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A Microsoft press release states "The cases have been settled through a patent agreement in which Salesforce.com will receive broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for its products and services as well as its back-end server infrastructure during the term. Also as part of the agreement, Microsoft receives c... |
Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft declared "Microsoft's patent portfolio is the strongest in the software industry and is the result of decades of software innovation. Today's agreement is an example of how companies can compete vi... |
Major players like Google, Amazon, and Salesforce exist solely in the cloud and have been a leading force in demonstrating the benefits of Web-based applications and storage, and driving businesses to migrate to the cloud. Microsoft has an advantage, though, with its vision of the cloud. |
It is easier to take an established dominance in client-server technologies, messaging, and productivity--software and services that businesses already rely on--and convince customers to migrate to the cloud, than it is to take an established presence in the cloud and build credible tools and services to compete with M... |
It often seems like Microsoft is oblivious to technology trends, and simply lacks the agility to compete in new markets. Over time, though, Microsoft also has a demonstrated ability to come late to the party, crash it, and emerge as a dominant force after the fact. That seems to describe Microsoft's ascent into the clo... |
Microsoft seemed opposed to the cloud trend, fighting for the traditional client-server model it has built its server and desktop operating system empire on. When stubborn denial fails, though--and the cloud goes on despite Microsoft--eventually Microsoft has to recognize that there is a culture shift going on in techn... |
Fortunately for Microsoft, it has the intellectual property to create a compelling cloud service, as well as the customer base and corporate credibility to successfully market its Azure services and carve out a significant share of the cloud market. With the recently unveiled Windows Azure Platform appliance, Microsoft... |
Now, with the Salesforce patent suits out of the way--including some monetary compensation to line Microsoft's pockets--Microsoft can proceed with doing what it does best: assimilate, adapt, and overcome. |
DHAKA, Jan 23 2018 (IPS) - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2013. |
It is past midnight. The aircraft come in from Saudi Arabia carrying workers who had been hastily ejected. They had gone from Ethiopia to work in a variety of jobs in a Kingdom flush with oil wealth. |
It is December 2013. Ethiopian migrant workers descend from the aircraft. They carry plastic bags that hold their belongings. There are few signs that they have benefitted from their hard labor in Saudi Arabia. A few of the migrants walk down without shoes. The air is chilly. They must be cold in their shirts and pants... |
What was the reason for their expulsion? The Saudi authorities said that these were migrants who came into the country without papers. They had crossed the dangerous Gulf of Aden in rickety boats. Saudi Arabia welcomes these migrants, even those without documents, largely because they – under duress – offer their servi... |
That was in 2013. Between June of 2017 and the end of the year the Saudi authorities detained 250,000 foreigners and sent home 96,000 Ethiopians. When the Saudi government feels particularly vicious, it carts the Ethiopians to the Saudi-Yemen border and merely leaves them on the Yemeni side. Yemen, still bombed almost ... |
The periodic cycle of allowing undocumented workers into the country and then humiliating them by this kind of public ejection maintains the workers in fear and allows the human traffickers and the employers to keep wages as low as possible. There is no one to complain to. |
Why do the Ethiopians keep returning to Saudi Arabia? Ethiopia is a country in dire economic distress. Six to nine million Ethiopians have needed food aid of one kind or another last year, as severe drought and poverty have combined to create a near famine situation. Southeastern Ethiopia, from where many of the migran... |
It is in this same area that Ethiopia hosts 894,000 refugees from Eritrea, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. Those refugees come for reasons of hunger and conflict. Last year alone, 106,000 refugees entered Ethiopia, most of them from South Sudan (whose citizens now number 420,000 in Ethiopia). A country that hosts almos... |
I can’t get the lack of shoes out of my mind. Ethiopian workers say that they are mistreated routinely in Saudi Arabia – sexual violence against domestic workers, beatings of all workers, harassment by the police. This has become normal. It is the way we live now. |
While in Dhaka, I visited the Drik Gallery III, where I saw the exhibition of photographs taken by Shahidul Alam of Bangladeshi migrants to Malaysia. The pictures are vivid illustrations of the hope in the eyes of the migrants and the great sense of disappointment, as life does not turn out as it was promised for most ... |
Alam gave me his book – The Best Years of My Life – which collects the pictures that I saw in the gallery, with a moving text that he wrote to accompany his photographs. The book traces the journey of Bangladeshi migrants – chasing a dream – to Malaysia’s factories and fields, where they work for low wages, get cheated... |
The legal status of these migrants is often unclear. It is precisely their tenuous legal status that forces them to bid down the rate of wages. But the money of the ‘illegal’ migrant is not illegal. It is welcomed into Bangladesh. There are roughly 9 million Bangladeshi migrants (according to the World Bank). They send... |
This is not as high a percentage as that of Liberia, where more than a quarter of its GDP comes from remittances from migrant workers. These economies would crumble without the small amounts of money from millions of workers that adds up to large amounts of foreign exchange for these countries. It is worth noting that ... |
And yet, as Alam finds, the government of Bangladesh is cavalier towards the migrant. The High Commissioner Mohammed Hafiz seems a nice enough man. But he has essentially given up on his duties. “What can I do?” he asks. |
The activists have it correctly. Parimala Narayanasamy of Coordination of Action Research on AID and Mobility (CARAM) tells Alam that “sending governments should come out strong to say that if any country needed workers, then they – the sending countries – should set the terms and conditions.” This is exactly what is n... |
They treat the foreign bankers and corporate executives like heroes. They treat their own nationals that send in far greater amounts of money like criminals. |
At Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, I charge my phone. Two men come and ask to use my charger. They are off to the Gulf. I don’t have a charger that fits their phone. A woman comes to me, hands me her boarding pass and asks me when her flight gets into Abu Dhabi. She is to be picked up by her employer. The boa... |
So Ethiopia has 7 million undernourished people, a fertility rate of 4 per couple, and over 100 million people at present in a drought prone region, but we won’t even mention overpopulation or family planning as a potential answer to this simmering problem? |
You’re absolutely right Friendly Guy. Ggovernments all around neglect this crucial issue. |
Gurbux Singh, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, answered your questions in a live forum on the day The Home Office published four separate reports into the summer race riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. |
Should the CRE be scrapped? |
How do you see race relations progressing? |
Integrating into British culture -how? |
In favour of desegregating schools? |
Mike from Middlesbrough, England: "Isn't it time that the CRE was scrapped, the CRE isn't relevant to white people and does nothing to help them, it refuses to recognise black/Asian racism against whites." |
And Tim Lenihan, England: We talk about prejudice but there are significant numbers of Asian employers in this country who will not employ non-Asians or in a lot of cases non-family members. If that was happening in the white community there would be uproar. |
Well clearly I don't agree with Mike's view which is that the CRE should be scrapped, I think the CRE does some very important work and if the CRE wasn't actually here then many of the issues of race discrimination, many of the individuals who come to us to seek redress within the courts, would not get the support and ... |
Kathryn Woolliscroft, UK: How do you see race relations progressing positively with the advancement of a truly real tolerant multicultural society? |
I have to say that I'm very optimistic, I'm very positive about the future. If you look at Britain today, in spite of some of the difficulties that we've witnessed over the last six or eight months in this country, that Britain is a major leader across Europe in developing race equality strategies, we've had race legis... |
What about this report, do you think it's going to help? |
I think clearly there are four reports that have come out today and I think they do point to some deep-seated problems which exist in our midst. Problems of segregation, problems with poor education, poor housing, problems where young people, frankly whether they're white or Asian, simply have no career opportunities f... |
Integrating into British culture - how? |
Ms M Shylaja: We've been reminded that we need to integrate into the British culture. Can someone please tell me what this culture's all about, all I see around me is unfriendliness - young people having no regard for elders, an alarming rate of indulgence and booze and drugs in the name of socialising, sexual permissi... |
Well I feel sorry that she feels like that because where I live in London I don't see that. Yes we have problems, yes we have problems with drugs and drunkenness and crime and all the things that she talks about but we have to get these things into their proper perspective. There are many, many positive things about Br... |
Gurmit Singh, the Netherlands: What happens when an immigrant is torn between two completely opposing poles of modernity, i.e. the West and the traditional values, say, of the East. And as a result of this inner dilemma he faces he cannot decide which sphere to live in. What do you think? |
I'm not sure about ships and the problems that ships cause but most certainly I know many, many young people, and as I've grown up in this country over the last 35-40 years, many, many young people, particularly from Asian backgrounds, who've gone through that sort of cultural crisis because they - many youngsters have... |
Do you think it's more difficult now than it was say a few decades ago? |
I think it is, it is, you know, and young people have in a sense greater distractions, greater pressures anyway now. I mean most certainly when I was a youngster many, many years ago we didn't have the same sorts of competing pressures and demands that young people have today. And on one level I feel sorry for young pe... |
Sanjay Khosla, London: Do you favour desegregating schools and encouraging the need for less faith orientated educational establishments? |
I fully agree and I think that there are some real problems in having schools which are mono-cultural, to use the hideous set of words. I think that they are something deeply wrong. I mean those schools may do very well in educational terms but I do think that it is vitally important that all our schools have a cross-m... |
Paul Rothwell: The simple fact is that you're not going to be able to make or persuade parents to send children to a faith-based school in which their children would be in the minority - racially and culturally. |
I'm not sure that that actually is the case. I know many schools where parents are desperately trying to get their children into those schools, which are faith schools, and yet cannot do so either because they're already full up or alternatively they don't meet the religious criteria. Now I myself would be very happy t... |
How key is this issue of schooling? |
I think schooling is fundamentally important. There are some real and very deep seated problems within our school system where sections of our schools [sic] leave school having done significantly less well. If you're Afro-Caribbean and male, if you're now Pakistani or Bangladeshi, or if you're a white working class you... |
Mr Gurbux Singh thank you for taking all those very varied e-mails, thanks for joining us. And that's it, that's all from the BBC's interactive Forum for now, I'm Emma Simpson. |
Is the world doing enough to combat Aids? |
Should Britain introduce ID cards? |
Links to more Forum stories are at the foot of the page. |
“This is not a story about forgiveness,” Emily Thorne tells us in the opening scenes of the new series “Revenge.” Not exactly a surprising piece of narrative information given the show's title, but “Revenge” is a promising new addition to the fall schedule. |
The story begins on the beach. A shot is fired. A man falls to the sand. The action cuts to Emily at her engagement party where she is celebrating her upcoming marriage to Daniel Grayson, son of Conrad and Victoria. The party is at the Grayson's beachfront mansion in the Hamptons. When the Grayson's daughter Charlotte ... |
The opening scenes of “Revenge” are a well-executed plot device in the tradition of the best prime time soap operas. It's a “Who shot J.R.?” moment with the wealthy Hampton set standing in for oil rich Texans. As the action leaves the present and takes us several months before the engagement and the shooting, it sets t... |
The targets of Emily's calculated plan revolve around the wealthy and influential Grayson family. Ruled by the formidable and perfectly groomed Victoria, the Grayson's don't wander too far from traditional character representations of entitlement and privilege. Victoria, as she tells the crowd at her son's engagement p... |
Emily's quiet slip back into the Hamptons starts with her renting her childhood home. It is here that we learn, through flashbacks, what happened to her father, as well as a few other secrets she is keeping in her quest to avenge his mistreatment. The pilot episode also introduces two men from Emily's past. One is a po... |
Emily VanCamp (“Brothers & Sisters,” “Everwood”) in a departure from her usual roles, plays Emily's dark need for revenge with a calm and clever detachment. When her war claims its first casualty, it's easy to root for her and it's this conflict that keeps the series interesting. Will all her victims deserve their fate... |
“Revenge” premieres on ABC on Sept. 21 at 10 p.m. EDT. |
Melissa Crawley credits her love of all things small screen to her parents, who never used the line, "Or no TV!" as a punishment. Her book, “Mr. Sorkin Goes to Washington: Shaping the President on Television's 'The West Wing,’” was published in 2006. She has a PhD in media studies. To comment on Stay Tuned, email her a... |
The “Fallout 4” section was key. We saw some gameplay footage that looks better than the shoddy trailer images. I will be happy as long as the graphics rest somewhere in between the footage shown during E3 and in the trailer. |
The game will release Nov. 10, and it includes tons of insane building and crafting options. It was one of the expo’s most important game showcases. |
We also learned a bit more about “Battlecry,” a competitive multiplayer game akin to “Team Fortress 2.” I played it at last year’s event, and it should be a fun game to run around in with your buddies for hour-long intervals. |
The Xbox crew delivered its heaviest punches in the features department, not with its game announcements. |
I am lukewarm on the backwards compatibility announcement. The option to play Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One would have been a lot more useful when the Xbox One first came out. |
Support for PC mods and an early access program are huge coups. This will attract developers and players from the PC gaming realm, and it something the PlayStation 4 can not yet match. |
Of the dozen or so games previewed, the “Gears of War 4” and “ReCore” trailers struck me the most. Gears of War is one of Microsoft’s strongest franchises, while “ReCore” has a great, Pixar-esque look and comes with a fabulous developer pedigree (Metroid, Mega Man). |
The godfather of them all’s E3 press event left one lasting impression on me: There were puppets. |
Other than that, I wasn’t too thrilled. The partnership between Nintendo’s Amiibo toy-to-game figures and the Skylanders crew was a major announcement. Both sets of toys will surely plaster children’s Christmas lists and torch parents’ wallets, but I don’t think it is a console-saving announcement. |
“Star Fox Zero” should be a new great title. I like that its creators are taking a “back to basics” approach with it, and I think the clumsy Wii U gamepad may actually fit the look and feel of the game perfectly. |
But we didn’t get a major Metroid announcement. In fact, we didn’t get any major Nintendo franchise announcements aside from “Star Fox Zero.” There were some fun games shown for Nintendo’s 3DS hand-held console, but the Wii U was left to die. |
I can’t believe I am writing this, but Electronic Arts’ event was probably my favorite. |
The largest third-party game publisher opened with a fantastically done announcement trailer for “Mass Effect: Andromeda,” arguably the biggest news of the entire conference. It was short, set to “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” and showed just enough Mass Effect deliciousness to whet my appetite. |
The company followed it up with a solid “Star Wars: Battlefront” presentation, a decent “Need for Speed” announcement and the quirky little “Unravel,” which is apparently about a little dude made out of yarn. I dig it. |
EA ended with a barrage of its many fine sports game franchises. The event wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was a strong showcase of everything the publishing giant has to offer us. |
Sony’s press event should have opened with this disclaimer: If you don’t like one-player action or role-playing games, the door is that way. I like those things, so the Sony event gave me a few warm, fuzzy feelings. |
The “Final Fantasy VII” high-definition remake was probably the major announcement. Remaking what is unquestionably one of the greatest RPGs ever made is a sure-fire way to curry favor with a good portion of gamers. |
I was pleased to get a look at “Hitman,” as that has always been one of my favorite single-player franchises. The Hitman stable is far superior to Assassin’s Creed, which also got a bump during Sony’s talk. |
“Horizon: Zero Dawn” could be a game to watch. Its announcement trailer showed a woman hunting some sort of robot dinosaur with a bow and arrow, which appeals to many of my interests. |
I don’t get the “Shenmue 3” buzz, but maybe I am too young to understand that franchise. |
The sequel to last year’s “South Park: The Stick of Truth” was a total shock. It took South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone about five years to finally work out the development, and both have told interviewers it would be a long time before they dove into a game again. |
“Stick of Truth” would have been my game of the year if not for “The Banner Saga” by indie developer Stoic, which also showed off a sequel at E3. I am sure the superhero-themed “Fractured but Whole” will live up to its predecessor and its hilarious name. |
We got another look at “The Division,” a promising apocalyptic role-playing game that has been brutalized by delays. |
I am also interested in “Rainbow Six: Siege.” About a decade ago, the Rainbow Six franchise delivered some fun shooters that offered a tactical change of pace from the Call of Duty franchise. |
Sony stole a bit of Square Enix’s thunder by showing off the “Final Fantasy VII” remake and “Hitman,” but the Japanese publisher still had a little more for us. |
The most important part of the conference centered around “Kingdom Hearts III.” The franchise, which is essentially a youthful “Final Fantasy” mixed with Disney characters, is a dynamite role-playing option for gamers of all ages. |
We got a look at more “Kingdom Hearts III” gameplay footage, which included a “Tangled” level. But we didn’t get a release date, which is pretty upsetting considering it was first revealed at E3 2013 and looks pretty finished to me. |
Square Enix also showed off new Tomb Raider and Dues Ex footage, but I have never understood the appeal of those two franchises. |
‘Personally the prospect of immortality does not excite me, but the prospect of being a materialistic idol for four years does,” says Marc Bolan, narrating his own documentary Marc Bolan: Cosmic Dancer (BBC4). Well, actually it’s actor Jamie Bamber talking, but he is using Bolan’s words, extracted from diaries and inte... |
Others chip in too. Paul Morley and Bob Harris are a given, because this is a BBC music doc on a Friday night. Plus Simon Napier-Bell and Tony Visconti, who worked with Bolan; Harry Feld, his brother; Toyah Willcox, who worshipped him; Gloria Jones who went out with him and had his son; Danielz, of tribute act T-Rextas... |
Roadie Mick is one of the most telling contributors. He remembers losing his rag with his friend and boss, telling him that success had made him “too effing big-headed for his own good”. Marc’s response was to give Mick an extra fiver a week. |
Not immortal then, but an idol certainly, just as he wished. And if that’s not enough Marc Bolan for you, on the 40th anniversary of his death, there is another documentary on Sky Arts tonight, with many of the same contributors and also his son, Rolan Bolan. |
The HAL police on Thursday arrested three frauds who cheated people of lakhs of rupees on the pretext of getting them jobs in reputed IT companies. The three have been identified as Harish Kumar, Anoop Kumar and Prem Kumar, all residents of Kadugodi. |
Prime accused Harish Kumar used to run a job consultancy firm where he was the administrator, while Anoop Kumar was the chief operating officer and Prem Kumar was looking after finance. |
The trio used to target job aspirants who applied through various portals and would contact them from their official email IDs from Bengaluru. |
Aspirants from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and West Bengal applied to their company. They claimed to offer training before job placements and used to collect lakhs of rupees from them. |
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