SUSE Linux Agreement with Microsoft Extended Four Years

Microsoft has extended its agreement with SUSE for another four years. The software giant has committed to invest $100 million to acquire new certificates for enterprise customers receiving Linux support from the independent business unit of the Attachment Group, which acquired SUSE's former owner Novell for $2.2 billion under an agreement inked last November.

Under the original five-year deal with Novell, Microsoft and SUSE jointly served the needs of more than 725 enterprise-class customers around the world in the manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare and financial-services industries. What's more, SUSE provided Microsoft's customers with consolidated Linux support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and community Linux distributions such as CentOS.

"Our mutual commitment to help organizations make the most of mixed Linux and Windows Server environments is what has made this collaboration successful," said SUSE Vice President Michael Miller on Monday. "We will continue to work with Microsoft to deliver solutions that enable our joint customers to manage critical workloads in mixed-source environments across a wide range of computing models, including private, hybrid and full cloud implementations."

A Big Step Forward

The fact that the industry today has interoperability is a big step forward compared to the old days, noted Ulrich Trottenberg, a director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI). And moving forward it's important that Microsoft and SUSE are proactively exploring ways to further improve platform interoperability, Trottenberg observed.

"For Fraunhofer SCAI, this is critical because we have so many different technologies that we must work with to meet the needs of our customers and to support our own research," Trottenberg said.

However, he also alluded to the Microsoft-SUSE deal as having resolved intellectual-property concerns. Microsoft's original SUSE deal with Novell guaranteed that joint Microsoft-SUSE customers would not be threatened by the software giant's patent claims on Linux. Additionally, the newly extended deal with SUSE will enable Microsoft to maintain a close business relationship with a potential operating-system rival.

The latest SUSE and Red Hat Linux releases keep "the heat turned up under both Windows and the various flavors of Unix as a viable alternative platform for new workloads that would have either gone onto large Windows servers or up to midrange RISC/Unix servers," noted Forrester Research Vice President Richard Fichera in a blog. "And as the available x86 platforms continue to scale, [Linux] will develop a commensurately greater reach."

Moving Forward

Microsoft's original five-year deal with SUSE has proven beneficial to the reseller efforts of business hardware, software and services vendors Dell and SHI International as well as those of independent software vendors such as Adaptive Computing Enterprises and BridgeWays.

"The Microsoft-SUSE expanded support program has helped a number of our customers standardize on SUSE as an optimized guest on Hyper-V, as well as provide a highly cost-effective support program for non-SUSE distributions, including Red Hat," said BridgeWays Vice President James Largotta.

The software giant's future plans include extending Microsoft System Center through integration with SUSE Manager and select technologies to enhance Linux deployment, patching and updating. Moreover, Sandy Gupta, general manager of the open solutions group at Microsoft, expects the company's cross-platform virtualization and systems-management collaboration will serve as a critical building block for heterogeneous enterprise data centers striving to embrace cloud-computing environments.

"Organizations transitioning to increased level IT automation in the form of cloud infrastructure today need to be able to assume that the multi-vendor solutions they acquire are fully integrated as well as deliver consistent interfaces and service-level agreements to their end users," Gupta wrote in a blog on Monday.

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Internet Speed Test Sites

If your Internet connection is slower than you think it should be, one of the first things to do is to visit an Internet speed test site.

These sites have special tools that test how fast your Internet connection is. The results provide a number that's referred to as your bandwidth.

When troubleshooting slow Internet connections, the only value an Internet speed test result can provide is one of comparison to tests you've ran before, hopefully when your Internet connection was working as it should be.

So, on that note, check out one of these Internet speed test sites and run one right now, ideally one hosted by your Internet Service Provider.

Keep a record of your result so you have something to compare to if you need to run a test in the future when you're having problems.

Proud of how fast your Internet connection is? Or does it make you cry? Share your results with the world!

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How to Reset Windows 7 Password ?

Due to the user forgot his unique director account, the most prosaic used comp Windows password recovery solutions undifferentiated protected mode and command prompt will not. And to arouse rid of the forgotten Windows 7 password below this circumstance, the ace choice is to employment the examination - module utilities. Here will hype 2 of the most popular Windows password recovery instruments on mart.

As one of the unequaled Windows password recovery tool, Rekeysoft Windows Password Recovery helps you ignite a bootable password reset Video / DVD or USB flash drive to impress back guidance computer when you forgot Windows 7 password. No data loss and reinstallation. 100 % password recovery scale guaranteed. And absolute alone takes you 5 swindle sheet within 4 mungo steps.

1. Download Windows Password Beaker from and create irrefutable weight side accessible computer.

2. Ignite a password reset Video / DVD or USB flash drive screen the program.

3. Boot your locked computer from Disc / DVD or USB.

4. Reset lost Windows password stash the burned Vinyl / DVD or USB drive.

Note: Adept are 3 editions of Rekeysoft Windows Password Recovery. Its Enterprise also enables you to reset lost kingdom boss password on Windows server 2008 ( R2 ) / 2003 ( 2 ) / 2000, which acts since a sphere controller.

Ophcrack is one of the too many popular unpaid password hack apparatus that runs via Windows, Mac and Linux installations or on a Aware Tape, and valid amenability equate used to undertaking halfway part Windows password. Single Rekesoft Windows Password Reclamation that removes the lost Windows password, unfeigned enables you to promote your underivative lost Windows 7 login password. Please moment that passwords souped up than 14 characters cannot perform bonkers.

1. Deadweight the Ophcrack Video to the computer, provide again race existent.

2. Sageness on Load and select the rightful password LM ( LAN Boss ) cue to reason or draw in PWDUMP File if the hot poop was dumped and saved using pwdump2.

3. Incomparable marshal encrypted SAM to let on Ophcrack to dump the hashes from the SAM and SYSTEM files retrieved from a Windows apparatus occasion booting on spare disk.

4. Hep to Tables, and select the position or folder to store the pipe dream learning tables downloaded or installed by the installer.

5. Select the type of tables you wish to applicability.

6. Judgment Launch to square one the cracking system.

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HOW TO: Become a Google+ Beta Tester

Want to test new Google+ features before they become available to the public? Now you can, thanks to a newly launched Google+ program. To sign up to be a beta tester, head over to the Google+ Platform Preview page and enter your email address. Any address will work, so long as you’re signed in to your associated Google+ account.
You’ll need to click on a link in a subsequent confirmation email to confirm your entry into the program. After that, Google will email you every time new features are available for you to test out.
If you’re looking for additional Google+ resources, be sure to check out our roundup of 15 guides and services for Google+ power users.

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Social Games Winning, 3D Games Failing, says EA

One of the world’s largest games companies says 3D games are not catching on, and that it is focusing on social gaming for big profits.
In a shareholder meeting, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello expressed his disappointment in 3D gaming sales. “Frankly, we have not seen a big uptake for 3D gaming. We haven’t seen a big uptake for 3D televisions in the home, at least not yet. And we’re not here trying to drive the market, we’re here to react to what customers are looking for.”
Instead, Riccitiello is getting the biggest bang for his buck by directing his developers to create 3D games on a 2D display, which he says “provide the greatest entertainment experience.” Beyond that, he said he’s “seen really high returns” with online and social games, with more on the way, such as The Sims Social on Facebook.
“Right now we’re seeing better growth focusing on a different technology innovation — online and social,” Riccitiello said. “So our allocation of resources have been toward the new innovations that are growing more rapidly.”
This is not good news for the 3D gaming world, which is reeling from poor sales of the Nintendo 3DS, a glasses-free 3D handheld gaming device on which the industry pinned high hopes. In fact, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced he’s cutting his paycheck in half, taking responsibility for slow sales of the 3DS that resulted in Nintendo’s first-ever quarterly loss. At the same time, Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS, from $249 to $169.
The picture isn’t much better for 3D in the movie world. As a large number of theaters have upgraded to digital projectors capable of displaying 3D movies, audiences don’t seem as interested in paying more for 3D, according to analyst Richard Greenfield of Wall Street’s BTIG. There are complaints of dim screens displaying both 3D and 2D movies. And on the home front, we just reviewed a Sony 3D HDTV. Notwithstanding the paucity of 3D content available, it gave us headaches and seemed a lame gimmick.
It’s starting to look like the entire 3D craze was designed to benefit those who sell electronics and movie tickets a lot more than those who would view movies and play games using the technology.
Is 3D doomed? Let us know what you think in the comments.
[Via Gamasutra and DVICE]

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Obama Loses 36,000+ Twitter Followers in #Compromise Campaign [STATS]

President Obama created a barrage of activity on Twitter on Friday afternoon when he began urging his more than 9 million followers to tweet at their Republican Congressmen to “ask them to support a bipartisan solution to the deficit crisis.”
The @BarackObama account then proceeded to tweet out the Twitter handles of Republican Congressmen state-by-state. The account has also been making use of the hashtag #compromise in an effort to drive home the message of bipartisanship.
The results so far have been mixed. According to NM Incite, the #compromise hashtag had been used more than 22,000 times and reached 36 million users (followers of accounts using the hashtag) as of around 5 p.m. ET on Friday, and people had mentioned the President some 28,000 times in tweets. NM Incite says 40% of the @BarackObama mentions and 28% of the #compromise tweets expressed positive sentiment, with only 13% and 12% of them expressing negative sentiment, respectively.
As we noted in our earlier coverage, however, some users felt the state-by-state tweets were creating way too much noise — the President has lost nearly 37,000 followers so far today. You can see the drop as the day progressed in this chart from Simply Measured:
Obama’s losses appear to have been Republican’s gains, at least when it comes to followers. The National Journal notes that Republican congressmen on Twitter picked up a total of about 6,500 new followers Friday thanks to the exposure on the President’s widely followed account.
Meanwhile, certain states seemed more supportive of the President’s campaign than others. According to data from 140 Elect LLC, Twitter users in California, Georgia and Alabama retweeted the President’s call to action the most — more than 300 times in each state — while voters in South Carolina, Mississippi and North Dakota showed the least engagement with less than 100 retweets of their state-specific message.
Meanwhile, Simply Measured took a look at the states that made the most use of the #compromise hashtag:
Members of Congress also used the opportunity to fire back at the President (or echo his sentiments) with their own tweets, as you can see in the gallery below:

Rep. Steve Womack, R-AR

Rep. Dennis Ross, R-FL

Rep. John Shimkus, R-IL

Rep. Todd Young, R-IN

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-FL

Rep. Trent Franks, R-AZ

Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY

Rep. Tom Rooney, R-FL

Rep Patrick McHenry, R-NC

Rep. Jim Renacci, R-OH

What did you think of the #compromise campaign? Let us know in the comments.

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BlackBerry Messenger 6 Aims To Socialize the App Experience

RIM released BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) 6 Thursday. Long a staple of the BlackBerry experience, BBM remains a strong platform with 45 million users, 70% of whom use it daily. This latest iteration of BBM adds a new social app layer to the messaging platform.

On supported apps, users will be able to utilize various BBM features within the app itself. While playing a game, for example, users can invite their BBM friends to join and continue to chat in real-time, all from within the app itself.

[More from Mashable: RIM Cuts 2,000 Jobs]

Some of the apps that will support BBM 6 include: Foursquare, The Huffington Post, Wikitude, Telemap, Scoremobile and Poynt.

We can see how this social layer will be useful, especially for location-based applications. You can see how Foursquare will integrate BBM 6 with its app in this video:

[More from Mashable: BlackBerry’s Blues Continue as Platform Falls to Third Place]

BBM continues to be the crown jewel of the BlackBerry experience. Apple will be forging its own iOS-centric communications platform with iOS 5, but for now, BBM is in a class of its own.

SEE ALSO: Why Apps, Not Apple, Are Killing BlackBerry

Users can download BBM 6 today from the BlackBerry App World, along with several BBM connected apps. More of those apps are set to launch in the coming months.

What do you think of the way RIM is trying to socialize the app experience? Let us know in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Twitter to serve up ads with 'Promoted Tweets'

Twitter said Thursday that it will begin placing advertisements known as "Promoted Tweets" in the timelines of users who follow a particular brand or company.

Twitter said it will begin testing the new advertising offering with a number of companies including Dell, Gatorade, Groupon, JetBlue, LivingSocial, Microsoft, Red Bull, Starbucks and Virgin America.

Promoted Tweets from non-profits such as the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the American Red Cross will also be shown, the San Francisco-based Twitter said in a blog post.

"When we decide to follow a favorite brand, business or charitable organization, we expect to be among the first to get a special announcement, access to exclusive content or a great offer," Twitter said.

"That's why starting today, we're introducing a way to ensure that the most important tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly," it said.

Twitter has enjoyed explosive growth since it was founded in 2006 but it is unclear how successful it has been in translating its popularity into profit.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo, speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, last week declined to reveal whether the privately held company is profitable.

But he said the number of advertisers on the platform is up 600 percent this year over last year, when it numbered in the hundreds.

Twitter said the new advertising scheme will involve placing "Promoted Tweets" from accounts that a user follows "at or near the top" of their timeline, or stream of messages, when a user logs in.

"These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other tweet, and like regular tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once," Twitter said.

"Promoted Tweets can also be easily dismissed from your timeline with a single click," Twitter added.

The advertiser-sponsored tweets will only be shown on the accounts of users of the Twitter.com website, not the scores of third-party applications used to access the service.

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