Author: Peter Bright

Windows Server 2016, not likely to arrive until the second half of next year, is going to shake up the way Microsoft licenses its server operating system, moving away from per socket licensing to per core. The change was first spotted by Wes Miller who is, for his sins, an expert on Microsoft licensing policies.

Windows Server 2012 introduced a great rationalization in the way Microsoft licensed its server operating system. The two main editions, Standard and Datacenter, had identical features, and differed only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they supported. Standard supported two VMs (in addition to the host OS); Datacenter was unlimited. Beyond that, they were identical. The licenses for both editions were sold in two socket units; one license was needed for each pair of sockets a system contained.

Windows Server 2016 makes that simple system less simple. First, it reinstates the functional differences between Standard and Datacenter editions. Datacenter will include additional storage replication capabilities, a new network stack with richer virtualization options, and shielded virtual machines that protect the content of a virtual machine from the administrator of the host operating system. These features won't be found in the Standard edition.

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.

Adobe's embrace of HTML5 has created its first big casualty: Flash. Not the browser plugin—Adobe said in 2012 that it would continue supporting the plugin for the next five to 10 years—but Flash Professional, the main authoring tool used to create Flash animations.

With the Creative Cloud update coming in January, Flash Professional will sport a new name: Adobe Animate CC. It will still be able to produce Flash (SWF) files and will also continue to support Adobe's standalone AIR runtime, but it also supports building for HTML5 Canvas and WebGL. Adobe says that a third of all content produced in Flash Professional is now HTML5-based, showing that the shift away from its proprietary browser technology is well underway. Flash Professional isn't just for Flash; it's for all kinds of timeline-based interactive animations. The name change makes sense.

AMD announced its new Crimson drivers, replacing the Catalyst name and software, with great fanfare earlier this month. The first Crimson drivers are now out, and they appear to have a serious problem. There are widespread reports of cards overheating and perhaps even failing permanently.

It appears that the new driver is setting the video card fans to 20 percent and then leaving them there. Normally, the fan speed should increase as the GPU temperature goes up, but that is not happening with Crimson. Even during games and intensive workloads, the fans are sticking at 20 percent, allowing GPU temperatures to climb to more than 90° C. These high temperatures are causing poor performance due to thermal throttling, graphical glitches and crashes, and some users are reporting permanent hardware damage. Although the GPU itself throttles when it overheats, there's speculation that other components on the cards, such as the VRMs, can still be damaged.

AMD has acknowledged the fan speed issue and says that a hot fix will be published today. This is unlikely to be any great comfort to those whose cards have bitten the dust, and it makes for an inauspicious debut for AMD's new driver. This is, however, not a problem unique to AMD; in 2010, Nvidia published a driver update that had a similar fan controller issue that led to cards overheating and in some cases breaking entirely. Another Nvidia release in 2013 also yielded complaints of overheating and video card destruction.