Windows Digital Life, from Vista to Windows 7 - But through Windows Live

Windows Digital Life is an excellent example of the lifestyle Microsoft has envisioned for end users. And since we are indeed talking about the Redmond company, you have to realize that the perspective is exclusively centered around the Windows brand. I say the Windows brand because Microsoft's example of a digital life is not limited to the operating system, but involves a much wider range of products and services brought together under the same umbrella.

Consumer Marketing Communications Lead Allister Frost pointed to a new website put together
by Microsoft UK, and "designed to help people see how some of Microsoft's newest products work together, and has been built entirely in Silverlight. Check out the site here and explore the digital lives of four British characters. Hope you like it," Frost stated.

"The site is built in Silverlight and is a set of interactive videos following typical digital users as they live their lives. Some great examples of how people use: Windows Vista, Windows Live and Windows Mobile. I think it's also a great example of using Silverlight and its media capabilities - the YouTube type embedded player is fine for most, but this is using the media capabilities in Silverlight to make it a much more immersive experience," explained Mark Johnston from Microsoft UK.

Yes, the website does feature Microsoft's alternative to Adobe Flash, namely the Silverlight technology and can be accessed via this link. Under the slogan "Windows Vista and Windows Live – Open up your digital life," Microsoft is essentially extending an invitation to end users to take a journey along with the characters featured on the website.

But in the end, the Windows Digital Life is about Windows Vista and Windows Live. Microsoft is currently building a strong connection between the Windows client and its online suite of services and products, one that will begin to take contour as the Redmond company evolves the development of Windows 7 and Windows Live Wave 3.

New YouTube Personalized Homepage - Experimental version coming soon

The world’s biggest video sharing service is preparing to revamp the personalized homepage for everybody. Their work is not out yet, but the team has already been creating a lot of buzz around it, and offered a short written description for all of the changes that would occur. The blog post relating to it is extremely joyous and unimaginably optimist as to how the users will react.

Truth be told, if the changes are half as good as the YouTube team has let us believe, it will be worth it to wait for it anxiously for a couple more days. In order to
make the most interesting videos to everybody easier to access, alongside the regular Featured and Most Popular video tabs, there will be some personalized recommendations, the latest videos from everybody’s subscribers and an option to view what friends are doing, uploading, rating or viewing.

It sounds like a lot of action and a lot of fun, although a little disorganized. They break it down for us: the recommendations feature actually discerns (the term is not really that out there) based on your viewing history and rating of videos, processed by a well-built algorithm, what videos you might be interested in, even though they might have as little as 10 views and an average number of stars.

The subscribers that anxiously await for the video producers to come up with something new will be ‘fed’ with the three most recently updated subscriptions. The layout will be changed accordingly, so there won’t be any problems with all of the recent activity.

Speaking about activity, the new personalized homepage will include a ‘Friend Activity’ feature, the team says, that will make it easier to stay in the loop with what they have been doing and the other way round, via feeds.

All of the above, plus the dashboard to be included, that will place stats about each user’s Inbox and information about their videos front and center, make it sound like the YouTube team is slowly transitioning the Google-owned video sharing service to a social network that evolves around the uploading and viewing of clips. But then again, that’s the whole point of Web 2.0, isn’t it?

IBM, AMD to Report the First Chip Built With Extreme Ultra-Violet Lithography - The next step is perfecting and extending the technique

AMD and IBM engineers have jointly announced a new advancement in the microprocessor design: they succeeded in creating a 45-nanometer processor using full Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography
on its square silicon surface. Their achievement may be regarded as a new milestone in chip design and open the gates for semiconductors with structures of 16-nanometer or even smaller.

The test chip was created using 193-nanometer Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) technology. The chip has been molded in AMD's Fab 36 located in Dresden, Germany. The two teams then patterned the first layer of metal interconnects using IBM's 13.5-nanometer ASML EUV lithography scanner installed in server manufacturer's Research Facility at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) in Albany, New York.

"This important demonstration of EUV lithography’s potential to be used in semiconductor manufacturing in the coming years is encouraging to all of us in the industry that benefit from chip feature sizes shrinking over time," said Dr. Bruno La Fontaine of AMD. "Although there is still a lot of work to be done before the industry can use EUV lithography in high volume production, AMD has shown it can be integrated successfully in a semiconductor fabrication flow to produce the first layer of metal interconnects across a full chip."

The EUV lithography is touted as the next-generation production technique and has quite a history behind. Back in 1997, Intel, Motorola and AMD set the basis of the EUV Limited Liability Corporation to develop an extreme ultraviolet process to replace DUV at the 100-nanometer processing node.

"Collaborative research is essential to enabling advancements in semiconductor research," said David Medeiros, manager of Patterning Research for IBM in Albany, NY. "Our partnerships at the Albany facility are allowing for assessment of the various aspects of the EUV infrastructure in an integrated way, and will be the true test of this technology’s readiness for manufacturing."

The next step on the two companies' roadmap is to make the EUV lithography a viable production technique by perfecting and extending it not only to metal interconnects, but also to all critical layers of the microprocessor.