Tagged: microsoft

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Microsoft’s renewable energy goal of 50% expected by 2018

As Microsoft continues to open up new data centers, the company is now committing itself to making itself more green. As part of its commitment, it says it will achieve 50% renewable energy use by 2018. Not only has the company promised 50% renewable energy use by 2018, it has also provided a future promise of 60% as we head into the 2020s. This brings...

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Windows Server 2016 coming mid-October

Microsoft is using its Ignite conference this week as the launch pad for Windows Server 2016, System Center 2016, and Technical Preview 2 of its Azure Stack hybrid system. An evaluation edition of the release to manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows Server 2016 is available for download today. Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 will be on the October 1 price list, and...

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Twitter sale looked into by Microsoft, Google, and others

Twitter continues to inch its way to a sale process, and the latest developments come in the form of alleged bids from potential buyers. Today CNBC is reporting, and we have also independently heard, that both Google and Salesforce are interested in buying the company. We have additionally heard that Microsoft and Verizon have also been knocking, although right now Verizon (which also owns AOL, which owns us), may...

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Microsoft not involved in Lenovo blocking Linux

There’s a story going round that Lenovo have signed an agreement with Microsoft that prevents installing free operating systems. This is sensationalist, untrue and distracts from a genuine problem. The background is straightforward. Intel platforms allow the storage to be configured in two different ways – “standard” (normal AHCI on SATA systems, normal NVMe on NVMe systems) or “RAID”. “RAID” mode is typically just...

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When it comes to Github contributions Microsoft loves Linux

What a difference 15 years makes. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was busy branding Linux “a cancer” during the height of the software giant’s domination of desktop computing. Fast forward to 2016 and you’ll find Microsoft confessing its love for everything open source and Linux. It’s a stunning turnaround that’s now backed up by Microsoft’s serious attention to the open source...

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Microsoft achieves milestone in speech recognition

Microsoft researchers have reached a milestone in the quest for computers to understand speech as well as humans. Xuedong Huang, the company’s chief speech scientist, reports that in a recent benchmark evaluation against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task, Microsoft researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3 percent, the lowest in the industry. In a research paper published Tuesday, the scientists...

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Microsoft Rewards program will track Edge browser usage

Microsoft recently announced that they would be making changes to the Bing Rewards program; the company is changing the name, and how it operates, to Microsoft Rewards and we are now learning new details about the service. There is a new account dashboard, that you can view here (if logged in) that shows you all the ways you can earn points for the program....

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Microsoft Lumia devices dead in favor of Surface Pro

Microsoft is preparing to “end sales” of its Lumia smartphones by the end of the year, according to an anonymous internal source. And in a decision that will surprise almost nobody, Microsoft is believed to be planning to replace its underperforming Lumia range with a new Surface Phone. The anonymous tipster’s predictions have seemingly been borne out recently, both by the fact that just...

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Microsoft is reportedly working on a Slack competitor

Microsoft is taking Slack head on, and reportedly doing it under the Skype umbrella as a Slack competitor. According to MSPowerUser, the software giant is developing new messaging software that closely mirrors Slack functionality. The new effort is called Skype Teams, and it promises to cater to the the same large teams and newsrooms that already use Slack every day, while also leveraging Skype’s...

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Tech companies rally round Microsoft over cloud surveillance

Microsoft has been backed by technology companies and a swathe of US corporates in a legal action against the US government over laws that could have major implications for the development of cloud computing. The law would enable US government agencies to seize data hosted on third-party computers, while at the same time barring the hosting company from informing its customers of the seizure....