“Move over, Bionic Man. Engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle have come up with a nanotech device that Steve Austin would have loved: a contact lens that displays images, letting a person surf the Web, read e-mail, scan a spreadsheet or play a video game, all without using a computer screen.

The lens has not undergone human trials, but it has been tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes without ill effects.”

Click here for this interesting story posted by Washington Post.

The research has been reported widely in the medical community and in the press. According to the uwnews. org “In computer laboratory bench tests, the research team used an inexpensive software radio to intercept and capture signals sent from the implantable device. They were able to obtain detailed information about a hypothetical patient, including name, diagnosis, date of birth and medical ID number. Researchers could determine the make and model of the device and access real-time electrocardiogram results as well as data on the hypothetical patient’s heart rate and cardiac activity.”

You can read the entire news story here.

Energy Star offers a free tool to network administrators that you might want to check out. It’s called EZ GPO and doesn’t have any licensing fees. EZ GPO will allow you to centrally manage your Windows XP/2000 client workstations through Group Policy.

According to the Energy Star Web site, here’s how EZ GPO works.

• - Uses an automated installer
• - Contains one binary application that runs as a service and one that runs on login under each user’s account
• - Reads the desired power management settings that are set using GPOs in integer and string value format
• - Allows changes to power management settings using Microsoft’s core Application Programming Interface
• - Intelligently selects only capable computers when activating “system standby.” (Computers generally capable of using system standby reliably run Windows 2000 or XP with Pentium 4 chip sets capable of S3 standby mode.)

You can download EZ GPO here.

Also check out EZ GPO Installation Instructions and FAQs.

In case you are wondering about Energy Star. It is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s purpose is to save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices.

Check out his prediction and the reasoning behind why in his opinion Microsoft will leapfrog Vista and change its OS business.

So how do you manage services in Server Core? Obviously, you use the command shell. Sometimes I wonder if we are going back to the old DOS days. Exchange Server 2007 is a major step backwards for administrators who expect to manage servers using GUI. Server Core also doesn’t has a GUI and you must learn and use the command shell. I have been telling my students for more than a decade, if you want to become a successful network administrator you need to know MS-DOS well. In other words, you need to know the command line interface well.

You know that sooner or later someone will come up with some GUI tools that should have been part of the Exchange Server 2007 or Server Core in the first place. Well, a fellow Directory Services MVP from Israel by the name Guy Teverovsky has written a GUI tool for the Server Core. Check out his blog for all the details.

Here are some of the features of the tool.

• Product Activation
• Configuration of display resolution
• Clock and time zone configuration
• Remote Desktop configuration
• Management of local user accounts (creation, deletion, group membership,
  passwords)
• Firewall configuration
• WinRM configuration
• IP configuration
• Computer name and domain/workgroup membership
• Installation of Server Core features/roles

The tool can be downloaded from Guy’s blog here.