Today I got my first cover story titled "The future is open source" published in Dawn Sci-Tech World weekly magazine. The purpose of this article is to shed light mainly on software piracy and ways to eliminate its roots from our society. I have also received an email this afternoon from our respected Vice-Chancellor, Engr. Abul Kalam, that he read my article and wants to see me. Well the email is not much revealing so I have to see him on Monday to unveil the mystery. I hope everything will turn out in my favor.

Read the story here.

Charlez Petzold had an amazing speech at NYC.NET Developers Groups on the state of programming in the Microsoft World. A must read for every developer and thanks to Bill Evjen for pointing it out on his blog.

Read it here.

Today I got my hands on a great new application by Microsoft which is code named "Acrylic." Its a great new addition amongst the variety of application that Microsoft is developing these days. Acrylic is a graphics designer and somewhat identical to the features provided by Adobe Photoshop. The great addition which I found is that it can export your images in XAML, which can be utilized in next generation of Windows and Web applications. You can have your complete deign in Acrylic and use it to export it into XAML, which can save a huge amount of time to produce xaml code if you are working on a big project. Acrylic is a part of Microsoft Expressions products and we still have to see other remaining tools to complete the package. Here are some snaps of Acrylic running on my PC.

See how beautifully it produces vector based images. There are other new features as well which I will explore in a couple of days. So stay tuned for more!

XBox 360 manufacturing is at full speed and will gonna hit stores next month on November 22. Here's a video showing the manufacturing procees of the upcoming console to fill your appetite till the release.

Click here to download the video in wmv format. File size 4.19 MB

See the LINQ Project in action in these code samples. The sample are in C# for the time being.

Click here for the samples.

The relentless push of Moore's Law has allowed data rates to soar, Internet traffic to swell, and wired and wireless technology to cover continents. Increasingly, we all expect fast, free-flowing bandwidth whenever and wherever we connect with the world. Within the next decade, the circuitry embodied by a rack of today's servers, able to churn through billions of bits of data per second and handle all the data-processing needs of a small company, will fit neatly on a single silicon chip half the size of a postage stamp.

But there's a problem. As newer, faster microprocessors roll out, the copper connections that feed those processors within computers and servers will prove inadequate to handle the crushing tides of data. At data rates approaching 10 billion bits per second, microscopic imperfections in the copper or irregularities in a printed-circuit board begin to weaken and distort the signals—even traveling distances as short as 50 centimeters can be a problem. New board materials and new techniques could provide some additional performance gains, but only at increased cost.

Here's a better way: replace the copper with optical fiber and the electrons with photons.

That's the promise of silicon photonics: affordable optical communications for everything. It will let manufacturers build optical components using the same semiconductor equipment and methods they use now for ordinary integrated circuits, thereby dramatically lowering the cost of photonics. Meanwhile, the performance gains will be significant: integrated onto a silicon chip, an optical transceiver could send and receive data at 10 billion or even 100 billion bits per second.

Source : IEEE Spectrum

Have you ever strayed onto a strange website, clicked on an interesting icon and felt the blood drain out of your face as your computer screen flickered and went black? It happens all the time. The security of your computer is constantly at risk and clearly something must be done to neutralise the threat. Traditionally, safety precautions such as antivirus software have worked well but with more sophisticated attacks exploiting all kind of bugs, the current security programmes are simply waiting to be chewed up. After all, one piece of software cannot make an insecure system risk free.

One solution could be to change the way the hardware itself is designed. This is the approach the trusted computing initiative was leaning toward. A family of specifications were produced by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) - a group initially headed by industry giants such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, Compaq and Intel which eventually grew to include over 190 members. They began with the stated goal of making computers more secure. One of the major products of this working group was a specification for providing a trusted subsystem using the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and additional chip to be included with computers to provide core security services and trusted computing features to the rest of the platform.

Read the complete story on Trusted Computing in this month's issue of Spider Magazine.