MSDN Architecture Webcast: Patterns & Practices Live: Enterprise Library Sneak Preview—Level 200
Start Time: Thursday, September 30, 2004 11:00 AM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
End Time: Thursday, September 30, 2004 12:30 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032258461&Culture=en-US
Microsoft Time Zone conveniently runs in the system tray and allows you to easily view the date and time in various locations around the world. You can also quickly and easily add your own personal locations to customize Microsoft Time Zone the way you want.
Download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bff59fcf-3148-40b8-a286-fe7274f6e4d8&DisplayLang=en
Calculator Plus offers conversions between different measurement units for area, temperature, volume and more. It also includes all the mathematical functions offered in Microsoft Calculator.
It's really cool
Download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/outreach/dnloads/calcplus.mspx
Scalability Experts have recently published a great white paper (PDF) that compares SQL Server 2000 running on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and benchmarks both versions against known loads. The whitepaper uses a Unisys ES7000 mainframe-class server using Itanium 2 processors. The most interesting results were using the 64-bit edition of Analysis Services, where they demonstrated far higher headroom in terms of number of members and partition processing. Some of the most severe limitations of the 32-bit edition will be eradicated when SQL Server 2005 arrives, due to the rearchitecture of much of the OLAP engine, but the enhanced throughput of a 64-bit environment will still have a major effect.
The paper doesn't go into deep technical detail on how the benchmarks were conducted, which is a pity, but if you're looking for a broad technical overview of how the introduction of 64-bit will improve SQL Server scalability, it's not a bad read at all.