Judging Criteria

Each judge will choose four (4) websites to be entered into the final rounds by assessing the following criteria:

• Original content
• Quality content
• Consistent content
• Website design is not necessarily a factor in the competition

First Prize

• SnagIt ($49.95)
• MultiSet 6.1 ($99.95)
• StarBurn Network ($495)
• A Squared Anti-malware ($39.95)
• Mamutu ($29.95)
• DemoCreator ($99.95)
• 3 month link on the Windows Tools, Help & Guides homepage

Second Prize

• A Squared Anti-malware ($39.95)
• Mamutu ($29.95)
• DemoCreator ($99.95)
• 1 month link on the Windows Tools, Help & Guides homepage

Third & Fourth Prizes

• A Squared Anti-malware ($39.95)
• Mamutu ($29.95)

Rules

• Only one entry per person (even if you have multiple sites)
• Judges cannot participate
• Your website must be in English or have an English translation

How to Enter

1. Enter Here
2. List the following:

• Website Title
• URL of homepage
• Short description

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Register for Bill Gates speech from New Delhi

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Microsoft products and tools give you the productivity boost to quickly address your most time-consuming development, deployment and management challenges, which helps you better connect with life outside work. Don’t take our word for it, though. Join your fellow colleagues and Tech Gurus at this online event and explore Microsoft products online, from the cosy confines of your workstations.
During the event, the Technical Experts from Microsoft will deliver 40+ free, in-depth sessions on latest Microsoft technologies that help you boost your productivity. Get set to access these online interactive sessions and provide instant feedback.

Stay tuned between 17th -19th September to know more.

• Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Agenda
• Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Speakers

To attend Microsoft virtual tech days first you have to register to Microsoft Virtual tech days Website. After that you have to install Microsoft Office Live Meeting software and all done.

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For those who do not have an idea what I am talking about, let me tell you about the best part of this year’s Olympics opening ceremony. When Chinese athlete, Li was coming down after lighting the olympic torch, nearly everyone noticed the biggest Blue Screen of Death ever, projected on the stadium’s roof. According to the news sites, it was there for nearly an hour, but was noticed only when a broadcast camera showed up its image. Few of the viewers in stadium has also capture pictures of same. Since then, every where in any technical forums, discussion is going on, about the same. Everyone is blaming Microsoft for the fault. But is it seriously an issue that should be dealt by Microsoft only. Lets check out.

The first point made by those criticizers is that why didn’t they used Linux, or Mac, instead of Windows. The obvious reason is the simplicity offered by Windows, over other operating systems, which is an advantage when there are so many of peripherals connected.

Next question obviously is why only XP, and not Windows Vista. For that, Olympic organizers committee said, that after so much of negative reviews of Vista, they didn’t felt like it will be worth going. Even Microsoft is against using XP, as it definitely is outdated, by today’s standard. Although Vista is resource hungry, but being far more stable now, it should have been the choice for opening ceremony.

Are we sure that XP version used in Beijing was not pirated, as China is well known for its piracy only? For that question, the answer is No, XP wasn’t pirated as it would not have been possible to use this many peripherals with normal XP, so the XP used should have been the one for Embedded Systems, which is by far not yet pirated.

Techies also asked, why it doesn’t restarted automatically in case of Fatal error, as in case of normal PC usage. Obvious answer is that XP version used was for Embedded Systems, so the user should be quite aware of basics of troubleshooting, hence showing up the troubleshooting information is necessary.

So, the fault definitely was not from Microsoft side, as they have shipped the right thing to the olympics committee. The fault definitely lies in some other hands. The fault must have been from drivers. But which driver actually failed, is not yet known. One reason as stated by some techies is that display drivers cause this kind of errors, most commonly, as they run in kernel mode. That’s why they should have used Linux or Mac. But still Linux or Mac would have failed in that case, the only difference is the information shown on the screen would have been replaced by some stupid animation, or the system would have simply restarted.

Restarting seems a good option here, as the Olympics committee officials just needed to run those projectors and LCD’s, they are not supposed to debug. But should Microsoft have provided the patch to simply restart the system, in case of failure, or a new OS for that matter. Obviously No. They are not supposed to write a new patch specifically for an event. May be Olympic committee should have asked them for that patch.

And why not some one saw that screen for nearly an hour, and restarted the system. That’s a human fault obviously, from organizer’s end. Even though the system didn’t restarted automatically, some one should have taken care of that. And then, its because of faulty drivers and not because of XP’s architecture. So, why is everyone blaming Microsoft for something they don’t even have any relation with. May be this is the price that Microsoft is paying for being the best in OS market.

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Over 200 innovations from the lab have been transferred to Microsoft products, including Office XP, Office System 2003, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Xbox, MSN, Windows Live and our company’s latest releases ¨C Windows Vista and Office 2007. In addition, technologies from the lab have been adopted by international standards bodies such as MPEG4 (error-resilient video transmission), IETF (TCP/IP header compression), and ITU/ISO (video-compression technology).

Microsoft Research Asia focuses on following five research areas

• Natural User Interfaces enable users to interact with a computer using speech, gestures, and expressions.
• Next-generation Multimedia allows people to search for and to be immersed in interactive online shopping, education, meeting, and entertainment activities.
• Data-Intensive Computing explores the new infrastructures, algorithms, tools, and applications to collect, analyze, and mine results for data-intensive business in both the consumer and enterprise sectors.
• Search and Online Ads take Web search and online advertising to the next level by applying data-mining, machine-learning, and knowledge-discovery techniques to information analysis, organization, retrieval, and visualization.
• Fundamental Computer Science includes areas such as theoretical computer science (theory), systems, networking, and machine learning that will have an impact on multiple applications and products.

Bill Gates Said on the Microsoft Research Website

When I visited China in 1997," Gates recalled recently, "I was deeply impressed by the talent, the enthusiasm, and the creativity of the Chinese university students I met. That trip played a pivotal role in our decision to establish a fundamental research lab in Beijing in 1998. The research lab in Beijing exceeded even my own high expectation. by making significant contributions to our technical knowledge and products within its first few years of existence. As a result, we expanded the lab to include the top researchers from the entire Asia Pacific region, and it is now known as Microsoft Research Asia. Our largest research lab outside of the United States, it has achieved remarkable things in the past 10 years

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The Panel Of Judges who will shortlist the 10 best are Steve Sinchak MVP of TweakVista.com, John Barnett MVP of Windows Vista Support, Kerry Brown MVP of VistaHelp.ca , James Stables of Windows Vista Magazine, Emil Protalinski of Arstechnica and Anand.

This should be a great opportunity for Vista bloggers to showcase their blogs. There are prizes to be won too. The contest will be open from 10th August 2008 to 09th Sept 2008. For more details CLICK HERE.

The Winner of the WinVistaClub Best Windows Vista Blog Contest 2008 will also get a Windows Vista Ultimate 32/64 bit DVD Box Pack, a Free 1 year license of ESET Smart Security Suite, a License of Magic Utilities, a License of MagicTweak, a one year subscription to the Windows Vista Magazine and a link for 3 months on the WinVistaClub Home Page. The 2 Runners-up will get a License of Magic Utilities & a subscription to the Windows Vista Magazine each.

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