Everyone that owns an XBox and is an XBox Live customer has been talking about the New XBox Experience (NXE) this week. The XBox dashboard got a full overhaul and new features were added to the platform (what a great selling point that these console can have their firmware upgraded – I think “offline” consoles are pretty much dead these days).
The Avatars are definitely a strike back at the Wii’s Mii.
The guys over at CincySQL forwarded this link to me (thanks Chris & Matt). This is a plug in for Visual Studio that helps with several tasks for SQL Developers using the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) that gets installed as part of the client developer tools with SQL Server (both 2005 & 2008). If you’re a SQL Developer you may want to check it out over on codeplex:
http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper
I came across this article this week during lunch. I had no idea that Russia had a space shuttle program. Check it out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7738489.stm
It looks a good deal like ours, but supposedly was much better. In the end the shuttles are not a great platform to get things in the space. Russia has always had us beat in the heavy lifting department. My favorite part of the article:
“*Years after a sceptical Pentagon had given up on the shuttle, even as a delivery truck for spy satellites, the Russian officials continued whispering to journalists that the US orbiter had a secret capability - to make an undetected “dive” into the Earth’s atmosphere and suddenly glide over Moscow dropping nuclear bombs.