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Brjann Brekkan, PM for the Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution and related products, describes the capabilities and business drivers behind the solution. Beginning at [6:08], he gives us a screencast demo of parts of the solution. The demo includes automated AD group management and access through Forefront Identity Manager (FIM), FIM password reset, and managing group membership via Outlook. Learn more about the IAM solution

The MATLAB team at MathWorks tested performance scaling of the backslash ("\") matrix division operator to solve for x in the equation A*x = b. In their testing, matrix A occupies far more memory (290 GB) than is available in a single high-end desktop machine—typically a quad core processor with 4-8 GB of RAM, supplying approximately 20 Gigaflops. Therefore, they spread the calculation across machines. In order to solve linear systems of equations they need to be able to access all of the elements of the array even when the array is spread across multiple machines. This problem requires significant amounts of network communication, memory access, and CPU power. They scaled up to a cluster in EC2, giving them the ability to work with larger arrays and to perform calculations at up to 1.3 Teraflops, a 60X improvement. They were able to do this without making any changes to the application code. Here's a graph showing the near-linear scalability of an EC2 cluster across a range of matrix sizes with corresponding increases in cluster size for MATLAB's parallel backslash operator:

When a data (typically a variable) can be accessed by several threads, you must synchronize the access to the data to ensure visibility and correctness.

The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification; a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is deployed on all major desktop operating systems.  OpenGL 4.0 brings the very latest in cross-platform graphics acceleration and functionality to personal computers and workstations and the OpenGL standard serves as the basis for OpenGL® ES, the graphics standard on virtually every shipping smart phone.   The OpenGL 4.0 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language in order to enable developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration with significantly enhanced graphics quality, acceleration performance and programming flexibility.  This new release continues the rapid evolution of the royalty-free OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry .

Cellphone carriers are racing this year to implement 4G wireless networks so that future smartphones will have access to a fire hose of data. But the towers and infrastructure the carriers are putting in place may ultimately facilitate as many connections with appliances and electric meters as they do downloads of movies and music. The electricity grid, in other words, may be jumping from no G to 4G—and rather soon, according to analysts.

In addition to voice connectivity, digital cellular wireless networks such as GSM and its enhancement, GSM-EDGE, can now provide increased data speeds up to a (theoretical) limit of 384ﾠKbps. Third generation mobile networks, such as CDMA2000 and WCDMA or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standards) and TD-SCDMA (China only) are currently being deployed worldwide. These systems offer services such as video streaming, Internet browsing and, by using a technique called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), they can in theory deliver downlink speeds up to 14,4 Mbps.

When we first reported on the Willow Garage PR2 robot, it was just a prototype. Earlier this year, Willow Garage started their beta program, which gave eleven lucky organizations two year access to PR2 robots in exchange for furthering work on open source robotics software. Now we've received word from Willow Garage that the PR2 is officially for sale to anyone who wants it. This is not a toy or hobby robot, of course, so don't expect a small price tag. The full retail price is $400,000 per unit. However, if your organization can demonstrate a proven track record in developing open source software and making contributions to the robotics community, you can get a hefty $120,000 discount on your PR2. For more see our previous stories on Willow Garage and the PR2.

The Care-O-bot® research initiative aims at making Care-O-bot® 3 available as high-tech research platform. The main objectives to reach this goal are to provide a common open source repository for the hardware platform provide simulation models of hardware components provide remote access to the Care-O-bot® 3 hardware platform

Microsoft Research who brought us some wonderful technologies such as the incredible Photosynth continue to impress with a much improved web mapping application integrated with the company's new Bing search engine. During the TED 2010 conference, Microsoft engineer Blaise Aguera y Arcas demoed the new Bing augmented reality maps showing real-time registration of video taken with a smart phone and street-view type maps. He showed how the live video can be overlayed over the static images and additional information about the area can be accessed via a Web interface. Much of this is made possible because of the advanced computer vision technology that has been developed in the past decade at Microsoft Research. The Seadragon technology is the back-end that makes it possible to manipulate such vast amounts of data in real-time. Microsoft has also integrated Photosynth and Worldwide telescope into their maps product. You are probably wondering what does this have to do with robotics other than the fact that it is a very impressive application? I can imagine robots using Bing maps to keep localized within a city. One of the most difficult and important problem in robotics is that of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Bing maps solve the mapping problem and the new vision techniques (with a bit of help from GPS) can be used to solve the localization problem. The registered video can be used by a robot to localized itself when it goes out to buy your weekly groceries.  You can watch the 10-minute demo below; I bet that it won't be long before Microsoft makes these new features available to us all for free.

The FPGAs referenced in these articles have complex dedicated I/O circuitries that are primarily designed to support external memory interfaces. The ALTMEMPHY megafunction is designed to support the most common memory standards, such as the DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM and QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in a burst length of 4) interfaces. The ALTMEMPHY megafunction should be used whenever possible as it is beneficial to use the IP and timing closure methodologies used with these FPGAs, which enables users not to have to create this function manually as compared with using the ALTDLL and ALTDQ_DQS solution. However, the ALTMEMPHY megafunction does not support other external memory standards such as Mobile DDR, QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in burst length of 2) or customized DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM external memory standards. For these scenarios, use the ALTDLL and ALTDQ_DQS megafunctions to access the FPGA architecture and build a custom external memory interface.

FPGAs referenced in this article have complex dedicated I/O circuitries that are primarily designed to support EMIF. The ALTMEMPHY megafunction is designed to support the most common memory standards, such as the DDR , DDR2 SDRAM, and QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in a burst length of 4) interfaces. Other external memory standards such as Mobile DDR, QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in burst length of 2), or customized DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM external memory standards are not supported. Instead, the ALTDLL and ALTDQ_DQS megafunctions are used to access the FPGA architecture and build a custom EMIF.

Google PowerMeter allows consumers to access their power consumption data through a secure, Web-based iGoogle™ gadget. As a Strategic Partner, Microchip incorporated the recently announced Google PowerMeter API to create a Reference Implementation, which makes it much easier to develop products that are compatible with Google PowerMeter. Microchip's Reference Implementation demonstrates the device's activation, data transmission and status messages using readily available Microchip development tools. It can be used as a template for developers' own designs.

Xilinx Inc. today introduced the architecture for a new Extensible Processing Platform they claim will deliver unrivaled levels of system performance, flexibility and integration to developers of a wide variety of embedded systems. The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor-based platform enables system architects and embedded software developers to apply a combination of serial and parallel processing to address the challenges they face in designing today's embedded systems, which must meet ever-growing demands to perform highly complex functions. The Xilinx Extensible Processing Platform offers embedded systems designers a processor-centric design and development approach for achieving the compute and processing horsepower required to drive tasks involving high-speed access to real-time inputs, high-performance processing and complex digital signal processing - or any combination thereof - needed to meet their application-specific requirements, including lower cost and power.

Microsoft Surface is a prime example of how natural user interfaces can change the way we interact with computers. As designers and developers, one challenge with creating natural user interfaces for multi-touch devices such as Microsoft Surface or Windows 7 is getting around the old ways of thinking and old habits for interface design. Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface. We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought. That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.