Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts

Sunday, 9 August 2015

Microsoft introduces translator app on smart phones and watches



Microsoft has launched a translator app that supports 50 different languages on various platforms.
Released this week, Microsoft Translator is a new app designed by the software giant for iOS and Android users. The app supports phones and tablets as well as the Apple Watch and smartwatches that run Android Wear.
Users can type or speak the word or phrase they want translated. In response, the app will show the translated text on the screen and then speaks it out loud. Users can also and copy and paste text from and to other apps for translation. At this point, Microsoft Translator supports 50 different languages, including English, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Russian.
Google's Translate app, on the other hand, supports only 27 languages for text and voice conversion. But Google's app lets users point their mobile device's camera at a sign, book or other object with text on it and watch as that text is automatically translated into the language of their choice.
Microsoft has already been serving up language translation via its Bing website along with apps for its Windows Phone mobile operating system and its Windows 10 desktop software. The company also offers translation through its Skype Translator program.

Saturday, 8 August 2015

Microsoft Open Sources Windows Bridge For iOS: What This Means



Microsoft has taken an early build of Windows Bridge, the tech giant's development environment for Apple's iOS, and released it as open source, a few months after revealing plans to port apps for the iOS and Android to Windows.
The component of Windows Bridge, which also goes by the name of Project Islandwood, is expected to be released this coming fall, along with new capabilities that Microsoft will be adding to the Visual Studio development environment. In the meantime, Microsoft has pushed out an early build of the technology into Github and into the open-source community.
While the history and development of personal computers are largely connected with Microsoft, the Windows app environment, not including games for the desktop PC, has been struggling. Developers have largely focused on apps for the iOS and Android, which are operating systems that have found massive success with the push of technology to mobile.
The goal of the development efforts of Microsoft is to make it easier for iOS and Android developers to create ports for their apps to be used on Windows.
Windows Bridge currently has three versions under development. The first version is Project Astoria, which is the development environment for porting apps for the Android mobile operating system to Windows. It is currently at the technical preview stage, with only invited developers participating in the testing. The public beta for the technology is expected to be released this coming fall season. The second version is Project Centennial, which looks to port the current Win32 Windows apps for Windows 10 and the Windows Store. This technology will be undergoing public testing by 2016.
Project Islandwood, looking to port apps from iOS to Windows, will support apps for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 that were developed using x64 amd x86 processor architectures. Microsoft will also soon add compiler optimization and ARM support to add mobile support, according to a post on the Windows Blog.
Releasing Project Islandwood into open source is a very important move for Microsoft to bump up the number of apps that it has on the Windows Store. According to figures by Statista, there were 1.6 million apps available on the Google Play Store for Android users and 1.5 million apps available on Apple's App Store for iOS users. While Microsoft has not revealed how many apps there are on the Windows Store, the number could be fewer than 300,000.
By releasing Project Islandwood to open source, there will hopefully be more developers that will take their iOS and Android creations and port them for Windows platforms.

Friday, 7 August 2015

Microsoft challenges Google with its own translator app



Released Thursday, Microsoft Translator is a new app designed by the software giant for iOS and Android users. The app supports phones and tablets as well as the Apple Watch and smartwatches that run Android Wear, Google's adaptation of its mobile software for wearables.
You can type or speak the word or phrase you want translated. In response, the app shows you the translated text on the screen and then speaks it for you. You can also and copy and paste text from and to other apps for translation. At this point, Microsoft Translator supports 50 different languages, including English, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Russian.
Microsoft has already been serving up language translation via its Bing website along with apps for its Windows Phone mobile operating system and its Windows 10 desktop software. The company also offers translation through its Skype Translatorprogram, which is soon due to become part of the Skype app itself. But this is the first expansion of Microsoft's translation app to the world of iOS and Android mobile devices and smartwatches.
With the new app, Microsoft is entering into Google territory -- the search giant has long offered translation services on the Web as well as for iOS and Android. Google's Translate app is more advanced in one respect. It lets you point your mobile device's camera at a sign, book or other object with text on it and watch as that text is automatically translated into the language of your choice. But Google's Translate app supports only 27 languages for text and voice conversion. Google does not make a version of its app for Android Wear smartwatches, offering an advantage to Microsoft.
Microsoft Translator provides several benefits to Apple Watch wearers. You can speak directly into your watch to get an instant translation in any of the 50 different languages. The app can correctly pronounce the phrase for you through your watch. And all your translations and settings are synchronized between your watch and your phone.
How is the app scoring among users? Quite well. At Apple's App store, only 13 people have reviewed it so far, but collectively they've given it a score of 4.5 stars out of 5. And at the Google Play store, a total of 426 reviews have also earned the app a 4.5 rating.
In my brief use of Microsoft Translate, I found the app quick and simple to use. You can easily switch between typing or speaking the words you want translated. You can speak or type your phrase and see or hear the translation in one language. You can then choose other languages to hear the same phrase in a different language. The app did not offer spoken translations in certain languages, such as Hebrew, Thai and Vietnamese. But otherwise, it provided text and speech for most of the languages I chose.

Wednesday, 5 August 2015

Microsoft Expands Its Parental Leave, Bolsters Paid Time Off And 401k Matching



On the heels of Netflix’s institution of ‘unlimited’ paid maternity and paternity leave for its employees, Microsoft this morning announced that it is bolstering its own parental leave policies for both mothers and fathers that work at the firm.
Previously, Microsoft offered eight weeks of paid maternity leave, along with 12 weeks of ‘parental leave,’ of which eight were paid, and four were not. The company is making all 12 weeks of leave now paid, starting in November, meaning that new mothers can take a full 20 weeks off, all paid.
New dads get the fully paid 12 weeks, but not the eight weeks reserved for the mom who actually gave birth.
The company will also allow expectant mothers that are nearly due to take up to two weeks off to, in the words of the company, “manage the physical impact that often comes with late pregnancy and to prepare for the upcoming birth.”
Parents can also use their 12 weeks of ‘parental leave’ in chunks, or all at once. That may allow parents to stagger when they are individually off, helping to smooth scheduling issues for families with new tots.
Microsoft also added two new paid holidays to its calendar, and dramatically increased its 401k matching program to 100 percent up to the federal limit. (Verizon, please.)
The improvements to parental leave are to be applauded. Certainly, Microsoft can afford the changes, but the non-monetary impact is what matters — the software company is helping families manage a key part in their child-bearing cycle, and is helping women who might have felt pressured into leaving their careers over their new kid to stay in the workforce.
Microsoft is a tech company, and changes like the above help tech retain more diverse talent. That’s a good thing. More of this sort of thing, please.

Microsoft Corporation Windows 10 Plagued With Privacy Loopholes



Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) released a free update of its operating system in the form of Windows 10 last month; the adoption rates hit 14 million within two days. The latest operating system is filled with some privacy holes that the company is likely to take advantage of for future marketing purposes. Bidness Etc looks at how you can protect yourself.

Protect Your Bandwidth Because Microsoft (Msft) Windows 10 Wants To Steal It


As per Lauren Weinstein’s blog, Microsoft Windows 10 is stealing your bandwidth every day that you use it. There is a feature deep within the operating system called “Windows Update Delivery Optimization,” which is enabled by default when you install the operating system. This feature allows Microsoft to use your bandwidth that you receive from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), and then send updates to itself and other computers on the company’s operating systems. This sending of data to other machines around the world is done without the user’s permission, which also leads to the company cutting down on its own bandwidth costs to deliver updates to PCs.
Ironically, the company states that it will not be stealing bandwidth if the user has a metered connection. However, it’s up to the users to change their settings to let the company know that they are using a metered connection, which is buried deep in the operating system’s settings. In the case a user does not change the settings, then the company has no way of knowing whether the computer it is stealing bandwidth from has a metered connection or not. This is how peer-to-peer (P2P) networks work; torrents, in case you were wondering, use the same technology but that is performed through a user’s own discretion. In Windows 10’s case, this stealing of bandwidth is done without permission, which would annoy users in the future.
To turn off this feature, users should go to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update > Advanced options; following this, users should change how they updates are delivered and switch turn off this option.

Microsoft (Msft) Has Permission To Collect Your Data


It’s no surprise that most users accept the terms and conditions without even reading them; in this way, they usually give permission to companies to collect data without them even knowing it. More so, with Microsoft Windows 10, the revised privacy policy that users accept gives the company authority to collect data from your PC whenever they want and store it on their servers.
Techworm states that the operating system is going to sync data by default; this includes browser history, favorites, bookmarked websites, Wi-Fi passwords, and other data. Additionally, your conversation with Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana is also recorded in the company’s servers. Microsoft’s privacy policy states that to better provide results to users, Cortana will be going through data like location, calendar, apps, emails, messages, your call logs, and contacts to provide you with a more personalized experience.
Microsoft has also assigned a unique advertising ID for each computer that is connected to the servers of the company. Microsoft also has a web search engine called Bing, which collects data which is then sold to third parties to provide users with more personalized search results.
A clause of Microsoft Windows 10’s privacy policy states: “We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services.”
In the case users want to deactivate automatic syncing and personalized ads then you can follow these links and steps to make the experience more secure and private.
For opting out of personalized ads, users can visit thispage while going to Settings> Privacy > General > Change Privacy Options.
To stop automatic sync on your operating system, you can visit this tutorialthat will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to disable Microsoft from taking your data.

Microsoft (Msft) Windows 10 Will Give Anyone Access To Your Wi-Fi


It is common to share your Wi-Fi password with those who come over to your household. Windows 10 Wi-Fi sense usually just goes through your friends list on Facebook and then gives the friend in the vicinity access to your wireless network. While this is really convenient, it raises safety concerns and may give users who are not that close friends access to a person’s Wi-Fi.
To disable this feature, users should go to Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > Manage Wi-Fi Settings. Anything that shows any signs of sharing passwords should be disabled. More so, there’s also the issue that if a friend comes to a user’s house and connects to the Wi-Fi, then Microsoft will have the power to use the friend’s operating system to send data to its servers for ad personalization. To opt out of this feature, users should add “_optout” to the end of their wireless network names and Microsoft will then not look at your data.
Microsoft has announced that this was the last version of the operating system, after which users will only get updates for life to make the experience better and faster in the future. It is pertinent to note that Microsoft will activate these setting every time you perform an update, so users should make it a habit to disable these features accordingly.

Microsoft's Halo World Championship antes up $1M for e-sports glory



Microsoft wants to pump up the appeal of its Halo game franchise among professional gamers.
Later this year, the company will launch the first-ever Halo World Championship, an e-sports competition with $1 million in prizes, Microsoftannounced at the Gamescom conference on Tuesday. The sum is the highest ever paid for a Halo tournament and will be available only to gamers playing Halo 5: Guardians, which launches October 27 to become the latest installment in the Halo franchise.
"The Halo series has always been synonymous with console [e-sports] and online competition," Microsoft wrote in a video description on YouTube. "With Halo 5: Guardians we are fully embracing that legacy with the announcement of the inaugural Halo World Championship, which launches later this year, featuring over $1 million dollars in prizing. The Halo World Championship will focus on Halo 5: Guardians' hypercompetitive Arena multiplayer experience."
Microsoft doubling down on e-sports is further proof of the unique and important impact the trend has had on the gaming world. E-sports have become a major industry, as some of the top gamers around the world battle each other in a wide range of games. In some cases, individuals will play each other, while in others, teams will compete. Several popular franchises, including Halo and Dota, are among the favorites for e-sports professionals.
The growth of e-sports has spawned professional gamers who make a career of playing video games. They often make money not only by winning games but also through sponsorships offered by connected companies. The firms that back e-sports tournaments, meanwhile, are cashing in. According to market research firm Newzoo, e-sports revenue generated from tickets, events, sponsorships and other sources will exceed $250 million worldwide this year. Newzoo estimates that there are over 113 million e-sports fans worldwide who tune in over the Web or attend events to see gamers competing.
With that much attention, Microsoft could potentially prop up Halo 5 as time goes on. Given the popularity of previous titles in the franchise, Halo 5 is expected to be popular at launch. Becoming a hit with e-sports professionals and their fans could extend the title's appeal and keep the millions of people deeply interested in the digital sport continuing to play the game long after its launch. Dota 2, a wildly popular game that launched in 2013, is arguably one of the best examples of that.
"With Halo 5: Guardians we are fully embracing that legacy to make Halo, the Xbox One and the Elite controller the gold standard" for console e-sports, a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.
Halo 5: Guardians is the second installment in the second trilogy in Halo's history. The first trilogy was designed by the franchise's creator, Bungie. That game company, previously owned by Microsoft, agreed to hand over the Halo franchise to Microsoft so it could be spun off into an independent company. Microsoft's 343 Industries is now in charge of the franchise and designed Guardians' predecessor, Halo 4.
In addition to announcing Halo World Championship at Gamescom on Tuesday, Microsoft during its keynote presentation showcased a matchup between two of the world's best e-sports teams, Team Epsilon and OpTic Gaming, on a multiplayer map in Halo 5. Microsoft also announced a Limited Edition Halo 5: Guardians controller it will launch on October 20, and it announced that another Halo entrant, Halo Wars 2, will be available in the fall of 2016.

Nokia nosedive: How can Microsoft avoid another $10bn mobile debacle?



The maths has been done, and the total cost of Microsoft's ill-informed acquisition and subsequent write-off of Nokia's mobile phone arm has been totalled at a staggering $10bn.
The figure came to light after Microsoft had to disclose details of the financial activity around Nokia when filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
"Impairment, integration, and restructuring expenses were $10bn for fiscal year 2015, compared to $127m for fiscal year 2014," Microsoft submitted.
"The increase was mainly due to impairment charges of $7.5bn related to our Phone Hardware business in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015."
The fiscal year ended on 30 June 2015, and the $10bn cost of Nokia seems to have been reached by combining its previously stated $7.6bn write-off of Nokia with $2.1bn "employee severance expenses and the write-down of certain assets in connection with restructuring activities".
Human money sponge and ex-CEO of Nokia Stephen Elop cost the company a total of $33m to hire and compensate, and while the precise value of his severance package is still up in the air, it seems likely Elop wouldn't have departed without a significant cash bonus.
A further $435m was spent on "integration expenses... associated with the acquisition of [Nokia]", as Microsoft put it.
In 2014, Microsoft was valued at an estimated $62.8bn, which means around a sixth of its total value has potentially been wiped out on the failed Nokia acquisition.
The acquisition was the brainchild of Microsoft's previous CEO, Steve Ballmer, who announced his plans in September 2013 to gobble up Nokia and adopt its mobile phone designs as a Microsoft sub-brand, afteralready favouring the ailing mobile phone company for its own equally ailing Windows Phone platform.
Described in an interview with Computing as "like bolting two sinking ships together" by ex-BT CTO and futurist Peter Cochrane, the "gaudy and horrible" branding strategies of Nokia and Microsoft collided head-on in something of a train-wreck of unfortunate decisions.
Microsoft decided to push Nokia's Lumia brand as the face of its phones, but the forefront models were still essentially feature phones with smartphone trappings, favouring technologically impressive cameras over an operating system or phone shell that appealed to the public.
Windows Phone itself continually failed with every iteration to launch a mobile application store that chimed with consumers or enterprise, with many developers deciding to steer clear of a "third pillar" in the iOS versus Android war, in a situation all-too familiar to BlackBerry, whose BlackBerry 10 platform began curling up and dying at a similar time, and for similar reasons.
Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose main achievements so far have been to slim down Microsoft's workforce while bringing together the company's various platform services under a "One Microsoft" message with "cloud first, mobile first" strategy, now seems to be hell-bent on another try at mobile.
"I think we want to be smart about how many of these phones do we want to generate, how many, which price points we want to participate in," Nadella sagely said during last month's company earning call.
"That's where you will see the most significant operational changes from how we operated last year to the coming year."
Windows 10 for phones is due to launch in an official capacity when a "blocking bug" is cleared. But in Computing's opinion it still requires a properly-developed app store in order to stand a chance in a market still ruled by iOS and Android.
Microsoft would also do well to properly leverage the obvious advantages of a mobile phone that enjoys a much closer relationship with Windows 10 on the desktop than the app-based functionality of Office, OneDrive and other Microsoft tools and services on rival mobile platforms.
With so much riding on it , it will be fascinating to see how Windows 10 Phone performs in the market - especially the enterprise, which is begging for a post-BlackBerry solution.

Microsoft Makes It Harder To Break Up With Bing In Windows 10, Critics Cry Foul



Windows 10 (so far) is a hit for Microsoft. It has been well reviewed, it’s free and already has millions of downloads. It also makes IE successor Edge the browser default and equally makes it harder to switch away from Bing as your default search engine.
There are roughly 1.5 billion Windows PC users around the globe (although the number is falling). Microsoft wants Windows 10 on a billion of them within three years.
Bing is integrated throughout the Windows 10 experience and voice-powered assistant Cortana, which uses Bing, has made the jump to the PC. As the image above indicates, the search bar (Bing bar) is always available at bottom of the desktop screen. Bing in Windows 10 will retrieve both your “local information” on the machine, stuff from the cloud and web content. This is very similar to the direction Apple is going with Spotlight, though the latter doesn’t offer full-blown web search.
Some Microsoft critics, such as Mozilla CEO Chris Beard, have called the new default browser experience “disturbing” and said it turns back the clock “on [user] choice and control.” In an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Beard says the following:
When we first saw the Windows 10 upgrade experience that strips users of their choice by effectively overriding existing user preferences for the Web browser and other apps, we reached out to your team to discuss this issue. Unfortunately, it didn’t result in any meaningful progress, hence this letter.
We appreciate that it’s still technically possible to preserve people’s previous settings and defaults, but the design of the whole upgrade experience and the default settings APIs have been changed to make this less obvious and more difficult. It now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows. It’s confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost.
Essentially, Beard and others have argued that Microsoft has erected new barriers to switching browsers (and search engines) — in the hope that most users won’t take the time to figure it out. (As with the Yahoo default Firefox search experience, some will and some won’t.) However there’s already a great deal of advice about how to enable Google search results via Cortana in Windows 10 and change browsers.
Some users will be inclined to see the new Edge/Bing set up as a conspiracy of sorts and the return of the “old Microsoft.” Others will shrug. Yet it is pretty clear that were Microsoft still in the globally dominant OS position it once enjoyed — a status now occupied by Android — it wouldn’t be permitted to do this, at least in Europe.
The Europeans fought for years with Microsoft over browser choice and fined the company nearly $800 million over the issue. Yet the market has dramatically changed since the EU battles with Redmond over the issue.
The PC continues its decline, Android reigns globally as the top OS and Microsoft has tried and so far mostly failed in mobile as it focuses increasing attention on iOS and Android devices. It’s not the juggernaut it once was. Accordingly the company may not be asked by regulators to make it easier to change browsers during Windows 10 setup (and by extension search engines).
Bing currently has roughly 20 percent of the US search market. These default settings, provided Windows 10 continues its advance, could give it another few points over time. As Alan Masarskyhas pointed out a few points of market share could be worth billions to Bing and represent a corresponding loss to Google.
As one would have expected, Google (and its fans) have already countered with help, advice and prompts on how to switch browsers and search engines.

Monday, 3 August 2015

Microsoft’s Offshore Profit Pile Surges Past $100 Billion Mark



Microsoft Corp.’s stockpile of offshore profits rose to $108 billion, with a 17 percent increase over the past year as the company continues reaping profits in low-tax foreign jurisdictions.
The company crossed the $100 billion mark, making it just the second U.S. corporation -- after General Electric Co. -- to do so, according to a securities filing July 31. Apple Inc. has more cash abroad than Microsoft, but it already has assumed for accounting purposes that it will pay tax on some of the stockpile and thus has less than $70 billion offshore that would affect earnings directly if repatriated.
What’s keeping Microsoft’s cash abroad is the U.S. tax code. The company would be required to pay the difference between its foreign taxes and the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate if it brought the money home.
To get its $108.3 billion back, Microsoft would have to pay the U.S. $34.5 billion in taxes. That equals a 31.9 percent rate, which suggests that the company has paid as little as 3.1 percent in taxes on its foreign income, because of operations in low-tax Ireland, Singapore and Puerto Rico.
The Internal Revenue Service and Microsoft are in the midst of an intense legal battle over the company’s transfer pricing, or intracompany transactions. The federal government is auditing the company’s returns as far back as 2004, and Microsoft has challenged the government’s hiring of outside lawyers.
Peter Wootton, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

Repatriating Profits

Under current law, U.S. companies owe the full 35 percent rate on profits they earn around the world, but they don’t have to pay the U.S. until they repatriate the profits. That gives companies an incentive to book profits overseas and leave them there, and that’s just what they’ve done.
U.S. companies have more than $2 trillion amassed outside the U.S., according to a Bloomberg News review earlier this year of the securities filings of 304 companies.
Apple has more than $200 billion in cash stockpiled, with almost 90 percent of it overseas. As of its most recent annual report, Apple had $69.7 billion in profits on which it hasn’t assumed taxes.
U.S. lawmakers are looking for ways to get some of that cash back in the U.S. President Barack Obama supports a one-time 14 percent tax on stockpiled profits, with the proceeds going to highways and other infrastructure programs. Some Republicans favor a similar approach and are working on a detailed plan.

Microsoft lays out its top three priorities — and none of them mention Windows



Microsoft's strategy is changing.
After years of focusing on its Windows operating system, Microsoft's 2015 financial filing with the SEC  makes it clear that the company is now pursuing a more balanced strategy divided between Windows, its cloud offerings, and its productivity suite.
In the document, Microsoft has an entire section entitled "Our vision" that lays out the company's top three priorities for research & development for the coming year.
They are:
  1. Reinvent productivity and business processes. 
  2. Build the intelligent cloud platform.
  3. Create more personal computing.
None of these are especially new — the first refers to the ongoing evolution of Microsoft's popular Office 365 productivity suite and related products. The second refers to the Microsoft Azure cloud computing product. Both of those are looking like big hits for Microsoft so far, with subscription revenue starting to come in.
The third one is something a little different for Microsoft, and it's something the company's been talking up for a while now.
Windows 10 is here, and Microsoft is positioning it as an operating system for the post-PC era. Amid shrinking PC sales and the still-growing market for mobile, Microsoft wants to make sure that its products and services can be everywhere, always. 
Windows 10 is a part of that.
The new operating system is landing primarily on desktop and laptop computers right now, but Microsoft wants to be sure that Windows 10 works just as well on tablets (like its own successful Surface tablet/laptop hybrids), connected home devices, and basically whatever else, forever. 
The other part of that mission harkens back to those first two bullet points. With Microsoft providing productivity applications and the Cortana digital assistant for iOS and Android right alongside its own Windows platforms, it wants to make sure that you're using its apps no matter where you're at
Microsoft is fond of calling this a win for consumers, since it means your apps, data, and preferences follow you from device to device, making for, yes, "more personal computing." 
And the Microsoft Azure cloud is designed for developers who want to swipe a credit card and throw supercomputing power behind the scenes of their app, no matter what platform on which that app will run.
Ultimately, the takeaway here that Windows is a part, but not the whole, of the overall Microsoft strategy. Windows 10 exists to integrate with and push those services, but those services are becoming the main event.
Quite a contrast with a company whose mission used to be "A PC on every desk and in every home."

Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Release Later This Year As Surface Tablets Sales Rise



Microsoft Surface Pro 4 release was reportedly pushed back in October and the sudden increase in Surface tablets sales.
According to Microsoft's latest earnings report, Surface tablet revenues grew by 117 percent or $888 million thanks to Surface Pro 3 and Surface 3 tablet that were launch in June 2014 and May 2015, respectively.
Executive vice president and chief financial officer Amy Hood, the aforementioned tablets were popular among people in the educational sector. She said that the success of the tablet is attributed to its uniqueness and the company's improved discipline and execution of the device.
"Surface is clearly a product where we've gotten the formula right, earned fans, and can apply this formula to other parts of our hardware portfolio," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 release is now speculated to happen in October. It will run with Windows 10 operating system. If rumors proved to be true, the laplet will battle head on with Apple's iPad Pro. Other reports stated that the new generation of laplet will be announced next year. However, Microsoft has not revealed the official specs and features of the device until now.
Some of the purported features of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 are: 12-inch screen display with 2K pixel resolution, Intel Skylake processor, stylus, and USB Type-C port. Other rumored features are keyboard accessory, Type Cover 3 and Docking Station. Other purported features of the tablet are 16GB RAM and up to 1TB internal storage.
IT Pro reported that Microsoft Surface Pro 4 will be released alongside a Surface Mini. The screen size of the miniature tablet remained undisclosed. However, based on the market, it will be around 8 inches. There is no official confirmation yet whether Microsoft will venture in miniature tablets.

Sunday, 2 August 2015

Securing Today’s Data Against Tomorrow’s Quantum Computers



Call it an abundance of caution. A Microsoft research project has upgraded the encryption protocol that secures the Web to resist attacks from quantum computers—machines that are expected to have stupendous power but have never been built.
Governments and computing giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Google are working on quantum computers because tapping subtle effects of quantum physics should let them solve in seconds some problems that a conventional machine couldn’t solve in billions of years (see “Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics”). That might allow breakthroughs in areas such as medicine or energy. But such machines would also be able to easily break the encryption used to secure information online.
Intelligence organizations see that as a positive—the National Security Agency has an $80 million research program on quantum computing. But some researchers think we should be planning to upgrade our encryption so life can continue normally in a quantum-computing era. A team from Microsoft, chip maker NXP, and Queensland University of Technology have now shown how that might be done. They are testing a quantum-computer-proof version of the transport layer security protocol, TLS, that online banking sites and others use to encrypt online data.
Krysta Svore, who leads a research group working on software for quantum computers at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, says this is more than just an academic exercise. “Given that scalable quantum computers are under development, it is crucial to prepare,” she says. It can take a decade or more for a new cryptographic algorithm—or “primitive”—to be properly tested out and widely deployed, she says. “There is an urgent need to determine other primitives now.”
When your bank or e-mail provider uses the TLS protocol to secure your data, today it typically uses the RSA algorithm (the letters stand for the last names of its three inventors). That creates pairs of digital security keys by multiplying together large prime numbers. One key is public and the other private; if you can figure out which primes were used to make the public key, you could also re-create the private one and unlock encrypted data. But conventional computers can’t quickly work out the primes used to make a key.
In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor proved that a quantum computer could easily find the primes behind a key. By using quantum states to exploit the mathematical structure of the problem, such a computer could effectively take a shortcut to the right answer. Shor’s algorithm can also be modified to crack a stronger alternative to RSA encryption, known as elliptic curve cryptography, which is becoming more common and is also used with TLS to secure online data.
The new quantum-proof version of TLS generates encryption keys using a different mathematical problem that’s believed to be beyond the practical reach of both conventional and quantum computers.
That system was tested by using it to encrypt data moving between two PCs, one taking the role of a Web browser and the other a Web server. The quantum-proof encryption protocol moved data 21 percent more slowly than a version using elliptic curve cryptography, as some websites do today, but the researchers consider that penalty a reasonable one to pay if their idea is polished up for real-world use.
Ari Juels, a professor at Cornell Tech and previously chief scientist at the security company RSA, says it makes sense to prepare our encryption for quantum computers now. Outdated encryption lingering in websites or software already causes security problems, even with the relatively slow progress made on encryption-beating attacks, he says.
However, right now it’s not certain that the math used in Microsoft’s quantum-proof software will always be intractable for either quantum or conventional computers, says Juels. Mathematicians and cryptographers haven’t studied them as intensely as they have RSA or the encryption used today. “We’ve no solid assurance,” he says.
Svore agrees but says the signs look good so far—people have looked for quantum shortcuts to the problem used in the new version of TLS for 15 years without success. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s researchers are studying possible alternative forms of quantum-proof encryption. Svore says she also wants to educate more computer scientists and programmers about how to write code for quantum computers so they are better prepared to use—or defend against—them when they do arrive. “We need to raise awareness on the power of quantum computing,” she says.

Microsoft hikes Australian Azure cloud computing prices due to falling dollar



Fears the falling Australian Dollar could hit the value businesses yield from US-based cloud computing services have arisen after Microsoft hiked Australian prices for its Azure cloud services by 26 per cent on Saturday.
A year ago on 1 August 2014, the Australian dollar was worth 93 US cents; by Saturday that had plunged to 73 cents. In a report issued last week Goldman Sachs suggested that the dollar could slide to 67 cents within the next 12 months. 
Microsoft's new prices won't affect existing annuity volume licensing agreements, but will apply to new or renewing contracts. A company spokesperson said that the company policy was to "periodically assess our pricing to ensure there is reasonable alignment with the market," and confirmed the Australian price rises took effect on Saturday.
In spite of that, in an interview last week, Jason Zander, corporate vice president for Microsoft Azure, stressed that Microsoft remained committed to price matching arch rival Amazon.
"For storage and networking and some of the components we have a price match guarantee – if Amazon drops their price then so do we."

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AWS declined to comment directly on its plans for Australian cloud pricing. A spokesman referred to statements made by Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky in an earnings call with analysts a fortnight ago when he acknowledged "uncertainty surrounding exchange rate fluctuations," but said that regular price reductions were a part of the AWS business model. "We're in for the long haul."
AWS revenues rose 81 per cent during the second quarter to $US1.8 billion, while operating income rose an astounding 401 per cent to $391 million. That figure included a $71million boost from a favourable exchange rate.
Microsoft, which also operates in the Software as a Service part of the cloud market with Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, during its year end results last month announced that global commercial cloud revenue had grown 88 per cent - 96 per cent in constant currency - and was now operating at $US8 billion a year annualised run rate.
The competition between these two giants is healthy for the sector overall, but Gartner analyst Michael Warrilow questioned Microsoft's decision to hike Australian cloud prices when the local instance of Azure is less than a year old.
"What is most surprising is the extent to which this first adjustment seems driven by Microsoft's accounting team, rather than a vendor trying to build and foster a new market," Mr Warrilow said.
"Over time, all cloud vendors will have to adjust for foreign exchange changes. What remains to be seen is whether the price rises, due to currency shifts, will also be matched by the falls."
Mr Zander said he did not believe currency induced price changes were a major issue for most enterprise CIOs switching to cloud.
"Currency fluctuations – yes there is pricing associated with that…but most of the time with developers, CTOs and CIOs, they are comparing 'what it would cost me to go run it myself versus what kind of cost savings I can get inside the cloud'," he said. 
"There are already such significant wins there, that with the currency fluctuation generally, I don't get a lot of concern. They are comparing the old bill to the new bill and getting significant savings."
Mr Warrilow warned that currency induced price fluctuations were a fact of life for all Australian IT users. 
"There are two only ways to protect against it: either become a successful FX currency trader or only buy from domestic vendors. Neither is prudent," he said. 
"The better approach is to look at pre-purchasing cloud usage in advance rather than pay-as-you-go. It won't entirely protect against rises but it can provide bigger discounts and defer price changes until the end of the commitment. It's all about price predictability, and Microsoft needs to be doing a better job to communicate that – as will others."