Feel the touch....!! Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface

Welcome to the new but not new world of surface computing.Microsoft's Research teams brain brainstorming and hardwork over the years has yeilded great dividends and yet again it looks like the hardwork is going to pay off this winter 07' at the launch of the new product "Microsoft Surface".

Lets get to the point...Microsoft Surface is a 30 inch table top computer mounted in a table which allows users to interact with the digital content using gestures,touch ...hell yeah i.e now nobody needs to use a mouse or a keyboard \m/

People can interact with data using natural gestures , touch , fingers , brushes,day to day objects.The digital content can be grabbed with your hands and you can move this information between objects with sheer ease.

Key features

- Table/surface computing
- Slick, translucent surface
- 30 inch diagonal display
- Touch interface
- Multiuser facility
- Inbuilt cameras to see if anything is sitting on the surface
- Future of computing ( photo manipulation,creating spreadsheets,websites..)
- Synchronisation with personal electronic devices( PDAs/cameras/music players..)
- Interacts with devices that are tagged using barcode/RFID tags
- Used for commercial/ household purposes ( gaming,music management...)

Imagine placing your music player or camera on the Surface and transferring data (music , videos , photos ) using your hands by simply dragging them...kickass man.

Surface has fundamentally altered the way we interact with the digital content and is indeed a new bridge connecting to the digital world.Rock on MS... !!

Related Stuff

Appx Price : 10,000 $ US

Launch : Winter 2007

The power of WMI

WMI ---Windows Management Instrumentation

WMI is Microsoft's implementation of the WBEM (Web based Enterprise Mgmt) which is an industry standard used for managing computers and devices across a network(locally or remotely).

Since WMI is a very deep rooted concept , its impossible to throw light on each and every aspect , and so i'd like to concentrate more on what the technology is all about and how it is powerful in managing thousands of "POTENTIALLY MANAGEABLE" entities .

To start of with WMI is a small piece of code / software that resides in Windows.

Typically all of us(scripters, users, admins) make use of WMI without actually knowing were using it :)

WMI is an interface provided by Windows which instruments (automates) the potentially managable objects to the outside world.By instrumentation i mean , it helps in exposing data which can be consumed.

Windows consists of managed objects. Each object can be referred to as a BOX.For example u may have a box of services , processes , registry , file system , chocolates :P etc

The entire concept is layered into 3 parts ...1) the front end which is the user / administrator
2) the middleware (WMI broker)
3) the backend (Managed objects)

The above block diagram illustrates the WMI architecture , showing 3 layers as mentioned above.

The WMI consumer is the user who wants to fetch information and consume it.

Second layer of abstraction is the WMI broker which acts as a bridge between the consumer and the managed objects (Boxes). Providers consists of classes which are implemented as dlls used to fetch information from the managed objects.The classes provides access to the properties and calling methods .

The managed objects are the third layer in the architecture which are the potentially manageable boxes/entities.

Information is fetched from the managed objects and instrumented to the outside world which may be consumed further.

WMI is platform agnostic i.e. a user can fetch information by firing vbscript() queries , C++ (com) code , WQL (WMI query language ) , or using the .NET framework ( C# , VB.NET, J#)

Any WMI compatible windows object can be monitored and managed effectively using scripts or WMI tools . All Operating systems after WindowsNT to the currently running Vista / Windows CE , servers like IIS , SQL , ISA , Exchange can be managed with ease.

Misunderstood concept of WMI

Users expect that information retrival using WMI should be magical. Thats not the case if a user is attempting to retrieve 10,000 files or 3000 instances of startup options. Common sense should prevail since it takes more than a few seconds to fetch data and display the same.

Other expectations include display of "out of the band " data. The information will be fetched only if the particular provider is present.

Microsoft is trying to include as many providers they can to solve day to day problems of the people. With the current version of Windows Vista 100 odd providers are included and there are more to come.

I end the article here. Hope you have enjoyed the concept of WMI and now you are ready to manage your computers and other's your own way ;)