Microsoft and Harrah’s Entertainment introduced a high-tech interactive bar table Wednesday that lets patrons order drinks, watch YouTube videos, play touch-screen games and even flirt with each other.

Not a bad price either, though I doubt it’s a money maker for Microsoft:

The six rectangular tables with built-in 30-inch flat screens using Microsoft Surface technology were installed in a lounge at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with custom applications built for Harrah’s.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the units sold for a base price of $10,000.

In fact Cloud Computing simply means moving things to big and bigger Data Centers. Data Centers are anything but fluffy. They are huge, energy-sucking giants — many the size of small towns. They are environmental disasters and the only thing fluffy about them is the C02 emissions they belch out. Data Centers will in time according to The Uptime Institute become bigger polluters than the aviation industry. Data Centers require massive amounts of energy to operate — often as much energy is used to cool the centers as to power them. All that heat has to go somewhere. If you think your air conditioning unit is an ecological no-no, then consider the AC demands on a data center the size of 5 football fields […]

The argument at the end is that efficient email archiving management can reduce your stored email by 90%.

[…] Netflix seems to be the winner in terms of pricing: the set-top box should leave all competition behind with its $99 price tag, with a $9 monthly subscription, and an improved sound and image quality. And that’s not all, if we consider the installation issue is in fact not an issue, but a very simple process.

The top consumers of your laptop’s power are the CPU, the GPU, the DVD, and WiFi — in that order.

I was surprised about the WiFi — I didn’t expect that to use so much power.

Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs.

We use Asterisk at Blend and it’s been a dream. We spent $2,000 (75% of that was on really nice handsets, which you could buy cheaper) and created a 9- or 10-node phone system that companies were trying to sell for ten times that. We run it off a commodity white-box computer with a $400 card in it (and this is only for POTS — if you went pure Internet-phone, you wouldn’t even need this).

We have had virtually no problems with it, and we have all the features of some of the really high-end office phone systems:

• Changing the hold music consists of dropping MP3s in a directory
• When we get a voice mail, an email gets sent with the message attached as a WAV
• We have a Web interface for voice mail, which shows us all the messages with their originating numbers, date, time, and length so we can asynchronously browse through our voice mail.
• We have a VRU for off-hours (“Press 1 for Deane, press 2 for Joe…” etc.)

While this all may seem very mundane, try paying for it sometime — the costs will surprise you.

We’ve had such a great experience with it that we briefly flirted with the idea of spinning off a company to implement these systems in Sioux Falls. We figured we could mark systems up two or three times our cost and still come in way, way under the larger outfits.

Alas, we quickly realized that phone system support would be a different animal than we were used to. If someone’s phone system goes down, you need to be sure you have a truck, a ladder, and a human to drive over there pronto. The investment of capital and stress was more than we were looking for.

“System optimization service” is what we’re calling a computer that comes without crapware. And by characterizing hard drive space as “valuable” and memory in need of conservation, Sony is effectively digging its own grave. I mean, do they not see that consumers notice this? If this new $50 feature “maximizes system performance,” then what does that imply of all the Sony laptops sold before it?

A video from 2001 from Tom’s Hardware. They run quake 3 from different mobo/cpu’s that were very common in that era and then take the cpu cooler (heatsink and/or fan) off. Its actually quite interesting to see which ones survive and which ones burn.

Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

That’s an 8-way box with 8GB of RAM. To run a single CMS. For a public high school.

This is a $3,000 machine. It is four months old.

For the record, in all my years of working with Windows, I have never had a machine go so totally non-responsive on me that I had to pave it. I had one once that locked up randomly every few days, and I paved that one, but I’ve never actually bricked a Windows machine.

No real point here, except to say that in my experience, Macs’ supposed superior reliability is a myth. Macs crash too, and based on my experience with all the Macs around me, they crash at about the same frequency as my Windows machine, which is to say rarely, but no better.

Enjoy your speedy broadband Web access while you can.

The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found.

“Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it’s back to the bad old days of dial-up,” says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. “The cool stuff that you’ll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won’t do it.”

The SiCortex SC072 “Catapult” is the personal version of the SiCortex family of revolutionary HPC computer systems. The system is a complete 72-processor cluster packaged in a whisper-quiet, low-power desk side cabinet using less than 200 watts of power. Each SC072 has a 48-GByte memory system, 2-gigabit Ethernet ports, and up to three (3) optional PCI Express™ cards, each operating at a peak speed of 2 GBytes/sec. The cabinet has space for up to six (6) industry-standard disk drives.

This is the desktop version of their SC5832 which is a Top500 machine running over 5,000 nodes and 8TB of RAM.

Disclaimer: SiCortex is a Blend client.

The Mac has never experienced sustained growth at this sort of pace. Breaking this quarterly sales record isn’t a fluke — it’s part of a trend. What we’re seeing now is what Mac enthusiasts have been hoping to see for 20 years: more people deciding to buy a Mac. The question now is how big can this trend get.

I think Microsoft is boned in a big way, I really do. Vista has been a flop, and I don’t just say that off-handedly to try and be like everyone else. We have Vista on one machine here in the office — our conference room — so I use it off and on. I can say without reservation that I see zero reason to upgrade.

What’s sad about Vista is that it isn’t a spectacular flop for me — that might be commendable. My experience is worse: there’s just nothing to get excited about. You can’t even say Microsoft failed trying to do something amazing. To me, Vista is a XP with a different theme that makes me go looking for stuff that I used to be able to find.

So, anyway, hats off to Mac enthusiasts. You held out, kept the faith, and I think the next five years will reward you. And someday the Raiders will win the Superbowl again, and perhaps I’ll know what you feel like right now.

From the press release:

Clad in hand-stitched, saddle-grade premium French leather, each Lenovo ThinkPad Reserve Edition notebook is individually numbered and comes with live, round-the-clock executive-class service and support. Each ThinkPad Reserve user is provided access to dedicated, specially-trained Executive Support staff, available at the touch of a button, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to support every aspect of the ThinkPad Reserve Edition computing experience.

Seriously — the whole laptop is encased in leather. It looks more like a portfolio, just thicker.

Are you sick of talking to a different person every time you call tech support?

The Executive Support staff specialist accompanies the customer throughout the lifecycle of his or her ThinkPad Reserve Edition notebook PC, and handles everything the customer needs to get their PC up and running and to keep it that way.

For ongoing support, each owner is provided concierge phone access to the Executive Support staff, with all calls answered within four rings in the owner’s native language.

[Insert the, “You wouldn’t need that with a Mac…” jokes here.]

With no mobile quad-core parts in existence, the Xtreme 917V Accelerator turns to desktop CPUs, giving you a choice between the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Q6700. Pricing starts at $3,359. Other niceties on this gaming laptop/mobile workstation include: a glossy widescreen 17-inch display (up to 1920x1200 resolution), one or two Nvidia GeForce Go 87000M GT or 7950 GTX graphics cards, and up to three hard drives in RAID 0, 1 or 5 configurations.

Nevermind cooling, how do they physically fit all those parts in a laptop case?