Day: March 6, 2018

Microsoft Corp on Monday said it will soon make it possible for government clients to run its cloud technology on their own servers as part of a concerted effort to make Azure more appealing to local and federal agencies. The pairing of Azure Stack, Microsoft’s localized cloud product, and Azure Government, the government-tailored version of Microsoft’s cloud, comes as competition against Amazon.com Inc for major clients in the public sector ramps up. The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure’s head of global infrastructure. Reuters I think this is Microsoft trying to compete with Oracle and expand their current offerings to government customers.

Google’s Chrome browser is now built using the Clang compiler on Windows. Previously built using the Microsoft C++ compiler, Google is now using the same compiler for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and the switch makes Chrome arguably the first major software project to use Clang on Windows. Chrome on macOS and Linux has long been built using the Clang compiler and the LLVM toolchain. The open source compiler is the compiler of choice on macOS, making it the natural option there, and it’s also a first-class choice for Linux; though the venerable GCC is still the primary compiler choice on Linux, by using Clang instead, Google ensured that it has only one set of compiler quirks and oddities to work with rather than two. ArsTechnica I think this is an example of Google trying to unify programming platforms to unify code platforms.

Tell me if you have heard this one before, “I need more than one terabyte of cloud storage”? It’s not a crazy idea that you have a lot of data and want to back it up to cloud but Microsoft is leaving money on the table with OneDrive. More than leaving money on the table, they are leaving an open door for competitors to come in and take away users from the platform. And this is a problem as I have reached my OneDrive storage limit and will be forced to move my data elsewhere. There are a couple problems here which, on the outside, seem incredibly simple to fix. Right now, I have an Office 365 Home subscription as well as a work Office 365 subscription but my personal drive is limited to the one terabyte ceiling. Currently, I have about 900 gigabytes of photos and videos and a bunch of other content that I need for podcasting which puts me at the limit of what OneDrive will support; so what do I do now? Thurrott I am concerned later in the article it says “Another oddity is that if you don’t have Office 365, Microsoft says that your OneDrive data is stored in a way that does not support advanced security.” OneDrive may be something I might move away from.

Kali Linux showed up on the Microsoft Store today, making it available to all Windows 10 users. It’s the latest Linux distribution to be made available, joining big names like Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and OpenSUSE Leap. Kali actually first announced the news a couple of weeks ago. At the time, it said that the app wasn’t officially supported for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) just yet. It was tested using the Xfce Desktop Environment in WSL, and the company says that it worked quite well. Neowin Microsoft really giving users options for Linux but still no Red Hat, CentOS or Fedora.