Slate-style computers have been around for a few years, but it took Apple to make them catch on with the general public in a big way when it introduced the iPad. This small, less than a pound-and-a-half wonder has sold millions of units in its first year for good reason: It’s well designed, feature rich, and opens up a world of...

Microsoft SharePoint and Windows Azure are two sizeable platforms unto themselves. SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s leading server productivity platforms—a collaborative platform for the enterprise and the web. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s operating system in the cloud. Separately, they have their own strengths, market...

When it comes to HDR, only three key ingredients are needed: hardware, software, and post-processing technique. Hardware is simple—there are only a few things you need to set up and shoot an HDR series. Software is vastly improved, making it easier for anyone to create an HDR image. The hard part is the post-processing technique. There...

As it turns out Bennis underestimated the impact that bad leadership can have. A combination of greed, hubris, flawed judgment, and miscalculation has made the Enron debacle seem almost quaint by comparison to the global financial crisis that we now face. Although numerous pundits and scholars have advanced many reasons for the...

TO THOSE OF US WHO PAY ATTENTION to such things, the world of software development has changed a lot in the last few years. In the .NET world, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 is undoubtedly the most successful development environment. Since the release of the fi rst .NET version in February 2002, this product has undergone dramatic...

This book is designed to accompany a final year undergraduate or masters level course in pervasive computing, although it could serve well as a course for introducing sensors or experiment design to students in earlier years at university with some skimming over the research focus; or equally as a getting-started guide for PhD level...

PowerShell is a scripting language built into Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. PowerShell is designed to help you perform routine and repetitive tasks in a scriptable fashion. PowerShell helps alleviate many of the time-consuming and tedious tasks administrators have had to do in the past. You may have used various scripting technologies over...

Are you a student with an assignment to research your ancestry? Or maybe you’re a bit older and recently retired and looking for a hobby. Or perhaps you simply love puzzles and mysteries, and you discovered that genealogy is a lot like solving these. It’s even possible that you’re an experienced researcher who is...

Web development has been rapidly evolving over the years. The features and functionality that today’s web developers are asked to produce are exponentially more involved and complex than they were just a few years ago. As the demands of today’s business and commercial software grow, so too must the power of the tools and...

More than 50 years ago when I was studying to become an electrical engineer, I came across complex numbers, which were used to represent out-of-phase voltages and currents using the j operator. I believe that the letter j was used, rather than i, because the latter stood for electrical current. So from the very start of my studies I...

RATHER THAN SIMPLY REPLACING PHONES and instant messages, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft ’ s Unifi ed Communications platform, makes communicating in completely new ways possible. Lync users can see whether a contact is available and where he or she is located before reaching out. After a user has decided to contact someone, he can...