Clipmarks | RecordSage's 'microsoft' clips

Microsoft Research inventions are wacky and useful

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:03:34 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Microsoft Research inventions are wacky and useful

At the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, researchers showed off everything from speakers that can precisely direct sound to a 'smart' walking stick

Flying bikes, cell phone robots, smart walking sticks, and audio speakers that defy logic are inventions all on display Tuesday at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters.

On the second day of the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft researchers and their academic partners showed off some of their projects. They ranged from the wacky to the relatively staid.

Without getting more precise, he said the group uses a small portion of Microsoft's $7 billion research and development budget.

Tags: microsoft, innovation

MS Exchange Server Group - BE AFRAID!

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:09:05 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: I was following this car yesterday and just had to shoot the license place cover. The rest of the car and the plate number has been removed to protect the innocent.

Clip Source: www.imagemirror.com

Tags: microsoft, exchange, license plate, humor

How to install Vista Upgrade on a blank hard drive

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:24:58 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: Useful

Clip Source: gizmodo.com

How to Install a Vista Upgrade on a Blank Hard Drive

I love Microsoft. We had just started to resign ourselves to the fact that we were going to need Windows XP on our hard drive if we ever had to reinstall our upgrade version of Vista. Then they ~~came up with a solution~~ left open a gaping loophole. That's right, you can install the upgrade version of Vista on a blank hard drive. The bad news? The workaround's almost as much of a pain in the ass as the original problem, requiring multiple installs...

Basically, start the setup for your upgrade version of Vista on a blank hard drive, but don't enter the product key. Instead, install it as a 30-day trial. Once Vista's up and running, run setup again, entering your product key this time. Do a clean install, then pat yourself on the back for ~~saving $80~~ not having to keep XP around in case you want a new hard drive at some point.

Act fast, cause there's no telling how long this little hole's going to stay open. – Matt Buchanan

Tags: microsoft, vista, upgrade, install, workaround

Vista is here!

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 07:20:00 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: Well, they finally got these out the doors... played with a new Gateway with 24-inch LCD... it's nice. 2gb RAM, 400gb hard drive, duocore CPU. I could get used to one of those, especially considering it's only $1649!

Clip Source: www.microsoft.com

Watch Bill Gates introduce Windows Vista

Tags: microsoft, vista, launch

Gates Foundation pledges $83.5million to fight Malaria

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 09:07:27 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: Bill scores again!

Clip Source: www.newsmax.com

SEATTLE -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Monday pledged $83.5 million to fight malaria by paying for better controls, vaccine research and prevention of a disease that kills more than a million people a year.

The Gates Foundation, the world's largest charity, said the new grants would also help pay for better malaria tests and for advocacy to get more attention for the killer disease.

All totaled, the charity started by Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. chairman and world's richest man, and his wife, Melinda, has donated $765 million to fight malaria, which kills one person every 30 seconds.

Tags: bill gates, foundation, charity, malaria, donation

Official Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch - November 30, 2006

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 07:55:12 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Clip Source: www.itwire.com.au

It’s official: Vista and Office 2007 to launch November 30

The Windows Vista journey is about to reach the end of the beginning, with the official launch date of November 30 announced for the simultaneous launch of Office 2007 and the business version of Windows Vista.

A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the planned release dates for Vista and Office are indeed November 30 after all, fulfilling Microsoft’s promise of delivering Vista in 2006.

That said, the general consumer versions of Vista are still planned for a January 2007 release, with the rumoured date of January 30 said to be on the verge of confirmation over the next few days.

Tags: windows, vista, office, launch, november, 2006

Microsoft: IE 7 Is AJAX-Ready

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:46:23 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Clip Source: www.eweek.com

Microsoft: IE 7 Is AJAX-Ready

BOSTON—Although Microsoft's Internet Explorer team has just shipped Version 7 of the browser, it is already working on IE 8—or should that be "IE Next'?—said a platform architect on the team.

At the AJAX Experience conference here, Chris Wilson, platform architect for the Internet Explorer platform at Microsoft, said, "The team is hard at work on IE 8," then with a smile added, "I think I am supposed to call it 'IE Next.'"

Wilson poked fun at criticism that Microsoft would never ship a stand-alone version of its browser by showing a picture of a pig flying across a crowd of people. IE 7 has shipped, and the pig has flown, he said.

Wilson said that in the first four days after releasing IE 7, Microsoft saw 3 million downloads of the browser, "and that was without Automatic Update," he said. He also said 90 percent of the Windows-based Web share is on Windows XP, so the adoption curve on IE 7 should ramp up quickly.

In a separate talk at the AJAX Experience show, Brendan Eich, chief technology officer at Mozilla and creator of the JavaScript language, said that in just 22 hours after releasing Firefox 2, Mozilla saw 2 million downloads of the open-source browser.

Tags: microsoft, ie, ajax

Microsoft Office 2007 Screenshots

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:45:18 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Clip Source: content.techrepublic.com.com

Office 2007 Beta 2 Screenshots

Tags: microsoft, office, screenshots, 2007

Google builds largest solar installation in U.S.

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 08:36:12 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Clip Source: venturebeat.com

Google builds largest solar installation in U.S. — oh, and bigger than Microsoft’s

Search giant Google will begin constructing the nation’s largest solar electricity system on its Mountain View campus, the company said today.

Panels will be built for Google’s entire Mountain View campus, decking the roofs of its four main buildings plus two that are nearby. With a total capacity of 1.6 megawatts – enough to supply 1,000 average California homes – the Google system will be the largest solar installation on any U.S. corporate campus, and will be among the five largest installations in in the world.

It easily exceeds Microsoft’s 480-kilowatt solar panel system in Mountain View, unveiled in April, not far Google’s campus.

The project is completed in spring. More information is here.

Tags: google, solar power, alternative energy, largest, us

Microsoft latest and ridiculous lawsuit

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:16:44 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: Unbelievable the idiocy of some people. I hope Microsoft sues these bozos back after the judge throws them on their face... Unreal!

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

Bill Gates: Inflicting Pain

Start your calculator, Bill Gates. Iowa plaintiff lawyers want Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) to pay pain-and-suffering-like damages to consumers of Microsoft products. Microsoft's actions, according to the plaintiffs, have denied consumers a better computing experience (remember Netscape?), so they deserve compensation for "lost innovation" in the marketplace. The class action, banging around Iowa state courts for six years, is one of the last suits remaining in Microsoft's long antitrust battles and is on the docket for November. "Can [this case] expand the thinking of courts generally about what appropriate damages are in antitrust cases? Yes, I think so," says plaintiff counsel Roxanne Barton Conlin.

Interesting take, considering that it would take a soothsayer to predict how our computing experience would have been different. "It would be extremely difficult to prove damages for 'lost innovation,' even if there are damages," says New York University law professor Eleanor Fox. Indeed, at least one federal court has tossed out the argument before.

Since resolving the feds' antitrust allegations, Microsoft has settled more than a dozen private plaintiff cases. In those cases Microsoft has paid $2.1 billion for alleged overcharging, a more common refrain in lawsuits against the software giant.

Microsoft has asked again to have the suit dismissed. Gates is a potential witness, but we suspect he's not yet preparing.

Tags: microsoft, lawsuit, pain-and-suffering, crazy

Microsoft to take on YouTube

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:34:20 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Clip Source: news.com.com

Microsoft to take on YouTube

Microsoft is set to launch on Tuesday a beta version of a new service that lets people upload videos of their cats dancing, babies laughing and teenagers playing air guitar.

Microsoft's new Soapbox on MSN Video site takes on the popular site YouTube, which has become an online sensation for viral and homegrown user-generated video. Also crowding the online video market are Google Video, Yahoo Video and Revver.

Soapbox on MSN Video, codenamed Warhol, will eventually be integrated with Windows Live Messenger to allow people to embed links to videos in instant messages and with Windows Live Spaces so people can include videos on their blogs.

Bennett also showed off a "visualizer" video search tool for MSN Video's existing licensed content that lets people search for and browse video by seeing relationships between tagged items. The keyword clustering application was created by an intern and could become a feature on Soapbox, he said.

Tags: microsoft, youtube, competition, video, service, search

Microsoft Launches the Zune!

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 10:13:50 GMT

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Clip Source: www.engadget.com

Microsoft launches the Zune!

Tags: microsoft, zune, launch

EU Warns Microsoft Against Making Vista Too Secure

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:43:51 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: Is EU serious?

Clip Source: techdirt.com

EU Warns Microsoft Against Making Vista Too Secure

There's no doubt that the European Union has taken a much harder line in its anti-trust actions against Microsoft than regulators have in the US. The company is still facing fines in Europe, and arguing about what features are legitimate, whereas Stateside the legal action is basically finished. A few months ago, we asked whether Microsoft's decision to beef up the security features in Vista might get them into legal hot water, in the same way as it has with Internet Explorer and the Windows Media Player. It doesn't seem like it's going to be an issue for US regulators, but again, the EU is concerned. A spokesman warned that Microsoft should not build security features into Vista, as it would shut out third party vendors and hurt consumers. Now, people can disagree about whether Microsoft's actions will make Vista more or less secure, but the idea that it shouldn't address security issues, so as to leave a market for other companies is odd. Shouldn't Vista users be allowed an inherently secure (in theory) operating system, without the need to spend extra on security software, and enjoy the same peace of mind held by Linux and Apple users all these years? Since added security is thought to be one of the main reasons to upgrade to Vista, limitations on what the company can offer could hurt Microsoft in the important European market.

Tags: microsoft, eu, vista, security

Microsoft Research Builds 'BrowserShield'

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:51:40 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage

Clip Source: www.eweek.com

Microsoft Research Builds 'BrowserShield'

Microsoft researchers are experimenting with an automatic code zapper for the company's Internet Explorer Web browser.

Researchers at the Redmond, Wash., company have completed work on a prototype framework called BrowserShield that promises to allow IE to intercept and remove, on the fly, malicious code hidden on Web pages, instead showing users safe equivalents of those pages.

The BrowserShield project—the brainchild of Helen Wang, a project leader in Microsoft Research's Systems & Networking Research Group, and an outgrowth of the company's Shield initiative to block network worms—could one day even become Microsoft's answer to zero-day browser exploits such as the WMF (Windows Metafile) attack that spread like wildfire in December 2005.

"This can provide another layer of security, even on unpatched browsers," Wang said in an interview with eWEEK. "If a patch isn't available, a BrowserShield-enabled tool bar can be used to clean pages hosting malicious content."

BrowserShield, described by Wang as a tool for deleting embedded scripts before a Web page is displayed on a browser, can inspect and clean both static and dynamic content. Dynamic content has become a popular vector for Web-borne malware attacks of late, security experts have said.

The framework could work particularly well, as it could provide a safety net, protecting many Web surfers from themselves.

Tags: microsoft, ie, security, browseshield

Microsoft Labs Live

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 06:40:00 GMT

clipped by: RecordSage
clipper's remarks: Some very innovative technologies coming from the big, bad ol' boys at MS.

Clip Source: labs.live.com

Photosynth

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. With Photosynth you can:

walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle;
seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it's gigapixels in size;
see where pictures were taken in relation to one another;
find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing;
explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or
send a collection to a friend.

For futher information and to view a demonstration video visit the Photosynth web site.

Tags: microsoft, labs, live, cool, software, beta, experimental