WARNING THIS TEXT IS PURELY FICTIONAL AND WAS INITIALLY PRODUCED APR 1^st AS A FOOL'S DAY PAPER

AS AN EXERCIZE FOR ATTEMPTING TO GUESSTIMATE THE STRATEGY FROM THE INDUSTRY'S LEADER.

It may be interesting to compare this fiction with the offering of the software industry almost 10 years later.

POUR UNE APPRECIATION 2003 de ce texte écrit ne 1994, on se reportera au texte ci-joint

 

 

Seattle  is a code name for Microsoft operating system is planning to introduce about April 1st, 2000.

It incorporates and magnifies the achievements made in the successive releases of Microsoft products like Windows / NT[2], Windows95 (alias Chicago)[3],  Microsoft Windows CE (alias AtWork),[4] and Cairo[5]. It integrates, within a seamless world, many applications that users believe they should  be part of everybody's computer systems. Those applications are being developed by Microsoft and other companies.

Since the initial pre-announcement, Microsoft has oriented the development of its networking products towards the public network Internet. The project Seattle stills address the compatibility requirements, but proposes to users a main stream orientation called ubiquitous group computing.

 

 

Introduction

The availability of high end technologies at an affordable price for personal computers allows Microsoft to offer a convergence release for "single user"s PCs and high-end workstations and servers. That means that programming and  maintenance tools, that applications are common to the whole line of Microsoft products.  Microsoft recognizes, however, the difficulty of migrations to a convergence release, so Seattle includes a large amount of coexistence features for the previous releases of Windows.

   With this release, Microsoft has a goal to offer to its customers the capability to build  their automated model of a globalizedgeneralized world. Everything that can be represented on the form of a computer model, can now be integrated with all the other computerizable entities. This model  may also allow to implement world globalworld-wide systems integrating computers and communications that have the potential of overlapping the countries'countries's frontiers. It should allowing individuals, families, small business enterprises, large corporations, utilities, governmental or United Nations administrations, charitable and / or church organizations to fulfill their mission with a better efficiency.

We, at Microsoft, believe that the information technology  (IT) industryindustry bearsbear some responsibility in the problems and deficiencies of our society. The IT industry and its customers had attempted to impose com­puterized solutions that did not match the expectations of our citizens. The advance of the computer hardware now allows pro­gressively to progressively "re-humanize"  the information technology at an affordable cost. Software had to be developed to operate those hardware devices. Microsoft people believe that their new operating system should offer a significant contribution to that humanization.

Figure 1 A model of World activity

^{f Warning}

1-Microsoft is fully committed to the development of software only. Microsoft does not intend to become a total supplier of solutions. That does not exclude the design or the marketing of some hardware components that Microsoft findsfind desirable to introduce to fit the objectives of its customers. Microsoft intends to keep its software completely open by associating users and the rest of industry to the functional specifications of its future products. However, Microsoft believes that the interest of the users of its products is better served by the rules of the market served by Microsoft and the associated companies, than by regulating committees. Committees are too often the battlefields of competing interests instead of the forum to listen the needs of the market.

2-Although Seattle may allow a complete automation of the society, but system and application designers should not assumemake the assumption  that all components and members of our environment respect the rules of their system they model. In particular, they have to take in account wild objects that may interfere with the behavior of their systems, such as wild life animals, outlaws, runaway vehicles, stolen computers and such underworld activities. Microsoft denies any responsibility on any misinterpretation of legal regulations, laws of nature and acts of God thatwhich could let a Seattle  based system behave illegally, wrongly, criminally, or being harmful to property. It is the responsibility of the owner to avoid setting up a Seattle  based system such that it could runaway from its owner control or interfere negatively with other systems.

 

Overview

Figure 3 A world of Computers everywhere

Seattle is a distributed system with the capability of linking together all the Microsoft based systems and the majority of other computers. The initial first release has an internal limit of up to 4 billions systems per network. However, the total number of registerable computer-ids is 1 trillion (10¹²⁾  to take care of severalmany computers per user and to include devices stored in closets and computers belonging to several networks with different identifications. This numbers are able to satisfy the largest part of the world needs.

 In addition, Seattle systems may extend and coexist  with other computer systems using  the recognized Internet and Intranet standards on local, regional and international intercommunications'intercommunications links. In particular, you willmay use all Internet Explorer facilities whenby connecting your  Seattle system to the rest of the world either directly or through an Internet Service Provider, such as Microsoft Network.

In addition, proprietary networks facilities justified by legacy applications or cost reasons will also be supported by Seattle

 

Seattle extends the concept of work-group, initially introduced with Windows for WorkGroups and Windows / NT ServersNT Advanced Servers, to groups of human activities that are not only those related

to work but also those relevantrelated to miscellaneous human activities (e.g., administrative, family and leisure). 

 It introduces a concept of personal domain which associates one or several personal mailboxes and the set of all fixed or mobile devices on which a person may permanently[6] or temporarily log-on. Although persons are the most important members of a group, members may also be non-inhuman processes. Typical examples of 'non-human processes' are  those that collect data from physical sensors, those that handle the output of other physical sensors, the computerized appliances or those that receiverecieve messages from other members. This removes a previous barrier between the world of the personal computer and that of process control activities. The application of this concept will allow a wider automation of  many traditional human processes.

 Members of the same group may be interconnected through more than a single network. For example, devices associated with pets, cattle  and young children may belong to a personal domain, while a shared home workstation may belong to several domains. It is also possible, but not mandatory, to pool the whole family devices in a single personal domain.

A person generally belongs to several groups : such as work, financial, federal, local, church, leisure, hobbyists, family, friends or special interest. Groups may be kept fully independent from each other or they may overlap.

The topology of groups and their administration have to be  independent from the topology of networks. The only requirement is that members of a group have to be interconnected within some period of time depending on the internal laws and means of the group . The interconnection may be direct (members of group belonging to the same network permanently or not) or indirect (a private or shared mailbox allows the connection of members belonging to different networks). Your connection to Internet may be used as a communication link to the other members of the group, even if you exclude the connection to the outside world[7].

The basic functionalities available inside a  group include the Eexchange of mMail, the sharing of files and documents and s well asthe composition of compound OLE[8] documents. Compound documents are sets of objects thatwhich can be updated independently by various members of the group, including possibly some non human processes. Mail Exchange allows the asynchronous transmission of compound documents from a person to another. The responsibility for storing it and translating in the receiver format resides inside the receiver station. The receiver, from this is station, may request storage and/or translation[9] service (such as text to voice) from the mail server.

Other Workgroups functionalities have been enhanced. A computer, such a mobile, many use shared resources not permanently connected to it. The shared resource itself may be only momentarily connected to the network.

On previous versions of Windows, users were given full control of object synchronization only in the case of a simple client / server organization of the updating processes. With Seattle, OLE technology has been improved : several users may now update compound documents "simultaneously" according protocols set by the document designer.

Figure 4 Networks & Groups

 

Seattle  is the normal successor of  Windows/NT. All Windows/NT stations and Windows/NT Advanced Sservers  satisfying the minimum hardware requirements may be upgraded to Seattle for only a nominal charge.

 

Seattle is available in three versions: mobile, personal system and shared server, differing only by their operational environment.

The functional difference between a shared server and personal system is the fact that a shared server is, normally, unattended and is also assumed to be permanently[10] hooked in the Nnetwork(s). A shared server cancould be private to an individual,  or owned by a company or education institution, or public servers operated by a service provider.

 Because computers are still subject to faults, servers are by default duplicated[11]:, i.e., a back-up server, not necessarily identical to the primary server system, is registeredknown inside the network and is able to replace the primary system if and when the primarythis one becomes unavailable.

 Those serversey have the responsibility of supporting the networking functions (storing & forwarding messages, network gateways ...). Servers mayare also hosting a part or the totality of applications programmed by software suppliers or by owners.

RemarkRem. Some servers may not be part of any groups and are called public servers, even if their aspect is restricted,  because their access is only available through Internet  or similar public Networks. (particularly Internet) . The public servers may discriminate their access according security rules set by their owners. Public servers use only a subset of Seattle servers'servers functions. Public servers include a firewall capability that prohibits to implant undesired programs into the server. You may configure any Seattle server as a public server. You just have to obtain an Internet address or any other way to have your server known to the external world.

The versions of Seattle correspond to physical configurations and to different prices (to be published).

 

Seattle is based on a client-server model where each individual owns at least one specific personal server, which may be hosted inside his (or her) station, or is designated to a collective shared server. Such a model is mandatory for users wishing to take full benefit of Seattle. However, a subset of its functionalities is available for any personal computer workgroup configuration, and even on a single isolated computer.

 

Stations offer the interactive capability to interface interactively with human beings. A station, typically a traditional  personal computer, includes generally a display and a keyboard and optionally a pointing device and a local secondary storage. Stations may operate also as a personal or collective server within the rules set for the group definition. Stations may be successively used by several persons. A person session begins when he (or she) logs-in and stops when he (or she) logs-out. Stations may or may not be permanently powered on. They can be on-line or off-line.

 

^%Networking

Seattle has a native network capabilitiesy. However it uses public or private networks strictly as communications pipes. It takes advantages of the available bandwidth, it uses the communications facilities addressing methods and alternate routings of the communications facilities. It recognizes the store and forward function as well as any buffering facilities offered by public networks.

Figure 45 Network Environment of Seattle

This behavior allows Seattle based groups of computers to operate  within miscellaneous telecommunications environments and to be used in a mix of networks. The use of private specific communications facilities is not precluded., but Ttheir owners are warned that a misbehavior of their communications facilities may misbehave if they not follow  the standard protocols of by some exotic processing of Seattle   messages.

 may limit or alter the functionalities and possibly impact  the reliability of the system.

The deregulation of telecommunications[12] in the major part of the world and the overall availability of digital telephone networks has allowed a change in networks philosophy. Tthe designers of Seattle to consider that servers (including domestic home servers) are (almost) permanently on-line.

Computers are attached to one or several value-added networks.

  TheOne main network available to most ofmany Seattle users is the ubiquitous Internet  network  now available in  the majority of the countries on this planet. Seattle servers may obtain an Internet address and be accessible by other Internet servers on a pair-to-pair basis.

It is however not expected that the majority of home and small users'users servers will be Internet servers. Rather, thoseand that these computers will see the ouside world through on-line connection will be to services networks.

Considering the importance of those services, Microsoft is committed to  develop and to improve Microsoft Network (MSNet née Marven). Some users may be permanently hooked to MSNet, while mostother users will be connected only momentarily.

The Microsoft Network is based on some basic business principles:

 The pricing strategy is up to the responsibility of the Information Provider. Microsoft acts as an Information Contents Provider for the items described in the present document and its own strategy is to price those items at a non predatory level. The price for hosting aan Contents Provider on MSNet servers is adapted to the revenues collected for the Contents Provider. Individuals and small business may participate as Contents Providers at special low fees. 

The price of access to the Network will be as low as possible ; Microsoft will make all possible efforts by negotiating with telephone companies, by building (or helping to build) the required pieces of infrastructure. Microsoft believes that in the very short term, non mobile computers will stay permanently on-line and that facility should be provided at marginal cost for the consumer.

Microsoft is committed to assist the Microsoft Network Contents Providers to improve their professionalism and the quality of their offers.

Microsoft is committed to offer Microsoft Network on a world-wide basis. It will offer a variety of tools allowing users to access all Contents Providers servers, independently of their nationality, language, place of residence, gender, race, or  religion. Thereligion.The only restrictions are those imposed by legal constraints[13].

To facilitate the work of Contents Providers and to allow them to focus on the contents of data they expose to the user, Microsoft is introducing a new version of the Information Producer Kit (IPK), (née Blackbird). IPK provides an enhanced common front-end that is located in the client user computer that is part of Seattle. This front-end now uses Unicode data, that allows a world-wide usage of native data. MSNet uses data communication compression that reduces the Unicode penalty at less than 1%. IPK allows the Contents Providers to distribute all types of data files from .RTF[14] to .VRFMMF[15]. Multimedia (voice, music, animation, movies) indexing is added to the new IPK release. IPK takes care of all constraints of "On demand" data (encryption, billing…). With IPK, Contents providing no more requires any programming responsibility nor any burden related to software problems in the server as in the client is passed to the Contents Provider. As no  programming  specific to the application is needed, the contents dodoes not require maintenance for the future evolution of IPK and/or the client software.

Among the new Contents Providers offering their services directly on MSNet, Microsoft is pleasedhappy to welcome the STCI Hubble Space Telescope(HST) that allow you access to the space satellite scope images at the same moment[16] as they become available to scientist. HST also is able to collect requests for spare time available on the telescope. Using your favorite astronomy software and a front-end available on MSNet, HST you may request HST1 or 2 or another available telescope to provide you a picture of a sky object. You may post-process the image on your own computer or compare the new image with archives retrieved from MSNet or other networks.

MSNet is hosting a world-wide accessible of human fingerprints that can be used for identity checking from a large diversity of terminals. This database is established from data made accessible by law-enforcement or administrations across the world. It does not include any personal characteristics except the identity record and the coded fingerprints.

Another InfoProvider on MSNet is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that exposes, for the first time to the worlwide public, the mass of information it collected between 1950 and 1989. Users are warned that some part of the material may belong to athe  disinformation program set up in case of penetration by foreign agents. The CIA material is offered on an 'as is' basis, as it was available to the government authorized people in the last century. It is available with the browsing tools available at that time. You may explore the same data with new tools ofavailable to day to see if the world would have been different if methods and tools of the Information Society have been available 30 years earlier.

The Universal Society for the Human Genome is also offering its data base to MSNet users. You may request them to compare DNA fragments that you have collected with their archived genes. You have to accept that the data you upload will become available to other users and to the Society.

The World Wide Geophysical Society, a newly association of Geodesic Bureaus across the planet is starting to provide on the MSNet in real time the output of 123,000 seismographs located in different sites of the planet and also on the Moon, Mars and Phobos. You may request to receive the output of those seismometers in your computer either in real or deferred time. You may collect data from man-produced events (such as explosions) or events due to natural causes (geological plates drift, colliding asteroids, volcano eruptions, or any oscillations due to tides in atmosphere, water or geological layers). You select time and location of seismographs and you receive in return on your computer the amplitude of the signal as well as a possible relocation of the seismometer[17].

However, Microsoft recognizes the need for some customers to develop their own network system with different requirements than Microsoft Network or Internet.

Since some  years, new  networks'networks media, collectively called Information Networks Infrastructure, are available or are being built in several countries by Telecom companies and  /  or by more specialized Network companies. Seattle is also designed to take advantages of the presently known features of those networks. It includes even a few features not present in the announced network plans,  because their economic justification has yet to be confirmed, but Microsoft believes that they will be implemented in the next years to come.

 As those "infobahns" are being built, they have to coexist with many 90’s and even 80’s communication media, and information groups must spread across countries and consequently different types of communication media.

Seattle supports many types of communication interface, from antique modems (300 to 1200 bds) to LAN adapters and ISDN or wide-band modems. A multi-mode digital adapter, adapted to such as CATV andor ISDN, and demultiplexed by your PC software,  and your PC may be used simultaneously as a  phone answering device, as a video recorder and as a fax receiver.

Supported mobiles include several types of appliances such as those controlled by Windws CEAtWork family of operating systems: notebooks, communications PDA[18], electronic wallets, home appliances (television, VCR…), automotive appliances (such as car navigation systems or remote monitoring systems), cellular GMS[19] telephones, video-cameras (attended and non-attended), watches, remote commanders of appliances and more generally non-permanently attended devices (including communication devices worn by pets and cattle ).

Seattle supports the X-10 control systems for domestic appliances that become supported  in Windows CEAtWork.

Programmers of applications dealing with mobiles should be aware that no assumption about connection, power availability or life of the thing to which they are attached, should be made when trying to establish connections. Communications with mobiles should initially be established in asynchronous mode and all synchronous communications should be able to revert to asynchronous mode. Owners of existing programmable mobile should upgrade their systems to the Seattle-mobile version.[20] It is highly recommended to use MDVB[21] for updating non-human operated devices such as the mobiles worn by cattle and wild life animals.

In a parallel announcement, Microsoft announces in association with Bell Tyrolean AG™ the availability of an electronic bell CowBell™ for the cattle market adding to the traditional bell a position sensing device. Two models are presently available: an ARGOS model with a precision of 300 yards and a GPS[22] with a precision reaching 3 meters in good conditions and giving also the altitude. While more expensive, the latter allows, for instance, a better monitoring of the grass consumption.

A lighter model of the GPS bell adapted to domestic felines and small pets is in under preparation. The same model will be available for children and other types of animals, although their usage in the Z-dimension is more limited. Contrarily to ordinary bells, the sound intensity and tune can be modulated according the application programs. Those electronic bells may be used as pagers receiving and messages received from other members of the group.

If your mobile computer is equipped  with a motion detector[23] in addition to GPS, you can record at predefined intervals the location  of your computer. You may instruct it to send you a message either at a time or at a distance interval. You may be able to track your computer for one day or more depending of the frequency of calls and the power management of your battery. If your mobile computer does not recordis subject to zero acceleration, such as during a very smooth flight, the GPS recording is done at frequency intervals. You can use this feature for tracking afollowing sensible shipment or simply to track your children going by themselves to school, church or playing grounds.

 

Microsoft expressed recently its interest to acquire from the US Government the DoD network of Global Position Satellites presently operated by USAF BMDO. ItMicrosoft proposes to remove, under normal conditions, the security jitters that had  limited the precision. Such a measure is expected to be a significant improvement to the security of persons and property allowing a localization of GPS devices within one meter. Microsoft proposes a plan to let US Defense authorities to control the jitters in selected areas while keeping GPS precise in the majority of the world areas. If the Department of Defense  is unable to accept Microsoft proposals, the Teledesic network will be expanded to support a GPS-compatible localization system in addition to its telecommunications facilities. The precision to be expected from GPS technology in open field, without auxiliary stations (differential GPS), is about 3 meters (10 ft) in horizontal and vertical position. The availability of differential GPS ground stations may tighten the precision up to less than onea few inches. However, the use of GPS inside buildings  (under certain conditions),and tunnels and underwater may be almost impossible and applications that may be exposed to such circumstances have to rely on other sources to complement GPS.

In some instances, such as inside terior of a building, in a tunnels, mines, in subaquatic positions, the GPS or the differential GPS repeaters may not be permanently operative. Seattle users may complement their GPS positioner by other devices such as inertia actuated positioner, such as civil or military models produced by Honeywell™. Positioning software in Seattle is able to handle the transitions between several positioners methods, taking in account the most accurate position according to the positioner type (ideally differential GPS is the best), but also the characteristics of a particular environment (elapsed time decay for inertia device, failure of satellites or failure of a part of a redundant positioner).

 

In addition to the various networking facilities thatwhich have been available until now, with Seattle, Microsoft introduces Microsoft Datavideo-broadcasting (MDVB) services which allow registered servers to use television broadcasting channels to update OLE documents all over the world. Servers using MDVB are either public servers broadcasting (such as financial market quotations, newspapers, sport news) or private servers with only one or a few addressees. Retransmission of data is broadcast at the minimum on ana hourly basis until asynchronous acknowledgment is made by the addressee or until the  server time-out. This facility completes the asynchronous network facilities introduced with Cairo and the support of mobiles. MDVB are available through direct satellite channels, Astra (Astra 2ED channel 147 for Europe), Teledesic™ the new Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) satellite network, and miscellaneous cable services. Details of conditions according to the geographical zones will be provided later.

 MDVB supports all types of OLE documents including video. MDVB insures encryption of broadcast objectsfiles and privacy of the addressees. The same message may be broadcast simultaneously to a list of addressees.

Figure 6 Microsoft Data Video Broadcasting

MDVB reception is achieved through digital TV tuners available as external devices or as PC-Cards (PCMCIA) cards. With the assistance of Microsoft Seattle software, the tuners perform address recognition on a  way similar way asto that of Ethernet adaptersdevices in addition to their capability of displaying TV images from TV channelschannels on the computer display.  Microsoft provided tuners incorporate a built-in address that allows a free reception of MDVB. Users of third parties provided  tuners may subscribe to MDVB services for a nominal fee.

Uplink connections to a MDVB server and acknowledgments are routed through standard networking facilities (including Teledesic wireless channels).

When fitted with the appropriate adapter, Seattle  will allow the receptioniving of digital or analog television programs in a window mode or in a full screen mode. Digital television can be stored in the PC storage in MPEG2[24] mode without a need for intermediary analog transforming, allowing a significant decrease of the complexity and price of a digital TV adapter. Replaying of digital television does not require a special hardware and MPEG2 can be viewed on the same configurations as .AVIas .AVI[25]. MCI interface allowsallow the control of simple VCR or complex professional VTR, but the VCR and VTR functionality areis also fully emulated  by the computer file system, given an appropriate storage capacity (typically a few GB).

 The support of analog TV by Video for Windows is essentially identical to the support to that of by the Video for Windows previous releases.

However, the MCI[26] driver is now able to support dual-function VCR (analog + digital) that may record or replay videos containing some chunks of analog data, such as parts of old movies without requiring  digitizing,. Users are warned that such usage may raise some  what in some cases raise problems of copyright.

In addition, Seattle now offers to support of PC centric television, in which the CATV (cable television) adapter functions areis under the PC software. Under this scheme, one or several windows of the computer display (and the other computer displays of the same group) are used as TV displays. This system is optimized for digital MPEG3 video where hundreds of channels are available on a single TV cable. After many discussions and experiments, operators and Microsoft have established a MPEG3 television standard (fully upward compatible with MPEG2) that includes a frame header adding informations such as the type of image (definition, stereoscopic option), the origin of the image source (location, time, copyright,) and of the frame characteristics (encoding, distributor-id usage restrictions[27]). MPEG3 will authorize a pay-by-frame[28] for viewing only some part of programs. An interesting feature of MPEG3 is the capability to merge frames distributed on several channels to avoid to store (and to view) redundant data. Video software is capable to watch up to 16 different news or news-like channels and to sort/merge frames from the same origin. TV centric users will continue to see and may prefer to see redundant news, but time conscious professionals may prefer to watch a recorded version of the original data, while having the capability to "fast forward" their program. MPEG3 allows also the on-line distribution of the program schedules updated in real time, allowing a precise rescheduling of the monitoring by the PC. Seattle Video software allows you to filter and monitor the programs you wish to redistribute in the different monitors (computers or TV set) in your home.

Your group network may include programs that you produce yourself such as alarm cameras or infant watching cameras or private programs (video communications) that appear as windows on your display. You have the control of the size of those windows (on each display). The sound mixer allows  a muting programmable priority .

Seattle implements not only stereophonic sound (from TV, .WAV recording and other sound sources), but it also defines a multi-directional sound  that, implemented by a spherical surround system (8-loudspeakers[29] or a sound helmet[30]) immersesimmerse the user in total sound virtual reality. The direction of multi-directional sound is generally synthesized from the relative position of the listener (set up in  at application initialization and possibly modified at run time) and from the positions of the sound source. So, MIDI applications may define the positions of the musicians and, given the appropriate reproduction equipment, you may select your seat in the orchestra and immerse you in the music. Multidirectional sound is part of the new .VRMMF format for animating applications.

For compatibility with many existing communication facilities, Seattle includes Microsoft At Work  fax transmission[31] software. Fax sending is still considered as a case of printing. You may force the document to be transmitted as an image and / or you may add a digital signature to avoid alteration at the receiving sites. Receiving faxes is equivalent of using a scanner. However, if the total fax session is encrypted (, including controls), the sender you  has the option tomay prohibitnot be able the storing of theto store the faxit for subsequent decoding. The Microsoft philosophy is not to not maintain the point to point synchronous capabilities of a fax, but to while offering asynchronous facilities that willdoes not alter the confidentiality enjoyed by old facsimile users.

 

Graphical Interface

A major achievement of Seattle is the extension of  the system of Graphics coordinates of Windows/NT thatwhich was, from the origin, limited to two dimensions. Windows/NT, using OpenGL licensed from Silicon Graphics Inc. had already included a third dimension but limited to graphics. Seattle is able to reference objects in a four dimensions (X, Y, Z and Time coordinates) reference space.

Date-Time dimension uses for compatibility reason the same reference (1 January 1900) as previous versions of Windows. However, Seattle maintains multiple calendars, the calendars applying to the context (country and date). The daylight savings time history is also maintained from may places, so that historical dates and hours are always consistent. When present and enabled, the windows "title bars" display the contextual date and time, the Day and Hours consistency is not guaranteed for pre-historical times nor for extrapolation in the future. Practically, geological dates are qualified as a range of years from the present time.

In addition, the color system introduced withof Windows95 has been improved by the addition of attributes of transparency and, texture reflectibility attributes thatwhich provide a more realistic representation of objects when they are illuminated by application or system light sources. Light sources are defined by their 3D position and by their color temperature. Color temperature of a source may be defined within the total electromagnetic spectrum. The visibility of an object under light sources (radar, infra-red or X-ray) can be specified within a single object description. Default lighting assumes a uniform light source located behind the user[32] with a color temperature of 5000°K. These default conditions give a representation of color close to the visible nature of the objects. They do not correspond to a realistic view of the object that requires an appropriate set-up of the lighting sources. The lighting characteristics of a document are document specific : they are not carried with OLE objects[33]. Lighting sources are objects that may be moved and color temperature may be modulated[34].

Windows are still rectangular, but the concept of curtains has been introduced. Curtains are  implemented as a window superimposed and masking another, it contains graphic objects of user determined shape, some of them being  transparent to let appear the subjacent window. Masks and windows are bound together for resizing and moving. The programmer has control of the level of transparency.

The precision of GDI[35] was previously limited 32-bits for each coordinate. It has been extended to 48 bits for the mobile version and to 64bits for the server and station versions. With  OLE4.0[36], Microsoft introduces quad-dimensional « documents » which can be updated from any computer in the network.

The 4-D space is local to a group, but as some objects, particularly real objects, may exist for all groups, they have to be allocated a common name and a common position in all groups in which they are known.

OLE 4 standardizes the representation of spatial (tri-dimensional) objects. It also handlesConversion utilities are available objects from for the most OLE[37] popular 3D programs. The native Seattle OLE4  representation is used in Micrografx Sculpture Plus 1.0™ program that uses CAD-type techniques as well as manual input and stereo-like photography (assembling of pictures taken from several pointspoint of views) to generate a 3D object.

Other programs will use 4D representations to represent the growing of plants[38], the manufacturing of objects and buildings, the assembly of parts.

The mapping between the new coordinates and the graphic display(s) is handled by a new DIB (device independent bitmap) engine of Seattle. This engine handles stereoscopic viewing devices (helmets, goggles) respecting STAPI (Stereoscopic API) specifications.

The maximum size of display devices supported by Seattle is presently 16384 x 16384[39], one order of magnitude larger than the size of the currently advanced graphic devices. But, it is possible to map this logical display on several SVGA standard devices to satisfy the needs of control rooms, offices or private entertainment. All the functions available in Windows, such as point & drag, move objects through  windows, are available between screens. Plug & Play video adapters may be simply plugged-in in your computer and Seattle software gives you a new view on the world. You may mix different types of adapters (AT, VESA or PCI) to design such a multi-screen system.

Another improvement of the graphic interface is the concepts of gates. Gates are objects that appear inside a window or outside windows. They fulfill the concept of teleport initially introduced in adventure games :i.e., they establish a new 4D context (technically, a new window appearsappear in a new process that inherits static objects from the process opening the gate). Gates may be two-ways or one-way[40]. Gates may stay open (i.e., static objects modified in the new process can be accessed from the opening process) or they may close automatically. This concept of gates is very useful in education software and in adventure gates. The use of gates may lead to an easier human interface of multi-windows'multi-windows applications, reducing display cluttering and the number of controls. Gates are represented by buttons of any size and shape. Gates are expected to be important components of adventure and role gates, as  well  as in educational products.

A new pointing device, code named StarTreck, allowing pointing in a 4-dimensions space  will be delivered at the same time as Seattle. StarTreck uses the concept of « gravity well »[41] to navigate easily in all dimensions. The space navigation paradigm introduces  the concept of navigating speed for easy navigation in a 4D workspace.

Objects Dragging & Dropping objects in the same or other « documents » in 4D will be available.

The movement of objects across the time dimension may be restricted by their creator or their owner. However, Microsoft recognizes that Seattle remains limited to Cartesian coordinates and is not yet able to operate in worlds where the laws of general relativity cause results significantly departing from those implied by Euclidean laws. As a consequence, Microsoft does not guarantee that the standard synchronization of networks is also applicable to space based computers.

An extensive The usagee of the time dimension is expectedpredicted infor business applications so that the archive files can be exploited to answer a question:search like « who was   in charge when  some condition happens? ». Of course, law enforcement and history research applications can also benefit of the stamping of all events in the time dimension.

The system references to "future  time" are always made conditional. The confirmation of a future time reference is asked to the process including this reference after the time is reached for potential recording or deletion. If the related process does not act on a reference (i.e., confirm the referenced act or canceling it),  it will be kept « conditional » or « shadowed » by the system.

 

In addition to the date / time functions supported by MS/DOS and Windows, Seattle supports the location function returning the  "earth coordinates"  of a system. The location is defined at installation time for the server (moving a server requires a re-installation to performestablishing anthe update and possibly to recalculate network and licenses billing rates). The position is defined by the operator for stations and mobiles. Advanced prediction of the position, such as defined in the Scheduler++ agenda,  is available to the members of the group. Optionally, Seattle includes  Plug&Play GPS drivers for mobiles equipped with Ground Positioning PCMCIA adapter. In addition to Global Position adapters, radio transmission of time and radio-beaconing for position (either on beaconing on ground stations to auto-determine the position or request for beaconing by ground stations) are also supported. Toll gates and customs gates may also be used to transmit mobile position.

Maps

Maps are becoming an important type of computers'computers objects. The 4D characteristics of Seattle make maps a type of object supported at basic level.

The merge with NextBase[42] thatwhich pioneered travel planning system with road maps allows Microsoft to provide a new release of AutoMaps thatwhich uses GPS positioning in the maps and the updates of maps via MVDB satellite broadcasting system. Progressively, the AutoMap collection of electronic maps will cover all the regions of the planet on a standard format, on several metric scales and various terrain details.

Aeronautical and marine charts are now being edited in similar formats for air and sea navigation. FAA low-altitude maps are now stored in 3D format to be used in head-up displays for low altitude navigation at night and low visibility (http://maps.faa.gov). They can be used in conjunction with flight simulation programs.

 

Video

Video for Windows has been dramatically enhanced by the addition of an interpreter of video sequences that is able to extract from a movie a synthetic interpretation of the scene. VidInterpret uses a library of templates, some being standard 3D objects other being character templates. Templates describe persons, animals or mobiles. The same templates are used in WinToon a cartoon generator application. Human templates are very sophisticated and are derived from Mannequin®_Designer technology  with added 4D features (such as the range of speed of movements and balance control for instance). VidInterpret attempts to match the contents of the movie frame with objects and characters from the template library and eventually create a movie metafile containing all the elements of the scene.

Vidinterpret  for all but very simple well-lightedwell lighted scenes requires a very powerful configuration to operate in real time video. However, it uses a learning process to personalize the library to progressively focus the updated template to a single character. Having progressively learn about the identified characters, VidInterpret is able to focus on movements and eventually record them in real time.

The video source is not necessary static. VidInterpret analyses the background objects to identify the cameras'cameras movements, zooming and some optic effects.

VidInterpret  technology is a pattern matching one similar to that used in OCR recognition, speech recognition, sound interpretation. It does not always identify characters and requires some manual help to enhance the contents of its template library.

A particular problem generally encountered in the synthesis of characters is the problem of clothing. The template library includes a variety of clothes that may be worn by characters. VidInterpret attempts to match a type of cloth with the character template preselected. Some rules help the pattern recognition : an evening dress is unlikely but imaginable in a beach scene, pets are less likely to wear clothes.

Matching voice or noise with the characters is also a difficult process. VidInterpret uses a library of template noises and voice accents to identify their origin. Sometimes, it is not able to isolate a voice from the background noise. Users have to be prevented that discarding background noise or objects from the target file may cause loss of necessary informations.

The Vidinterpret virtual realitymovie metafile (.VRMMF) contains all informations able to resynthetise the movie but not limited to the original point of view. .VRFMMF files use OLE4 embedding of objects and allowallows a personalization of the movie using other templates than the original identified  by VidIntepret.[43] 

One of the backgrounds behind processing movies by VidInterpret is to create learning tools for education in the creation of movies. In changing the point of view, the angle of field, the colors of clothing, the lighting conditions, you may study your rushes and correct your movies.

You may also merge several VRFMMF files and have scenes displaying characters who never encounter each other, you may mix real characters with purely artificial ones. The new version of WinToon makes extensive usage of VRFMMF files[44].

The Video capabilities of Seattle can also be used for applications of person recognition and tracking. Using the VidInterpret API library, and given and the appropriate computing power, you may process the output of a video camera to identify a person in a scene and to record in a compact format, suitable for network transmission, his (or her) displacements and moves. Several sources of video output  may be processed simultaneously for a better precision of the record or alternatively to lengthen the duration of the record. Intelligence and law enforcement applications may take advantage of those capabilities. Users should be warned that a VRFMMF file is relatively easy to alter and that movie synthesis may easily lead to the inclusion or to a removal of virtual characters in a movie. The Seattle enhanced security features should be used when trying to use computer processed video for mission critical operations.

Applications

Microsoft Applications have been enhanced to take benefit of the new functionalities of Seattle. Excel and Word are now merged into a single product called Document where tables include all the spreadsheet functionalities. The specialized computing facilities of Excel such as Solver, Statistical Analyzer … are packaged within micro-applications thatwhich were previously available for Word (Grammar, Spelling checkers[45]…). Document   is built around OLE4 OLE 4 functionalities thatwhich allow  the production of a document by a collection of persons.

Microsoft applications are also available under MacOS. Some restrictions in functions may appear when they rely on functionalities not available in the underlying version of the operating system.

Excel remains available as a separate product and will be supporting OLE4.

Document supports popular mathematical packages such as MathCad™, Mapple™  or Mathematica™. The OLE versions of those products may be used for alternative to the Equation Editor of World and as extensions to the mathematical functions of Excel.

Document includes an enforcement of  intellectual property and copyrights through OLE4. An OLE4 server is maintaining copyrights and access rights specifications of a document, such as defined by the author. OLE4 enforces the fact that a protected  object (document or portion thereof) cannot be pasted in another document without transmission of the copyright notice and restrictions of distribution (Secret, Company Confidential, National Eyes Only,…). The protected portions of a document are stored in a specific encrypted format thatwhich is recognized as such by the OLE 4 mechanism as well as the Clipboard. Protected text may be reformatted, but cannot be altered outside the original server. In addition to the protection of intellectual property rights in literature and software, this Document functionality finds applications in the automation of all form-driven administrative documents thatwhich cannot be altered when transmitted across distributed networks. It should be noted, however, that the application designer retains the responsibility of avoiding the manufacture of forged documents and that of implementing the appropriate controls of authenticity.

The macro-language for Document is Visaural Basic for Application, an extended superset of Visual Basic for Applications, the Microsoft language introduced with Excel 5 and Word for Windows v77.x. Specific Macrolanguages (such as Winword v6) is supported only for importinged files butand not for editing.

Document also includes the hyper-text facilities previously available exclusively in .HLP format and hyper-text links such as defined in HTML4 WWW specifications. You may define in your documents links to text, voice, sound and video data located inside your group or available from Internet. You can also insert Java applets[46] in documents. Hyper-text links are OLE 4 links allowing a full  control of the referenced object by their owner.  

.

Microsoft announces an agreement with Gamma Productions and other specialized companies to incorporates  in Document a complete multi-lingual facility. Unicode is the internal encoding of text into Document, and writing text in right-to-left or left-to-right as well as top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top is achieved as a basic function of Document.

Document is able to import non-Unicoded documents, and to export them in 8-bit or double-byte format when the languages used in the document do not require the Unicode encoding (e.g., combinations of western European languages might be stored in extended ASCII, a combination of English and Japanese may be stored in DBCS, a combination of French and Chinese has to use Unicode)

  TrueType fonts distributed as partspart of Seattle include a collection of at least one font type for all languages present or past of the world, allowing many human sciences applications to operate cooperatively.

Multilingual documents can be composed and read on all versions of Seattle. It is no more required to use a localized version of the operating system nor of the hardware. A library of IMP for Far-Eastern languages is delivered as components of Microsoft Office.

As part of Seattle, Microsoft delivers Document_Viewer[47] a utility able to view and to output all types produced by Document, Word, Excel, Word for MacIntosh, AmiPro , PageMaker and WordPerfect. With Document_Viewer you cannot edit or reformat documents.

Internet Assistant & Server

Microsoft Internet Assistant is a set of programs allowing to prepare data for distribution on the Internet according th Net standards. It allows to convert the majority of Seattle applications data formats into HTML (hypertext), Java (animations and other applets), graphics, video and sound formats.

It maintains and formats by default the copyrights information from Document and other Viewers. Informations in Far-eastern languages is normally maintained as Unicode, but may be also made available in DBCS formats.

Internet Server is the program operating under Seattle that handle Internet requests. It includes the collection of Forms and statistics. The new edition of Internet Server includes significant improvement in performances by taking advantage of larger memories and new fast communications links. It uses an adaptative packet size (up to 64Kbytes) depending of the capabilities of routers and the reliability of communications liinks. The telephone and video capabilities, allowing a local application using TAPI or video API to communicate with a person using phone or video over Internet, of Internet Server have also been improved.

Internet Server implements "output on demand" that transmits encrypted data that can be unscrambled by special viewers such as Document viewers (see later in chapter on Privacy). Internet Server has the capability to interface with billing applications for "pay per view" or other financial transactions. Note that Viewers may also interface with Money at the receiving side of the Internet link.

 

Intellect

Microsoft introduces an ambitious experimental program, named Intellect to bring the capability to integrate knowledge gathered from miscellaneous computerized sources.

Users are warned that to take befit of such a project, they have to expect delays to build a knowledge base able to bring superior results. The present release of Intellect is proposed at a symbolic fee to the Seattle users in conjunction with Microsoft Network.

The sources of knowledge used by Intellect are either local to a group, global to several groups or public. Local knowledge includes non guaranteed sources (such as deduction rules invented by the user) and private data sources. As persons may be attached to several groups, they may offer some of their knowledge (data and rules) as available to other members of a group. The "Public" knowledge is what is available on public networks (such as Microsoft Network or specific trusted[48] servers on Internet).

Intellect handles data and rules in a specific encoding (using 128 bits128bits GUID[49] - global unique identifiers-) that allows to store knowledge in a way independent from all natural language. However, the first release of Intellect is only able to handle a large part of the English written language, business Japanese written language, legal written French and German. No guarantee is given to have Intellect "understanding" all texts such as, specially poetry,  transcripts of verbal language, synthesized scripts generated by VidInterpret.

The first applications of Intellect areis expected to be in the legal domain. You may check the legal statements of your draft contracts and agreements against current laws and courts'courts decisions of several countries. You can also check numbers you intend to put in your documents against available statistics. You may use your computer to answer typical "why?" questions the children are asking[50].

Intellect may also be able to generate "Why?" requests to other computers in addition to more typical data requests (SQL-requests). You may request that many computers loaded with Intellect  work to generate an answer to your questions.

Intellect handles a cache of the knowledge rules and data it has collected. Such a cache will uses almost all the idle storage capacity in your system. As idle capacity disappears, the knowledge remains cached in servers available to you and eventually is flushed out, requiring that a new search from basic is performed, when (if) the flushed request is reiterated later.

The Intellect technology is also used by the Pelican search engine available through Internet and  MSNet to help users not to be submerged by the amount of information available on the Internet.  Pelican is a search engine reading pages on the Internet and attempting to digest them. The user uses a Pelican client to its Internet Browser as an add-on applet. This client builds a user profile, that you may update, correct or censure before it is transmitted to the Pelican server, when you decide to make a search request to the MSNet server (http://pelican.msnet.com). The main characteristics of Pelican is that it presents by order of priority:  the changes to the Net pages matching your request that you have linked to your private data or programs, then changes to pages you have already browsed seriously, then the new pages corresponding to your profile discarding pages with redundant informations and lately the pages simply matching the criteria.[51] The user profiles are not remembered by the search servers and have to be validated as part of the search request. The filtering of redundant pages is done by the Pelican server by sorting correlated pages by increasing useful content of information, using Intellect technology. In addition to the MSNet availability of Pelican, this technology is offered as part of Internet server for Seattle for processing group private information and merging it with public data.

 

 

CAD-CAM

The extension of GDI and the use of OLE4 will allow a seamless communication between various CAD programs, and Seattle users will have the capability to gather object of many sources in their applications programs.

An important usage of this feature is the capability to extend CAD-CAM facilities to the domestic usage. The documentation of domestic appliances and furniture will be available in OLE4 compatible format from many manufacturers. This is particularly interesting for appliances and furniture delivered in parts and that have to be assembled (glued, screwed, wired, ..) by the purchaser. The purchasers of those products will be able to assemble the parts in a virtual form, to check their compatibility with floors and walls and with already existing devices, in a similar way as professional users of CAD/CAM. Assembling of parts coming from different suppliers without a preliminary gathering at a distributor site will become available and will contribute to decrease the end-user costs. Microsoft Network will offer on-line access to the documentation for small, inexpensive parts available at small retailers that will have only to carry the part reference.

The production of Output should not be confused with the production of messages. Output is generally produced as committed actions and can be directed to addresses outside the group. And as such, they should be performed with extreme caution, while the system has the facility to back up messages to other members of the group if they are not expressly committed. Operators'Operators panels are, by default, message devices. Operator panels may be specified as output by the application, after a positive identification of the attendee, when their reading implies a commitment attendee for unrecoverable action.

Additional output sinks are available in Seattle:

While direct printing from Windows (At Work printers) is now the most common way of printing, non-At Work PC or LAN compatible printers are still supported by Seattle, in particular,  PostScript and LaTeX processors are supported for asynchronous off-line printing on stations that are potentially isolated from computing group.

Different models of Braille printers are fully supported including in low-resolution graphic mode.

Video output allows to direct data to video tape recorder like devices. The user has control of the time duration of fixed images before output. Several formats are available : digital and analog (NTSC or PAL). The output driver includes the control of VCR, VTR and digital recorders.

3M developed 3D-clay model generating device with distant color-ink jet impression facility is presently one of the best way to project a compound document in 3-dimensions.

Many other output devices may operate nicely under Seattle like computer generated tattooing, automated garden sprinklers or selective defoliating devices, medical  surgical devices and any kind of military warfare devices. However, Microsoft has not tested those devices for all potential cases of utilization and shall not be liable for any effect of their operation.

 

The synergy between Microsoft and its recent acquisition of Pierre Cardin haute couture and perfume laboratories will allow  new opportunities for developing new kinds of computer-generated outputs in the area of clothing and of odor generators. This project contributed to the creation of the Couture project used in WinToon processing of clothing for virtual characters.

Another fall-out of the merger with Pierre Cardin haute couture is the announcement of a line of clothes and  jewelry specially designed for incorporating mobile Microsoft based technology. Masculine clothes will incorporateincorporated pockets and pre-wiring for cellular telephone, personal digital assistant, and batteries.  Specially designed jewels will also incorporate Seattle based pager, watch and message transmitter that can be worn even with formal evening dresses or the tiniest of swim suits.

 

In addition, Microsoft announces the publication of the Sewing Machine Application Programming Interface (SMAPI) which has been developed in coordination with Singer and Pfaff. SMAPI allows PC owners to develop embroidery or any sewing machine applications on their Windows PC. SMAPI allows also to connect cutting devices (such as scissors) and insures the possibility to synchronize cutting and sewing, allowing the owner to home manufacture automatically dresses, shirts or suits from a model and alters it to his (or hers) taste or morphology.

 

 Presentation

The integration in Seattle  of visual and audio capabilities will allow the developments of virtual reality applications thatwhich will encompass the domain of games and education. Powerpoint  v5 has already been extended to provide time dependent features inside a slide of the presentation as well as audio and video effects. 

The new release of Powerpoint is now customizable using Visaural BA. It displays 3D objects thatwhich can be looked around from several angles  by the viewer at show time. Display options include stereoscopic images  with colored or polarized glasses.

 The most innovative feature of Powerpoint is a virtual teleconference facility where the image of the presenter is a character artifact generated by a 3D modeling program under license of Mannequin®, combined with presenter photographic pictures. The image of the face of the virtual presenter is modulated according to the modulation of the speech. Questions from assistance are recognized by the Seattle speech recognition mechanism and handled by Powerpoint through pre-recorded Q&A or they are stored for an asynchronous "real" answerback. Powerpoint will allow teleconferences to be held 24h a day inside multi-national companies or between governments, and the asynchronous interactivity will allow a person to attend simultaneously several conferences. Powerpoint may also be a server for Internet videoconferencing programs, such as CU-Seeme or its derivatives.

 Powerpoint   may operate as a OLE4 client for including compound documents in the presentation and as a server to expose the audience reactions to other applications. The audience reactions can be automatically dispatched to other instances of Powerpoint within the group which can themselves update the original compound document. The group will obtain finally not only an updated presentation but also will have decisions taken and actions triggered, while the original author of the presentation is still sleeping in his (or her) bed or playing golf in a resort. The results of the conference impacting his (or her) job, or requiring some action from him (or her) will be signified through his(or her) personal group mobile devices.

 

Document and Powerpoint  are available at conditions and at a price tag unchanged from those of Microsoft Office version 7.

 

Project Management

Microsoft Project has been enhanced for Seattle  with version 6.0. It is no more a tool exclusively for a project manager, but is a distributed tool for all the participants of the project and it can be completely integrated with other groups'groups applications such as accounting, ordering …

Previous versions of Project were not able to track directly objects, such as blueprints, models and programs that were however computer objects. Version 6.0 now has the option to retrieve the state of computers'computers objects located in any computer belonging to the groups and to update the project plan accordingly. Programs testing and models'models simulations are directly handled by Project. The majority of non-computer tasks is also described in computers in some way or another and can be reflected in Project  through OLE4.0, decreasing the burden of tracking the state task manually.

Contrarily to previous versions of Project  that were essentially devoted to non-recurrent projects, Version 6.0 allows a full parameterization of tasks, allowing to define tasks'tasks duration and cost as functions of quantitative or conditional parameters. Essentially, all the functions available in Document are available in Project.

With Project   v6.o, users may define some tasks or groups of tasks as iterative, the number of iterations being fixed or a function, and the duration of task occurrences being constant or a function.

Project  uses internally the 4 dimensions of the Seattle  GDI, and more specifically the time dimension. The concept of hypersphere of uncertainty was introduced in Seattle for other purposes, but the concept fits nicely to address a specific problem in Project .The duration of some tasks may be defined in terms of probability, the probability law differing between tasks. As a project may contain several thousands of tasks, some of them having a non-null probability of ever finish, the computation of a scheduled or planned project has to be expressed in terms of probability. So to take advantage of Seattle GDI, the traditional Gantt diagram is displayed in three dimensions and the resulting date is expressed in terms of probabilities.  However, Project  may express milestones in terms of time and cost exposure'sexposures vis à vis the planned schedule. The persons responsible of the tasks may alter the probability parameters and laws related to those tasks. When actual values are entered, it is possible to store the history of scheduled values and to display the history of knowledge about the project.

The distributed capability of Project allows to integrate several projects, possibly developed by other companies. The user of Project may specify external milestones and specific access rights for those milestones allowing to reprocess automatically plans'plans changes caused by suppliers. This feature allows to update dynamically the conditions of schedule and price thatwhich can be offered  to customers. An add-on product Vendor available from Microsoft handles the negotiation with a customer to settle an order taking in account customer specification and project planning. Vendor  uses the capability to parameterize the duration and the cost of tasks according to the customer specifications. A symmetrical program called Purchaser allows to alter specifications to decrease the cost of a project without altering the output. Purchaser  has the capability to poll all Vendors to find the best conditions. The user of Project with Purchaser  has an option to commit directly the purchase order or to request either a human (electronic) signature or another program authorization to issue the order.

The task updates may be filled by the task responsible persons and Seattle  uses its commit functionality to transfer of a task state from planned to actual. Another enhancement incorporates a currency function to track cost. It is possible to specify the currency in which resource costscost are estimated and to consolidated the estimated profit according to the currency fluctuations. A further enhancement is the possibility of setting alternate strategies for the project. This feature computescompute a decision milestone and computes the value of each strategy. When a decision has been committed, it is always possible to recalculate the alternative strategies and to estimate the cost of a write-off when backing out to the other alternative. This feature makes Project a significant CAM (Computer Aided Management) tool.

 

Project  is able to incorporate not only the time dimension but also the position and it may do an evaluation of the duration of location related tasks by making an automatic recalculation of transportation time and cost.  It can query automatically the OAG server   or other locally available servers to automatically schedule public transportation related tasks. Private transportation may also be recalculated taking in accordance the GPS position transmitted by transported object (including  persons).

Another feature of Project  is the capability to identify spheres of responsibility allowing a sub-responsible to reconfigure the project in real time without waiting the project manager to be on control. For instance, a truck driver experimenting a breakdown during a night shift may reschedule an alternate truck without waiting the next morning ;  he can evaluate the cost of the alternative solutions and can make decisions using his (or her) PDA or the truck computer or even a voice actuated server, according the situation of the truck crash. It is even possible to use a heart-beat mechanism that may be implemented in  the group network to externally detect the crash and to make decisions without any human interventions. Decisions may integrate the insurance cost and the schedule impact on the overall project.

 

While modern companies now use flexible budgeting and flexible resources allocation, many users and administrations still rely on unlimited contract resources and annual budgeting. So Project has been improved to include periodic budgeting in the plans. When delays of critical tasks may not allow whole planned budgeted expenditures, Project reschedules non-critical tasks to be as close as possible to the planned budget and not to lead to overhead costs due to underemployment of resources. Another fall-out of this feature is to allow the charging of the overhead cost as overrun cost to projects thatwhich were really responsible of them and to avoid to base the plan on a higher cost of resources. In consequence, Project is an incomparable tool for companies envisioning restructuring and re-engineering.

 

While the project manager has entire rights about scheduled and planned information, he (or she) has not the right to alter or delete actual facts. Microsoft offersoffer to its customers at no additional charge to maintain the recording of actual facts in its Repository of Facts data base. The privacy of those facts is guaranteed  to be maintained in accordance with the legislation.

The price of Project 6.0 is unchanged from version 5.0. However, the distributed part, not allowing task redefinition, is available for $49.95 per member of the group, without limitation of the number of projects and groups to which it is connected.

 

Accounting

Since the integration in 1995 of Intuit corporation inside Applications Division that has brought a lot of home accounting experience, Microsoft is now  ready to announce MoneyQuicken Pro v1.0 as a high end companion to the domestic MoneyQuicken v5.0 introduced in At Home series as a domestic finances'finances applicationapplications. With MoneyQuickenPro, you will be able to handle your accounts in different currencies and to manage your money on a world wide basis.

MoneyQuickenPro also targets small businesses and Home business and  to will be able to provide a complete data processing system for those companies. Due to many differences in business practices in different countries of the  world, its first release will be limited to a certain number of countries following business practices based on USA practices, what is now covering the major countries in the world including European Union and off-shore places of business. Using MoneyQuickenPro Inc. add-on and the related services offered on Microsoft Network by several financial companies, you will be able to manage a multinational company staffed by yourself as the only employee. Inc. Is a front-end program that is an extension to MoneyQuicken Pro. It is only usable in conjunction with a MSNet server. This server is an interface program to the other financial companies'companies servers allowing you to access similarly to those facilities. Using Inc. after selecting the financial institution of your choice, you may incorporate a company in the state or country of your choice, you may visualize the results of your companies, you may transfer money by EFT between the accounts of your companies. Microsoft makes its best effort to insure that Inc. (client and server) is perfectly conform to the current regulations of the countries you are able to incorporate your company. However, Microsoft cannot be taken as responsible for any fraud or any losses due to the use of funds transfer. You must have your transactions checked with your bank or financial authority through  which you have incorporated. In most cases, those checks can be controlled on-line between the Inc. server and the bank server. The Inc. server prepares the appropriate legal forms and  the relevant tax declarations to the country tax or custom authorities. You cannot use Inc. to generate transactions in contradiction with laws and regulations accepted by the financial community. You can use Inc. to maximize your profit by taking advantage of the differences of regulations and/or taxes between states and countries.

MSNet provides also legal services that can check the contracts you are negotiating through MoneyQuicken Pro.

MoneyQuickenPro  is able to handle all your relations with your banks, investment funds, credit loans, saving banks and audits cabinets. As its predecessor, it can record your money movements, write checks and prepare tax filings.

In addition, MoneyQuickenPro can be your own accountant or your own finance officer, in arbitrating between your accounts, purchasing or selling securities, buying or selling foreign currencies…Most operations are performed automatically by MoneyQuickenPro taking in account all computerized world wide informations that you specify, and according the goals you preset. Opening a new account in any place of the world is done electronically. However,  in some countries, electronic signatures are not sufficient and account opening requires a confirmation by fax or mail. MoneyQuickenPro provides forms for written confirmations.

Direct operations on securities market and many derivative products can be made by MoneyQuickenPro, but some may be submitted to regulations, such as to a deposit on a banking account agreed upon by the regulating authority. Localized versions of MoneyQuickenPro include local regulations. Foreign regulations, known at release time to Microsoft Financial ProductsIntuit division are included. Updates of those regulations are distributed through Microsoft Network or MSDN . In providing an understanding as precise as available of the monetary mechanisms, MoneyQuickenPro now puts complex derivative financial products at the fingertips of the non-professional and makes exotic or foreign products available to everybody.

During beta testing of MoneyQuickenPro, that has been performed with the participation of the San Francisco stock exchange, Crédit Lyonnais, ING Groep NV and the Chemical Citybank of New York, it has been observed that the usage of MoneyQuickenPro by about one fourth of US investors would be able to induce oscillations in stocks'stocks prices that could potentially impact the solidity of the currency and alter the faith into financial institutions. At the request of the Federal Reserve Bank, Microsoft Financial ProductsIntuit Division put in MoneyQuickenPro a damping mechanism to delay somewhat the reaction time of operators (in reverse proportion to the level of their accounts) and to introduce a random factor in the reaction time. To comply with a request of international regulating authorities, MoneyQuickenPro incorporates up to 16 modules to handle regulations for domestic and off-shore markets. Those regulation modules can be down loaded using MDVB by regulating authorities. They are encrypted and cannot be modified by users nor by Microsoft.

In addition, regulating authorities may upload an audit trail of MoneyQuickenPro transactions. The integrity of the audit trail is verified by the regulation modules. The owner is fully responsible for any fraudulent action done using MoneyQuickenPro.

For international transactions, MoneyQuickenPro  uses the SWIFT network through your bank gateway. Owners of MoneyQuickenPro have also the option to use a SWIFT gateway owned by Microsoft Credit Bank (MCB) and located in Georgetown, Grand Cayman. Use of MCB gateway by MoneyQuickenPro licensed users is submitted to the approval of MCB that has to be requested separately.

For the moment, transactions made between foreign accounts are not regulated, except in some cases when they cannot be handled but through bank or financial institutions. Direct operations on US securities are not allowed from foreign locations. MoneyQuickenPro incorporates in the messages the position of your computer, such as that reported by the GPS feature of your computer. You may install your MoneyQuickenPro computer in a domestic location and control it through your personal network through a notebook or a PDA from your plane or your yacht.

In addition to financial products from the major places of the world, MoneyQuickenPro allows you to operate in some commodities market such as raw materials markets. However, There isare built-in restrictions in MoneyQuickenPro for operating from the continental United States on some specific markets such as Yakoutsk for minerals, Groznyi and Peshawar for specific hardware, Myanmar, Medellin, Cali or Chiang Rai for some agricultural products.

MoneyQuickenPro cannot be used for entering cash in any of your accounts. You have also to use banks ATM to cash your accounts. It can only record and monitor your cash transactions in dollars or in any foreign currency. Microsoft denies any responsibility if you use MoneyQuickenPro in illegal traffic or money laundering. Microsoft retains the right to immediately terminate the MoneyQuickenPro license and the related services if asked to do so by the competent regulating authorities.

MoneyQuickenPro can operate as a OLE4.0 server for Excel, Document and Project. It can be used as a OLE4.0 client for other instances of MoneyQuickenPro. You can simulate a business competition inside your private network by observing the behavior of a virtual market where operators are several instances of MoneyQuickenPro. You may even interconnect your private market with the real securities and currencies'currencies market, using one or several instances of MoneyQuickenPro acting as gateway with the real(s) market(s). Such a feature can be used by savvy investors to coordinate theoretically independent and isolated markets.

Microsoft does not carry any responsibility nor can be taken liable to any losses or damages for the use of MoneyQuickenPro in front of changes in regulations, failures of any financial institutions,  initiatives of foreign governments, legal or illegal actions performed by other actors, or for any misrepresentation of financial products.

The price of MoneyQuickenPro is $495 for the basic services. The upgrade from MoneyQuicken is $195. Competitive upgrades are available for $205. The Fed regulation module is automatically charged at $75/month. Other regulation modules'modules fees are still to be defined.

 

Leisure and Entertainment

Microsoft recognizes this still growing segment of the personal computer market and how it contributed to the acceptance for that technology. Microsoft  wishes  to continue to improve the ubiquity of the personal computer and wishes that Seattle contributes to expand its influence on the game'sgames market.

 With Seattle, Microsoft expands the SDK with a new and  extended version of WinG allowing Games designers to take advantage of the advanced 4D facilities of the system.  All new applications introduced by Microsoft have been developed under extended WinG.

WinToon, a development tool originally intended to create cartoons in .AVI multimedia format, has been extended to the third dimension, allowing authors to move characters in 3-D landscape, while offering better play performances than created with standard functionalities. WinToon v3.0 now produces scenarios in virtual realitymovie meta-file format (.VRFMMF) as well as AVI or MPEG format. The use of .VRFMMF format is particularly suitable to interactive cartoons, because you can determine the point of view and change some features of characters at play time. Because .VRFMMF is significantly more compact than MPG, it is also more suitable to network interactive games. Using OLE4 with WinToon, you may morph one each charactercharacters with each player of the game and for instance to play realistic roles'roles games in a network.

VRFMMF format WinToon characters may be dressed in a variety of clothes. The cloth library offers a wide range of colors and characteristics of textiles and shapes. Realistic drapés can be realized on characters as well as dynamic aspect due to movements of wind or water. The cloth library used in WinToon is a subset of the Couture library also available in Seattle. All the Couture generated clothes can be made worn by VRFMMF characters.

In a VRFMMF WinToon environment, Dolls are specific objects of the character libraries and can be created, dressed and undressed, made moving, speaking and acting on the way you want. Dolls are objects you may morph from existing characters. They may have a movingng scenario that can be interactively modified by the player. All games played with dolls may now be played in a virtual world controlled by the user. Specific interface devicesdevice are available from third parties for infants and young children wishing to play with Virtual Dolls.

WinTool technology has been developed in collaboration with DreamWorks SKG thatwhich has used it noticeably in Triassic Park IV and in Dinos successful interactive game. Microsoft announces that it has bought half of Paul Allen's share'sshareholding part in DreamWorks SKG, having now 49% of the capital.

 

 

Among the new Microsoft products updated for Seattle, Flight Simulator for Windows v6.0 is able to take benefit of the 4-dimensional GDI. Airplanes can navigate in a world fully integrated with the other GDI Windows applications such as maps, virtual reality and other simulation programs. ODBC access to the OAG server (CompuServe, DJN...) or similar servers (in France 3615 HORAV) and OLE functionalities may be used to generate simulated external traffic inside FSW. Similarly weather information and prediction servers already available as an add-on for Flight Simulator 5 isare integrated in FSW.

FSW  is programmable with Visaural Basic for Applications   and application programmers can develop their own specific simulations'simulations games and adventures using their own aircraft parameters and the 4-D GDI capabilities of Seattle. FSW aircraft definition can be imported from Autocad for Windows™ or CATIA™ using ODBC facilities.

FSW  can be used for airplane training by interconnecting real airplane instruments through a radio  link to a personal computer, allowing a ground based instructor to operateoperates as a co-pilot of the real plane. Beta Testing of FSW6 has already been successfully done by USNavy at various classified locations. Use of FSW on board of commercial aircrafts is subject to FAA restrictions differing according with the risk of interference with the planes. Use of  upward link towards commercial liners is prohibited by a security feature embedded within FSW.

Price of FSW6.0 is unchanged from that FS5.

 

 In the collection AtHome, Microsoft is introducing  Racing Car Simulator (RCS). This simulator differs from arcade simulators by being based on the actual CAD model of mid-1990s F1 racing car. Real vehicles have been prohibited in 1997 after many circuit accidents. Microsoft has obtained the CAD models of Ford, Benneton and Williams. Lotus models are not yet available in RCS car library due to ana intellectual property dispute. Pre-1990 cars present in the RCS library are simulated from their description. Owners  of Racing Car Simulator are able to drive virtual F1 with the real characteristics of  those famous antique cars. All circuits used during the early 90s are simulated in RCS. Owners are able to compete on famous circuits such as Monte-Carlo, Silverstone or Monza using RCS on private or public networks. Access to public networks requires successful training and virtual accidents may lead to a removal of license to use RCS on public networks.

The use of 4D Seattle software is well demonstrated by Microsoft Train Simulator that allows the simulation of railroad tracks, stations and a variety of steam and electric engines, of various freight and passengers cars in landscape chosen by the user among real or fantasy landscapes. Train Simulator uses the same basic 3D landscape'slandscapes library as Flight Simulator. You may add new tracks to the existing landscape, the cost of construction is computed according the track construction progress ; you may select an accelerated time and you also simulate financial costs as well as costs of acquisition of land for your network. You can let Train Simulator establish for you signals and traffic lights or you may specify them. Then you acquire a fleet of engines and cars and establish schedules for your trains. You may select different scales and point of views to contemplate your network. You may even select a mechanics point of view or a passenger seat. Noises are reproduced according your point of view. You may appreciate the environmental troubles caused to the neighbors before really running your trains.

Although trains dynamic characteristics (acceleration,  speed,  braking) areis normally specified in the library, you may redefine the specification of  engines and cars (size, weight, power, rail adherence …) and / or  take the driver seat in a specific train.

Train Simulator economics may be simulated by specifying the passengers and freight transportation requirement in all stations. You may enter your own data and / or use real statistics from the Microsoft Network.

As the other simulations offered by Microsoft, Trains may operate in a network environment, gathering the functions of financial management on one PC, engineering management in another and letting different mechanics driving specific trains in their own PCs.

 

Microsoft is updating its collection  of Museums at FingerTips, inaugurated with the British National Gallery in 1973, to fit into the new 4D environment. A new front-end, compatible with previously edited paintings and sculptures, will allow virtual visits of museums and monuments. Microsoft expresses its intent to cooperate with UNESCO[52] in the reconstruction of ancient cities, buildings and monuments within the 4D space of Seattle. Monuments'Monuments representations will be used not only as visits, but in education games, publications and wargames.

All data collected in this collection are stored in Repository of Facts from which they become public after 10 years or owner rights whatever is the larger. For artistic works no more covered by artists or their heirs'heirs rights, Microsoft abandons the standard copyrighting of publications to allow a global and faster distribution of the patrimony of the humanity.

In addition, Microsoft introduces the Virtual_Travel program in conjunction with the Microsoft Network. Virtual_Travel gathers a collection of interactive animations (.VRFMMF files), pictures, music landscapes, 3D monuments, characters that you may personalize to you and your friends. The purpose of Virtual_Travel is to allow you to visit a country, a city, a monument, a museum,  at a time you select. So, you may visit Mongolia at the time of Chingis Khan or you may visit New Orleans during the 1930's. Virtual_Travel is actually a synthesis of the world such as it has been presently collected in the Network.

If you choose to view youryour (or your friends') character in Virtual_Travel , you may select to wear local clothes or apparel that makes you appear for instance as a pharaoh's scribe in Egypt or wearing chador whileen visiting contemporary Iran. You may 'borrow' costumes and jewelry from 'virtual' museums for those wearings.

Virtual_Travel program is part of Seattle. You may acquire data from several media of distribution. Media are distributed either by Microsoft or by third parties committed to Virtual_Travel compatibility. The license scheme recommended by Microsoft is to grant to a group ( a person or a group of persons such as a school class or a family) a 10 years license to get access to all Travel files (those published at licensing time existing and all those to be publishedavailable during the next ten years) Travel files concerning a region or a country of the world. This scheme will contribute to sponsor the collection and the digitization of facts throughout the world. The individual pricing of each collection will be published later, but it is the intent of Microsoft to be priced at a level as low asabout one tenth of a real trip in a country (excluding transportation). Microsoft recognizes that the available technology is presently unavailable to provide virtual travelers such sensations as odors, weather, taste of meals, jet lag and other things that real travelers enjoy. However, it makes many cultural objects at the fingertips of millions of persons who would never consider and / or afford traveling in remote countries. As Virtual_Travel includes monuments and objects of the past that have presently disappeared, it gives opportunities to real travelers to be exposed to past events.

A very usualinteresting occupation, when traveling, is to bring back souvenirs and send post cards to your friends. In Virtual_Travel, you have the capabilities to get free souvenirs by Edit-Copy objects in your bag[53]. You are only entitled to capture removable virtual objects, such as jewelry, cloth, animals, persons, art treasures and removable documents. Later, you will be able to paste them in your fantasy landscape. Removed objects lose their Time dimension and can be transported in a completely (and possibly anachronic world). You may bring Cleopatra in downtown Manhattan trying to seduce Napoleon by offering him gifts from your own design. Actually, by visiting the world  with Virtual_Travel you may envision to become a movie producer. You (or more exactly the character that represents you) may also send post-cards to your real friends (using their real e-mail address) or to some virtual friends, such as your dolls. Post cards are Document files including text, photographs and movies (not screen captures, but the 2D image seen from the virtual point of view[54]). By sending postcards to your friends you encourage them to pay themselves visits to the world of Virtual_Travel.

You can organize a travel group, in which different real people from different computers (of the same group) control  different animated characters. So, in a group visit, postcards from different characters have a good chance to reflect the sensibility of the sender. The tour leader establish the general framework of the visit, all the members have to stay in the same scene, but they may wandering at their convenience or they may stay close together (one character is taking control but the other keeps the freedom of the view direction and some movements). In a travel group, objects collected by the members of the party are transported by the tour leader and the same instance of an object cannot be collected twice.

You may wish to add to the Virtual Travel data base your own documentation about a place of travel. It may include photographs, maps and movies (either in video mode or in animation .VRFMMF processed mode. You may also include in a Virtual Travel  group real travelers who are on-line in real time. Those travelers can send you real time movies (in extended ..MPG (or AVI) format[55] ). Those virtual trips in proxy will be enhanced by the capability of real time incorporation of cameras able to record directly in .VRFMMF format[56].

You may store files in your computer (or network) or you may retrieve them from Microsoft Network. You may request via the Network  that files related to the region you selected be sent to you on a personalized CD-ROM to cut communication time (and charges). All the files used in Virtual_Travel are encoded with your name, so they cannot be used outside your group.

 

⁺Strategic Simulations Inc. announces the publication of its first title Japan V-Day. They use a combination of Microsoft 4D technology for a virtual representation of pre-war Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other cities and of SSI own warfare objects and methods. Players may select roles of USAF crew or those of   generals or Japanese ordinary citizens. Some methods  used  by SSI are developed under some classified US services contracts are specially encrypted and are not available in any source or intermediary form for export. Microsoft denies any responsibility and any liability for those methods and consequences thatwhich may result from their application to any object.

 

^}Microsoft announces an agreement with Sony recordings to extend its collection of music. Sony records will be republished in CD-ROM in Microsoft format. Microsoft and Sony will use the MPEG-3 format that will allow multivision[57] concert and opera movies, images of the score to be displayed on screen in synchronization with the music, as well as pictures and descriptive of the titles. Music may be included in compound documents. OLE4 Facilities will have the capability of enforcing intellectual property and copyright rights of musical works through group operations.

Seattle multimedia manager supports the encapsulated MIDI format which allows transmission of MIDI coded signals on LAN or RLAN (radio-LAN) networks. Each MIDI output data message is encapsulated into an IEEE 802-like frame containing the address of the originator and the time information. The limits to the throughput and the number of channels implied by the 31.5 Kbps of the original MIDI standard are overcome, allowing musicians to play together without wiring  (using RLAN), distance and number of players'players constraints. Virtual orchestra becomes possible through this feature, assuming a sufficient bandwidth to allow a natural feedback from the sound of other players.

Previously, there was no relation between MIDI coded music and digitally sampled sounds (e.g. .WAV data). In conjunction with Passport Designs Inc. , Microsoft provides an interactive conversion program SoundScore that attempts to translate a sound recorded from analog instruments, from singing voice, birds or various sources of "music",  MIDI and music score representations of those sounds. Independently from their contribution to music learning, this utility has manysome advantages for music data compression.

The representation of music sctores has lead Microsoft to implement in Document additional features[58] required to process music scores as if they  were  text.

You may also convert your .MID files into .WAV form without having to output them through a sound card. Such a facility will allow you to apply post-processing continuous algorithms not available on discrete representation of music as .MID format.

In reverse, you may use the  speech synthesizer of Seattle  to generate a synthetic song, with user definable accents and modulations. So, musicians will be able to incorporate in their compositions'compositions lyrics as well as musical instruments. Karaoke programs can  also now be run completely unattended by the singer.

 

^Antiques

Microsoft announces the creation of the William Gates Foundation for the History of Computer  Science (WGFHCS). This non-profit organization intends to keep memory of ancient computers offering to schools, universities, technical museums and the general public a recreation of the ancient computing environment on modern computers, more precisely in a Seattle Window environment. The foundation will be funded on the base of $5m per year, and will employ retired or unemployed software engineers and high school students in several places in the world. It will buy back licenses rights of old programs and will republish them in a CD-ROM form. Original platforms and devices will be emulated, and original devices will be optional.

  Initial publications ready for publication are Pong, the original version of CP/M 80, Windows V1, MS/DOS 1.0,  UNIX 1971 version and Visicalc.

MULTICS, Amiga, OS/2 Warp, AIX and Lotus 1-2-3 v1A  are currently under development. The  British chapter of WGFHCS is trying to reconstruct a version of Atlas and the French chapter is developing the 1950 Gamma 3 A/ET and GCOS64. In collaboration with Boston Computer Museum, the porting of SAGE system and that of DEC VMS v3.03 are being undertaken. Xerox PARC veterans are porting the original version of Smalltalk 80. WGFHCS is still trying to secure the acquisition of the original version of OS/360 ; WGFHCS is for the moment facing difficulties in locating people understanding the design of some operating system, people who, in some cases, may have not ever existed.  An interesting facility of the WGFHCS environment is the possibility to interconnect the ancient program to the new distributed world, the communication being in general limited by the capabilities of ancient system. One example is the possibility to integrate in a same war game Flight Simulator  and a real copy of the SAGE system, allowing historians to verify scenarios of a Third WW envisioned in the 60s and 70s. Ported systems will keep all their software development environment and retired programmers will be able to continue to exercizekeep their creativity, for example in COBOL, without having to learn the new Microsoft environment. WGFHCS estimates that the performances of anythe emulated ancient system will be in general satisfied by any contemporary workstation. However, real creation of original facilities like drum or band printers, punched cards'cards usage or open reel tape moving that may be desirable for shows and museums will require a special hardware attachment. WGFHCS is planning to develop some on a case by case  basis and will develop the drivers. They are available on a RPQ basis at a fee not exceeding the cost.

 

Personal Usage

 Seattle includes a built-in Microsoft Personal Assistant (MPA) application. Using the Personal Assistant from a notebook (under Windows for WorkGroups4.2 or MacOS System8), a Personal Digital Assistant (Apple, Sharp, or WinPads PDA) or a workstation, Seattle users may benefit from an assistant 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. MPA uses Scheduler++ to handle agendas. It includes Travel++ thatwhich automatically communicates with Microsoft EasySabre for train, airplanes, entertainment and hotel reservations. MPA Personal_Assistant communicates with other groups'groups members Schedulers to set up meetings and appointments.

Agenda tracking by Scheduler++ may determine the expected future position of the MPA bearer by computing the time-to-destination. It proposes an automatic rescheduling of missed appointments. Handling of time zones, a function rarely present in such programs, is fully integrated in Personal_Assistant

A user of MPA may set rules to protect his (or her) privacy, while enhancing his (or her) productivity. It handles hazards caused or miscellaneous delays and reschedules activities. MPA Personal_Assistant is distributed between the devices that are members of the personal group, and includes private or Microsoft RDS back-up. Communication between user and MPA is achieved  either through a PDA/subnotebook Keyboard/pen interface or directly through speech (direct or telephone). Automation of low qualification assistants or secretariats'secretariats tasks provided by Microsoft PA may lead to a significant increase of productivity in  business and other activities. MPA Personal_Assistant is included in next release of WinPad, MPA Personal_Assistant for Windows for Workgroups is available at the price of $39.95, MPA Personal_Assistant for PowerBook/ System8 is available for $59.99.

 

Specific Characteristics

^;Privacy is enforced through the definition of groups. For example, position information may be available to work groups during work hours only and itsthe precision of it can be filtered in each of the groupsgroup (e.g., federal authority may be made aware of « present in the country » only). Privacy conditions may be modified dynamically by each user within the rules established for the group. For example, onea family may adopt rules allowing some position fuzziness, another may adopt maximum precision.

Default values for privacy are set by Microsoft according to the laws and the Constitution of United States. Microsoft distributors may alter those default rules for distribution in specific countries but should not alter the capabilities for customers to set up their own privacy and securities rules, except  when explicitly constrained by law.

Some groups can be set up to limit shared documents to specific formats. For example, only official forms and their annexes can be made « shared » within to the IRS group. Informal notes cannot be "shared" in some official groups. Obviously, specific access rights can be established within a group.

 

When the reliability and the availability of data are considered important by their owner, he (or she) may consider using the Microsoft service called Repository of Facts   (ROF)[59]. Microsoft guarantees that the data (after the issue of a certificate of deposit) are maintained in a safe place and are guaranteed against  a large scope of mishaps improving by far the guarantees offered by banks and insurance companies. This service is provided by a combination of  world and space distributed computers. Although, Microsoft provides its best effort to protect data in all circumstances, are not guaranteed the damages caused by some cosmic catastrophes, by a deliberate destruction of ROF network or significant part of it by government or criminal individuals acts and by any act leading to the absence of survival and loss of integrity of Microsoft Corporation. Charge for ROF includes a charge for data change and a charge for data storage. Microsoft does not offer the deletion of data stored in ROF, but suspends the storage charge when the owner signifies it. Data stored in ROF may become public in accordance with the legislation of the country of their owner (50 years after their death for private matters, the expiration of intellectual property or similar rights for business matters). The geographical location of the ROF data being essentially undefined, Microsoft cannot fulfill a subpoena of the access of data issued by local or national authorities. Microsoft ROF comply however with present and future international legislation on facilities essentially similar to ROF.

Data stored in ROF can be made available to public through networks. When copyrighted, they may be declared by their owner as "on-demand only" and are transmitted for a single occurrence of use. An occurrence of use is defined as one single output. "On demand" data remain encrypted and any temporary copy is automatically destroyed  when this output has been successfully produced. Users of "on-demand" data are billed at the time of the extraction from ROF. "On demand" data are not necessarily outputted immediately, theirthey may be embeddinged within other objects is allowed and their output (printed, displayed, played) can be delayed according the wishes of the client. Preview of files including "on demand" data is allowed, but preview software filters the embedded "on-demand" data to provide only the necessary information to formatting. While, the output of "on-demand" objects or of data containing embedded "on-demand" objects is not performed, they can be stored and transmitted to another computer.

While "on-demand" data can be stored in non-Microsoft servers, Microsoft cannot be held accountable for violation of copyrights and intellectual property rights in other systems than Microsoft ROF.

Data exchange between applications via Clipboard, DDE and OLE convey the copyright information of documents transparently. Microsoft Document and various Viewers available from Microsoft output systematically a Copyright information paragraph in each output. This Copyright paragraph includes copyright information coming from parts of other documents.

If the output media is subsequently reproduced by an analog process, such as scanning, audio or video recording, Microsoft cannot be held responsible of any violation of the  laws governing traditional copyright and intellectual property rights.

Seattle  implements the Component Object Model  when referencing imported objects (i.e., data objects encapsulated through non-trusted methods)  by creating a dedicated server for that object class. Seattle  creates a  special process environment for executing non trusted procedures , environment that is destroyed after the execution of the procedure. By default, the methods accompanying all objects imported through Internet or any public network are reputed  non trusted.

 

Internationalization

From the location information, it is possible to determine the system local time and the local language of the user of a system. This is used for internationalization. In Seattle, a group may be given the International attribute.

The international attribute implies that local language will be automatically selected as the default option, but the user may also use English.

The internal code of Seattle is extended Unicode. Messages can be in  English and/or any language. The system also supports vocal language with the option to  select a locutor of the user choice.

The user of any native[60] application of Seattle may specify that his (or her) keyboard input is filtered by an Input Method Editor (IME) that transforms the keyboard entry in a Unicode stream. The most popular examples of IME are those allowing kana-kanji or Hangul translation as well as pinyin-Han translation. An escape mechanism to directly type English is available in IME. Specific IMEs are provided by Document to allow context recognized inputs. IME specific for pen-input is also available for most popular  languages (presently, English, Russian, Chinese and Japanese).

Win64 API supports speech recognition and translation of Unicode from any language into speech. Third parties may include their own speech recognition dictionary and language translation. Microsoft delivers as part of Seattle English and Japanese dictionaries, and makes available Cantonese for $69, Malay, Tagalong and Lao-Khmer for $49.95 each, European Union English and Central American Spanish are also available on request for $119.95 each. The support of other languages, like other European languages, will be made available by Microsoft according to market requirements[61].

TAPI (Telecommunications API) is extended by including speech recognition and an optional dynamic synchronous retransmisssion of the recorded speech. Speech generation is improved to support optional regional accents. Users should be aware that use of regional accents could impair future speech recognition by computers located remotely and particularly in countries where native language is not English. Users should be encouraged to have their English speech automatically or manually translated into Filipino English thatwhich happen to be the easiest accent for automatic recognition by foreigners. Using Seattle, the users should be able to replace old PBX and answerbacks functions by inexpensive personal computers.

 

Storage Management.

Microsoft recognizes the limits reached by several users of notebooks and owners of ancient personal computers on secondary storage. With Seattle, applications can stay compressed in .LZV format[62] on secondary storage. At the moment of the initialization of the application, it is decompressed (in virtual memory). Additionally, ACCESS and SQL servers store their tables in .LZW format, a slight variant of Microsoft compacted .LZV maintaining containers'  indexes to allow updates in place. Those improvements should decrease the usefulness of third parties disk compacting utilities. Microsoft is working with Intel and others on a hardware support of a .LZV format allowing the decompaction to be performed inside the CPU itself[63].

This version of microprocessors will be announced later and will be supported by an optional feature of the Seattle application loader. In addition, those microprocessors will allow the use of encrypted code that prohibit the deciphering of functions, algorithms'algorithms methods and signatures[64].

As very small files can be stored as members of a component library and that compression is supported as file level, it is less necessary to use compression at volume level as provided by DoubleSpace, Stacker™ or similar products. However, compatible interfaces for storage remapping between file systems and device drivers are maintained in Seattle.

Seattle handles various types of secondary storage including removable storage media. Access restrictions are now being stored in the media and a combination of aan key encryption of the table of contents of the removable media volume and of a data striping protect disallow the use by unauthorized users on another type of computer.

Automatic N-plication of data through the group network is also available.

 

^yAutomatic Power Management ( APM) was already available for systems powered by chemical rechargeable or not rechargeable batteries and nuclear fuel cells. APM is extended to support UPS backed electrical network, solar cells powered devices and mass inertia powered systems.

APM allows system to optimize not only their availability but also the electricity cost making choices between different recharging strategiesy, taking advantage of availability of free electricity such as hotel rooms (for battery powered units), sundecks (for solar-cells units)…

Systems with radio type connection may use the power transmitted by radio waves to maintain the charge of their back up battery. An application is the remote resurrection of a solar powered station on the south pole at Spring time or similar resurrection of some space based computers after a solar eclipse. The Plug&Play strategy is also applicable to the power units of any system allowing exchange of batteries or switching the type of power without a major (if any) disturbance of the software. Remote power control of appliances is fully supported.

 Power management procedures obey to the general security and privacy rules of the Seattle system. A practical application is to include in networks cars'cars ignition control[65] devices. So, Seattle will bring a significant improvement to the defense of  property ownership in troubled areas. Stables', private hHouses' and apartments'apartments doors may also take advantage from such a feature.

 

Resource management has been a plague of the open system software for long. Microsoft MS / DOS and Windows had often encountered system outages when reaching secondary storage limits, time-outs could be reached when processor requirements are not matched by the configuration. Recognizing this problem, Microsoft has decided to offer a Network Resource Service thatwhich provides  to all devices including wireless mobiles additional File and Compute servers'servers capability through a NRS pool of computing resources. NRS differs from Microsoft Repository of Facts (ROF), by the fact that NRS has no knowledge on the nature and the status of objects that are stored in NRS. However, it uses common facilities with ROF and provides the same availability services.

NRS can be used either for application or for system objects. NRS in Seattle v1.0 does not perform direct update of OLE4.O distributed data. Back-up of NRS located data towards removable media can be done using NRS. NRS services include the option of copying, storing or retrieving NRS located objects into or from ROF.

This service is available for only $1.99 per month plus communications and resources utilization charges. A continuous  monitoring of NRS usage allows the user to decide between investment into a private server or continuing to rely on NRS. Optionally, a user may rely entirely on NRS,  limiting its own investment into mobile devices. Microsoft NRS are scattered between several countries and daily backed-up in other locations. Initial locations of NRS centers will be Zurich, Hamilton (Bermuda) and Singapore.

 

Hardware

The minimum configuration of servers and stations is based on Intel processors starting from a single 486[66] with a minimum memory size of 32MB of main memory and a single disc of 1GB capacity. A reasonable configuration for servers and high-end workstations will be a Heptium (P7) based quad-processor unit with 128MB of memory backed by a 4GB disc and CD-ROM, with SoundBlaster32 or Microsoft compatible sound card.

Several peripheral connections are fully supported by Plug&Play adapters: PCI directly attached connections, ATAPI IDE, X-IDE and E-IDE adapters, SCSI devices.

Native support of CD (audio and/or data) juke-box or linear libraries provided by Sony, Matsushita and other vendors is  available in a mixable configuration of non-writable and rewritable discs. Stations require in addition a color graphic device able to display at least 1024x768 pixels.

To be able to displays several windows containing different color Palettes, Seattle has enhanced  DCI to support an extended palette. Extended palette is supported by recent display graphics cards. With old cards, Seattle attempts to remap the extended palette in 256 colors at the expense of the fidelity of colors.

Seattle generalizes the concept of docking-undocking that has been pioneered with the first notebooks in the early 1990's. A computer or an appliance running Seattle is able to accept dynamically an extension of its configuration by docking it (physically through a Plug&Play connector or through an infra-red or radio connection). This concept is different from the dynamic connection to a network, because the passive nature of the resources of the docking station. The docking station may includeincludes computer basic resources such as memory, additional processors and adapters but they are inactive between docking sessions. It is possible to dock different computers at different times in the same station. Security and privacy (password controlled access to files) areis implemented on the same way as if different persons were using alternatively the same workstation.

Distribution of versions based on NECµR4000 and 5000, DEC Alpha, Apple PowerPC (PCI-bus models exclusively and Portable devices based on PowerPC) , and IBM ES9000 derivatives  will be done approximately at the same time as Intel version.

Seattle  is able to operate on shared memory multi-processors (SMP) configuration up to 6032 processors. The performance obtained on a SMP system relative to the single processor’s one depends upon the interference of shared data references between the parallel threads and upon efficiency of the hardware. The 4 to 16 processors'processors configurations presently available shows a negligible overhead in the operating system. The behavior of applications depends generally of the multi-threading parallelism that was implemented in their design.

 In addition, Seattle supports cluster configurations (including such asDigital Equipment Alpha clusters and IBM Parallel systems). Those systems may be used either as a simple network of separate computers thatwhich may cooperate in group(s) or part of group(s) or as a true parallel system[67]. Their manufacturers may provide hardware, firmware and (or) basic software extensions improving the performances or the (local) reliability of the group.   Among the features available in many parallel systems, Extended Shared memory is supported as a throughput accelerator for distributed applications. It is specially useful for OLE documents used by separate applications. While NRS (network resources services) can have the same architecture properties of extended shared memory, it does not presently support the full OLE4 functionality.

Seattle is also an excellent choice as the operating system of highly parallel servers similar to  IBM SP3+ or Cray TS-5. Multi-threaded applications may operate indifferently on massively parallel systems, on distributed servers, on powerful SMP servers or on a combination of those. Microsoft offers a Performance Simulation Analyzer (PSA) which helps users to specify their hardware needs based on the real application code and/or formal design specifications extracted from the Visaural programs.

 

The mobiles'mobiles configuration depends on the specific application.  All mobile devices able to be members of  a Seattle system may carry a « MICROSOFT World » green logo.

 

Applications Programming

Seattle includes a Win64 API thatwhich is fully upward compatible with Win32 introduced in 92 with Windows3.1 and NT. Win32 support of the 4th dimension is limited to the relative time, applications referencing pre-historical events in OLE4 should be rewritten in Win64.

 

Seattle was developed in Visaural C++++, an extension of Visual C++, Microsoft intends to distribute Win64 development package with the next release of Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) 6.51. A particular care has been taken to optimize the x-huge[68] model and the P-code model of object code. It is expected that out-of-cache references of Intel and PowerPC code (P-code + interpreting code) may be reduced to less than 5‰ on systems with a cache size of 16MB.[69]

 The Workstation model of Seattle supports Visaural Basic for Applications 2.1 thatwhich is also the normal programming language of Microsoft applications such as  Word9.0, Excel87.0, Video for Windows 1.97, Notes 6.0, Pagemaker 4 and X-Windows extended.

As an example, using Visaural Basic for Groups Applications 2.1(Visaural BA) , developers can write an application providing the appropriate encouraging  tune for a cow pasturing  in Iowa fields according to the variation of the milk consumption in Kuala Lumpur supermarket and the production output of a Nestle plant in Switzerland.

Other examples of possible applications might be remote baby sitting, virtual teleconferencing and even remote sexual activities.

Visaural C++++ and Visaural BA debuggers include 4D dockable windows to allow  to see source code, object code and 4D data simultaneously. Docking another copy of Visaural allows the debugging of remote client/server applications not only in the native station code but using Cross-Development run time in the machine language of a foreign workstation. Using the audio and speech functionalities of Visaural does not requirerequires audio hardware facilities. A sound emulation in 4D visual may be used instead or in addition to sound hardware.

Hosting applications development with Visaural C++ and Visaural BA requires the workstation version of Seattle  with a minimum of 40MB of main memory and 985MB of secondary disc storage or a 400MB capacity on a server. A non fully functional version of the Visaural development environment is available under Windows95 (alias Chicago) and Windows NT4.0.

Microsoft expressed its intent to supply products or to license rights forVisaural  target platforms for the following non Seattle server platforms: IBM MVS370-ESA, IBM AIXv3.7 and v4.1, DEC VMS, NEC GCOS, and for the generic UNIX System V.4.

In supporting distributed applications, Visaural Basic and Visaural C++++  allows the programmer to take benefit of multi-threading capabilities of Seattle.

Many limits previously encountered in Visual Basic and Visual C++ are removed from Visaural products. In particular, the stack size is extended to a programmer set limit set by the programmer up to the size of virtual memory, and allows recursive procedures and event procedures applications entirely based on event procedures.

Controls are now definable inside and outside forms in the 4 dimensions of the workspace. New controls are provided such as Time_navigation, Long_Lat_navigation, Altitude. In addition, customs controls stored in a Custom Control_ Library can be shared in OLE mode between applications. So an application may dynamically use and manipulate a control located in a different application thatwhich may run in a different computer. Specific access rights can be assigned to controls. Audio (and voice[70]) controls are introduced allowing voice commands and answers to be used in Visaural applications; audio controls may be used not only as alternate « short keys » for  standard controls, but as specific controls for voice directed applications. Rotating Tool bars controls are now part of basic Seattle controls. They decrease the clutter in the display. They can also rotate under the application control, providing additional flexibility to your user interface.

You may embed controls, including audio controls as part of compound documents.

The concept of environment objects is extended to distributed objects. An application may have access to the environments objects of applications located in a different computer. Specific access rights may be assigned to environment objects. Such a facility allows the administration of any Seattle  computer from a remote site[71].

By specifying a method  external to the computer containing an object, an application programmer may specify objects operating out of his (or her) domination.

Using OLE4, the programmer may define a multi-computer application system composed  of several App objects each exposing its own objects to the view and the manipulation by other App objects located in the same or in other computers. In the Visaural system itself, such a process is used for program preparation and compilation, a new program is being given birth as the consequence of the relationship between the program editor and the program generator.

Telephone objects, properties and statements defined in TAPI specifications are fully supported in Visaural. For example, it is possible to program a personal server not only to record calls and faxes but to determine what is the closest way to reach the addressee, among the mobiles of his (or her) personal group, taking in account his(or her) appointments and eventually calling hospitals or police in case of emergency calls. When rerouting messages (voice or faxes) outside the personal group, messages can be selectively encrypted by a personal key (submitted through a keypad or a phone message).

OLE4 also allows to paste in a "document" not only another object, such as defined at the introduction of OLE technology, but also any composite object. For instance, you may paste in a Document report an image which has been produced in a virtual reality application such as Vistapro™ from a DES map obtained from the US Geological Services server[72], image to which you could have added a drawing of your house from a 3D package such as Floorplan for Windows™, that you have  both ray-traced  taking in account real-time local clock, taking in account sun position and reflections on a glass window. You may guess that such a document may require quite an amount of processing and elapse time (the latter specially when a remote service is required). To improve the total response time, Seattle OLE4 implementation doesdo use multiple threading processing in parallel as many parts of the document that is achievable. Another consequence of the elapsed time required to process a document would be that new changes might be required before the document processing is complete. OLE4 includes a featurefeatures to "freeze the time" dependent functions according to the processing speed.

The user has the possibility to commit a document (i.e. to create an object fixed in the "time" dimension) or to let it able to evolve either on the next access or asynchronously during the spare time of the computer.

The capability to define very complex objects could require a large amount of storage resources (think to an image reflected into parallel mirrors). Instead of relying on the storage capacity limit to abort the computation, Seattle OLE4 implementation stops the recursion according to the object intrinsic property (such as the reflection coefficient of the mirror or the characteristics of the media intended for output the document).

 

 

The concept of transaction is extended to long duration tasks thatwhich may encompass several applications execution occurrences that may occur in different computers possibly linked only by human activities. Rollback of files updates in such long transaction is possible except when the results are alteration of some system objects and non-reversible external operations, such as denial of rights to access his (or her) group, termination of physical life and similar operations. Rollback of messages and forms occurrences is done directly when the message is still pending to be delivered. It is done through messagesmessages cancellation notices when messages have not been delivered to an output device or outside a group. To allow recovery of long transactions and more generally speculative programs on future events or data thatwhich are still uncertain, the concept of shadow applications occurrences is introduced. A shadow application occurrence mimics the behavior of real applications occurrences without making committed updates to files and databases. This concept is used for business simulations, scientific simulations, games interacting with reality, application debugging… It is the application designer responsibility to use the shadowing concept, that may imply a significant overhead, or not use it, taking a snapshot copy of files and databases or taking the risk to interfere with the real world. Microsoft denies any liability on property or health damages or loss, due to ana improper behavior of applications.

More generally, in Seattle,  objects have a 4D dimensions position, which is specified within a certain hypersphere of uncertainty. Objects may be shadow objects, with a conditional existence or they may be real or committed objects. Object may exist only within a group or they may exist across the groups (i.e., their name, their state and their properties have static values are that may be inherited by other groups if and when a remapping of the groups occur. Such objects may sometimes named "absolute objects".

The diameter of the hypersphere of uncertainty is variable within a group according to members.

Within a group, taking in account the position of the group accessible objects and the position of absolute objects thatwhich has been published, Seattle insures that two distinct committed objects do not occupy the same 4D position. Shadow objects are repositioned in accordance. When an absolute objectobjects is made known inside a group, databases local to this group are verified  for discrepancies and committed  objects may have to be updated, reset in shadow state and applications may have to be rerun for full database consistency. MDVB is a convenient way for updating the values of absolute objects (for example, prices, statistical data, legislation driven methods or controls, address directories…). Business activities, such as financial models and business practices can be permanently updated without any human intervention.

Using OLE4 and MDVB, you may encompass the limitations of previous OLE specs to limits of a workgroup (excluding servers). Now, you may receive notices, through MDVB, from any server that some data you  have been used in your document have been changed and you may have your data updated automatically. There is obviously a cost to broadcast those infos even by high speed satellite links. The server you have used takes notice that you have used a given object (set of data or program) and if data are modified[73], it broadcast the change during some period (the period during which updated data isare  broadcasted depends on the nature of data).

 

Data Bases

Seattle internal database engine is that of Access 4.5  thatwhich is used by System Management Server[74] support. Visaural BA includes the necessary procedures to handle system and user Visaural-defined objects.

Access 4 has been extended to support new data types such as the extended precision of objects coordinates. FoxPro data bases and language areis now supported by Access 4.5 and FoxPro performances are surpassed by Access JET engine with extended cache option. Existing FoxPro users are now encouraged to migrate to Access 4.5.

SQL Server has been extended to encompass the DB2 and Oracle functionalities and is available for $999.95 for IBM and DEC mainframe computers and for $99 for Seattle servers. SQL Server provides full access to Access Data Bases as well as other popular relational data bases.

 

Coexistence

Microsoft recognizes that many installations have some ancient software sensitive to the year 2000 syndrome. Seattle includes a utility « check_date » that scans the software to identify all suspected references to a 2-digit date and propose changes for programs written in Microsoft Basic or VisualBasic, Excel macros and FoxPro macros.

Seattle has enhanced capabilities not only to interconnect to previous networks such as Netware, SNA, DEC DNA, Unisys, Groupe Bull DSA, but also to provide a mapping of existing terminals or client applications in view to reroute old applications communications through Seattle networking facilities. So, it will be possible to use a wireless connected subnotebook anywhere in the world as a 3270 terminal of a specific application. The recommended strategy is to add to the main frame operating system a gateway application distributed by Microsoft (for IBM MVS ) or by third parties. This gateway will allow the customer to start dismantling the passive part of its old network before converting its applications. This gateway operates in co-existence with the old network, however, Microsoft does not guaranteeguarantees the synchronization of it with the modifications of the network facilities of the main frame operating system. A sound customer strategy will be to freeze all modifications of the OS and of application programs soon after the incorporation of the main frame server into the Seattle network.

Old main frame programs[75] may be converted to a Seattle environment by recompiling them, using for instance Micro-Focus COBOL for Windows  compiler that establishes a Visaural compatible environment for encapsulating old programs in a rejuvenated system. Several companies are developing similar reengineering processes for FORTRAN and C applications designed for UNIX.

Licensing Policy

There is basically no major change in Microsoft licensing policy for software products that are available either as a group license or as a single user license.

However as a convenience for users of Microsoft Network, the license is now represented on the form of a credit card smart card that is obtained from Microsoft when it returns the registration form or shipped with direct orders. This card can be also used as a telephone charge card. It allows the legitimate owner who has forgotten to download its software products in its mobile computer to request the download of it from Microsoft Network. Microsoft grants such service to software editors who wish and to third parties add-ons providers.

Seattle products do not presently use smart cards to enforce software protection, but the security API has been enhanced to allow a limited usage of the software for interested editors who require the card to be physically available on the computer on which the licensed program is run. To allow the use of numbered copies on a network, this requirement is usually cumbersome. The security API allows to log informations about all the files produced by the usage of the licensed programs. Files are stamped with the user-id and the begin time and duration. OLE4 has been enhanced to convey such informations in embedding objects.

Lost or stolen cards are replaced by Microsoft, however, the operating system may deny the re-entry of objects that it suspects of a protection violation and it reports the problem to the system administrator who has the authority to override the denial.

 

Maintenance

To take benefit of free maintenance service by Microsoft, all subnetworks have to be connected to MDVB through at least one of their servers. Seattle includes a software synchronization protocol as part of its network hand-shaking facilities. Automatic updates of software configurations are provided not only for Seattle but for all Microsoft applications.

All updates including functionalities improvements are documented through the Microsoft Development Network at the subscription rate of $299/year. The documentation of bug Fixes and other corrections is  available on CompuServe GO MICROSOFT.

Maintenance of software produced by Microsoft associated development companies may  be provided  optionally according to those companies'companies maintenance rules. Microsoft provides MDVB to those companies without charge. The responsibility of Microsoft is not engaged by that service.

 

 

Support for Handicapped or Impaired Persons

With Seattle, Microsoft improves its support for persons who are temporarily or permanently without not fully operational capabilities.

Persons with visual limitations will take benefit of the speech recognition and of speech synthesis facilities built in the system. StarTreck pointing device will have an option to report an audio feedback on the pointing device position and speed. Microsoft is working with a non disclosed manufacturer to provide a 3D sensing device thatwhich allows a person to « see » the  by his (or her) hand the output of a computer.

Persons with manual disability will be able to control  all the functionalities of the System by speech control. StarTreck will also to be used by persons with limited usage of their hands.

Persons with auditive  limitations will be able to display music in a window using standard score notation or wave form. They will also be able to transpose sound in a different frequency band, for example the visible light band.

 

Minority people will be able to set up their system to transpose into their native language English or whatever is the specific language of the groups they happen to belong. Microsoft is also delivering primitives and controls thatwhich allow developers of applications to accept input from any present or past. language

 

Although some personal mobile devices might be specific to the gender of a person, Seattle system guarantees that no gender or sexual discrimination is built in the code and in the system data supplied by Microsoft. Microsoft denies however any responsibility thatwhich may be due to specific rules or properties established by system administrators or application programmers. Microsoft retainsretain all rights to suspend services such as MDVB, ROF or NRS to customers violating US or international treaties on human rights.

Documentation

Microsoft documentation is available through the following numbers[76]:

 

HongKong         852-804-4234

Japan                03-5461-2617

Korea                82-2-531-400

Taiwan              886-2-504-3122

India                 91-11-646-0694

Singapore          (65)22207381

Argentina          54-1-814-5105

USA and NA      (800)759-5474

Israel                972-3-275-7034

Arab countries   971-4-513888

European Union  31-10-258-8864

Russia              7-095-244-3474

 

Microsoft also transmits continuously video programs on Astra (channel 147), AsiaSat (channel 325) and several cable programs (in the US : TCI 235 to 239, TBC 131) for user education on Microsoft products. Programs are available on Microsoft Network, CompuServe (GO MICROSOFT).

 

Interactive demonstrations are available through all Microsoft subsidiaries and distributors in the world. Those demonstrations are available on  Interactive TV (channel'schannels information and rates available on Microsoft Network, Internet[77] or CompuServe) and may involve participation of viewers personal computer in a demonstration group.