Trigger Finger

Two things stand out to me about the pirate themed mmorpg so many have been waiting for.
1. How much potential it had
2. How bland the final gameplay is.

This is very standard fare by anyone’s standards. There are so many things that could have been done well, nay properly! I am going to keep the rant brief and thus assume that people have a general knowledge about the game and mmorpgs in general.

Here are 5 reasons the game simply sucks at this moment in time:

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Well I got the beta of Yahoo messenger last night after seeing some ghee-whiz video a few months back of it in action and applying for the beta.

Its definitely a pretty looking client with its integration with the Vista theme and use of WPF almost impeccable. In fact it’s amusing that yahoo messenger now looks so much more integrated than Microsoft’s… it must be embarrassing to them Redmond goons.

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Well that was unexpected!

A year where the console dominated my playing time rather than the PC! I never thought I would see the day and to be honest, I didn’t even realised I had seen the day until I thought about offering up my thoughts for Game of the Year!

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Well I got this on rental and its a good job I did.

The main thing that was so special about the MoH series used to be multiplayer…. its freaking awful now! It cant be just me when late sunday evening there are only 90 players online and 4 games!! The games are too short, the games take too long to find, the games are only 4 v 4, and when you are actually playing it is disconcerting to know some kind of auto aim is on. I accidentally fired my sniper rifle when pointing a good 5 metres wide of my target… yet I got a headshot. I thought it was some kind of lag-fluke and experimented a little. Dissapointed to see that aiming vaguely in the area of anyone with a sniper rifle will in fact kill them.

Add to the fact that the other 7 players on the server are probably armed with the rocket launcher and its incredible blast radius of about 10m …. the game lacks any sense of skill or achievement. The single player is better, but the use of save points is pretty terrible and makes some of the more difficult missions just a royal pain in the ass.

Having said that I LOVE the flexibility of the cover/peeking system. By far the best i have ever seen. Overall though…. meh 6/10

Every dog has it’s day they say and today that dog is called SUSE. Well OpenSuse 10.3 to be precise. I spend a lot of time messing around with various distros and operating systems (even if I don’t intend to keep them on my machine) so that I can keep up to date with the developments in them all. The common Linux distros such as Suse/OpenSuse, (k)Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and a few BSD derivatives are my normal ‘bookmarks’ in the OS world. And once in a while one of these reaches a sweet point where instead of bugs and frustration, I find a really slick OS that has reached a level of maturity that ‘just works.’ OpenSuse 10.3 represents such a point for that dev team and I have been REALLY impressed by how far this distro has come in the 6(?) short months since it’s last refresh.

For all those Ubuntu fanatics out there that are constantly dissatisfied with one or more elements, I recommend OPENSUSE 10.3 as your next stop on that search for your distro-utopia! My biggest gripes with OpenSuse 10.2 were it’s package management (what a MESS that was 6 months ago), it’s fallibility with authenticated proxies, and many crucial apps (for me) were really unstable in it’s repositories such as Dia and Open Office.

The final nail in 10.2 was the incredibly slow browsing, yes even with ipv6 disabled. What I have always like about OpenSuse has been the professionalism in the final interface and the integration is rarely matched by any other distro, and there has always been a large community following to turn to for support and code.

So needless to say, on installing 10.3 you are, as always, impressed by the appearance of the GUI (KDE in my case) and they do a great job of removing the clutter of most KDE installations. They could make Compfusion effects easier to enable if that’s your thing, but as mine is running on a laptop it wasn’t a high priority for me anyway. But for the first time in my living memory I am sat here using a KDE (3.5.7 at time of writing) desktop that has a clean and well organised menu! You will also be shocked to see how fast this thing boots now! OpenSuse has always been one of those OS’s that took a good 1.5 to 2 minutes to boot on any machine I have installed it on, in fact slower than any OS I have ever used. Yet I haven’t changed a single item of hardware since 10.2, and 10.3 boots in almost exactly 30 seconds (from POST completion to desktop loaded). Very very fast! On the subject of speed, package management is also much much faster than previous iterations. In fact I dare say as fast as apt-get in Ubuntu.

Repository checks are fast, package searches are fast, and installations are fast, none of which could be said for 10.2. It’s also extremely easy to add the online repositories you most commonly use (such as non-oss, Packman, etc) by simply ticking one check box for each and voila!

Unlike previous versions, I have no unstable applications our of those I use every day such as Dia, Open Office, Citrix and in actual fact they seem to run much quicker on my laptop than other distros run those same applications. Last but not least, there are bugs in the proxy management module, especially concerning those people that use an authenticated proxy. But simply hard coding those details in the /etc/proxy file fixes that and every single application is working flawlessly through it (of course those programs that annoyingly use their own proxy settings like Firefox still need to be configured).

Overall i cannot find any real flaw in 10.3, it really does seem like a gargantuan effort has gone into making it a respectable distro again after the train-wreck that was 10.2. Great work guys.. this one is staying on my laptop for a good while!

It’s a fantastic achievement by the anySim team to create the GUI, ‘one click’ solution to unlocking the iPhone, but to be honest things are getting very confusing with so many versions flying around, so many contradictory guides, and so many relative success / failure stories. So what I hope to achieve in this little guide is a simple step by step guide that takes you from an iPhone in a selophane sealed box, to an unlocked iPhone using any SIM card and with as many features as I can figure out

So  with the phone finally in my hands, I will lay out the basic steps and update as I progress. If you see anything wrong or have a correction /comment to make please let me know in the comments below.

Pre-Requisites:

• Windows PC (I don’t own a MAC and am running Windows Vista so that is what I will base the guide on).
• Install iTunes 7.3.x (Any 7.3 version of iTunes, I hear 7.4 versions have added complexities)
• Download & extract iBrickr v0.8 to C:\ibrickr
• Download anySIM v1.1 (NOT v1.0 as that had a few issues)

The Unlock Process

1. Rip open iPhone box excitedly
2. Pop-out that AT&T SIM card and put it your GSM SIM card
3. Hook the cradle cable up to your PC and set the iphone charging for at least 10-20 minutes so there is some juice (or at least as long as your patience lasts…. I have had bad experience with flashing hardware with low battery )
4. iTunes will probably launch and start the AT&T activation process (depending on your iTunes settings) or if you get an ‘Invalid SIM’ message Cancel it and close iTunes again
5. Run iBrickr and follow the onscreen instructions to ‘Free Your Phone’ Once all complete close iBrickr. One very important step of this should be that it ensures you are running the 1.02 version of the iPhone firmware which is required for a successful unlock.
6. Download and extract PACAY.rar Then run the activate.bat Follow the instructions including the restart
7. Open iTunes and close it again
8. Run iBrickr again and install the PXL service… more phone reboots
9. Download the PXL v1.1 version of the AnySim utility
10. Click Applications in iBrickr and install the anysim.pxl file you downloaded earlier
11. Go to Settings > General > AutoLock on the iPhone and choose ‘never’ (you can always change it back later)
12. Tap the Home button on the iPhone and then run the AnySim application you just installed
13. Wait 10 minutes and then laugh or cry depending on the results. If the unlock is successful then you may be on the network of choice almost immediately, or in some cases I have read you may need to restart the iPhone before it will work.

UPDATE: Mine apparently failed with the message "the flash operation succeeded but the unlock commands failed" but I rebooted the phone and it worked!!!

If you have any issues then refer to http://iphonegoboom.com where a lot of this guide was stolen from and they maintain a great FAQ on common issues.

In order that you can choose whether or not to install later updates to iTunes and/or the iPhone firmware (i.e. avoid updates that may break the unlock) make sure you disable all options in iTunes that check for / install updates automatically!

Post Installation

Add your EDGE settings for your network/carrier. Everything you need to know right here

Make the voicemail button ring your voicemail. Taken from the iphone dev wiki: 1. First, take note of what your voicemail number is with your current provider (for example, in Spain the Vodafone voicemail number is 177). 2. Click on the phone button in your iPhone. 3. Click on the keypad tab. 4. Tap the following code: *5005*86*xxx# The xxx is the voicemail number, in our example it will read: *5005*86*177# 5. Tap call. 6. After a second, the code will have been set. 7. Tap now on the voicemail button and it will automatically call your usual voicemail service. Fix YouTube. Coming Soon Overall I am delighted with the phone and have had a great evening playing with all its features on the Telia network in Sweden

Continued from Part 1

So… after much delay all the components arrived. Ten days in all, I am not used to having to wait more than two or three days typically so that was a real test of my patience! However I will forgive them as they sent me a faster processor (2.2ghz as opposed to the 2.0ghz I ordered). The previous order with these guys saw me receive 2GB of RAM instead of the 1GB I ordered, so all I can say is Thankyou www.komplett.se

But anyhoo, everything arrived, the components were correct and so it was onto the fun part of building the machine.

As with any PC, the chassis was critical to how easy the building was going to be. For someone who builds a lot of PC’s, I am somewhat afflicted by a disease my father called ‘Complete Cack-Handedness.’ Seriously I have the dexterity of an elephant when it comes to small cables and switches so I was a little concerned working about working on a ‘small’ chassis and a micro ATX board. However the Antec fusion helped tremendously with it’s well thought out design and things were not so bad.

The case is based around 3 compartments, one for the motherboard and associated components, one for the PSU and one for the Hard Drives, the idea being to isolate heat and noise from each compartment. The case has cleverly pre-placed cable ties and cable passages to aid in that (most hated for me!) process of cable management. And a note that is my bug-bear with many cheap cases… PROPERLY labelled connections from the front panel!

I did however have to read the manual carefully concerning the VFD (the front display) connections as they are somewhat unique! As a correction to part one of this guide, the VFD no longer uses the floppy connection for power and has its own unique connectors which are detailed in the manual.

A big tip for you with such a smaller design case though is to avoid anything that uses fat old IDE cables. My hard drives were SATA with their nice thin and flexible cables, but I bought an IDE DVDRW and it was very tough to fit that fat ugly cable through the cable passage with all the other cables running through there too. Spend a couple of pounds more and get a SATA unit instead just for the cabling benefits.

So the process ran something like this:

1. I go against all the rules in my builds in that the first thing I do before even looking at the case is put the CPU in the CPU socket of the motherboard. Then put on the heatsink/fan, and throw in the memory sticks before mounting the motherboard in the case. I do this because of habit now really as in the ‘olden’ days this was sometimes difficult and awkward to do after mounting the motherboard in a confined space. This is frowned upon because manhandling the motherboard with the CPU in, and then a big heavy heatsink on top could lead to damage to the motherboard PCB due to flexing and/or damaging the CPU core. However, with the old styles of heatsink clips, a severe amount of brute force with a sharp screwdriver only millimetres from the PCB of the motherboard was usually required to get these clips on, so I considered my method a far lesser risk to the components as long as I am very careful with how I handle the board. But now with the new heatsink designs the process is much easier, pushing down 4 pins at the corners of the heatsink is much safer and easier so I shouldn’t really use my method any more… but still old habits die hard!

2. With the motherboard, CPU/heatsink and RAM in place I dropped the lot into the case and screwed it in.

3. Before putting the rest of the components in, now is a good time to do a lot of cabling whilst there is still space to move around your ‘cack-hands’ and start with the fiddliest cables… typically those tiny front panel connections. Route the power cables to where they will be needed but dont tighten any cable ties yet as you may need to adjust lengths and positions. Finally I do the ‘data’ cables such as the SATA cables and the fat ugly IDE cable. When tying up the cables and placing them, bear in mind that you still probably need room to be swinging PCI/PCIe cards around in there. Connect the 24 pin power cable to the motherboard, the 4pin 12v one too, and connect the CPU fan to the header on the motherboard.

4. With the cabling in place, it’s time to throw in the Hard Drives and the DVDRW. There are removable cages for both which makes things very simple, and Antec supplied (with the Fusion) silicon grommets and special long screws to reduce rattle, another nice touch!

5. Last but not least do the PCIe/PCI cards. I had a bitch of a time getting the Hauppaugge HVR1100 TV card in. This was because the silver mounting plate at the end of the card seems a millimetre or two thicker than most and the Fusion case seems to have a very narrow slit between the motherboard and the chassis for the bottom of the plate to fall through. Thus it was very difficult to get the thing sitting in the PCI slot at that end, but a combination of 15 minutes of swearing and sheer luck bending the mounting plate to the exact angle seemed to do the trick, though I am not sure I will ever get it out again! The Geforce 7300 went it very easily, but its heatsink is HUGE!!! So huge that it completley covers the neighbouring PCI slot so I in fact would never be able to fit another PCI card in there… good job the motherboard has built in sound eh?

6. Now all the components are in, you have a better idea of where all the cabling can finally lie and be tightened up. Connect up all the power leads to the components and tie them up, and connect the data cables. DOUBLE CHECK the cpu fan cable is still sitting in its header as it can be easily dislodged when fiddling around in the case. Nothing worse than a fried CPU!

7. Final note: Again common practice is to only install the motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics at the start and do a quick test to see if you can actually get a POST screen before throwing everything else in. This is to check that these critical components all work as you can understand that to take everything out of a fully built machine, after painstakingly tying up all those cables to perfection, would be a royal pain in the ass, but I have been very lucky over the years in that I have never received a faulty component.. ever!! Hundreds of machines built with no faulty components leads me to being more gung-ho and just doing everything before testing. It will bite me on the ass one day… but so far I have been very lucky!

So the build is complete and it’s that heart thumping moment to switch the thing on and hope for some life! I would say I typically have a 50% success rate with that first boot. Common issues are things not being seated properly (RAM and GFX card especially) but this is very hard to identify with the Fusion case as it has no system speaker, and thus you cannot hear any wailing beeps from the motherboard that typically tell you what is wrong.

Another thing I am always forgetting is to connect that 4 pin 12v connector as it’s something you didn’t have a few years ago. But the immediate thing to check for when you switch on is that the CPU fan is spinning. If not, then pull the power pronto! Then make sure all other fans are spinning like the one on the graphics card (if applicable) and case fans. If these are all spinning then you know a) that you have power and b) that you aren’t damaging any components leaving it running even if for some reason you have no display at the moment. Assuming you pass the ‘spin check’ then hopefully you have a display and the POST screen is beginning to go through the motions.

Check the front of the chassis and see that the various LED’s are working (otherwise you have put them in the wrong way round) and then your POST should have finished. It may even then move on and try to boot but having no OS installed means that you won’t get any further. If all good (or fixed!) so far, then it’s time to go through the BIOS with a fine tooth comb, rebooting and entering the BIOS is important for a few reasons.

1) Often motherboards mis-detect the CPU if the BIOS is not up to date. In the worst case this can mean a overclocked CPU, but can more often mean an underclocked CPU. Indeed this motherboard had a BIOS almost one year old and had my E4550 Core 2 Duo running as only 2.0ghz per core as opposed to the 2.2ghz it is supposed to run at.

2) Often RAM settings are mis-represented and can be corrected

3) On board devices you dont use can be switched off, and in my case the onboard sound was set to default mode as opposed to HiDef mode.

4) Check the power saving options, often manufacturers leave these at safer settings for compatibility, but would mean you would not have hibernate as an option

5) Go through every setting, research what they mean and set them sensibly. Remember you can always optimise or overclock later. For now you want a stable system with all on board components you will use switched on, and those you wont use switched off. Save your BIOS Settings and allow it to reboot.

If you want to pause the POST screen so you can check everything is working as it should… hit the Pause|Break key on your keyboard. This time your CPU and RAM should be correct, and now is a good time to check that your Hard Drives and DVDRW are also detected ready for the OS install. If everything is good, you are ready for Part Three… Install and Configuration of the OS.

I recently discovered a real gem for a task I had at work.

We needed something to automatically surf our web site in a specific manner in order that it pre-compiled the jsp’s etc so users would have ready cached pages to view when the new version of the site launched rather than having to wait for things to compile. The site has 30 country specific domains, is clustered so many different caches needed to be populated too, and for each site there are 10-12 servlets that must be hit so that everything is cached up and ready to go. A very laborious task to do manually!

To complicate matters further, some servlets could not be hit by a direct URL as they were pulled via specific javascripts from specfic pages thus you need to go to Page A and then Page B and then click a specific button. So after some serious googling I hit on a few site testing utilities which were good as long as you were talking about specific url’s, but no use for the more complicated javascript sequences that must be run.

Then I found my saviour! Chickenfoot which is an open source, free Firefox plugin that is built by the good guys at MIT. In a nutshell it is a very simple javascript extension that uses extremely simple syntax to build a script that will navigate your pages in almost any way you want. For example:

go("www.google.com")

openTab("www.google.com")

click("images")

enter("monkeys")

sleep(30)

click("search images button")

So simple I could teach my dog to write such scripts! The only issue I have found is that most actions need to be done on the foremost tab/window, but if you are clever you can do things in such a sequence to work around the limitation. Great work fellas!

Following up on the previous Windows Home Server article where I analysed the state of WHS to date, this shorter piece focuses on one of the key features that I am sure many are eager to use, remote access.

By remote access I don’t mean Remote Desktop (though of course you can use it), I mean remotely accessing your files (and we are promised the desktops of any of your home PC’s) (see addendum at bottom of this article for remote desktop over the web) via a web browser. What follows is a brief rundown of what the system looks like so far.

First thing to mention is that this feature took ZERO configuration. This is out of the box web enabled server browsing from any browser on any PC on the web… nifty!

First you bring up your browser and type in https://www.whateverdomainorip.com/remote which will bring you to a simple login page

Once you enter you login name and password you arrive at the welcome screen. Many of the promised features have not been implemented yet, so the options are simple…. file browse or logoff!

By choosing the file browser you now have access (at what level is of course determined by your account permissions in WHS) to all the shares of the server.

Selecting for example music (wanting some decent stuff to listen to at work perhaps) you can then browse the directory structure, download files, upload files, delete them, create new folders …. just about anything you want!

When you find something to download you can either download the whole folder nicely zipped up by WHS for you…

Or select multiple individual files which will also be nicely zipped up for you.

Likewise you can upload either files or diretories to your server (handy way to send some work home perhaps?).

That’s it. They say the simple things are best and in this case things are very simple, but also at this stage working flawlessly. The pages are a bit slow to load until they get cached, but otherwise the only limit is your connection at home. I’m looking forward to some of the more advanced features and I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

Addendum  

Remote desktops over the web are in beta 2, I didn’t notice because I always use firefox and this feature only displays when using Internet Explorer! So here is a brief rundown of what that looks like.

When using IE, on the welcome screen you will see a ‘Computers’ tab where you can see all the computers that you can connect to.

There are a few caveats, IE is one The usual remote desktop necessities such as a password on the account and appropriate ports forwarded, and of course the user must be enabled for remote desktops in the WHS user admin (a simple tick-box). WHS is unable to connect to sleeping PC’s or of course those that are switched off.

On selecting a computer a couple of warnings pop up about the full screen mode and the local clipboard, but then you are taken straight to a standard (Vista in this case) logon screen which I couldn’t get a screen-grab of. Enter the local user-name/password and voila…. control your home PC’s from anywhere!

Our house at times must resemble something of a wet dream for Microsoft. Of the four or five computers in use, 4 run Windows (mostly Vista) and only one multiboots between Windows and a variety of Nix distros. We used Media Centre extensively to pump content to an XBox 360 in the living room which provides the focus of content consumption on the big screen TV.

Ours is probably a typical house in terms of what we want to store on the computers. 95% of it is media such valuable family photos, videos and recorded TV (via a digital tuner using the excellent Media Centre), and of course a music collection that has developed over the years to something like 20,000 tracks. A tiny proportion of all the data in the house is ‘work related.’ Probably a few hundred documents between the users, some photoshop files and a load of web stuff. In terms of gigabytes this ‘work content’ is probably less than 1 GB of the TB or so of data we have stored. So although the work content is important, the main use of the computers is to provide content to whoever wants it, either on one of the PC’s (rare) or on the TV in the living room (most of the time).
Although media content is important, most of it is replacable. Obviously some isn’t but most could be re-downloaded, re-ripped or similar. What can’t be replaced is the 5 or 6 years of photographs from the digital cameras, that precious home movie of the dog or kids, and of course that work-content may be found in a sent email, but if not will be a huge chore to recreate.

So, in our house (and I expect many others too) one PC tends to act as ‘the server.’ It stores all the media, is in fact a Media Centre itself (Vista Ultimate) and is left switched on 24 hours a day doing the long downloads, the bittorrent client lives there, backups are stored there, and it has remote access for people to access files from wherevere they may be in the world. In fact if you have Vista Ultimate there is no function on earth it cannot provide to the average home user. What it isn’t capable of doing (without extra software) is remotely backing up machines on a schedule without all kinds of tweaking and mappings, it certainly can’t image the other machines, I could set up volume shadowing and so on too but it’s a big pain in the ass when you have so much content on the disks already. But all in all it serves the Home Server role pretty well already, but there are always more things I want to do to secure what is important to content for the household.

So when the announcement of Windows Home Server was made, it seemed like music to the ears. I lept on the beta signup and was accepted a week ago or so. In that time it has been installed, the media is moved there and what follows is a brief roundup of the great and the ugly of Beta 2 of Windows Home Server.

First the great:

Centralised Backup

The backup end of things in Windows Home Server is superb. Dumping everything onto one machine is nice, but could already be done on any other operating system. What makes it nice on WHS is a few things combining to provide a solution that just makes sense and is INCREDIBLY SIMPLE to set up.

• First there are no drive letters as far as the user is concerned. Every hard drive as it is added to the machine is simply formatted added to one large volume. Thus no more juggling space between partitions when things get tight. Once the storage is in place there are pre-shared folders for Video, Pictures, Music, Programs and so on, plus a share for each user on the network which can be made private if required. You can add additional shares should you need to but I haven’t needed any more than the pre-configured ones so far. So storage and sharing is managed very simply and I don’t think any more than 2-3 clicks of a mouse has been needed to set any of it up.
• Folder duplication is another great feature. Of the shares you can choose that any of them be duplicated backups meaning that there are two copies residing on different physical disks, so should one die on you the data is still available on another drive. Perfect for the really important stuff such as the user folders and the photos, whilst there is no need to use double the space for the TV shows and other replacable stuff.
• The next nice thing is the backup routines. Once a machine is added to the network (via installation of a very small 10mb piece of client software called the Connector) it’s backups can be managed totally within WHS. Every night a complete image is taken of the computer you can choose to exclude anything you don’t want and obvious things such as the page file, temp folder, hibernation file, are already excluded. This image can then be used to completely restore a PC like Ghost image, or be browsed to restore just a single file. It works flawlessly in both cases as I have tested and retested several times to feel secure the process will actually work! I even made a fresh installation image that included all the drivers for the various boxes around the house that could be used to rebuild any time I feel like.

Headless / Remote Management

WHS is designed to be a headless machine (i.e. no monitor, keyboard, mouse) and so after installation all that is connected to the box is a network cable and the power. Nice not to have even more cables adding to the copper jungle under the desk!

• All management of the server can be done using the WHS Console. This is a mini-remote desktop launched from any machine on the network that provides a very simple and intuitive interface to manage everything from new accounts, to adding extra hard drives. It is INCREDIBLY SIMPLE to use and even non-tecchies will come to grips with it in 5 minutes.
• You can also access the box of course over the internet using remote desktop (though this could be simpler to configure on the permissions side by launch as new users had to be added to a group outside of the console interface… I am sure its just a bug right now) so you can access the server wherever you are to grab important files, or maybe just listen to your music collection from work

Low System Requirements

The server runs on a stripped down version of SBS 2003 and thus the requirements are pretty low. The recommended (note not the mininum) requirements are a 1ghz processor and 512mb RAM. That means any old frankenstein machine can be thrown together from old parts and will run it perfectly. Some may find an old computer they consigned to the garage to gather dust may find a new lease of life running one of the most important functions of a home network!

So on the backup and setup side of things WHS is truly great. Very simple, very effective.

However, there are some things right now which would stop me buying it on release and some of them are insane.

The Ugly

First and most ridiculous is the fact that if you use the XBox 360 Media centre (I don’t just mean the video and music entries on the main blades, but the full blown media centre interface which is essential for us to use the digital TV features and program guide etc) you cannot access the Server’s shares. Crazy and one thing surely they have to fix. WHS should be the final piece of the end to end solution for the home media network and they have completely blunted the final step of it! What use is media if we can’t display it on the destination of choice which is within the fantastic Media Centre Extender interface of the 360 on the big screen?

Second (and related) is that due to the insane refusal of Microsoft to support DivX/Xvid formats through the 360, users have had to use realtime re-encoding solutions such as Runtime360 to view content in such formats through the 360. Now if you move the media to the WHS you would have to send the content across the network to the re-encoding box, and then again onto the 360. In something as bandwith intensive and dependent on throughput… this now seems impossible.
These two things alone would absolutely stop me from buying WHS and as almost everyone I know requires something similar, I would advise against it for them too. This could be easily fixed by Microsoft, implement DivX support on the 360, and make the shares extendable to media centre extenders…. voila!

Lesser issues (more like suggestions) are that roaming profile seem to be an obvious missing integration that would fit perfectly into the home network so that Dad can easily sit at his sons computer and everything he needs such as favourites and documents is just there waiting for him.
WHS is also REALLY missing a download manager. If WHS is to be sold as the replacement for that ‘always on’ machine, then users should be able to send a download link to the WHS to download and store so they can then switch their computer off. I think if they were bold and integrated a bittorrent client too, this could really be a killer sales pitch as right now there is still a need to have other machines switched on overnight guzzling electricity.

Conclusion

As it stands, WHS is a great backup product, but ultimately a crippled solution right now. I envisaged the WHS to be a solution to all those problems and to be the stand-alone resource for content and backup in the house. Right now the solution can be pulled off better by a single Windows Vista (in fact a single Windows XP machine), and similarly with open source solutions such as FreeNAS and various Linux Distros, though admittedly with more configuration required and some extra software. If they can just make media distribution to the living room a focus of future features and provide those little applications such as a download manager that would kill off the need for other PC’s to be left on overnight…. then they could have a real killer app on their hands. I understand they want to make the product simple but the problems and suggestions I have made would add little to the interface, yet add a bundle to the functionality.

I have shown three other people the box in action and they have asked the same three questions only to be dissapointed every time – DivX, Media Distribution, Download Manager…. Stop being so stubborn and get it done!