Month: January 2019

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Lee, Duke University)

The Canadian government announced Wednesday that it will halve the number of diplomats at its embassy in Cuba after a 14^th Canadian has mysteriously fallen ill with brain injuries there.

The latest case from December suggests that the enigmatic incidents—which began in late 2016 and have been considered by the US government to be attacks—are still ongoing, straining relations between Cuba and the US, and now Cuba and Canada.

Josefina Vidal, Cuba's ambassador to Canada, called the decision Wednesday “incomprehensible.”

Release YouTube, you beast! (credit: 123pendejos)

The latest beleaguered Google product to get a death date is Google+. Google's controversial Facebook clone is shutting down on April 2. Google has been backing away from the service for years, but it gave the site a death sentence in October, after revelations of a data leak were made public. Now we have a concrete shutdown date for the service.

Google's support page details exactly how the G+ shutdown will go down, and it's not just freezing posts on the site. The whole site will be taken down, and everything will be deleted. "On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts," the page reads.

The whole deletion process sounds brutal. It won't just be the entire Google+ site that will be scrubbed from the Internet—Google+-powered comments on Blogger and other third-party sites will all be deleted, too. Users of Google+ have until April to download and save everything themselves, which they can do via this page.

(credit: Julien GONG Min / Flickr)

Microsoft has posted the results of the second quarter of its 2019 financial year, which runs up to December 31, 2018. Revenue was $32.5 billion, up 12 percent year-on-year; operating income was $10.3 billion, up 18 percent; and net income was $8.6 billion, as compared to a $6.3 billion loss due to the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act one year ago. Earnings per share were $1.08, as compared to a loss of $0.82.

Microsoft currently has three reporting segments: Productivity and Business Processes (covering Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype, Dynamics, and LinkedIn), Intelligent Cloud (including Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Enterprise Services), and More Personal Computing (covering Windows, hardware, and Xbox, as well as search and advertising).

Productivity group revenue was up 13 percent to $10.1 billion, with operating income up 20 percent to $4.0 billion. Commercial Office revenue was up 11 percent, with seat growth of 27 percent; this growth continues to be driven by the shift to cloud, with Office 365 revenue up 34 percent but perpetually licensed revenue down 21 percent. Consumer Office revenue was almost flat, growing by just 1 percent. This drop in growth comes after a series of strong quarters; a year ago, Office consumer revenue was up 12 percent, with the intervening quarters showing growth of 12, 8, and 16 percent. Microsoft says that Office 365 subscriptions were up, now totaling 33.3 million, but the weaker-than-expected PC market offset this growth. Dynamics revenue grew by 17 percent, and LinkedIn by 29 percent.