Will virtualisation create a mainframe renaissance?
When IBM first introduced the idea of a mainframe virtual machine back in the 1960s, few people would have predicted that the IT industry would have come full circle more than 40 years later. But increased interest in virtualisation and the demand for ‘greener’ computing could see a revival of interest in mainframe computing, according to some industry insiders.
“We are absolutely seeing interest in mainframes from clients who want to use more virtualisation,” says Roy Illsley, a senior research analyst with Butler Group. “It’s not an approach for everyone but, done well, it can reduce power consumption and footprint, improve reliability and provide a lot of value to the business.”
Although virtualisation is most often discussed in terms of Wintel and Unix servers, the idea of consolidating many workloads onto a single machine and creating ‘virtual partitions’ was invented on the mainframe in 1967, says Carl Greiner, an analyst with Ovum. “This isn’t a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, and virtualisation has always been done on mainframes.”
View Full Article: ZDNet Australia
Scientists build mind-reading computer
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have developed a ‘mind-reading’ computer.
It is hoped the mind-reading machine, which can forecast the activity patterns a brain will create for a specific word, will offer a better understanding of how and where the brain stores information and even lead to improved treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities.
Researchers used nine volunteers to train the computer. They were given 58 words and asked to think about the meaning and properties of the words. Brain scans taken when the users were thinking about the different words were then captured using magnetic resonance imaging, which identifies real-time brain activity.
View Full Article: Computerworld.com.au
Assassin’s Creed PC DirectX 10.1 Review
Today we’ll be looking at Assassin’s
Creed (AC for short) for the PC, a port of a game
that launched over six months ago on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Reviews
were decidedly mixed on the console version, with some publications declaring
it one of the best games of the year and others labeling it as merely okay. As
usual, what you actually think of the game will depend a lot on what you’re
looking for, and there are certain to be users that will love this game and
others that will hate it. We’ll discuss the gameplay and the pros and cons of
the game momentarily.
One of the other interesting tidbits
about the PC port of AC is that it’s one of the first titles
to launch with support for DirectX 10.1… sort of. Version 1.0 does indeed
support DirectX 10.1 features, but Ubisoft decided to remove this functionality
in the 1.02 patch. Whether it will make a return in the future is unclear, but
signs point to “no”. Given that we’re late to the game in terms of
reviewing AC, we are going to spend a decent chunk of this
review looking at the technology side of the equation and what it means to
gamers.
View Full Article: AnandTech
Adobe launches its latest test of Buzzword online WP
The viability of AIR as an application platform is only becoming more clear with today’s revamp of Buzzword, Adobe’s online word processor, now part of Acrobat.com. BetaNews spent some more time with Buzzword this morning and afternoon.
Chinese OpenOffice 4.0 beta takes design cues from Office 2007
RedOffice, the suite of Office products based upon OpenOffice.org and optimized for Chinese users has received a new UI in its 4.0 beta.
Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007
This Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 provides authors of scientific articles with the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, PubMed Central.
This Beta 1 release is targeted at the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows.
Download: Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007
The Desktop Files: Security vs. Compliance
IT professionals often find themselves with objectives that should complement each other but often compete instead. Security and compliance are two such organizational goals, where the achievement of one should enhance the other. But thats not usually the case, as Wes Miller shows. Read his overview of why being secure doesn’t always mean being compliant with the initiatives required, and why being compliant often doesn’t mean being secure, or at least not as secure as you should be if compliance truly equated to security. Youll also find other security and compliance resources in the column, from both within and outside of Microsoft.
News Source: TechNet Magazine Blog
Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies For Next Four Years
The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years.
The usual suspects including multi-core chips, virtualization, and cloud computing are on the list. Multicore servers and virtualization will mean that firms will need fewer boxes, and apps can be easily moved from box to box (and right out the door to an outsourced data center). Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm’s apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes.
News Source: Slashdot
Windows 7 multi-touch SDK being readied for PDC in October
By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews
As details continue to emerge about Microsoft’s evidently well-made plans for its next operating system, we learn that full documentation for how multi-touch capabilities will work in Windows, will be ready for demonstration by this fall.
For Microsoft’s next Professional Developers’ Conference currently scheduled for late October in Los Angeles, the company plans to demonstrate the use of a system developers’ kit for producing multi-touch applications for Windows 7. Such applications would follow the model unveiled yesterday by executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at a Wall Street Journal technology conference in Carlsbad, California yesterday.
For the session tentatively entitled “Windows 7: Touch Computing,” the PDC Web site — which went live just this morning — describes, “In Windows 7, innovative touch and gesture support will enable more direct and natural interaction in your applications. This session will highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications.”
We were surprised to find the PDC site reads better when viewed in Internet Explorer.
The early suggestions from Microsoft’s developers — some of whom have been openly hinting that multi-touch was coming to Windows 7 since last December — is that the next version of Windows will be endowed with technology that emerged from the company’s Surface project, its first to implement such controls. Surface is actually an extension of the Windows Vista platform — specifically, it’s the Windows Presentation Foundation extended so that it sees a surface display device as essentially just another container control, with an expanded list of supported graphic devices.
What is not known at this stage is how much today’s Windows Vista will have to be extended to enable multi-touch in Windows 7, especially for the sake of downward compatibility with existing and earlier applications.
Prior to the advent of Windows XP, when applications were largely compiled using Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), application windows were very generic containers with standardized window gadgets and menu bars. When a developer used the standard MFC library, he could be assured that scroll bars could respond to mouse events and that contents that spilled off the edge of the visible area would not, as a result, descend into some invisible twilight zone.
Holding that MFC fabric together was the concept that graphic elements responded to individual events, often called “mouse events.” And the basic premise of a mouse event was that it had to do with a single element positioned at one spot, or one set of coordinates, on the screen. A keyboard event could alternately trigger a mouse event (pressing Enter while the highlight was over “OK,” for example), but the developer would only have to write one event handler for managing what happened after clicking on OK.
The first touch sensitivity in Windows came by way of Tablet PC, which was a platform extension to Windows, coupled with a series of drivers. Adding a stylus as a new device for input could indeed change the way applications worked unto themselves; they could add all kinds of new gadgets that would have been pointless under mouse control only.
In addition, Microsoft opened up a wide array of so-called semantic gestures, which was a library of simple things one could do with a stylus that could potentially mean something within an application. For example, scratching on top of a word could be taken to mean, “Delete this word.” Drawing a long arrow beside a graphic object could mean, “Please move this object over here.” It all depended on how the application developer wanted the user to see things; and there were certainly some good suggestions, but not the kind or level of standardization as prescribed by IBM’s Common User Access model (PDF available here) of the early 1990s.
However, outside of the application’s native context, whatever a stylus can do in the Windows workspace is relegated to substituting for a mouse event. In other words, the Windows desktop was not supposed to know or care whether the user was operating a mouse, a keyboard, or a stylus, just as long as the same events were triggered.
For instance, a tap of the stylus on the surface will send an event whose constant code in Visual Studio is WM_LBUTTONDOWN, followed immediately by WM_LBUTTONUP, as though the user had pressed and released the left mouse button (the “L” in these constant codes). By comparison, holding down the pen on the surface will trigger the WM_RBUTTONDOWN event just after the time the pen touches the surface, followed by WM_RBUTTONUP when the user lifts it from the surface. However Windows would normally respond to a left or right button click, respectively, is how the Tablet PC developer would expect Windows to respond to a stylus tap or a press-and-hold.
Here, because standard Windows functions must be capable of working reasonably within a Tablet PC environment, the interface between the general functions and the outside world is standardized.
Since that time, we’ve seen the advent of Windows Presentation Foundation, a little piece of which is distributed with every copy of Silverlight. An application built to support WPF operates under a new set of rules.
McAfee seeks beta testers for Total Protection suite
By Nate Mook, BetaNews
Security software vendor McAfee is seeking beta testers for its Total Protection suite, which combines 12 tools into one, much like Microsoft’s Live OneCare and Symantec’s Norton 360. Although the company doesn’t specify, it’s likely testing the 2009 edition of the product, which is version 3.0.
McAfee also has its Personal Vault software in beta, and those who join the company’s beta program can try out both. Personal Vault, which is a new product that entered testing last year, encrypts files and folder with a password. McAfee’s beta program is free and U.S. residents may be eligible to obtain rewards including gift cards or certificates and other prizes.
