Microsoft tops the list as the best global workplace

Microsoft has been ranked as the number one global workplace by the great places to work institute.

The software giant topped the list this year based on its 90,819 global employees. “Being recognized as the number one global workplace by the Great Places to Work Institute is an honor,” said Microsoft’s chief people officer Lisa Brummel, in a blog post on Thursday. “Our investments in our employees and the opportunities for them have not gone unnoticed. We are particularly proud of the work people get to do every day, and the impact we have on the world around us.”

Brummel praised Microsoft’s Xbox group as an example of great opportunity and innovation. “Ten years ago, we had only a fledgling PC games business,” explained Brummel. “Since then, as a company and with the talented people in that group, Xbox has grown to be one of the most valued platforms in the entertainment arena.” The great places to work institute found that the average age of Microsoft employees is 38.5 and that the company offers flex time, telecommuting and jobs sharing. Microsoft Canada employes are allowed 40 fully paid hours per year to devote to volunteer activities. Employees time can be spent helping out at orphanages, setting up a soup kitchen or various other activities.

“Microsoft is a great community, and the voice of the employee will continue to drive us forward,” said Brummel. “Today, we’ll celebrate being the number one best global company to work for.”

Microsoft unveils amazing new vision of the future video

Microsoft has created a follow-up to its “Office 2019″ video and the latest concept of the future provides some amazing insights into how technology will impact our lives in the future.

The latest video builds on Microsoft’s previous concepts of touch based computing anywhere and everywhere. The video opens with a business woman visiting Johannesburg and having the audio around her translated in real time thanks to some futuristic glasses. Other scenes in the video feature highly personalised experiences and touch computing on every surface. Microsoft previously created an “Office 2019” video which also features the same opaque smartphones and touch walls.

Microsoft’s future vision is designed to show what the world might look like in the next five to 10 years.GeekWire’s Todd Bishop managed to speak to the videos creators at Microsoft in a recent interview. “We see an expanded definition of productivity where it’s not just about getting things done,” said David Jones, Microsoft’s director of envisioning. “It’s also about doing the right things, and doing them well and enjoying the process with other people in a very natural way.”

Microsoft believes that most of the technology in the video exists in some form or another today. “All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology,” explains Microsoft’s Office chief, Kurt DelBene, in a blog post on Thursday. “Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration and data visualization already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies.”

Check out the video below and let us know in the comments what you think the future of computing will be in the next five years.

Nokia unveils Lumia 800 Windows Phone

NOKIA LUMIA 800

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop took to the stage at Nokia World in London on Wednesday to reveal Nokia’s first Windows Phone.

The Nokia Lumia 800, codenamed Searay, is Nokia’s first entry into an increasingly busy Windows Phone market. Elop revealed the device to the world on Wednesday. Elop described the Lumia as “the first real Windows Phone” before unveiling the specifics of the Lumia 800. The Lumia 800 includes a curved 3.7-inch ClearBlack LCD display and will be available in black, cyan or magenta colors. The Lumia 800 also features a 8-megapixel camera that includes an f2.2 aperture, and is designed for low-light environments. Nokia described the camera as one that’s for “ordinary people, under ordinary circumstances.”

Nokia has invested heavily in navigation, music and sports. Nokia’s Lumia 800 will include full voice guided turn-by-turn navigation with Nokia Drive. The Nokia Drive application includes an optimized horizontal view and will allow users to navigate whilst in their cars or on the go. Nokia’s Music application is an easy way for users to discover new artists and music. The headline feature is mix radio that provides pre-setup mixes of full length music for Nokia Windows Phone users.

Microsoft demonstrates touch screen for any surface [video]

Microsoft OmniTouch

Microsoft is developing a new technology in its research labs that will allow users to touch any surface as if it were a touch screen.

The technology is called OmniTouch and was born in Microsoft’s Research labs. The software giant has created a prototype unit that is wearable and projects images onto various surfaces. The interactions can take place on the go with no calibration required. Imagine holding up your hand and dialling a number in the palm of your hand, that’s how OmniTouch works. ”We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” explains Hrvoje Benko, of the Natural Interaction Research group. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet. If we could appropriate these ad hoc surfaces in an on-demand way, we could deliver all of the benefits of mobility while expanding the user’s interactive capability.”

The custom camera works in a similar way to Microsoft’s Kinect system but has been modified to work at short range. A user simply carries the camera on their person and the system will project user interfaces onto various surfaces. “We wanted the ability to use any surface,” Benko says. “Let the user define the area of where they want the interface to be, and have the system do its best to track it frame to frame. This creates a highly flexible, on-demand user interface. You can tap on your hand or drag your interface out to specify the top left and bottom right border. All this stems from the main idea that if everything around you is a potential interface, then the first action has to be defining an interface area.”

Microsoft is demonstrating the technology as part of its presentation during UIST 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery’s 24th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, being held Oct. 16-19 in Santa Barbara, California.

Microsoft launches developer preview of Windows Server 8

Microsoft introduced its new Windows Server 8 operating system on Wednesday.

Windows Server 8

Server and Tools Business President Satya Nadella detailed Microsoft’s Windows Server 8 improvements in a keynote speech at the company’s BUILD developer conference on Wednesday. Windows Server 8 is designed with the cloud in mind. The company has taken its work of building and operating the Windows Azure service and optimised Windows Server 8 for high availability and high-performance virtualization. The new operating system includes over 300 new features and some heavy changes to the underlying architecture of Windows Server 8. One of the visual changes in Windows Server 8 is the inclusion of a Metro style server manager and Windows Phone-like tiles.

Under the hood, Microsoft is continuing its support of PowerShell throughout Windows Server. Version 3.0 of PowerShell is now included which ships with over 2,000 commands to allow system admins to easily script and manage all of their servers. Windows Server 8 also includes the ability to script workflows with Powershell to make it an easier to patch multiple servers while maintaining great uptime.

Hyper-V 3.0 is also included which includes VHDX support. The new VHDX format is capable of supporting disks much larger than the current 2TB restriction of VHD. Microsoft has created VHDX which is capable of supporting disks up to 16TB in size. The new format can only be used in Windows OS versions starting at Windows 8.

“With Windows Server 8 we are delivering high availability and disaster recovery at a much better price point,” said Microsoft’s server and cloud corporate VP Bill Laing in a blog post on Wednesday. “We are giving customers access to high-end storage capabilities that before required specialized hardware, such as device pooling, disk virtualization, and thin provisioning, in Windows Server 8.”

• A complete virtualization platform that delivers a fully isolated, multitenant environment with tools that can guarantee service-level agreements, enable chargebacks through usage-based billing, and support self-service delivery.
• Increased scalability and performance through a high-density, highly scalable environment that can be modified to perform at the optimum level based on your needs.
• Connectivity to cloud services using a common identity and management framework for secure and reliable cross-premises connectivity.
• Continuous availability: New and improved features offer cost-effective, high IT service uptime. They are designed to endure failures without disrupting services to users.
• Management efficiency: Windows Server 8 helps automate an even broader set of management task and simplifies deployment and virtualization of major workloads, which provides a path to full lights-out automation.
• Cost efficiency: Windows Server 8 leverages commodity storage, networking, and server infrastructure, as well as offering increased power efficiency for superior acquisition and operating economics.
• Flexibility to build on-premises and in the cloud: Developers can use the same languages and tools to build on-premises and cloud applications, allowing them to build applications that use distributed and temporally decoupled components.
• An open web platform: Windows Server 8 combined with Internet Information Services (IIS) offers a solid platform for both open-source web stacks and ASP.NET, opening up a wide range of choices for application development.
• A scalable and elastic web platform: Hosting providers can use new features in Windows Server 8 to increase density, simplify management, and achieve higher scalability in a shared web-hosting environment.
• Access anywhere on any device: Seamless, always-on access to virtualized work from anywhere, including branch locations and public connectivity services.
• A full Windows experience anywhere: By enabling a personalized and rich user experience from any device while adapting to different network conditions quickly and responsively.
• Enhanced data security and compliance: Central audit and access policies enable granular access to data and corporate resources based on strong identity, data classification, and simplified administration for remote access.

The Windows Server 8 developer preview is available to download at Microsoft’s MSDN developer center.

Windows 8 Developer Preview now available to download

Windows 8 Start Screen

Microsoft’s Windows 8 Developer Preview is now available to download.

The Windows developer center is now live and Windows 8 available to download in the following flavours:

Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64)

DOWNLOAD (3.6 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 79DBF235FD49F5C1C8F8C04E24BDE6E1D04DA1E9

Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86)

DOWNLOAD (2.8 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 4E0698BBABE01ED27582C9FC16AD21C4422913CC

Microsoft also supplied some system requirements for the Windows 8 Developer preview:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
• Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch

Windows 8 really does change everything, it’s mind-blowing

Windows 8 Start Screen

Microsoft is welcoming around 5,000 developers to its BUILD conference today to unveil the most significant change in the PC space since Windows 95.

“It’s a launch,” explains Windows chief Steven Sinofsky. “It’s a launch of an opportunity for developers. That’s a lot, it’s a big deal to do today and tomorrow,” he says during an opening address to media and analysts in Anaheim California. You sense the sense of excitement in the room and the realisation that windows 8is a really big deal for Microsoft, a deal that cannot go wrong.

“We are very very excited about what we have to do,” says Sinofsky. Microsoft is only at the beginning of its discussions on Windows 8 after kicking off the product planning in June 2009, five months before the release of windows 7. It’s clear that Microsoft is doing huge amounts of work behind the scenes for Windows 8. Sinofsky highlights the work in Windows 7 as a foundation for the building of Windows 8. “Windows 8 makes windows 7 even better,” he claims before explaining that Microsoft has designed Windows 8 with Windows 7 in mind, everything that runs on Windows 7 runs on Windows 8.

• Approaching 450,000,000 copies of Windows 7 sold
• Windows 7 usage greater than Windows XP
• 1,502 seamless non-security product code changes delivered
• Internet Explorer 9 is the fastest growing Windows 7 browser
• 542,000,000 people signing into Windows Live Services

“Windows 8 is a bold re-imagination of what windows could be,” according to Sinofsky. The “re-imagination” starts immediately from when a user switches on their Windows 8 PC. Microsoft has overhauled windows lock screen to match its Windows Phone one and it makes the experience functional and simplify beautiful. As you unlock a Windows 8 PC you’re immediately presented with the new Start Screen interface with its bold colors, live tiles and stunning look and feel. The interface replaces the aged Start Menu in Windows and hints at the future of Windows and computing in general. The simple fact that Microsoft has removed the Start Menu and created this unique and compelling interface is an incredibly risky strategy for the company. You immediately understand why Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, described the product at the company’s riskiest bet.

Microsoft isn’t leaving this risk to total chance however. The company has been validating all of the changes with Windows customers. The company showed some consumer research videos where every day folk get a hands on with early copes of Windows 8 and say what they see. “It looks cool,” says one female customer as she describes how she has to search for apps on her current desktop. One college student is excited at the prospect of Windows 8 as she can snap Facebook to the side of the screen during class whilst she uses Excel on the right hand site. The personalisation and customisation of Windows 8 is what will strike at the heart of end users. The experience of setting up a Windows 8 PC turns into an emotional attachment where your data is no longer static and hidden in apps but flows freely from app to app in a beautiful and well thought out way. Microsoft loves the idea of apps but in Windows 8 the company has an opportunity to reimagine how they work with each other.

Some of the most game changing work with Windows 8 arrives in the form of a new application model for developers. Microsoft’s new APIs will let developers share their app data in a secure and managed environment to fellow applications and the operating system as a whole. Microsoft is introducing the idea of “contracts” that app developers virtually sign-up to. The contracts allow developers to take advantage of some of the new features inside Microsoft’s metro interface. Developers from C++ to C# or HTML/CSS and JavaScript will be able to code Windows 8 Metro applications thanks to a set of new Windows RunTime APIs (WinRT). The immersive experience is truly engaging. Every pixel of the screen is reserved for the application, gone are the days of chrome and its status bars and clutter. Microsoft wants apps to shine in Windows 8.

The sea of change in Windows 8 is breathtaking and overwhelming. It’s difficult to understand how Microsoft will pull this off. The company is often accused of not being agile enough to switch directions or truly innovate. That certainly isn’t the case under Sinofsky. The clean and secretive development schedule of Windows 7 and 8 have created a new buzz around Windows. The world is waiting to see and hear what will be unveiled today, a historic day for computing and Microsoft. The software giant will show a number of features that aren’t baked into the developer preview build that attendees will receive but they demonstrate how much work the company is undertaking. This is a bigger vision than Windows Longhorn and a much bigger concept than Windows 95. Windows 8 is simply mind blowing.

dns-the-interface-between-human-computer-view-in-network.

As we all know that the computers communicate using IP Addresses to identify each other on the Internet.

209.85.149.105
69.63.181.12
74.125.95.93
69.147.125.65
173.192.48.10

DNS

Humans, Computer Users, don’t remember IP Addresses, so they use words, which are called as Domain Names.

google.com
facebook.com
youtube.com
yahoo.com
himanshpal.com

The DNS or Domain Name System combines the two together and takes you to your destination.

google.com (209.85.149.105)
facebook.com (69.63.181.12)
youtube.com (74.125.95.93)
yahoo.com (69.147.125.65)
himanshpal.com 

So let’s see, how this Domain Name System works. The user types a web site address ordomain name in his browser’s address bar.

http://www.Himanshpal.com/

The search for the IP Address starts. First step, it goes to the Root NameServer. It gives theNameServer address of Top Level Domain’s NameServer. In our case, it is .com. It finds and reaches the .com NameServer.

After reaching the TLD NameServer, it finds and reaches the himanshpal.com NameServer.

From here, it gets the IP Address or Virtual Host of the WWW of himanshpal.com and displays the contents to your browser.

All these actions take a maximum of 500 milliseconds, approximately half a second!

Bhopal’s Dilip Rai invents ‘Jugaad Programming Concept’.

Jugaad 

Bhopal: Dilip Rai, a Computer teacher in Bhopal, has developed a Jugaad Programming Concept’ of programming.

Dilip deleted the space which is occupied in RAM in the form of variable because of which the programs, which are compiled in C and C++, performs in zero variables.

Dilip has sent this achievement to Guinness Book of World Records and he has also received the claim ID. He is now gearing up for its presentation in ‘Jugaad Programming Concept Conclave 2011’, which will be held on June 11

Dilip, a resident of Kailash Nagar, said the programs that are run on a computer, they occupy some space in the RAM, which is known as variable. Each program requires a variable. A normal application uses 1000-5000 variables, thus lowering down the Computer’s speed and causes it to hang.

Jugaad Programming Concept

This technique takes less time in loading than the current operating system (UNIX, Linux, and Windows). The operating system developed with this technique would allow the system to take 20 per cent less time to load in comparison to the other operating systems.

Dilip said, “I am a graduate in Biology. I wanted to stand out from the clutter and wanted to do something unique. I bought a computer in 2001 and learnt C language. I used to stay awake the whole night while I was learning C language. I worked as a lab assistant in a company and also taught Aptech to students.”

“These days, I am providing corporate training at the Bhopal branch of C-DAC (New Delhi. Jugaad Programming Concept is the outcome of my 8-year-long research and hard work,” he added.

Introduction to Office Web Apps.

Microsoft Office Web Apps extend your Microsoft Office experience to the web browser, where you can work with documents right there on the website where the document is stored. Office Web Apps are available for personal use in Windows Live, for organizations that have installed and configured Office Web Apps on their SharePoint site, and for professionals and businesses that subscribe to selectOffice 365 services.

Microsoft Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps work in some of the most widely used browsers, and are officially supported in Windows Internet Explorer 7 and later, Safari 4 for the Mac, and Firefox 3.5 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

INTEGRATE SEAMLESSLY WITH OFFICE

You use Microsoft Office to create documents that present information, collect thoughts, and help you and your colleagues make decisions. You store these documents on your computer, on a removable storage device, on a server. Office Web Apps provides a new way to store your documents so that they can be viewed and even edited in the browser. By using Office Web Apps, a website becomes a new storage device for your Office documents: a storage device that makes your documents easy to access and easy to share.

In Microsoft Office 2010 programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote), you can start using Office Web Apps by saving your document to your SkyDrive or your SharePoint library.

Now, your document is available to view and edit in the browser, or re-open in Office.

 NOTE    Documents don’t need to be created in Office 2010 to be opened in Office Web Apps. For best compatibility, use Office 2003 or later, or use Office for Mac 2008 version 12.2.9 or Office for Mac 2011. If you’re using Office 2003, install the most recent service pack and save documents on your computer in the Office Open XML file format (for example, .docx, .xlsx, or pptx files). Then upload the document to a SharePoint site where Office Web Apps are configured, or upload the document to SkyDrive.

BROWSE DOCUMENTS

With Office Web Apps, your documents are like web pages because they are stored on a website and displayed in the browser. To view the document, you click it. To share it with other people, you send a link.

It doesn’t matter whether your version of Office matches what your friends or colleagues have. There’s no need to download a viewer. Your documents look the same in the browser as they do in the Office programs.

EDIT ON THE FLY

Beyond viewing documents, Office Web Apps enable you to edit a document’s content in the browser.

Browser-based editing is optimized for situations when you want to rewrite some text, enter some data, add a slide, or jot down notes. If you’re already viewing the document, you click Edit in Browser in the Office Web App, make your changes, and you’re done. In most cases your updates are saved automatically (in Word Web App, click Save).

CO-AUTHOR IN REAL TIME : EXCEL WEB APP & ONENOTE WEB APPLICATION

In Excel Web App and OneNote Web App you can work with other people on the same document at the same time.Collecting information is often a group activity. Use Excel Web App to collect information in a structured way, or be free-form with OneNote Web App. The file is stored in a central location where everyone who needs to can access it. There’s no waiting for one person to finish with the file before the next person can get in. There’s no e-mailing multiple copies that later need to be reconciled.There’s no special command for real-time collaboration. You simply edit the file in the Office Web App while you colleagues are doing so.

TRANSITION TO OFFICE, SEAMLESSLY

Sometimes you want to make substantive changes that require the feature-rich Office desktop applications. In these situations, you can seamlessly transition to the corresponding Office desktop application directly from the Office Web Apps. If you have a document open in an Office Web App, click the Open command to open the file directly from the browser into the Office program that is installed on your computer. When you are finished, click Save in the Office program, and the file is saved back on the server (in the OneNote desktop application your changes are saved to the server automatically).

 NOTE :  Opening documents directly from the browser into an Office desktop application is supported in Firefox, Internet Explorer (Windows), and Safari (Mac) browsers. In Windows, you must also be using Office 2003 or later to use this feature. OneNote Web App requires OneNote 2010 to use this feature. On the Mac, this feature requires Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 version 12.2.9 or Office for Mac 2011, and the OneNote desktop application is not available.

Windows Thin PC goes RTM, will be available for download.

Windows Thin PC

Microsoft announced that Windows Thin PC has now released to manufacturing (RTM).

Windows Thin PC (WinTPC) is a new version of Windows 7 designed specifically for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) customers. Windows Thin PC is a smaller footprint, locked down version of Windows 7 designed for virtualised environments to rebuild their existing PCs as thin clients. PCs with WinTPC will not require the VDA license that regular thin clients will need to access VDI desktops according to Microsoft.

The final version of Windows Thin PC will be available to SA customers to download on July 1. Microsoft is ending its CTP program, effective June 6. The release candidate (RC) build of Windows Thin PC will still be available to download at the CTP site with associated documentation until July 1. In an email to testers, Microsoft thanked its early tester community. “We thank you for all the feedback and evaluation provided in helping make the Windows Thin PC a success in the Windows community.”

Microsoft is not planning to charge customers for Windows Thin PC. Instead, the company will offer it as part of Microsoft’s Software Assurance offerings for customers. Microsoft’s software assurance Licensing allows businesses large and small to spread licence costs over multiple years and receive “free” upgrades to newer versions during the licence period.

Windows Thin PC

Bing starts testing IPv6 version in preparation for World IPv6 day.

Bing

In February we brought you the news that Bing had plans for a one-day test of IPv6 connectivity in June. Today Microsoft announced that the Bing IPv6 experiment, which is in conjunction with World IPv6 Day, will commence at 5 pm PST.

The test will last 24 hours, concluding at 5 pm PST on Wednesday, June 8th. IPv6 will be enabled for users around the world who can support the protocol. Users who cannot will continue to use the IPv4 version of Bing without interruption.

The Microsoft search engine stated that a “complete migration [from IPv4 to 6] will take years.” All of the possible IPv4 addresses have been distributed, pushing forward the cause of IPv6 rapidly.

Unlike with IPv4, the chance of running out of IPv6 addresses is very low. According to the same Bing blog post there are “300 trillion trillion trillion [IPv6] addresses available.” If the world ever reaches that level of need, we suspect that it will not still be using IPv6.

WinRumors has a fun explanation of just how many IPv6 addresses will be available:

Microsoft’s Windows operating systems have had IPv6 support for years and it’s now the turn of Internet Service Providers to future proof the Internet. Internet Protocol 6 supports 340282366920938463463374607431768211455 addresses (340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 455) addresses.

Microsoft, in the same blog post, did state that “[a] small fraction of users (<1%) may have difficulty accessing Bing and other sites participating in World IPv6 Day during the test flight.” The company promised to report back after the test with analyzed results to share.

E3: Microsoft confirms Voice Search coming to Xbox LIVE

Xbox LIVE Voice Search

We’re still a few hours away from Microsoft’s official E3 press conference but someone inside Redmond is a little eager.

The software giant has leaked out a number of E3 announcements at its official press page for E3 2011. One particular gem (featured above) is the revelation that Microsoft is planning to include voice search in Xbox LIVE. There’s not much more information on exactly how this would work but it sounds like Bing might be coming to xbox live.in some form.