Day: November 27, 2012

Windows 8 sales are good, if not great, at 40 million copies in the first month

Tami Reller, corporate vice president (and chief financial officer and chief marketing officer) for Windows and Windows Live, announced today that Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses after its first month of retail availability. Is that number good, bad, or merely mediocre? Probably good, but perhaps not great. Microsoft sold 60 million copies of Windows 7 in the first ten weeks of that operating system’s availability, with the Wall Street Journal estimating that 40 million copies were sold in the first month. With Windows 8 selling 40 million copies in five weeks, it seems to be selling at about the same pace as Windows 7. Considering the different market dynamics—Windows 7 was an iterative release that fulfilled substantial pent-up demand as businesses chose to ignore Windows Vista whereas Windows 8 is a more controversial update being brought to a market that is generally happy with Windows 7 anyway—this is a healthy performance. Windows 7 sold very well and matching it is no mean feat. The apparent failure to surpass Windows 7’s launch could explain the mixed reports on early sales. Strong sales can still be disappointing if they were expected to be stronger still. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Windows 8 sales are good, if not great, at 40 million copies in the first month

Covert assassin weapons from North Korea

CNN reports on the arsenal discovered on the North Korean assassin arrested in Seoul last year: a poison-dart pen, a pen-pistol, a flashlight-gun, and more. Disguised to look like a Parker ballpoint pen, it contains a poison needle and is practically impossible to identify as a weapon. The second pen shoots a poison-filled bullet which penetrates the skin and releases the toxin and the third weapon is a flashlight, loaded with up to three bullets. They all look completely innocuous but all three will kill… … That target was anti-North Korea activist, Park Sang-hak, who has since been given round-the-clock police protection by South Korean authorities. We showed Park the footage of the weapons intended for him. He was shocked. ‘Poison’ pen mightier than sword for would-be North Korean assassin ( Thanks, polymorf! )

More:
Covert assassin weapons from North Korea

Netflix Gives Data Center Tools To Fail

Nerval’s Lobster writes “Netflix has released Hystrix, a library designed for managing interactions between distributed systems, complete with ‘fallback’ options for when those systems inevitably fail. The code for Hystrix—which Netflix tested on its own systems—can be downloaded at Github, with documentation available here, in addition to a getting-started guide and operations examples, among others. Hystrix evolved out of Netflix’s need to manage an increasing rate of calls to its APIs, and resulted in (according to the company) a ‘dramatic improvement in uptime and resilience has been achieved through its use.’ The Netflix API receives more than 1 billion incoming calls per day, which translates into several billion outgoing calls (averaging a ratio of 1:6) to dozens of underlying systems, with peaks of over 100,000 dependency requests per second. That’s according to Netflix engineer Ben Christensen, who described the incredible loads on the company’s infrastructure in a February blog posting. The vast majority of those calls serve the discovery user interfaces (UIs) of the more than 800 different devices supported by Netflix.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read this article:
Netflix Gives Data Center Tools To Fail