This is something I think is pretty exciting – especially if you’re looking to score some Microsoft product. We are announcing the Microsoft Store – the first online store where you can purchase Microsoft products straight from the source!

We’re selling all of our products at a one-stop-shop: www.MicrosoftStore.com. 

The Microsoft Store offers the largest selection of Microsoft software, devices and hardware in one place.  You will find many reasons to visit the store:

• Immediate software download option with the largest download catalog of Microsoft titles.
• Most up-to-date selection of and information on everyone’s favorite Microsoft products including Windows, Office, Xbox, Zune and more!
• Simple and secure purchases with full Microsoft support both before and after purchase.

We’re not just launching the Microsoft Store for US customers. In addition to the US Microsoft Store, there are also online stores for customers in the UK, Germany and Korea.  Japan, France, Spain and the Netherlands are coming soon.  More countries will be coming onboard throughout the year.

I’ll be picking myself up one of the new Microsoft LifeCam Show webcams from the Microsoft Store as I had been looking to pick one up for a while now.

I received an email this evening detailing some of the new features of Windows Live Hotmail wave 3 in addition to features to expect from services such as Skydrive, Photos and social networking improvements to home.live.com.

Over the next few months, we're rolling out enhancements to the rest of Windows Live.
• Get 25 GB of free online storage for your files with Windows Live SkyDrive™.

• Easily create photo albums and slideshows with Windows Live Photos.

• Stay in touch with your network of friends via the "What's New" feed. See who posted new photos or commented on a blog, find your favorite video, and see who's currently online by viewing your home page at home.live.com.

I hope Windows Live Spaces is not de-emphasized as some have noted, but I look forward to these changes awesome changes coming in the pipeline. The storage capacity for Skydrive is rather surprising which shows that Microsoft is definitely serious about Web 2.0 and making your personal information available to you anytime, anywhere.

New Windows Live Features coming soon.

In 1989, what has become the World Wide Web first entered the world in the mind of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire), the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, Switzerland. The term World Wide Web wasn’t actually coined until 1990, when Tim BernersLee and Robert Cailliau submitted an official project proposal for developing the World Wide Web. The suggested a new way of sharing information between researchers at CERN who used different types of terminals and workstations. The unique aspect of their information sharing model was that the servers would host information and deliver it to clients in a device-independent form, and it would be the responsibility of each client to display (officially known as render) that information. Web clients and servers would communicate using a language (protocol) known as HTTP, which stands for the HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Hypertext is just text with embedded links to other text in it. The most common examples of hypertext outside of the World Wide Web are various types of online help files, where you navigate from one help topic to another by clicking on keywords or other highlighted text. The most basic form of hypertext used on the Web is HTML, the HyperText Markup Language.

On the World Wide Web, the servers are Web servers and the clients are typically browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, SeaMonkey, Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and many others, running on your machine. To retrieve a Web page or other Web resource, you enter its address as a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) in your browser by either typing it in or clicking on a link that contains a reference to that URI. Your browser contacts the appropriate Web server, which uses that URI to locate the resource that you requested and returns that resource as a stream of hypertext information that your browser displays appropriately, and you’re off and running!

Today’s browsers can understand many protocols beyond HTTP, including FTP (File Transfer Protocol, used to send and receive files), file (used to deliver plain-text files), POP (Post Office Protocol, used to send and receive electronic mail), and NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol, used to send and receive Usenet News postings). Which protocol you use to retrieve a specific Web resource is encoded into the URI, and is referred to as a scheme in Web nerd terms. A URI specifies three basic things:

scheme://host/pathname

The scheme is one of http, ftp, file, and many more, and specifies how to contact the server running on host, which the Web server then uses to determine how to act on your request. The pathname is an optional part of the URI that identifies a location used by the server to locate or generate information to return to you. Web pages consist of a static or dynamically generated text document that can contain text, links to other Web pages or sites, embedded graphics in a variety of formats, references to included documents such as style sheets, and much more. These text documents are created using a structured markup language called HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. A structured markup language is a markup language that enforces a certain hierarchy where different elements of the document can appear only in certain contexts. Using a structured markup language can be useful to guarantee that, for example, a heading can never appear in the middle of a paragraph. Like documents in other modern markup languages, HTML documents consist of logical elements that identify the type of each element—it is the browser’s responsibility to identify each element and determine how to display (render) it. Using a device-independent markup language simplifies developing tools that render Web pages in different ways, convert the information in Web pages to other structured formats (and vice versa), and so on.

“Web addresses.” URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the traditional acronym and term for a Web address, but the acronym and term URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is actually more technically correct. Another acronym and term that you may come across is URN (Universal Resource Name). The relationship between these acronyms is the following: a URI is any way to identify a Web resource. A URL is a URI that explicitly provides the location of a resource and the protocol used to retrieve it. A URN is a URI that simply provides the name of a resource, and may or may not tell you how to retrieve it or where it is located.

Source of Information : Ubuntu Linux - Bible

From time to time I have accidentally typed in the wrong address in Outlook. To make matters worse the wrong email address comes up every time when I start typing.



I searched for quite some time trying to figure out how to remove items from the list - until finally I discovered the obvious.

To remove an item from auto-complete simply select the address with the cursor keys, and press the delete key. Poof the entry is gone.

With the roll of Microsoft's Windows Live Wave 3 of Software and Services, the Company is making some major changes to how it delivers it with some old favorites possibly taking a back seat. There are definitely some welcome changes, especially with the new Windows Live Hotmail that is much lighter and faster with improvements to search and organization of interface elements. One of the things that interest me the most is the direction of Windows Live Spaces. An interesting post by Mary Jo Foley suggest that Windows Live Spaces in its current state may remain that way going forward.

Quote: First, Microsoft is de-emphasizing Windows Live Spaces. Existing Spaces don’t disappear. But now Microsoft is repositioning the centralized Windows Live user profile areas as the revamped start.live.com sites. Users’ start.live.com page will look a lot like Facebook, with a centralized activity feed."

Read the entire post here

I find that strange that the Windows Live Team is not updating Spaces for Wave 3. Right now, the service is suffering from a number of issues: commentary spam (especially from China), performance and the fact that Windows Live Writer should be a web interface instead of this fat client that just times out every time you try to make a post to your blog. Yes, its one thing for them not to kill the service and existing Spaces, but to just to leave it hanging to create a FaceBook alternative seems like a weak desperate move that's only going to backfire. I can understand having a social networking play, but at the same time, what made Live Spaces such a draw to me was the opportunity to have a way to express myself over the Internet through content I create about topics that matter to me. When you look at what a social network does these days as defined by Facebook, comment about stupidity, use small useless web applets, share a few photos and just waste part of your day on the web and share mash-ups, its kind of sad to see Microsoft heading in this same direction. The fact that partnership between Facebook and My Space is not included with Wave 3 says a lot about the endeavor of this new release.

In their quest to compete with the iPhone, Research In Motion has developed the BlackBerry storm. For quite some time BlackBerry has had a grip on the corporate environment. That was starting to fall apart with the iPhone.

We can attest to that from our own informal sampling here. For a long time we would only get requests to create BlackBerry compatible applications. These days it is about 50/50 with the iPhone and BlackBerry.

The new interfaces sports a few unique features that may please iPhone haters. The screen actually indents when you press it - so when you type on the visual keyboard it actually feels like you are pressing buttons. It also has excellent integration with Microsoft Exchange - something the iPhone has, but it is still far from what it should be.

Still, the look is missing that something special that the iPhone has:

And it is lacking in specifications. The stock $199 model (That Verizon will subsidize) Comes with only a 1GB memory card. In contrast the $199 iPhone comes with 8GB.

Still I think in the corporate environment the BlackBerry will win over for now - it has some of the best tools for controlling and monitoring use.

We are starting to toy around with a few test apps on the iPhone here…maybe we will get one of these also and see what type of apps we can come up with