Officially Windows 7 at PDC, WinHEC

Microsoft has confirmed that attendees of its two forthcoming developer conferences get an early version of Windows 7, the next version of its desktop client. The company made the news official on a blog for the Professional Developer Conference (PDC), which takes place in Los Angeles from October 27th to the 30th. The following week will be the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), also in Los Angeles, and those attendees will also get the early beta.

"At this year’s PDC, keynote attendees will be among the first to receive the pre-beta build of Windows 7. Additionally, attendees will have the opportunity to attend 21 different sessions that drill down into the details of developing for Windows 7," wrote Denise Begley, a Microsoft marketing manager.

2 weeks ago Microsoft was aiming to release a beta at the PDC show, and that internally the company was aiming for a June 2009 final code release. Publicly, Microsoft has said Windows 7 will be released in the first half of 2010. Vista, launched in early 2007, has become a PR problem for Microsoft due to numerous compatibility and performance issues since it hit the market. Microsoft has worked on the operating system over the past 18 months and released one Service Pack, but it has not been enough to counter overwhelming negative consumer sentiment.

Windows 7 won't be a radical departure from Vista. It will feature the same kernel technology, which has been upgraded with the first Service Pack and the release of Windows Server 2008. It will use the same device drivers as Vista as well.

CERN's large hadron collider (LHC) set in motion

Scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest, most powerful particle collider, in an attempt to understand the makeup of the universe.

On Wednesday morning, scientists shot the first protons into an about 27-km-long tunnel below the Swiss-French border in the world's most powerful particle accelerator -- the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The 9 billion dollar LHC project operates a tunnel buried 50 meters to 150 meters below the ground. The tunnel, or tube, is designed to facilitate and control a head-on collision between two beams of the same kind of particles -- either protons or ions.

According to documents from CERN, as the European Organization for Nuclear Research is known, each of the two beams will contain about 3,000 bunches of particles. Each bunch will hold as many as 100 billion particles. Despite these huge numbers, the particles are so tiny that a collision between any two is quite small.

The LHC, built since 2003 at a cost of 3.8 billion U.S. dollars, will take scientists to within a split second of a laboratory recreation of the big bang, which they theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe, giving scientists the chance to answer one of humanity's oldest questions: How was the universe created.
Source : http://english.people.com.cn