The offices of Zynga, Pinterest, AirBnB and other companies in San Francisco's South of Market District were under lockdown Friday after a shooting at a nearby store located in the same building as AirBnB's headquarters.
Two people were killed and one was injured in the incident at a jewelry store at 888 Brannan St. at about 2 p.m. local time Friday, according to local news reports.
The suspect emerged from the store "covered in blood" and fired at police before he apparently ran out of ammunition and surrendered, the San Jose Mercury News reported. No police were injured and no motive had been determined, the paper said.
The jewelry store, near the corner of 8th and Brannan streets, is in the basement of a large building that's also the site of AirBnB's new headquarters a few floors up.
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Microsoft has completed its purchase of InCycle's InRelease business unit, announced in June, and is now deploying the software to offer DevOps capabilities to its Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server users.
The company has released an InRelease preview for Visual Studio of the company's flagship software and has discussed how the software will be folded into Microsoft's line of development software.
"The real interest in DevOps is about figuring out how to streamline the delivery of the software from the developer's desktop to the production environment," said Brian Harry, Microsoft technical fellow in charge of Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft's application lifecycle management product.
The emerging practice of DevOps seeks to shorten development time of software by having software developers work more closely with system administrators and other IT operations staff. The InRelease acquisition is providing Microsoft with a set of tools it can offer its customers to facilitate DevOps workflows.
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With a shareholder vote scheduled for July 18, the battle over Dell's $24.4 billion plan to go private intensified Friday as investor Carl Icahn and his affiliates issued an enhanced offer for the company.
Icahn and his partner, Southeastern Asset Management, issued a letter to Dell shareholders offering a warrant to buy a share in the company at $20 over the next seven years for every four shares that they sell now. Icahn's plan calls for part of the company to continue to be publicly traded.
The new offer is in addition to the previous proposal to buy shares at $14 each. Making the calculation that shares will rise over $20 once the suggested proposal and new management is in place, Icahn said in the letter that the entire deal is potentially worth $15.50 to $18 a share for current shareholders.
In the letter, Icahn said that he and Southeastern are "completely committed to bringing in management that we expect to be far superior to Michael Dell who we believe has had an abysmal record during the last three years. We believe there would be several excellent candidates for this position who would be very interested in running this company once a clear mandate has been established."
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In another example of the consumerization of IT, people have embraced cloud storage and file sharing services like Dropbox both at home and at work, and CIOs better take notice about this trend, according to a Forrester Research report.
"There is huge business value in these types of services," said Rob Koplowitz, co-author of the study "File Sync and Share Platforms, Q3 2013. "They solve a bunch of business problems."
Dropbox and similar services, with their intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, make it easy and convenient for people to sync files across multiple personal and enterprise devices, including tablets and smartphones, and share these often large files with colleagues, clients and partners, he said.
The problem for enterprise IT leaders is that this is yet another technology product that employees are using outside of their companies' controlled IT environment.
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Chinese government officials agreed to crack down on software and other piracy and to take steps to ensure that state-owned organizations use legal software.
The commitments, reached during negotiations with U.S. government representatives this week as part of the countries' Strategic and Economic Dialogue, will grow U.S. exports and help create U.S. jobs, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said.
The agreements "promise real results for American innovators, creative industries and workers, from more vigorous protection and enforcement of trade secrets to strengthened software legalization efforts at state-owned enterprises and improved enforcement of intellectual property rights," he said in a statement.
China agreed to implement software management systems to promote the use of legal software by state-owned enterprises, and the country's negotiators promised to take action against Internet piracy and trade secret theft, said the BSA, a software trade group.
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Reader Chris needs to reinstall Windows 7 Home Basic on his laptop. Just one problem: he lost his recovery discs.
A more common problem is when you need to reinstall Windows and you never had recovery discs to begin with. Few manufacturers provide them anymore, and many new PCs don't have optical drives even if they did.
Thankfully, there's a way around this. All you need is a Windows ISO file (basically the entire Windows operating system in a single container) and the free Ei.cfg Removal Utility. The latter deletes a key file inside the former, thus allowing you to install any version of Windows.
Let me explain that a bit further. Windows 7 and 8 installation discs are version-specific; they're designed to match up with your product key. That's why you can't use, say, a Windows 7 Home Premium product key to install Windows 7 Professional, even if you have a disc for the latter.
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According to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, the future of Microsoft involves such things as "living" documents, the Microsoft equivalent of "Google Now," a blurring of email and chat, and the ability to add a gaming layer to everyday activities.
It's an ambitious vision, and Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer laid it all out in a strategy document that accompanied his "One Microsoft" memo outlining an ambitious company reorganization. While most of the early attention paid to Microsoft's strategy correctly focused on what the reorganization means for the short term, it's worth focusing on what the company has in store for the longer-term future of its product groups, too.
Ballmer made much of the fact that Microsoft is reorganizing around devices and services and moving away from being a purely software-driven business. But Microsoft was founded on identifying and meeting key needs that it can address, such as productivity, collaboration, and fun. What Ballmer's document appears to do is essentially remix those concepts, combining them in much the same way painters mix primary colors together, to develop new and profitable combinations of technologies.
Ballmer addresses five key areas: the future of documents, anticipatory data, the future of social, gaming, and the "shell" of the Windows interface.
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Leviathan: Warships is a game of classic warship tactics...or would be, if Admiral Nelson had railguns and lasers at his disposal. Victorian styling, World War I armored battleships, and far-future force fields and beam weapons combine to give Leviathan a unique style that works perfectly for a tactical game.
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When Microsoft added support for the revamped Start page into Windows 8.1, that eliminated the need for dedicated third-party Start menus, right? Wrong, say developers like Stardock, Classic Shell, and others.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the third-party devs say there's still a need for their products, even though Windows 8.1 will be more friendly to those used to the traditional, or legacy, Start menu found in Windows 7. Many have released updates for the Windows 8.1 preview, but none that spoke to PCWorld said that they've thrown in the towel.
If nothing else, fans of Iobit's Start Menu 8, Classic Shell, and Stardock's Start8 can rest assured that their favorite plugins aren't going away. (Pokki, an "apparating system" that was designed to facilitate the interaction of mobile-style apps with the Windows OS, also offers a "classic" Start menu.)
StardockThese products fill a need: to ease the transition to Windows 8 and its unfamiliar Start page. In many ways, Windows 8 is just Windows 7 with a tablet interface layered on top of it, but—sorry!—no Start button. Users upset by the jarringly different Start page had no refuge from it other than third-party alternatives.
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Your business makes a number of impressions on customers, but few business owners give much thought to how happy those customers are while they're waiting in line.
Generally, that level of happiness is incredibly low. Americans collectively spend a total of 37 billion hours each year waiting in line. Waiting in line is punctuated by boredom, anger, and sometimes even violence. Great amounts of science have been poured into how to make waiting in line less miserable. (See the first link for a few tips, like Disney's use of winding lines to conceal their actual length and habitually overestimating wait times so guests are happily surprised when they get to the front of the queue faster than expected.)
Such trickery may help ease some of our suffering, but most businesses don't have the luxury of wrapping a line around an interactive Winnie the Pooh exhibit to amuse customers while they wait. Instead, they regretfully funnel customers into a world of misery, where they're surprisingly likely to abandon their purchase and walk out if the line is long. If they do stick around, satisfaction levels plummet and those shoppers may never return to the store again.
Fortunately, high-tech solutions are forthcoming.
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Let's go grab some burgers. Or maybe Thai food sounds good? If everything else is closed I'm sure we can go for some tacos. It's just important that we get some dinner and have a really good time—and you can certainly try in Save the Date.
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Anyone looking to snag a Windows RT tablet should hold off until Sunday, when at least one retailer will be lopping $150 off the base price of Microsoft's Surface RT. Staples will be selling the 32GB Surface RT for $350 starting Sunday, July 14 until Saturday, July 20, as part of the retailer's weekly promotional sales. But whether the Surface RT's cheaper pricing is part of a larger, more permanent price cut or just a temporary drop for one model appears to be up for debate.
The Staples price drop appears to confirm an earlier report by The Verge which said Microsoft plans to cut the prices for the 32GB and 64GB Surface RT. Except it doesn't, really.
Based on The Verge report, you will reportedly be able to pick-up the 32GB Surface RT for $350 or $450 for the 64GB model. If you want a Touch Cover accessory to go with either slate, add another $100 as you do now. But the Staples weekly ad makes no mention of a price cut for the 64GB model, even though the retailer sells that version of the Microsoft slate.
When approached by PCWorld, Microsoft said it doesn't comment on rumors or speculation.
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A Japanese ministry is conducting an internal investigation after a Google Groups account used for international treaty negotiations was left on its default, publicly viewable settings.
An official at Japan's Ministry of the Environment created the group to share mails and documents related to Japan's negotiations during the Minamata Convention, a meeting held in Geneva in January to create international standards to limit international mercury use. But the official used the default privacy setting, leaving the exchanges open to searches and views in the months since. The information has now been removed.
"The majority of the information that was accessible was not secret, but we're conducting an investigation into the details now," said Michihiru Oi, a ministry official.
Over 6,000 items, including private contact information of officials, was publically accessible.
Oi said the ministry has its own system for creating groups and sharing documents, but it doesn't always function well outside of Japan, sometimes leading to "poor connections" and a "bad working environment."
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Twitter has handed French prosecutors information enabling the identification of some of those responsible for posts last year apparently contravening French laws on hate speech, according to the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), which had filed suits against the company to compel it to release the data.
One lawsuit, filed in November, went all the way to the Court of Appeal, which on June 12 rejected Twitter's attempt to shield the identities of those responsible for posts made last year with the hashtag #unbonjuif (a good Jew).
The UEJF and four other French anti-racism organizations asked Twitter to reveal the identities of the posters and to make it easy for its users to flag messages potentially contravening hate speech laws.
In a ruling on Jan. 24, the court gave Twitter 15 days from receipt of the order to reveal the posters' identities.
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Microsoft has already received several vulnerability reports that qualify for monetary rewards as part of the company's bug bounty program launched in June for the preview version of Internet Explorer 11.
The recipient of the first IE 11 bounty will be Ivan Fratric, a security researcher who earned second place and $50,000 last year in Microsoft's BlueHat Prize contest for the development of defensive technologies. Fratric's entry into the contest was a system called ROPGuard, which can detect and prevent return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Fratric worked as a researcher at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing until October 2012, when he joined Google as an information security engineer.
"The security community has responded enthusiastically to our new bounty programs, submitting over a dozen issues for us to investigate in just the first two weeks since the programs opened," said Katie Moussouris, a senior security strategist with Microsoft's Security Response Center, Wednesday in a blog post. "I personally notified the very first bounty recipient via email today that his submission for the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty is confirmed and validated," she said, adding that this means "he's getting paid."
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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston talked a big game this week when he announced new ways for apps to save and load user data.
More than just a set of developer tools, Houston billed the new Dropbox Platform as a way to "replace the hard drive." Dropbox Platform is supposed to provide easier ways to store your files in the cloud, with simple buttons that developers can add to their apps. It can also let apps save their own data across platforms, so your work in an Android app can carry over to iOS, and vice versa.
"Today," Houston said, "the hard drive goes away."
Houston's grand proclamations certainly made for some great headlines. But as Dropbox does its best to eliminate the storage woes of the post-PC era, it may also create new headaches when it comes to storing more of our lives in the cloud.
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Imagine a world with no tweets, no emails, no notifications pushed to your phone. A world without Candy Crush or indeed, even Facebook; a land without the Internet.
The thought may sound like heaven to minimalists, but in recent months, dictators around the world have been all too willing to transform the idea into a hellacious reality, flipping a switch and completely disconnecting whole nations from the Web: Syria. Egypt. Libya. All have been plunged into darkness during periods of civil unrest.
But is there any way the United States could be disconnected from the Internet? Could an act of terror, war, or simple governmental dictatorship snatch away our social feeds and online gaming? Curious, I reached out to several experts to examine all the potential doomsday scenarios.
Physical attack on the tubes
They say the Internet is a series of tubes. One obvious way to disconnect the United States from the rest of the Net would be to cut, blow up, or otherwise destroy those tubes, right?
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Infosys posted strong revenue growth in the second quarter as demand picked up in key markets including the U.S.
However, the Indian outsourcer's net profit grew only 0.5 percent year on year as the company increased salaries for staff in India and elsewhere.
Profit was also affected by currency fluctuations, particularly the depreciation of the Australian dollar, and low staff utilization, said Ashok Vemuri, Infosys' head of Americas, on Friday.
Revenue was close to $2 billion in the quarter, up by 13.6 percent year-on-year. Net profit for the quarter was $418 million.
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The latest simulator for the upcoming Firefox mobile OS is aimed to please developers planning to sell applications.
Firefox Simulator 4.0, released on Thursday, "is a boon for those developers that want to make money using their app in the Marketplace," wrote Angelina Fabbro, a technology evangelist for Mozilla.
The simulator is a test environment for the forthcoming Firefox OS, a Linux-based OS for mobile devices designed with tight integration with the Internet using open web standards such HTML5.
The first devices came on the market earlier this month in Spain from operator Telefonica, with Deutsche Telekom in Poland due to release devices soon. Firefox OS is a new challenger in a market dominated by Android and iOS phones and is seeking to compete with high performance, lower-cost phones.
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Verizon Wireless became the first U.S. carrier to join the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, but it is not clear whether it will eventually promote phones running the open-source Ubuntu OS on its network.
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, announced in June the formation of a Carrier Advisory Group that would shape Ubuntu for the mobile industry. Other members of the CAG include Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, Smartfren, China Unicom and SK Telecom.
Being able to work closely with Verizon gives Canonical an opportunity to shape Ubuntu into "the most compelling new, alternative platform for mobile," Canonical said Thursday.
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Insurance provider WellPoint has agreed to pay a $1.7 million fine for exposing more than 600,000 personal records online due to weak database security, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) said Thursday.
WellPoint, based in Indianapolis, is one the largest health insurers in the U.S., with more than 100 million customers covered by it and its subsidiaries.
In 2009, WellPoint reported to the federal agency that an online database holding personal and health information for 612,402 individuals was left accessible over the Internet between October 2009 and March 2010. The data included names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and health information.
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Steve Ballmer's grand plan to reinvent Microsoft has garnered mixed reviews from industry analysts, ranging from enthusiastic endorsements to frowning skepticism.
Some predict the reorganization will accomplish its goal of making Microsoft more efficient and innovative, and thus better able to compete against rivals like Apple, Oracle, IBM and Google. Others are concerned that internal accountability will drop and the company will become less responsive to customer needs and market inflections.
The new structure
At the heart of the restructuring, announced Thursday, is the dissolution of the company's five business units—the Business Division, which housed Office; Server & Tools, which included SQL Server and System Center; the Windows Division; Online Services, which included Bing; and Entertainment and Devices, whose main product was the Xbox console.
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Microsoft's reorganization is the biggest shot yet fired against the company's core partners, the computer makers who have made the software developer a technology giant, analysts said today.
"There were clear lines of demarcation where Microsoft's efforts ended and OEMs' started, but this could challenge OEMs down the road," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an interview Thursday.
Moorhead was referring to the corporate reshuffling announced earlier today by CEO Steve Ballmer—specifically the creation of a hardware group within the company.
Read more coverage of Microsoft's reorganization efforts on PCWorld.com
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Oracle has updated some of its middleware and developer products to make them better equipped for private cloud deployments, releasing major updates for the WebLogic application server and Oracle Coherence in-memory data cache.
The updates are designed to "provide an integrated foundation infrastructure for customers who want to build a cloud infrastructure, for customized applications or applications running under our Fusion middleware," said Mike Lehmann, Oracle vice president of product management.
Oracle now describes this set of software, which also includes the Tuxedo application server and recently released Oracle 12c database, as the Oracle Cloud Application Foundation.
"They have done a lot of integration in this wave" of releases, IDC analyst Al Hilwa said via email. "Some of the most interesting stuff is the integration pathways between [WebLogic], the Coherence layer and the Oracle database."
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Microsoft helped the National Security Agency circumvent the company's own encryption in order to conduct surveillance on email accounts through Outlook.com, according to a new report in the Guardian.
Microsoft-owned Skype also worked with U.S. intelligence agencies last year to allow them to collect video conversations through the service, according to the U.K. newspaper, citing secret documents. Microsoft also worked with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation this year to allow easier access to its cloud storage service, SkyDrive, the Guardian reported.
Microsoft and Skype have both emphasized their privacy protections as a benefit of using their services. Microsoft has criticized Google's privacy practices, saying in its Scroogled campaign that Google shares personal information on the Android mobile operating system with app developers.
Skype's privacy policy reads: "Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content."
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Microsoft's restructuring places a new emphasis not on products, but on technologies that will be shared across the company, to tie together and improve the company's overall business as a whole.
What does this mean for consumers? For us, it most likely means a sense of coherence: Not only will Windows Phone and Windows 8 look like one another, but it could mean more shared code and services, for example.
Microsoft goes holistic
So how will it work? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer published both a lengthy memo as well as a strategy document unveiling the changes that the company outlined Thursday. Simply put, all parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of Microsoft's core offerings: Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and Microsoft's server products, Ballmer wrote. "We will see our product line holistically, not as a set of islands."
MicrosoftBusiness strategists will undoubtedly spend days parsing Microsoft's business strategy, but on the surface, there are a couple of key changes. First, Microsoft's priority is engineering technologies, not products, and its core leadership all share "engineering" titles. Second, the devices that you buy, such as tablets and phones, will simply serve as gateways to the Microsoft software and services that you already know and use. The difference here, however, is that the ecosystem will be more tightly interlaced, as evidenced by products like the Xbox One, which will include Skype and Internet Explorer.
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Microsoft's sweeping company reorganization may have some insiders feeling jittery about the future, but it's doubtful that the vendor's Dynamics business applications division or its customers need to worry.
While Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't expound on Dynamics at length in a memo about the changes released Thursday, what he did say was telling.
Ballmer's plan calls for "one Microsoft" focused on "shared goals," with engineering divided into four categories: operating systems, applications, cloud and devices.
However, "we will keep Dynamics separate as it continues to need special focus and represents significant opportunity," Ballmer added.
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Cellular carrier T-Mobile is disrupting the network carrier model once again, offering customers the ability to upgrade to a new smartphone once every six months as opposed to the industry standard of once every two years. For early adopters and technology influencers, this could provide major motivation to drop their current network. In fact, T-Mobile's data shows that a lot of people are doing that already.
When T-Mobile announced their "uncarrier" approach to cellular service plans earlier this year, it stood out as a long overdue benchmark. Customers were finally able to get the latest smartphone without having to commit to a two-year contract. Unfortunately, the lack of a contract also meant that T-Mobile could not offer the extreme discounts on new phones that major carriers provide. With heavy hitters like Sprint and Verizon, new customers can score a $750 phone for $200. Without that, a new smartphone is out of reach for a lot of consumers.
T-Mobile's solution was for consumers to mortgage the cost of the phone, making monthly payments tacked onto the phone bill. With respectable monthly plans for $30, there's still plenty of room for phone payments before you reach the average $80-$100 monthly cost of many major carriers. Using this model, T-Mobile has been building awareness and gaining membership.
The other decision point that T-Mobile had yet to address was the ability to upgrade hardware. Although customers on a 2-year plan can only upgrade their phone once every year or two on average, the discount is still a draw. T-Mobile's announcement today that customers can upgrade every six months is another reinvention of the common model that makes excellent intuitive sense. Two years can be a long time to wait when new models like the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy S4 are dangled in front of you all year long.
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One Microsoft, all the time.
They're just five words, but those five words hold a universe of importance to Microsoft. Those five words prompted a sweeping revamp of Microsoft's core organizational structure this morning: Newly vertical divisions were carved out, executives were shuffled, and some senior-level people even lost their jobs.
One Microsoft, all the time. It means a lot for Microsoft. What could it mean for you? If everything goes to Steve Ballmer's grand plan, no less than a seamless computing experience across every device you own.
That grand plan envisions a truly unified OS experience across your phone, tablet, notebook, desktop PC, and TV. They all run the same apps, the settings are in all the same places, and your game saves carry over from console to computer and back again. Live tiles everywhere!
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Boosting its portfolio of solid state storage technologies, EMC is acquiring ScaleIO, a purveyor of storage management software, for an undisclosed amount of cash.
EMC plans to fold ScaleIO's software into its EMC XtremSW Suite of software for managing server-based flash storage arrays. ScaleIO operations will be placed under the EMC Flash Product Division.
The company will also combine the software with PCIe flash cards to provide storage systems designed for private clouds and service providers.
"The addition of ScaleIO to our portfolio will enable EMC customers to build protected, shared storage pools from in-server direct-attached storage (DAS), such as XtremSF PCie Flash cards—while not limiting them to any storage media type or form factor," wrote Zahid Hussain, senior vice president and general manager for EMC Flash Products Division, in a blog post announcing the pending acquisition.
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