Want to try out for yourself what made Robert Scoble cry? Tonight, Microsoft Research has made available the Spring Beta of WorldWide Telescope.

Download: WorldWide Telescope Spring Release

WorldWide Telescope is an application designed to turn your PC into a "virtual telescope" by stitching together terabytes (soon to be petabytes) of high-resolution images of the universe. Massive amounts of data are generated by the various scientific and research facilities and WorldWide Telescope brings the catalog of that data together for anyone to access using the power of the Internet. This new application is particularly exciting for me being someone really heavy into astronomy.  You can also use WorldWide Telescope and connect an ASCOM-capable Telescope to your PC to watch the night sky.  

WorldWide Telescope lets me connect to Communities, access Collections of celestial objects such as the Solar System or Constellations, or take Guides Tours.

Using my mouse, I can navigate the cosmos zooming in and out to any object in the rich catalog of celestial objects. I can right-click to access quick information on any celestial object.

I can

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The Ajax View JavaScript Instrumentation Proxy is the end result of the work from Microsoft Research. Essentially the tool is designed to act as a HTTP proxy focused on monitoring the performance and behavior of JavaScript applications within Internet Explorer 7, although Ajax View is not limited to just Microsoft’s browser. The Redmond company only recently delivered a public version of Ajax View under an academic and non-commercial use license.

“Ajax View is an HTTP proxy that instruments JavaScript as it’s served to the client based on a set of rules defined by plug-ins. The download includes a plug-in that contains a commented sample instrumentation policy. This design has a couple important effects. [First off] you can customize Ajax View to monitor exactly the JavaScript behavior you’re looking for, whether it’s about performance, or how people navigate through your site. And using Ajax View does not require modification of either the page source or the browser,” explained John Hrvatin, Program Manager, Internet Explorer. (more…)

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