Google Squared - Bing - Wolfram Alpha

It seems that this week is the week of new search (decision/computational knowledge) engines. After launching Bing and Wolfram Alpha just a few days ago, Google just released Google Squared as "an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet". Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha are quite similar, as both try to "compute" answers in response to a user query. However, unlike Wolfram Alpha which uses an internal database, Google's database is the whole web. Will Google Squared be the Wolfram Alpha (and maybe also Bing) killer...  

The Hidden Connection Between Windows and Google Chrome Logo

Via Amit Agarwal.

Image Credit: oneBlog

Microsoft Windows Live Supports OpenID

OpenID - the "free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet" - is now supported by Microsoft Windows Live. Microsoft describes OpenID as the "emerging, de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication". According to Microsoft "We look forward to making it easier for our users to access the Web sites they use, by reducing their need to create additional identity accounts. That is the promise of OpenID. We are happy to support that goal by providing OpenID-based sign-in functionality to Windows Live ID account holders".


Windows Live ID OpenID Provider Screencast from Angus Logan on Vimeo.

Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft

Bill Gates' Lessons to Kids

Just came across this post by Katie Ledger listing 11 things kids will not learn in school from a speech Bill Gates recently gave at a High School.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault; so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time..

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

OpenID 2.0 Final

OpenID 2.0 is finally a released specification. The announcement by the OpenID community yesterday stated:

It’s important to remember that this has been the work of many folks not only within the OpenID community but also the OpenID Foundation, AOL, Cordance, JanRain, Microsoft, NetMesh, Six Apart, Sxip, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Yahoo!. Microsoft was instrumental in helping with legal support and guidance combined with the insight of Sun and Yahoo! with their joint work in developing the right language. This is great news as it means that today not only is OpenID 2.0 final, but all of the contributors have sent a strong message that OpenID must be freely implementable world-wide.

Last week Google and Microsoft also showed their support of OpenID. In the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View CA, both Microsoft and Google included OpenID features in beta products. Google announced the ability to comment on Blogger blogs using OpenID and Microsoft Research announced an experimental Provider.

Acquisitions by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo from July 2006 to June 2007

Via Tim O'Reilly.

A chart from the LibraryHouse blog showing acquisitions by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo from July 2006 to June 2007.

Security in Windows/Mac/Linux

In a recent report, Jeff Jones, Security Strategy Director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, compared Windows Vista with Windows XP, several Linux distributions and Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger). The report can be downloaded here. Actually I´m not sure if it´s true that Windows Vista is more secure than a Mac or Linux platform!

Google Apps = Microsoft Office 2.0 ?

On the official Google blog, the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team announced that Google will add a presentations product to its Web apps suite. Sam Schillace, Engineering Director at Google writes:

We'll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations...We've already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you're almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

Scott Guthrie, General Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division, announced the final release of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (aka "Atlas").

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 delivers a rich client-side AJAX library that provides cross platform, cross browser support for a core JavaScript type-system, JSON-based network serialization stack, JavaScript component/control model, as well as common client JavaScript helper classes. ASP.NET AJAX also delivers a rich server-side library that integrates AJAX functionality within ASP.NET, and enables developers to easily AJAX-enable existing ASP.NET 2.0 sites with minimal effort.

Future Plans

While the core ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release is now officially shipped, we are definitely not slowing down. :-)

All of the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 features will be integrated directly into the next release of ASP.NET (codename: "Orcas"). Visual Studio "Orcas" will also provide client-side JavaScript intellisense, JavaScript compilation checking, and rich JavaScript debugging support for ASP.NET AJAX scenarios.

We are also already at work on the next ASP.NET AJAX release, and will continue to add new features and improvements to the supported ASP.NET AJAX core.

Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional Edition