“Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives.
“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honour.”
— Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman
“I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work.”
Credit goes to fellow techie Ahmed Ali Ibrahim of Qatar for his inputs.
Here’s how we installed Windows 8 Developer Preview on an Acer Iconia tab W500.
Extract the 32-bit Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO and copy the files to a USB thumb drive.
Shutdown the tablet.
Connect a USB keyboard to the tablet.
Press and hold down the Windows button and the Power button, when the machine starts, press F2. This will display the BIOS setup.
Change the boot order to boot from the USB HDD.
Save changes and exit BIOS setup, plug in the USB thumb drive, and restart the computer. You can disconnect the keyboard at this point.
The computer boots into Windows 8 setup from the USB drive.
Windows 8 automatically installs all the drivers, except for the Bluetooth and the G-Sensor. You can download these drivers from the Acer website. You also need to download the “Device Control” application from the Acer website (it is listed under applications). The screen rotation will not work both the G-Sensor driver and the Device Control application are not installed.
If you had installed the 64-bit version of Windows 8 Developer Preview, the G-sensor will not work as the driver on the Acer website is only for 32-bit versions of Windows.
Windows 8 Developer Preview was made available last week and it came with Internet Explorer 10. Internet Explorer 10 can be started within the Metro UI and also in the desktop mode.
However, when started in the Metro UI, Adobe Flash plugin is unavailable and hence you cannot play YouTube videos. There is a workaround for this as Internet Explorer supports the next generation HTML5 capabilities.
YouTube now offers an HTML5 trial on their website. All you need to do is to activate the HTML5 trial using your YouTube account. To activate HTML5 trial, go to www.youtube.com/html5 .
Once you opt-in for HTML5 on YouTube, you can start watching YouTube videos on IE10 in Metro mode.
Windows 8 represents a reimagining of Windows from the chipset to the experience. Since this is a week focused on developers, we also detailed the bold underpinnings of the re-imagination of the Windows platform, tools, and APIs. We will show off the opportunity to build applications for all of the customers of Windows 8, no matter what type of PC they have—from tablets to laptops to convertibles to desktops. We will show the brand new tools that allow you to code Metro style applications in HTML5/JavaScript, C/C++, and/or C#/XAML. The investments you have made as developers in all of these languages carry forward for Windows 8, which lets you choose how to best make use of the Windows 8 system services. We talked about Windows 8 being a no-compromise OS for end-users, and it is also a no-compromise platform for developers.
Many are interested in Windows 8 for ARM processors. Everything we showcased today at BUILD also runs on the ARM-based Windows PCs being created by ARM partners and PC manufacturers. Windows 8 running on ARM will ultimately be available with ARM-based hardware that you can purchase. ARM requires a deeper level of integrated engineering between hardware and software, as each ARM device is unique, and Windows allows this uniqueness to shine through. The new development tools enable you to start today to build Metro style applications that will seamlessly run on x86 (32 and 64 bit) or ARM architectures. Even if you use native C/C++ code, these tools will enable Metro style apps to target specific hardware if you choose. As new PCs become available for testing, PC manufacturers will develop seed programs for developers.
Mac users will soon have a Lync client, starting October 2011. . From the updated contact cards to the ability to set up Lync conferences from Outlook 2011 for Mac to enterprise voice features, Lync for Mac 2011 offers Mac users integrated functionality for presence, instant messaging, conferencing and voice and is designed to work with both Lync Server 2010 and Lync Online.
Lync for Mac 2011 is available to customers as a part of the Office for Mac 2011 Volume Licensing SKU or through many of Microsoft’s Licensing programs. Customers can also purchase the application as a standalone volume licensing SKU.
Microsoft today demonstrated Windows 8 booting up in a mind-boggling 8 seconds!
The extremely fast boot up time is a great indication of overall system performance with the upcoming version of Windows, the most widely used operating system on the planet. The key difference here between Windows 7 and Windows 8 is that the kernel session is now placed into hibernate mode instead of being closed down, even if the user shuts down the computer.
I recently got myself a Belkin Wireless FSD7050 USB adapter for my Windows Server 2008 R2 test machine.
After installing the latest drivers from Belkin, the adapter is detected by Windows, but refuses to ‘enable’.
This is because wireless networking is disabled by default in Windows Server 2008 R2. To enable it, go to Server Manager > Features > Add Features > and add the Wireless LAN Service.
