Microsoft Corp.co-founder Bill Gates said he supports chief executive officer Steve Ballmer, as rival Apple Inc. overtook Microsoft last month to become the technology company with the highest market capitalization.

“I happen to like the things that Steve’s doing,” Gates said when asked if he had confidence in Ballmer, according to the transcript of an interview for broadcast later on Sunday on ABC’s This Week programme. “It’s not my full-time work, but as a board member, you know, I see a lot of great things going on.”

Apple became the most valuable technology firm in the world on 26 May. Cupertino, California-based Apple’s market capitalization was $230.70 billion (Rs10.8 trillion) as of 11 June; Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft’s was $224.90 billion.

Asked why Apple overtook Microsoft, Gates said: “Oh, Microsoft is doing a lot of great stuff,” and that the opportunities in the software industry are pretty phenomenal.

“The way that people think about TV, the way they think about reading, about learning, software is going to revolutionize that,” said Gates.

Asked about the economy Gates said the President can’t just pull the levers and make the economy take off. He said reducing the US budget deficit will be difficult. “It’s a tricky thing, because almost everybody agrees we need to keep spending up, you know, not take all country deficits to zero right away. But over time, you have to move in that direction,” he said.

Gates also repeated his call for the US government to increase spending on clean-energy research and development. “Without such research, the problem we’ll run into is that we’ll have more crises like the oil spill and we’ll have the supply disruption. We’ll start to see more and more effects of the climate problem. The costs will go up because you’re looking for oil in harder and harder places,“ Gates said

Courtesy Livemint(Joshua Zumbrun) June14

Now no more wait, Microsoft has announced the imminent availability of public beta version of Service pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 at TechEd 2010 annual conference held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA (June 7-10 2010).

” Today, at TechEd, we are pleased to announce that by the end of July we will be releasing the public beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. ” - Microsoft Corporation

According to them expectation seems that we will be having SP1 Public Beta in the next one or two weeks.

Current assembly build tag for Windows 7/ Server 2008 R2 SP1 as follows :
6.1.7601.16562.win7sp1_beta.100603-1800 – actual build in win7sp1_beta branch
6.1.7601.16561.win7sp1_beta.100527-1447 – previous build
6.1.7601.16560.win7sp1_beta.100524-1800 – previous build
6.1.7601.16559.win7sp1_beta.100506-1349 – previous build

Over the years of continues improvement of Microsoft Infrastructures and its business tactics, many company choose Microsoft products over Google apps. The saying of some of its consumer is Google is just focusing on its Advertising business and they released Google apps to serve people more advertising. With Hidden Costs. Document Fidelity. Security Concerns. Lack of Roadmap. and no support.

Here are some of the point which has been collected from some of the old Google consumers by Microsoft Itself.

“Google Apps is not an enterprise-class solution. It’s a consumer solution, and we did not want to risk our business on it.” – Credit Immobilier de France

“The Google applications just weren’t robust enough to compete with Office Outlook functionality,” – James C. Nolan Law Firm

“Many of the things you normally expect to be able to do at an enterprise IT management level were not available with Google Apps—things like the ability to easily manage groups and users.” Vinci PLC

“Google has Google Docs and Google Sites, but what’s the point of having Google Docs when everyone is working in Office Word…If I threw Google in the mix, I’d have to code all that integration.“ Kellwood

“The ability to have an archiving solution that integrates more fully with our e-mail system gives us a level of integration that we never had before when we using the Google Apps platform” – Phaeton Automotive Group

“The Microsoft online and offline applications complement each other. Google is online only and posed compatibility and formatting issues” Competitiveness.

“When we looked at the actual difference in price over a 12-month period, and the amount of grief we’d have gone through with Google, sticking with Microsoft was the clear-cut choice.” -SBFI

“Yes, we might have saved one or two dollars per month going with Google Apps, but it wasn’t worth it. Selecting software that makes it more difficult to work is the wrong way to save money.” – SaaS IT

Apart from these there are more companies which values Microsoft Solution effective over Google Apps. – Case study.

It has been 18 months since Microsoft has launched mobile barcode technology, “Microsoft Tag”. In that time, more than one billion Tags have been printed by people and businesses all over the world, more than 20 million magazines with Tags were in the hands of U.S. consumers. Today, Microsoft has made an announcement of its final availability.

This specifically means you will be able to generate and use Tags that link to our standard scenarios and use the reader application at no cost. By simply going to Tag.Microsoft.com, you can create Tags and deliver rich interactive experiences on mobile phones.

Microsoft also has a plan to offer the ability to create richer, more powerful, and more effective solutions and experiences through a variety of value-added services, such as advanced reporting and analytics and real-time location services.

Coming out of beta Microsoft has updated the website, the Tag Campaign Manager and improved our Tag Reader clients and also introduced some cool new features that will enhance customers’ ability to create, execute and track creative Tag campaigns:

• A device ID feature will allow marketers to deliver a more personalized consumer experience across multiple Tags. For example, consumers can now receive customized content, such as a coupon or other offer from a retail outlet, based on Tags they’ve previously scanned.
• A new .tag file format will make it easier to print and manage a large number of different Tags as part of a broad campaign deployment. Developers of professional printing programs can now generate the Tag graphic on the fly as part of their solution
• Tag has always been available worldwide and has been distributed and deployed globally. They have added localization in five new languages which include: French, Spanish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Italian
• They will be introducing a beta Heat Map feature in the next few days, available in the Tag Campaign Manager, that will help companies better measure Tag usage by location and make more informed decisions about their Tag campaigns and overall marketing spend

You can find more about how to implement these features and more over at the Microsoft Tag website. (via MSDN blog)

]]> http://winspark.net/2010/05/27/microsoft-tag-comes-out-of-beta-tag/feed/ 0 http://winspark.net/2010/05/25/google-providing-a-secure-search-through-secure-socket-layer-ssl/ http://winspark.net/2010/05/25/google-providing-a-secure-search-through-secure-socket-layer-ssl/#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 15:32:31 +0000 Mr. Spark (admin) http://winspark.net/?p=1667

Are you scared of being caught by your ISP or any other third party user while having a personal search about your required private data . Google has made a good incremented by providing Secure Socket Layer over their search engine’s protocol.

Now search your required information by just changing the protocol from http:// to https://. Now you have to type https://google.com on your addressbar rather then the traditional http://google.com, and your required query and your search data will by encrypted through Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

Whats SSL ?

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can’t be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).

Why SSL ?

SSL encrypts the communication channel between Google and a searcher’s computer. When search traffic is encrypted, it can’t be read by third parties trying to access the connection between a searcher’s computer and Google’s servers.

Caution :
Your Google experience using SSL search might be slighly slower than you’re used to because your computer needs to first establish a secure connection with Google. – From Google explanation of SSL Search

In this race of Silicon Valley, every organizations wants to hold the current wave of the mobile technology. Whereas Microsoft is leading in this race holding the Windows Phone 7 then why apple will sit behind quietly. Apple is moving its development and presenting all over a world to beat the Windows Phone 7, its iPhone OS 4 on April 8th,10AM Pacific.

Whatever it will be, but everyone is sure that it will be the bestest of iPhone 3G which will also may have 3.5G or 4G capability. whether it will be capable to stand in front of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 or will introduce unacquainted mobile technology, we will see the discloser on April 8th.

]]> http://winspark.net/2010/04/06/welcome-apple-iphone-os-4/feed/ 1 http://winspark.net/2010/01/29/watch-ishqiya-on-iphone/ http://winspark.net/2010/01/29/watch-ishqiya-on-iphone/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:55:24 +0000 Mr. Spark (admin) http://winspark.net/?p=1519

Vigyapan Technologies has launched the first ever iPhone application for the film which includes photoes, videos, songs, information about the cast and crew of the movie and is integrated with Twitter and Facebook.

It plays on the Storyline, revealing facets of the movie, situation in the plot and other interesting facts. It also contains behind-the-scenes photographs, giving moviegoers a unique chance to experience what happens on the sets.

From : Hindustaan Times

Now a days transfer of Application and data access over WAN is slow in Branch Offices. By this nature of slow connection which results the dissatisfaction of  user and on their productivity though improving network performance is expensive and difficult to implement.

The Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems introduce BranchCache, which enables content from file and Web servers on a wide area network (WAN) to be cached on computers at a local branch office. It not only speeds up access to data and documents from Web and file servers by reducing web and file access over a WAN link, it frees up bandwidth over the WAN link for other uses.

BranchCach has two operating modes:

• Hosted Cache mode
• Distributed Cache mode.

Hosted Cache mode specifies a local server for caching content downloaded form a content server over the WAN. Caching occurs at the very first request from a user in a branch office. A user from the same branch office subsequently requests for the same content will establish a connection with and retrieve the cached content from the local Hosted Cache server. Host Cache mode is recommended for a branch with more than 50 clients and does require some form of infrastructure for caching and accessing the content in a local server.

Distributed Cache mode, on the other hand, is for a small branch without a local file server that can be used as a hosted cache server. This configuration caches content downloaded from a content server over the WAN at a user’s computer. Caching occurs at the very first request from a user in a branch office. A user from the same branch office subsequently requests for the same content will locate the cached content by broadcasting, and then retrieve the content from that user’s computer in the local area network. Peer-to-peer sharing is the basic idea. There is no central repository in the branch. There are no requirements for servers or services in the branch office beyond client computers running Windows 7.

This is how the BranchCache™ process works:

1. A Windows 7 client connects to the content server in the central office and requests a file (or file segment) exactly as it would if it were retrieving the file without using BranchCache™.
2. The content server authenticates and authorizes the client exactly as it would without BranchCache™. If successful, it returns content metadata over the same channel that data would normally have been sent. If this is the first time any client from the branch office network is requesting a file not already cached on the local network, the client retrieves the file directly from the content server.
3. In Distributed Cache mode, the client sends a request on the local network for the required file by using the Web Services Discovery (WS-Discovery) multicast protocol. The segment hashes provide a unit of discovery. This helps reduce the total number of lookups performed for a given piece of content (versus looking up each block). The client that previously cached the file sends the file to the requesting client. The data is encrypted using a key derived from the hashes sent by the content server, as part of the content metadata. The client decrypts the data, computes the hashes on the blocks received from the first client, and ensures that it is identical to the block hashes provided as part of the content metadata by the content server. This ensures that the content has not been modified.

While in Hosted Cache mode, the client uses the hashes in the metadata to search for the file in the Hosted Cache server. A key difference in Hosted Cache mode is that a client establishes an SSL connection with the Hosted Cache server, and it offers content identifiers over this encrypted channel. The Hosted Cache server connects to the client and retrieves the set of blocks that are not cached.

To implement BranchCache, client computers must be running Windows® 7, with the BranchCache feature enabled. Web servers and file servers must be running Windows Server 2008 R2, with the BranchCache feature enabled

Useful Links :

Download

• BranchCache Executive Overview (.doc)
• BranchCache Technical Overview (.doc)
• BranchCache Security Guide (.doc)

• BranchCache Deployment Guide
• BranchCache Migration Guide

Video guide

• Remote Connectivity in Windows 7 (Snack)
• Windows 7 Enterprise Demo of BranchCache

Microsoft has announced to the visitors of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Project Natal will go on sale in November 2010 it will work on all existing Xbox 360 consoles.

Project Natal was first announced at the E3 video games conference in June last year. It is the system allows users to play games controlled by body movements and speech rather than a handheld device.

Natal’s body gesturing system relies on cameras, sensors, microphones and software to understand voice commands and capture the motions of a player as they jump, kick or wave.

Mr Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices at Microsoft, said that – “With Project Natal we are allowing you to have the experience you want with technology that’s natural for you,” but they did not say how much Natal would cost or which countries it would launch in.

Links :

• E3 2009 Announcement
• Project natal Homepage

]]> http://winspark.net/2010/01/07/project-natal-on-the-air/feed/ 0 http://winspark.net/2009/12/16/all-about-microsoft-indic-language-input-tool/ http://winspark.net/2009/12/16/all-about-microsoft-indic-language-input-tool/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:05:02 +0000 Mr. Spark (admin) http://winspark.net/?p=1417

Now a days we feel that for many languages like Hindi, entering text on PC is difficult. And there are many products and tools in market out there today through which we can enter text in hindi by any translation widget. But most products have some barrier – e.g. some require users to know a fixed transliteration scheme; some others allow free form transliteration, but work only on webpages etc.

But Microsoft peoples has made their efforts to create a tool that can bring translations to the desktop such that it can be used to enter text in any application on the PC, and that is a key focus of the Indic Language Input Tool.

Currently it support six languages – Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

By using this tool you can enter text in Indic language in any webpages, Take an example below.

You can download this tool in two different versions through Indic Language tool Homepage.

Some FAQ regarding Indic Language tool.

Q1 : How to Install Web version ?

Ans :

1. Select Language.
2. click on Install Web version Button .
3. Follow the instructions according to your browser.

• Internet Explorer.
  • Right-click on the language name above and select Add to Favorites…
  • Click Yes on the security alert dialog.
  • On IE8: Select Favorites Bar from the Create in drop down.
  • On IE7 or IE6: Select Links from the Create in drop down. Make sure the Links
  • toolbar is visible.
  • Click OK.
• Mozilla Firefox
  • Drag the language name above to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Safari
  • Drag the language name above to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Google Chrome
  • Make sure the Bookmarks toolbar is visible.
  • Drag the language name above to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Opera
  • Right-click on the language name above and select Bookmark Link…
    Click OK on the Add Bookmark dialog.

Q2 : How to install Desktop version ?

Ans :

1. Select Language.
2. Click on Install desktop version.
3. Click on Install button and download the Setup.

Q3 : How to use it on desktop application.

Ans :

Do the following to use Microsoft ILIT in any application, such as Microsoft Wordpad or Windows Live messenger.

1. Open the application in which you would like to enter Indic text.
2. Change the language using the language bar, which typically appears in the taskbar as follows.
   

   Language Bar

3. You can now start typing in English and whatever you type automatically gets transliterated after a word-breaking character like a space, comma, etc. is entered.
4. Note that this language setting is per application. You may have to repeat the steps above for each application you want to use Microsoft ILIT in.
   

   Live Messenger Chat Box

Links :

• Microsoft Indic tool Homepage
• MSDN support blog