2006/01/11

MPs demand wi-fi access in Houses of Parliament - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

MPs demand wi-fi access in Houses of Parliament - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

MP's want Wireless networking in the Houses of Parliament. Apart from the obvious security issues, the main difficulty in installing networking equipment is that the main Parliament building is listed (and to the highest level) which means installing anything is a complete PITA.

Portcullis House would be easier as it's a new building and almost certainly has networking installed that could easily be tapped and access points installed.

Wired News: Ultrawideband's Macworld Twirl

Wired News: Ultrawideband's Macworld Twirl

UWB is here, well almost - consumer devices are starting to appear in the US where the FCC has allowed the use or low power short range (wire replacement) UWB.

Of course in the UK it's a different story and UWB isn't allowed yet, though Ofcom have submitted proposals to CEPT (The EU radio standards lot) - but they are different from the US standards, so US kit isn't legal.

One day the EU will catch-up, but it might be a while, but by that time there may be various manufacturers of UWB chips and some conformance tests from the WiMeda Alliance (currently only Freescale have a UWB chipset).

Exchange moves to 64bit path - Network IT Week

Exchange moves to 64bit path - Network IT Week

Now that support for Exchange 5.5 has ended many people will be thinking of upgrading (there's a lot of 5.5 users out there), should they upgrade to Exchange 2003 or wait for 12?

Version 12 will ONLY run on 64bit architechtures which may be a good thing in terms of server software, but users will also be forced to upgrade their hardware.

It should mean a much more scalable platform. MS were thinking of replacing the datastore that Exchange users to MS SQL (or a derivative) - which may still happen, the current store uses the JET database engine (like Access), however with the move to 64bit the speed and other advantages aren't so apparent, which means they are likely to stick with what they've got for a while.

So it might be worth waiting and just jump to Exchange 12 on upgraded hardware.