It was always Microsoft's intention to turn Windows 10 into a cloud service with a monthly subscription attached, and now the company has rolled out details of its new subscriptions for enterprise customers, which will be introduced later this year.
Microsoft made the announcement at the Worldwide Partner Conference currently taking place in Toronto. Starting this fall, the company will offer Windows 10 Enterprise E3 through its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) network on a subscription basis at $7 per seat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Malware infections in the United States dropped by 47 percent in the first half of 2016 when compared to the same period last year, according to a new report by cybersecurity software provider Enigma Software.
Enigma analyzed 30 million infected computers and found that while malware and ransomware infections still remained at an all-time high relative to prior years, the overall rate of infections had dropped 47.3 percent compared to the first half of 2015.
+ Also on Network World: 8 ways to fend off spyware, malware and ransomware +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has announced a new enterprise program called "Surface as a Service," which is a nifty way of saying businesses can lease Surface devices that come with subscriptions to Office 365, Dynamics Azure and Windows 10.The company said this will allow customers to keep their hardware more current and up to date, since enterprises are not known for being bleeding edge when it comes to new hardware adoption.+ Also on Network World: Surface Books get major driver updates +Microsoft also expanded its list of Surface partners to include two IT heavyweights: IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton. Both firms sign on as Surface solution integrators. Microsoft already had secured HP and Dell, two companies it effectively competes with by selling Surface, as resellers last fall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft officially ended support for Windows Server 2003 a year ago, and there was a major push to get people off the aging operating system and onto something new all through 2014 and 2015. But the zombie OS lives on mostly because people feel no urgency to get rid of it.Spiceworks, the helpdesk and monitoring provider, released a survey focused on virtualization but with a few OS tidbits as well.Virtualization use
According to Spiceworks' 2016 State of IT report, more than 76 percent of organizations today use virtualization, and another 9 percent expect to adopt it in the coming years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft officially ended support for Windows Server 2003 a year ago, and there was a major push to get people off the aging operating system and onto something new all through 2014 and 2015. But the zombie OS lives on mostly because people feel no urgency to get rid of it.Spiceworks, the helpdesk and monitoring provider, released a survey focused on virtualization but with a few OS tidbits as well.Virtualization use
According to Spiceworks' 2016 State of IT report, more than 76 percent of organizations today use virtualization, and another 9 percent expect to adopt it in the coming years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last month Microsoft introduced Flow, a service that allows you to create conditional connections between its business services. It supported both Microsoft products, such as Office, Office 365 and SharePoint, and non-Microsoft services, such as Twitter, Slack, Google Drive and Dropbox, letting you build conditional actions.For example, you could have a text alert generated when you received an email, automatically pull tweets into an Office app or get Slack notifications when a file is uploaded to a Dropbox folder.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is believed to be working on an all-in-one (AIO) PC under the Surface brand. If that’s true, it would put it squarely in competition with HP and Dell, which have their own AIO lines, as well as with the Apple iMac desktop.Both DigiTimes and Windows Central picked up on the story, each citing their own sources. DigiTimes, a Taiwan-based publication with connections to the PC industry over there (but also a very mixed record of accuracy) said the new devices would come in the third quarter of this year. Windows Central, which is a little better when it comes to rumors, said it did not have a solid release date.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Linux got its start in the 1990s as an alternative operating system for older PCs that didn't have the horsepower to run newer versions of Windows. So it seems a bit ironic, but not totally surprising, that one major Linux distro is looking to end support for 32-bit processors.Ubuntu’s Dimitri John Ledkov put out a proposal on the Ubuntu mailing list recently that the company will be winding down support for 32-bit processors. He notes that by 2018, it will be two years since major software vendors and products—Google, ZFS and Docker, specifically—ended their support for 32-bit processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The advent of high-resolution video recording in smartphones has been a boon for fans looking for concert footage on YouTube, but the bands aren't so keen on their concerts appearing for free online before the show even ends.Of course, it also sucks to be at a concert and have your view blocked by the dozens of smartphones being held up to take pictures and video.So it seems Apple, which has been trying to cozy up to the music industry, has come up with a fix that sounds good on paper but has potential for misuse. It has been granted a patent, first filed in 2011 and refiled in 2014, that allows the iPhone camera to detect an infrared signal that will give instructions or information to the camera.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After spending the better part of a year aggressively pushing consumers to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft is finally taking a step back with the acknowledgment it went too far.Customers have endured unwanted downloading of the software onto their PC without being told, then unwanted upgrades. And finally, the Get Windows 10 (GWX) application was changed so if you clicked the red “X” at the corner of the window thinking it would opt out, Microsoft treated this click as a confirmation of a scheduled update.The outcry has been very loud, and it recently cost Microsoft $10,000 in the form of a court loss over one small business user's forced upgrade that left her work PC unusable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The lovefest between Microsoft and Salesforce.com continues, this time with a new connector for Outlook that links Salesforce connections to the Outlook contact and calendar manager.Microsoft made the announcement via the Office blog, noting that sales reps rely on two primary tools Customer Relational Management (CRM) and email. "Yet, CRM and email have traditionally been disconnected tools, and sales reps have had to spend valuable time toggling between these apps," the company noted.Manually adding contacts or calendar events from email to CRM or having to move back and forth between the two waste a lot of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft used a Linux conference of all places to announce the release of .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0, the open source, cross-platform version of its .NET Framework for building apps that can run on Mac and Linux. With the help of its recently acquired Xamarin, iOS and Android can also be supported.The announcement was made simultaneously at the Red Hat DevNation summit in San Francisco and on the MSDN blog. The release includes the .Net Core runtime, libraries and tools and the ASP.NET Core libraries. Microsoft also released Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions to create .NET Core projects, as well as Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The tech press has documented for months the continued pushy and obnoxious behavior on the part of Microsoft to get people to upgrade their PC to Windows 10, including forced upgrades. Well, now the other shoe has dropped, and Microsoft may regret its decision. The Seattle Times reports that Teri Goldstein of Sausalito, California, sued Microsoft after an unwanted Windows 10 upgrade left her system unusable for days and prone to crashing. Other times, her computer, which she needed to run her travel agency, slowed to a crawl.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The recent E3 show saw Microsoft break with game console tradition. Normally when a console is released, the vendor does not change the specs for its lifespan (traditionally five to seven years). This way, developers will always have one hardware spec to target when creating games. That kind of certainty helps in game development and keeps the amount of patching down compared with PC games.But just three years after the release of the Xbox One, Microsoft gave its console a massive upgrade in the form of the Xbox One S, a console that will be 40 percent smaller than the Xbox One but will have six times the compute power. The Xbox One has around one teraflop of compute power, the S will have six teraflops, which means 4K video and virtual reality, according to Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has been anxious to goose interest in Edge, its replacement browser for Internet Explorer that ships with Windows 10. Thus far, while Windows 10 has piled up 300 million installs, it's offered no coattails for Edge. The latest numbers from Net Applications put Edge at just 4.99 percent share.So, the company's newest tactic? Battery power. In a series of its own power consumption tests "in a controlled lab environment," combined with "the real-world energy telemetry from millions of Windows 10 devices," Microsoft claims you can "simply browse longer with Microsoft Edge" than with Chrome, Firefox or Opera on a Windows 10 device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the best things about a build-your-own PC is you can make sure no crapware/bloatware is installed, since you are buying a bard hard drive to start. No unwanted apps or utilities that cause more harm than good. You install the OS and the apps you want. Unfortunately, not everyone is as good with a screwdriver as me, and most folks prefer to buy a brand-name PC. That's especially true for laptops, since the white box/builders market is primarily for tower builders. So, laptop buyers have no choice but to put up with unwanted apps that clog the hard drive and memory.+ Also on Network World: Windows 10 Anniversary Update: A guide to the builds +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An article on Boing Boing is stirring up fears that Intel x86 processors have a secret control mechanism that no one is allowed to audit or examine, so consequently, this could expose systems to unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks. In an article that is equal parts technical and fear-inducing, Damien Zammit is up front about his goal. He declared he had made it his mission to get Intel to replace this system with a free, open source replacement "before it's too late."+ Also on Network World: Intel declares independence from the PC +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An article on Boing Boing is stirring up fears that Intel x86 processors have a secret control mechanism that no one is allowed to audit or examine, so consequently, this could expose systems to unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks. In an article that is equal parts technical and fear-inducing, Damien Zammit is up front about his goal. He declared he had made it his mission to get Intel to replace this system with a free, open source replacement "before it's too late."+ Also on Network World: Intel declares independence from the PC +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Bluetooth SIG will formally introduce Bluetooth 5 on Thursday, offering a significant upgrade in speed and range, and hopefully security as well.Bluetooth 5 will have double the speed and four times the range of the current version, 4.2, which was more focused on power savings than performance. Technical improvements in Bluetooth 5 include new functionality for connectionless services, such as navigation and location-based services, and possibly set up beacons around the world to transmit information.All of these details are spelled out in an update from Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It has always been tradition with a new Windows release that there is both an upgrade path for some users with the smarts to do it and the guts to risk it, while those preferring a safer path would just buy a new PC with the new operating system.So, what happens when Microsoft practically shoves a new OS down people's throats, pesters people to upgrade and even performs upgrades they didn't ask for? Well, that gets the installed base to 300 million in under a year, as Microsoft recently announced. It also kneecaps the PC market for new desktops.+ Also on Network World: Credibility and trust: Microsoft blows it +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Andy Patrizio