betanews.com - 29.01.2009

NASA: it snows on Mars

When NASA sent two rovers to Mars they were not quite sure what all they would find. What they ended up finding far exceeded expectations and has proven that the possible foundations for life do exist on other planets. The scientists were eventually able to conclude that cloud formations do form on the planet and they can, in fact, make it snow on Mars. Scientists were able to observe this phenomenon using the LIDAR instrument (Light Detection and Ranging). "But the really amazing data came from the LIDAR instrument, which was able to track the formation of the clouds at the atmosphere's boundary layer.

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neowin.net - 06.07.2009

The Linux phone

With thousands of phones in the market, companies are looking for ways to cut costs to give the users the best overall experience, along with a cheap price tag to attract a user base. Mobile phones are now a multi-purpose device, so bringing in both consumers and developers is needed to turn a profit with an overcrowded cell phone market. Telefonica, one of the largest mobile operators in the world, has joined wireless Linux foundations LiMo, along with five other major operators said they would bring Linux to the mobile phone. The open source platform will introduce a wide variety of customizable applications to the phones.

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neowin.net - 09.02.2009

Windows 7 adds native Virtual WiFi technology from Microsoft Research

WiFi is an incredible technology that has transformed how and where people used computers, however besides advancements in speed, range and security, very little has changed how we use wireless networks. Since 2002, Microsoft Research has been exploring a fascinating idea to virtualize the WiFi adapter, turning a single piece of hardware and radio into virtually (pun) unlimited adapters. Years after the project was seemingly abandoned, it is now uncovered Virtual WiFi technology has been baked in the Windows 7 networking foundations...




winbeta.org - 16.05.2009

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2, Already Reaching One in Four Consumers Worldwide

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industrys most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.



Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundations integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.




winbeta.org - 13.10.2008

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize

He might have made a couple of mistakes in his Inconvenient Truth documentary, but we suspect Al Gore will consider his shiny new Nobel Peace Prize a winning blow in the PR war on climate change.



Gore is to share the gong with the IPCC, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change", the Swedish Academy says.



Yesterday, a UK judge said the government couldn't show Gore's documentary in schools without guidance highlighting a few sections not supported by mainstream science. Today, the same documentary has garnered him probably the highest honour our society is capable of bestowing.




winbeta.org - 12.10.2007

Windows Mobile 7 job ad reveals "Unified Store", confirms Zune partnership/integration

It appears the Windows Mobile team, who has had a history for sharing good insights into the future development of Windows Mobile through innocent job advertisements, is not wasting any time sharing new information about Windows Mobile 7. A recent job advertisement for a Software Development Engineer on the "Communications Foundations" team writes...




winbeta.org - 20.05.2009

Microsoft sees progress in getting Windows on XO

Microsoft Corporation Vice President Will Poole has announced the software giant has made progress in getting a basic version of Windows XP to work on the low-cost One Laptop Per Child Foundations laptop that currently runs on rival Linux software." Were spending a nontrivial amount of money on it. We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes. At the end of the day, theres no guarantees ," said Poole.

The OLPC Foundation, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans to start producing the $188 machines in China next month and eventually manufacture millions a year for elementary school children in developing countries. The laptops were designed specifically to run Linux programs. If the machines run only Linux, Microsoft will lose an opportunity to expose tens of millions of children worldwide to its Windows system. What I’m most interested in, however, is by how much, if at all, would the cost go up?


neowin.net - 26.10.2007

Net growth prompts privacy update

The world's leading industrialised nations have been forced to update privacy laws made obsolete by the huge volume of data moving around the net.

Of particular concern to the 30 OECD states was the increasing amount of personal data flowing between nations.

These cross-border torrents made it tricky to prevent unlawful use of people's data and for authorities to enforce existing laws, the OECD said.

The newly adopted recommendations update a 27-year-old agreement.

The 1980 guidelines laid the foundations of privacy laws amongst OECD states but did not account for the internet age, with instant access to global information.

"The initiative is motivated by a recognition that changes in the character and volume of cross-border data flows have elevated privacy risks for individuals and highlighted the need for better co-operation among the authorities charged with providing them protection," read an OECD statement.

The recommendations are meant to augment member countries' existing privacy laws to aid co operation between different enforcement agencies.


neowin.net - 02.07.2007

NASA photo, video collection to be digitized

In the next five years, NASA's archives of manned and unmanned space missions, a 50-year collection of photos, videos, films and other material, is about to be put online into a central searchable archive by the non-profit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive. The effort will be paid for solely through grants, foundations and individual contributions received by the Internet Archive. NASA already has much of its collection online, but the material is divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is.

Paul Hickman, office manager for the Internet Archive, said the group will house the digitized collection on its high-capacity redundant servers in San Francisco, Europe and Egypt. Presently, the group handles an estimated 5 petabytes of storage, but more capacity can be added. The images and other data will likely be provided to the Internet Archive on hard drives so that it can be transferred to the group's archives for storage, Hickman said. Other materials, including printed documents, microfilm, books, computer presentations, audio files and VHS video, will be scanned or copied and then digitized for the online archive.


neowin.net - 27.08.2007

Cops pull TV-links, claim facilitation of infringement

Last weeks arrest of a 26-year-old Cheltenham man, and the related closure of the TV-links website, has prompted a flurry of speculation that the very foundations of the internet (linking to stuff) might be under threat. Although this might be a worry too far, legal eagles at Pinsent Masons say that it could be an important test case of UK law.

After an investigation by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and local trading standards office, police swooped on an address in Cheltenham on Thursday last week, cuffing a 26-year-old for "offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the Internet" according to the FACT announcement. The man has been released pending further investigation


neowin.net - 22.10.2007

Supercomputer Expert Joins Microsoft

In what will be his first job in the commercial sector, veteran supercomputer research Daniel Reed, former director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chief architect of the National Science Foundations TeraGrid, a national distributed computing system for researchers, and chair of the Computing Research Association, will be joining Microsoft Research as director of Scalable and Multicore Computing, the company has revealed. Reed will collaborate with Burton Smith, another parallel computing guru who joined Microsoft in 2005 to help spearhead work on multicore issues. In addition, he plans to take a "green field" approach to spiraling power and reliability requirements for large data centers.

" There is a sea change in computing coming at the intersection of multicore and large data centers, and working on this is one of the most exciting things I can imagine doing, " said Reed who most recently served as director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina.


neowin.net - 13.11.2007

Judge Rules: SCO Does Not Own Unix

The SCO Group, notorious for its legal campagin against Linux users and developers, was dealt a devastating blow last week. A federal judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns the copyrights to Unix, effectively cutting the foundations of SCO's five billion dollar legal suit against IBM. SCO's case was based on a 1995 asset purchase agreement for Unix between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations, a predecessor to SCO; the group claimed that the 1995 transaction concerned the entire Unix intellectual property, whereas Novell argued the contrary. As proof of its claims, Novell produced the original transaction agreement and bill of sale, which indicated that the purchase did not include the copyright. The agreement furthermore gives Novell the right to waive any claims for misuse of Unix by IBM, and requires SCO to forward all royalties that it received for the software to Novell.

This agreement could very well mark the end of SCO, as the software maker in 2003 inked a $10 million licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems, and a $16.8 million agreement with Microsoft. According to the contract, it should have paid 95 per cent of those funds to Novell, but failed to do so. In light of SCO's most recent financial filings, the $25.46 million claim Novell has on SCO's earnings could give SCO a negative total worth.

Novell hailed the ruling, with spokesperson Kevan Barney saying: " The court's ruling has cut out the core of SCO's case and, as a result, eliminates SCO's threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix. We are extremely pleased with the outcome. " Groklaw, a website closely following the case, had this to say: " The big picture is, SCO lost. " SCO could not be reached for comment.


neowin.net - 13.08.2007

October 2007 MSDN Magazine now online

The October 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/default.aspx.



In this issue you'll find coverage of some advanced concurrency topics. We have articles on employing the new thread pool APIs in Windows Server 2008 to provide more control and scalability, using the UI thread and the Dispatcher to build more responsive Windows Presentation Foundation apps, harnessing the Task Parallel Library to optimize your .NET apps for multi-core processors, and Joe Duffy and Ed Essey introduce Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ).



For something completely different, Chris Mitchell shows you a Windows Mobile application that adjusts your ringtone volume based on the ambient noise level.



In the columns we take a look at  take a look at type inference and LINQ in Visual Basic 2008, and explore Windows XP Embedded UI test automation. Dino Esposito continues his discussion of the AJAX application architecture, Stephen Toub builds a .NET deadlock monitor, and Charles Petzold demonstrates how to create 3D text in WPF.



There's much more in the issue, and I'll be blogging about these and other articles throughout the month.



As usual, the issue is available online in a bunch of languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.




winbeta.org - 13.09.2007