Windows Touch for Windows 7

Microsoft released Windows 7 with multi-touch capabilities embedded into the operating system. The touch features built-in to Windows 7 heavily borrow from the Microsoft Surface technology shown to the world a couple of years ago. It has taken several months for PC vendors to build hardware to support the touch capabilities of the operating system. The extensive line-up of touch enabled devices shown at this year's CES conference ensure that it won't be long before we see all sorts of new touch enabled devices using Windows 7 touch features.

The power of fully integrated Windows touch in Windows 7 makes your PC experience more intimate and productive.

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Windows Touch for Windows 7

Microsoft released Windows 7 with multi-touch capabilities embedded into the operating system. The touch features built-in to Windows 7 heavily borrow from the Microsoft Surface technology shown to the world a couple of years ago. It has taken several months for PC vendors to build hardware to support the touch capabilities of the operating system. The extensive line-up of touch enabled devices shown at this year's CES conference ensure that it won't be long before we see all sorts of new touch enabled devices using Windows 7 touch features.

The power of fully integrated Windows touch in Windows 7 makes your PC experience more intimate and productive.

Windows 7 includes the following integrated touch features:
 Touch Gestures (editing flicks, scroll, tap, back, forward, drag, right click) including multi-touch gestures like rotate and zoom. Gestures work with any application, not just touch enabled ones.
 Updated taskbar layout that is optimized for both touch and non-touch operation. Things like Aero-peek and Aero-snap work great with touch.
 Touch keyboard where the keys light up when pressed and you can use multi-touch to hold down more than one key at a time like a real keyboard. You double tap the screen's edge for it to slide to center screen.
 Touch optimizations to core applications such as IE8 and Media Player help make the touch experience natural.

Cisco Unified Computing System

Cisco entered the server business in 2009 to the surprise of many. In order to compete, Cisco needed to differentiate itself from the pack. To this end it introduced the Unified Computing System (UCS). Cisco offers multiple form factors; blade servers, chassis server systems, rack-mount servers, fabric interconnects, network adapters and UCS Manager to manage it all. None of these products on the surface seem mind-blowing, but when you look under the covers and kick the tires, the technology gets tremendous.

Cisco UCS pushes the performance and innovation of the server market in a few areas:
 Cisco UCS B-250 M1 blade servers are built with industry leading performance.
 The Cisco Extended Memory Technology enables the servers to scale to twice (384GB) that of other server vendors.
 The Cisco UCS manager GUI can control up to 320 UCS B-200 server blades as a single system. It integrates compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system.
 Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card presents up to 128 virtual interfaces to the operating system on a single blade server. The virtual interfaces can be dynamically configured as either Ethernet interfaces or Fibre Channel adapters.
 Cisco VN-Link technology allows you to virtually cable a virtual adapter in VMware to a virtual switch port in the Cisco Nexus switch.

All of these innovations and advancements have made the Cisco UCS one of the hottest new technologies of 2009.

iPhone 3GS

Once again Apple kicks it up a notch with its release of the latest iPhone model, the 3GS. I wouldn't say the 3GS added any innovative features but it sure did add in many highly useful ones, such as voice control, video camera and MMS. The iPhone 3GS also added in security features that were holding back the mass adoption by enterprises, such as disk encryption, remote wipe and encrypted iPhone backups. Add to that the 2x performance gains, internal compass, 3MP camera and more flash storage and you get the best smart phone on the planet.

Heary, CCIE No. 7680, is the author of the Cisco NAC Appliance: Enforcing Host Security with Clean Access. He is a  security technologist with over 15 years in the IT field with 10 years focused on IT security. Heary is currently a Security Consulting Systems Engineer with Cisco, though the opinions expressed here are his own. Jamey is a member of Network World's Cisco Subnet blog community. He can be reached at jameyheary@yahoo.com.

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