Tag: microsoft

Whitehat

The Internet Bug Bounty: Rewarding friendly hackers who contribute to a more secure internet.

so if i submit some iptable patches to block XP machines from the internet at the ISP level, i can collect a reward from microsoft?

Google & MS against secrecy

there are many days when Microsoft and Google stand apart. But today our 2 companies stand together. We both remain concerned with the Government’s continued unwillingness to permit us to publish sufficient data relating to FISA orders.

Proper HVAC

by collecting 500M data points from the sensors in all their buildings every 24h, finding huge energy savings right away:

In 1 building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66K of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.

2016-07-21: Cooling AI

by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to Google data centers, we’ve reduced the energy we use for cooling by up to 40%. In any large scale environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centers are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward.

this is why smart grids are one of the highest ROI investments countries could make.

Speech Recognition Breakthrough

I make a lot of fun of Microsoft for being fools here, but they do have an amazing research team. If only they could ship this stuff. The world would never be the same.

Mediocre future

in the future, people will still spend their time looking at chart junk, doing useless business travel, and use UIs at toddler speed. and don’t worry, everyone will still have ginormous kitchens to make a bowl of cereal.

Hotmail surveillance

Microsoft appears to have turned off the always-use-HTTPS option in Hotmail for users in Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

the fix is easy: use a real email provider.

OnLive

a couple days ago OnLive announced a price drop for CES – $66 for the system, plus a free game. I couldn’t resist any more. For the price of a new XBox game, I could get a whole new gaming system which my brain still says should be impossible. Bargain! Despite the fact that I already have an XBox and a Wii, and barely any free time to play either of them, I handed over my credit card info and got the system in yesterday. It’s amazing. The system itself isn’t much bigger than a Roku box or an Apple TV box (though heavier). I mean, it’s *tiny*. OnLive need to put pics of the box next to some pencils or something on their website, because even though I saw its size compared to the controller, I just mentally enlarged it to the size of an XBox or PS3. It’s half the size of a Wii, if not tinier.

a streaming game console.

Live Search vs. GMM

includes a comment from a microsoft PM admitting that they suck at search.

MS Cedes World Sim

sucks for Avi Bar-Zeev.

So the industrial applications market can only grow, but what about the competitive landscape? While some would argue Microsoft World-Sim and Google Earth are very different tools for different purposes, let’s face it – both are realistic simulations you can fly through, which aggregate real world data for physics purposes. And while Flight Sim was going to deliver underwater as a mode, Google just pulled the trigger. In a story today Google Earth Fills Its Watery Gaps The NY Times reported that Google is now mapping the blue parts of the planet. Microsoft and Google were in adjacent market, on a collision course. Not any more. Somebody blinked.

Microsoft Layoff 2009

timid. they need 20%, not 5%. that place is full of clowns.