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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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The primary function is to add a couple of buttons to the Outlook ribbon to prevent people from doing a reply-all to your message, or forwarding it (using a facility built into Outlook & Exchange which is really lightweight compared to using IRM machinery, but which is not exposed in the existing UI). However, it also includes a check for email goofs such as omitting attachments or subject lines.
This works with both Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, as long as you're using an Exchange account.
When you install this thing, you'll see a couple of extra buttons at the end of the ribbon: No Reply All and No Forward. As the names suggest, clicking on these will prevent recipients of your emails from performing those two actions; clicking again toggles the relevant option off again.
Download it from here: unzip to somewhere on your local PC and run setup.exe.
Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie sees technologies converging to transform how humans and computers work together.
It’s safe to say that computers have become a bit more powerful over the past 15 years.
Cellular technology untethered our phones. The Internet brought the world into our homes and offices. And the power of microprocessors has kept leaping forward. Now we’re embarking on a new era, where all kinds of powerful computers, in all shapes and sizes, will work hand in hand with vast online databases. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, calls this the “client plus cloud” era.
Mundie, whose job is to interpret the impact of emerging technology trends, says that changes under way in the tech industry today have the potential to completely change the technology world as we know it.
“We’re approaching an imminent sea change in technology that will transform everything we know today,” Mundie says. “A combination of the cloud plus very powerful client machines, along with a revolution in how people interact with computers, will define the next era of technology — and have a vast impact on society.”
Recent, significant advances in microprocessors, up to 100 times as powerful as the machines we’re using today, are emerging at every level — chip, device and data center — and are enabling our everyday client devices including PCs, phones, e-books, game systems and more to take on very complex computing tasks. At the same time, the cloud is scaling up its service capacity thanks to massive data centers. Taken together, they form a new programming paradigm, the seamless client-plus-cloud platform.
And if that’s not enough, we’re also seeing new ways to interact with computers, via a natural user interface or “NUI” that embraces gestures, anticipatory computing, expressive response, contextual and environmental awareness, and 3-D or even immersive experiences. These new forms of input, Mundie says, will create a startling transformation in how humans and computers interact.
“The transition to a natural user interface will change everything from the way students write term papers and play computer games to how scientists study global population growth and its impact on our natural resources,” Mundie says. “In the healthcare field, physicians and patients alike will also benefit from simpler and more effective tools with which to communicate and share information.”
The NUI Revolution
Continue: Computing, Naturally Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie sees technologies convergi
At TED2010 this week, Live Labs Director Gary Flake presents an experiment in data visualization that allows people to make more sense of the growing amount of information that surrounds them.
A Microsoft technical fellow and director of Live Labs, Gary Flake has made a career out of building technologies that glean insight from information.
Today at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, Flake will show off Live Labs’ latest development — a data visualization technology called Pivot, designed to help people make better use of digital information.
“We’re at a really interesting point in the history of the Internet,” says Flake. “Pivot was not possible to build five years ago. But it is possible to build today.”
Pivot is an experimental technology that allows people to visualize data and then sort, organize and categorize it dynamically. The result is that correlations, exceptions and trends become immediately apparent in ways they can’t when information is stuck in rows and columns.
The program is designed to provide a much more natural way for humans to digest large palettes of information without losing their way — an idea that anyone who has analyzed giant spreadsheets may welcome. And while it has something in common with spreadsheets and many other technologies, Flake says Pivot is so new and different that it’s difficult to even picture what it does without seeing it in action.
“With Pivot you can interact with data in a way that is powerful, informative and fun,” Flake says.
Pivot combines related data — anything from pictures, videos and maps to batting averages and financials — into large collections that can then be manipulated, sorted, filtered and examined visually. In this way, the data itself can help shape and inform the way it is presented.
Perhaps Pivot’s most compelling feature is its ability to smoothly and quickly arrange collections according to common characteristics and then zoom in for a closer look, by either clicking on a particular item or filtering the collection to get a subset of information.
“With Pivot you can swim through the data, taking little twists and turns,” Flake says. “If you are looking at all the information at once, the proverbial forest, you can click on any one item or filter and smoothly zoom into the trees without any interruption.”
The example right of a Pivot view makes it clear how pitchers outnumber other players on Major League Baseball teams. Subsequent views can display salary, performance against salary, and other information on the fly.
Flake says that Live Labs’ research with users has found that the continuity and smoothness Pivot provides in surfing through data is important to help users understand what they’re looking at, and how they got there.
“We found that if you make it a sudden transition, people lose their way,” he says. “But if you make it very smooth and continuous, people have a mental model of how they got to where they are.”
Because Pivot works with almost any kind of data, its potential uses are as varied as the types of information available today — in other words, practically infinite. A Pivot collection designed to help study the history of movies, for example, could sort by male or female leads, and then sort again to find their most frequently occurring co-star. The user could then “pivot” the information again, to shape the display of the movies themselves, perhaps by decade.
Realizing that the horizon for Pivot’s possibilities was far beyond what one research group could hope to imagine, Live Labs released the technology on a limited basis last fall at the 2009 Professional Developers Conference. After only a couple of months, says Flake, the examples started rolling in.
“Just as we anticipated,” Flake says, “people are using it in ways that we never anticipated.”
Live Labs has made Pivot downloadable to people who want to give it a try and think about new scenarios it enables.
Source: Microsoft Live Labs Pivot Technology Brings Information to Life At TED2010 this week, Live L
Microsoft Research Ltd is believed to be close to agreeing a deal with the University of Cambridge to virtually double its space on the institution’s West Cambridge site.
Microsoft needs extra space to facilitate its rapid growth from Cambridge and reports from the local property sector suggested it would move off the West Cambridge site to another local base if it failed to negotiate suitable terms with the university. While neither the University nor Microsoft is prepared to comment, we understand an agreement is now imminent. Cambridge was Microsoft Corporation’s first research base outside of its Redmond headquarters.
Microsoft Research to double Cambridge space Property and Construction
It turns out 2019 is getting closer every day. At the moment, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie is doing the rounds at a number of prestigious colleges in the States showing off Microsoft’s vision for technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Of course, one must use the latest in natural user interfaces for this task.
A feature of this year’s tour appears to be a next-generation computer – one that docks and undocks from a transparent glass display and allows for not only pen and voice input as you’d come to expect from natural user interfaces, but also incorporates touchless gestures and eye-tracking to interact with the information at hand.
let two videos do the rest of the talking at source:
A team of Microsoft developers is working on a platform that couples online maps with video to create richer driving directions.
The researchers, along with developers from the University of Konstanz in Germany, create the video using the 360-degree photos companies like Google produce for Street View on Google Maps. They then use the images to identify landmarks at turns along a person's driving route, and integrate the video into an online-map interface.
Continue for video at seattlepi
Lecture series by celebrated physics professor Richard Feynman is now available to all.
Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science.
The historic lectures and related content can be seen at http://research.microsoft.com/tuva. The name “Tuva” was chosen because of Feynman’s lifelong fascination with the small Russian republic of Tuva, located in the heart of Asia.
Feynman was one of the most popular scientists of the 20th century, equally regarded for his scientific insights as well as his ability to convey his enthusiasm for science through his lectures and writings. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and was also known for his quirky sense of humor and eccentric and wide-ranging interests..................Continue At Source
From the Photosynth Blog:
The world will change on January 20th when Barack Obama, the President-elect takes the oath of office and becomes the 44th President of the United States.
"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
If you are going to be among the millions attending, you can be part of history by helping create the most immersive and detailed experience of a single moment ever created.
Capturing the Moment of Transition
We’re partnering with CNN to gather thousands of your photographs to create an immersive experience of the moment when President Obama takes the Oath of Office. From the vast sweep of the crowd to a close-up on the President’s hand on the Bible, every part of this historic scene will be frozen in time and presented in 3-D as only Photosynth can.
Well placed CNN photographers will capture lots of detailed shots for this synth, and if you’re there you can help make this an even more amazing experience by adding your perspective with your digital camera or camera phone.
Check out CNN’s page dedicated to this collaboration: http://cnn.com/themoment.
How it Will Work
We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN’s professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN. And you thought the Jessica Yellin hologram was cool! The synth will also be available for everyone to see on CNN.com.
How to Participate
When you make a Photosynth on your own, you shoot tens or hundreds of photos from different positions. Since we hope to have thousands of people participating, we’re asking to just capture the view from one position.
Kodu, a game to be released on an Xbox Live Community Games channel in the spring, helps youngsters learn to program and lets them create their own video games to play and share.
For children, learning to program at an early age can open up a lifetime of creativity and opportunity. And with Kodu, a new game unveiled by Microsoft at the recent 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), they can learn the skill of programming while having fun creating and playing their own games.Kodu will be released this spring on the Xbox Live Community Games channel and will help people of all ages program their own games in addition to exercising their logic and problem-solving skills, says Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division. “It started as a way to help kids learn how to program, but what it’s turned into is a way to not only learn how to program, but to create your own games,” he says.
Kodu is built around a game-friendly programming language that is simple and icon-based. Players can choose from 20 different game characters – including flying saucers, submarines, and a Pac Man-like Kodu main character – then use an interactive terrain editor, a bridge and path builder, and other tools to create their own game world. Players also have the option of using pre-loaded worlds.Kodu is a product of Microsoft Research, where it was developed over the past two years by principal program manger designer Matt MacLaurin. His goal: Create a game his four-year-old daughter could use to both have fun and learn something about programming...........Continue At Source
Microsoft Tag is a new system to help give you a way to direct people to a URL using the camera on their mobile phone. You can think of it as TinyURL for optics, or Cue Cat on-the-go minus the hokey cat reader (hey, I know lots of people who loved that thing). It's actually a great system to visually direct people to a URL, free text, a vcard, or a dialer. You can sign up for free at Microsoft.com/tag, and download the app for your phone at gettag.mobi. Tag is available for a number of phones including Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, and the iPhone. Tag can link to multiple types of content from web, SMS, e-mail, calendars, maps, or coupons and can be as small as 5/8". There is a great backend as well so you can see analytics on when and where people are reading your tags.
National Virtual Observatory Cone Search / Registry Lookup – Search through the United States NVO registry to find information about astronomical bodies. You’ll find this under Search then VO Cone Search / Registry Lookup. Once the screen comes up, you can enter anything into the NVO Registry Title Like box then click the NVO Registry Search button. The results will populate the other form fields:
Microsoft Live Labs is releasing Thumbtack, an easy way to gather and share links, photos, and text, from different Web sites and save all of the data in the form of a collection to a single place at: http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/. Thumbtack allows users to share and collaborate with others on collections by providing the ability to directly email the content or by allowing them to publish their collection to the Web with a number of options including RSS, Atom, HTML and Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. Thumbtack collections can also be embedded in personal websites and blogs.
In addition, Thumbtack includes gadgets which enhance and extend the capabilities of Thumbtack and enable people to do more with their content, such as compare different items by price or location or automatically find and map addresses. Clips within Thumbtack can also be annotated with properties and then viewed as a scatter plot or bar graph to help sort, filter and visualize content within a collection.
The team incorporated ideas from the community feedback of the Listas tech preview, which Live Labs released in the fall of 2007. Thumbtack focuses on ways to seamlessly collect and organize information gathered from across the web. Similar to other technology preview releases from Microsoft Live Labs, the team will evaluate user feedback to determine the best places to move forward on Thumbtack, including better ways of collecting clips to further analyze the rich metadata to better support visualization and decision making.
Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom..........Continue At Source
............... Download At Source
Photo collages celebrate important events and themes in our lives. Pick a folder, press a button, and in a few minutes AutoCollage presents you with a unique memento to print or email to your family and friends.
Download AutoCollage 2008 now and start creating your own collages within minutes.
AutoCollage allows you to create beautiful collages of your favorite pictures in a few clicks of a mouse. Click here to see the program in action.
At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit today, leaders from Microsoft Research outlined their vision for how Microsoft Corp. and academics can collaborate on research projects to develop technological breakthroughs that will define computing and scientific research in the years ahead.
Some of the tools available freely are :
Add-ins. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.
The Microsoft e-Journal Service. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals.
Research Output Repository Platform. This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects — such as papers, lectures, presentations and video — to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.
The Research Information Centre. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process.
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