IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (AnandTech) 24/11/2010

Windows Home Server v2 'Vail': Drive Extender v2 Dismissed
Back in April we dissected Drive Extender v2 – Microsoft’s storage pool and data duplication technology for Windows Home Server – based upon the first preview release of Windows Home Server “Vail”. So imagine our utter shock when we found out that Microsoft is going to be removing Drive Extender entirely from “Vail” and the rest of its offshoots.

The Boxee Box Review

Content aggregation has been instrumental in the development of the web. In the early days of the web, destinations held all the power. If you wanted news or reviews you went to news and review sites, consuming the content they had to offer at each individual website. Email newsletters were the first to really change the manner in which content was consumed online. Instead of visiting a website to read the latest it had to offer, you got an email in your inbox with either complete content or enough of a teaser for you to decide whether or not you were interested in it.
These days we have many more ways to get access to written content on the web than a simple newsletter. There’s RSS, Twitter and Instapaper among others. It generally works well. RSS didn’t stop users from visiting websites, neither did Twitter and Instapaper hasn’t spelled the end of the front page either. If anything all of these technologies have helped make consuming content online easier. While the front page of any website today isn’t quite as big of an example of prime real estate as it was 10 years ago, it’s still quite valuable.
I mention this history for one important reason: we haven’t seen the same progress with aggregating and distributing television content on the web. These days you can find a lot of cable TV content on the web, usually posted the day after the shows air live on cable TV. All of the major networks support it. Visit Fox.com, NBC.com or CBS.com and you’ll be greeted with ways to watch all of the shows they air via the web. The content is all out there, and it wouldn’t be too difficult to aggregate it all into one cable-TV-like interface. In theory, with what’s posted online already, you could pull the plug on cable and just rely on video over the web without missing much. It’s just not quite as easy as a cable subscription with a DVR. This is where Boxee comes in.

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Micca Slim-HD: 1080p In Your Pocket

Last year, Micca released a hard drive based portable media drive called the Slim HDD Digital Media Player (imaginative, I know). Based around a standard 2.5” notebook hard drive, the Slim DMP could handle a wide range of containers and formats and had a 720p HDMI output. For the $59 (no drive) price tag, it represented a solid value and even without too many premium features, it was a very functional media player at its core. Now we’ve got Micca’s followup device, the $79 Slim-HD Portable 1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player, which adds support for 1080p playback, FLAC audio, and a new UI. How does it fare in our labs? Read on to find out.

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The Clevo B5130M: GeForce GT 425M with a 15.6" 1080p Chaser
Finding a mainstream notebook with a high resolution screen can be harder than pulling teeth. Outside of the new Dell XPS 15 and the odd business-class machine, a resolution higher than the dismal 1366x768 on a 15.6" screen can be extremely difficult to locate and may even force you to compromise and buy a bigger machine than you'd intended. Fortunately there are options and we've tracked one down in the form of the Clevo B5130M. Sporting NVIDIA's new GeForce GT 425M and a 1080p high-resolution screen, is this notebook enough to steal the crown from the Dell XPS 15?

Thursday, November 25, 2010

IT News HeadLines (AnandTech) 24/11/2010

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