MICROSOFTWARE SOFTWARES

Custom Search

Microsoft Software Assurance is a comprehensive maintenance offering that helps you get the most out of your software investment. It combines the latest software with phone support available 24 hours a day, partner services, training, and IT tools that help customers deploy, manage, and migrate software. With Software Assurance, you can increase worker productivity, accelerate organizational performance, and quickly realize a return on your software investment.

You can choose Software Assurance at the time of purchase and begin using your benefits immediately for the term of your license agreement.

If you purchased through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), you can add Software Assurance within 90 days. Contact your Microsoft representative or reseller to find out how.


How to Activate Software Assurance Benefits
Published: May 27, 2003 | Updated: November 6, 2007

Microsoft Software Assurance is a maintenance program that you can select at the time of a software purchase. It can be used immediately and through the term of your licensing agreement. Software Assurance provides a broad range of benefits, including exclusive technology, training, support, deployment services, and rights to future upgrades. These benefits are available for you to use throughout the software management life cycle, so you can access them when you need them. Software Assurance benefits contribute to the return on your technology investment, providing better budget predictability, minimized downtime, improved productivity, and lower operating expenses associated with employee development, deployment, and support costs. Software Assurance may also offer other advantages depending on how you activate and use the benefits.
Activate and Use Software Assurance


Follow these steps to quickly understand what benefits are available, how to communicate the value of these benefits to your human resources team, IT department, and knowledge workers—and then activate and use your Software Assurance benefits. The tools and resources in the section that follows can also help you choose the benefits that are best for your organization.

Step 1: Learn

Learn about the benefits of Software Assurance by contacting your local reseller or account manager or by visiting the Software Assurance Web site.

Step 2: Communicate

Take advantage of the resources in the section that follows and on the Software Assurance Web site to communicate how these benefits can be used across your organization.

Step 3: Activate and Use

Get the most value out of your Software Assurance benefits. Activate and manage all of your organization's benefits on the Microsoft Volume License Services (MVLS) Web site. The resources in the following section can help you promote awareness and use.

Visit the Software Assurance Web site


How to Get Software Assurance
Published: May 27, 2003 | Updated: May 30, 2006

Your preferred Microsoft Volume Licensing program reseller or channel partner can help you acquire Software Assurance, which can be ordered through any of Microsoft's Volume Licensing programs.

To find which Microsoft Volume Licensing program is right for you:

OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE

OPREATING SYSTEM

15 ways Microsoft can reinvent itself for the post-Gates eraIts co-founder is retiring, its latest big product has been vilified, and potential partners are spurning its advances. So what does Microsoft do to remain relevant? Here are 15 ideas.
Opinion: RTM edition of Microsoft Hyper-V adds speed In one test, the virtual machine was able to saturate the hardware enough to achieve 97% of the storage performance of a physical server.
Opinion: The mythical 'Vista application'Analysts are raising the alarm that less than 10% of developers are writing applications for Vista, but they've got the wrong end of the stick.
Review: Microsoft's Hyper-V does the trickMicrosoft's virtualization software works well, but it's still pretty far behind the functionality of VMware in most areas, according to InfoWorld's reviewer. Still, Microsoft's tool is "good enough" for the vast majority of scenarios, or it will be soon.
FAQ: XP deathwatch, T minus 1 weekOne week from today, Microsoft will pull the plug, more or less, on Windows XP. But there will still be ways to get the aging operating system.
Firefox 3 for Mac: Is it time to switch from Safari?Performance improvements and a pleasant user interface in Mozilla's Firefox 3 mean that Apple's Safari 3.1 is no longer the de facto standard. But is Firefox the clear choice?
This old laptop: Revitalizing an aging notebook on the cheapDon't ditch that old notebook! With about $125 and an hour or two, you can make it run like new.
Run Windows software on Linux with Wine 1.0Fifteen years in the making, software lets Linux speak Windows' language. When an application tries to make a Windows system call, the Wine libraries intercept it and perform whatever action was requested, only they do it the Linux way, instead of the Windows way.
Apple iWork and Microsoft Office: Can they work together?Sharing files between Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork suite can be a pain -- especially if you've got Windows users in the mix. John Rizzo explains how to make it work.
Opinion: Apple's Snow Leopard -- an OS without any new features?Apple's next operating system, Snow Leopard, is due out in about a year, and it won't bring with it any major new features. Columnist Dan Turner explains why that may just be a good thing.

http://www.google.com/cse" id="cse-search-box" target="_blank">

Custom Search

HISTORY ABOUT COMPUTERS

The computer age dawns
Some of the boldest early steps into the computer age were taken in Britain. Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, did his main work at Cambridge University before joining the team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First electronic computer (1943) : the building of Colossus
By designing a huge machine now generally regarded as the world's first programmable electronic computer, the then Post Office Research Branch played a crucial but secret role in helping to win the Second World War. The purpose of Colossus was to decipher messages that came in on a German cipher machine, called the Lorenz SZ.
The original Colossus used a vast array of telephone exchange parts together with 1,500 electronic valves and was the size of a small room, weighing around a ton. This 'string and sealing wax affair' could process 5,000 characters a second to run through the many millions of possible settings for the code wheels on the Lorenz system in hours - rather than weeks.
Both machines were designed and constructed by a Post Office Research team headed by Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill and transported to the secret code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, where it was demonstrated on December 8, 1943. We have to fast forward nearly thirty years to 1972 for the arrival of the first desktop all-in-one computer, which are more familar to us today. That honour falls to the HP9830. But unfortunately few people got to hear about it because Hewlett Packard marketed it primarily to scientists and engineers - by nature very quiet people!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colossus (1941) : inside the machine
During the Second World War the Germans used a Lorenz encoding teleprinter to transmit their high-command radio messages. The teleprinter used something called the 5-bit Baudot code, which enciphered the original text by adding to it successively two characters before transmission. The same two characters were applied to the received text at the other end to reveal the original message.
Gilbert Vernam had developed this scheme in America, using two synchronised tapes to generate the additional random characters. Lorenz replaced the tapes with mechanical gearing - so it wasn't a genuinely random sequence - just extremely complex.
But in August 1941 the Germans made a bad mistake. A tired operator sent almost the same message again, using the same wheel settings. It meant the British were able to calculate the logical structure inside the Lorenz.
Colossus was then built to find the Lorenz wheel settings used for each message, using a large electronic programmable logic calculator, driven by up to 2,500 thermionic valves. The computer was fast, even by today's standards. It could break the combination in about two hours - the same as today's modern Pentium PC.
Colossus Mk II (1944) : a bigger better Colossus
Without the contribution of the codebreaking activity, in which Colossus played such a major part, the Second World War would have lasted considerably longer.
By the time of the Allied invasion of France in the early summer of 1944, a Colossus Mk II (using nearly twice as many valves to power it) was almost ready.
The head of the Post Office Research Team, Tommy Flowers, had been told that Colossus Mk II had to be ready by June 1944 or it would not be of any use. He was not told the reason for the deadline, but realising that it was significant he ensured that the new version was ready for June 1, five days before D-Day.
It was in the build-up to D-Day and during the European campaign that followed that Colossus proved most valuable, since it was able to track in detail communications between Hitler and his field commanders.
Top secret : the ultimate Chinese walls
Colossus weighed around 35 tonnes in Mark II form. Its 2,500 valves, consuming 4.5 Kwatts, were spread over two banks of racks 7 feet 6 inches high by 16 feet wide spaced 6 feet apart. Thus the whole machine was around 80 feet long and 40 feet wide.
This huge machine was also one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war yet required dozens of people to build, many of them outside the military establishment in the Post Office.
Tommy Flowers was one of the very few entrusted with the overall plan - and even he didn't know the full details of the German codes.
In order to ensure security, Colossus was broken down into modules - each given to a separate Post Office team at Dollis Hill. The teams were kept apart - each having no idea of the overall shape of the ground breaking machines they were creating.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The building of SIGSALY (1943) : pioneer digital telephone system
Another secret wartime computer whose existence was finally revealed many years later was SIGSALY - the secret 'scrambling' system devised to protect the security of high level Allied telephone traffic.
SIGSALY - originally codenamed Project X - was also known as 'Green Hornet'. It was the first unbreakable speech coding system, using digital cryptography techniques, with one time digital keys being supplied by synchronised gramophone discs.
SIGSALY was built in the USA, though using pulse code modulation (PCM) digital encoding techniques invented in 1937 by the English engineer Alec Reeves.
The first priority was to protect the hotline between the Cabinet War Room bunker under Downing Street and the White House in Washington D.C. The 50-ton London terminal was shipped over in 1943 and housed in the basement of the Selfridges annexe in Oxford Street, under tight guard.