Good morning. And Happy Thanksgiving Eve. That should be a thing, don't you think?
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There's been a lot of fallout over the Drive Extender cancellation as expected. I ended up writing about it in three different places, in yesterday's daily update, in a dedicated blog post, and then again in a news story this morning. Feedback about the decision has been universally negative, as I knew it would be. But what I didn't expect was that Microsoft wouldn't explain why it made this decision. Very odd.
A lot of my email involves what I think will happen to Windows Home Server, what I'll do, and what I think others should do. But as I've noted elsewhere, right now we just have to wait and see what WHS Vail looks like. There's a new beta coming in January. So I'll be holding tight. You should too.
One email suggested a bit of a disconnect, however. Microsoft isn't going to remove Drive Extender from the current version of WHS, and you won't get some Windows Update or whatever that removes data duplication and the single storage pool from your current product. This applies only to Vail and the next-gen "Colorado" servers.
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As I noted here previously, I've had various pre-release versions of iOS 4.2 running on the iPad over the past few months. But it wasn't until last night that my Apple TV was upgraded with a software update that made the other half of AirPlay (i.e. video "send") work; previously, you could use the iPad to send audio only to the Apple TV because the Apple TV's version of AirPlay didn't work with video.
But now it does.
What you're looking at there is me playing "Aliens" on the iPad, but broadcasting it via AirPlay to my HDTV via the Apple TV. This is pretty powerful stuff, though arguably I'd be better off doing this from a PC or Mac. (Which also works.)
It's worth noting that what Apple has done with AirPlay is essentially re-invent DLNA "push," which is part of Windows 7, where it is called Play To. If you think about the ways in which you might get content from a device or PC to the TV, there are basically two: Pull (in which a connected TV device looks for content, over the network, that is stored on a PC or whatever) and Push (which is what this is; you send the content from the containing device to another device for output). Apple has always done the second of these pretty well. Now it does both pretty well. (Previously, you could only push audio using Apple's solutions, but you could pull audio and video.)
Anyway, it looks nice.