The real news here is that an OS that has less than a year of support left is at around 37% market share. XP is falling at about 1% per month - but will still be a substantial part of the market (probably at least 25%) when Microsoft stops releasing software updates.

Google would clearly prefer to drop billions into stuff like balloon internet as opposed to fighting the endless war on Microsoft Office.

In general, advocates of the humanities have done a poor job of explaining why they are necessary. Which is problematic given that one of the things one would hope that someone in the humanities could do was come up with excellent persuasive arguments about things.

Microsoft has built an impressive new entrant to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, and Ubuntu is there for customers who want to run workloads on Azure that are best suited to Linux. Windows Azure was built for the enterprise market, an audience which is increasingly comfortable with Ubuntu as a workhorse for scale-out workloads; in short, it's a good fit for both of us, and it's been interesting to do the work to bring Ubuntu to the platform.

Given that it's normal for us to spin up 2,000-node Hadoop clusters with Juju, it will be very valuable to have a new enterprise-oriented cloud with which to evaluate performance, latency, reliability, scalability and many other key metrics for production deployment scenarios.

As IAAS grows in recognition as a standard part of the enterprise toolkit, it will be important to have a wide range of infrastructures that are addressable, with diverse strengths. In the case of Windows Azure, there is clearly a deep connection between Windows-based IT and the new IAAS. But I think Microsoft has set their sights on a bigger story, which is high-quality enterprise-oriented infrastructure that is generally useful. That's why Ubuntu is important to them, and why it was worthwhile for us to work together despite our differences. Just as we need to ensure that customers can run Ubuntu and Windows together inside their data centre and on the LAN, we want to ensure that cloud workloads play nicely.

The team leading Azure has a sophisticated understanding of Ubuntu and Linux in general. They are taking a pragmatic approach that will raise eyebrows around the Redmond campus, but is exactly what customers want to see. We have taken a similar view. I know there will be members of the free software community that will leap at the chance to berate Microsoft for its very existence, but it's not very Ubuntu to do so: let's argue our perspective, work towards our goals, be open to those who are open to us, and build great stuff. There is nothing proprietary in Ubuntu-for-Azure, and no about-turn from us on long-held values. This is us making sure our audience, and especially the enterprise audience, can benefit from the work our community and Canonical do no matter where they want to do it.

From: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1158

MSFT tends to get things right on their third go. Surface is getting Outlook and a start menu in the next month or so. Surface 2 is going to have a higher resolution display. Will it work? Who knows - but they seem to be giving it a serious shake.

Remember the rage around here a few years back when Sony nixed Linux on PS3. Or the whole "rootkit fiasco"? Amazing how quickly past outrage is forgotten.

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-mooc-moment-and-the-end-of-reform/ - discusses that MOOCs haven't really been tested in terms of how good they are at educating people. The article also suggests that the push for MOOCs is coming because governments can no longer afford to provide college education, so by pushing to an online model, they can shrink the college sector. They still fulfill their responsibility of "educating people" - but they don't have to pay for all those expensive bits like college buildings and academics. The article suggests that a small number of people will get a "traditional premium education" which costs an arm and a leg and where they get to interact with an academic directly. The majority of people though will get their education in a way similar to how IT vendors do certification today. Students self study from MOOCs and then book themselves in for exams taken at authorized testing centers. Anyway the article is a lot more detailed - but the push for this stuff is coming because it's a quick way for governments to cut a lot of spending whilst claiming to be embracing "the revolution in education".

The reason there aren't a whole lot of beacons detected by SETI is pretty clear. Every time someone lights up a beacon, the Space Lizard Starfleet turns up in orbit and it's buffet time. Beacons are like an evolutionary test. The races that send them out end up as lunch. The races that keep quiet get to live another day.

SOPA et all gives the EFF something "important" to do as a distraction from doing things that are important. Get nerds excited about copyright protection for a bunch of Hollywood elites and they don't excited about their data being sifted by three letter agencies. It's the same strategy that the right uses - get voters wound up about abortion and same sex marriage and they'll ignore the other stuff that may be detrimental to them and have an actual impact on their lives.

Juveniles get different sentences to adults. "Vigilante Hacker" is an adult and the reported possible sentence is "maximum possible" which is quite different to "an actual sentence".

This article on Penny Arcade Report provides some detail that the OP lacks: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/microsoft-outlines-their-system-for-used-games-licenses-and-family-sharing

While I understand why they've taken this position, "The Internet" != "WWW". Increasingly content producers are publishing content through app stores because apps provide content creators with a piece of mind that distribution across the DRM free web does not.

We will get to see the result of the grand experiment of publishing content on the web versus through apps. Content follows the money. If there is more money to be generated distributing content over a DRM free web, that's where it will stay. But if there is more money to be made distributing it through locked down apps on locked down platforms - well there's no reason to think that people won't abandon any technology as quickly as they adopt it if the content that they want to view migrates somewhere else.

What's really surprising is that torrents aren't infected up the wazoo with malware anyway.

Xbox One includes and requires Kinect. This means that each Xbox One has an internet connected camera. In every living room, dorm room and bed room where someone places an Xbox One http://windowsitpro.com/blog/csi-effect-not-everyone-wants-kinect-camera-their-living-room

If your job can be automated, it will be automated. Most jobs that involve sitting in front of a desk at a computer will be automated as AI improves. AI won't get rid of *all* the jobs, but it does allow one person to do the work that at one stage would have required many people. Plumber is bloody hard to automate and it's pretty difficult to come up with software that allows one plumber to do the work that five plumbers did a couple of years ago.