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Submission + - MS squeezing SQL Server customers on licensing (crn.com)

Submitted by yuhong
yuhong writes: "Microsoft's SQL Server business has hit the $5 billion mark in terms of annual revenue and is growing like gangbusters, according to CEO Satya Nadella. " What Satya did not mention is where this revenue comes from. According to an article from CRN, "Licensing experts believe this stunning figure is primarily due to the company raising prices last summer for many of its enterprise products [such as SQL Server]."

Comment Re:Advanced? (Score 1) 95

by UnknownSoldier (#47518645) Attached to: Finding Life In Space By Looking For Extraterrestrial Pollution

Exactly. This human myopic assumptions are purely asinine at times. (Just like Scientists assume the Laws of Physics are constant for the universe based purely on visual data which has huge margins of error.)

Other stupid assumptions: Assuming life favors a single-star system when in reality it favors a twin-star system.

Earth is the anomaly here; NOT the norm.

Submission + - Microsoft to Finally Pull the Plug on Windows RT

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year.

Submission + - 'Just Let Me Code!' (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrew Binstock has an article about the ever-increasing complexity required to write code. He says, "I got into programming because I like creating stuff. Not just any stuff, but stuff other people find useful. I like the constant problem solving, the use of abstractions that exist for long periods nowhere but in my imagination, and I like seeing the transformation into a living presence. ... The simple programs of a few hundred lines of C++ long ago disappeared from my experience. What was the experience of riding a bicycle has become the equivalent of traveling by jumbo jet; replete with the delays, inspections, limitations on personal choices, and sudden, unexplained cancellations — all at a significantly higher cost. ... Project overhead, even for simple projects, is so heavy that it's a wonder anyone can find the time to code, much less derive joy from it. Software development has become a mostly operational activity, rather than a creative one. The fundamental problem here is not the complexity of apps, but the complexity of tools. Tools have gone rather haywire during the last decade chasing shibboleths of scalability, comprehensiveness, performance. Everything except simplicity."

Submission + - Finding life in space by looking for extraterrestrial pollution (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: If what we know as advanced life exists anywhere other than Earth, then perhaps they are dirtying their atmosphere as much as we have and that we could use such pollution components to perhaps more easily spot such planets in the universe. That’s the basics of new research put for this week by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that stated if we could spot the fingerprints of certain pollutants under ideal conditions, it would offer a new approach in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Submission + - MagicJack Inventor Dan Borislow Dead at Age 52 (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Nightwraith
Nightwraith writes: Dan Borislow, whose “MagicJack,” peddled in television infomercials, helped pioneer free phone calls through the Internet, has died. He was 52.

His death was confirmed by Brad Shewmake, a spokesman for MagicJack Vocaltec Ltd., the maker of the device. Borislow was the founder and former chief executive officer of the company, based in Netanya, Israel, and West Palm Beach, Florida.

He died yesterday of a heart attack after playing in a soccer game in West Palm Beach, according to an e-mail today from his friend, Douglas Kass, founder of Seabreeze Partners Management Inc. in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Dan was a true telecom pioneer whose vision, creativity, energy, passion and single-minded focus was the driving force behind the success of MagicJack,” the company’s CEO, Gerald Vento, said today in a statement. Vento replaced Borislow as the company’s chief executive on Jan. 1, 2013.

Submission + - 'Optical fibre' Made Out Of Thin Air 1

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: Scientists from the University of Maryland say they have turned thin air into an "optical fibre" that can transmit and amplify light signals without the need for any cables. As described in the research, this was accomplished by generating a laser with its light split into a ring of multiple beams forming a pipe. Very short and powerful pulses from the laser are used to heat the air molecules along the beam extremely quickly. Such rapid heating produces sound waves that take about a microsecond to converge to the centre of the pipe, creating a high-density area surrounded by a low-density area left behind in the wake of the laser beams. The lower density region of air surrounding the centre of the air waveguide has a lower refractive index, keeping the light focused, and allowing the higher-density region (with its correspondingly higher index of refraction) to act like an optical fibre. The findings, reported in the journal Optica, have applications in long range laser communications, high-resolution topographic mapping, air pollution and climate change research, and could also be used by the military to make laser weapons.

Submission + - Motley Crüe's interesting take on photography copyright (petapixel.com) 1

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Concert photography sounds like a great job but like anything else, it's tough to make a dollar. The heavy metal band Motley Crüe's most recent photography licence appears to be making that harder. A leaked copy claims that "Licensor agrees that it shall not license any of the Materials (or shall not exploit any of the Materials) without the written consent of the Licensee which shall be withheld in Licensee’s sole discretion." Effectively, that professional photographers relinquish their copyright. This is followed by a secrecy clause that you can read more about on PetaPixel.

Submission + - Firefox 33 gets Cisco's OpenH264 (ghacks.net)

Submitted by NotInHere
NotInHere writes: As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the <video> tag and WebRTC, which has a codec war on this matter. The module won't be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla's answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before.

Submission + - Microsoft reports a whopping $23.38 billion in revenue for FY14 Q4

Submitted by DroidJason1
DroidJason1 writes: Microsoft revealed today in an earnings call that quarterly profit declined 7.1% as the company absorbed a financial hit from acquiring Nokia's money-losing cellphone business. Microsoft also reported a whopping $23.38 billion in revenue for FY14 Q4, as well as an operating income of $6.48 billion. The company also reported $1.99 billion in phone revenue, stemming from its purchase of Nokia’s hardware assets for more than $7 billion. Microsoft also sold 5.8 million Windows Phone-based Lumia handsets in the period. That business cost the company $0.08 in earnings per share and lost it $692 million in the quarter. Had Microsoft not purchased the asset, it would have hit its profit mark. Azure and Office 365 grew more than 100 percent in just one year. Office 365 for consumers picked up another 1 million subscribers, ending the quarter with more than 5.6 million. Microsoft is clearly trying to sort out its profits and margins, especially since the company recently revealed that 18,000 employees were being laid off.

Submission + - Microsoft brings two open source tools to Azure (pcworld.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Following through on promises from new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft continues to add support for non-Microsoft technologies, allowing them to run well on the company’s Azure cloud hosting platform.

The company has partnered with two organizations that offer popular open source programs for managing cloud resources—Packer and OpenNebula. Microsoft is releasing drivers that will make it easy to use the programs on Azure, as well as with Microsoft server software for in-house deployments.

Packer is increasingly being used by system administrators to create and then manage the operations of virtual machine images. Running from any OS, Packer assembles and configures the necessary components for a virtual machine and can create identical copies to run on different platforms, such as Linux and Windows.

Packer can also work with popular open source configuration tools such as Chef and Puppet to automate the procedures of rolling out many virtual machines at once.

“Packer has been so popular lately that we heard from people that they want it see it on Azure,” Mahugh said.

Microsoft is also adding support for the OpenNebula cloud management software. OpenNebula could be a key technology for companies interested in running hybrid clouds, a model in which some operations run on a public cloud like Azure and others run in-house, perhaps on a private cloud.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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