Month: December 2015

Microsoft today held its annual shareholder meeting, leaving one significant Microsoft shareholder—former CEO Steve Ballmer—less than happy with the way the company reports the financial performance both of its nascent hardware business and of its cloud business, according to Dina Bass at Bloomberg.

That's because the company hasn't disclosed profit margins or sales figures for either business. Ballmer says that revenue is a "key metric" and that if these businesses are important then the company "should report it." Rather than reporting these figures, Microsoft has reported its annualized revenue run rate—a hypothetical value that describes what the company's revenue would be if the current level of sales were sustained over the full year. Ballmer's view of the run rate: "Bullshit. They should report the revenue, not the run rate."

Margin is also important because of the shifting revenue base of the company. Margins for software (which can be duplicated at zero cost) tend to be very high; margins for hardware and cloud services tend to be lower. As Microsoft shifts more revenue from software, such as Office, to cloud services, such as Office 365, its margins will change. Ballmer wants these margins to be reported to make this visible. This lack of transparency means that Ballmer has no idea how the company is really doing.

(credit: US Coast Guard)

In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon exploded and began spewing oil into the US Gulf Coast. In all, this released some 134 million gallons of crude over a span of almost three months. Eleven workers were killed in the nation's worst offshore oil spill.

Today, federal prosecutors moved—and a judge agreed—to drop manslaughter charges against two supervisors aboard the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded. This development, in which prosecutors said they believed they no longer could meet the legal threshold for a conviction, means that nobody will go to prison for the disaster that soiled coastlines from Texas to Florida, killed nearly a dozen people, and was an environmental disaster that perhaps brings with it never-before-seen longterm consequences.

The government announced the legal move Wednesday in a New Orleans courtroom. Rig supervisor Donald Vidrine instead pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act, a misdemeanor that likely will result in 10 months of probation and 100 hours of community service. Robert Kaluza, the other supervisor who also was being charged with 11 manslaughter counts, is going to fight a single misdemeanor charge that he also violated the Clean Water Act.

H1N1 flu virus (credit: NIAID/Flickr)

Ditching annual flu shots for a single stick that can protect year after year may be even harder to do than scientists thought—thanks to our own bamboozled immune systems.

Influenza viruses are infamous masters of mutation, changing themselves ever so slightly to dodge detection by immune cells. That viral variation drives the need for us to roll up our sleeves each fall instead of relying on our immune system’s memory of last year’s flu—or so researchers thought. A new study finds that although our immune systems naturally have the potential to detect and fight all flavors of flu virus, they get tricked into fighting only strain-specific battles. The finding, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that making a universal vaccine may require wising up our immune cells as well as outsmarting the virus.

The study, from a group of researchers led by Patrick Wilson of the University of Chicago, examined the immune responses of 21 people after exposures to the 2009 H1N1 virus (swine flu). Researchers specifically looked at participants’ B cells, which make antibodies that help fend off the flu by seeking out the virus and marking it for an attack, as well as seeking out the antibodies themselves.