Microsoft had one hell of a year. Their best ever, in fact, from a revenue perspective. They’re no Apple, but hey, who is? Nearly $70 billion in revenue for what is primarily a software company is amazing. But the great numbers continue to mask one thing: the gaping, blood-soaked wound that is the Online Services Division.

Reading Microsoft’s press release on their earnings, you’d think everything is fantastic in the division. “Online Services Division revenue grew 17% for the fourth quarter and 15% for the full year, primarily driven by increases in search revenue.” Big growth! Awesome!

Wait a minute…

What Microsoft once again conveniently left out is any talk of how profitable the division is. That’s because it’s not profitable. Oh boy is it ever not profitable. The division lost $728 million for quarter. Remarkably, that’s the second-worst loss they’ve ever reported — only $4 million shy of the record $732 million loss in Q4 2009.

After I pointed out the loss last quarter, apologists were quick to jump on the “they just need more time” argument. Well, unbelievably, they continue moving the wrong way. Last quarter’s loss was $726 million. They somehow lost $2 million more this past quarter.

Even crazier, this is the 22nd consecutive quarter that Microsoft has reported an overall loss in the Online Services Division. There hasn’t been a profit reported since 2005.

Think about that for a second. 22nd consecutive quarters of losses. Revenues are increasing, but the losses are increasing faster. They’re spending well over two dollars for every dollar they earn.

And then there is the biggest number of all. For the year, the Online Services Division lost $2.557 billion.

Yes, Microsoft can afford these losses thanks to their other wildly profitable businesses. But at what point do they start to reconsider their online strategy?

Spending more than they’re earning has worked for them in the past with the Entertainment and Devices division, which is now increasingly profitable. But again, Online Services has been losing money for almost 6 straight years now. And this was the worst year yet. Things are getting worse, not better.

Windows, Business (Office), and Servers are essentially subsidizing Online Services (Entertainment still doesn’t come close to covering the loses Online Services is seeing). And while Business and Servers had strong years with good growth, the Windows business actually shrank from last year. What happens if the other businesses start to shrink too? Will be able to continue to justify the Online loses?

For their part, Microsoft mainly blames the loses on the Yahoo deal:

OSD operating loss increased due to higher operating expenses, offset in part by increased revenue. Cost of revenue grew $641 million driven by costs associated with the Yahoo! search agreement and increased traffic acquisition costs. General and administrative expenses decreased $157 million or 60% due mainly to transition expenses in the prior year associated with the inception of the Yahoo! Commercial Agreement. Research and development increased $117 million or 11% due to increased headcount-related costs.

Don’t overlook another crazy stat: Microsoft was able to decrease general and administrative expenses by 60 percent for the year, and still lost more than ever.

Next quarter will be interesting to watch. Microsoft paid $8.5 billion in May to buy Skype — another online business with a history of losing money. It’s Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever. And the deal closed in late June, so this next quarter we should start to see how it affects the division.

With the worst online startup in history finally be able to turn things around? Or will they continue to bathe in blood?

The charts below by BusinessInsider really drive the point home.

Many companies are adopting a ‘virtualization first’ policy due to all the benefits associated with virtualization. But, there is still legitimate concern about virtualizing everything, especially with security and performance for high I/O driven applications. The hyperadvisor, Antone Heyward addresses these concerns and best practices for virtualizing these applications.

This obviously also opens the merge window for the next kernel, which will be 3.1. The stable team will take the third digit, so 3.0.1 will be the first stable release based on 3.0.

Rick: “How can you close me up? On what grounds?”
Captain Renault: “I’m shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on in here!”
Croupier: “Your winnings, sir.”
Captain Renault: “Oh, thank you very much.”

One has to mourn such a collective loss of innocence. The innocence of the British parliament tearfully quizzing News Corp executives over revelations that phone hacking was used in the pursuit of tabloid scoops. The innocence of those same executives who were “shocked, appalled and ashamed” at the means used by their staff to keep delivering front page gold. The innocence of senior Metropolitan Police officers on learning that underpaid colleagues routinely sold information to tabloid reporters.

And most of all the innocence of the Great British Public — the same public who made books like Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Scoop‘ into a 1938 best-seller, and did the same to Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade two generations later. How shocked — shocked! — they all are to learn that tabloid journalists are, at heart, scumbags.

America too is shocked by the revelations — and with only slightly more justification. US journalists have trended towards higher moral ground than their Fleet Street counterparts, but only in recent years — as Paul Collins explains in this fascinating piece for Slate.

Really, anyone who has ever picked up a Murdoch newspaper, read a book about Fleet Street or laughed at any of the myriad movie characters based on News Corp executives (Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies is a perfect, and representative example) has to ask themselves whether they’re really shocked, or even surprised, by the revelations of wrong-doing at the company or whether this is all just a very convenient opportunity to bring about the downfall of a man that almost everyone in the public eye has a reason to hate.

In this week’s year’s episode of Why Is This News we ask exactly that question; with Paul offering a spirit defense of the most hated man in media, and Sarah wondering whether such a blasé attitude to corruption and criminality means he’s on the Murdoch payroll too. At one point in the show (which was taped yesterday), Paul suggests that it’s only a matter of time before non-Murdoch newspapers are accused of phone hacking — and worse. And what’s this in today’s Independent?

“Hacking was endemic at the ‘Mirror’, says former reporter“

Shocked!

Video below…

No, the heat isn’t playing tricks on you: it’s time for another new episode of OMG/JK!

In this episode we take a look at Mac OS X Lion, the latest release of Apple’s operating system that introduces some key new features: Mission Control, Launchpad, and inverted scrolling. Tune in to hear how often MG attempts to touch the screen of his Macbook because he’s so used to the iPad. Yup.

Next, we turn to Spotify, the all-you-can-eat music streaming startup that finally launched in the United States after scoring record deals with the major US labels (there had been rumors about an impending US launch for well over a year). Was it worth the wait?

We also revisit Google+, Google’s promising social network that keeps making headlines (both good and bad).

Here are some recent stories relevant to this week’s topics:

• Sean Parker On Spotify U.S. Launch: “The Realization Of A Dream”, “The Answer To Piracy”
• With OS X Lion, Apple Touches Upon The Next Decade Of The OS
• Nine Things You Should Do After Installing OS X Lion
• Google+ iPhone App Now Live In The App Store (Screenshots)

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The Smart GWT Quick Start Guide is designed to introduce you to the Smart GWT web presentation layer.

As you probably saw by now, JetBrains just announced that they are working on a brand new statically typed JVM language called Kotlin. I am planning to write a post to evaluate how Kotlin compares to the other existing languages, but first, I’d like to take a slightly different angle and try to answer a question I have already seen asked several times: what’s the point? We already have quite a few JVM languages, do we need any more? Here are a few reasons that come to mind.

The newly released Linux kernel features improved support for Xen and BTRFS file system, as well as a new versioning scheme

I've had some interesting discussions with other developers about writing code recently. I often have the impression that some developers put too much emphasis on clean code. Don't get me wrong, i strive for clean code as well, and have written about its importance quite a lot in the past couple of years. But when i'm coding, clean code is my secondary goal and it could never take the place of my primary goal: making it work. And preferably, i want to make it work great.

First advice I got when I entered #kernelnewbies a year ago, was to download kernel version 0.0.1. It's a good start for someone who doesn't know jack about kernels, and wants to see a very basic one.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened for yet another G+ conversation. This one, however, was noted for its evenhandedness as @ajkeen and @scobleizer traded social blows over the new Google service. As someone in the Friendfeed chat on the livecast noted, @stevegillmor seems surprisingly positive about the new service. As Keen observed, that’s because I think the new service is Friendfeed revisited.

Of course, it is. But it’s also Twitter without the 140 character limit, Facebook without the unseen authority algorithm, and the Gillmor Gang without a human director (Hangouts). @kevinmarks says it a little differently, seeing G+ growth gaining on Club Penguin. And that’s the fundamental reason Google has a winner, by underlining the best parts of each of these services and floating all boats on a rising tide.

First in a series of "hidden Java 7 features", highlighting lesser known new features in the latest Java release. This one gives an overview of the new capabilities to monitor process and system CPU loads, with a CPU monitor GUI example.

Google+, pronounced “Google plus” is a new social network from Google. The service, which is initially available to a select group of Google users who will soon be able to invite others, will let people share and discuss status updates, photos and links, much as they do on Facebook.

The past few months have been a jam-packed with a few developments in terms of C++. Not only did C++0x get the almost unanimous nod of the industry to be good enough to be called C++11 but there’s also a few stories that have come out that need some attention too. With a new version coming up I’d say this decade is the one where C++ is more relevant than ever.

Editor’s note: Guest author Bindu Reddy is the CEO of MyLikes, a word-of-mouth ad network funded by former Googlers. 

When we were raising our angel round, I had a phone conversation with a prominent Silicon Valley investor who did not have time to meet me face-to-face but was interested in investing in MyLikes because I was a female entrepreneur—aka the “diversity candidate.”

While it is difficult to say no to money, especially when someone is giving it to you without even listening to what it is that you are doing, I felt insulted and unhappy.  I felt that I was competent enough to raise money and build a successful business regardless of my gender, not because of it.

In all fairness, this angel and many other supporters of women in technology have good intentions. However, they don’t realize that by calling out someone’s gender they make the system less meritocratic.

Coming from India, I have a personal perspective on the unintended consequences of such policies. My alma mater (the Indian Institute of Technology) is a highly meritocratic institution—admission is based on a completely objective criteria: stack ranking in a single entrance examination taken by students all across the country.

However, there is one exception: a certain number of seats are reserved for students from castes who have been historically discriminated against. It helps in some cases by providing opportunities to people who could really use them, but in most instances it simply does not work. It undermines the really good people who would have been admitted without the quota and causes a lot of insecurity and stress amongst people who don’t have the ability to cope in a highly competitive environment.  There is also a lot of anger and resentment from others who just missed getting admission as well.

Stepping back, at a more fundamental level, I am not really sure we should worry about the lack of women in tech any more than worrying about why there are not more female truck drivers or more male nurses.

Women and men are different.  Even in an ideal world, where women and men have the freedom to choose what they want to do, without any prejudices or social bias, we will continue to have male and female dominated professions.

Fundamentally, people will gravitate towards professions and careers that they are good at or have an innate advantage at.

That said, we are still far from that perfect world. Women tend to get paid less than men even if they perform equally well and there is no denying that there are still many biases against women even in professions that they are likely to be better at. While I do think we should do what we can to foster gender equality, I don’t believe preferential treatment or having diversity quotas is the answer.

Quotas always tend to be bad for everyone concerned in the long run—the female candidate who got the job because she was a woman, the hiring manager who may have compromised with a B player and the rest of the team who will always harbor the thought—“she is where she is, because she is a woman.” Worst of all it does a real disservice to the women who are simply better at their jobs.

Git has become the programming world's most popular version control system--at least that's what surveys conducted by Microsoft Corp. suggest. While there are abundant write-ups already available for new users and administrators, from tutorials to descriptions of clever merge workflows, I still often encounter a few missteps in basic version control naming and layout.

Hrm, I notice it's been just over three months since I semi-accidentally announced the existence of the Ceylon project, and I guess I feel like you folks deserve some kind of progress report!

Java is known for security purpose widely.As Java 7 has come so it is obvious that some security features will be there.Ya its right.Java community add lots of major and better security algorithms in Java 7.They added Elliptic Curve Cryptography that is so much secure other side they deprecated MD2 digest algorithm.Here i am listing some security features those are implemented in java 7.

Hot on the heels of recent announcements from Mozilla about strategy, personnel, and general company changes, Brendan provides us with almost 12 minutes of very deep insight into the future of Mozilla and the web

LMAX, a trading company in the UK, recently open sourced one of their core components: the Disruptor. This component allows reduces execution overhead by removing the necessity for locks, while still keeping processing order guarantees. A pretty ingenious piece of engineering, if you ask me. I tried to apply the disruptor to the Axon Command Bus, just to see what it potential is. The results are pretty astonishing.