Introducing Windows Server 2012
Introducing Windows SQL Server 2012
Introducing Windows 8 - An Overview for IT Professionals
Moving to MS Visual Studio 2010
Programming Windows 8 apps
Security and privacy for MS Office 2010 users
Introducing Windows Server 2012 RTM edition
First Look: Microsoft Office 2010
Microsoft® Office 365
In June, year 6 pupils will sit a National Test in spelling, grammar and punctuation. But how good is your knowledge? Take our quiz for students, teachers and grammar fans
Are you an Information Technology (IT) Professional or developer looking for a resource to stay up to date with Microsoft security? If so, I strongly encourage you to check out our Microsoft Security Newsletter. This monthly newsletter delivered to your inbox in either HTML or Plain Text covers a wide range of Microsoft security topics from leading experts
San Francisco eBook publishing startup Inkling has released a new set of collaborative online digital publishing tools to try and coax book publishers to fully move their content into the Internet age.
The new software suite, called Inkling Habitat, will be the first online, collaborate, free, and open digital publishing environment for professionals.
Matt McInnis, CEO of Inkling, showed off some of Habitat's capabilities at an event in New York this week. The online software appears to compete with the likes of Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite and even Apple's iBooks Author. Like Apple's product, Habitat is free, although it sounds slightly more geared toward professional publishing houses, particularly those in education.
In the early 1980s, I was told that COBOL was going away and that I should quickly move toward other programming languages. Well, thirty years later, COBOL is alive and well and living in large companies everywhere.
Yes, most of the smaller COBOL programs written in the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s have been replaced with newer systems and newer technologies. However, the big mission critical systems written long ago in COBOL and modified and enhanced for the past thirty to forty years are still driving very large, very prestigious companies around the country and around the world. These companies include banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, retail chains, health care organizations, and every other type of company you can imagine.
Although normally a pretty upbeat and optimistic person, I end a lot of my different talks these days with a pretty scary, even dystopic slide: "IF WE PROFS CAN BE REPLACED BY A COMPUTER SCREEN, WE SHOULD BE.”
That gets people’s attention. And it makes people mad. My meaning is often misunderstood at first—and that’s what I want. I want profs in the audience to be outraged that I’m saying they can be replaced by a computer screen. And, if they think they are not replaceable by a computer screen, I want them to articulate why.
If they can make a good case for what they add, then my conditional statement is answered negatively: No, I cannot be replaced by a computer screen because of . . . Making that case accurately and persuasively (to the public, to legislators, to donors, and mostly to our students) is the single most important thing any professor can do because, if we don’t, it will be made for us. And we won't like the result.
Colleges and University Professors are Improving Learning Outcomes, and Lowering Costs, with Flipped Classroom Techniques.
When you think about it, hoping that a 21st century middle or high school student will obsess over reading like they do. . .say. . .Tumblr or their new iPhone. . . is almost laughable. It is as anachronistic as wishing for an age before freeways or toys before plastic.
Indeed, expecting kids to deeply embrace and read books today whether for independent reading or homework is not a whole lot different than asking them to churn their own butter, carry their favorite music around in their backpack as an LP collection, use a telephone that is wired to the wall, or watch their favorite shows on a black and white tv with rabbit ears. But really – have books jumped the shark?
For learners, and I am one, learning is a lifelong continuum . I still think though that those who deliver learning and the accreditation of learning still live in silos, worse some of them have stopped learning.
Richard Mayer and Ruth Clark are among the foremost researchers in the empirical testing of media and media mix hypotheses in online learning. Their e-Learning and the Science of Instruction (2003) covers seven design principles; multimedia, contiguity, modality, redundancy, coherence, personalisation, and practice opportunities. Clear explanations are given about the risks of ignoring these principles - with support from worked examples and case study challenges. It should be a compulsory text for online learning designers.
Microsoft is supporting the WW competition and in the UK were having a dedicated competition at each event and online.
So even if who cannot physically attend the event can enter the online competition see http://www.ubelly.com/global-game-jam/
The next frontier in the ongoing talent war, according to McKinsey, will be deep analytics, a critical weapon required to probe big data in the competition underpinning new waves of productivity, growth, and innovation. Are you ready to compete and win in this technical talent war?
Similarly, Information Week contends that data expertise is called for to take advantage of data mining, text mining, forecasting, and machine learning techniques. The System z data center is ideally is ideally positioned to win if you can attract the right talent.
If George Washington really never told a lie, then he must never have been a programmer. All those long hours sitting alone in a cube or at a workstation (unless you pair program) can lead you to not just talk to yourself, but to outright lie. How else to justify doing (or not doing) certain things that you probably shouldn’t (or should) do?
Chrome: Reading articles online isn't always the most pleasant experience. MagicScroll is a Chrome extension that transforms a page into a book-like, distraction free experience to make reading longer articles online easier.
Join the European APPCUP 2013!
Take the chance to develop your application for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8.
It´s a great opportunity to showcase your development skills for innovative applications.
While I’m strongly in the camp of ‘everyone should use Twitter because we all use it in a different way,’ this humorous Twitter flowchart was just too interesting to not post. It’s basically a visualization that helps you critically think about why you should or shouldn’t use Twitter.
Christmas comes but once a year, which is similar to the frequency in which I blog. I thought as it’s the season of good will, I would write a blog that details some of the free stuff we have to offer.
Anyone who ever monitored or analyzed an application uses or has used averages. They are simple to understand and calculate. We tend to ignore just how wrong the picture is that averages paint of the world. To emphasis the point let me give you a real-world example outside of the performance space that I read recently in a newspaper.
The article was explaining that the average salary in a certain region in Europe was 1900 Euro's (to be clear this would be quite good in that region!). However when looking closer they found out that the majority, namely 9 out of 10 people, only earned around 1000 Euros and one would earn 10.000 (I over simplified this of course, but you get the idea). If you do the math you will see that the average of this is indeed 1900, but we can all agree that this does not represent the "average" salary as we would use the word in day to day live. So now let's apply this thinking to application performance.
Have you ever thought that computer science should include more dragons and wizards? Computational Fairy Tales introduces principles of computational thinking, illustrating high-level computer science concepts, the motivation behind them, and their application in a non-computer—fairy tale—domain. It’s a quest that will take you from learning the basics of programming in a blacksmith’s forge to fighting curses with recursion.
Fifteen seers delivered the same prophecy, without so much as a single minstrel to lighten the mood: an unknown darkness threatens the kingdom. Suddenly, Princess Ann finds herself sent forth alone to save the kingdom. Leaving behind her home, family, and pet turtle Fido, Princess Ann must face goblin attacks, magical curses, arrogant scholars, an unpleasant oracle, and rude Boolean waiters. Along the way she must build a war chest of computational knowledge to survive the coming challenge.
The Computational Fairy Tales book includes ~30 rewritten or revised stories from the online collection and 15 all new chapters. Each story serves to illustrate a computational concept, supplementing official instruction or motivating computer science concepts. The stories have also be set up to provide a natural progression both within the computer science concepts and within the fairy tale quest.
Can digital rights management technology stop the unauthorized spread of copyrighted content? Ten years ago this month, four engineers argued that it can't, forever changing how the world thinks about piracy. Their paper, "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution" (available as a .doc here) was presented at a security conference in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2002.
By itself, the paper's clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft's future DRM schemes. The paper's lead author told Ars that the paper's pessimistic view of Hollywood's beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later, its predictions have proved impressively accurate.
