Author: jay f

I have blogged about this product before and now Microsoft has announced

Microsoft Corp. today announced updates to its Photosynth technology that enable commercial use through integration with Microsoft Virtual Earth. The Photosynth integration into Virtual Earth signifies the first release designed to enable businesses to use Photosynth in commercial applications.

Photosynth software analyzes digital photographs and generates a 3-D model by “stitching” the photos together. These models, or “synths,” can now be viewed using Silverlight technology across multiple platforms. Virtual Earth brings together features, functionality and content that help consumers, businesses, citizens and governments bring location to life. It helps businesses and governments share location-based information, build better connections with consumers or citizens, and helps organizations make better operational decisions. With the integration of Photosynth into Virtual Earth customers will be able to create detailed 3-D views of anything from places to products and from hotels to homes.

Look at this site to see this technology in action http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/default.aspx

HPC is becoming part of mainstream computing, and that’s a nice way of saying it can’t fail. We have customers in production and they’ve provided us with a list of great features for our upcoming release. Some of them told us they wanted to use our SOA programming model in mission critical environments. With this CTP we provide the first of many mission critical features, disconnection/reconnection for SOA workloads. Say you submit a million Monte Carlo simulations to the cluster. In the past you would receive the calculations as they were completed, one by one. With our CTP you could submit from your laptop, disconnect, go home, play with the dog, sleep soundly, and come back in the morning to collect the complete set of results. We’ll have additional mission critical features in our future pre-releases.

HPC Server 2008 allowed people who weren’t supercomputing geniuses to set up and run a cluster, easily and quickly. Our CTP includes a number of enhancements to our distributed management infrastructure, including the ability to create custom heat maps and use 3^rd party reporting tools.

Using a cluster should be as easy as using any other network resource. Just like you can connect to a network printer and print jobs, you should be able to connect to a cluster, submit a computationally challenging job, and get the results. Our improved job scheduler includes a number of customer requested features including job progress and pre/post tasks. Pre/post tasks are cool because you can use them to set up and tear down compute nodes. Say you’re doing a bunch of genomic searches. With pre-tasks you could stage parts of the genomic database across your compute nodes, run your searches in parallel, and then clean up when you’re finished. Hey, it’s a simple map/reduce system.

Finally, we’re about to ship a new toolpack and it has our favorite new tool: Lizard. Lizard is a tuning wizard for the Linpack benchmark (get the name???). If you’re a Top500 geek you’ll love this tool. Using a set of parametric sweeps we identify the best input parameters for Linpack, helping you get a killer Linpack benchmark score. Oh, and it’s called Lizard. Did we mention the name? Hmmm… What could we call a GPU tuning wizard…

Back to the CTP. HPC is all about scale, performance, and applications. With this CTP we start with scale, and this Fall we’ll demonstrate performance as well as some exciting improvements to help application developers, from the Python/Excel users to MPI programmers and everyone in between.

More information on the CTP is at: http://www.microsoft.com/hpc.

This is a copy of a post that

Ryan Waite – Product Unit Manager Windows HPC Server put on his blog. (Since most folks know I teach and work with HPC I wanted to share this with you)

Microsoft released the test version  of a new product called Microsoft Vine that will allow users to share reports and updates tied to real-world locations, a tool that could be particularly useful for communication during a disaster.

This tool connects you to the people and places you care about most, when it matters. Stay in touch with family and friends, be informed when someone needs help. Get involved to create great communities. Use alerts, reports and your personal dashboard to stay in touch, informed and involved.

To learn more go here

Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit, by Christa Anderson and Kristin L. Griffin with the Microsoft Presentation Hosted Desktop Virtualization Team

The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention, by Marc McDonald, Robert Musson, and Ross Smith

Did you know that Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. It’s a great value for your family since it can be installed on up to three PCs in your home.

Just found this today

Clinic 10077: What’s New in Windows 7 for IT Professionals

This two-hour clinic provides you with an overview of the new and enhanced deployment, security, manageability, and performance features in Windows 7. It describes how these features meet the day-to-day needs of IT professionals.
This clinic covers the following topics.

• Overview of Deployment Enhancements
• Overview of Security Enhancements
• Overview of Manageability and Performance Enhancements

IT professionals completing this clinic should have basic familiarity with deploying, managing, and maintaining Windows Vista or the Windows XP operating system.

Objectives

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Describe the new and updated deployment features and tools for Windows 7.
• Describe new and enhanced security features in Windows 7.
• Describe the improvements in performance and manageability in Windows 7.
• To take this course go Here

The is a special no-cost online learning opportunity for students. IT Academy Student Pass provides free e-learning courses to verified students who are interested in extending their technical skills with Microsoft technologies.

The IT Academy Student Pass offers 12 to 22 hours of FREE e-learning courses, aligned to the first set of topics you need to master for the first Microsoft certification exam within the track. Each track is unique, and most will require you to take additional e-learning courses to complete all of the topics you need to succeed on the certification exam.

The goal of the IT Academy Student Pass is to give you a head start by providing hours and hours of rich, award-winning e-learning content that sets the stage for the learning to come.

Students may also want to explore Microsoft technical certifications, and the IT Academy Student Pass is a perfect entry point to five different certification paths. Learn about Microsoft Certifications

The IT Academy Student Pass will be available initially in English, but additional languages are being considered for future releases, to get this deal go here

1. Office 2010 will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. 

2. Office 2010 will run on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

3. Groove becomes SharePoint Workspace.  This is true. Please read the Groove SharePoint Workspace team blog here for the scoop.

4.  OneNote and SharePoint Workspace going into the ProPlus SKU.

Want to learn more about Office 2010

go here for Office,and from the SharePoint blog

Announcing SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements

We’ve heard loud and clear that you want system requirements information as early as possible to assist in your budgeting and planning, so today we’re happy to announce (and confirm) some preliminary system requirements for SharePoint Server 2010:

1. SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only.
2. SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2.
3. SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005.

In addition to the requirements listed above we also wanted to share with you some preliminary detail about SharePoint Server 2010 browser compatibility. 

To ensure the best possible experience across multiple browsers we’re focusing our SharePoint 2010 engineering efforts on targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems.  In addition we’re planning on an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows Operating Systems.  Due to this focus Internet Explorer 6 will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010.

So, what can you do today to get into the best shape for SharePoint Server 2010?

1. Start by ensuring new hardware is 64-bit.  Deploying 64-bit is our current best practice recommendation for SharePoint 2007.
2. Deploy Service Pack 2 and take a good look at the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Checker that’s shipped as part of the update.  The Upgrade Checker will scan your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment for many issues that could affect a future upgrade to SharePoint 2010.
3. Get to know Windows Server 2008 with SharePoint 2007, this post is a great starting point.
4. Consider your desktop browser strategy if you have large population of Internet Explorer 6 users.
5. Continue to follow the Best Practices guidance for SharePoint Server 2007.
6. Keep an eye on this blog for updates and more details in the coming months.

I be talking about Windows 7 at the TPCUG MEETING

at the Trumbull Library Community Room

33 Quality Street, Trumbull, CT on Thursday night May 21, 2009 at 7pm come join us.