In the News

At its Ignite conference in Atlanta, Microsoft announced a preview of Project Springfield, a cloud-based tool designed to help developers detect bugs in their Windows-based applications. The main component in Project Springfield is SAGE, a fuzz testing tool that Microsoft used to uncover security flaws in Windows 7. The company says that the cost of deploying patches for majorly distributed software like OSes can go up to a million dollars each; SAGE helped surface a third of all the vulnerabilities that would’ve cost Microsoft that much to fix.

Networking among virtual machines in Microsoft Azure is going to get a whole lot faster, thanks to some new hardware that Microsoft has rolled out across its fleet of data centers. The company announced that it has deployed hundreds of thousands of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) across servers in 15 countries and five different continents. The chips have been put to use in a variety of first-party Microsoft services, and they’re now starting to accelerate networking on the company’s Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have joined forces on a project to use blockchain technology to make trade finance transactions faster, cheaper, safer and more transparent. The two multinationals said at the Sibos Financial Services conference in Geneva that they would build and test the technology and create a blockchain-based framework that could eventually be sold to other businesses.

Microsoft and Workday have joined hands to expand the business solutions their joint customers can use to continually optimize the way work gets done. This strategic partnership will deliver integrations that mirror where and how people want to work across Microsoft Office 365 and Workday’s finance and HR applications. “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet, and key to this is forging strategic partnerships with companies including Workday,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has famously skipped coming out with a game this year, and it looks like the under-development game which was supposed to be out in 2017 may not be launched next year after all. The latest main game from the Ubisoft franchise was Assassin’s Creed Syndicate which was launched in December 2014 for the PS4, the Xbox One and PC.

Forza Horizon 3, on the surface, seemed like a mix of Test Drive Unlimited and the newer Most Wanted. The game looks great and more importantly, feels great to play. The controls are precise and responsive and if you’re playing with driving assists enabled, they manage to provide just enough assistance to be enjoyable. Turn them off and you’re in for a much more fun, albeit challenging time. Forza Horizon 3 is available for $59.99 (around Rs 4,000), $79.99 (around Rs 5,300) and $99.99 (around Rs 6,700) in Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate Edition variants respectively.

The Redmond giant is working on their own Windows 10 powered smartphone, which might be dubbed as the Surface Phone. The concept of the phone shows that it will feature a bezel-less screen, an additional keyboard for typing, a Stylus aka Surface Pen, three LED flashes on the rear, and probably a fingerprint sensor embedded into the screen itself.

“In engineering, you’re looking to solve a problem, you have goals in mind,” says Sriram Rajamani, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India, speaking to Gadgets 360 at the sidelines of a conference in Bengaluru last week. “With research, you’re working on things that might have a 20-year timeline. For example, on our team, we have Ravi Kannan, a very gifted scientist, who worked on algorithms as a mathematics problem. He wasn’t looking at applying it, he was just interested in it as a mathematical problem. But today, the algorithm that he developed is so important for search engines.”

With the Xbox One Scorpio and the PS4 Pro, Microsoft and Sony are introducing a brand new paradigm to console gaming that has simply not existed so far. And yet, while this is something new for consoles, other consumer electronics like tablets, mobiles, and PCs, all see constant iteration. In an interview with TechRadar, Microsoft’s Albert Penello emphasized that the specific needs of the console market must be kept in mind as Microsoft moves forward with this new paradigm.

Loyalists of Microsoft’s Xbox are now in for a great time as the Redmond-based company is offering an extra game to users on the purchase of a new Xbox One S bundle. This offer is live in the United States until October 1. With this offer, Xbox loyalists purchasing a new Xbox One S Madden bundle get to enjoy Fifa for no extra cost. Buyers of the Xbox One S Halo Collection bundle will be eligible to play Destiny: Rise of Iron for free.