Microsoft Live Lab Photosynth

History

Photosynth is based on Photo Tourism, a research project by University of Washington graduate student Noah Snavely.

Microsoft released a free tech preview version on November 9, 2006. Users could view models generated by Microsoft or the BBC, but not create their own models at that time.Microsoft teamed up with NASA on August 6, 2007 allowing users to preview its Photosynth technology showing the Space Shuttle Endeavour. On August 20, 2007, a preview showing the tiles of Endeavour during the backflip process was made available for viewing.

On August 20, 2008, Microsoft officially released Photosynth to the public, allowing users to upload their images and generate their own Photosynth models.

Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Users are able to view and generate their own models using a software tool available for download at the Photosynth website.

Process

The Photosynth technology works in two steps. The first step involves the analysis of multiple photographs taken of the same area. Each photograph is processed using an interest point detection and matching algorithm developed by Microsoft Research which is similar in function to UBC's Scale-invariant feature transform. This process identifies specific features, for example the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Features in one photograph are then compared to and matched with the same features in the other photographs. Thus photographs of the same areas are identified. By analyzing the position of matching features within each photograph, the program can identify which photographs belong on which side of others. By analyzing subtle differences in the relationships between the features (angle, distance, etc.), the program identifies the 3D position of each feature, as well as the position and angle at which each photograph was taken. This process is known scientifically as Bundle adjustment and is commonly used in the field of photogrammetry, with similar products available such asImodeller, D-Sculptor, and Rhinoceros. This first step is extremely computationally intensive, but only has to be performed once on each set of photographs.

The second step involves the display of and navigation through the 3D point cloud of features identified in the first step. This is done with the publicly downloadable Photosynth viewer. The viewer resides on a client computer and maintains a connection to a server that stores the original photographs. It enables a user to, among other things, see any of the photographs from their original vantage point. It incorporates DeepZoom technology Microsoft obtained through its acquisition of Seadragon in January 2006. The Seadragon technology enables smooth zooming into the high-resolution photographs without downloading them to the user's machine.

The Photosynth D3D based viewing software is only available to the Windows Vista and XP operating systems. The team recently released a Silverlight version of the viewer:Photosynth Silverlight Viewer

As of March 2009 user uploaded Photosynth collections are now available for viewing on iPhones using iSynth (3D) or Seadragon Mobile (2D only).Capabilities

3D model view of Piazza San Marco, Venice using Photosynth

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle
• Zoom in or out of a photo
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another
• Smoothly change viewing angle between nearby photos
• Smoothly zoom in and out of high-resolution photos
• Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing
• Send pictures

 

In the media

• On April 30, 2008, Photosynth was featured in the episode Admissions of the television show CSI: New York
• CNN utilized Photosynth for a user-contributed 3D vision of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the President of the United States.
• In the Angels & Demons "Path of Illumination Contest," Photosynth is used as well as advertised in the website.

if you want to view photos developed by photosynth go to this------->File:Photosynth.jpg

Sixth sense technology

Indian Geek Develops 'Sixth Sense' Device

Use hand gestures to click pictures or send mails

28-year-old Pranav Mistry, a MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) based researcher hailing from Gujarat has created  a digital prototype of a "sixth sense" device that is being currently evaluated by corporations including Google, Microsoft, HP and Samsung.

To briefly describe what this sixth sense is all about, we need to understand how the current dissemination of information from current electronic devices takes place. Most of the information from computers, mobile phones and other devices are confined to screen or paper - if we decide to take a print. However, the sixth sense, according to Mistry, bridges this gap "bringing intangible digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures". The concept falls under "wearable computing" -- the same category under which the ubiquitous mobile phone falls as well.

The equipment list for the sixth sense might seem a tad crude, but it does its job quite well. It comprises a pocket projector; mirror and web camera bundled in a wearable pendant-like mobile. With the help of the projector, you can turn any material surface into a touchscreen. The camera is used to "see" the hand gestures. The user will however need to wear color-coded gloves on the index finger and the thumb so that the hand movements can be recorded and decrypted.

Some of the interesting hand gestures include drawing a square frame which will trigger a command to take a picture, drawing the @ sign will let the user access his email. You can even write e-mails with the help of the projector, which projects an image of a virtual keyboard so that you can type. All this costs around $350 (Rs. 17,000) to build - which is not a bad for something as futuristic as this!

Mistry has been approached by a couple of Indian companies who seem to be interested in his project. However, he wants the technology to be a little cheaper before it comes to India.

The Future is in the Cloud

Microsoft is changing tracks: the software giant now sees the importance of web-based services ,even though some of these edges have been around for a while already.

 

Windows 7 certainly got its fair share of attention when it was first shown off,but another announcement made by the microsoft at the same time might just turn out to be a lot more important.At the annual professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, the company’s new chief architect Ray Ozzie introduced Microsoft’s agenda for the coming years.The group wants to capture the Internet market

with new platforms and services,and Ozzie underscored the historical  significance of the move by saying “It’s the transformation of our software; it’s the transformation of our strategy and our offerings across the board to fundamentally embrace services”. The vehicle which take Microsoft on that transformational journey , he revealed,is Windows Azure a new “cloud computing “ platform designed to offer users access to computing applications on any Internet-connected device from anywhere on planet.

What is cloud computing?

Users traditionally use softwares installed on their terminals , whether these are desktop PCs,laptops,cellphones or other devices.For bussines and enterprise scenarios ,individual servers or racks of them operate behind the scenes ,depending on the type of applications they need to support and the scale of the organization.When these companies have millions of customers who uses their websites and online services,they need to maintain massive data centres to ensure constant speed and uptime(which might involve multiple physical locations around the world).
The web is fast becoming the primary contact of contact for businesses,which means they can’t go offline when demand peaks.For example a shopping site that can’t deal with a spike in traffic during a holiday season will go offline ,causing massive business looses as well as customer dissatisfaction.On the flip side ,investments in processing power of this magnitude will not always be worthwhile .If it’s night time in North America,servers there are almost idle whereas those in India are under full load since it is day time here.

                                                   With cloud computing ,processing loads can be easily redistributed between idle servers.By hosting applications on a platform that consists of millions of distributed centres around the world rather than a single server ,customers don’t have to worry about uptime,latency,capacity,power supply,or even natural disasters and geopolitical events .Paying for only the server capacity you need means you can scale your infrastructure requirements fairly easily,based on peaks and valleys in user demand.Meanwhile the hosts of cloud use advanced virtualisations techniques to host multiple clients ,but not necessarily on individual machines or in single physical locations.This greatly optimizes space,power consumption and overall costs , and works out particularly well for small start-ups which don’t know how much demand their services can cope with and how much power they must purchase at the outset .Some might even need to rent bursts of power to analyze complex simulations every now and then.the cloud automatically provides them with required capacity also redistributes load evenly…………

                          

xams over

i successfully get through my xams and I am back again.............well these cycles goes on

The spread of the computer virus

Viruses likeMydoom ,CodeRed and llove you have been bringing PCs to a standstill ,slowing down the internet and causing crores of rupees worth of damage for more than 20 years now


When Fred Cohen ,a student at the University of Sothern California,wrote a thesis on the possibility that computers would not be defended from malicious programs,nobody guessed that he was layingground for a $3.8 billion industry.In 1984,Cohen published a paper titled "Computer viruses : Theories and Experiments" that not every professor would allow his student to go through today. The paper described thestructure of a theoretical program which could multiply and carry out commands without the user's knowledge: the conceptualization of first virus.

everything was going fine in the mid-eighties; and if a ever disappeared it was most likely due to aprogramme error or simple carelessnes on the part of the user.But only a couple a year latter, a new type of virus start emerging
- the so-called polymorphic type of virus could change itself and encrypt the malicious payload .Many firms in the still-nascent antivirus industry couldn't deal with the next advancement , and threw in their towels .The few that remained had to clean up the fallout of virus construction kits ,which started becoming quite popular and allowed every PC novice to program malware and cause the billions of dollars of worth damages...

Viruses for everyone: infection through the web

In the pre-Internt era it wasn,t easy for virus swriters to circulate their creations their creations ,since floppy disks were the only the widespread means of transmission.The golden age for crooks dawned with the emergence of the Internet . now they can send their to all over world from their own homes-all that was needed a web connection..The internet also introduced antivirus manufactures to a new problem -until then ,experts had studied every virus individually and come up with individual tools to deal with them.Three hundred viruses per day were not too much of a burden but the number quickly rose to 30,000 per day.

As a result , the antivirus vendors had to built large computers centres and write tools that automatically analyze virus samples to determine their signatures.Today,such analysis takes a cople of seconds -only in difficult cases do the experts personally examine any data.In recent times,it is not just PCs but also cellphones that have been affected by viruses attacks .Thankfully,only a limited number of threats have surfaced so far, but that could change in the near future with the advent of synchronization services such as Microsoft Live Mesh and Apple MobileMe ,which consatntly updates data between cell phones and computers. These serve as perfect distribution method for viruses- there is no real protection against such attacks yet.Even Fred Cohen concluded in his computer can only be perfectly safe when it is completely isolated from contact with other computers .that is it can't be networked or allow any foreign storage medium to be connected .Today this is not practically possible .There is nothing we can do but be careful and trust the antivirus industry,which in turn has to continuously react to new types of threats and provide users with tools to keep us on top of the daily cat-and-mouse game we face............

1949

Virus theory

In one of his works ,John Von Neumann puts forth the theory that a computer program can replicate itself on its own.

1982

Independent tools

15 year old student Rich Skrenta writes a program called Elk Cloner that spread itselfs in the system through disks.It uses the boot sector to propagate itself.

1984

First virus

Fred Cohen introduces the first functioning virus in his thesis, which is written for the unix systems.

1986

Pakistan Connection

Softwares retailers from the middle east spreadthe first dos virus .The progrmas renames disks but doesn't causes any great damage..

1987

1. Jerusalem

This is the first virus that causes permanent damage it deletes all COM and EXE files fromthe disk on wvery friday till 13th.

2.Resisting detection

The cascade virus coceals itself in the infected system's RAM

1988

Virus constructions kits

a virus constructions kit appears for the popular atari st computers with which even beginners can write malware that resists detection- all without any program language.

1989-1972

1.Antivirus tools

Program designed to fight viruses make their first appeareances..

2.Virus win a round

Malware writers start creating polymorphic viruses which are more difficult to detect on ainfected pcs.Many antivirys manufacturers

give up since they are unable to find a solution to this problem.

3. Michelangelo

The first virus that captures the attention of a media .It lise dormanton infected machines till march 6,the artists birthday ,when it overwrites the boot sector..

1995

Macro viruses.

The first malware for world and other such programs ,make their appeareances .Due to frequent document exchanges ,the virus circulates more than those which attack the operating system.

2000

I love you

The worm "lloveyou" spreads via mail and causes damage worth billions with in days,by deelting files from affected pcs

2002

Independentof the os

New generations of viruses can also infect files on linux machines, apart from windows appliacations

2004

1.Sasser

A german student programs a virus that shuts down PCs , causing huge bussiness losses and disruptions .

2. cell phones

The first virus for cellphones came . A year later later they make appeareance on Symbian devices .however they have not spread much.

2006

Radio worm

A research group from holland introduces a new wormthat can spread itself through rfid radio transmissions.

2009------------------>

"FUTURE"

Viruses everywhere

communications medium such as mobile and PCs are always connected to each other throgh networks.MAlware will attack these systems and simultaneously delete or exploit available data.

This is not much about viruses but i have to end my discussions here.

The spread of the computer virus

Virus likeMydoom ,CodeRed and llove you have been bringing PCs to a standstill ,slowing down the internet and causing crores of rupees worth of damage for more than 20 years now

When Fred Cohen ,a student at the University of Sothern California,wrote a thesis on the possibility that computers would not be defended from malicious programs,nobody guessed that he was layingground for a $3.8 billion industry.In 1984,Cohen published a paper titled "Computer viruses : Theories and Experiments" that not every professor would allow his student to go through today. The paper described thestructure of a theoretical program which could multiply and carry out commands without the user's knowledge: the conceptualization of first virus. everything was going fine in the mid-eighties; and if a ever disappeared it was most likely due to aprogramme error or simple carelessnes on the part of the user.But only a couple a year latter, a new type of virus start emerging - the so-called polymorphic type of virus could change itself and encrypt the malicious payload .Many firms in the still-nascent antivirus industry couldn't deal with the next advancement , and threw in their towels .The few that remained had to clean up the fallout of virus construction kits ,which started becoming quite popular and allowed every PC novice to program malware and cause the billions of dollars of worth damages...

Viruses for everyone: infection through the web

In the pre-Internt era it wasn,t easy for virus swriters to circulate their creations their creations ,since floppy disks were the only the widespread means of transmission.The golden age for crooks dawned with the emergence of the Internet . now they can send their to all over world from their own homes-all that was needed a web connection..The internet also introduced antivirus manufactures to a new problem -until then ,experts had studied every virus individually and come up with individual tools to deal with them.Three hundred viruses per day were not too much of a burden but the number quickly rose to 30,000 per day. As a result , the antivirus vendors had to built large computers centres and write tools that automatically analyze virus samples to determine their signatures.Today,such analysis takes a cople of seconds -only in difficult cases do the experts personally examine any data.In recent times,it is not just PCs but also cellphones that have been affected by viruses attacks .Thankfully,only a limited number of threats have surfaced so far, but that could change in the near future with the advent of synchronization services such as Microsoft Live Mesh and Apple MobileMe ,which consatntly updates data between cell phones and computers. These serve as perfect distribution method for viruses- there is no real protection against such attacks yet.Even Fred Cohen concluded in his computer can only be perfectly safe when it is completely isolated from contact with other computers .that is it can't be networked or allow any foreign storage medium to be connected .Today this is not practically possible .There is nothing we can do but be careful and trust the antivirus industry,which in turn has to continuously react to new types of threats and provide users with tools to keep us on top of the daily cat-and-mouse game we face............theory In one of his works ,John Von Neumann puts forth the theory that a computer program can replicate itself on its own.

 

1982 

15 year old student Rich Skrenta writes a program called Elk Cloner that spread itselfs in the system through disks.It uses the boot sector to propagate itself.

 

1984 

Fred Cohen introduces the first functioning virus in his thesis, which is written for the unix systems.

 

1986

Pakistan Connection Softwares retailers from the middle east spreadthe first dos virus .The progrmas renames disks but doesn't causes any great damage..

 

1987

1. Jerusalem This is the first virus that causes permanent damage it deletes all COM and EXE files fromthe disk on wvery friday till 13th. 2.Resisting detection The cascade virus coceals itself in the infected system's RAM 1988 Virus constructions kits a virus constructions kit appears for the popular atari st computers with which even beginners can write malware that resists detection- all without any program language. 1989-1972 1.Antivirus tools
fight viruses make their first appeareances..

2.Virus win a round Malware writers start creating polymorphic viruses which are more difficult to detect on ainfected pcs.Many antivirys manufacturers give up since they are unable to find a solution to this problem.

3. Michelangelo  The first virus that captures the attention of a media .It lise dormanton infected machines till march 6,the artists birthday ,when it overwrites the boot sector.. 1995 Macro viruses. The first malware for world and other such programs ,make their appeareances .Due to frequent document exchanges ,the virus circulates more than those which attack the operating system. 2000  I love you The worm "lloveyou" spreads via mail and causes damage worth billions with in days,by deelting files from affected pcs 2002 Independentof the os New generations of viruses can also infect files on linux machines, apart from windows appliacations.

 

2004

1.Sasser A german student programs a virus that shuts down PCs , causing huge bussiness losses and disruptions .

2. cell phones The first virus for cellphones came . A year later later they make appeareance on Symbian devices .however they have not spread much. 2006  A research group from holland introduces a new wormthat can spread itself through rfid radio transmissions. 2009------------------> "FUTURE" Viruses everywhere communications medium such as mobile and PCs are always connected to each other throgh networks.MAlware will attack these systems and simultaneously delete or exploit available data.

This is not much about viruses but i have to end my discussions here.

xams started

our exams are started finally and i have to really work hard to get through ...............

"We students are like rocket,

It is not we aim high

but we start working only when our back is on fire."

nyway i have my maths exam tommorrow

how to install ubuntu on your windows laptop ...........

As everyone want to have linux in his system but it is very difficult to install it.but now to install linux there are very easier ways.now , here i am discuss about the installation of ubuntu 8.1 on your windows.

first make a partition of about 10 gb  on your system by vista diskmgmt,msc command type diskmgmt.msc on your run menu and there is a way to create new partition.now insert your ubuntu 8.1 into your optical drive and reboot the computer.in the bios make changes in boot options and make the optical drive first preferences in boot order.now your system boots with ubuntu live cd.now when u boot through your ubuntu cd then a graphic user interface comes or you can say desktop.in the desktop there is a icon name install now click the icon.then a windows pops-up with the welcome menu gives u an option to choose your language.choose your appropiate language and click on forward now another windows pops up and it ask for your time-zone choose your appropiate time zone click on forward button and then it asks for keyboard layout choose your appropiate keyboard english users should use usa keyboards and click forward button then it shows setting up partitioner.there are two ways to partition your disk one is guided one other one is manual one.guided one uses to install linux on the free space you created on windows. so new ones should use this method and click forward this windows ask you to fill up your profile.and caution dont fill password and login name it shows a error.and click forward .and after this is the last window before installing and click ready to install and get ready for linux. at the end a grub is loaded it shows you the menu for the both windows and linux. 

winter sets in.........................

t's getting colder everyday.....
The withered leaves have started disappearing under blankets of snow..
I don't feel like steeping out of home
still......here i am.at work ......
Good Morning!