Archive for November, 2008
Download Windows Home Server Toolkit v1.1 (32-Bit)
The Windows Home Server Toolkit is a collection of tools that help you troubleshoot issues with Windows Home Server. The toolkit has the following components:
- Error Reporting: The Error Reporting tool collects log files from your home computer and sends them to Microsoft. These log files are useful to Microsoft Support when troubleshooting problems you may encounter with Windows Home Server.
- Windows Home Server Connector Troubleshooter: The Windows Home Server Connector Troubleshooter is a program that runs on your home computer to help troubleshoot problems you may encounter while installing the Connector software. The Connector Troubleshooter runs a series of tests to check the most common Connector Setup problems, and then it recommends possible solutions.
- Windows Home Server Toolkit Add-in: You can also use the Troubleshooter to install a Windows Home Server Toolkit Add-in on your home server. With this Add-in, you can run troubleshooting tasks from the Windows Home Server Console Settings page.
Download the 64 bit version here
New language pair on MicrosoftTranslator.com
The Translator team is excited to announce the availability of the English to Russian language pair on MicrosoftTranslator.com. This language pair is now available across all implementations of the translator technology, including Live Search and (in the next few days) the Windows Live Messenger TBot.
You have probably noticed that the Russian to English language pair has been available for some time on our site. As always, translation quality is a top focus for our team. Sometimes reaching quality takes longer for a particular direction – this can be for many reasons. For example, if you are translating between a simple language and a complex language, the translations will be better going to the simple language than they will be going to the complex language. If you are interested in learning more about the technology behind our machine translation engine, see Will Lewis’ blog post on statistical machine translation.
While machine translation is certainly never perfect, for this new language pair we have now hit our quality bar for release. How do we determine the quality bar? In general, when the translation can be considered “useful”. We consistently receive feedback from our users that imperfect translation which is useful is better than no translation. So we have to balance user demand with translation quality. With that in mind, we test our language pairs with human evaluations, until we have reached “useful” translation.
We are always open to your constructive feedback and help – please continue to help us so that we can keep improving quality! We are always very grateful for good feedback.
Some other updates in this release you may notice:
· We have officially migrated our domain to www.microsofttranslator.com
· Improved quality across several language pairs, due to improvements in training data quality
· Improvements in Japanese to English, due to an improved method of parsing the training data
Source- MSR-MT team Blog
Windows SideShow Bitmap Driver released on CodePlex!
The SideShow team is excited to announce the Windows SideShow Bitmap Driver!
This is an open source project that we are hosting on CodePlex:
http://www.codeplex.com/SideShowBitmap
We have provided source code for a Driver and a Simulator. This solution renders pages on a computer and sends bitmap images to the SideShow-compatible device, so the device can be lower cost. This solution allows SideShow functionality to be easily adapted to existing, in-market hardware, in many cases without any hardware modifications. This solution differs from other SideShow solutions. Typically, the SideShow device would parse and render the SCF content. In contrast, the Windows SideShow Bitmap Driver is doing the parsing and rendering.
There are 2 major wins that this project brings to our partners and platform:
- To tailor the driver for your device, you may download the source, alter the look and feel of the user interface as you see fit, and add different transports to the driver. In this sample Windows Rally technologies have been implemented including Plug and Play Extensions for Windows (PnP-x) and Device Profile Web Services (DPWS) as the transport. Because the heavy lifting (parsing and rendering of SCF XML) is handled by the driver, this project is very well suited for devices that have low CPU power or for devices that are always connected.
- The Windows SideShow Bitmap Driver serves as the first published Simple Content Format (SCF) implementation! It allows you to port the code to your device so that it parses and renders SCF. Combine this with our recently published protocol for the Universal Driver for Windows SideShow, and you can quickly build a complete SideShow solution for your device.
Source- MSDN Blog
Windows 7 netbook system specs explained
If I show you the PC I use as my primary machine, I think you’ll be surprised," Steven Sinofsky told us just before this year’s Professional Developers Conference.
The next day the Senior Vice President of the Windows team showed off the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 running Windows 7, and the next week at the Windows Hardware Engineering conference he had an Atom-based Asus EEE netbook with 1GB of RAM in his hands.
At the same event Microsoft showed a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, an MSI Wind, an Asus Bamboo and even the VIA-based HP Mini-Note 2133 all running Windows 7 with full Aero and no missing features.
Don’t expect system requirements until next year, but Windows 7 will give you "a good user experience" on a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of disk space, according to Windows Lead Program Manager Leon Braginski
Source- Techradar
Windows 7 appears with new boot screen
There has been no significant change in boot screens of Microsoft’s operating systems for the last few years. Same goes for Windows 7. The boot screen of Windows 7 builds that have been showed by Microsoft are pretty much same as Windows Vista and others but Winfuture.de has reported that a newer internal build 6954 has got a new boot screen which is significantly different from the previous boot screens.
It is also being speculated that the newer boot screen might be present in the earlier builds of Windows 7 but kept hidden. As per information Win Future has received, the new boot screen shows animated items/balls that come together to/to form Windows logo. It is not clear yet if the new boot screen will be present in the final version.
Microsoft is also thinking about giving the OEMs a choice of changing the boot screen to their requirement. It can of course be done through 3rd party softwares but I don’t think OEMs have been allowed to do it in the past.
Source: Windows7Spot.com
Exec says Internet Explorer 8 is not delayed
Last week, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team announced that a release candidate of IE8 would be issued in the first quarter of next year, followed some time thereafter with a final release of the new browser. Microsoft has never laid out an official timeline for the release of IE8, but there had been hints that the next version of the Web browser was due out before then (Bill Veghte, Microsoft’s senior vice president of online services, said in July, "This is the product that we’ll release to the Web later this year.")
But in an interview Friday, Matthew Lapsen, a director of Windows Product Management, insisted that the release of IE8 was not delayed. "It’s not a slipped schedule," he said. "We release based on product quality, not dates." He declined to state any targets, but did say that the release of IE8 would be independent of any release of Windows.
source: seattlepi.com
Webmaster tools now sniffing for malware
Last week we announced Project Silk Road, our vision for delivering a broad suite of products and services for publishers and web developers, including a customizable Live Search API, rich content, multiple media and source types, and the ability to monetize through ad-serving.
Today we’re expanding our toolkit with two important updates to Webmaster Center: the ability to detect malware on your site and the sites you link to, plus a greatly simplified authentication process that makes accessing our tools much easier. Together these updates help improve your site performance for Live Search, and protect you and your customers from inadvertent exposure to malware.
Here are just a things our tools can help you do.
Malware Detection
- Detect whether there is malware present on any of your webpages or on any of the webpages you link to (all these links will be disabled and flagged in the search results as malware).
- Download reports detailing which webpages on your website are affected and how to fix the problem.
- Ping our support team to get your sites re-scanned and re-included in Live results within days, not weeks.
Source- Live Search Blog
Windows 7 Beta on Hold Until 2009
Sometimes I don’t know my own strength. After several painful weeks of poking holes in the Windows 7 bubble (and being poked right back by the legions of Windows zealots), it seems my message about Microsoft not doing enough to satisfy IT is finally getting through: The company has now officially delayed the release of the first public Windows 7 beta until "early 2009" — per the company’s PR firm, Waggener Edstrom.
A delay of this magnitude, hot on the heels of our scathing rebuke of the PDC pre-beta, can mean only one thing: It’s running scared. Microsoft is so concerned by the overwhelming response to our groundbreaking expose, "Windows 7 unmasked," that it’s pulling back on the delivery reins so that it can retool the product to address the myriad performance and compatibility issues we identified.
I, for one, applaud their honesty. Microsoft knows it’s dropped the ball with Windows 7; the initial PDC build was woefully inadequate and demonstrated none of the claimed improvements in performance or resource consumption. Delaying the public beta program — which was generally accepted to be slated for the mid-December 2008 timeframe — is a smart move. It’ll give the company a chance to take another pass at the kernel code base and maybe, just maybe, reconsider dropping some of that consumer-focused baggage.
Source: PC World
