Microsoft® Popfly™

Microsoft® Popfly™ is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, games, Web pages, and applications.

Create Games. Popfly is a simple way to create and share games with your friends. Choose from a variety of built-in templates or start from scratch to create a side scrolling game, a 2D shoot-em-up, or a host of others. And best of all, you can get started without writing a line of code.

Build Mashups. Mashups are a kind of application that take information from many places and mix it together. With Popfly's mashup creator you'll be able to take photos, RSS feeds, and many other kinds of information and combine them to create your own personalized view of the web.

Design a Web Page. Always wanted to create a web page but thought it was too hard? Popfly makes it easy with its simple web page creator.

...and Much More. Popfly makes it easy to place your creations into your blog, your Facebook page, or even make them into Windows Vista sidebar gadgets. And it's fully integrated with Visual Studio™ so as you gain experience you can upgrade to professional-quality tools.

Make your own game. If you have an idea for a game but don't want to learn to program, Popfly is an easy way to get started making it real. No coding is required, and Popfly supplies a large library of actors, images, and sounds so you can get started quickly.

Try recreating one of the classics, like creating a personal version of Space Invaders™ in just a couple of minutes. And if you ever feel you're running out of power, Popfly makes it easy to step into the source code and take full control.

Display your images, your way. If you have photos on a web site like Flickr™ or Windows® Live™ Spaces, Popfly can quickly convert them into a variety of attractive display formats and embed them into any blog, Facebook page, or even turn them into a Windows Vista® sidebar gadget with the click of a button.

Map information with Popfly. Whether it's your Twitter friends, photos, or something like earthquake activity, Popfly makes it simple to put information onto a map so you can see it and share it with your friends.

Do you use Facebook? Do you want a more custom experience? All Popfly creations can be embedded in your Facebook page to make it truly yours. And Popfly even comes with full Facebook support for games like Halo 3™ and World of Warcraft™.

WWTelescape

“The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.”

Try it here ... http://wwtelescope.com/

Midori from Microsoft

Midori has been reported to be a possible commercial successor to the Singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in managed code.

Microsoft is working on a managed-mode operating system, code-named Midori. Managed mode is a computer program code that executes under the management of a virtual machine, unlike an unmanaged code, which is executed directly by the computer's CPU.

Midori has been reported to be a possible commercial successor to the Singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code.

According to Microsoft, Midori is being designed from the ground up to tackle challenges that cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology. Midori's proposed design is Internet-centric and provides an overall "connectedness" between applications and devices. When Windows was first designed,there was no "Internet" as we understand it today, and things were added later in patches. With the Midori however, it will focus on concurrency for both distributed applications and local ones.

Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates' technical staff, is heading up the effort.

No time frame for development has been set for Midori as its considered a 'research project' at the moment, according to Microsoft technical fellow Burton Smith. A spokesperson added that Midori is one of many projects in incubation at Microsoft Research.

Source: Techtree.com

Hiberfil.sys

Hiberfil.sys:

• How to delete it
• What is it's function?
• How do I use it?

In theory, it is supposed to be a quick shortcut or power saving option that allows you to leave your PC in suspended animation until you are ready to work again. However, in practice, most people find little time difference between shutting down and using hibernation. For people who use drive imaging to backup their system, the hiberfil.sys file can bloat the backup files - making them larger (sometimes over 1GB bigger!) and therefore slower to copy/restore.

Hibernation temporarily 'freezes' the computer when the PC becomes inactive, so it won't work if you have tasks running constantly (eg downloading files). However it can be handy if you want the computer to sleep after a task has completed (such as creating a video).

OK, that's the role of hibernation - so what is the hiberfil.sys file and why is it so big? Hibernation takes everything in memory and writes it to your hard drive as the hiberfil.sys file. If you have 512MB of memory, then hiberfil.sys will be about 512MB. If you have 1GB, the file will be around 1GB. The important point to remember is that even if you don't use hibernation, hiberfil.sys will still take up this huge amount of disk space. The way to remove the file is to turn off the hibernation feature (by default, hibernate is activated automatically when XP is installed). Here's how to do it:

• Open the Windows Control Panel
• Double-click Power Options
• Click the Hibernate tab, de-select the 'Enable hibernate support' check box, and then click Apply.
• Restart your computer and hiberfil.sys will be automatically deleted.
• If you change your mind in the future and would like to use hibernation, go to the Windows Help & Support Center and search for 'enable hibernation'. It should be the first result. The instructions detail some other steps you may need to follow to reactivate the hibernation.

Windows Vienna / Windows 7

Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb, then Vienna) is a future version of Microsoft Windows. It is expected to be the successor to Windows Vista. Microsoft has confirmed that the planned development time frame is at least three years, putting the release date around 2010. On July 20, 2007, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 7 is "the internal name for the next version of the Windows Client OS".Microsoft has refrained from discussing the details about Windows 7 publicly as they focus on the release and marketing of Windows Vista, though some early details of various core operating system features have emerged at developer conferences such as Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in 2006.


Focus
On February 9, 2007, Microsoft's Ben Fathi claimed that the focus on the operating system was still being worked out, and could merely hint at some possibilities: “ We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors. I don't know what it is" [...] "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers.” Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, also suggested that the next version of Windows would "be more user-centric." When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said: “That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot bet er with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.

Features
Microsoft is maintaining a policy of silence concerning plans and aspirations for Windows 7. As a result, very little is known about the feature set. However, from interviews and speeches of company executives certain features have been known.

Availability
The client versions of Windows 7 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.Server versions of Windows 7, however, will be exclusively 64-bit.

SmartFlip

Many have (falsely) accused the "Flip3D" feature in Windows Vista of being a rip-off of Mac OS X's Exposé. It's not: Flip3D is simply a 3D version of the ALT+TAB task switcher shortcut that's been in Windows for decades. (Put another way: Where Exposé offers additional functionality related to locating individual windows in running applications, Flip3D only provides access to each application.) As you might expect, however, various people are looking to replace Flip3D with something more Exposé-like. Here's what looks like an excellent example:

Neat! I'll try to test this soon to see how well it works, but the developer tell that a stable version will be out in about two weeks.