If you know where to look, you can find a variety of useful applications – free from Microsoft. Greg Shultz introduces a few of his favorites. 

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone say, “For all the money I’ve spent on Microsoft products, they should be giving me free software by now,” I’d be rich!  Well, unfortunately, that’s not going to happen.  But Microsoft does have a lot of Windows software that is free for the taking.  We’re all familiar with the free Windows Live offerings, but that’s not all there is.  Microsoft has a lot of free software just waiting for you to find it.  You just have to know where to look.  Here are 10 free programs to get you started:  http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1099

Boy did I let this last post s_l_i_d_e. I just couldn’t get around to writing it because I kept doing other things, trying to squeeze what I could out of this summer. And now it’s gone and I feel like I have to get this posted before midnight tonight for it to count. Or at least before I show up to school tomorrow. So, I hope that you all had a great summer and that you are looking forward to having a powerful and productive year. Before we get into the serious work, I wanted to share with you some of the web gems that I found over the summer:

Bing: By now I’m sure you’ve heard that some little company is trying to lure you away from the mighty mega giant Google. Bing is claiming to be, not a search engine, but the Internet’s first “decision engine”. Oh, and it includes a cool and different background every day that has little pop up boxes with factoids and links. And stuff. You’ll have to evaluate it for yourself. Right now, I’m not sure I’d start using Bing as a verb to sound trendy or with it as in, “have you Binged it”?

World Wide Telescope: The same spunky startup that launched Bing recently also happens to have a really cool application that lets you peer through the universe and get awesome pictures of all the amazing things our puny little eyes can’t see. Whenever you get tired of this cozy place we call home, take some time to explore the Cosmos in a way that would have made Copernicus’ explanations a lot easier to imagine.

Closer to the Truth: When you’re done exploring outer space, take some time to contemplate the inner space. This site features show length videos of the program by the same name hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn (perhaps the prototype for Dos Equis’ “most interesting man in the world”). The series intends to explore “Cosmos. Consciousness. God” by interviewing scholars and leading thinkers to share their thoughts on the deepest questions.

Academic Earth: Still have more questions? Maybe you want to listen to a professor from Stanford talk about the “Modern Freedom Struggle” or let a professor from Berkley introduce you to the human brain and muscular system. Maybe you’re feeling gloomy with summer ending and all, and you want to check out Yale’s intro to the philosophy of death. Of course I went for MIT’s “Introduction to copyright law” … scintillating.

Sporcle: Okay, not everything has got to be so serious. Sporcle’s tagline is “mentally stimulating diversions” and they had me at hello. I figured I was gonna ace such easy topics as “U.S. States”, “Corporate Logos” and “U.S. Presidents”, are you kidding me? I did fine, but I kept forgetting either Warren G. Harding or Martin van Buren. Anyway once I mastered those, I figured I’d move on to the Periodic Table. Yeah, I’m still on that one and I’m up to like twenty elements. Maybe you’d like to try your hand at Uma Thurman Movies or Pokemon Characters. And finally …

Virus Total: Don’t know if you trust that e-mail from a suspicious “friend”? Downloaded an application from a site you’re not really familiar with, and now you’re not sure if you want to run it? Sure you might have McAfee, but not F-Secure. Or maybe you have both plus ViRobot, but not Norton or Virus Buster. Why not be absolutely sure and check out that shady file at Virus Total. They’ll run your file through 39 databases shared by the anti-malware heroes of the connected world. And it’s absolutely FREE.

Hope you find something worth checking out and I will see you all in a few hours. (Didn’t post it before midnight.) Thanks for reading.

Copyright © henry toromoreno, 2009. All rights reserved.

From Lifehacker: WorldWide Telescope Puts the Night Sky in Your Browser.

Over at Lifehacker, I saw a post about the new Microsoft World Wide Telescope Web Client. Microsoft created a pretty darn cool Windows-only desktop version of World Wide Telescope and now they have created a Silverlight-based web-application that should run in any browser if the computer has the Microsoft Silverlight framework installed.

Give it a try. It’s pretty neat.

A Telescope Makes Objects Appear Closer Than It Really Is

Before going out to buy or even construct your own telescope you should become familiar with its working; essentially, it will magnify objects and make them appear to be closer than they actually are and this is achieved by bringing the image at the viewing lens’s focal distance. Read further Telescope

Microsoft launched WorldWideTelescope, it’s downloadable answer to Google Sky, Google Earth and Google Moon, yesterday.The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.  Other than being a bit of a memory hog (understandable for the power it provides) and requiring the latest version of DivX and .Net framework to install, WWTelescope is a pretty amazing program. You can aimlessly browse around the solar system and beyond, zooming in with incredible detail on Earth, the moon, other planets or galaxies, or you can download a professional tour of any of the above. Each item you look at comes with various “Imagery” options. You can check out satellite images of Earth, a street view, a hybrid of both or use the incredible cool “Earth at Night” mode. The options for viewing space are too numerous to numerate. For a quick fix, you can browse through various collections of space images, like those taken from the Hubble or Chandra telescopes, and see where in space those images are from.

If anything, WWTelescope is too advanced, offering a slew of advanced and sometimes incomprehensible options aimed at professionals and true hobbyists. You can even hook up your telescope to it. But it’s still great, interesting fun for the average user. I just wasted an hour or so “researching” it for this article, and left with the same semi-accomplished feeling I get when I waste time on Wikipedia.

Microsoft products have often fallen behind Google on the coolness factor of their products. This time they definitely have the search giant beat.

I’ve just downloaded World Wide Telescope, Microsoft’s latest offering to the world. It’s free and here’s why(according to their What is World Wide Telescope page);

Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before. 

That’s very nice of Microsoft, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a response to the open source revolution that is taking place. Regardless, it looks like an amazing tool that is going to be a truly wonderful resource for Science teachers and anyone with an interest in checking out the universe.

I’ma bit of a night sky lover. A few years ago a friend and I spent some nights getting up at 2am and drove to a sports field so that we could check out meteor showers that were visible. We saw some incredible meteors; the most spectaculor one blazed across the sky and was a true aha moment. It sounds cliche, but losing yourself in the night sky does make you question our purpose here – why is it that we push ourselves so hard and get caught up in the minutiae of life?

Enough philosophising! I lost myself in World Wide Telescope for 45 mins and didn’t notice time passing. Still don’t know how to navigate it properly. Best remedy for this is to introduce it to a class and let them work it out for me! Or alternately, take this advice from Microsoft;

Click the top of the Guided Tours tab and then click the Welcome thumbnail to watch a guided tour showing you how to navigate in WWT.

It’s a big file to download (20MB) but it’s pretty impressive. Give it a try.

This is a new segment on the Skeptic Dad blog.  Every few weeks I’ll post about scientific things in the news that you can apply to your own family.  Hopefully, you’ll be able to make science education fun by developing your child’s curiousity and enthusiasm for scientific exploration.

The first item I want to bring to your attention is the new World Wide Telescope.  Those parents who have installed Google Sky onto their desktop will not want to miss Microsoft’s sleek and stylish answer to their cyber-counterparts at Google.  World Wide Telescope is accessible, free to download, and the functions are easy to use.  It’s the perfect complement to an actual telescope.

There are a variety of summer camps, some of them religious and others secular, but there is only one Camp Quest, the first summer camp for children of secular freethinkers, humanists, and atheists.  The camp is meant to foster a rational and logical worldview, and to focus on the natural world over the supernatural.  You can find a Camp Quest in Ohio, Minnesota, Smokey Mountains, California, Michigan, and Ontario.  I don’t blame people for being a little concerned about brainwashing, but the whole point of this camp is to avoid dogma by encouraging the campers to think for themselves.  My own parents were concerned when I brought up the subject of this camp, but they forgot that I was sent to a christian camp as a child.  Why not send your kids to a humanist freethought camp?

Expelled Exposed has been doing a lovely job of squashing the arguments in Ben Stein’s despicable Expelled “documentary”.  One video on the site challenges the intelligent design argument of the complexity of the eye.  Check it out…

Ya está disponible para su descarga (versión beta) el “World Wide Telescope” de Microsoft, para poder explorar las estrellas.

El WWT es un entorno de visualización tipo web 2.0 que permite que tu ordenador funcione como un telescopio virtual, en el se muestran las mejores imágenes del espacio captadas con los mejores telescopios del mundo para una perfecta exploración del universo.

[What is WTT? - Word Wide Telescope]

Lamentablemente la descarga está disponible sólo para usuarios Microsoft.

Se podría decir que es algo parecido al proyecto de Google (Google Sky), sólo que con un poco más de maquillaje.

Sugiero que primero verifiques los requerimientos necesarios antes de instalar para ver si tu PC/Windows puede soportar el programa.

Μερικές φορές σε κάποια πράγματα πρέπει να σταθείς. Όχι τόσο για την ιδέα όσο για τον τρόπο υλοποίησης. Η Microsoft φαίνεται, λοιπόν, να έχει εκείνο το magic touch που κάνει τα πράγματα διαφορετικά, ακόμα και όταν πρόκειται για μια ιδέα κοινή. Έχει βέβαια και τις πηγές και τις δυνατότητες ανάπτυξης και υλοποίησης προσπαθειών όπως το World Wide Telescope.

Κυρίες και κύριοι, υποδεχτείτε the ultimate frontier, από την Microsoft Research, το WWT ή World Wide Telescope.

Δεν έχω δει κάτι παρόμοιο. Και αν το έχω δει ήταν σε κάποια παιχνίδια. Η πλοήγηση στον virtual ουρανό και το interface καταπληκτικά. Το zooming, η μετακίνηση σε διάφορους τομείς του ουρανού τόσο απαλά, ελαστικά.

Αλλά…τι είναι το World Wide Telescope; Πρόκειται για ένα νέο software της Microsoft, ακόμα σε beta version ( Spring beta ) που πραγματικά σας ανοίγει τις πόρτες του ουρανού-διαστήματος. 3D περιβάλλον για το virtual τηλεσκόπιο. Το πραγματικά σημαντικό στην όλη υπόθεση δεν είναι το virtual τηλεσκόπιο αλλά το όλο περιβάλλον. Πρόκεται όχι απλά για μια εφαρμογή αλλά για ένα περιβάλλον μέσα στο οποίο μπορεί κάποιος να χτίσει τις δικές του presentations, τα δικά του tours στον ουρανό, να δημιουργήσει δικές του collections, slide shows, να συμμετέχει σε communities, να ελέγχει το δικό του τηλεσκόπιο κ.ά.

Σταματώ εδώ. Σας προτείνω ανεπιφύλακτα τη χρήση του, αξίζει.

Τέλος, σας δίνω ραντεβού σήμερα ή το αργότερο αύριο με ένα review που ετοιμάζω για το WWT.

But now, just a couple of hours ago Microsoft Research released the first public beta of Worldwide Telescope since it’s debut last month. The software is a combination of various state-of-the-art Microsoft technologies including Live Lab’s Photosynth and Seadragon using numerous high-resolution pictures from imaging satellites including the Hubble telescope.

“It is Simply Breath Taking”

You can collaborate on it like for example share your galaxies you visited with your buddies. You can also make your own customized“Guided Tour”, share, zoom in and zoom out.

I think the use of the WPF framework has been awesome.

Microsoft’s research division created the software as part of a project to develop and demonstrate its multimedia technologies, said Curtis Wong, a principal researcher at the company.

“We had the opportunity to create something that helps kids explore and understand the universe,” Wong said.

The software has a lot of potential for astronomy professionals and researchers, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, who advised Wong on the project and created one of the tours.

“This is like a dream come true in some ways,” Goodman said.

Last year Google also released a similar service but only based on a browser called Google Sky.

The guided tours within WorldWide Telescope help to set it apart from Google Sky, So do the graphics, which help give users the feeling that they are moving in three dimensions, she said.

But WorldWide Telescope has at least one big drawback.

The software runs only on computers with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

And The Monopoly Come In again…..

This could be a problem in the professional astronomy community, where Apple’s Macintosh computers have a wide following.

The program could be downloaded Here… which is a mere 20mb Download.

Mind it the installation does update your DirectX installation as well.

Here are a few things I did…

A Visit to the Black Hole….

I simply loved it and exploring more of it

The options to zoom are fabulous, although a scroll mouse is good for more interactiveness.

I played with it to view the milky way.

The best option I like is to view geostationary details about the image i am looking at

Download it today and have your say here…

Enjoy…

‘Nuff said.

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org

M

Over at Webguild I blogged about Google Sky, the new Astronomy mapping tool from Google that has come out before the much anticipated Microsoft World Wide Telescope project which is not available yet.

I’ll be doing most of my technology and business blogging over at Webguild.org from now on, with more personal stuff here at Joe Duck.

Now and again you stumble across something that makes you go <insert superlative of choice>.   The World Wide Telescope does just that and you don’t even have to an interest in astronomy to see how genius it is.  The client will be available for download soon…

It even made Scoble cry.

So it turned out to be a long busy weekend and I missed the blog awards and a bunch of other stuff – including as it turns out, one of the things I was waiting for for the last few weeks…

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a conference that brings together some of the great minds in all three of those fields and runs talks, showcases and demos. I’d love to go someday! Until that day, over on www.ted.com they put up some of the highlights for free viewing and that will have to do me! When you’re finished here pop over there and have a look at the biggest item on the front page right now… I can’t believe I nearly missed this; thankfully Claire Dillon pointed it out on her blog and I got the heads up on the thing that “made Robert Scoble cry“.

Microsoft are launching a new toy for the hardcore geeks, the casual nerds, the sky lovers, the star gazers, the astro dabblers, the average Joe Soap, the “big kid inside”, the teachers, the alien seekers, the physicists and above all the children! The “WorldWideTelescope” (clever naming too) is a digital representation of the night sky that you can scan and pan around, zoom in on, zoom deep into (no really, really deep – like think “Space Porn“). I don’t know how far the zoom goes or to what resolution but Ray Gould mentioned, “the worlds best telescopes (on Earth and in space)”, in his talk at TED so I would assume they are pretty much the best you can get without your own observatory. (See the talk here.)

I have been a sky watcher since I was a very small kid and while I never learned all the constellations, I did regularly fall asleep at the window while gazing out at the stars wishing I had a telescope. Later I used to sneak out at night to lie on the lawn (or the sand dunes or a handy golf course) and watch the stars. Now, while I wouldn’t have replaced that with booting up an application and panning across the sky (warmer but far less fun) I would most definitely have given the tooth fairy all my teeth (and those of my friends and neighbours) to have been able to zoom in and look deep into the nebulae and star clusters or to have been able to pull up fascinating facts right there and then without hitting the books and trying to reconcile that wonderful, beautiful, deep vista of space with the boringly flat and comparatively unfulfilling pictures and diagrams.

All in all this is fantastic news and I’m pretty excited to see how it actually flies! Forget Google Earth (one of my favourite apps of the past few years) I’m waiting eagerly to get going “where no man has gone before”!

Edit (01:40 04/03/2008): Robert Scoble has just commented on Claire’s post that there is a “better” video of the World Wide Telescope on http://www.fastcompany.tv – unfortunately I can’t confirm that because all I get is a “Sorry” page. (Scoble did say today that they are having “some technical difficulties — our engineers have been up all night optimizing databases and getting things turned on”)

Further Edit (01:50 04/03/2008): Scoble’s video seems to be up and running now and looks pretty good

Finally, Some Real Innovation by Microsoft!

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Here are the Videos, Hope you enjoy….

Enjoy…