Posted by admin on 18th, 2008
Looks like the world is bright for Microsoft right now. Their annual revenue is whopping $60 billion:
For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008, Microsoft announced revenue of $60.42 billion, an 18% increase over the prior year. Operating income and diluted earnings per share for the year were $22.49 billion and $1.87, representing yearly growth of 21% and 32%, respectively.
What had caused this strong growth? Here it is:
This fiscal year marked the launch of Microsoft’s flagship server products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. Revenue growth was primarily driven by continued customer demand for all products, including Windows Vista, which has sold over 180 million licenses since launch, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, server software, and Xbox 360 consoles and games.
Posted by admin on 18th, 2008
An MIT team reportedly created touch-based illusion:
"The most familiar illusions involve vision," explains Christopher Moore, a principal investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "But we’re interested in discovering general principles of perception, and we wanted to see whether similar illusions can occur in the tactile domain."
This is how they did it:
To create a tactile version of this illusion, Olivia Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, and Talia Konkle, a graduate student in Moore’s MIT lab, used a new piezoelectric stimulator device developed by Qi Wang and Vincent Hayward at McGill University. This device, originally designed as a computer Braille display, uses a centimeter-square array composed of 60 "tactors" to deliver precisely controlled touch stimuli to the finger tips of volunteer subjects.
If we can have good touch-based illusion in addition to good vision-based illusion, the dream of having a holodeck as in Star Trek is not impossible.
Posted by admin on 7th, 2008
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