Microsoft Announces New Operating Systems

Yesterday(Oct 27, 2008). Microsoft unveiled details of two new operating systems. Currently the most commonly used Microsoft operating systems are Windows XP and Windows Vista. Although frequently criticized, often by those who never use it, Vista is actually a very stable, rich environment in which to work. Particularly when used with up to date machines.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has decided to press ahead with successors for Vista. In late 2009, Windows 7 will be released. It will be much like Vista. Around the same time Microsoft will release Windows azure, an operating system that lives on Microsoft servers. This is called cloud computing. "Cloud" being the internet. Basically this means that you will not need an operating system or programs: they will all live in the cloud.

Whether this works out or not remains to be seen. However, many companies are already trying this, both with Microsoft and with Google products.

"Cloud" computing is one of the most and used technology buzz words at present.

ICT 12 Student Blogs

Ava Balingit
Ryan Battistel
Sofia Busse
Nicole Ceralde
Nathan Chiu
Jonathan De Maeseneer
Danila Di Giacinto
Lia Estrellado
Kimberly Francisco
Dilantha Geekiyanage
Nikko Henderson
Nikka Komisarski
Steffani Mastromonaco
Caitlin Nery
Conner Olenick
Andrea Strazzullo
Adam Troczynski
Nikko Tagle
Alannah Villella
Jason Wong

These are the blog URLs from my ICT 12 class colleagues. The class is using Blogger throughout the year to record information about various programs and techniques.
This list has be updated to include several other URLs for students currently not in the list.

iGoogle

Today I signed up for the iGoogle service and made a couple of minor custom changes. I added a custom widget to display my IP address.

Learning Binary

Computers today work with binary operations, based on off-on status of "switches" or "bits" that are arranged in groups called "bytes." Switches that are set to "on" are represented by a 1 and switches that are set to "off" are shown as 0.

There are only two values for a switch, so that means the values of the switches cannot be ones, tens, hundreds. However, the values are powers of two; ones, twos, fours, eights, etc., reading from right to left.

Ex.
1011 = 8 + 0 + 2 + 1 = 11
1111 = 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 15
0111 = 0 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 7

My binary number for my workstation in ICT 12 is "00011" which means 3. This number will be incorporated into my name in assignment footers and program code comment header sections.