Posts tagged microsoft

Elon Musk is the founder, chief executive and chief designer of SpaceX. The company managed to overcome a series of technical and financial crises and made history Friday by attaching the first private spacecraft to the international space station.

Amazon.com Founder Jeff Bezos runs Blue Origin, a start-up targeting space station runs. An unnamed spaceship developed by Blue Origin suffered a major failure during a test flight in the summer of 2011.

In December, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen indicated he is prepared to commit $200 million or more of his wealth to build the world’s largest airplane as a mobile platform for launching satellites at low cost. The novel, high-risk project was conceived by renowned aerospace engineer.

British billionaire and playboy Sir Richard Branson years ago entered the fray, creating Virgin Galactic, an extension of his well-known brand that intends to take well-heeled customers to the edge of space, but also foresees launching satellites and carrying experiments.

Planetary Resources Inc., a start-up with backers including Google co-founders Larry Page, left, Eric Schmidt, right, and Ross Perot Jr., not shown, unveiled in April a plan to send robotic spacecraft to remotely mine asteroids.

Robert Bigelow is the billionaire founder of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain and the president of Bigelow Aerospace. In the spring of 2012, Boeing completed a parachute drop test of the Crew Space Transportation-1000 spacecraft. Mr. Bigelow plans to use the CST-100 spacecraft for transporting people to and from his expandable modules developed for space habitation.

(Source: futurenow321)

Steller sea lions from Alaska’s Panhandle to California’s Channel Islands have reached recovery targets and should be removed from the endangered-species list, according to the federal agency that oversees them.

The eastern population of the marine mammal has increased from about 34,000 in 1997 to 70,000 in 2010, according to federal officials.

The recommendation Wednesday from the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), does not affect the endangered status of the western population, which includes sea lions throughout the Aleutian Islands.

Fishing restrictions put in place there to aid sea lions were challenged by commercial fishing interests and the state of Alaska.

(Source: futurenow321)

Two tech heavyweights are about to start the legal fight of the century in a California courtroom Google and Oracle the high-profile battle over intellectual property begins today with jury selection. The stakes are no less than the future of Android. Oracle sued Google over its use of java, a software platform Oracle obtained from its acquisition of Sun Microsystems earlier that same year. Java is actually free to use without licensing it, but when Google developed its Android mobile operating system, it used many of Sun’s Java APIs (application programming interfaces) so Android developers could create apps with Java. Google’s argument is that programming languages are merely the tools software developers use and aren’t subject to copyright, though the programs they make with them are. It says Oracle is trying to copyright an idea rather than an expression — one of the main distinctions about what can be copyrighted and what can’t.

(Source: futurenow321)

If you fear the robot apocalypse, perhaps your day would be much improved if you just moved on. Boston Dynamics’ PETMAN robot, developed for DARPA, is getting more humanoid-like by the day it seems, and here we see it—legs, torso, arms, and all—negotiating staircases, running on a treadmill, and even hitting the floor for some pushups. All this strength training appears to be doing PETMAN some good.

(Source: futurenow321)

Also known as NGC123 this fascinating galaxy is dominated by millions of bright stars and dark dust, caught up in a gravitational swirl of spiral arms rotating about the center. Open clusters containing bright blue stars can be seen sprinkled along these spiral arms, while dark lanes of dense interstellar dust can be seen sprinkled between them. Less visible, but detectable, are billions of dim normal stars and vast tracts of interstellar gas, together wielding such high mass that they dominate the dynamics of the inner galaxy. Invisible are even greater amounts of matter in a form we don’t yet know - pervasive dark matter needed to explain the motions of the visible in the outer galaxy.

(Source: futurenow321)

The research firm said it expected Microsoft’s market share to rise gradually, helped by enterprise purchases, but to reach just 11.8 percent in 2016 as it lacks consumer appeal.

“Many vendors will wait for Windows 8 to be ready and will try to enter the market with a dual-platform approach, hoping that the Microsoft brand could help them in both the business and consumer markets,” Milanesi said.

In addition to traditional PC makers, Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker by volume, is set to unveil its first tablet using Windows 8 software later this year.

(Source: futurenow321)

After much anticipation, AT&T officially announced launch details for the Nokia Lumia 900, the first LTE Windows Phone handset for the U.S. on April 8, the lumia 900 will be available for $99 with a two-year plan commitment, making it one of the least expensive LTE phone debuts to date. Such pricing is likely backed by a higher level of subsidies from Microsoft, Nokia, or both, in order to restore both brands to prominence.

(Source: futurenow321)

Windows 8 calls for three standard scaling percentages that ensure applications written for the operating system are functional and attractive no matter what size screen they are on, so long as they meet the minimum display specs a senior program manager on the Windows user experience team.

The minimum requirement is 1024 by 768 to allow more than bare-bones layouts, to fall in line with most website resolutions and to fall in line with the devices that most Windows 7 users already have.

As pixel densities increase, the size of each pixel gets smaller. If no accommodation is made for this change, objects and type sizes in applications would shrink as the screen resolution gets better. Scaling percentages ensure that as display resolution increases, the actual size of the objects remains within a usable range, type is always large enough to read and objects remain large enough to finger tap accurately, he says.

Those percentages are 100 percent, 140 percent and 180 percent. If developers write applications to accommodate them, the apps should look good no matter what type of device they run on so long as the devices meet Windows 8 minimum display requirements. “Because these scaling percentages are predictable, developers who provide images for each percentage can easily avoid any blurriness or artifacts due to image stretching,” he says.

 He addresses iPads directly, noting that the scaling between an iPad 2 and a new iPad is 20 percent — roughly twice the pixel density. “In the case of iPad 2 compared to new iPad the 200 percent scaling factor means that what you see on 1024 by 768 is exactly what you see on the new resolution, only sharper because more pixels are used,” he says.

Microsoft has frameworks so developers don’t have to manually code the apps to scale. Use of standard pixel units and XAML layouts, layouts will scale. Images corresponding to each scaling percentage can be stored and appropriately named so the appropriate one for the hardware will be chosen automatically. The goal is a baseline level of quality that can be achieved with little effort.

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