Techno Babble

The Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 is a collection of games and applications that are made available to computers with multi-touch enabled displays running Windows 7 and is now available from the Microsoft Download centre at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b152fadd-82e4-4ddb-a46a-aebe49944428&displaylang=en

The Touch Pack includes:

Microsoft Blackboard, an intricate game of physics in which you solve a puzzle by creating a fanciful machine on a blackboard.

Microsoft Garden Pond, a tranquil game that takes place in serene Japanese water gardens.

Microsoft Rebound, a game in which you use your fingertips to control Tesla spheres with an electrical field between them to catapult a metal game ball into your opponent’s goal.

Microsoft Surface Globe, a program that you can use to explore the earth as a flat 2-D map or as an immersive 3-D experience.

Microsoft Surface Collage, a program that you can use to explore and interact with your photos and arrange them as a desktop background.

Microsoft Surface Lagoon, a screen saver and interactive water simulation, complete with a meditative rock arrangement and playful, shy fish.

There are lots of reports on the web related to the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). This conference atracts leading-edge developers who want to learn about the future direction of Microsoft products. Here’s my take on a couple of the topics and the location of some useful links for further information.

Microsoft Azure is an operating system for the “cloud”.

The closest comparison appears to be with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the “cloud” which is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. (ref. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ )

Microsoft Azure is a web-tier offering, for Windows in the Cloud and provides

• virtualized computation
• a shared storage system
• an automated service managment system

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