Archive for September, 2009

On September 22, the world's wealthiest man - Bill Gates, was speaking at the dedication of Carnegie Mellon’s Gates and Hillman Centers and presented a keynote address before taking questions from the young and talented students. When a Chinese student asked the former CEO of Microsoft regarding his views and opinions about software copyright laws and policies, he blasted successful Chinese companies for using software and not paying a single cent for them. Instead, he said sales of software to companies who do purchase licenses could enable him to render his help to millions of needy and sick children around the world. Despite saying that software privacy will head south as the country's affluence goes up, but he continued to accuse Chinese large tech companies of software-copying. "What's unique to China is you have large businesses using software without paying for it. SUPER-profitable big businesses [he chuckles]. Take two of the five most-profitable businesses in China: they don't pay for their software.

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With an aim to build an OS for future multi- and many-core systems, the folks at Microsoft Research (Cambridge) have collaborated with researchers at ETH Zurich (a technology university) on a project code-named Barrelfish. When it comes to dealing with heavy traffic between multiple cores, Barrelfish helps to minimize all shared state up till level when the cores only exchange explicit messages, avoiding to use any shared memory. Another feature which stands out is that it uses a database-like approach to keep track of the hardware available, instead of fully isolating program from device via driver Released earlier this month, Barrelfish is one of Microsoft's next generation operating system projects, and the researchers behind it developed the operating system with several crucial factors in mind - the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

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Today, the folks at the tech giant announced a new proof-of-concept prototype monitoring tool which aims to help businesses organize and analyze their social presence on the web. Code-named "Looking Glass", this platform enables companies to manage their social accounts effectively as they create advertising on major social networking websites. By merging social media and advertising into one simple and easy-to-use platform, marketers are now able to listen to the conversation on the social web. They are able to track customer sentiment across an array of social media sites by grabbing a wide variety of feeds related to a specific topic from platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. One good example would Microsoft's new Zune HD. In the past, the Zune HD marketing team would have to analyze statistics from Twitter search and this could be quite tedious unless San Francisco-based micro-blogging service sells data to Microsoft. However, with Looking Glass, they are now able to see what users are saying about the product in real time on Twitter, in a rich and impressive user-interface which displays graphs and statistics, all thanks to Microsoft's Silverlight technology.

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