Turns out, the BIOS settings were backwards — if you DISABLE VT in the BIOS it is actually enabled. Disabling VT in BIOS allowed me to install Hyper-V.

This is with the latest PowerEdge 2900 BIOS (v 2.6.1)  and 1 dual-core Xeon CPU.  The problem also existed with BIOS version 1.5.1

1. Figure Out US Carrier Subsidies and Partnerships. This is something that EVERY successful smartphone company in the US must do — 99.9% of the US market simply WILL NOT BUY AN UNSUBSIDIZED PHONE, EVER.   US consumers get their smartphones by walking into a Verizon Wireless or Cingular or T-Mobile storefront (or booth) and signing up for a contract/getting a phone on the spot.  NONE OF THESE CONSUMERS ARE EVEN BEING OFFERED THE CHOICE OF A NOKIA SMARTPHONE. The US is an important market and it is going to be impossible for Nokia smartphones to succeed without a US presence.
2. Revitalize Symbian. This means, in many cases, UI improvements need to be copied from the iPhone — menus need to be simplified, boot time needs to be dramatically reduced, lag needs to be reduced, browsing needs to be improved, touchscreen support needs to be made drastically more user-friendly, sensitive, and intuitive.  Multitouch support needs to be added and if there is a way in software to add multitouch to existing devices, that needs to be done (there is a Symbian touchscreen game that at least appears to support multitouch).
3. The Ovi Store needs dramatic improvements. First off, the enormous library of existing S60 freeware apps need to be added to the Ovi store — Nokia should go so far as to actually PAY developers to put applications in the store.  Nokia needs to stop worrying about profiting by charging developers fees to add applications to the store and taking a percentage of commercial apps — IF THE SYMBIAN PLATFORM DIES THESE FEES WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING.  Charging development fees on a platform no one uses is not a workable business model.    Second, the store needs far more applications, the Ovi application needs to be more responsive, and installing an application needs to be faster.
4. Navigation needs to be free on every GPS-enabled Nokia phone. Again, trying to charge for add-ons to a platform that is essentially dead is not a workable business model;  Nokia needs to defeat the iPhone first and then they will have the luxury of trying to increase profit margins by charging for add-ons; you can’t sell add-ons to a phone nobody buys.
5. Nokia needs to make several Android phones. Nokia has some of the best hardware engineering skills in the world;  they  should show off these skills by making the best Android smartphones on the market, and the internal competition should encourage improvements in Maemo and Symbian.  This also hedges Nokia’s position if the Maemo and Symbian product development teams fail.
6. 5800 Needs Firmware Updates to Become iPhone Killer. The Symbian and Ovi Store improvements mentioned above should help this, as should carrier relationships — we need news stories about the things the 5800 can do that the iPhone can’t.  We need better browsing, better apps, more responsiveness, and a better overall user experience.

• 14 inch non-glossy screen with low-power technology, wide angle visibility, and decent resolution. Smaller screens than this are hard to see, glossy screens are hard to see in bright conditions, and low resolutions like 800×600 make it difficult to use many applications and websites that were designed for larger screens. Daylight readability would be nice if possible.
• Correspondingly full-sized keyboard — this is one place where many netbooks fall short, with keyboards that are simply too small to comfortably use.
• TouchPoint(tm) style nipple-mouse with separate well-protected/well-designed touchpad and at least 3 mouse buttons - many notebook touchpads are awful, and will interpret an accidental brush of your palm while typing as a click or drag, with sometimes disastrous consequences.  Nipple mice take some getting used to but don’t have this problem and can be very nice once you are used to them.
• A Very Fast , decent-sized SSD drive -  we can gain a LOT of performance by going with a fast SSD instead of a hard disk, and it is silent, and it will use less power.
• A “Middle of the road” processor and chipset. Right now, there are a few solutions (like Atom) with very low power, but also poor performance.  Intel has not yet released a dual-core notebook/netbook processor, with dual-core 8-watt atom 330s only being sold in desktop or embedded systems.   On the other hand, most Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs are 35 watts, and the GPUs and northbridges could easily double that to 70 watts, consuming a lot of battery and requiring loud fans.  I propose a CPU/GPU/chipset combination that includes a multi-core CPU with decent performance (perhaps like the extremely expensive 17 watt Core 2 Duo 7700) but a total thermal dissipation of around 35 watts for CPU, GPU, and chipset.
• A very large (9-cell at least) battery — we’d like this sucker to run on battery a _long_ time, hopefully 8 hours at least.
• Integrated DVD/blueray/CD burner/reader, gigabit, modem, 802.11a/b/g/n with external antenna connector,  bluetooth, infrared, at least 6 usb2 ports, webcam, microphone, speakers
• An integrated ramdisk OS on the BIOS chip (like Asus provides) that allows web browsing even if your hard disk dies
• Quiet fans, and a Silent mode – if there is a fan that can get loud (when you _really_ need that processing power), there should also be a silent mode where the CPU will slow down/throttle to cool itself rather than letting the fan get louder..
• Solid construction with well-thought-out design.  IBM’s innovative keyboard drains (where liquids spilled through the keyboard can drain out the bottom instead of getting into the system) come to mind. Solid titanium hinges, impact-resistant design, etc.

I can’t wait till somebody builds something like this.

• Glossy screens. If you wanted a mirror, you would buy a mirror, not a laptop. These make the screen VERY hard to read because you’re staring at a reflection of your own face (and the room behind you). I have read some other people who agree with this; their general idea was that glossy screens look shiny and new when someone goes to Best Buy and looks over all the laptops on display. I actually returned one notebook because had a glossy screen; as far as I’m concerned, a glossy screen makes a notebook essentially unusable.
• Widescreen aspect ratio. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of the documents I read (or work on) are not very wide — they are TALL. That’s why mice have up-down scrollwheels and not left-right scrollwheels — because most of the time documents are _vertically_ too large for the screen they are on, not _horizontally_. The only legitimate reason to use a widescreen aspect ratio is for watching widescreen movies — I don’t watch movies on my laptop. If anything, I would like to buy a tallscreen notebook so that I can spend less time scrolling. Widescreen aspect ratios also cause a lot of problems including:
  • Looking horribly stretched and blurred whenever something (a movie, a game, etc) needs a normal 4:3 aspect ratio.
  • Incompatibilities with virtual machine software
  • Incompatibilities with different operating systems
  • Incompatibilities or just plain ugliness when using Remote Desktop or similar between widescreen and non-widescreen PCs

So, the engineer visits DNStuff.com or one of these other awful sites, plugs in the domain name, and gets printed out a 12-page report giving them a warning about their mailserver’s reverse DNS and some suggestions on how to fix it.

However, in many many cases, this report is wrong, and here’s why:  The way reverse DNS checks typically work, when the mailserver makes an outgoing connection to a foreign server (to deliver a message), the foreign server checks for a PTR/RDNS hostname record associated with the IP your mailserver is connecting from.  It then does a forward dns lookup on this hostname and tries to confirm that it resolves to the same IP. If it does, you pass the test. There is absolutely no way, whatsoever, that a web-based DNS tool could possibly know what IP your mailserver makes outgoing connections on.  What most of these tools do is check your MX records and assume that the IPs that you receive incoming mail on (from the MX records) are the same as the IPs you send outgoing mail from.  Many people these days use incoming mail filters that are not necessarily on the same IP addresses as their outgoing mail server.
The right way to test this is to do the same test manually — first, figure out what external IP your mailserver makes outgoing connections on (by hitting www.whatismyip.org, for example).  Then, use nslookup or host to figure out if there is a reverse DNS record for this IP.  If there isn’t, that is your problem right there.  If there is, then use nslookup again to check the _forward_ lookup on that same hostname — this must match your outgoing connection IP.

• A Symbian OS Series 60 phone — these are primarily Nokia phones, you can get a used lower-end one on Ebay. These are all GSM phones, so you can use them with any GSM-based cell carrier; just pop in your SIM card.



• The N95, despite it’s $550 price tag, is quite attractive for mobile robotics platforms because of features like:
• GPS
• 3-axis accelerometer
• 2 cameras — a 5 megapixel camera facing forwards, and a 640×480 camera facing backwards
• Up to 8 (or maybe even 12!) GB of storage
• Wifi, bluetooth, and IR
• 3G and EDGE wireless internet access
• Other much cheaper Series 60 phones can also be used for robotics — for instance the Nokia 6620 goes for about $120, it still has bluetooth, a camera, and internet support.
• A cellular plan (I am currently using AT&T Wireless) with unlimited internet access is probably a good idea, although with some of these phones you can also use free wifi.
• Pys60 installed on the phone- this is the Python programming language for Series 60 phones. I used this instead of C++ because the development cycle is much faster/easier. This is open source software, provided free of charge.
• Movino, which is a totally awesome free software cellphone-to-internet client/server video streaming system. Movino has a part that runs on the phone which captures video and audio from the phone’s camera and mic and sends it to the server, which can then stream it to viewers live.
• A Mini SSC II Serial Servo Controller from Scott Edwards Electronics Inc. He sells this for $44 — I recommend also getting the pack of “connectamundos”, wire segments with nice connectors pre-crimped onto the ends, for another $6. This comes with a snap for a 9V battery to power it, but the 9v will not power the servos — two additional leads are provided to connect to a power supply for the servos in the 4.5V – 6V range.

• An eb501-SER bluetooth serial port from A7 Engineering, for $49. This is nice because it can run off a very wide range of power supplies (5.5V – 14V; you could run it off the same battery as the Mini SSC II.) and it is also very small.

• Any robotics platform that utilizes standard 3-pin (PWM) hobby servos and electronic speed controllers. I found a 4wd RC car at Micro Center for $49.99 that uses an ESC to control the motor and a single servo for steering; the only problem with this platform is that it is too fast and needs to be geared down a little bit.