We all admire and use reopen last closed tabs on our favorite modern browsers. It comes really handy when we accidentally close a running browser tab or realize immediately after closing it that you missed something.

What if it was possible to ReOpen closed explorer windows, Applications. Thanks to UndoClose, its possible on Windows.

Windows 7 application windows has totally different way of operating, even though it maintains a list of  recently opened programs and items in Start Menu, it doesn’t support bringing them up again using a hotkey.

UndoClose remembers all recently closed folders and applications, and lets you restore them in the same sequence in which they were closed using two hotkeys.

Using two hotkeys you can do pretty much all. Use Ctrl+Shift+F to open last closed folder (in Windows Explorer) and Ctrl+Shift+A, to open last closed application. You can use them multiple times to cycle through the history. You can even change the hotkeys from Settings of the application that sits silently in system tray.

Application is light weight and eats nominal RAM. No installation required, its portable across all version of Windows7.

Download UndoClose

via AddictiveTips

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So far, we’ve covered various Transformation packs for Windows, OSX, Ubuntu and the experience had been outstanding.

Lion UX Pack provides one of the easiest and yet most powerful Transformation pack for Windows 7. Post-installation you can easily select dock configurations, system font and various OS X UI elements. Configuring the start orb, caption button, expose feature and spaces is among the best features of Lion UX Pack. Its a single click transformation!

However, we would like to give a word of warning about rolling back changes. Most transformation packs are impossible to get rid of, once installed. For this one, we found creating a new user helps, but it may not be an optimal thing to do.

Download Lion UX Pack

Key Features:

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Metro UI is sure a fresh concept for modern intuitive User interaction. Luckily enough, you can get Windows 8 Metro UI on Windows 7, thanks to Metro7 app.

Metro 7 provides instant access to built-in widgets and a custom store from where you can install more applications. Obviously, these are not same as native Windows 8 apps, but they are pretty close.

The tiles provide time and date information, access to built-in metro store, weather application, and shortcuts to numerous websites like Facebook and Badoo. You can go ahead and customize it to your needs.

Overall, Metro7 is a good application for emulating the Windows 8 MetroUI style interface on your Windows 7 desktop, however, it still seems to be under construction as some of the widgets simply lead to a blank page and many of the  website shortcuts on the main interface seem to be there to fill the main interface. Metro 7 has been developed for Windows 7.

Download Metro7

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iPad Launcher of Windows 7 gives you the chance to try Launcher on Windows 7. It also allows you to lock the desktop icons without forcing users to log off. You can also customize the app icons, easily.

How to Get OSX Launchpad, iPad Launcher on Windows 7

Step 1. Download and unrar the file and run the exe.
Step 2. You now assign icons by clicking on desired icons. And later customize the icons.
Step 3. Configure locking (optional). This is of course a not very secure way since you can kill the app using task manager and retrieve your desktop.

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Zetro UI is very simple to install and configure. Extract the zip after downloading the theme from the link below. When done, follow the below two simple steps:

• Opening the Extras folder, running the Theme Patcher, and clicking on all three “patch” buttons contained within.
• Opening the Theme folder and copying both of the files inside it to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes.

When finished, Open the Control Panel and “Change the Theme” under Appearance and Personalization. The Zetro theme should be available in “Installed themes”.

The look and feel of the theme makes you windows 7 look simple with white all over the place, which might look a bit odd for the first few minutes. You can tweak it using the extra tweaks available in the readme file that comes along with the zip.

Extending the tweak further, feel free to blend it with something like the Metro-inspired Omnimo 4 theme for Rainmeter.

Source/Download: Zetro UI

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Many of us believe that “Windows upgrade” is buggy and doesn’t work well when you upgrade from older to newer version. We have often recommended a clean install but this video is here to prove every one wrong — A Man uses VMware to emulate old hardware and install DOS to Windows 1.0 and then upgrade it to all the subsequent versions, all the way upto Windows 7. And surprisingly, it worked.

The adventurous guy didn’t include the Windows ME, a big failure. The journey  is documented as a 10 minute video examining the upgrade process a Great recall for all Windows versions.

Twenty Years of Backward compatibility

Before starting systematic upgrades, The Secret of Monkey Island and Doom II were installed to test DOS functionality in each version of Windows.

The results of the experiment are pretty amazing–the games worked in every version of Windows but Vista, which had clumsy DOS support, and problematic everywhere. Twenty years of backwards compatibility? Whoa!

As far as installation times are concerned, they peaked  with Windows 98 and Vista–So we conclude, its possible to upgrade from Windows 1 to Windows 7 without much trouble.

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Despite what people, Nokia had to take a move, either could be MeeGo, Android or WP7. Nokia chose x-Microsoft Employee’s decision.

Nokia has dropped the plans from upcoming N series phones, but has revealed new WP7 concept phone which is expected hit market within 2011. We have it on good authority that the technicolor phones on show are conceptual devices produced by the two companies. The shape of these handsets is somewhere between its recent N8 and C7 Symbian devices and there is, as usual for Nokia, a choice of sprightly colors

Even when the partnership has just been announced, the Microkia has actually spent lots of time working together and the phones are coming soon.

image credit: engadget

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Glitches would never go away till it’s a software. And they can be annoying at times, but there are ways you can minimize the annoyances and prevent havocs. One such problem is with Windows Explorer who like to act weird with its “Windows Explorer has stopped responding” “Windows explorer has misbehaved and needs to be closed”, blah blah.

You can always force close it but The Explorer process runs a lot of important things in Windows, and when it crashes, it can really slow you down.

But there is a solution to minimize the damage by sandboxing its process, so that when next time one crashes, others don’t in the fission.

The Solution to windows Explorer crashes

Windows Folder options actually let you create a separate process for the taskbar and desktop from the other open Explorer windows in two different explorer.exe processes (that you see in task manager). This comes handy when one of them crashes.

HowTo: Go to any Windows Explorer (say my computer), Alt+T  > Tools > Folder Options > View > “Launch Folder Windows in a Separate Process”.

If you look more closely, its something that powers Google Chrome browser, new process for every Tab. Instead, there are just two processes. Of course it would be slightly more CPU intensive, but that’s definitely worth it.

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WP7 Windows Phone 7 is now Hacker friendly & Open to developers.

Believe it or not but Microsoft is taking every step to make the platform popular.

Initially, Microsoft contacted several companies and paid them to develop apps for WP7. Recently, they got in touch with WP7 Jailbreakers to learn from their experiences. This is the first time ever that Microsoft has opened up to talk with hackers and developers more closely than ever.

Very recently, they have taken a step that every developer, hacker would be happy to hear about: They are offering WP7 device to GeoHot, the iPhone hacker. Of course these are good signs for the platform, going ahead we can actually start seeign great apps, hacks, and eventually sales, like we see for Android, iPhone today.

#geohot if you want to build cool stuff on #wp7, send me email and the team will give you a phone – let dev creativity flourish #wp7dev

Geohot offer may be based on the soft response by Microsoft over jailbreaking & unlocking of their core product Windows Phone 7 (WP7) by Chevron WP7-a well known hacker group on WP7. Now, at this stage, the jailbreaking and hacking story catches a new twist with the positive response from Microsoft over the jailbreak offer by Geohot. Now Apple & Sony will surely be thinking to take their step backs in this regard.

Of course we could have doubted the success of iPhone without jailbreaking and unlocking, knowing the fact that nearly 50% iPhones are unlocked, illegally.

Microsoft’s soft corner (just like Google Android’s openness) will attract 1000s of developers and they would eventually  win the market, if all goes well.

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Evolve III Maestro has built world’s first tablet that Triple boots Android, Windows 7 and MeeGo. The tablet has a 1.83GHz Atom N475 DualCore CPU based on OakTrail processor.

With Windows 7, you would be able to attain 8 hours of battery & 16hours of battery with Android, not bad for a Tablet that weighs less than 2 pounds.

The tablet features a large 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 32GB of solid state storage, 3G and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and 2 USB ports.

What Evolve Three hopes will make this device stand out is the fact that it’ll ship with Android, MeeGo and Windows 7 out of the box. Although a custom layer for Windows was in the works – imagine a mash-up of Windows Phone 7 and Android – it was MeeGo that had the developers really excited. A virtualised version was running on the device, and while the combo of pre-release software and hardware were still a little rough around the edges, it certainly seemed like it would make for a finger friendly consumption focussed interface.

The device is set for launch in Q2 2011 and at a price of $500, it could be a steal.

Unfortunately, there’ll be no quick way to switch between the different operating environments.

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Sure we need to give it some time to mature, it would grow as long as Microsoft is desperate on its mobile OS.

There are lots of new stuff heading WP7’s way in 2011 which would bring it step nearer to Android, iOS. But yeah, it would take 1 full year.

So what’s coming ?

Update 1. “No Donuts”

The first Windows Phone 7 software update, codenamed “NoDo,” will RTM within January, after CES is over. But, it wont be available to new users until February when they start shipping new devices and OTA for existing.The update is supposed to bring

• “copy and paste”
• support for the Qualcomm 7×30 smart phone chipset, a CDMA location stack

Fun fact: “NoDo” stands for “No Donuts” and could be so named because the a minor Android update was called “Donut.” Wow did they copy thaat name as well?

Update 2: “Mango”

This would be a major update which will:

• Introduce Internet Explorer 9 with with the Trident 5 rendering engine, HTML 5 and Silverlight, and gesture support.
• New enhancements related to “entertainment”.

Microsoft had promised Multitasking in 2011, seems like that might be a part of Mango (Windows phone 7.5) which would ship near Q4 timeframe,  if not earlier.
However, it should be noted that there can be number of small updates in between mango and NoDo.
The updates would be available like as ServicePack kind of packages (just like windows), which maynot be OTA as most users might desire for.

More updates soon.

Update: WP7 Updates: Multitasking, IE9, Cross-platform Gaming

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Somehow, a video of very close look to the device was just posted on the youtube. Remember, this product is head for the enterprise market and you probably won’t be able to buy it. Even if you could buy it today, the question is would you? Its really hard to use a windows on a Tablet that does nothing else but Touch. The hardware makes the experience fast, but that alone won’t do.

Watch the Video after the break:

The hardware looks promising but the OS doesn’t. I feel Samsung’s Galaxy tab offers much more robust solution even better that the iPad.

Related:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab Review vs iPad [Android Tablet]
• iPad vs. Windows 7 Tablet

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The Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 was first introduced last May as a series of 6 applications that were designed to showcase Windows Touch in Windows 7 and to help people learn touch gestures. The features were limited to OEMs with devices having multitouch. But now the Touch pack allows users to use it with any 3rd party touchscreens.

The Touch Pack is a set of six multi-touch consists of 3 casual games, and 3 Microsoft Surface applications that have been created for Windows 7.

Download: Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7

What’s Inside Touch Pack

1. Microsoft Surface Globe uses the Virtual Earth 3D engine to display a 3D  Earth. Using multi-touch, you can navigate to different regions, get local information, and “pin” your favorite locations. You can even “fly” around 3D models of buildings in some cities.

2. Microsoft Surface Collage: A photo collage app that arranges photos in the way you want.

3. Microsoft Surface Lagoon is a screensaver that you can interact with using multi-touch.

4. Microsoft Blackboard, A puzzle game of physics that uses nifty machine on a virtual blackboard. Use gestures to rotate and resize gears, fans, seesaws and more to move balloons and balls toward the light bulbs – and victory.

Other Games:

5. Microsoft Rebound

6. Microsoft Garden Pond

The apps gives you basic multitotuch experience on Windows 7 but clearly shows how immature this platform is as far as Multitouch is concerned when compared to a native device like iPad. This is the reason why HP’s Slate is a bad idea.

But would multitouch apps appear on Windows 7 Marketplace? We’ll have to wait to see it.

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Windows 7 SP1 brings two big features– Dynamic Memory support and a more robust Remote Desktop client which uses RemoteFX. and the other part is the large number of Bug fixes.

It’s been leaked and is freely available to anyone willing to download and install the update from a torrent site.

Though the update is legit, its hard to say what else is included in the update.
However, what’s good is that this build is very recent, with a compile date of March 27th.  The full build string is as follows:  6.1.7601.16537.amd64fre.win7.100327-0053

After the update, the main build number has been incremented by one, so you now have Build 7601. (This is exactly like Vista SP1)

The system was stable for the period I tested after the update. however, you can try it at your own risk.

Download

via GeeksMack

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Of course there are some limitations to Sync and Messenger, restricted to corporate users with Microsoft credentials. Your LiveID won’t let you sign in. But luckily enough the crack is also available, everything works with almost no extra effort.

You can download it here.

Wave 4 has a revamped GUI, and you can theme it to what you want. What comes more is the obvious Windows 7 Integration plus a bulk of new features.

Live Mail

This is much better than Outlook. As far as using Gmail with it goes, it’s  nitty-gritty on features like “Auto Inbox Refresh”, Keyboard shortcuts, Contact Picker Improvements and more.

Live Messenger

Messenger gets Twitter and WordPress connection, Geo-tagging support in Windows Live Photos, New “Friends” view

Live Writer

Live Writer has seen a number of improvements as well (particularly integration with online services like YouTube and Facebook). It’s even better than previous versions — which were already must-haves for desktop blogging on Windows.

Live Photos

Just like Picasa, Live photos has been there for a while. But this update makes it faster and equally competent with most things Picasa can do: Tags, locations, etc.

Movie Maker

Movie Maker for the first time becomes truly usable.  It has new cut, crop, and effects plus uploading to Youtube, Facebook.

via DownloadS

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There’s an app called NetBalancer that let’s you throttle your internet connection (and even LAN connections) by limiting per-application bandwidth. You can choose to assign priorities to each one of them (just like CPU priority) and avoid the sluggish throughput. This application Shapes your bandwidth so as to fairly divide bandwidth among applications.

So next time you run BitTorrent application like uTorrent, you don’t have to worry about how much it wants to eat, you can always restrict it.

You can, for example, designate priority to your web browser instead of your BitTorrent client. You can even specify download and upload priorities separately meaning a process can have a high download priority but a low upload priority.

However, the free version of NetBalancer limits you to setting upload and/or download priorities for 5 different processes and the main features include:

• Set download and upload network priority for any process. Currently supported priorities are:
  • High priority
  • Normal priority
  • Low priority
  • Block traffic
  • Ignore traffic
  • Limit traffic
• Set download and upload speed limits for a process
• Show all system processes with their in and out network traffic speed
• Show current connection for any process
• Show downloaded and uploaded traffic for any process since NetBlancer’s start
• View overall system traffic as a graph
• Show last 15 seconds traffic in system tray
• Fine tune priorities (see Level Severity setting).

NetBalanceris one of it’s kind Quality of Service (QoS) on Windows, avail it for free on Windows Platform: Windows 2003 32/64-bit, XP 32/64-bit, Vista 32-bit, Windows 7 32-bit, 64bit

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A while back, we discussed that Windows 7 features a half-baked “SoftAP” feature, also called “virtual Wi-Fi,” that allows a PC to function as a Wi-Fi client and also as an Access Point (AP) a.k.a wireless router.

The idea is not new  but, pretty nifty for sharing data, music, files with others other peers in absence of an actual AP. But often good features come with a backdoor. But it makes executions of certain nightmares handy, e.g.Visitors and parking-lot hackers can piggyback onto the user’s laptop and “ghost ride” into the corporate network, unnoticed.

The problem was first demonstrated at  BlackHat by AirTight networks, a wireless intrusion-prevention system (WIPS). They first executed Rogue APs to fetch user’s frequently-connected Wifi, followed by how to make a wishful hacking on the victim’s machine.

Gopinath KN, director of engineering at AirTight Networks, says a Windows 7 device performs Port Address Translation (PAT), allowing a single public IP address to be used by many LAN devices (and exposing only certain Layer 4 port numbers). So devices that associate with the Windows 7′s virtual AP will be bridged into the wired network unseen because they will be hidden behind the “master” IP address.

The issue is more dangerous than Wi-Fi’s peer-to-peer(ad hoc) mode. In peer-to-peer mode, the only data exposed is the local files and applications on participating users’ laptops — not the whole corporate network.

Remedy

WIPS products such as AirTight’s and those from competitors such as AirMagnet and AirDefense scan the airwaves for unauthorized devices in the airspace — such as a Windows 7 SoftAP — and flag them as rogues that clients are not permitted to associate with.

So using WIPS is one protective option. Another is to provision the laptop with the SoftAP capability turned off and deprive Windows 7 user’s admin rights, so that they can’t turn it back on.

Another way out is to install mobile device management, security agent software on the laptop that enforces centralized policies such as disabling soft APs and ad-hoc Wi-Fi modes. And AirTight, in addition to offering WIPS, also has such a client agent it calls SpectraGuard SAFE.

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Often, one would say Windows 7 has memory leaks, Windows 7 is a memory hog, but all these blames are pretty unfair and FUD. The truth is the extra memory footprint is to enhance the speed.

Windows 7, just like Windows Vista, includes aggressive disk caching. The SuperFetch mechanism causes Windows to preload certain data if the OS detects that it is used regularly, even if there is no specific need for it at that given moment.

SuperFetch is less aggressive in Windows 7, but still use a substantial amount of memory. But it’s not bad, 7 will feed on RAM only when there is no other demand for that memory. And when an application needs lots of memory then Windows will purge the cache and make the RAM available to the needy-application.

So using the wasted memory is a not a bad idea. If pre-loaded data comes to a use at a later time, it makes sense altogether and SuperFetch is good at ensuring that only that data is loaded, which is likely to be needed. All this makes it it much faster to access, the difference is obvious: 10s of milliseconds to sub-nanoseconds.

Windows XP and Ubuntu with their so called “low memory usage”, does nothing like this, thereby showing higher free memory. But that has no practical advantage, we are just not using the resources up to the mark. And yes this is the reason why Windows 7 depletes battery faster, may be its wise to disable it in services.

So next time you open Task Manager, the important number is not “free,” but “available”. The “available” memory includes both memory that is free, and memory that can be made available by getting rid of cache instantly. This “Available” count is new in Windows 7.

Simply summarizing, what looks may not be always the case, Microsoft Windows 7 has lots of good work under the hood, go on, dig deeper and you would find solutions. More on Why Windows 7

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The battery backup reduced from 2.5hrs to merely 1hr. I believed this was due to the the heavy Nvidia GT m230  GPU (Windows 7 doesn’t support NVIDIA Powermizer which reduces battery usage by lowering the clock). But very soon, all other Operating Systems started to mimic Windows 7.

This didn’t end here.

Recently, it became worse from bad when Laptop battery was totally dead.  The battery backup went literally down to zero. After couple of days, [I don't know why] battery came back to life but with reduced life. The same battery that used to have 1hr of juice, started giving me no more than 10 minutes.

I tried Ubuntu, XP, everything, it was all the same, max battery backup was 15 minutes. I thought it could be manufacturer’s fault, but I was so wrong, the fact is: Windows 7 destroys your battery, permanently.

A very long thread on Microsoft’s support site dedicated to Windows 7 battery problems kicked off in early June 2009.

Microsoft claimed that the problem was in the Windows 7 tool that decided when the battery had been drained, or was unable to hold a charge.

“We are investigating this issue in conjunction with our hardware partners, which appears to be related to system firmware (BIOS), The warning received in Windows 7 uses firmware information to determine if battery replacement is needed.”

While some users on that thread agree with Microsoft that the warnings are spurious, others believe that the new operating system has permanently crippled their batteries.

“I have tried charging the battery while the computer is off or in another OS, and it does not work,” said someone identified as “DanLee81″ today. “It will charge for a few minutes, then stop. The battery will say it’s full when it actually only has a few minutes of charge, and when you take out the A/C, it will either last for a few minutes, or completely shut off your laptop. This behavior happens in all [OSes] after Windows 7 damages the battery, not just within Windows 7.”

Another one, from Russ Latham claims:

It seems that after Windows 7 has damaged your battery, it doesn’t matter what OS you use.  The solution is, obviously, don’t use Windows 7 at all.  Not even once, unless you’re prepared to shell out money for a new battery.  What a shame.  I really liked Windows 7 but now I’m using Linux on my new laptop (with 2nd battery!).  I can’t afford to buy a new laptop batteries all the time.

Clearly, 100s of users can’t be wrong. The damages are indeed permanent- batteries underperformed, even after they abandoned Windows 7 and returned their notebooks to running Windows XP or Vista, or switched to Linux.

“Rolling back does not work either,in another message on Tuesday. I feel rip[ped] off!”

Situation is much more complex than What Microsoft thinks it is.

Almost all users using Notebooks from Acer, Dell, HP, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba have reported problems. Most have seen battery-life reduction 66%. That means 1/3rd the battery life.

I hope they do something about it fast, or it won’t be far when people get their say in consumer courts, suing the company for billions.

Update: Why windows 7 Appears to kill Battery?

Have you faced a similar issue? Let us know.

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The Evolution and Features that can mark Success for Windows 7 – Direct X 11 from dx10 and dx9

No doubt, Windows is the best platform for Gaming. Other platforms, due to lack of proper driver support and optimizations (Linux, Mac OS); never lived upto the competition. What we mean by Best platform is: If you have a good Graphics GPU and a great Processor, you can beat the performance of PS3 and Xbox 360.

Note: This article is part of Why Windows 7 series.

Prevalently, DirectX nowadays is a mark of success over the other standards. But, we tend to forget that a decade ago, war waged between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics in the field of 3D APIs has lived for years.  Part of it was to do with the success of the Quake engine, which paved the way to solid support for OpenGL for the makers of 3D cards in their drivers.
Microsoft was starting from scratch, and the learning curve was exponential. So, for several years, Direct3D’s capabilities were below the curve, with an API that many programmers found a lot more confusing than OpenGL’s. With each new version of Direct3D, it gradually began to catch up with OpenGL.

In Direct X8, for the first time, Microsoft’s API did more than just copy from SGI. It actually introduced innovations of its own like support for vertex and pixel shaders. With DirectX 9, Microsoft managed to strike a decisive victory, imposing its API on developers.
There’s a good chance that Direct3D 11 will prove to be a more important page in the history of the API than version 10 was. While Direct3D 10 was a complete revision, brining incompatibility,  Microsoft has now put enough distance between it and this new version to correct the problems raised by the first major overhaul of its API. So you could call Direct3D 11 a major update with potential fixes to new features in Dx10. It re-uses all the concepts that were introduced with Direct3D 10, and is compatible with the preceding version and with the preceding generation’s hardware. It’ll be available not only on Windows 7, but also on Vista. This widens the gaming horizon.

A typical game’s development phase is between 2 and 4 years. So by the time a game that is just now starting its development phase is released, Direct3D 11 will be already well established for PCs, since it’ll run on all PCs shipped with Windows 7 and work on the great majority of PCs running Vista.

The Difference is here:

The best way to praise Directx 11 is to compare it with previous versions. Here is a screenshot that gives you slight idea:

Direct x - dx9 vs. dx11

You might have to concentrate to see what’s changed between the two versions. Hint: It’s not about better shape and natural colors.

Dx10 vs. dx11

In that first shot with the swine flu guy, it seems the one on the right is a bit nicer looking, as in his head and mask don’t look as polygonal as the one on the left. The two vents in his mask are actually round instead of octagonal, and there are more details all around. and the one on right has more Natural colors than amplified ones on left.
The second shot, has more to do with Digital Vibrancy and detail. The right image gives a better lighting to the far off land across the gate.
In the stills, the difference will be minor, but it becomes much more noticeable while you are in the game.

Let’s have a brief look on the Core changes to DirectX 11:

Multi-threaded Rendering

One may ask, “We’ve had multi-core CPUs for several years now and developers have learned to use them. So multi-threading their rendering engines is nothing new with Direct3D 11“. Well, this may come as a surprise to most, but current engines still use only a single thread model for 3D rendering. The other threads are used for sound, decompression of resources, physics, etc. But rendering is a heavy user of CPU time, so why not thread it, too? There are a several reasons, some of them related to the way GPUs operate and others to the 3D API. So Microsoft set about solving the latter and working around the former.

Multithreaded GPU -via TomsHardware

After all, there’s only one GPU (even when several of them are connected via SLI or CrossFire, they create one virtual GPU) and consequently only one command buffer. When a single resource is shared by several threads, mutual exclusion (mutex) is used to prevent several threads from writing commands simultaneously and stepping on each others’ feet. That means that all the advantages of using several threads are canceled out by the critical section, which serializes code.

No API, today, can solve this problem—it’s inherent in the way the CPU and GPU communicate.
But Microsoft is offering an API that can try to work around it, if not solve directly. Direct3D 11 introduces secondary command buffers that can be saved and used later.

Direct 3D 11

So, each thread has a deferred context, where the commands written are recorded in a display list that can then be inserted into the main processing stream. Obviously, when a display list is called by the main thread (the “Execute” in the “Multi-threaded Submission” diagram below) it has to be ascertained that its thread has finished filling it. So there’s still synchronization, but this execution model at least allows some of the rendering work to be parallelized, even if the resulting acceleration won’t be ideal.

As one would anticipate, a large share of the workload was still on the main thread, which was already overloaded. That doesn’t ensure good balance, needed for good execution times. So, Microsoft has introduced a new interface with Direct3D 11: a programmer can create one Device object per thread, which will be used to load resources. Synchronization within the functions of a Device is more finely managed than in Direct3D 10 and is much more economical with CPU time.

Thanks to tessellation, the potential is enormous. It, now,  becomes possible to do without the normal map and implement a level of detail directly on the GPU, allowing the use of very detailed models (several million polygons instead of 10,000 or so with current games)—at least in theory.  Can Direct3D 11 cards avoid these pitfalls practically? It’s too early to say, but in any event not everybody is convinced, and id Software is working on solving the same geometry problem with a completely different approach based on ray casting with voxels.

Nvidia’s CUDA marked an evolution. Microsoft wasn’t about to let the GPGPU market get away and now has its own language for using the GPU. The model they chose, like OpenCL, appears to be quite similar to CUDA, confirming the clarity of Nvidia’s vision. The advantage over the Nvidia solution lies in portability—a Compute Shader will work on an Nvidia or ATI GPU and on the future Larrabee, plus feature better integration with Direct3D, even if CUDA does already have a certain amount of support. But we won’t spend any more time on this subject, even if it is a huge one. Instead, we’ll look at all this in more detail in a few months with a story on OpenCL and Compute Shaders.

Graphics will mark a new step with Direct X 11. Are you in ?

credits: Tomshardware, Gamefest, gizmodo

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Unfortunately, Microsoft has a different story. After 17 years of windows, someone found a hole that makes every windows PC on this earth prone to hacking.

This hole allows users with restricted access to escalate their privileges to system level – This is possible on all 32bit Windows Platforms: Windows 3.1 to Windows 7. (and upcoming win7 SP1 too)

The vulnerability is going to have severe impact on a business/office user, on the other hand, a home user might get malware/viruses/worms more easily and readily.

The root cause is Virtual DOS Machine (VDM) introduced to support 16-bit applications for 8086 Mode (VM86) in 80386 processors and other stuff like BIOS calls.

A Typical hack implementation will allow an unprivileged 16-bit program to manipulate the kernel stack of each process via a number of tricks. This can enable attackers to execute code at system privilege level.

Google security analyst, Ormandy, has published exploit which functions under Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Its said that Microsoft was already informed of the hole in mid 2009.

The FIX

For windows 2003: Start group policy editor and enable the “Prevent access to 16-bit applications” option in the Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Application Compatibility section. The settings won’t interfere with 16-bit applications compatibility, but will make it secure for sure.

Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7:

Users will have to create a Registry Key under:
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppCompat
with a D-Word value of VDMDissallowed = 1.

Under Windows XP, to prevent the system from being vulnerable to the exploit, users can place the following text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppCompat]
"VDMDisallowed"=dword:00000001

into a file called vdmdisallow.reg and double click the file. Windows will then automatically import the key.

For more Windows, Open Source,  Security, and Tech News get in touch @taranfx on Twitter.

Cloud Computing

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for all the web applications we see on the Internet, Enterprise. Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications and services on the internet in Microsoft data centers. i.e. On-Demand, the capacity can be increased, or based on Threshold triggers, capacity can be increased to meet-up the expected traffic with optimal performance.

e.g. For Bloggers: You can host your WordPress blogging app-service on the Cloud and capacity is Tuned dynamically. For Developers: You can run Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP, .NET applications on the cloud. 

So if you own a blog or belong to an enterprise that wants to run Applications and scale the capacity sky high, Azure is for you. On day one: your blog may be getting low traffic, you can subscribe to a low-end cloud service. On demand, with rise in traffic, capacity can be increased (on the fly) to scale upto a traffic of Billion hits per day, like Twitter gets.

So what all can be done with Windows Azure?

Features (as per Microsoft)

When is it Available, What is the Deal?

Microsoft will launch Azure as a production service on January 1st, and customers can avail it for free for 1 month. The Technical Preview, now underway, will continue through the end of the year.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, took the keynote stage on PDC 09, today. He introduced the world to Azure Services Platform a year ago, during PDC 08. Today, he added when to why, what and where about what Microsoft now calls the Windows Azure Platform.

Ozzie said that a few companies would take Azure into production starting today (November 18th 09). With that as introduction, Ozzie announced that Automatic, creator of open-source WordPress blogging system, would be one of those companies. From a marketing perspective, it was a stunning announcement, since Automatic uses open-source tools like Apache and MySQL.

The message: Azure isn’t just about Microsoft products or development tools.

I must say it was simply shocking, Microsoft promoting Open source, I Love it!

What do you think?

The Update rolled out by Microsoft to fix IE8 security rips apart Google Chrome performance. The update (MS09-054 /  974455) is supposed to fix two critical flaws in IE 8:

But unfortunately, it effects all versions of chrome to behave unusually. Chrome becomes unresponsive, sluggish and slower by factor of 10x times (of the order of IE8). The KB articles detail out the fixing of the flaw related to VBScript and javascript, however it modifies Chrome’s Javascript execution engine.

The case was reported to Chrome development community and was brought to forum as well, where it was confirmed that the Update was the root cause. Uninstalling the Update, however, fixes Chrome again.

Was it  Microsoft’s attempt to cripple Google‘s Chrome business? Or Something that went un-noticed?

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A Microsoft manager saying flat-out that Windows 7 copied Mac OS X. Surely, he had been misquoted. Or something. Well, Microsfot explains he didn’t mean it “that way”.

Microsoft is currently holding a partner conference in Wembley Stadium, and Microsoft’s partner group manager, Simon Aldous was asked “Is Windows 7 really a much more agile operating system, in terms of the specific uses it can be moulded to?“, he replied:

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

I have a faint feeling , it sure is refreshing, but at the same time, it’s also complete nonsense. I see little in Windows 7 that makes it look or function like Mac OS X, and I see little Aqua in Aero either.

I’m having the feeling a certain group of people are going to have a field day with this one. I have to say, if this is indeed what Microsoft wants to profess – than more power to them. The honesty would be a welcome change of pace in this industry.

Back when Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” at WWDC 2004 there were banners hung from the ceiling with the following poke at Microsoft printed on them:

“Redmond, start your photocopiers.”

Personally, unless someone wants to go to court over patent infringement, this whole “who copied who” debate is little more than fanboys howling at the moon. Does it really matter? and Do you feel the was UI copied? your opinion will count.

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