This time around the Microsoft Student Partner Meet or Boot-Camp took place at Microsoft Office, Gurgaon for the north zone MSP’s.
Here is a follow-up of as to what happened over the two days, September 1-2, 2007…(apart from pranks and fun).
On the first day, there was a session on Softwares and Services by Tejas Shah of DPE Team…followed by a talk on TechVista by Ms. Vidya (Director-Strategy) and Mr. Sridhar (Head-Communications), from Microsoft Research Lab, India. They also talked about Research at Microsoft.
Then there were discussions till the evening, followed by a trip to the Malls, and Dinner.
Due to the impossibility of complete Night-Out (since some of us had to take sessions the very next morning…), we arranged for fun at the Guest House/Hotel…and it had to be my room. Sharapova lost!!!, so TV was not an option anymore…and when some 10 people get together at one place, talks take most of the time…with all random discussions, but that was fun. Soon it was 3 in the morning and time for some rest…so that was it for the first day!
Morning came with a little surprise for me…at 6:30, and I still doubt if I was in sleep…I only wished I was in 205, and not 204! 
Then it was the day some of us were supposed to take sessions.
Started off with our ADE, Ajay Thomas (the Logistics Expert!), taking up .NET and Intro to the MSP Program for the new MSP’s.
Joy (in the pic below, the huge guy in shirt, who looks as if suppressing two other MSP’s in the front row 
) added some more with Visual Studio Concepts and Coding part.
Then Varun (posing next to me) and Akshaya (behind the desk in the pic, all smiling) took up Web 2.0 and Windows Live, and most of the time, Akshaya marked, threatened and pestered the new MSP’s…but again, it was all fun!
Hitesh (the smarty programmer, in fancy shirt, who gets HACKED very often…ahh…that’s a long story! 
), then showed some cool apps. and demos on how to play with GUI and WPF (not to be confused with somewhat popular acronym "WTF!").
The breaks in between were mostly consumed by free-colas/beverages…(yeah, that COFFEE kept me awake all the time! 
) and lunch at the Cafeteria all the way 9 floors down…(those 30 seconds in the elevator were lost gazing at the female species, the only time we got to do so…)…
But there was still no respite and the tired MSP’s had to attend another session, the last one for the day and this Boot-Camp…this time by me, on Windows Mobile 6, which, quite surprisingly, was "termed" nice (from the feed-back that I got later on).
That was it for this meet, and two days of fun ultimately came to an end…another Nice Experience at Microsoft.
This picture sums it all, some smiling faces, and some even happier!
(Me in the White T-shirt in front, and at the right-most is Rajat, the Security Expert, my partner in all Pranks)
Moixa Energy has developed the USBCELL as an environmentally-friendly alternative to normal AA batteries. The top of one side flips up to reveal a USB connector, and the battery simply plugs into an open port.
The first batteries available are AA sized, but Moixa plans to unveil a full range standard formats, as well as phone and camera batteries.
The convenience of the USBCELL means that you don’t have to carry around a separate charger or cables, and can charge it in a game station, as well as in keyboards and monitors with USB sockets.
It takes five hours to charge one of the cells if it was fully discharged; each battery has a capacity of 1300mAH.
The USBCELL can be bought online at www.usbcell.com for £12.99 for two AA batteries.
When you look at the new Nokia 8600 Luna luxury phone, you can tell the higher-ups at Nokia let the design team flex a little bit of its creative muscle. It uses a smoked-glass sheathe to hide the keypad. Yes, glass. It also features a gorgeous QVGA display. It’s a beautiful phone, no doubt. Too bad its features aren’t more impressive than any $100 off-the-shelf feature phone. But hey, beauty comes at a price.
Looking at the spec sheet, the Nokia 8600 Luna looks pretty middle of the road. Quad-band GSM/EDGE lets it work all over the world. It has a 2 megapixel camera, which is what many camera-equipped phones come with these days, such as the iPhone, Motorola Q9 or BlackBerry Curve. It’s one of the first Nokia’s to ship with the new MicroUSB port for charging and syncing data. It plays most music formats. And the screen is darned purty. Nokia calls the Luna "organic" and even says the Luna has a "heartbeat." (Um, that’s the vibrate alert, people.) The price tag, however, is not so middle of the road.
The Luna, named for the Moon Goddess, will street at an astronomical 700 Euros, or $940, which far outstrips the iPhone in cost. Obviously this phone is not meant for plebs. Only Paris Hilton and other fashion-conscious (and wealthy) people would consider such a high price for such low features.
At least we can stop complaining about the high price of the iPhone. $500 is a bargain compared to $940.
Oh, but you wouldn’t be able to run this at home. You’d need a huge air conditioner. And a power supply capable of keeping the juice running to this (I heard the one powering the lab where this is in cost about a quarter million).
This machine, by the way, is on loan from Hewlett Packard to the SQL Server team.
What do they need all that power for?
Well, for testing. The SQL Server team, for instance, runs more than 250,000 automated tests on each build to ensure that the quality of the software is high.
And not to say, I’m Happy, or rather was happy, with my 2GB RAM and 100GB Hard Drive…Dual Core 64-bit Mobile processor…but all that seems nothing as compared to the Superdome… 
Sigh!!!
The launch of Vista is in a dimension of itself, even if there aren’t lines of people waiting for Windows Vista going on sale. Steve Ballmer claimed that the Vista launch is the biggest in software history (as was Windows 95 in 1995), stating that the software will be available in 70 countries, "thousands" of OEMs and 39,000 retail outlets around the globe. The software will be sold in 19 languages right away and will expand to 99 languages by the end of the year, Ballmer said.
Aside from new features, Microsoft mentioned the quality of Vista, and this may be the most apparent factor where the new software differs from Windows 95. While Windows 95 was plagued by driver issues, Vista comes with 31,000 certified drivers right away and Microsoft claims that 1.5 million devices are supporting Vista already. Also, according to Microsoft, there are more than 2500 software titles certified for Microsoft.
Beta testing of the software was done by five million users, ad the company mentioned that a total of 60 years of performance testing went into the software as well as one billion observed Office sessions. New for Microsoft was a Vista-targeted ethnography research team that worked with 50 families around the globe that, according to the company, contributed more than 800 changes to the operating system. Highlighting its work, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer launched Vista symbolically together with a "Vista family."
Abhishek's Live Space!!! 