Microsoft.com now running on Windows Server 2008 Beta 3
Posted on July 11, 2007
Microsoft has recently switched its main website, www.microsoft.com to Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft-IIS/7.0. Microsoft.com is the 5th most trafficked site in the world, 4th most in the US. The site is supported by roughly 80 Web servers delivering content daily to around 287M unique users via +300k concurrent connections at a rate of over 10k requests per second.
The Operations team for MSCom had been playing with IIS7 since its early beta builds and recently finished deploying the new Web server in Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 to all its production servers.
Although Windows Server 2008 is not yet released, Beta 3 is publicly available for early adopters to use. Internet Information Server 7 is already released, but will probably not see widespread use until Windows Server 2008 (formerly “Longhorn”) is released, since it only runs on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista.
There are already around 2,600 sites running Windows Server 2008 on the Internet. Whilst some of the servers running Windows Server 2008 are at Microsoft itself, the majority are not, with developers and hosting companies taking advantage of Windows Server 2008’s availability under a Go Live license which allows the beta to be used for testing or in a live environment without cost.
Windows Server 2008 is due to be released in the second half of 2007, although there has been media speculation - fueled by the 2008 name - that a release may be at the end of that period. Once it is released, it could be expected to take a long time for large numbers of sites to move over to the latest version; it took several years for the installed base of Windows Server 2003 to overtake Windows 2000, and there are still some 5 million sites running on Windows 2000 even today.
Highlights on IIS 7
- Module Based Installation
- IIS Metabase Compatibility component
- XML Configuration File don’t contain machine specific settings
- Delegated, Remote Administration
- Built-in FastCGI support for PHP and other dynamic languages
- FTP server includes secure publishing with FTP/SSL support
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Programming Language Ranking - Java Leading
Posted on July 6, 2007
The TIOBE website has released a Programming Community index for the month of June, which gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. The definition of TIOBE index is available on its website
This index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system.
Information about other programming languages are available on its website .
| Position Jun 2007 |
Position Jun 2006 |
Programming Language | Ratings Jun 2007 |
Delta Jun 2006 |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Java | 20.025% | -1.10% | A |
| 2 | 2 | C | 15.967% | -2.29% | A |
| 3 | 3 | C++ | 11.118% | +0.45% | A |
| 4 | 4 | (Visual) Basic | 9.332% | -0.85% | A |
| 5 | 5 | PHP | 8.871% | -0.72% | A |
| 6 | 6 | Perl | 6.177% | +0.17% | A |
| 7 | 8 | C# | 3.483% | +0.25% | A |
| 8 | 7 | Python | 3.161% | -0.30% | A |
| 9 | 10 | JavaScript | 2.616% | +1.16% | A |
| 10 | 19 | Ruby | 2.132% | +1.65% | A |
| 11 | 13 | PL/SQL | 2.015% | +1.06% | A |
| 12 | 11 | SAS | 1.766% | +0.39% | A |
| 13 | 9 | Delphi | 1.573% | -0.82% | A |
| 14 | 18 | D | 1.253% | +0.77% | A |
| 15 | 15 | Lisp/Scheme | 0.669% | +0.03% | B |
| 16 | 21 | ABAP | 0.634% | +0.20% | B |
| 17 | 16 | Ada | 0.632% | +0.10% | B |
| 18 | 12 | FoxPro/xBase | 0.596% | -0.44% | B |
| 19 | 14 | COBOL | 0.593% | -0.06% | B |
| 20 | 22 | Fortran | 0.576% | +0.14% | B |
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LiveStation Beta - Interactive Live TV on PC
Posted on July 5, 2007
Livestation, a project currently under development, is based on the technology developed by Microsoft Research team of Cambridge. The project is an effort of Skinkers with support from Microsoft Research team.
LiveStation is currently in beta stage, but essentially the project is designed to enable users to watch live television on their machines. “Interactive live TV on the PC that works” is in fact the slogan under which the LiveStation beta project went live.
“LiveStation is a software solution, co-developed with Microsoft Research, designed to allow people to watch live TV on their desktop in a highly scalable way and without requiring broadcasters to invest a large amount of money in hardware and infrastructure,” reveals a message posted on the LiveStation website.
LiveStation uses Microsoft Silverlight to create a rich interactive user experience for live video delivery. The peer-to-peer approach ensures bandwidth usage is minimized and removes the need for powerful, expensive server farms to stream live TV shows and events.
To watch the Live TV, LiveStation users will simply need to click the LiveStation viewer, which can be embedded in a browser installed through website or distributed on physical media.
Here is the signup page for the beta version of LiveStation.
Videos of LiveStation Demo and Interview of Matteo Berlucchi from Skinkers
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Apple iPhone is Hacked
Posted on July 5, 2007
In less than 6 days the Norwegian hacker, Jon Lech Johansen who became world-famous after writing a DVD copying software and got a name of DVD Jon, has published a hack to activate the iPhone without iTunes or the two year voice and data contract from AT&T.
In order to hack the iPhone you have to use a program called Phone Activation Server 1.0 with some “magic numbers” and the change in hosts file
Add “127.0.0.1 albert.apple.com” to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
After the hack the iPhone can be used as an iPod, to browse the net and read mails using WiFi. You still have to activate the iPhone, in order to use it as a phone.
iPhone hack project
Following the publication of this hack, a new group has picked up the baton
The iPhone Development Project claims to have developed software to activate the device without an AT&T account, or to re-activate the kit after an AT&T account has been cancelled.
The project has set out a list of further goals including the ability to unlock the phone, run third party applications on the device, and eventually enable disk mode. These aims go well beyond what’s already been achieved. Further objectives may be added as the project progresses.
Another simple way to avoid activation is to use a SIM-card from an already activated iPhone, but you can read more about that on the Apple iPhone Hack WiKi.
Last year, the US copyright office rules that it was legal for consumers to unlock their mobile phones in order to use them with other carriers, a decision AT&T and Apple may seek to contest, but one which gives hackers some leeway in opening up the functionality of the iPhone. That’s not to say fiddling around with the software on the iPhone is without its risk, most notably invalidating any guarantees, as the hackers behind the iPhone Development Project note.
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