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Microsoft and Google are working together to support the FCC’s free Wi-Fi proposal that might mean you could dump that monthly cellphone bill.

How sweet would it be to dump that monthly cellphone bill in favor of making calls over free Wi-Fi networks, so powerful it would be like “Wi-Fi on steroids”? Microsoft and Google are working together to support the FCC’s powerful Wi-Fi for free proposal. As a bonus, Super Wi-Fi is also “super for improving how we transmit and distribute energy in America.” However, as you might imagine, wireless carriers are fit to be tied and doing their best to put a stop to providing such free access.

Of course, it’s not the first time that the Microsoft-Google team — now there’s a phrase you don’t see very often — joined forces. In 2007, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Philips came together to give FCC officials a “free phone” prototype device built by Microsoft. The FCC later rejected the white space device. Microsoft had wanted to be named an administrator to rule the white spaces, but so did Google. Microsoft came up with Wi-Fi over narrow channels which the company called WiFi-NC last year. In February 2012, Microsoft, Google and hundreds of other nonprofit groups and companies urged Congress not to restrict the FCC’s authority to structure proposed spectrum auctions.

Now, the Washington Post, which has jumped on the “Chinese-hacked-us-too” bandwagon, reported that Google, Microsoft and other tech giants “say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.”

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

Meanwhile, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and chip makers Intel and Qualcomm are lobbying hard against the FCC’s proposal. In fact, AT&T announced that it, Verizon and T-Mobile had entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense “to test the viability of sharing 95 MHz of spectrum that is currently used by DoD and other federal agencies. This spectrum is located in the 1755 to 1850 MHz spectrum band, which NTIA has analyzed in great detail for potential clearing and sharing opportunities.” These wireless carrier companies are opposed to using the spectrum for free Wi-Fi to the public and insist that the airwaves should instead be sold to businesses.

But FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has designed the free Wi-Fi plan. If you are interested, you can read Genachowski’s Presentation on White Spaces for Wireless Broadband and Genachowski’s remarks to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology. He told the Washington Post, “Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers.”

As Neowin pointed out, Microsoft and Google want more devices connecting to their cloud services such as Microsoft’s new Office 365, dubbed as “Your complete office in the cloud.”

It would seem as if law enforcement would be vehemently opposed to such free Wi-Fi. After all, law enforcement has a gold mine when it comes to spying via wireless carriers. In 2011, the cops collected a staggering 1.3 million customer records. Innocent Americans get caught in dragnet surveillance via cell tower dumps. The ACLU has warned that location tracking is out of control. Additionally, the ACLU uncovered “new” law enforcement/mobile carrier spying deals, such as “voicemail cloning, copying existing voicemail to a different account, resetting voicemail PIN, or the Verizon smorgasbord for law enforcement mobile/landline spying.” It seems the feds hope to replace warrantless GPS tracking with warrantless cell phone surveillance. But on the other hand, even with free and powerful wireless networks, cell phones wouldn’t go away entirely.

Besides, as it stands now with ECPA, the cloud is the cloud and any info stored there is not private, but is a favorite surveillance hunting ground used by law enforcement. Also, keep in mind that when an online service is “free,” it is because you are the product. Just the same, let’s hope the Microsoft/Google “team force” can help bring on the free Wi-Fi on steroids!

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All quiet on the Galaxy S IV front, but plenty going on elsewhere.After a CES week during which the Android world was all a-twitter over a device that wasn’t even revealed at the show, the previously hyperactive Galaxy S IV rumor mill has quieted down, mostly. It’s likely to only be a momentary respite, however, as the device is heavily tipped to be released at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

MORE OFFBEAT: The dumbest products of CES 2013

Perhaps the biggest news on the most hotly anticipated Android device so far in 2013 is that an ostensible screenshot of mobile benchmarking results has been published by a Japanese-language blog), which points out that the 1.8GHz CPU speed matches up with Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa eight-core SoC. (More on the Octa later.)

Given the source, it’s important to remember that this should be taken with many grains of salt – even the inclusion of the point about the Exynos 5 Octa could easily be read as a little too circumstantially convenient. (Like Manti Te’o confessing to Lance Armstrong on Oprah or something.)

Still, I can’t deny that the pairing of Samsung’s two biggest headline grabbing topics makes sense. We’ll see what happens (probably) at MWC at the end of February.

Speaking of the Exynos 5 Octa, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs is unsurprisingly not a fan, according to a report from Unwired View. Essentially, he told reporters in China yesterday, Samsung is just covering for the fact that the four high-performance Cortex-A15 cores drain a ton of power by jamming four slower but less demanding Cortex-A7s into the SoC alongside them, and attempting to reap a publicity windfall by boasting about their eight-core processor.

While Jacobs is correct in noting that all eight of the Octa’s cores won’t operate at the same time, I’m not sure why he’s saying this means the SoC is going to suck. OK, so it’s not a “true” eight-core SoC, but the idea of using the low-power cores for light work and switching to the A15s for more serious tasks still makes sense, and could well back up Samsung’s claims of improved battery life and better performance. Seems like fairly ineffectual spin to me.

The Nexus 4 official wireless charger has appeared on the site of Norwegian store Dustin Home, providing a slick pad on which to charge the Nexus 4 that you still probably don’t have. Presumably, this means that it’ll become available soon in the U.S., but this is a product release story involving the phrase “Nexus 4,” so who really knows?

(Hat tip: Android Central)
But wait! The Nexus 4′s availability problems will soon be a thing of the past, according to an LG executive who spoke to Challenges.fr Wednesday. LG France director of mobile communication Cathy Robin says production of the Nexus 4 is due to increase by mid-February, which could ease the supply crunch. As of this writing, both the 8GB and 16GB models are still sold out on the Play Store.

(Hat tip: r/Android)
Android Police has what it says is an internal Sprint document, which asserts that the company plans to offer a $400 device credit to new family plan customers who port at least one line in from a competitor. The deal’s supposedly set to roll out tomorrow, so you don’t have long to wait, if you’re interested.

All quiet on the Galaxy S IV front, but plenty going on elsewhere.

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On August 9, 2011, Apple’s market capitalization briefly rose to $341.5 billion, edging it just ahead of Exxon, until that morning the highest-valued company in the world. The company Steve Jobs had co-created putting together computers, the one that Michael Dell had suggested shutting down 14 years earlier because it had no future, was now worth more than any other. The stock fell back by the end of the day, but it had made its mark; the transformation of Apple from financial basket case to ruler was complete. At the end of the day it was worth $346.7 billion; Microsoft was worth $214.3 billion and Google $185.1 billion.

Compared to the end of 1998 (Apple $5.54 billion, Microsoft $344.6 billion, Google $10 million), the aggregate wealth of the companies had more than doubled. Microsoft, though, had shrunk by 40%, after being outdistanced first in search, then in digital music and then in smartphones — in the latter category by both companies.

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The companies had changed enormously. Google was soon to celebrate its 13th birthday, having roared from a three-person garage start-up to web giant; it was struggling too with having nearly 29,000 staff worldwide. Larry Page, once more the chief executive, was forcing the divisions to justify themselves, getting divisional heads to explain their projects in soundbite-length memos. His greatest concern was that Google was getting too big and slow to act: “Large companies are their own worst enemy,” he said in September. “There are basically no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that have good fast decisions.”

Where Apple hadn’t heard of Google 13 years before, now it had gone from having a common cause against Microsoft to being just a business acquaintance, and sometimes opponent; Apple and Microsoft bid together against Google for patents covering the mobile business. Apple was seeking to disintermediate Google from search with the cloud-based voice search of its upcoming iPhone. And they were constantly niggling each other in smartphones and tablets. Even so, by September 2011 the majority of mobile search still came from iPhones, according to Google testimony at the US Senate.

Apple had changed. From just under 10,000 full- and part-time staff in September 1998, it had grown to being 50,000 strong, though around 30,000 were in its retail store chain; the core of the company in Cupertino remained small and relatively tight-knit. The old enmity with Microsoft still flickered occasionally, but strategically they almost ignored each other. Apple’s position in PCs was set at 5% of the market. It had won in music. It didn’t do search. Its position in phones and tablets had pushed Microsoft to playing catch-up; yet the Redmond company could rely on the sheer heft of 1.5 billion PC installations to ensure a stream of replacements and of new sales for Office. Apple’s value, revenues and profits had all passed those of its old rival. Its reputation had been transformed from put-upon also-ran PC maker to world-spanning design brand. Tim Cook’s influence was visible in its inventory, whose value was equivalent to three days’ hardware sales.

Microsoft, by contrast, had gone from world-beater to catch-up. The staff at Microsoft (90,000 worldwide, compared to 27,000 in summer 1998) were a little battle-weary too. As Steve Ballmer, still the chief executive, spoke at the September 2011 all-hands company meeting in front of 20,000 employees, some simply got up and left, unhappy at the ‘cloud computing’ strategy, the stock’s lack of movement, and the lack of excitement at their employer. The version of Windows that would truly work on tablets was still a year away. Microsoft seemed mired in its fabulously profitable past – not a leader or innovator in search or on mobiles or tablets or anything. People began whispering that Steven Sinofsky, who had conquered internal politics and got the Windows team to grapple successfully with the future of tablets and chip architectures, might be chief executive material.

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After months of waiting, Google+ invites enterprises, brands into the fold

Computerworld – Google is getting ready for businesses to start jumping onboard its Google+ social network.

The social network Monday began to roll out Google+ Pages to help businesses create a presence on the social network platform for connecting with their users locally or worldwide. Vic Gundotra, Google senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post that users can add businesses to their circles, recommend them with a +1 and connect with business team members personally in Hang Outs.

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“For you and me, this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour,” Gundotra wrote. “Google+ Pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.”

Google+ engineers appear to be gradually rolling out the new Pages. While some organizations, like the band ColdPlay, already have signed up, not everyone can. Some users clicking on the link to create a business page receive the prompt, “Google+ Pages isn’t ready for everyone, and asks users to “check back soon.” Gundotra said in his blog post that everyone “will soon be able to join.”

Google released its social network last June and a month later was asking enterprises and organizations to back off from using the site for business purposes.

“Right now, we’re very much focused on optimizing for the consumer experience,” said Christian Oestlien, a developer on the Google+ project, in a video blog posted last summer. “But we have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimized business experience for Google+. We are very excited about it and hope to roll it out later this year.”

At the time, Google also put out a call for business that would be interested in acting as a test group so Google engineers could see how users want to interact with companies.

A matter of days after that post, Google said it was accelerating its efforts to develop a business version of Google+. The company also noted that “tens of thousands” of businesses had signed up to be part of their test group.

In Monday’s blog post, Gundotra did not say how the company had optimized Google+ Pages for business use. Google has not yet responded to a request for more information.

Despite the lack of details, Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said this is a good move for Google+. “It’s high time that Google delivered on the promise of a more business-oriented social networking mechanism,” Olds said. “This is one area where they can get a jump on Facebook and make a name for themselves.”

Many businesses and organizations use Facebook for marketing purposes, but the social network isn’t optimized for them, Old said. Monday’s announcement could give Google+ an advantage in the lucrative enterprise market.

“With Facebook, companies are using mechanisms that are really designed and geared to individuals,” he added. “While they’re making it work, they’d probably be better served with tools that are designed with companies in mind. Google+ can get the jump on Facebook if they can put together a set of tools that make social networking easier and more effective for businesses.”

A group of businesses, including Macy’s, Pepsi, Toyota, Angry Birds and Zen Bikes, already have set up business pages on Google+.

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After ten days of hemming and hawing, Google is ready to address — but not apologize to — those users upset by the death of Reader’s social features. “We understand that some may not like this change,” a Google spokesperson told The Atlantic Wire. “Retiring Reader’s sharing features wasn’t a decision that we made lightly, but in the end, it helps us focus on fewer areas and build an even better experience across all of Google.”

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Related: How to Survive the Switch from Google Reader to Google+
Undoubtedly, some people like Reader’s facelift for the cleaner design, but those opposed are increasingly vocal. As we’ve reported last week, the group of Google Reader evangelists known as the Sharebros did not take Google’s decision to redesign the social RSS-site lightly. About 10,000 disgruntled Sharebros have signed a petition, and some are even working on building their own replacement site, HiveMined, that resurrects the now missing following, sharing and commenting features as Google encourages people to use Google+ for these kinds of things. Francis Cleary, the developer that came up with and has been building the Reader replacement, told us on Monday, “Google+ is a cool idea, but it’s not about content first. It’s about page views — that’s not what people want.”
Related: The World Is Surprisingly Angry About the End of Google Reader

Then there’s the matter of the Iranian freedom fighters. Because Google Reader worked effectively like a social network, and because it existed in the google.com domain, the Iranian government didn’t block access as they had for Facebook and Twitter. The network of Iranian activists protested loudlywhen Google announced the move to Google+, because they were worried that the Iranian government would cut off yet another lifeline used to organize online. In a post on their official Farsi blog, Google addressed the Iranian protesters but not the domain issue. A rough (Google Translate) translation reads:[indent]
We are currently developing solutions to tackle other forms of support for the identity (beyond the common use of real names), but in time we’ll try to post more information that’s not in this report. We believe that support for pseudonyms valuable feature for Google+ and the team is trying to accomplish it. Meanwhile, Google Reader continues to support the RSS feed Subscribe (RSS Feed) to a large group of users in Iran.[/indent]
Pseudonyms could protect Iranians freedom fighters from being identified on social networks, but Iran’s history of blocking freedom of speech suggests that the probably won’t have access to Google’s social network at all. In July, Iran’s culture minister called Google+ “a new spy tool on the Web” andcut off access less than two weeks after launch. But don’t worry, “a large group of users in Iran” can still read RSS feeds. Free speech between the Iranian citizens, be damned.

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Users must be alert about having their real identity from Google+ replace pseudonyms in other Google services

Google’s work to integrate its Google+ social networking site broadly with its other services could raise red flags for users who want to closely guard their privacy.

It’s valid to raise concerns over Google’s decision to integrate Google+, which carries a real-name requirement for users, with other Google services people have been using with pseudonyms for years, said John Verdi, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in a phone interview.

Google’s nightmare scenario would be for a critical mass of users to inadvertently green-light Google+ integrations only to later complain that they didn’t know their pseudonyms in certain services would be replaced by their Google+ real name.

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If that were to happen, Google could find itself in a privacy controversy that it can ill afford. The U.S. government has the company on a short leash, having mandated audits of its privacy policies and practices for the next 20 years after a privacy firestorm ignited with the launch of the now-closed Buzz service last year.

Buzz, a microblogging and social networking service, debuted with an integration with the Gmail webmail service that exposed users’ private e-mail contacts publicly and without authorization.

Since launching Google+ this summer, Google officials have been stressing that it makes it simple and intuitive for members to control what they share, with whom and how.

During this initial period, when Google+ has operated mostly as a stand-alone social networking site, consensus has been that, yes, its content sharing and privacy controls work well and as advertised.

However, Google has now started to integrate Google+ with other services, and it remains to be seen whether a critical mass of users will fully understand the interaction, cross-functionality and data sharing between Google+ and other Google services.

Google officials, from the CEO on down, are gung-ho about Google+ and it’s clear that the push to fuse Google+ with other company services will be extensive.

Google has redesigned the interface of the Google Account control panel, whose previous version clearly listed Google services available to users as part of the account, along with links to the services and some of their settings pages. The new control panel lacks that list of services.

Previously found at google.com/accounts, the control panel is now part of the Google+ site domain, another sign that Google+ is becoming the command center for privacy controls and settings across Google services. The new control panel includes a link to the old control panel, but it’s not clear for how long the latter will be available.

The road to propagate Google+ across the Google product line is just starting, and the potential for a misstep at some point seems high, considering that at issue is the online identity of potentially hundreds of millions of people.

In some cases, shielding their real identity is of life-and-death importance for some people, such as spousal abuse victims and political dissidents in totalitarian regimes.

“If Google wants to be the broker in the relationship between pseudonyms and real names, there will be all sorts of ways that that could go wrong across their many services. If you’re a user in Syria depending on your pseudonymity in order to stay alive, that’s not a very comforting situation,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, via e-mail.

In other words, now more than ever, Google must make sure that it fully complies its famous “do not be evil” philosophy.

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Getting the hang of Google+ and looking for more? Check out these four Google+ tools that let you easily upload photos in bulk, find new people to follow, translate posts and more.

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CIO — While rumors continue to swirl about when the Google+ API will be released to developers, that’s not stopping some people from getting in on the Google+ action.

Whether you’re just starting out on Google+ or consider yourself an advanced user, more and more Google+ enhancements and add-ons are popping up across the Web.

Here’s a look at four new ones that do everything from streamlining bulk photo-uploading to helping you increase your network reach.

1. Google+ Photo Importer for iPhone
If you store your photos on multiple sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Instagram or Photobucket, there’s a new download available in the Apple App Store that lets you upload 100 photos in less than a minute to your Google+ account. This tool is especially handy if you plan on shifting your social networking focus to Google+.

The Google Plus Photo Importer by Dropico costs 99 cents, and while uploads I tested generally took longer than the advertised 60 seconds, it was still impressively fast.

10 Google+ tips for Beginners
Google+ Privacy: 5 Settings You Need to Know

2. Find People on Google+
Looking for more connections on Google+? While its own search feature only lets you find people by name, you can dig a bit deeper to find groups of people with certain characteristics at FindPeopleOnPlus.

Here, you can not only search for people by name, but you can also search by profession, location, relationship status, gender, education, employer, occupation and more, which makes growing your network and tailoring it to your needs a lot easier.

You can also choose to add yourself to its directory. This will keep your FindPeopleOnPlus profile updated and in-synch with your Google+ profile.

3. PlusClout
Akin to Klout.com, a site that measures your social media influence, PlusClout measures the influence a user has on Google+ and rates it from 0 to 100.

When you visit the site, PlusClout will ask you to insert your Google+ ID in order to generate your score. Your ID is the string of numbers that appear in the URL of your profile page.

PlusClout says that while its formula is still evolving, right now it calculates your number based on 15 million public Google+ profiles and items shared, such as posts, comments, +1s, the number of followers you have and the frequency and volume of information sharing.

You can also browse people with the highest PlusClout in categories such as bloggers, designers, entrepreneurs and the most-followed users on Google+. Click on any of these names and you will see their current PlusClout score, a graph of their score over the last five days, and websites associated with that person.
4. Google Translate for Google+

If you want to connect with people from around the world but find that language is a barrier, this is a must-download Google Chrome extension.

Google Translate for Google+ is a powerful tool that inserts a button into your Google+ streams, letting you quickly interpret a chunk of foreign text.

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Yahoo said it only had to make one minor adjustment to its website for traffic optimization as a result of World IPv6 Day.

“Yahoo is very excited about how smoothly World IPv6 Day went for everybody. It’s a great testament to the preparation that went into this event,” said Jason Fesler, an IPv6 architect at Yahoo. “The early data says there is minimal risk to pushing forward.”

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BACKGROUND: World IPv6 Day: Tech industry’s most-watched event since Y2K

Akamai and Limelight also said they were stepping up their efforts toward full, commercial-grade support of IPv6 due to the success of World IPv6 Day.

“We’re going to look at the data for IPv6 usage and use that to improve our services,” said Andy Champagne, director of engineering at Akamai, which had 30 customers participate in World IPv6 Day using its beta IPv6 service. “Then we are going to work with our customers to roll out IPv6.”

Tom Coffeen, director of global network architecture for Limelight, said it had IPv6-enabled every server on its network for World IPv6 Day and that it had encountered only minor issues that involved some routing policy changes.

“We were surprised and pleased to see no bugs. The few issues we did encounter were quickly resolved,” Coffeen said. “We had many customers choosing to stay IPv6-enabled going forward. We’re ready to move to an opt-out model for our customers, where they have to request no IPv6 availability.”

Despite these successes, World IPv6 Day participants conceded that IPv6 still has a long way to go before it approaches the ubiquity of IPv4.

Colitti said Google estimates that only 0.3% of its users have adopted IPv6. He said it was too early to determine how many of its users suffered from broken IPv6 connections; estimates prior to World IPv6 Day put IPv6 brokenness at 0.03% to 0.05% of Internet users.

Similarly, Lee said that Facebook estimates that about 0.2% of its users were able to reach the website via IPv6.

“Once the world gets to about 1% adoption [of IPv6], then this will be for real,” Lee said. “That’s the initial mass that you need to have for global adoption.”

MORE: What if IPv6 simply fails to catch on?

Content providers are migrating to IPv6 because the Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.

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To capture XML data about LOGON events for use inside logon triggers, use the EVENTDATA function. For more information, see Designing and Implementing Structured Storage (Database Engine). The LOGON event returns the following event data schema:

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<EVENT_INSTANCE>

<EventType>event_type</EventType>

<PostTime>post_time</PostTime>

<SPID>spid</SPID>

<ServerName>server_name</ServerName>

<LoginName>login_name</LoginName>

<LoginType>login_type</LoginType>

<SID>sid</SID>

<ClientHost>client_host</ClientHost>

<IsPooled>is_pooled</IsPooled>

</EVENT_INSTANCE>

<EventType>

Contains LOGON.
<PostTime>

Contains the time when a session is requested to be established.
<SID>

Contains the base 64-encoded binary stream of the security identification number (SID) for the specified login name.
<ClientHost>

Contains the host name of the client from where the connection is made. The value is ‘&lt;local_machine&gt;’ if the client and server name are the same. Otherwise, the value is the IP address of the client.
<IsPooled>

Is 1 if the connection is reused by using connection pooling. MCTS Online Training
MCITP Online Training Otherwise, the value is 0.

Creating, Modifying, and Dropping Logon Triggers

Logon triggers can be created from any database, but are registered at the server level and reside in the master database.
To create a logon trigger

*

CREATE TRIGGER (Transact-SQL)

To modify a logon trigger

*

ALTER TRIGGER (Transact-SQL)

To drop a logon trigger

*

DROP TRIGGER (Transact-SQL)

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Apple 300, Microsoft 8

Despite wanting to take on Apple in the retail space by opening more dedicated Microsoft Stores, CEO Steve Ballmer has reportedly had to put his retail plans on hold for the time being.

Business Insider reports that both Ballmer and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner are keen to open lots more dedicated Microsoft Stores to try to catch-up and overtake Apple – which currently has over 300 Apple Stores worldwide.

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Microsoft has only opened eight stores since it first announced its new retail plans back in early 2009 and has recently announced plans for two more stores in Atlanta and Seattle.

Apple owns our malls

We are still to hear more about the company’s plans to open a flagship UK store in London with a Microsoft PR rep telling TechRadar that there was “no news on this yet, unfortunately.”

Due to the high cost of building flagship retail outlets, sources are claiming that Steve Ballmer has been convinced to shelve his big plan to take on Apple in our malls and on our high streets.For now, at least.

Of course, if Windows Phone 7 starts to overtake iPhone sales by 2015, as some analysts are already predicting, then we may well see a change in Microsoft’s retail strategy over the next few years.

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As most parents and teachers can attest, teenage students have a tendency to procrastinate – not a particularly endearing characteristic, especially if you’re a company that helps students with their college applications.

“You know how students are – they leave everything for the last moment, which for us means millions of students trying to file an application on deadline. That makes scalability a huge issue,” says Rick Blaisdell, CTO at ConnectEDU, a Boston-based education and career management company.

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Florida hospice saves with SaaS-based CRM

Six tough questions for your next IAAS vendor

And scalability, in turn, makes cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) an enticing alternative to traditional architecture. “The elastic nature of IaaS, the ability to scale up and down and have that directly relate to utility pricing, is the No. 1 reason we decided to go with infrastructure as a service,” he says.

That technology driver dovetailed with a critical business decision. Rather than rebuilding legacy software platforms to meet changing business demands, ConnectEDU decided to break up its products and deliver them via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Blaisdell came on board in April 2009 to help orchestrate that shift. From day one, he says, the plan to move to cloud-based architecture began taking shape.

“From a CIO/CTO perspective, I always look at simplifying things. If you can simplify, clone and reproduce, you’re always in a much better place. So when I started looking at the physical architecture and the number of servers we were maintaining and the number we needed to purchase, I knew from previous experience with virtualization and cloud that that’s where I needed to go,” Blaisdell explains.

But Blaisdell says he didn’t want to deal with management of the cloud environment and so decided to explore managed IaaS options. Three managed services companies came immediately to mind, he says: NaviSite, which Time Warner Cable acquired in February, Savvis (now being acquired by CenturyLink) and Terremark (now Verizon Business).

“I wanted a company that would manage my servers and systems all the way from security to maintenance and, if we had any issues, I needed people there at a 24/7 operations center that I knew would carry out our procedures or, if that couldn’t be done, call in my team. I knew I’d be spending more money for that, but it was a baseline requirement for us,” he says.

When Blaisdell came on board, ConnectEDU was already doing some hybrid virtualization with NaviSite. And while that was working out well, it had neither the true elasticity nor utility features he wanted, Blaisdell says.
Taking a flyer on Cisco’s UCS

He discussed those concerns with NaviSite and learned that his hoster would be one of the first beta and production facilities using Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS). “Would he care to be a beta tester himself?” Blaisdell says he was asked.

Already impressed with Cisco’s integrated approach to the cloud, and having further investigated the NaviSite environment and architecture plans, Blaisdell decided to go for it. He tested NaviSite’s UCS-based cloud service in late 2009 to early 2010.

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As soon as Microsoft launched Windows 8 at the All Things D conference in California, and then demoed a copy at Computex in Taiwan, people all around the world began tweeting their thoughts on the highly-anticipated build.

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, its newest Windows progeny since Windows 7 was announced in July 2009. Windows 8 (a codename, still) is a multi-platform operating system that caters to tablets and laptops but also works on desktops.

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The first unveiling took place at the All Things Digital 9 conference in Los Angeles, where PCMag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff watched, while another demonstration was held at Computex in Taiwan, as captured by our lead laptop analyst, Cisco Cheng. Click here for the Taiwan walk-through and here for footage from California.

With tiles, the Windows 8 user interface looks a lot more like Windows Phone 7 than any PC-centric Windows OS from Microsoft. It handles touch screen Web browsing, photo manipulation and tweeting in a tablet-y fashion that will be familiar to users of Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems for tablets and smartphones.

Even though Windows 8 isn’t expected to appear in stores until the end of 2012—Microsoft’s reported one-chipmaker-per-tablet-maker rule may have something to do with that – the Twitterverse was full of strong reactions to the new build. Not everyone agreed with Microsoft’s description of Windows 8 as “possibly the most radical update since Windows 95″ and “virtually unrecognizable” from Windows 7. Click on the slideshow below to see for yourself.

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The CTO is not a Java programmer, but a self-styled “application architect.” Deal’s done, money’s spent. He hired a Java architect and a lead developer. Both of them went over the wireframes and announced they need a functional spec. That’s about three weeks’ worth of work. They got that and pumped out a technical spec in under a week. Nowhere does it mention a messaging bus. The CTO had some yelling matches with them, but they’re right — no need for the $5 million hobbyhorse.

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To “save his job,” the CTO hired a separate small team of developers to build a separate module for the overall application that no one needed or asked for, but it ran the messaging bus.

I never found out whether the startup sold anything.

Fallout: The CTO did in fact save his job, but only because he was “kernel DNA” to the enterprise. When the boss found out about the extra team he hired to hide his mistakes, the CTO got kicked to a sideline “analysis” role.

Moral: If you’ve screwed up that bad, better to fall on your sword early than crawl deeper into an already dark hole.

Stupid user trick No. 7: Lying to IT
Incident: Even the whitest of lies can sap productivity from the more underappreciated, overworked members of your company: the IT pros left to shift through the rubble to find out what really went wrong.

Users lie. I hate it when users lie, usually because I don’t understand why they lie.

Case in point: I got called to a branch office for unspecified “printer problems.” It’s a small branch office, with three users, each in his own office. The firewall/router on a bookshelf in one room connected them and provided the way back to headquarters and the Web. One guy had a big HP LaserJet in his office, and he complained that suddenly his coworkers can’t print “off my printer anymore.” I did the due diligence and found that while the printer had an Ethernet port: (a) it wasn’t configured, (b) it was hooked only to his desktop with a USB cable, and (c) his wall jack only had a single Ethernet port available and that was being used by his PC. I checked his desktop, and no, Windows XP was not set up to share his printer. I knew he’s lying, but I can’t resist:

Me: “So you were all sharing this printer?”

Lying liar: “Yup. It was working fine until the other day, and then it just stopped.”

Me: “You know, there’s nothing wrong with requesting that you be able to share the printer. If you’d have just said that on the phone, I’d have driven out here with a mini-hub and we’d be all set right now.”

Lying liar: “But it was working. It just suddenly stopped. That’s why I called.”

Me [eyes rolling]: “Fine. I can share the printer. Hang on.”

Now I could have told him that print sharing his PC was going to slow down performance a bit, but I was annoyed so I just did it, had his coworkers test it out and then left.

Skip forward a week. The same guy called and my boss kicked it to me. Once again, the ticket said “printer problems,” but now it added “Internet down.” The bastard was snickering when he gave it to me, too. This time I grabbed a mini hub and some spare patch cables before I drove over.

I got there and for some reason they’d switched offices. The moved desks, bookshelves .. and their PCs, as well as the big printer. Again, the same guy got up and said, “Everything was working until yesterday, and then the printer just stopped working.”

Me: “Uh-huh. Yesterday wouldn’t happen to be the day you moved offices, would it?”

Lying liar: “No, no. That was over the weekend.” [This is Wednesday.]

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The Asia-Pacific region effectively ran out of IPv4 addresses on Friday, meaning that the region is now conserving addresses for the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition.

The region officially moved into its planned “Phase Three” of the transition, where new and existing members will have restricted access to the existing IPv4 addresses used by most PCs today. All new and existing APNIC members will be entitled to a maximum delegation of a “/22″, or (1,024 addresses) of IPv4 space, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre said.

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APNIC is the first regional Internet registry to exhaust its IPv4 address space, which experts have warned about for some time. When the available IPv4 addresses are exhausted, new devices coming onto the network, from phones to network switches, must be assigned an IPv6 address unless some intermediary technology is used.

“Considering the ongoing demand for IP addresses, this date effectively represents IPv4 exhaustion for many of the current operators in the Asia Pacific region,” said Paul Wilson, director general of APNIC, in a statement. “From this day onwards, IPv6 is mandatory for building new Internet networks and services.”

Current IP addresses use the IPv4 format, which assigns users an IP address using four numbers, each from 1 to 256. (8.8.8.8 is an available DNS server IP address administered by Google, for example.) Addresses like pcmag.com are translated behind the scenes into their numeric equivalents, just like 800-DOMINOS equates to an actual phone number. Each new device that connects to the Internet is assigned a new IP address, although home networks can assign their own non-unique IPs via network address translation, or NAT.

While the IPv4-to IPv6 shift will be a worry for networking vendors, ISPs, and domain-name registrars, the transition shouldn’t be as much of a concern for ordinary consumers, networking vendors told PCMag.com. ISPs like Comcast can also run in dual-stack mode, internally translating addresses from IPv4 to IPv6.

“You can certainly run dual-stack in the routers to serve both types of packets,” said Vint Cerf, the so-called “father of the Internet” and a chief Internet evangelist for Google, in an interview earlier this year. “You can certainly run dual-stack at edge devices, if the device has been provided with both address types. The IPv4 address might be a NAT assignment using so-call ‘private IP address space.’

“Eventually there will be no more IPv4 ‘public address space,’” he continued. “When that exhaustion occurs (and it won’t happen in a uniform way—some places will run out before others), then there will be some devices that only have IPv6 assignments. They will not be able to directly interact with IPV4-only devices.”

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Adobe said Friday that it has identified and issued a patch for Adobe Flash Player, just days after issuing a similar patch.

Adobe issued Adobe Flash Player 10.2.159.1 on Friday, for users of Flash version 10.2.153.1, and Adobe Flash Player 10.2.154.25 for those that use Chrome. Adobe also said it recommends users of Adobe AIR 2.6.19120 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux update to Adobe AIR 2.6.19140.

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Adobe expects to make available an update for Adobe Flash Player 10.2.156.12 and earlier versions for Android no later than the week of April 25, 2011, the company added.

Why? According to Adobe, there have been reports that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks via a malicious Web page, or a Flash (.swf) file embedded in a Microsoft Word (.doc) or Microsoft Excel (.xls) file delivered as an email attachment, targeting the Windows platform. The updates resolve a memory corruption vulnerability that could lead to code execution, Adobe said.

That’s basically the same vector that a previous vulnerability exploited on Wednesday.. Adobe said then that it was not aware of PDF-related attacks in Reader or Acrobat, and Adobe Reader X Protected Mode mitigations would prevent that type of exploit from happening.

As PCMag’s Larry Seltzer points out, this type of vulernability might sound familiar. It’s quite similar to another Flash zero-day from several weeks ago that was embedded in an Excel file and used to attack RSA.

Adobe Reader 9.x for UNIX, Adobe Reader for Android, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.x are not affected by this issue, Seltzer noted.

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When a group of developers broke off from Oracle last year to establish the Document Foundation and create the new LibreOffice open-source office suite, it was unclear what would become of the well-known OpenOffice.org project they left behind. Today, Oracle has announced that it will no longer offer a commercial version of the OpenOffice.org software, and that it plans to move the suite to a purely community-based open source project.

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In a statement, Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven said, “Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis. We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF).”

“Oracle has a long history of investing in the development and support of open source products,” Screven continued. “We will continue to make large investments in open source technologies that are strategic to our customers including Linux and MySQL. Oracle is focused on Linux and MySQL because both of these products have won broad based adoption among commercial and government customers.”

Oracle provided no additional information about OpenOffice.org, or its own proprietary Web-based office suite, Oracle Cloud Office, which also supports ODF.

The LibreOffice developers released their first stable version of that software earlier this year.

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Its not about winning or losing, we are happy to start seeing some competition to industry’s most popular Tablet device: Apple iPad.

As illustrated in the video, there are things that iPad would do better than Windows 7 tablet, and vice versa.

Watch the Handson Comparison video for most daily use-cases:

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Web Browsing: Windows 7 Tablet might be slightly faster at this but layout, screen size-wise, it fails to showcase its appeal.

OnScreen Keyboard: The on-screen keyboards are great, iPad definitely has a better one.

Flash, youtube: Windows runs native Flash in browsers and iPad relies on native youtube app to achieve the same. Other flash sites, just wont work. However, unofficial iPad Flash [Frash] should nail down to stability and support.

Screen: Windows 7 Tablets will feature different screens, varied by the vendor that manufactures it. But iPad already features best in class IPS display.

Email & apps: As you can see from the video above, Windows 7 tablet seriously lacks on user usability. Its not easy when it comes to touching small areas which were originally meant be used with mouse cursor.

Connectivity: Windows 7 Tablets have its edge over here as it provide all kinds of standard PC connectivity ports: USB, SDcard and what not.

Battery: Mileage may vary but, iPad gives a bare minimum of 10hours, which is atleast 2x times better than any Windows 7 Tablet device that will be coming anytime soon. This is one of the reasons why HP windows 7 Slate was dropped.

Multitouch: Nobody, I said nobody can beat apple in this. They are the mastters of multitouch gesture smoothness, google might be approaching them, but Apple is far more superior at this.

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