Saturday, August 14, 2010

Book: TRANSCEND by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD
Chapters 1-3 free online

Ray Kurzweil is a leading futurist and inventor, actively exploring "singularity" and related ideas. This book provides very interest view on health and aging, as well as some good advices.

The premise is that information technology is increasing its capability on exponential scale, doubling every year or two. This revolutionize many other fields, including health care.

There are very interesting "dialogs" with authors in "year 2034", that is 25 years in the future.

For example, on page 15 of chapter 1 (about brain and sleep) they talk about virtual reality by means of "nanobots" floating in bloodstream of brain...

There is also a description of a useful problem-solving technique while you sleep, starting on page 23...
Visual Studio LightSwitch | Microsoft® Visual Studio®

A new set of tools from Microsoft, for building business applications.

Based on Silverlight and RIA services.

Will be shopped a level of Visual Studio, between "Express" and "Pro"

LightSwitch links
Microsoft WebMatrix

"WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database)."

Microsoft "all-in-one" package for deploying simple web apps

WebMatrix links