Interested in becoming part of the team?

We are now accepting applications for Microsoft Student Partners for 2010.

More info on the program can be found at http://www.student-partners.com/ along with the application form (Click Apply on the front page).

The program is an awesome learning experience where you get to network with heaps of other great students and industry leaders to share your love of technology.

We are really looking to expand the number of MSPs out there so if you have a love of technology, and love to share it, go to the website and apply now!

Fancy high-paying summer vac work, a free trip to the US, free xboxes, your own police security cavalcade, plus an 85% chance for a job offer?  Look no further than Microsoft’s Internship Program.

If you’re not convinced, check out what the Chicago Tribunal has to say.

In other news, the Playstation is often touted as a great parallel-processing research tool, but researchers are now saying the same of the Xbox 360.

Lisa from Microsoft will be presenting at 2 events at UWA on the 27th August.

The first event is for ENGINERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE students and the second is for BUSINESS students.

Meet the Company!

Fulltime and Intern

Software Development

27^th August

5pm

CSSE 1.24

People here love their work because they get to think big and dream big. Right now we’re looking for the next generation of Microsoft innovators. If you have talent and a passion for technology, this could be your big moment. 

Come find out more about our fulltime and internship opportunities technical opportunities in the United States!

Bring your résumé for a chance to win

Tons of great Microsoft

Prizes will be raffled and

FREE FOOD will be provided!

Questions? Contact uwa@student-partners.com.au

Meet the Company!

Fulltime and Intern

Marketing, Sales and Services

IN AUSTRALIA!!!

27^th August

4:00pm

CSSE 1.24

People here love their work because they get to think big and dream big. Right now we’re looking for the next generation of Microsoft innovators. If you have talent and a passion for technology, this could be your big moment. 

Come find out more about our fulltime and internship business opportunities in Australia.

Bring your résumé for a chance to win

Tons of great Microsoft

Prizes will be raffled and

FREE FOOD will be provided!

Questions?  Contact uwa@student-partners.com.au

Coming soon the Xbox Live in Australia (already out in other countries) is the beta of 1 vs 100. In this adaption of the popular TV show, players get the chance to win up to 10,000 XBL points. The game will be available free to Xbox Live Gold subscribers, so keep an eye out for it!

In other Microsoft gaming news, have you seen Project Natal yet?

Something useful to all students…  $10,000.

Microsoft is running a treasure hunt, where you download IE8, look out for clues on Twitter to find $10,000 on the Net.

A little good news to brighten your exam-study filled days (’cause everyone is studying for exams now, right? right?) – Windows 7 will be released to manufacturing (i.e. the RTM version) during the second half of July and should hit general availability (i.e. the consumer market) on October 22 of this year!

Check out the Press Release and stay tuned for information on a Windows 7 countdown timer…

Following on from the success of last year’s Imagine ‘08 event, the UWA MSPs will be running a similar session this semester.  We will be covering a host of topics, from Microsoft Internship opportunities (how to apply, how to succeed, and what the internship is like) to creating Mashups with MS Popfly, to examining the new Win7 Release Candidate (with plenty of installation DVDs to save you the download). The event will be held at:

4-5 pm Thursday May 14th

Weatherburn Lecture Theatre, UWA

Reservations are not required, we have plenty of seats for everybody. Be sure to come along, the event only goes for an hour, but could see you on your way to Seattle at the end of 2009, or in Egypt for the Imagine Cup Finals; the possibilities really are endless. We will also have prizes and drinks, for you lovers of free stuff.

See you there!

Back with a blast, the MSPs swung into action today with their latest event at UWA, “The Ultimate Steal”.  Talks were given, people were wowed, Xboxes were played.

We started off by speaking about the various discounts and freebies available to all Australian uni students (see below for links to these resources), and then spoke about our role at UWA, and our upcoming GameFest event (keep your eyes peeled for details this week).  everyone headed down to the courtyard to the CSSC barbeque.  After that, we ran Halo 3 on 3 xboxes, whiche made for some massively multiplayer mayhem, and had Halo Wars running on another screen for people to try out.

All in all, it was a pretty fun event, and was a good lead up to our major event for the semester: Perth GameFest 2009.

Now, those links:

It’s Not Cheating ($75 Office):

Dreamspark (Free developer tools, like Visual Studio and XNA):

MSDN-AA (Vista, XP, Windows Server, Project and much, much more):

Imagine Cup

Windows Live

Enjoy!  Thanks for attending, and thanks to CSSC for hosting the BBQ and helping to set up.

<Photos will be arriving shortly>

Hey! Who like free stuff?  And games?  And more free stuff?

Next Tuesday, we’re running an awesome event down at the CSSE building at UWA.  Come up to Lab 2.03 between 1pm to 3pm to try out the latest Xbox 360 games, play some 4v4 Halo 3, and best of all, to learn just how much software you can get free, just for being a student.

I don’t want to “steal” too much thunder from the event itself, so I won’t reveal any more just yet.  Be in Lab 2.03 from 1-3pm to get your hands on freebies and have some fun (we have upwards of 8 Xboxes, so you’ll get plenty of play time).

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

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

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.

In case you haven’t noticed, Microsoft has updated its clothing line (dubbed "Softwear") with a few more shirts. So before you continue reading this post, please take your time to have a look through the different shirt designs and the gallery of models showing off said attire.

Done?
Right, here is my question then to Microsoft: Why focus so heavily on the nostalgic aspect of when computers were just starting? Seriously?

For those of you who think that this is ‘brand building’ and an excellent marketing exercise, let me explain my position. These clothes are targeted at non-geeks, this is evident in some of the language used on the site ("geek-chic icongraphy") and the fact that it is being sold at Urban Outfitters (a quick look at their site shows it to be *far* more fashionable then what most geeks I know (myself included) wear). The problem here is that presenting the view that Microsoft is reminiscing the good ol’ days of DOS and the command line shows Microsoft to be even more out of touch then most people had thought. One of the themes that I have been working hard at Curtin to create is the idea that "this is not your fathers’ Microsoft" – namely that Microsoft has changed and moved on from the days of DOS and Windows 9x and is now a stronger company that builds far better software. These shirts entirely undermine that notion.

So, what is to be done? 
My recommendation is for "Softwear" to focus heavily on the new technologies that Microsoft is releasing. For the non-geek, have something with the Windows Live Messenger logo, or a modified Windows 7 logo (eg here or here). However, for the geeks (myself included) focus on the developer and server-side technologies. At the moment Microsoft has a *ton* of cool logos (example: anything to do with Windows Azure), putting any of these logos on a shirt with a quick, 3 or 4 word, slogan beneath will sell to the geek community, especially if Microsoft partners with a company like Think Geek to do distribution. And even if people are not sure of what the logo or the slogan means, the geek wearing the shirt would be more than happy to explain (they become a walking bill-board…)

Finally, I’d just like to add that if you are a person from Microsoft’s marketing department then please, *please*, leave a comment to explain to me (seeing this from the Australian Geek perspective) what Microsoft was aiming for.

- Daniel
Curtin MSP