Microsoft's beef with Apple over SkyDrive for iOS is justified

Apple and Microsoft must have missed sniping at each other, because this is petty.

It's been a while since Apple and Microsoft took cheap shots at each other. I guess they got bored. One news outlet reports Apple is being difficult about approving the newest version of SkyDrive for iOS.

The Next Web reports that the two are at loggerheads over a new version of SkyDrive, which has a paid storage option because Microsoft doesn’t pay Apple a 30% cut of subscription revenue generated by paid storage services.

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A main sticking point is that Microsoft does not want to pay Apple the 30% cut, which runs in perpetuity regardless of whether users continue to use an iOS device or not, because the billing is done through their Apple account.

So if a user signed up for the enhanced-capacity drive on their iOS device and then moved to a non-iOS phone (say, a Windows Phone), Apple would still collect 30% of their fee for storage even though they aren’t using the iOS device any more. Microsoft is understandably not keen on this.

The problem is not limited to just SkyDrive. AllThingsD reports that this fee is also applied to Office 365 subscriptions sold through Microsoft Office for iOS, which Microsoft has all but acknowledged will be launched sometime next year.

A spokesperson for Microsoft responded to a query with this comment:

"Similar to the experiences of some other companies, we are experiencing a delay in approval of our updated SkyDrive for iOS. We are in contact with Apple regarding the matter and hope to come to a resolution. We will provide additional information as it becomes available."

Apple, as usual, isn’t talking.

This problem could easily spread to other apps. Third-party developers that use SkyDrive would also be hit with the 30% fee, and they aren’t going to like that perpetual fee, either.

How this plays out will be very interesting. Microsoft could practice what it preaches and offer policies for the Windows Store similar to what it wants from Apple. This would be a key point of differentiation and potentially competitive.

If Apple continues to play hardball and extends the same courtesy to DropBox and other cloud storage apps, Apple could be the one shut out and shunned. Will it happen? Who knows? Tim Cook does not strike me as unreasonable, and now that this is out and in the media, the pressure may come down on Apple.

Now the real test for Microsoft will be how it behaves when the shoe is on the other foot.

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Cisco, VMware and OpenFlow fragment SDNs

Three controller "standards" emerging in nascent network programmability, virtualization market

Juniper Networks Executive Vice President Bob Muglia spelled it out succinctly: the nascent software-defined networking market is morphing into three camps - OpenFlow/open source, Cisco and VMware.

Muglia said Juniper is looking to coalesce the industry around a third "standard" in SDN controllers, one that would be an open source alternative to those offered, or to be offered, from Cisco and VMware. Given their dominant positions in their respective markets, Muglia expects Cisco and VMware to be leading players in SDNs.

"We think the likely thing and the best thing for the industry is to have an open source controller emerge that becomes a third standard controller," Muglia said in an interview with Network World in September. "One that is available broadly across companies and supports the broad set of capabilities that are needed."

Read Network World's other tech arguments.

BIG DEAL: OpenFlow and SDN: Networking's Future?
And that pretty much lays out how the SDN marketplace is shaping up - the Cisco camp, the VMware camp, and everyone else looking for an alternative to Cisco and VMware. That mantle is falling on the open source community, where OpenFlow-based controllers have seized the early momentum.

Juniper is supporting an OpenFlow/open source controller from start-up Big Switch Networks, which has also garnered the support of many other industry players, including Arista Networks, Broadcom, Brocade, Citrix, Dell, Extreme Networks, F5, Mellanox and Microsoft. Meanwhile, data center titans HP and IBM are offering their own OpenFlow-based controllers.

But Juniper cautions not to read too much into the Big Switch endorsement. The company did not answer a direct question on whether the Big Switch controller and its Floodlight open source core represent the third standard Muglia referred to.

"Unlike many start-ups and incumbents in our space, Juniper is a pure-play networking company that embraces partners," says Mike Marcellin, Juniper senior vice president of strategy and marketing. "Juniper's involvement in the Big Switch announcements highlights our commitment to partnerships to support and advance open SDN protocols. This will continue to be a key part of our SDN strategy. "Additionally, we demonstrated Floodlight controller interoperability on our systems already earlier this year with BigSwitch, so support of this announcement is nothing new."

Cisco, which also offers an OpenFlow-based controller for research and academia, has actually downplayed OpenFlow's significance in programmable networking. Cisco targets five key markets for programmable networks but views OpenFlow as only relevant in one of them - research and academia. And thus far, Cisco has pledged to support OpenFlow on only the Catalyst 3750-X and 3560-X switches.

VMware paid $1.26 billion to acquire start-up Nicira for its overlay network virtualization control software. Nicira was co-founded by OpenFlow creator Martin Casado but OpenFlow plays a supporting role in Nicira's software - not a central one.

"Traditionally, OpenFlow does not do network virtualization," Casado told Network World back in June. "All OpenFlow does is allow you to control switches and it may allow you to run different applications on the switch. But it doesn't provide you the ability to create a virtual network that's topology independent that supports L2 and L3. I don't know of any OpenFlow solution that does this."

Perhaps with the activity around defining an open source standard SDN controller to go up against Cisco and VMware, this gap will be filled.

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5 Ways to Stay Safe Online on Black Friday, Cyber Monday

5 Ways to Stay Safe Online on Black Friday, Cyber Monday
Thanksgiving is just around the corner in the U.S., and so are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two of the busiest shopping days of the year. It's also a peak period for malware, phishing and spam. Since employees are increasingly using their own devices to access corporate resources (or simply using a work PC to sneak in a little shopping on Cyber Monday), it's a good idea to share some best practices with your users to help protect them and your network from threats.

17 eye-popping Black Friday deals

"You could tell them no," says Bob Bunge, professor of Cyber Security in the College of Engineering and Information Sciences at DeVry University. "In some circumstances, that's absolutely what you should be telling them. Don't use the office network for retail. It's just a bad idea, period. It's a lousy, bad thing to do."

However, employees often don't perceive the security threat as acutely as IT managers do, so a few pointers on keeping safe are a good idea. After all, shopping sites are among the top malware-infected sites on the Web, according to Symantec.

Five Best Practices to Stay Safe Online

When it comes to dodging malware and phishing attacks, there are a few simple things you can watch for on shopping sites to help keep you safe:

Look for an HTTPS and/or padlock in the address bar before submitting personal information on a website. This is a sign that the site is leveraging the SSL/TLS cryptographic protocol to secure your communications with the website in question. This helps protect against man-in-the-middle attacks that allow an attacker to intercept your communications with the site and inject new ones.

Look for your browser address bar to light up green. This is an indication that the identity of the website you're visiting has been strictly validated with an Extended Validation Certificate. In other words, you really are at the website of the merchant you're trying to shop with rather than fake site created by a malicious attacker to fool you into sharing personal information.

Look for a trust seal. Many merchant websites bear trust seals, usually at the bottom of the home page or on pages where you are asked to provide personal information. They come in many different shapes, sizes and colors and are used to verify a number of different claims about a website, from its use of data encryption to its status as a legitimate business entity. For instance, the TRUSTe seal is a privacy seal that indicates TRUSTe has reviewed the site's privacy policy, while the Verisign Trust Seal verifies the identity of a website's owner and operator and that the site is subject to daily malware scans and uses verified data encryption. Scammers can forge a legitimate seal, so you should always verify a trust seal's authenticity by clicking on it and checking the seal's validation page.

If an offer in an online ad or email sounds too good to be true, avoid it. These are often lures to infect you with malware or gather your personal information. "If it sounds scammy, it's probably scammy," Bunge says. "If I had to cut a large IT security training program into just a paragraph or so, probably the first thing I'd say is 'Don't click on that link!' The whole phishing industry nowadays is based on finding ever more creative ways to get you to click on some link.

Use good passwords. Pay attention to the passwords for your email, social networking and online banking accounts. Don't use the same one for everything. "Add up the asset value of everything in the world you have attached to that password," Bunge says. "All your email, all your online storage, all your credit cards and bank accountsthat's an awful lot of asset attached to just one password." Symantec recommends you use passwords that are at least eight characters, a random mixture of upper and lower case characters (including numbers, punctuation and symbols) and are not found in the dictionary. Additionally, never use the same password twice and change your passwords every six months.

"My main advice to consumers is to get yourself simple, reliable routines," Bunge says. "Find three, four or five online merchants that you trust and stick to known commodities. If you do want to branch out and surf the general Internet and try some merchants you haven't work with before, do some research. Put the name of the merchant in a search engine and see how often "fraud" or "rip off" pop up.

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Comparing MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro

Comparing MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro
Torn between the portability of the Apple MacBook Air and the unparalleled display of the Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display? We compare the two to make your next visit to the Apple store a bit less daunting.

Performance or portability? Cost or capability? These are the tough decisions facing anyone buying a laptop; but these issues are thrown into sharp relief when you're browsing at an Apple store. The MacBook lineup is book-ended by two stunning examples of systems that redraw the boundaries constraining laptops. The MacBook Air 13-inch redefined portable computing, simultaneously killing off the netbook and spawning the ultrabook. Adding a Retina display to the MacBook Pro 15-inch pushed the laptop from all-around performer to the pinnacle of premium laptops for video and graphics professionals. But which one is best for you? Let's take a closer look at each.

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display)
At first glance, the MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) looks a lot like the regular MacBook Pro. It's a little bit thinner, and a little bit lighter, but it's clearly part of the same family. The real difference becomes apparent when the laptop is turned on, and you get a first look at the stunning Retina Display.

With a 2,880-by-1,800 resolution screen, the MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) is perfect for media professionals and prosumers, with such smooth edges and tiny pixels that it's easy to forget that there are pixels at all. High-resolution photos and videos can now be seen at full resolution, even as you edit. Apple's video editing software now allows video editing—on the fly editing, with toolbars and palettes galore—while still running at 1080p in the corner preview window. It's also a great system for work, games, and anything else that needs processing power, thanks to a beefy quad-core Intel Core i7-3615QM processor (2.3GHz) and Nvidia GeForce GT 650M discrete graphics.

The MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) is also outfitted with two Thunderbolt ports—which do double duty for both high-speed data and Mini DisplayPort for monitors—along with two USB 3.0 ports, full-size HDMI output, and an SDXC card slot. The addition of "Extreme Capacity" (the XC in SDXC) is also important for anyone working with the highest resolution images and video. And, in our anecdotal testing, we found Apple's claims of 7-hour battery life to be right on the money.

So why wouldn't you get the MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display)? Two reasons: Portability and price. While thinner and lighter than the standard MacBook Pro 15-inch, 4.46 pounds is still heavier than most people want to carry every day, and it's still too heavy and unwieldy for the go-anywhere convenience that some users demand. And at $2,199 for the starting configuration, the MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) ain't cheap.

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New Windows RT tablets raise competition among ARM chip makers

IDG News Service - New Windows RT tablets announced at the IFA trade show in Berlin have intensified competition among ARM-based chip makers, which are adding unique capabilities to processors so tablets become more attractive to buyers based on performance and features.

Samsung and Dell announced Windows RT tablets with Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon S4 APQ8060A processor, which is built on ARM architecture. These are the first Windows RT tablets using Qualcomm's chips, while tablets announced earlier in the year, such as Microsoft's Surface and Asustek's Vivo Tab RT (previously called Asus Tablet 600), were based on Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 processor.

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Microsoft is working only with ARM-based chip makers Qualcomm, Nvidia and Texas Instruments for Windows RT on tablets and PCs. Toshiba previously showed a Windows RT tablet based on Texas Instruments' OMAP processor, but the device was scrapped due to a component shortage. Microsoft has also announced Windows 8 for tablets and PCs based on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices chips. The Windows operating systems will become available Oct. 26, at which time devices like tablets and hybrid laptops are also expected to ship.

Much like Android, the Windows RT ecosystem is fragmented with the OS divorced from the hardware, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. Hardware makers are offering unique features in Windows RT devices, and key differentiators could be connectivity, performance and form factors, McCarron said.

Windows RT devices on Qualcomm's S4 chip may provide a better blend of performance and connectivity, while Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 chip may deliver faster overall performance and better graphics, McCarron said. ARM processors are power efficient and will bring long battery life to Windows RT devices, McCarron said.

Windows RT has the look and feel of Windows 8, but Microsoft says that RT has been re-engineered with mobile features like power consumption and instant connectivity in mind. Chips with ARM processors are used in most smartphones and tablets that ship today, and Qualcomm and Nvidia are pitching different features on their chips in order to capture a larger share of the future Windows RT device market.

Qualcomm wants to bring smartphone features to Windows RT tablets with its S4 chips, said Luis Pineda, senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm. The chip in the Samsung and Dell tablets will bring a wide range of cellular and Internet connectivity features, while also enabling long battery life on tablets, Pineda said.

The S4 chip being used in the tablets has an integrated 3G/4G radio, Pineda said. The S4 chips also have a powerful graphics core, and the integration of all key components helps enable thin and light devices with long battery life, Pineda said. Qualcomm has also announced a quad-core S4 chip for tablets, which will bring more performance to tablets.

Tegra will be the only quad-core processor for Windows RT devices this year, and great graphics performance will bring console-quality gaming to devices, said an Nvidia spokesman via email. The Tegra 3 processor is already being used in some high-performance gaming tablets. Nvidia in the future will offer chips with integrated radios, but for now is working with partners to offer a separate 3G/4G radio on chips.

While chip makers in the ARM camp are watching each other closely, the companies also have to contend with x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, on which the Windows OS has grown up. Beta testers have played with Windows 8 on x86 tablets and PCs for months now, giving it a leg up over Windows RT, which has been shown as a product in development via a few tightly monitored tablet demonstrations at trade shows.

The first choice buyers will make is whether they want Windows 8 or Windows RT, after which they will decide on the device, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

Both the operating systems have a similar touch user interface, but existing Windows applications will not work on Windows RT devices. Microsoft is trying to make RT attractive to new buyers by bundling desktop Office productivity applications.

Some longtime PC users may want Windows 8 on Intel chips for access to legacy x86 applications, which by default users have to leave behind when going to RT, Brookwood said.

Microsoft has kept Windows RT under tight wraps, which has frustrated device and chip makers, analysts said. But the success of Windows RT devices will ultimately depend on the price and the features buyers identify with.

"It's hard to say with Windows RT because it has not yet happened," McCarron said.

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Vantaggi di Citrix Resource Manager

Vantaggi di Citrix Resource Manager

I vantaggi, le configurazioni e le modalità di utilizzo di Citrix Resource Manager durante l'amministrazione del sistema.

CITRIX Exams - Citrix Training

Citrix ha classificato in tre versioni di
Citrix Presentation
Server loro prodotti sul mercato. Le tre categorie suddivise in
Standard, Advanced ed Enterprise edizioni. Come tutti è consapevole
circa anticipo sostiene di Citrix e bilanciamento del carico di prova
di versione standard. L'attività di edizione con Presentation Server 4
fornisce maggiori funzionalità e le caratteristiche come le più recenti
opzioni di riavvio del server, Installation Manager, l'utilizzo della
CPU di gestione, l'ambiente e la domanda di isolamento di
ottimizzazione della memoria virtuale.


Anche queste funzioni sono disponibili in edizione il progetto di
Resource Manager. Anche se può essere molto utile, ma molte aziende non
utilizzare questa funzionalità di monitoraggio di Citrix nel loro
infrastrutture.


Introduzione a Citrix Performance Resource Manager (RPM)



Citrix Resource Manager, visualizza e memorizza i dati circa le
applicazioni di sistema, le prestazioni di prova o processo uso scopo.
Citrix RM è in parte coperto con Performance Monitor, ma aggiunge
alcune funzionalità ad esso.


La breve introduzione e la funzionalità di Citrix Resource Manager
sono descritte di seguito. Queste funzionalità supplementari sono i
principali vantaggi di Resource Manager.




* Real Time Watcher - La controllata contatori che sono chiamati
in metrica delle prestazioni di Citrix Resource Manager. È possibile
assegnare questo in due fasi di allarme e di errore. Se questi passaggi
sono colpite Resource Manager, allora si può usare direttamente alcuni
metodi come SNMP, e-mail o SMS.
* E 'possibile memorizzare i dati raccolti per un lungo periodo
di tempo. In questo modo è possibile generare rapporti basati su
attività attuali e passate.
* Resource Manager, che hanno possibilità di creare rapporti di
cristallo di fatturazione di autodeterminazione definito costi.
* Oltre al sistema di contatori, Citrix RM raccoglie dati
specifici, come le attività degli utenti, l'uso e l'applicazione
Agriturismo informazioni.


Se l'infrastruttura è già più recente applicazione sistema di
monitoraggio come HP OpenView, Tivoli NetView, CA Unicentre OpenView o
poi questi fornire le migliori soluzioni di rete Gestisci componente.
Questi componenti porti i dati dal Resource Manager per il sistema di
controllo, quindi i dati sono disponibili anche in tali sistemi. Citrix
s sostegno anche le caratteristiche per Microsoft Operations Manager
(MOM).

Best

CITRIX,
CCA 4.0,
CCEA 4.0, CCA 3.0,
CCA,
CCEA/CCIA,

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