuing their cards for individuals, rebranding as “FE Social”. Well, uh, ok I guess. Businesses discontinue products all the time, so I really wasn’t mad about that part. Heck, my cards appeared to have been hand-packed, and even came in little wax packs like baseball cards with individual seals on them. We’re probably an unprofitable lot as individuals, and I can understand their focus on going for business branded cards.

But, here’s where FE Social (a division of First Edge Solutions) made cardinal sin #1 of web-hosted services. There was absolutely zero information about this effect on current cardholders other than “yeah, you can’t order these anymore.”

I replied this email asking “So, will the URLS on my card continue to work?” and receive a reply quite quickly stating to the tune of “Yes, sorry, we forgot to include that info!”

Forgot to include information if your product differentiator. will continue to keep working? That seems kind of important.

Now, to their credit, and this is saying more then some web companies (LOOKING AT YOU YAHOO), the URL printed on my card continues to work and point to my social network profiles. Now this is an important fact, because the cool thing about these cards was if you changed/added/modified social network presence, you could change your links on the fly from that page and people would always have a “permanent” link to your social media info.

But, I noticed a problem when I checked my URL about two weeks back. My Twitter link no longer worked, and that was because I had changed Twitter usernames.

At this point, I attempted to login to the old MeetMeme site and… it didn’t work. Huh, weird. So I attempted to do a password reset. And I would get the email from them, reset the password and then… I still couldn’t login.

I opened a support ticket on this, which is now over 10 days old and I’ve not been contacted about. Meh. Not good. Now, MeetMeme to their credit was always very responsive to customer support issues. So it perplexed me that I had opened a support ticket over 10 days ago and no one had gotten back to me. Reaching out on the great Twitterverse, I sent a message to both the @meetmeme and @fe_social accounts with my Ticket # and the password problem. To which the ultimate reply was “Are you looking to buy some cards?”

Cardinal Sin #2 - Treating a legacy customer support problem as an upsell opportunity to your new shiny product

*FACEPALM*

On a whim, I decided to try the reset PW process again, and this time I was able to login. Except …

“As of March 29, 2013, we are no longer offering personal trading cards to the general public.

We do offer full-branded options for businesses with packages starting at $500.00 as Meet-Meme starts the transition to FE Social, A First Edge Solutions product. If you have already purchased a customized theme, you will still be able to access and order that through your private Meet-Meme link, or login below.

Thanks for your interest in the Meet-Meme trading cards!”

This is the only message I now see when logging in. Well, crap. Isn’t that great. The old interface that used to work to change your account info isn’t there anymore. Just a nice “LOL, that’ll be $500 please!” message in it’s place.

Sadly, I’m not surprised. And at the end of the day I still have some cool looking cards with my phone # / email address, and a photo on them. And a link that (knock on wood) still works with (mostly) functional links to  my social networking profiles

So, in a span of less than 10 months, FE Social has managed to end of life support for my paper business/contact card. In the Internet “entrepreneur” /startup world, they sometimes call these rapid shifts in business antics/tactics “pivoting”. I like to instead refer to it as “spastic, anti-customer behavior”.

So remember, “cloud computing” and “hosted services” work great, until they’re suddenly not there one day. In this perfect storm and textbook example of how not to decommission/sunset your Internet service, FE Social has managed to end of life the web-enabled support on a paper product. And that is bit of a hilarious first for me.

I’m in the fortunate position of having grown up geeky, and saw the dying breathes of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) before the Internet made text-based, local communication passe. Back before Prodigy, AOL, and the Web I cut my young technological teeth on the arcane magic of modem communication, AT commands, and obscure telephony magic.

During this wasted youth of mine, I assisted, or just participated, in using friends bulletin board systems. Untold hours were spent honing my technological and social skills through text-based communication. Through the miracle of proper backups, I am in possession of a nearly complete copy of the one BBS on I spent the most time on. Today, a copy of the file library from another BBS I spent time on came into my possession

While looking through the 439 megs of various door games, text files, and assorted digital ephemera, I noticed a curious thing of the files contained within the ZIP files.

For those unfamiliar with the arcane nature of BBS’, they contained file libraries that all users of the system could upload files into and then other users could download the files. As part of file library functionality of a BBS, some BBS packages allowed the injection of BBS Advertisement files into ZIP Files.

These BBS Advertisement files often included information such as the BBS name, phone number, file library size the BBS offers (in megs, or later gigs), phone line counts (if the system had more than one line), modem speed, as well as other ad-copy about what the BBS offered.

Surprisingly, I found four different versions of the BBS Advertisement for “The Dark Souls” BBS system within these zip files. Through these BBS Advertisements, we can in turn trace the history and timeline of a BBS.

In this first advertisement, we can see the Sysop and CoSysop’s names, in heavily stylized ANSI script. Also included is the name of the BBS (The Dark Souls BBS), a graphical ANSI logo, the phone number (215.674.9243), Modem Speed (14.4k V.42), and file library size (150 mEgS!). We also see this specific system was offering “Lots of ADULT and DOOM files!” 

The next version of the advertisement shows a few subtle changes, which will continue from here-out. The tag-line about adult and Doom files has been resumed, presumably in the name of discreetness. We also see that the previously advertised 150 meg file library has now been increased to 400+ megs. 

The third version of the advertisement results in even less information, presumably as the BBS goes “underground”. Any mention of a file library at all has been removed, and the phone number is now marked as “XXX.PRI.VATE”. Far from just an artistic choice, these changes show the transition of a previously public BBS system converting itself into a private club of sorts.

Finally, in the last located revision of the advertisement we find any suggestion of a phone number has been removed. The disappearance of a phone number from the advertisement signifies the BBS final move to “underground” status, the hallmark of an “elite” BBS. 

As many BBS systems grew in popularity, they followed a similar trajectory. Initial enthusiasm for openness led to a more private-club like atmosphere, as the volume of possibly-illegal activities increased. As the Sysop’s themselves gained more experience in running their system, so too did the exclusivity of the system increase.

Jason Scott has done a brilliant job preserving known BBS’ through his BBS List section on Textfiles.com. Reconstructing the history of these BBS’ through BBS advertisements however, may prove a much more difficult task due to the rarity of locating multiple revisions of BBS Advertisements.

BBS advertisements such as the examples shown offer a new window into the view of digital history. Some of the questions we might ask from such findings are did an increase from 150 megs to 400 megs of storage indicate an improvement in the Sysops financial condition?

Did a BBS that go from 1 or 2 lines to 8 suddenly experience a surge in popularity, or did the Sysop in question find a profitable business model for the system? Were unlisted, previously listed phone numbers an indication of law enforcement activity against a system, or merely protectionism on a Sysop’s behalf?

Next time you dig through your old file archives, be sure to save the BBS ads. They might tell us some interesting stories. 

Sandy stopped by yesterday, drank too much Atlantic, and threw up all over town. During this bender of a hurricane, I learned one thing observing my neighborhood - infrastructure works.

That’s right people, infrastructure. That terribly boring, sexy topic that includes things like storm drains, road grading, sewage systems, power transformers and all sorts of other things you use every day that you don’t think about. I moved to Haddon Township in March of of 2010 in the midst of my neighborhood looking like a giant sandbox.

The Townships infrastructure project grinded on for what seemed like years, as we all put up with muddy, rocky roads, two inches of permanent dust on our cars and construction workers in too small tank tops. Their were the irate letters to the editor in the newspapers. The workers are lazy! What is taking so long! Why isn’t this done yet?

When all was said and done, they finished the job eventually. And at the end of that months long process we had a nice new smooth road, and uh… well, what else did we have?

Infrastructure isn’t something you probably think about that much. You drive on roads, pass over bridges, turn on your faucet, and flush your toilet on a regular basis. That stuff just works. Except, when it doesn’t. Luckily, all that stuff did work yesterday when the contents of thousands of swimming pools got dumped in our front yards, back yards, on our roofs, and in our gutters. 

It worked amazingly well in my neighborhood. At the beginning of the storm’s approach I walked to the end of my street, checked out the storm drains recently installed and happily saw thousands of gallons of water rushing through them like it should. Highfive to the public works crew for that one.

In this election season we’re hearing lots of big government versus small government arguments and FEMA Funding. There’s also the “government doesn’t create jobs” versus “government bailouts stimulate the economy” arguments. Put all that aside for one second and just consider the basics of the situation.

The water you drink, the toilet you flush, the road you drive on all have “stuff” behind the scenes that happens. To you and I, these might just be black boxes. Water out faucet, water down drain. But behind the scenes tucked away beneath the street and in the strange looking buildings in your town lies the equipment that keeps your town, city, or borough running. A lot of it is really old, having been neglected for decades as it happily did it’s job out of sight, out of mind. Eventually, it breaks. And keeping the lights on, water flowing, and bridges standing takes money and time.

So next time you find yourself temporarily inconvenienced by a public works project or road construction, or have to vote on a public infrastructure spending proposal - take a deep breathe and picture the long term. The next time a hurricane blows through your town do really want to be crossing your fingers hoping the 80 year old drainage system in your town holds up? 

I’m glad Haddon Township spent the money improving the infrastructure when I moved in, even if living in a giant sandbox for a few months wasn’t any fun. No one ended up with their toilet contents in their tea-room, and that’s what happens when Infrastructure works. 

Despite being leaked late last week, Boxee today officially took the wraps off their next product - the “Boxee TV”

Featuring the standard suite of Netflix/Pandora/Youtube Vudu that you can find on typically any “smart TV”, Blu-Ray Player, and Set-Top Box, the Boxee TV also comes with a really interesting feature - a “Cloud DVR”

Unlike a traditional DVR like TiVo or your Comcast Cable box, the Boxee TV will store your TV recordings “in the cloud.” Plus, it will work with Over-The-Air (OTA) HD TV Transmissions, and Clear QAM (Unencrypted) Cable signals. You can record The Office on NBC and then watch it on your Boxee TV, your tablet, or cellphone. This will cost you $15 a month when it launches.

Being the curious guy I am the first thought that is - How the heck are they going to store all those TV recordings? Or better yet, are they really storing YOUR TV recordings?

Aereo made news last year by skirting around the legality of streaming online television shows by building thousands of micro-antennas to offer streaming television in New York City. The question on my mind is, if Aereo needed to go through such huge hurdles to be legal - what are the crafty folks at Boxee up to on their back-end?

Interestingly, Boxee appears to only launching Boxee TV in select markets to begin with. Now, why would that be? There’s a few theories. Boxee could have a massive array of some kind of Aereo-like antennas, or huge banks of DVRs sitting in a data somewhere to serve 1 to 1 copies of TV shows. Your “recording” of your TV show may actually just be a “Golden Ticket” per se that unlocks previously recorded content on Boxee’s backend (“You are now assigned DVR #4847 of #4958597”)

Or, maybe they really are storing each and every upload. For those of you unfamiliar with large-scale, enterprise disk storage, a key advantage you gain when building really big collections of disks is data deduplication. The simplest way to explain data deduplication is that if you have three copies of NBC’s The Office stored on your file server (which may be one server, a collection of servers, a “Storage Area Network” among other physical architectures), your server will only store one actual copy of the file. The three copies on your file system are basically pointers under the covers which point to the real copy of the file.

So is Boxee going to be using deduplication to store TV shows on their servers? If you have 500 people who have the same recording of The Office, it’s surely inefficient to keep 500 copies of the exact same show. Except, that might be exactly what they need to do to be legal in the eyes of the TV industry. The Boxee TV device would need a large hard drive on board to cache content before it is uploaded to Boxee’s “TV Cloud”, or alternatively, the Boxee TV would need to be streaming TV shows in real time to “cloud storage” to save them.

There may be a middle ground, however. By doing some form of signature to check if a customers Boxee TV has actually successfully recorded a TV show, such as sampling video frames every 15 seconds and comparing to a master, you could unlock TV shows for a customer without the customer needing to actually upload the TV show. 

Any of these methods, large banks of file servers, networked DVRs, frame comparison, or realtime streaming/uploading is plausible. However, they’re both horribly inefficient methods of dealing with the issue of storing the same TV Show. Uploading TV Shows in real time would kill the bandwidth of the average home user, and caching TV shows on an internal hard drive kind of negates the point of “Cloud Storage” of your TV shows if the device still needs a big hard drive.

Additionally, Boxee is advertising the fact that you can watch your TV shows from any device including smartphones and tablets. This, in turn, requires transcoding, or converting, the original recordings either in real-time on demand, or after they’re “recorded” to make copies suitable and optimized for the screen sizes and bandwidth available on say smartphones and 3G networks. If you’re keeping score, that would be now at least 3 copies of a TV Show stored for each user, in multiple formats (“TV” Quality, “Smartphone” quality, “Tablet” quality), and so on.

If we’re to believe that Boxee TV is truly uploading your TV shows to “the cloud”, this is a completely ridiculous, audacious, and impressive hack to workaround the legal framework that may have  slowed down Aereo. The limited launch in select markets could be due to needing to build out multiple regionally based datacenters, as well as storage arrays and networks to store say Philadelphia’s recording of The Office. After all, the commercials broadcast out to everyone in a metropolitan area over the air are going to be the same, but wouldn’t be the same to a viewer in Atlanta. I think this is a telling point that points to some form of deduplication/awesome hack/legal workaround occuring.

I will be keeping a keen eye on Boxee, and I am really interested if they will be revealing the technology that powers this whole beast at some point. Boxee TV is an idea whose time has come, but I fear is yet another technological innovation that will be attacked on all fronts by lawyers of the dying old-media world.

11/9 Update:

I’ve tried a Boxee TV. It sucks. Hard. Also in case anyone read this far down, they do indeed seem to be uploading your actual recording.

The 2600 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference has been known to me for years. Back in my formative teenage years, I used to listen to Emmanuel Goldstein’s Off The Hook Radio show religiously. In recent years, I admit I listen seldom  if at all. But it was good fortune that earlier this year I decided to check out what my old friends at 2600 were up to and I discovered there was a HOPE conference happening again - this year too!

Without hesitation, I hopped online and pre-ordered my ticket at a steep discount. And I waited…. and waited months … until finally July 13th came around this last week, and it was HOPE Time! For those not in the know, 2600 is a magazine and organization that is a pillar of the “Hacker Culture.” The short description of the HOPE conference is that for 3 days, geeks, tinkerers, nerds, privacy advocates, the counterculture, the anarcho-capitalists, the do-gooders, the curious, and the paranoid converge on Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City for 3 days straight of talks on a myriad of topics, workshops, marketplaces, parties, concerts, experiments, segway rides, lock picking contests, and all sorts of other glorious activities.

It is with great happiness that I was able to attend HOPE this year, and I will be back in two years. I won’t try to describe the “conference experience” here. I think there’s far better people doing that right now. Morgan Spurlock has Comic-Con: The Movie, Jason Scott is currently producing a DEFCON Documentary. Either one of these will surely explain the thrill of going to a conference of topics you are interested in far better then I can.

I entered the conference eager, with a pocket full of circled talks I wanted to hear on a variety of topics. But, funny enough, the best experiences I had were not the nitty gritty technical talks, but the happy accidents, unexpected experiences, and sense of purpose I came away with after 3 days.

Case in point, I ended up wandering into a panel discussion on “The Autism Spectrum and You”. I didn’t plan on attending this, the other room I wanted to be in was full because I was late getting there. Unsure what to expect, I sat down and proceeded to listen to Mary Robison, Alex Plank, Jack Robison, Kirsten Lindsmith. As I listened, I started to identify with the speakers. Kirsten explained her experience in a relationship when trying to express how she felt, that her mind was blank, like a “blue screen of death.” She was unable to find the words to express her feelings. I’ve been there.

I have a nephew on the Autism Spectrum, and went to school with many other kids also with  varying levels of Autism. So this topic was not entirely new to me, but it was somewhat of a shock to me to realize Hey - I’ve got some of these traits too, and that’s OK.

Another fascinating, unplanned experience I had was attending a workshop put on by The Hacktory on The Gender Gap in Technology. Georgia, Stephanie, and Sarah from The Hacktory led this discussion bringing up some very interesting facts for me on the huge gender gap inherent in the IT/Technology world.

It’s late as I write this, and I’m tired, so I won’t try to summarize this workshop, because they already did an awesome job summarizing the first time they did it:

http://www.thehacktory.org/?p=2471

I like to think of myself as a sensitive guy, with an open mind who tries not be a total asshole. But, after listening to the women in the room share their experiences I realized that even though I feel I go out of the way to make people comfortable, I still had some inherent gender bias due to my past experiences. It would be preposterous for me to claim this workshop has “transformed” me and made me think in a completely gender-neutral way day to day, but I can assure you it has definitely got me thinking very hard about my views on women in the IT workplace.

Johnny Diggz and Willow Brugh of Geeks Without Bounds covered lots of ground of technology applied to humanitarian and relief situations in their talk “Solving More Than #firstworldproblems” Technology as a positive influence on the planet has been an abstract concept for me, but this talk helped me see the direct impact of how even minor advancements can help change lives for the better. You don’t need to write super-awesome code, or big fancy systems. Sometimes even just small, simple, well understood examples, tailored for the people you are trying to help and the culture (IMPORTANT!) are all that is needed.

“Hacking the Spaces” panel turned into a lively discussion of the differences between American and European hackerspaces, the exclusionist structures of some spaces (See how the gender gap is tying in here now? ….) and the role of politics in hackerspaces. Is a hackerspace a political movement? The European contingent said yes, Ben from HacDC pointed out that 501c3 non-profit status in the US places some limits on the ability of hacker spaces to directly influence political campaigns/issues.

“DARPA Funding for Hackers, Hackerspaces, and Education: A Good Thing?” took these ideas even further. DARPA, the DoD’s military technology wing, will be making $10 million available for the creation of hackerspaces in high schools across the country, as well as funding other hackerspaces. Is this a good thing? Should you take the government money if you run a hackerspace, or are you making a deal with the devil? Opinions here seemed a bit less strong then the Hacking the Spaces talk, with the basic vibe I got off the panel is that no one is really sure yet what impact this will have on the maker/hacker community. There are those with their political beliefs/minds made up now, but even then, no one seemed certain if this was bad, good, or in-between.

If Geeks Without Bounds made me realize the positive impact of technology in humanitarian situations, then the talk “Hacktivism, Tools, and the Arab Spring” by Telecomix REALLY made me realize how important technology can be in the real world. “During the Arab Spring of 2011, agents of Telecomix, members of Anonymous, and a multitude of independent hackers took direct action to aid dissidents by helping to circumvent censorship, disseminating photographs and video footage of violence against peaceful protesters, redeploying dialup modem pools, and using DNS hijacking to warn people of online surveillance” These guys aren’t screwing around - they’re helping real people, involved in real conflicts, being shot at with real guns, get out their message with technology and overcome censorship. Shit doesn’t get much more real then this.

A subset of the Telecomix crew from HacDC have also been working on “Project Byzantium”, which I can basically describe as emergency-wireless-network-in-a-box. If an oppressive government swoops in, or the central internet infrastructure is disrupted - roll your own. I’ve already been inspired enough by this project to get directly involved with software testing and documentation.

Direct involvement is really what I came away with realizing is important from HOPE. These projects don’t start themselves. Code doesn’t write itself, documentation doesn’t write itself, systems don’t get built, ideas don’t get made on their own. The “hacker community”, and your community as a whole, isn’t some large inaccessible pie in the sky idea. I used to think the folks working on these inspiring projects were some special, demigod class of folk. They’re not. They’re just like you and me, they’re just doing cool things.

So I’m getting involved more, and worrying less that I might fail or look stupid in the process while trying things. I may not know how to program, but I know how to communicate with people, teach, and take abstract ideas and reduce them to simpler terms for the less technical. A common theme I spotted across all these projects/talks is that even the simpler tasks such as writing documentation for a project hold immense value. You can have the coolest piece of software in the world, but if it’s really hard to use and you don’t have directions, it’s useless. You can’t tell your users to RTFM, when there is no M.

My plan is to go WTFM for projects needing documentation. To answer questions from “noobs”, to take on the less glamorous jobs that are just as important. Everyone has some kind of skills they can contribute to these projects. Let’s go get some cool stuff done to help each other out.

GR8 Technology Conference Recap

June 19, 2012

Before I begin I’d like to give big thumbs up to Dave Johnson (GR8 Technology Conferences) who organized this event. I’ve been bored out of my skull at tech events before - this one kept things interesting with enough tracks for everyone to find something they want to know.

I’ll be recapping the tracks I attended, which is not a comprehensive review of the conference as a whole. It’s impossible to sit in all the tracks at once, so I focused on what I know as a SysAdmin - Windows Server and Client management.

What is Unified Communications? by Marty Parker / State of Communications & Lync Overview by Teo De Las Heras Gomez

A great way to start because I have to admit - I really had absolutely no idea what Microsoft Lync was going into this conference. I’m putting these two talks together in my recap as they were both at the beginning and paired nicely together. To me, Lync and “Unified communications” was some kind of instant-messaging-voicemail-collection-Facebook-clone kind of “thingy” in my mind, I really had no idea what it did or how one would use it.

Well, now I know.

As Marty described, Unified Communications is not simply “mashing services together.” This is exactly what I have to admit I thought it was before going into this. Unified Communications should be thought of as a collection of unique tailored use cases, using different technologies per use case to build communication into business processes.

In other words, it’s not one size fits all. You can’t just plop a Lync server down into your company, unleash the client on your end users, and say “figure it out.” As Teo would describe - that might work, in certain circumstances. Let’s not forget that you, Mr. IT Strategy guy, may not think of every possible way your employees or teams can use Lync to communicate.

But, tailoring Lync to work with your use cases will benefit all. Maybe your team doesn’t need real-time status, but just branch-to-branch communication voice calls, or maybe your sales guys just need to know where the heck everyone is. No organization will be the same, though I imagine there’s probably some models that a lot of folks would fall into.

Teo’s description on “The State of Communication Now” was a vivid example of how what we have now is such a horrible mash up of technologies, it’s a wonder we manage to talk to each other at all. Desk phone, cell phone, personal cell phone, voicemail (spread across all previously said phones), random chat clients.

When I need someone, I just want to reach them. I don’t care where they are. I want one single way I reach them, every time, and as a user of this technology I want people to be able to reach me wherever I am, on whatever device.

Sure, you can hack some of this functionality together with call forwarding on your companies PBX system, but it’s really not the same.

Statistic time - it is estimated that 43% of employees will be telecommuting in some fashion by 2016. If you’re a company that doesn’t allow telecommuting, I’d be worrying about now because you’re going to start losing your key talents as they find jobs elsewhere with more flexibility.

I was impressed with the desktop Lync client shown - Simple, easy to use, a global search that looks in your corporate and personal address books. Status (what I’m doing), and Presence (Where am I). Stateful, contextual instant messaging conversations allow you to pick right off where you were on Monday from Friday and remember what the heck you were talking about. 

I might be drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid, but I kind of want this where I work. Right now I’ve got to deal with my desk phone, iPhone, email, desk phone voicemail, iPhone voicemail, and I sometimes use the PBX forwarding to send my calls to home via an Obitalk adapter, which connects via Google voice/Chat, which makes it even more fun and complicated.

If I want to do a conference call/share a presentation I need to go to our WebEx site (never could get that Outlook plugin to work just right). For chat networks if I want to reach folks in one office they’re mostly on Skype, and the other office mostly on Yahoo. I don’t know everyone’s screen names, so I need to get someone to send me them, or email the person directly to ask for it. Some people refuse to even use IM.

Some folks are hard to pin down at their desks, some are always there. Some people like phone calls, some people never answer their phones. 

WHEW! After listening to these guys talk, I can see the benefits of Unified Communication technologies!

Desktop Management in the Cloud with Windows InTune by Drew Slothower

Alright,so a disclaimer is in order here. I work for a leading Mobile Device Management company, so I’m a bit biased on this topic and cast a critical eye towards these products because I know them quite well.

With that said, Microsoft has some serious catching up to do in this arena. But, InTune does bring some interesting things to the table that I think makes it a good fit for some organizations. AV/Malware, Updates, Software Distribution, Remote Assistance, Monitoring/Alerting, inventory, Licensing, security policies, all in a cloud-based management model. Sounds good, Right?

How about Smartphones you ask? Just added in Wave 3 (releasing now). Well, kind of added. Smartphone/MDM (which Microsoft oddly refers to as “Modern” device management) support in Wave 3 is limited to what you can do through Microsoft ActiveSync protocol.

Ouch. So in other words, Microsoft isn’t offering up much here for MDM that you couldn’t have done say … 5 years ago with Exchange Server 2007 ActiveSync policies. ActiveSync offers basic MDM functionality at best. Though Microsoft will say “sure it works with your iPads and Android phones”, what they’re really saying here is: Yes, if your device talks ActiveSync we can sort of, kind of, manage it.

But surely, InTune must work with Windows Phone 7.5 nicely you say, right?

From the Windows Team Blog (http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/business/archive/2012/06/11/windows-intune-with-mobile-device-management-is-now-available.aspx)

·         Automatically discover mobile devices that access corporate data through Microsoft Exchange Server. Mobile devices are automatically linked to users during the discovery process.

·         Define mobile device access rules to govern which mobile devices can access Exchange Server.

·         Let users access and install internal line-of-business software applications that you make available for their mobile devices.

·         Deploy policies to users to help secure the corporate data that is stored on their mobile devices.

·         Wipe data from lost or stolen mobile devices, or let users perform this task.

·         Remove mobile devices from Windows InTune and Exchange Server, or let users perform this task.

I’m sorry guys, but this just doesn’t cut it. Need I remind you that Market Share as of Feb-12 for Windows Phone was 3.9%? Trust me, your customers and users aren’t all marching along happily with their Nokia Lumia’s. We’ve got iPhones, Androids and tablets, and we want to manage everything. For real.

Despite the beautiful looking Surface hardware recently announced, I’d place a small wager that the InTune guys are not in in tune with the Windows 8 team, and it may take a bit to get the full set of management features for Windows 8 Tablets in InTune.

But, fear not. I am told that InTune is really being pushed as “MDM Light”, and I got the impression that later down the road you’ll get the “full package” with InTune’s integration with System Center Configuration Manager (2012).

You do have SCCM, right? No? Better get on that, because it seems InTune is meant as the glue that brings the cloud together with your SCCM on premise solution.

Eventually, I think Microsoft will get there with this product, and integrate it nicely in a vertical fashion across their stack. But, the rest of you may want to look elsewhere for your cloud-based mobile device management needs at this time, especially if you don’t have SCCM setup or aren’t in love with it.

Managing your Applications and User State using Group Policy by Jeremy Moskowitz

Jeremy was a great speaker, fun to listen to, and I’ll definitely be checking out his site at GPAnswers.com. This session may of well have been titled “GPO kind of sucks some times, and PolicyPak can fix that.”

Specifically, Jeremy went into detail on the four “proper” locations in which your application must store data in the registry to be “Policy Aware” and fully function with Group Policy. Well, that must be pretty easy, you must think. All software must do that!

Adobe Acrobat? Fail. Sun Java? Fail. Mozilla Firefox? Fail. WinZip? Fail.

Yikes, how is the world getting this completely wrong? Also, why in the world is there an option in GPO to remove a setting when it no longer applies, but not revert it to default?! Open source developers take note as well: most of you are doing it wrong.

My GPO experience has been mostly limited to using it to manage servers, and I haven’t handled a large desktop management situation with it, but I know everything it can do. I also know that when the time comes, one of my first calls is going to be to these guys to get a license for PolicyPak. They’ve wrapped a number of these problematic third party applications around their product, allowing you to manage things that you should be able to manage in GPO, but normally can’t.

And additionally, you can manage some custom applications, including in-house developed software, by linking into and importing the DCOM model/interfaces from your apps directly into PolicyPak, enabling you to “GPO-enable” legacy apps that were never designed to be managed with GPO.

Pretty. Damn. Cool.

Windows Server 2012 Overview by Scott Stumpf

Ok, so I admit it. I’m an MCSA on Windows Server 2003. I’ve been neglecting upgrading my cert to 2008 for a long time now. Server 2008 just doesn’t really excite me.

Windows Server 2012 excites me.

And, it’s not just that Windows Server has been “metrofied” (hint: it has been). Microsoft seems to finally have taken a giant leap here to build a server solution that is going to scale well for the small business with 2 servers, the medium business with 20 servers, the large enterprise with 400, and the ability for all of these guys to leverage virtualized, or cloud infrastructures in one interface. Yes, please!

I’m also excited about the ability to use “commodity hardware” to build your own Hyper-V clusters. Finally, I can geek out and build a big giant Hyper-V lab at home, and get reasonably good performance with SMB 2.2 and Offloading Data Exchange, without being disappointed that I can’t afford $20k in SAN hardware. Hyper-V finally looks like it’s ready to take on VMware. 

PowerShell is also featured in a huge way now in Windows Server 2012. An Integrated Shell Environment provides lots of useful contextual help, and will assist you in easing your way into generating PowerShell commands. The number of CmdLets in Server 2012 numbers around 2400 now, up from around 200 in Server 2008!

The interface for PowerShell ISE reminded me quite a bit of SciTE which was bundled with AutoIT that I used to make use of when automating software installations. I am looking forward to becoming more adept with PowerShell. But fear not, your old standby favorite MMC management consoles are still there if you don’t feel like tracking things down in the metrofied new Server Manager, or figuring out the PowerShell command for it.

I am definitely grabbing the Server 2012 preview ASAP off TechNet to learn it.

Best Practices - Windows 7 Virtualization by Tim Flite

The last time I had any exposure to Virtual Desktop Initiatives was a few years back when VMware was first introducing the whole idea to us. In the meantime, I’ve used Citrix as an end-user, briefly read about AppV, and read up on thin clients. VDI paired with Windows 7 (and 8) looks like a promising idea, but also seems to be intersecting in a weird way with the Bring your own Device (BYOD) movement.

When I think BYOD, I typically think of Smartphones and Tablets, as that’s where the movement has gotten started. But, soon it seems like we’re going to see BYOD starting to mean Bring Your Own Anything and just use it. Ultrabooks, Android Tablets, iPad, Smartphones, Windows Surface. VDI can, and does work with any of these technologies.

You can now, with the right backend infrastructure, seamlessly roam from Laptop, to Tablet, back to Laptop, all while your desktop infrastructure actually runs server-side somewhere in your companies data center.

Or maybe not in your companies data center. Can you imagine VDI consisting of Microsoft Cloud/Azure services running the desktops, managed by Windows InTune, delivered to devices that your company doesn’t even own? We’re not that far off from this, and I think it’s going to happen soon.

But, we’ve still got the MDM problem here. In some fashion, that device the user brings to your BYOD party is still going to need to managed and cleared for takeoff. Whether that is through Mobile NAC technologies, thin clients with stripped down operating systems of limited attack surface, will vary based on the devices chosen, and each company.

Microsoft’s future plans for Windows on the desktop, phone, tablets, and servers is starting to look very “cloud”-y.

I’ve read numerous books about the power of social media, Twitter specifically, enabling the average citizen to become a reporter and creator. Among these books, “Wisdom of the Crowds”. Saturday evening, I found myself unexpectedly drawn in by The Idiocy of the Crowd. The WXTU 92.5 28th Anniversary Crowd, specifically.

WXTU is a local country radio station in the Philadelphia area. Now personally, I can leave or take country music, mostly leave it - but I don’t hate it. Apparently for this anniversary concert they hold, they give away tickets for free. What does a nice summer day + free tickets + a bunch of bored suburban college and high-school gets you? Lots of underage drinking and riots, that’s what.

One of my geeky hobbies is listening to the police, fire, and other surrounding randomness on my scanner, a Uniden Bearcat BC246T. My grandfather used to do it when I was a kid, and when he passed away I got his old scanner, and the hobby has stuck with me since.

On Saturday afternoon upon turning my scanner on, I started to hear the Camden Police department TRAFFIC-1 channel a lot. It was a very busy day, but that’s not to be unexpected when events take place at the Susquehanna Bank Center. But, this day was different. There was a sense of urgency, nervousness, and iritation in the officers voices on the radio. The more I listened, I wondered what was going on. A quick Google search turned up the XTU show taking place.

I was sitting around without much to do, so I decided for entertainment value to start looking on Twitter for information about the concert. Unsurprisingly, Twitter was ripe with people tweeting the #XTU hashtag. This, combined with the information I was getting over the radio was making for a very interesting thousand foot view of the events going on down at ground level.

In the name of public service, or even boredom, I started tweeting what I was hearing on the radio while I was monitoring the #XTU hashtag. And tweet I did, as order started to breakdown and the calls kept coming in over the radio. Fights everywhere, fans throwing bottles at police officers and concert staff. Officer down calls. EMS repeatedly called to the same locations to tend to the injured targets of flying bottles, fights, and other drunkenness.

The scene on the #XTU hashtag wasn’t much different. I was somewhat appalled, but not surprised, at the behavior of the people on the ground. 80% of the tweets contained the equivalent of “WHOO I AM SO WASTED AND DRUNK, SHIT IS CRAZY HERE!”. Countless photos of happy, smiling people holding the obligatory red solo cup or cans of beer flashed across the screen.

As the madness continued, I started noticing photos of crowd-shots of the overcrowded Susquehanna bank center and parking lot. Forget the concert inside, there was a full-blown crowd just hanging out in the parking lot, apparently drinking and causing chaos. I would hear calls for EMS on the radio, and minutes later, the stylish-Instagram photos of bloodied bodies laid out on stretchers started filling up the twitter feed.

Fake Snoop Dogg showed up even - things got real weird at that point. This debauchery went on for over 90 minutes, as in disbelief I couldn’t stop listening to the amount of crap the Camden PD and EMS had to put up with.

Now, for those not in the know about Camden, it’s a city having a bit of trouble keeping itself afloat. A bit of trouble is an understatement. Recent massive police layoffs, budgetary shortfalls, widespread crime and crumbling infrastructure has done little to help the city. Camden is literally a city that cannot keep it’s street lights operating because the copper is being stolen out of the fixtures.

This whole scene left me a bit conflicted. While I am a firm believer in individual rights and peoples liberties to act like an idiot if they want (and suffer the consequences), this whole scene just left a bad taste in my mouth. Can WXTU be held responsible for the behavior of their fans? No, as I said - everyone is free to make their own poor choices on their own.

However, where is the burden placed here? Unfortunately, it falls on the city of Camden. For one Saturday evening, I listened as an understaffed, overwhelmed police department tried to keep control of thousands of drunk kids from the suburbs.

Who pays for all this police presence, I wondered to myself. Camden is strapped as it is, and the burden is being placed on the city to provide order for event organizers.  Should the Susquehanna Bank center here take a more active role? Should XTU? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I think Camden got the short end of the stick here.

Lest it sound like I am preaching from the pulpit here, I’ve been known to cut loose myself. I’m not against alcohol consumption in moderation (hell, I love beer myself.) But, the continuous photos of clearly underage kids rocking beer cans and flasks coming across twitter was ridiculous. “Kids these days!”, says me, the grumpy 30 year old.

At the end of the day when my career as an amateur journalist came to an end, I came away with a lot more respect for the law enforcement officers on the streets of Camden, the EMS staff out there, and event staff who have to put up with this crap all summer long. You guys truly are the unsung heroes, and deserve better.

I should title this post “or how to not get too ahead of yourself.”

So I originally didn’t intend this as a post, but decided to write it as a reminder to myself to don’t get too ahead of myself in thinking.

About two weeks back, I picked up a Creative Labs Nomad Zen Xtra Jukebox MP3 Player at a garage sale for $3. It didn’t have the AC Adapter with it, and the guy selling it had no idea what it was, nor if it worked. So, I decided to take a gamble, worst case I’ve got myself a $3 30GB Laptop hard drive.

After not managing to produce a compatible AC Adapter from my collection of random power bricks, I decided it was time for the hard drive to come out and some MP3/data recovery. Hey, maybe I’d find some lost masterpiece by someone, right?

Ten minutes of unscrewing later, I hooked the 2.5” ATA Hard drive up to my desktop via my SATA/ATA USB Adapter. The drive was recognized as Windows as an Unknown partition structure.

My first guess here was “Ok, Old MP3 player. Probably ext2”. So I fired up PhotoRec to attempt to extract MP3s off it. No go, nothing found but gibberish files. Then I took a crack at it with TestDisk, thinking maybe the partition structure was corrupted. Nope.

So next step, I googled around and found apparently Creative invented their own ext2-like filesystem, on which the files were stored in a database. Dug up some 2002 code, and then a python script circa 2008 someone had written to extract files from the raw device with linux dd=if syntax.

Spun up an Arch Linux VM in VirtualBox, and 45 minutes later…. fdisk /dev/hdb shows me the drive is totally blank with no partition structure at all. My best guess? Someone replaced the drive with a blank one before selling it to my seller.

Crap. Didn’t even bother to check that first. Lesson learned, before wasting time on data recovery make sure there is actually data to recover

Gartner nailed it in 2003, when they called Microsoft’s Smart Display initiative “”an idea in search of a home.”

For those not familiar with the concept, a “Smart Display” was Microsoft’s idea to provide a tablet form factor that you could use from your yard, dining  room table, kitchen, or pool (I kid …) to run your computer applications from. This idea isn’t that far- fetched in 2012 with the iPad and a slew of Android tablets on the market.

A Smart Display was a tablet. Except it wasn’t a tablet. And there in lied it’s ultimate failure.

ViewSonic was the first to launch with the “AirPanel” series of tablets in January 2003. Retailing at $999 for the 10-inch V110, and $1299 for the V150 display, these were mighty expensive toys. Baffingly, ViewSonic’s Hong

Kong Website still has this product up on the web at:

http://hk.viewsonic.com/en/products/airpanel/index.php

Good luck finding it on ViewSonic USA - they’ve decided to try to erase this embarassing mistake.

Thanks to my  eager bleeding-edge adopter friend Bob, I have a near pristine ViewSonic V110 in my posession, along with it’s  Optional Dock, which was another meager $150, and added easy recharging and extra USB ports. Except the little  minor problem of a bulging, non-functional battery, the unit still works perfectly.

But what did these Smart Displays offer? Let’s start with the hardware specs, quoting directly from ViewSonic’s  now-amusing Tech Specs

“Processor:
Powerful 400MHz Intel XScale processor for added speed, power savings and efficiency.

Operating System:
Microsoft Windows CE for Smart Displays operating system works much like your PC. You’ll automatically feel familiar with applications.

Memory:
Includes a whopping 32MB ROM and 64MB SDRAM.

Display Touch Panel:

Colors are vivid and text is crisp with the bright
10” full-color transmissive display. 800x600
resolution keeps your image details clear. (V110)

or

Display Touch Panel
Colors are vivid and text is crisp with the bright 15” full-color transmissive display. High 1024x768 resolution keeps your image details clear. (V150)

Size & Weight:

With a sleek design, weighing less than 3 pounds, this 10” LCD is truly portable. (V110)
or
With a sleek design, weighing less than 6 pounds, this 15” LCD is truly portable. (v115)


Integrated Wireless:
802.11b wireless technology is built in for easy wireless access to your PC or wireless access point.

Quickly Input Data:
The Input Panel application allows you to choose the way you input data, either by handwriting recognition or via a soft keyboard. Or, connect your included keyboard to the integrated USB ports and type in your data  easily.

Easily Access Information:
Convenient directional pad and hot buttons make navigation fast and simple.

Installation CD-ROM Included:
Get up and running in about 15 minutes with the included airpanel companion CD-ROM. A simple to use utility that

walks you through the installation process.

Primary Monitor
Use the V150p as your PC’s primary monitor when docked. The optional V150p dock allows you to hot-dock/undock  your Wireless Smart Display. And with VGA pass through and OSD you can truly have a visual experience.

or

Optional V110 Dock:
Charge the V110p battery when connected to the optional dock. Also attach keyboards and/or a mouse for added  input functionality.

airpanel V110 optional accessories
   

airpanel V110 dock
Optical mouse
Battery
Extended battery
External battery charger
Screen protectors (5 pack)
Stylus (3 pack)

airpanel V150 optional accessories
   

airpanel V150 dock with VGA passthrough
Optical mouse
Battery
Extended battery
External battery charger
Screen protectors (5 pack)
Stylus (3 pack)”

Say what you will about the amusing terms (Whopping RAM!), I am actually extremely impressed at the build quality of the ViewSonic AirPanel V110. This thing feels solid, and not cheap in the hands. The optional dock is made with a metal base and has some heft to it. The touch-screen is actually quite amazing for a product from  2003, and I spot no dead pixels on it even after nine years.

But what of the software? Well, it ran “Microsoft Windows CE for Smart Displays” This, in reality, was just a  very neutered version of Windows CE 4.1, which later became “Pocket PC.” I actually find no fault with Windows  CE 4.x, having used Pocket PCs of the era it was actually a very slick OS for the hardware and time.

Unfortunately, ViewSonic chose not to implement a full operating system onto the AirPanel. Why this is, I’m not  sure I understand. Would it have cost a little more for some additional hardware resources? Perhaps. But for  $1000, you would have thought this unit could stand on it’s own without being tethered to a PC. But it didn’t.

The first issue I encountered setting the unit up was due to it’s age, it only supports WEP encryption for Wi-Fi  signals. Luckily my router supports multiple SSIDs, so for fun I added a WEP signal, configured the AirPanel for  it, and it connected right away with no issues. Unfortunately, it also showed my connection rate as being 2 MBs.

At this point, it bears mentioning that the AirPanel shipped with a USB Desktop Wi-Fi adapter. Why you ask?

Remember, this was the beginning of 2003. Wi-Fi Networks were not as common in homes at this time. 802.11b had  been standardized in September 1999, and 802.11g wouldn’t be standardized until June 2003. The geeks among us may have had Wi-Fi at that time (Honestly, I don’t think I did …) but ViewSonic couldn’t count on it.

So in the box, they included the desktop USB Wi-Fi Adapter. And between that desktop adapter, and the integrated

Wi-Fi in the AirPanel, you were able to make yourself an Ad-hoc network connection between your desktop, and the  AirPanel.

Further complicating this issue, I pulled up some Market Share figures of OS’ from 2003:

Microsoft OS Global Web Usage Share as of May 7, 2003
Windows XP     34.73%
Windows 98     24.93%
Source: StatMarket

When only a small percentage of your audience has a wireless network, and then only 1/3rd of your target audience is running an OS that works with Remote Desktop, you can see how this product might have some trouble being implemented. So, ViewSonic kindly included an upgrade copy of Windows XP Pro with this product.

Unfortunately due to Remote Desktop limitations, when you connect to your desktop with the AirPanel, the local  desktop session will be locked. Lots of people seem to have complained about this at the time, and rightfully so. This is not the behavior I would expect when shelling out a thousand bucks. 

So, now we’ve got our desktop and our AirPanel networked together (if this was 2003, you’d do this Ad-Hoc likely, I’m doing it with my existing Wi-Fi network). What can your AirPanel do? Well, it can connect over Remote Desktop to your desktop.

And that’s about it.

But, at this, I have to say it actually does a very good job. I was able to connect to my Windows Server 2008 system in my basement on my first attempt, with no difficulties encounted. Trying to imagine a use-case for me  to actually use this thing, I decided it’d make a nice little front-end interface to play music files from my file server onto my stereo via the AirPanel’s headphone out jack.

My hopes for this were dashed however, when the file server reported no audio devices found, and that Windows Media Services were not installed. The media services installed, but I still couldn’t seem to get sound output  working over Remote Desktop. It is likely this may just be a soundcard driver issue, as I haven’t ever tested sound on the fileserver. I will be researching this at a later time.

Input to the Remote Desktop session is achieve either through the stylus, which is actually quite accurate and works very nicely on the touchscreen, or via the directional pad on the AirPanel itself, which is a bit more clunky, but also works fairly well. Clicking is accomplished through a pen tap for the stylus, or in the event
of right click, holding the pen until a red circle appears. For the physical directional pad, the AirPanel has  two mouse buttons on the left of the unit, allowing you two-handed control that works fairly well.

Text input is also surprisingly well done. A press of the keyboard button on the AirPanel will bring up an on- screen keyboard you can tap out letters on, or you can use the handwriting input.

Yes, handwriting input. And it actually works pretty well! Additionally, the unit offers two USB (!!) ports on the top for Mouse and Keyboard Input. I didn’t test these, but I’m sure they work like you’d think they would.

All said, I’m actually impressed at how well the AirPanel performs as a Remote Desktop client. Sadly, the weak  encryption will keep any smart admin from using this in a business setting, but it may still have a place on  home networks. Remember though, WEP security is terrible.

While I have previously mentioned the AirPanel ran a de-featured Windows CE, ther is one other application that can run natively on the hardware itself. This is the “Nevo Home Control” application for home automation.

It seems like Nevo is still around in the Home Automation business (http://www.mynevo.com/), but I lack any of  the hardware needed to test this side of it. That said, I imagine this AirPanel would have worked extremely well
as a UI for a home automation system, circa 2003.

So why did Smart Display’s fail? Ultimately, Gartner was right.

$1000 for a “wireless monitor” that still required a laptop or desktop system, running an operating system you may or may not already have, over a wireless network that you probably didn’t have. Add to this the low network speeds I observed, and any multimedia past rudimentary audio streams was not going to happen on the AirPanel.

Video Playback doesn’t even work well on modern high-speed networks over the Remote Desktop protocol, and definitely would not work well on an AirPanel.

ViewSonic probably had this product in the development pipeline for a while, and had they waited a little longer they could have used 802.11g in the product.

Ultimately, the Smart Displays were just too expensive for what small functionality they offered. What’s the point in a portable screen if you are still tethered to your home PC? No wonder this ended up #11 on CNet’s “The decade’s 30 biggest tech flops”

Bonus - Just for fun I opened it up …. never tempt me with a label like “Risk of Electrical Shock - Do Not Open!”

Most computer folks look back fondly on their first computer they used. The lucky ones point to Commodore 64’s, Apple II’s, Atari’s or the like.

When I was a kid? We had this:

You don’t hear many people fondly recalling the time spent with Sinclair computers. Infact, I can name only one other person (my neighbor across the street) who ever remembers using one of these as a kid.

Probably because they were cheap. And terrible.

My childhood memories of this thing consist of my dad plugging it into an old black and white television set in his bedroom, while I eagerly awaited for him to “make the computer do things.” Because of the horrible design of the Power Adapter, the slightest nudge would lock the system up, freeze it, and you would lose your work. I remember on at least one or more occasions when I over-enthusiastically bumped the system and caused him to lose the program he was typing in.

That keyboard. Oh dear god, that horrible keyboard. As you see in the photo, this thing barely qualifies as a “keyboard”. This type of keyboard is whats known as a membrane keyboard, otherwise known as torturous to use. You didn’t type everything on these either, oh no. Every key was multi-function, so if you wanted “PRINT”, you would hit Shift-P.  A horrible macro idea if I’ve ever heard one. This computer ran BASIC, and as a result … it did nothing when you turned it on other then sit there, waiting for you.

Wikipedia tells me this thing sold as low as $50 at one point, which is probably how it ended up in our house. Good ole Frugal dad, and the Timex marketing of it (yeah, the watch people), combined with the low price probably made this a Mom-friendly purchase.

If you check out this link, you will see apparently there were all number accessories/ACTUAL keyboards made for this. We had the awesome 16K Ram pack of course, which allowed you to load the most sophisticated software that you could purchase from a store, from your incredibly high-tech cassette deck!

I have to be honest, I can’t name or remember a single game or program my dad had for this thing. I vaguely recall maybe some Sherlock-Holmes esque game, but nothing else. My dad also had a backlog of old Sinclair Magazines, featuring amazing BASIC programs you could TYPE IN to make your fabulous little computer do things like scroll patterns on the screen! This, as a small child, I recall being my favorite thing.

The Sinclair 1000 still sits in my dads sock drawer I believe, where it has lived for the last 25 years. I think I tried firing it up about 15 years back, only to find it wasn’t working at all.

So count my lucky stars, when I was at the Vintage Computer Festival I found myself his bigger brother, for $15 (Untested). I don’t have a power supply for it, but I did score a cassette deck to use with it at the Ham-Fest.

Behold, the Timex Sinclair 1500. With real keyboard!

Wish me luck when I eventually get around to finding a power adapter… I’m going to need it.

Info from www.old-computers.com

NAME  1000

MANUFACTURER  TIMEX / SINCLAIR

TYPE  Home Computer

ORIGIN  U.S.A.

YEAR  1982

BUILT IN LANGUAGE  Sinclair Basic

KEYBOARD  Membrane keyboard

CPU  Zilog Z80A

SPEED  3.25 Mhz

RAM  2 KB

ROM  8 kb

TEXT MODES  32 x 22

GRAPHIC MODES  64 x 44

COLOrsc  None, black & white

SOUND  None

SIZE / WEIGHT  16.5(W) x 17.5(D) x 3.8(H) cm

I/O PORTS  Expansion bus, tape-recorder, video

POWER SUPPLY  9V external power supply unit

PERIPHERALS  Memory modules, thermal printer

PRICE  $99.95

NAME  1500

MANUFACTURER  TIMEX / SINCLAIR

TYPE  Home Computer

ORIGIN  U.S.A.

YEAR  August 1983

BUILT IN LANGUAGE  Sinclair Basic

KEYBOARD  Chicklet keyboard (ZX Spectrum style), 40 keys

CPU  Zilog Z80A

SPEED  3.5 MHz

RAM  16 KB

ROM  8 KB

TEXT MODES  32 columns x 24 lines (2 lines are reserved for system messages and commands)

GRAPHIC MODES  64 x 44 dots

COLOrsc  Black and white

SOUND  None

SIZE / WEIGHT  23 x 14,4 x 3 cm / 550g

I/O PORTS  Expansion bus (Z80 bus), tape interface, RF video output

POWER SUPPLY  9V AC adaptor

PERIPHERALS  16 KB RAM, printer + all the Sinclair ZX81 peripherals

PRICE  US $79.95 (USA, 1983)