Tony Gurney: Microsoft Windows

Showing posts with label Microsoft Windows. Show all posts

Tuesday, 28 April 2009

Easy Lecture Streaming

Looking to get in to broadcasting your lectures to off-campus students but not sure where to start?

ProCaster is a free Windows application (Mac is promised soon) that allows you to set up internet broadcasting without any problems. Just connect your camera to the application and go. Your broadcasts are available as a live stream and recorded for video on demand use later. You can mix in views of your computer screen and also chat (and tweet!) to your viewers interactively. The video is then streamed on the internet by Mogulus.

The viewer is Flash based so should be available on pretty much any platform you can think of.

You can try Mogulus broadcasting for free as long as you want if you don't mind ads appearing. Otherwise you can upgrade to the Pro version for a reasonable charge.

Try ProCaster here:

Procaster: One-click live streaming, powered by Mogulus

Thursday, 5 February 2009

Microsoft DreamSpark

Image via CrunchBase

Quick reminder for those that haven't come across it before that Microsoft have made available a pile of tools free for students. They include

Visual Studio
Expression Studio
SQL Server Developer
Windows Server
Visual Languages (C Sharp, C++, Basic)
Virtual PC

and more including a pass for the IT Academy.

Check it out here:

Microsoft DreamSpark

Wednesday, 3 December 2008

Microsoft SmallBasic

Image representing Microsoft as depicted in Cr...

Image by via CrunchBase

Microsoft have released a new version of basic designed for children and novices called SmallBasic. It has only fifteen keywords to learn to allow newbies to get up and running quickly. The web site says that

Small Basic is a simple and easy programming language with a friendly environment that provides a cool and fun way of learning programming. From making turtles animations to running a slide show on the desktop, Small Basic makes programming natural and effortless.

Might be a good way of introducing programming to your classes.

Featured Windows Download: Small Basic Teaches Programming Fundamentals

Wednesday, 26 November 2008

Didn't This Used to be Investigated by the Justice Department?

Image via Wikipedia

OK Here's the scam.

Invent an operating system that's full of vulnerabilities
Create some software that plugs the holes (let's call it OneCare, for example)
Sell it
Find that no-one buys it because others sell similar software except cheaper and better
Make your software free
Drive all the other manufacturers out of the game
Sell your software at a new, higher, price

Microsoft are at point five on the list. Six and seven are sure to follow soon.

In the meantime take advantage of their "generosity" to make your Windows machine safe to use.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft to offer free security

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Google Get Into Browsers

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Google live on the Internet and so it makes sense that they would want to influence the nuts and bolts of web browsing. To that end they have introduced their own browser, Chrome.

Some of the choices made in creating the browser such as multiple processes, secrecy mode and a brand new Java interpreter are interesting to say the least and are well explained in the accompanying comic. (It's Google, of course it's a comic!)

You can download the browser here (Windows only at the moment, Mac and Linux to follow). It's certainly worth a look and, as the code has been open-sourced, it's only a matter of time until at least some of the ideas appear elsewhere.

Browser wars in 2008. Who'd have thought?

Tony Gurney