Raj Agrawal

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Microsoft’s Upcoming Operating System. It’s Not A Windows.

May 2, 2012 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

No matter to what level consumer technologies and appliances be new to a market, they have always been accepted for good reasons. By definition and intention, consumer technologies are constantly augmented to simplify our routine habits and requirements. Pointing specifically at the household appliances, you may introduce new devices and setups to your current home eco-system to make it smarter than ever. But there has always been a much wider room to enhance your abode. Much of the menial tasks at home can be automated. 

Microsoft’s Home Operating System research is about pushing the home eco-system management to a broader level. Of course, refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, air conditioners, etceteras, are the most common home applications that automate a good deal of manual work. But consider a time when you are not home and you have a set of activities to perform, which can only be achieved in your presence. Or may be a point where you need to perform a step-by-step list of activities that require physical presence just to tip-tap buttons and get the machines working (television, set-top boxes, lamps and so on). This is where HomeOS steps in to organize the menial tasks into one place and conveniently control, like as easily from a smart phone.

A student demonstrating how to turn on and off lights via gestures with a Kinect (an excerpt from the white paper)

With HomeOS, you can add remote surveillance for security and monitor the energy consumption at your home. All and more of these capabilities will be available and setup through the HomeStore gateway installed on the user’s computer. The user can accordingly add more functionalities to the home system from the HomeStore. According a video shared by one of the contributors of this research, the add-on like functionalities in HomeOS are coded in C# language.

Illustration

In the following video, Ratul Mahajan (one of the contributors to this project) demonstrates how the HomeOS system would work on a very basic scale.

Microsoft Research: [White Paper, HomePage]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: microsoft, Remote

Giveaway: Premium Membership for MyGreenPC

June 28, 2010 by Raj Agrawal 2 Comments

MyGreenPC is a unique service that builds upon Windows integrated technology to provide a remote desktop solution that is easy to setup, far more secure, saves energy, and available anywhere in the world.

MyGreenPC is a easy to setup remote desktop access program which uses US government approved AES encrypted remote access sessions. This program enables you to easily access ‘client’ computers anywhere around the globe within few mouse clicks and in a more secure way. If you are a techie willing to fix someone else’s computer or just want to access your own computer located in some other country, remote access programs like these do the job.

It has two membership options – basic(free) and premium. The good news is that MyGreenPC is giving away it’s premium membership for free. If you are into remote desktop work, you should not miss this.

Difference between basic and premium membership:

my green pc premium
Plan table

A very unique feature of this program is that you can actually start a power-off computer with it. How? The FAQ section on the website says:

We do get this question asked a lot and surprisingly not even a lot of Computer professionals are aware of this feature. Most PCs support ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) and one of the features supported by this standard is allowing devices to Power-on the PC even from complete shutdown. The device in our case is the Network Adapter (network/lan card) that supports Wake-On Lan (WOL) functionality and luckily most of the computers these days have built-in support for ACPI and WOL. When you send a request to power-on your PC through our Client software, our servers instantly send a special packet called magic packet to the network card which signals the PC to power-on. And as soon as your PC boots our software will display your windows logon screen just as if you were sitting in front of it.

Follow these visual illustrations to obtain premium membership for MyGreenPC:

  • Sign up for the premium membership:
Sign-up
  • Once signed-up, you will be redirected to a page saying:
And you’re done!
  • Now, activate your MyGreenPC account from the confirmation email you receive in your email  inbox
  • That is it. You now have a MyGreenPC premium account!
  • You will need to follow the quick guide mentioned on (Click here) to setup and get started with a much secure and more flexible remote access session.

Visit: MyGreenPC

We do get this question asked a lot and surprisingly not even a lot of Computer professionals are aware of this feature. Most PCs support ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) and one of the features supported by this standard is allowing devices to Power-on the PC even from complete shutdown. The device in our case is the Network Adapter (network/lan card) that supports Wake-On Lan (WOL) functionality and luckily most of the computers these days have built-in support for ACPI and WOL. When you send a request to power-on your PC through our Client software, our servers instantly send a special packet called magic packet to the network card which signals the PC to power-on. And as soon as your PC boots our software will display your windows logon screen just as if you were sitting in front of it.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: Remote