Last year only a couple of weeks after Kinect hit the market, a bunch of dubious hackers managed to crack the hardware and get it running on a Windows 7 machine. While the function it performed was fairly basic, it opened the flood gates for the rest of the hackers and developers since they had the necessary drivers.

Initially it didn’t look like Microsoft condoned this practice and didn’t seem to happy about it. But then at CES, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that the company would announce official PC support for Kinect “in the right time” 

It looks like Microsoft decided to talk a leaf out of the hackers book and realised the potential that having the Kinect controller connected to a PC would bring. Microsoft’s gaming division obviously must have been planning on incorporating Kinect into Windows at some stage, but the hackers beat them to it.

None the less, they are said to be planning an official release of drivers and a Kinect SDK for Windows machines so that users could have genuine software for using the device with PCs, and not just botched up programs from hackers.

I’m sure having Kinect on Windows would greatly enhance the experience, especially the home media center where you could control everything on your Windows machine without actually having to be at it. There is a lot of possibilities for the Kinect hardware on Windows.

Winrumors have reported that some insiders have let slip that the first drivers will be distributed with a beta tag and incorporated into a “Community Technical Preview” of the company’s XNA Game Studio tools in the coming months. 

Source

Just ahead of the first public demonstration of Windows 8, details on the new UI (codenamed Mosh) and App Model (codenamed Jupiter) of Windows 7’s successor were made available.
At the end of the past week, additional information on codenamed Jupiter, which is reportedly designed to function as a new user interface (UI) library for Windows, was provided by Mary-Jo Foley.

According to third-party sources, with codenamed Jupiter, Microsoft works to make it easier for developers to enhance their applications with rich animation, typography and media capabilities.

All that devs will have to do is tap the XAML/UI layer set up on top of Windows, enhancing the operating system’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and the frameworks for various platform subsystems.

Silverlight is said to have a big role to play in relation to codename Jupiter, as it’s also the case for the next version of Visual Studio, the successor of VS 2010.

Reports indicate that codenamed Jupiter will be integrated into Windows 8, and that it will also be a part of .NET Framework vNext, with devs having the option to choose between C#, Visual Basic and even C++ in order to write their immersive applications for the OS.

Of course, Microsoft has yet to confirm this information in any way. While announcing and demoing Windows 8 support for support for System on a Chip (SoC) architectures at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Steven Sinofsky, president, Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Division did note that there’s more to come for the next version of Windows.

The software giant has shared no details on Windows 8’s user interface, programming APIs, or any of the new features.

However, Soma Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division managed to come across the information already posted on Windows 8.

Somasegar indicated that some of the information already available on codenamed Jupiter is wrong.

At the same time he managed to confirm that Microsoft was in fact exploring the concept detailed above, but noted that the info are outdated since the project evolved, and no longer reflects the company’s current focus.
 

Microsoft has killed off the anti-piracy mechanism designed to validate whether customers were running genuine copies of Office or not.

And the Redmond company has been as quiet about the death of Office Genuine Advantage as it was about the recent release of Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0.

However, the move was indeed confirmed officially by the software giant, which published a Knowledge Base article containing a tad of information of the discontinuing of the Office anti-piracy watchdog.

“The Office Genuine Advantage (“OGA”) program has been retired. For more information about the benefits of genuine Office, please visit the following website: Benefits of genuine Office,” Microsoft revealed (via Ed Bott).

The message has been shared with the world on December 17th, via KB 917999 “Error message when you try to validate Office by using Office Genuine Advantage: "Why didn't my computer complete validation" or "Error code: 0x8018111".”

I’ve tried to validate my copy of Office 2010, but the Office Genuine Advantage mechanism is indeed missing completely.

I’m guessing that customers running older versions of Office, such as Office 2007, will also no longer be able to validate their genuine copies of the productivity suite, or check to see whether their software is not pirated.

The software giant offered no explanation related to the decision to shut down Office Genuine Advantage, or deliver any indication of whether customers should expect the Windows Genuine Advantage mechanism to suffer the same fate.

At the time of this article WGA was up and running under normal parameters.

According to Microsoft both OGA and WGA have been set up to help users verify products they acquire and make sure that they’re genuine.

The Redmond company did not use OGA or WGA as tools to go against consumers, but rather as solutions to detect pirated versions of Windows and Office and ultimately have end users help identify the source, with bootleggers facing legal consequences.

As is the case for WGA, OGA was capable of reducing the functionality of Office when it detected that a copy of the productivity suite was non-genuine, the euphemism Microsoft used instead of pirated.

Office Home and Business 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

Office Home and Student 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

Office Professional 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

 Source SoftPedia