Microsoft Student Partners

560 Office 2007 Trial CD’s
7 Comp Sci First Years
1 Challenge…

So the other day Mitch and myself received about 80 Office 2007 Trial CD’s each, combined with the 400 CD’s I had left over from last year left us in a bit of a dilemma – how to distribute them all? Our first thoughts went to the Curtin Abacus (Computing) labs, and while they were happy to have a stack of CD’s at their helpdesk, they weren’t willing to actively distribute over 500 disks. Luckily, help was at hand – in lieu of the traditional ComSSA Scavenger Hunt, we were looking for another fun event for our new first years, and what better than to have them run around campus handing out Office 2007 trial CD’s?

The challenge began Wednesday during Common Free time (12-2pm), with seven first years turning up to join in. After each dressing up in the provided pirate gear (yes, we made them dress up as pirates ), and taking a wad of trial CD’s,  the first years ran off to spread the CD’s amongst the populace, while Mitch and myself kept a tally of the number each First Year had dispersed.

As the day wound down, and finding students without CD’s became increasingly difficult, we called a stop to the madness. It had also become apparent who had distributed the most: Frank, with a grand total of 200 CD’s. The other results:

For winning the day, Frank won himself a copy of Vista Ultimate SP1, and all of the First Years got a "It’s Not Piracy" T-Shirt for their efforts. Overall, the day was a huge success, especially for something so spontaneous.

This, however, left us with the problem of what to do with the other 90 CD’s? There was only one solution: donate them to the University; and Curtin’s Abacus Labs (ie the general computing labs) were much happier with accepting the much reduced box.

So, an awesome day of fun, prizes, exercise and education for all!

And, don’t forget, you can get your copy of Office Ultimate for only $75 at http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au

– Daniel
Curtin MSP

UWA Microsoft Student Partners have teamed up with the UWA CSSC to run a monthly Xbox 360 games night.

The CSSC E-mail out is copied below:

Hello to all the club members out there!

There are times when getting together with your fellow intellectuals
and enjoy some mindless FPS action.

With that in mind the CSSC has grouped up with our UWA Microsoft
student partners and organised what is planned to be the first in a
monthly Halo Tournament.

So here’s what you need to know:

When : Tuesday the 31st of March, 6pm – 9pm 

Where : 1.24 seminar room (the seminar room outside administration on
the first floor…of csse)

What else? : the Halo tournament will run like this, there will teams
of two (either find a friend or be randomly assigned) with a round
robin style set up. No sign up is required, and we will be doing a
pizza run at some point.

It’d be great to see you all there, so get ready for killing some
aliens.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

The Microsoft DreamSpark program provides students access to an awesome list of free Microsoft software and has just got better. Students now have access to free Microsoft Technology Specialist Exam vouchers to be used at Prometric test centers.

This is a limited offer and the voucher must be redeemed before June 30th 2009, so get in quick.

Additionally Microsoft has added several free e-books for download, along with access to the IT Academy program.

Learn more at www.dreamspark.com

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Well, I’ve had Windows 7 installed on both my machines for a while now (a month on my desktop, and two on my laptop).  There have certainly been ups and downs.  The Libraries, Taskbar and new mouse gestures are all winners, though I’ve had issues with drivers and networking (though once I finally set up Homegroups, they worked beautifully).  But there is little doubt that the main factor in the recent upsurge in confidence for Microsoft’s upcoming OS is performance and reliability.  Despite the fact that many of Vista’s failings were fixed in Service Pack 1, there is still little doubt that the OS was far from successful, at least compared to it’s predecessor.  Windows 7 has gone straight to the heart of Vista’s problems (the so-called “bloat” and overly-complex workflows) and trimmed down the operating system to run much, much better – indeed, benchmarks generally place it on par, if not outright ahead, of Windows XP.

An interesting article caught my eye today, claiming that the driving force behind the Win7 engineering team’s change of focus from features to robustness is the “Rise of the Netbook.”  With so many of these cheap yet relatively weak machines hitting shelves lately, there is a huge market for a lightweight, simplified operating system, which also allows for easy integration with other mobile hardware, such as phones, PDAs and MP3 players.  Indeed, I have always felt that economics will always be the driving force behind technological changes – even free and open source products are driven by competition with their commercial counterparts.  What does this mean for the future?  Increasingly pervasive computers?  The sacrifice of personal privacy in exchange for additional conveniences?  Only time – and money – will tell.

While in Sydney at the Microsoft headquarters I had an opportunity to play with a Surface and after watching the Future Visions video this got me thinking about the future of computing, especially touch computing and how the surface plays a part in this.

At the moment multi-touch computing is struggling to take off because of the fact that outside the iPhone hardware is expensive, multi-touch development is young, casual developers can’t really afford the hardware and the application base does not yet exist because of this. It is a case of catch-22, people won’t use them as there is no support but people won’t support them till people are using them. This problem will be solved with time as the hardware price lowers to a more consumer/developer friendly price and as the number of applications slowly grows multi-touch devices such as the Surface and multi-touch tablet PC’s will become ubiquitous, we are at the beginning end what is surely to be an exponential growth.

After pondering on this I realised one ideal situation for the Surface would be a restaurant, your table could be a (larger version) of the Surface with icons on the side from which you could drag food and drink menus out from passing one to each diner on the table, you could then peruse this digital menu and drag items off of it for comparison or to pass an item to a companion as a suggestion or some such. Your meals and drinks could be ordered from the table itself where your order would then be sent to the kitchen or bar. Glasses in this theoretical restaurant could be RFID tagged and placed on a surface behind the bar where your drink order would appear attached to an empty glass, your drink would be placed into it and brought to your table. These glasses would also solve the problem of getting glasses mixed up as your table would label whose glass is whose and would (if you so desire) tell others what you are drinking to quell such curiosity.

With a Surface as your table this would be an ideal place to go to celebrate a birthday or a return from a holiday. While waiting for your meal you could plug in a USB drive into the table and browse holiday snaps of childhood photos across the table, play a game with friends or just scribble notes or doodles.

As everything is automated but for the food and drink preparation and delivery efficiency would be increased, potentially valuable ordering data is automatically saved and errors are reduced, the downside however would be that this technology is very expensive and this would be a very experimental venture but I do believe (and hope) some day it will be entirely common place if not even better then what I can imagine.

-Mitchell
Curtin MSP

Wait, when was it ever not cool?

[Note to our RSS readers: This post contains embedded videos]

While I previously have a huge rant against Microsoft Marketing, I just wanted to show off a couple of recent ads for Windows Mobile. These ads revolve around "Start Windows" and are perfect examples of marketing done right.

Now all that needs to happen is for me to see these on TV during prime time, rather than through MSN Video\YouTube…

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

We students love free stuff. Scott Guthrie is announcing the free PDF download for the tutorial section of their newest book on ASP .MVC.

More information on his blog.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

The TechNet Australia Blog is reporting about an upcoming Live Meeting on Windows 7 security that looks interesting.

It’s free, so register for the event today.

Details below:

Registration for our next Live Meeting on Windows 7 is ready.

Language(s):  English. 
Product(s):  Other,Security. 
Audience(s):  IT Manager,IT Professional.  
Duration:  75 Minutes 

Start Date:  Friday, 3 April 2009 11:00 AM Australia (East) 

Event Overview 
Windows 7 has many features for the consumer, developer and IT Pro.  But what about Security?  In this session we’ll talk about and show some of the important security features that are coming as part of Windows 7.  These include Applocker™, Bitlocker™ and Bitlocker To Go™, DirectAcess™, User Account Control and the security changes to Internet Explorer 8.  There will be demo’s on all these technologies so you can see firsthand how Windows 7 security has been improved!

Speaker – Jeff Alexander, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft
Jeff Alexander is a IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft and travels across Australia speaking to customers and partners about the latest technologies.  Jeff can be seen speaking at Security events, TechEd and other recognised Industry Tech events.  Jeff started as employee number 27 at Microsoft Australia and has been with the company for 21 years.  Jeff’s blog is http://blogs.technet.com/jeffa36
Twitter Hashtag #win7live
Click here to Register for the Live Meeting Event
If you have any questions prior to the event that you would like us to address please Twitter it with the hashtag #win7live

Paul over at Deakin MSP has done an awesome post on free stuff from Microsoft.

Check it out.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Microsoft loves students. And they want students to have the best access to software and technology. For Microsoft software there is two main ways to do this.

1. DreamSpark – any university student has access to this, technology wise or otherwise
2. MSDN-AA – each university specifically signs up for this. Generally this is available only for Computing & Engineering students. The university can sign up for MSDN-AA on its own or to IT Academy with includes MSDN-AA.

The good news is both Curtin and UWA both have signed up for MSDN-AA.

MSDN-AA primarily works by allowing students to borrow DVDs of the software and installing it on their machine. For Curtin students you can get the media from ComSSA, and UWA students should ask at the CSSE reception desk.

ELMS for MSDN-AA is an addon for MSDN-AA which allows the students to download the software online, not just install off pre-burned media. UWA has signed up for this and if you are a Computer Science student you should have received an invite for you to register. Once you have registered you can download the software at http://msdn70.e-academy.com/au_37792

For more information, please contact ComSAA at comssa@lists.curtin.edu.au for Curtin students or go to http://web.csse.uwa.edu.au/school_and_systems_information/school_systems_information/downloads for UWA students.

A couple of students noted why bother if they can just pirate the software? I would say just for the easy of use. No worrying about keygens or serials, updates all work and any genuine advantage addons just work.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

As some of you may already have seen Microsoft Office Labs has released a 5 minute video of what they dream the year 2019 should be. I have to say that the video is very impressive with Hollywood level production values and some interesting concepts.

While it must be a nice job to be paid to dream and then spending a lot of money on putting that dream into an awesome video I feel that videos like this are important to show possible directions technology can or should take, to act as a goal to strive for, a beacon placed in the future to guide us.

While I do love the future they envision here, not everything will be so uniform as I do like my dark themes and others like red, blue or fluorescent pink styles, some like curvy designs while others like leather coated sharp designs with brushed aluminium.

For all this to happen screens will need to be developed that are incredibly cheap, flexible, low power (or wireless power) and sensor laden and tiny or remote computers with powerful graphics processing will need to be tied to them then every product will have to be coated with these screen, oh we will also need decent internet (and at this rate that isn’t likely to happen by 2019 unless people start picking up their act) and interfaces will have to become a lot easier to create (Microsoft is doing a good job working on this at this moment). Apparently in the future we will also either have people hired full time to clean fingerprints or we will remove the ability produce oil removed from the skin on our hands, even better though would be to have this magic surface absorb fingerprints for the purposes of power generation/scratch repair/some other awesome and magic purpose.

This is all doable by some point in the future but 2019 seems way too soon, I am wondering if they chose such a difficult goal so that we shall try and pursue it, and even if we only get half way to this goal we have still covered a lot of ground. Then again in 10 years we went from 1.44mb 3.5″ floppy disks to 16gb in the size of your pinky nail. we went from some people having analogue mobiles with 2 colour screens to everyone having full colour graphical phones with calendars, games, web browsing and media playback being standard so who knows where we will be in another 10 years.

below is the HD version of the full length video.

A quick bit of back story: Two of the MSPs at the bootcamp gave a presentation where they stated that their old, reliable phones were superior to modern smartphones because they were nearly indestructible. To prove this point, they then proceeded to throw their phones at the ground (which promptly smashed (although were later fixed)).

This is just a quick post to prove those two MSPs wrong.

Engadget has an article on the Nautiz X5: A phone that can survive being trapped in a pressurised, dust filled chamber, dropped from 1.8m and sprayed with a garden hose (IPX6 Dust and IPX5 Water Rating). That said, you don’t have to compromise on any performance either; the Nautiz X5 is running Windows Mobile 6.1 (yay!) on an 806Mhz processor with 512Mb of flash and 256Mb of RAM along with all connectivity you’ve come to expect from a WinMo phone (Bluetooth, Wifi b\g, HSDPA, IrDA and GPS). To top it off, the phone also has a full VGA touch screen, a MicroSD card slot, 3MP camera, a 4400mAh battery and a barcode scanner (with optional 2D imager!).

So there you are: You can have all the features of a modern WinMo phone, while still being able to throw it at people.

– Daniel
Curtin MSP