Students can avail the facility of downloading Microsoft Software's for free by registering themselves at the Microsoft Dreamspark website. Dreamspark is an initiative taken by Microsoft giving students Microsoft professional tools at no charge. Under this students can download Microsoft visual studio, Expression Studio 4 , Sql server and many other. Students can even register as a windows mobile developer for free(99$ per year registration fee waived off) and publish their software’s at windows mobile market place . To register in Dreamspark you need to have a Live account and to verify yourself as an valid student either you need to have student identification number like “International Student Identity card “ Number or you need to have an activation code provided by Microsoft to your University .
Get Microsoft profession tools for FREE
Get Microsoft profession tools for FREE
Students can avail the facility of downloading Microsoft Software's for free by registering themselves at the Microsoft Dreamspark website. Dreamspark is an initiative taken by Microsoft giving students Microsoft professional tools at no charge. Under this students can download Microsoft visual studio, Expression Studio 4 , Sql server and many other. Students can even register as a windows mobile developer for free(99$ per year registration fee waived off) and publish their software’s at windows mobile market place . To register in Dreamspark you need to have a Live account and to verify yourself as an valid student either you need to have student identification number like “International Student Identity card “ Number or you need to have an activation code provided by Microsoft to your University .
How Microsoft Kinetic Works
A Microsoft patent, granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday, gives some insight into how Kinect works. In fact, the patent application sums up nicely, in one paragraph, what Kinect's sensors see and how Kinect sends that data to an Xbox.
To determine whether a target or object in the scene corresponds to a human target, each of the targets may be flood filled and compared to a pattern of a human body model. Each target or object that matches the human body model may then be scanned to generate a skeletal model associated therewith. The skeletal model may then be provided to the computing environment such that the computing environment may track the skeletal model, render an avatar associated with the skeletal model, and may determine which controls to perform in an application executing on the computing environment based on, for example, gestures of the user that have been recognized from the skeletal model. A gesture recognizer engine, the architecture of which is described more fully below, is used to determine when a particular gesture has been made by the user.
How HTML 5 Will shock up the web
Experts say that what HTML5 does behind the scenes--such as its network communications and browser storage features--could make pages load faster (particularly on sluggish mobile devices), make Web applications work more smoothly, and even enable browsers to read older Web pages more easily.
Many websites now act like desktop applications--Web-based office productivity suites and photo-editing tools, for example. But many of the sophisticated features of these sites depend on connections that developers create between different Web technologies, such as HTML, javascript, and cascading style sheets (CSS)--connections that don't always work perfectly. As a result, websites can be sluggish, may work differently from browser to browser, and can be vulnerable to security holes.
Bruce Lawson, who evangelizes about open Web standards at Opera Software, says that to make websites perform functions the Web wasn't originally designed for, developers must perform complex coding tasks that can easily introduce errors and make applications fail.
The group working on HTML5, Lawson says,
Does Microsoft have a secret weapon for Windows Phone 7?
That bit of news didn’t get picked up yesterday. I first heard about it from Mini-Microsoft this morning. The anonymous insider, in his thoughtson Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call today, mentioned something I hadn’t seen elsewhere:
Todd Bishop posted a memo from Windows PhoneWP7: application developers in the queue? We need to re-enforce the cool apps that we’ll have ready when WP7 is launched. In a move that has totally delighted me, Microsoft is giving every employee the ability to write and deploy WP7 applications (and, what, ability to get a device at launch, too?) - wow! Now’s the time to truly show off your stuff and write for WP7 and get your app out the door.
Invisibility cloak turns into reality
If the same thing could be replicated in visible light, Harry Potter fans would probably rush to the store to buy an invisibility cloak.
That reality is distant, but researchers are getting close.
Metamaterials act as designer atoms that can be used to bend light, so objects appear invisible. Unlike natural materials, metamaterials are artificial and depend on small resonators rather than atoms or molecules.
Semouchkina has made an invisibility cloak made of glass.In this case, the resonator is made of chalcogenide glass and is shaped like a cylinder. When run on computer models, the glass invisibility cloak works in the infrared range.
Previously, researchers have tried to create invisibility cloaks with metal rings and wires.
“Ours is the first to do the cloaking of cylindrical objects with glass,” Semouchkina said in a statement.
“Starting from these experiments, we want to move to higher frequencies and smaller wavelengths,” Semouchkina added. “The most exciting applications will be at the frequencies of visible light.”
Next, the Michigan Tech researcher is going to test out the invisibility cloak at microwave frequencies using ceramic resonators.
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku said on The Colbert Report that in the coming decade, we will have something resembling a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
rofessor Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews
Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere
Why I Fired Steve Jobs
In the annals of blown calls, it ranks somewhere between the publishers who turned down the first Harry Potter book and baseball umpire Jim Joyce’s instantly infamous perfect-game flub last week. It was the spring of 1985, and the board of Apple Computer decided it no longer needed the services of one Steven P. Jobs.
Where are the men who sent Steve Jobs packing today?
New Fiber Optic Technology Fastens Internet by 100 times
The technology, that may be in use only five or 10 years in the future, is being designed by Koby Scheuer of Tel Aviv University's (TAU) School of Electrical Engineering.
Scheuer has developed a new plastic-based technology for the nano-photonics market, which manufactures optical devices and components. His plastic-based "filter" is made from nanometre (a billionth of a metre) sized grooves embedded into the plastic.
When used in fibre optics cable switches, this new device will make our communication devices smaller, more flexible and more powerful, he says.
"Once Americans have a fibre optics cable coming into every home, all communication will go through it - telephone, cable TV, the Internet," adds Scheuer.
"But to avoid bottlenecks of information, we need to separate the information coming through into different channels. Our polymeric devices can do that in the optical domain - at a speed, quality and cost that the semi-conductor industry can't even imagine," Scheuer says.
In the next decade, fibre optic cables that now run from city to city will feed directly into every individual home. When that technology comes to light, the new plastic-based switches could revolutionise the way we communicate.
"Right now, we could transmit all of the written text of the world though a single fibre in a fibre optics cable in just a few seconds," says Scheuer.
"But in order to handle these massive amounts of communication data, we need filters to make sense of the incoming information. Ours uses a plastic-based switch, replacing hard-to-fabricate and expensive semi-conductors."
Semi-conductors, grown on crystals in sterile labs and processed in special ovens, take days and sometimes months to manufacture. They are delicate and inflexible as well, Scheuer explains.
"Our plastic polymer switches come in an easy-to-work-with liquid solution. Using a method called 'stamping,' almost any lab can make optical devices out of the silicon rubber mould we've developed."
His biggest hurdle, says Scheuer, is in convincing the communications industry that polymers are stable materials.
"There is a lot of prejudice in this industry against plastics. But this approach could take us to a new level of communication," the researcher says, according to a TAU release.
He also notes that the process is not much different from the way that mass numbers of DVDs are produced in a factory - except Scheuer works on a nano, not a "giant" micro, scale.
His device can also be used in the gyros of planes, ships and rockets; inserted into cell phones; and made a part of flexible virtual reality gloves so doctors could "operate" on computer networks over large distances.
These findings were published in Optics Express.
Motorola to split into three companies
The company has hired JPMorgan Chase, Centerview Partners and Goldman Sachs to seek buyers for its division that manufactures set-top boxes for cable television companies and radios to go into cellphone transmission towers. "The businesses up for sale could be worth as much as $5 billion," said Philip Cusick, Analyst for Macquarie Capital.
Last year, Motorola had said that it wanted to separate its struggling cellphone handset unit from the rest of the company, which includes a third business unit that sells two-way radios to businesses and government agencies. "Even if it sells the set-top box and communications equipment unit, the company would still likely separate the two remaining divisions," said Cusick. The company is not expected to begin the separation process, however, until the finances of the handset unit stabilize, perhaps in mid-2010. Some of the analysts said that a final split-up is not expected until 2011 at the earliest.
After a long slide, Motorola has high hopes for turning around its cellphone business. It recently introduced two smartphones, including the Droid, which is being promoted by Verizon Wireless. Motorola promises dozens more smartphones in the next year.
Motorola got into the cable box business in 2000, when it acquired General Instruments for $17 billion. Prospects for that business may be dimming, however, in part from more aggressive competition from its main rival Cisco Systems. Moreover, the rise of video delivered over the internet may undercut the traditional cable TV model.
Motorola's telecom equipment business has also had its share of troubles. It primarily supplies radios to wireless carriers that use an older technology. The company's bankers are also approaching private equity firms, including TPG and Silver Lake Partners.