Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Internet or cloud applications. and services on the Internet in Microsoft data centers.

Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third-party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.


Windows® Azure is the operating system that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure handles load balancing and resource management and automatically manages the life cycle of a service based on requirements that the owner of the service established. A developer who wishes to deploy an application to Windows Azure specifies the service topology, including the number of instances to deploy and any configuration settings. Windows Azure deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.

Basic Working Model


Storage Services

The Windows Azure storage services provide persistent, durable storage in the cloud. To access the storage services, you must have a storage account, which is provided through the developer portal.

The fundamental storage services include:

* Blob service, for storing text or binary data

* Queue service, for reliable, persistent messaging between services

* Table service, for structured storage that can be queried

The Windows Azure SDK offers REST APIs for working with the storage services. You may access the storage services from within a service running in Windows Azure or directly over the Internet from any application that can send and receive data over HTTP/HTTPS.

Compute Service

Windows Azure offers an Internet-scale hosting environment built on geographically distributed data centers. This hosting environment provides a runtime execution environment for managed code.

A Windows Azure compute service is built from one or more roles. A role defines a component that may run in the execution environment; within Windows Azure, a service may run one or more instances of a role.

Currently Windows Azure supports the following two types of roles:

* A web role is an ASP.NET Web application that may be accessed via an HTTP or HTTPS endpoint. Web roles run in integrated pipeline mode on an Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Hosted Web Core.

* A worker role is a background processing component. It does not accept inbound network connections.

A service may be comprised of one or both types of roles, and may include multiple roles of each type.




Developers can use the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio® to build, package, and run services from within Visual Studio. The Windows Azure Tools also provide project templates for designing roles. The tools are available as a separate download and are not included as part of this SDK.
Developer Model

­Windo­ws 7 ­on th­e way­!

Well, Windows 7 is officially released to the manufacturer as of last week - it's due to be available to the public on Oct 22. While a lot of people have already had a chance to try it out via the publicly available RC (release candidate) version, I think everyone else is still in for a shock when they see how cool this new version is! I've had the chance to spend the summer interning on the Windows team and have gotten to know Win7 as part of the process. Here are a few of my favorite features:

- The taskbar: simpler, easier to use and prettier

- Aero: a cool desktop feature that allows you to see tranparently through windows when you want to and to view previews of windows in the taskbar (you have to check it out for yourself to really understand)

- Devices: I've been using cameras, phones, printers, a wireless mouse, etc. with Win7 and everything connects no problem and works seamlessly...a nice improvement from needing to always install drivers.

Has anyone else been using the RC? Any other cool features that should be pointed out?

In any case, I hope everyone else is as excited for the release as I am. You can get lots of previews and info on the internet and at www.windows.com.

Source: Virtual Tech Days global video chat by one of the designer in windows 7

Google Dominates Internet Landscape in India

In India, Google Sites accounted for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2 percent), maps with Google Maps (63.9 percent), multimedia with YouTube (82.8 percent). It also commanded slightly less than half of all time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6 percent) and email with Gmail (46.8 percent).

Google-Owned Sites Across Selected Site Categories India July 2009 Total India, Age 15+, Home & Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix and comScore qSearch
Site Category	Google Site	Category Rank by Unique Visitors	Google’s Share of Time Spent in Category
India
Search*	Google Sites	1	88.4%
Social Networking	Orkut	1	68.2%
Maps	Google Maps	1	63.9%
Photos	Picasa Network	1	16.2%
Blogs	Blogger	1	47.6%
Multimedia	YouTube	1	82.8%
Email	Gmail	2	46.8%

Facebook User Statistics- August 2009

Facebook has now more than ever become a potent force on the web and also a “parallel” internet. Optimization on Facebook is a must for every organization, brand and individual.

Facebook General Growth

* More than 250 million active users
* More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
* More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

Facebook User Engagement

* Average user has 120 friends on the site
* More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
* More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day

Facebook Applications

* More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
* More than 2.5 million events created each month
* More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

Facebook International Growth

* More than 50 translations available on the site, with more than 40 in development
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Facebook Platform

* More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
* Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
* More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
* More than 200 applications have more than one million monthly active users
* More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

Facebook Mobile

* There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
* People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
* There are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Web Awards

Using web services is no longer a one time activity , it is now a part of our lives,and a serious investment of time ,energy and money.
users now need to trust these sites as much as they do on jeweller, doctor or a mechanic.
So i decided to give some web awards on my basis :

Search Engine
"In blind test done, there was a neck to neck competition between google and bing. While yahoo didn't garner many points."
www.google.com
www.bing.com

"Email service"
www.gmail.com

"Social Networking"
www.facebook.com

"Business Networking"
www.linkedin.com

"job Sites"
www.naukri.com

"Online Office Suites"
www.zoho.com

"Travel Sites"
www.makemytrip.com

"Video Streaming"
www.youtube.com

"Real Estate"
www.magicbricks.com

"Image Hosting"
www.flickr.com

"Image Editing"
www.pixlr.com

"Photo Printing"
www.zoomin.com

"Tech Shopping"
www.ebay.in

"Games"
www.zapak.com


I think that's all Hats off to all these websites , in my view they are best in there work.

Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)

The Open Source Community is all set to offer u the latest and greatest software till date. The Ubuntu developers are moving (working)quickly to bring up this gift to its users--The Karmic Koala Alpha 1 . The Karmic Koala Alpha 1 is the first alpha release of Ubuntu 9.10, bringing with it the earliest new features for the next version of Ubuntu.

The final stable version will be released on October 29th, 2009.


New features in Karmic

Development for Karmic just recently opened and many of the new features have not yet started to appear. Currently the changes include the sync of packages from Debian Unstable or Sid has begun, a new kernel based on 2.6.30 and the latest development release of GNOME, 2.27.1.

Alpha 1 includes the 2.6.30-5.6 kernel based on 2.6.30-rc5.


Download Alpha 1

Get it while it's hot. ISOs and torrents are available at:

*

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu Alternates, Server, Netbook Remix, and MID)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/karmic/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu ARM)

Firefox vs IE (No need for comparison but still..)

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Hmm.. See no comparion of firefox ... Ie is no where in comparison to firefox...