Microsoft is buying LinkedIn in an all-cash transaction valued at $26.2 billion (at $196 per share). It will continue to operate independently and will retain its brand after the acquisition. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and the deal is expected to be finalized by the end of this year. Read more…
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Microsoft Is Buying LinkedIn for $26 Billion in Cash
schwit1 shares an article from The Hill: The Air Force announced on Friday that it has lost thousands of records belonging to the service’s inspector general due to a database crash. “We estimate we’ve lost information for 100, 000 cases dating back to 2004, ” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Hill in an email. “The database crashed and there is no data…” The database, called the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS), holds all records related to IG complaints, investigations, appeals and Freedom of Information Act requests…. “We also use ACTS to track congressional/constituent inquiries.” The Air Force said they were “aggressively” trying to recover the data, adding that they had no evidence of malicious intent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Air Force Has Lost 100,000 Inspector General Records
Reader Orome1 writes: The Mozilla Foundation has set up the Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund, whose aim is to help open source software projects get rid their code of vulnerabilities. Projects that want Mozilla’s help must be open source/free software and must be actively maintained, but they have a much better probability to being chosen if their software is commonly used and is vital to the continued functioning of the Internet or the Web. Three open source projects — PCRE, libjpeg-turbo, and phpMyAdmin — have already gone through the process, and the result was removal of 43 vulnerabilities (including one critical). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mozilla Will Fund Code Audits For Open Source Software
The latest version of Android just hit a big, big milestone. Google’s early June developer stats have revealed that Marshmallow is now on just over 10 percent of Android devices, representing a huge jump from just 2.3 percent in March . Notably, only some of that surge can be credited to people upgrading from Lollipop. While the not-quite-current version’s adoption did go down (to 35.4 percent), the biggest declines in usage were for Jelly Bean and KitKat. In essence: many of those moving to Marshmallow may well have been replacing devices that were 3 or more years old. The timing isn’t coincidental, as you might have gathered. In the three months since we last looked back, numerous smartphone makers have delivered Marshmallow phones in force. The Galaxy S7 is the big kahuna, but you can also point to phones like the HTC 10 , LG G5 and Sony’s newer Xperias as factors. If you bought a brand new device this spring, especially if it was reasonably high-end, it might have been hard to avoid Marshmallow. To us, the big unknown is how well Marshmallow will fare by the time its successor rolls around in a few months, around Marshmallow’s first anniversary. Lollipop took a year and a half to become the dominant Android flavor. Although Marshmallow isn’t necessarily going to repeat history, its year-one figures should give you a good idea as to whether or not it’s doing as well as its predecessor. Source: Android Developers
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Marshmallow is now on 10 percent of Android devices
Microsoft has quietly introduced a Surface Membership Plan that allows small businesses to keep up with the latest Surface hardware and buy the devices on a monthly payment plan. Starting at $32.99 per month, business users get “the latest Surface devices, accessories, support, and training.” The membership plan includes the current generation Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, and Surface 3, but it also comes with free upgrades when newer models become available. As Thurrott.com points out , the membership program follows the iPhone Upgrade program that Apple introduced last year . The Surface memberships also include setup, personal training, in-store tech support, an extended service plan and Accidental Damage Protection. The monthly costs vary, depending on the model and whether you stretch out the payments over 18, 24 or 30 months, but the cheapest is a basic Surface Pro 3 for $33 per month over 30 months. The most expensive will run you about $221 per month for a tricked-out Surface Book with a 1TB hard drive, 16 GB RAM, Intel i7 processor and dual GPUs. That also means, at the end of the installments, you’ll have shelled out about $3, 978 for that Surface Book, versus $3, 448 for the same machine with just a two-year service plan and no other bundled deals (or $3, 199 if you live on the edge and skip the service plan). For the budget Surface 3, the membership plan works out to $990 total over two and a half years, versus $600 for the device with no extras. One other thing to note here: the plans are meant for business customers and not individuals, although you can still sign up to order only a single device, rather than a whole fleet. Also, in order to be approved for the membership plan, you’ll have to go through Microsoft’s financing partner LiftForward to handle all the monthly payments and credit applications.
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Microsoft now offering Surface Membership Plans
Reader jones_supa writes: In a world moving to electronic communications, the snail mail traffic has seen a huge drop. Because of this, Posti, the mail delivery organization of Finland will not be delivering letters and magazines on Tuesdays anymore. Tuesday was selected because it generally has the lowest volume of mail. For example, magazines and advertisements are targeted to the end of the week, so that people have more time for shopping dreams in the weekend. Another reason is that Posti recently launched a lawn mowing service which operates on Tuesdays. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Finnish Mail System Abandons Tuesday Delivery
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: Two years ago the FCC announced its intention to fine a Chinese electronics maker $34.9 million and a Florida man $48, 000 for respectively selling and using illegal cell-phone jammers. Today the agency has issued press releases telling us that those fines have finally been made official, without either of the offending parties having bothered to mount a formal defense of their actions. From the press release announcing the fine against CTS. Technology: ” The company’s website falsely claimed that some jammers had been approved by the FCC, and advertised that the company could ship signal jammers to consumers in the United States.” The company did not respond to the FCC’s allegations, although the agency does report that changes were made to its website that appear to be aimed at complying with U.S. law. Next up is Florida man, Jason R. Humphreys, who is alleged to have used a jammer on his commute: “Mr. Humphreys’ illegal operation of the jammer continued for up to two years, caused interference to cellular service along Interstate 4, and disrupted police communications.” Last Fall, a Chicagoan was arrested for using a cell-phone jammer to make his subway commute more tolerable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FCC Formalizes Massive Fines For Selling, Using Cell-Phone Jammers
ComiXology, Amazon’s online comic book service, unveiled a new unlimited content subscription option on Tuesday. The $6 per month ComiXology Unlimited plan gives subscribers unfettered access to the service’s entire archive, which includes titles from Image, Dark Horse, IDW and a bunch more — basically every notable publisher outside of Marvel and DC. ComiXology will continue to sell individual issues from the Big Two, it just won’t offer them on the unlimited plan. Via: Android Central Source: Comixology
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ComiXology Unlimited offers all of the comics for $6 a month
Last week, a blog post by a designer named James Pinkstone made the rounds; in it, the writer claimed that Apple Music and iTunes teamed up to delete his 122GB of local music files and basically cause havoc with his library. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of oddness around how Apple Music plays with your local files, but it sounded more severe than most other reports. Now, Apple has confirmed to iMore that it is working on a patch to iTunes to fix the issue. In the statement, Apple acknowledged that an “extremely small” number of customers were having their libraries disappear without their permission. Apple hasn’t been able to reproduce the bug itself, but nonetheless it says a patch to iTunes next week should help solve the problem. That’s little comfort to those who lost their local music libraries (back up your files, people), but it does serve as confirmation that this isn’t expected Apple Music behavior — the service is not intended to to overwrite your personal music library. With 13 million customers now, we’d probably be hearing from more upset users if this was happening more frequently. Source: iMore
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Apple says a bug in iTunes might be deleting user’s libraries
Microsoft wants folks to believe Windows 10 is a serious gaming platform and has showcased its capabilities with tech demos like its retooling of Forza 6 for powerhouse PCs. Today, they’re letting games designed for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) unlock their framerates from the refresh rate of their monitors. This fixes a long-standing complaint from gamers and developers who want to play games at higher framerates on UWP but were prevented from doing so. Framerate, measured in frames per second, is an important benchmark in graphical power: your high-resolution game might be gorgeous, but you’ll get flak if players can only run through it at a choppy 30fps. 343 Studios prioritized Halo 5 ‘s consistent 60fps so much that the game sacrifices resolution on the fly and ditched splitscreen multiplayer entirely. Microsoft also announced support for AMD Freesync and NVIDIA G-SYNC, which enables smarter refreshing of the monitor’s display. This and the framerate unlocking are exactly the granular support needed for computers to run titles to their maximum graphical capability. Other PC gaming platforms like Steam don’t lock framerates, so it’s strange for UWP to have set a framerate cap to begin with. Eliminating limits in graphical capability is a good way to win over the core computer gaming fanbase, which takes its visuals seriously . Source: DirectX Developer Blog
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Microsoft unlocks framerates for smoother gameplay on Windows 10