Computerzworld

Google Wave is a project announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 28, 2009.It is a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki and social networking, mixed with spellchecker and translator extensions, which are able to work in concert. It is planned to be released later in 2009.

Google announced on the Wave site that the service will feature an open protocol, Google Wave Federation Protocol, that can be used to build a “custom Wave system”. It provides APIs for writing extensions on both the client and server. Google also announced that they plan to release the majority of the source code as open source. Google Wave is created using the Google Web Toolkit.

VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by German software company innotek, now developed by Sun Microsystems as part of its Sun xVM virtualization platform. It is installed on an existing host operating system; within this application, additional operating systems, each known as a Guest OS, can be loaded and run, each with its own virtual environment.

Supported host operating systems include Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp, Windows XP or Vista, and Solaris, while supported guest operating systems include FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp, Windows and Solaris.

According to a 2007 survey by DesktopLinux.com, VirtualBox is the third most popular software package for running Windows programs on Linux desktops.

DreamSpark is a program set up by Microsoft to provide students with software design and development tools at no charge. The program was originally directed at college students, but now it has been expanded to include high school students. The DreamSpark program was announced by Bill Gates on February 19, 2008 during a speech at Stanford University. A video interview with Bill Gates is also available. It is estimated that up to 35 million students will be able to access these software titles free of charge through this program.

Several development software titles are available for download through the program. They include :

* Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
* Expression Studio 2 (includes Web, Blend, Media and Design)
* Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
* Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
* Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, with SP2
* Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition
* XNA Game Studio