Microsoft pushes Windows 10 upgrade using tactic it once called 'a mistake'

Maker of 'GWX Control Panel' tool reports that Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs receiving upgrade as pre-selected 'Optional' item in Windows Update

Microsoft has begun to deliver the Windows 10 upgrade to eligible Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs through Windows Update, making good on an October announcement.

A company spokeswoman confirmed that the Windows 10 upgrade is reaching customers' systems.

More than three months ago, Terry Myerson, the executive who leads the operating system and devices group, said that the Windows 10 upgrade would be pushed to users via Windows Update, the primary maintenance service for its OSes.

At the time, Myerson said that the upgrade would first appear under the "Optional" section in Windows Update, then later transit to "Recommended." The difference is more than labeling: In Windows Update, "Optional" is supposed to be just that; customers must explicitly check the box for an item for it to automatically download and install. "Recommended" items, on the other hand, will be retrieved and installed unless the user has changed the default settings of Windows Update.

In the past, Microsoft has issued updates and upgrades in that two-step process under which bits first appeared under Optional, then after a month or more -- a span Microsoft used to digest diagnostic data from affected PCs to ensure things worked as expected -- the same update shifted to Recommended, and reached the majority of users.

It's unclear whether Microsoft is following the plan it laid out in October: While several prominent bloggers who focus on Microsoft -- including Paul Thurrott and ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley -- said that the Windows 10 upgrade had been deployed as Recommended in Windows Update, there was no explicit evidence that that had, in fact, begun.

But the Windows 10 upgrade has appeared under Windows Update's Optional list, according to Josh Mayfield, the creator of GWX Control Panel. The free utility made Microsoft's Get Windows 10 (hence "GWX") upgrade reservation app go away, purged the system of upgrade files, and blocked the automatic upgrade.

Mayfield maintains a multiple-PC pool of test machines to monitor how Microsoft promotes Windows 10. Yesterday, he confirmed that the upgrade showed up under Optional on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs.

"As we saw over the summer, it's listed as an 'Optional' update but automatically selected to install, unlike other updates in that category," said Mayfield in an email reply to questions Tuesday.

Mayfield was referring to events that began in mid-September at the latest, when users noticed "Upgrade to Windows 10 Home" or "Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro," in Windows Update. Those items appeared in the Optional section of Windows Update's listing of available patches and fixes. Normally, updates pegged as Optional will not download to a PC -- whether automatically or in a manual check -- until the user has ticked a box.

But according to users' reports at the time, Windows Update itself checked the "Upgrade to Windows 10" optional update as eligible for download and installation. Users with Windows Update set to automatically retrieve and install updates -- the norm, and the setting recommended by Microsoft -- or who did not examine the optional update list, were then served with the Windows 10 upgrade, whether they wanted it or not.

Microsoft quickly issued a statement saying that the checking of the upgrade's Optional item "was a mistake."

Mayfield contended that Microsoft has done the same this week by automatically checking the Windows 10 upgrade box. Under those conditions, it mattered not a whit whether the upgrade was listed under Recommended or Optional: The result would be the same. For the vast majority of users, the upgrade would download -- if it wasn't already on the PC, having been pre-loaded under a long-running campaign to place the bits on customers' devices -- and the installation process would begin.

Microsoft has said that users could decline the Windows 10 upgrade once installation began, but has declined to say whether the upgrade starts in all cases, detail how the user authorization process is to play out, and whether -- after a customer declines the upgrade -- it presents itself again later.

The company has been little help when asked to clarify exactly what began this week for the Windows 10 upgrade on Windows 7 and 8.1 devices.

"We are committed to making it easy for our Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers to upgrade to Windows 10," Microsoft said in a statement forwarded by the firm's spokeswoman. "We updated the upgrade experience today to help our customers, who previously reserved their upgrade, schedule[d] a time for their upgrade to take place."

In a follow-up email, the spokeswoman did not directly answer questions Computerworld posed, including whether the Windows 10 upgrade was being placed in Recommended, Optional or both. "This is rolling out in a phased approach which is why you are seeing different reports," she said.

Mayfield noted that as far as he can tell, Microsoft has honored the registry settings it had earlier said would block the appearance of the Windows 10 upgrade on PCs powered by Windows 7 and 8.1. Those registry tweaks -- made by crafting a Group Policy that could be distributed to large numbers of machines -- were spelled out in a support document revised last month.

That means Mayfield's GWX Control Panel will stymie attempts to place the Windows 10 upgrade in Windows Update, as the tool was designed to do. Previously, Mayfield had warned that might not be the case if Microsoft again changed the rules, an increasingly common practice for the company, which, for example, repeatedly issued a Windows 10 reservation app to users who had managed to uninstall it.

"If GWX Control Panel reports 'No' for 'Are Windows 10 Upgrades allowed?', then the Windows 10 upgrade doesn't even appear as an option in the Windows Update control panel," Mayfield reported. Those who download and install GWX Control Panel can block the Windows 10 upgrade from appearing by clicking "Disable Get Windows 10 app," and then clicking "Prevent Windows 10 Upgrades."

Earlier this month, Microsoft said that it would expand Windows 10 upgrade distribution to include all systems running Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro -- even domain-joined Windows 10 Pro machines in businesses -- that receive their security patches directly from Windows Update. It was also unclear today whether Microsoft is serving the upgrade to domain-joined PCs, which were originally exempt from the push, or only to consumers and commercial systems not connected to a network in which administrators use Active Directory to set access rights.

GWX Control Panel can be downloaded from Mayfield's website free of charge, although he accepts donations from appreciative users.

Microsoft is placing the Windows 10 upgrade on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs, but pre-selects the download, even though it's listed as an 'Optional" update/upgrade. That's contrary to how Windows Update's Optional items usually work, and was called a "mistake" by Microsoft when it did the same last year.

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Five ways your startup is screwed

The founders of failed startups share lessons learned along the way -- and signs of impending doom they wish they'd spotted sooner

Building a startup is risky business. For every Facebook, Google, or Uber, there are hundreds of once-brilliant-seeming companies that entered the tech landscape with great fanfare -- only to fizzle out and fade away a matter of months later.

We tend to hear about these failures far less frequently than the successes -- that's a shame, because there are important lessons to be learned from those who tried and fell flat on their faces. Lucky for us, a venture capital database company called CB Insights took it upon itself to track and compile the many postmortem emails, blog posts, and interviews startup founders have shared over the past couple of years. Boy, do those missives contain fascinating insights.

I sifted through all the tear-shedding, blame-shifting, and self-flogging to find some of the more telling themes from these sorrowful tales (setting aside the obvious stuff like running out of money or building a product that people flat-out rejected). You might recognize one of these signs from a startup you know today. Or, given that IT projects are often like microstartups within an organization, you might learn a lesson or two about how not to steer your project straight into the ground.

Failure sign No. 1: You don't have a strong and consistent focus
Knowing what a business is all about means everything -- especially in the critical early months when a startup is working to find its footing. If you see a startup without a strong focus -- or with a focus that keeps changing or expanding -- it might be time to start worrying. It's a lesson numerous founders have learned the hard way.

"We were trying to do everything for everybody," writes Yash Kotak, founder of the failed startup Lumos. "We were making switches that could automate your lights, fans, ACs, and water heaters. We would have tried to automate your TV, fridge, oven, and car as well, had it been feasible to do so."

The issue, Kotak says, isn't that it's inherently bad to pursue multiple angles; it's that you can spread your resources only so thin before they get tight -- and that's when something is bound to snap. Sound familiar?

"As a startup, you are constrained in resources," he reflects. "So it is always better to identify and solve one problem very well instead of solving n problems in a so-so way."

Thor Fridriksson had similar struggles at his now-defunct startup, Pumodo. As he recalls it, he and his cohorts got "tangled in the hype machine" and made the same mistake of being mediocre at a bunch of things instead of being exceptionally great at one.

"Our business plan was changing every week," Fridriksson writes. "We went from focusing only on football to becoming [an] app for all sports."

Pumodo's mantra, according to Fridriksson, was "think bigger" -- a plan that also didn't pan out for Jeanette Cajide, founder of folded mobile app Blurtt (yes, Blurtt).

"Ideas are a dime a dozen; the difference is in the execution," Cajide notes. She should know: Her startup went through four different business models before finally calling it quits.

That brings us to our next sign that something might be amiss...

Failure sign No. 2: Your vision's been twisted out of your control
Blurtt started out as a place where you could pay two bucks to create a custom physical postcard from your phone and have it sent to someone in the mail. A year later, it shifted its model to being a free service supported by ads on the back of each printed postcard.

A year after that, the company pivoted again and became a "mobile platform of micro-gifting and greeting cards" -- whatever that means. Soon thereafter, it tossed that idea aside and tried to convince people to download its app for creating digital "blurtts," which were basically images with text-based captions stamped on top. (Where have we seen that before?)

"In the end, the passion and magic was lost," Cajide says. "Remember why you started this in the first place and never lose sight of it, because once it becomes something you are not happy doing, you shouldn't be doing it."

Speaking of which, remember Secret? It was an anonymous message-sharing tool that was all the rage among Silicon Valley insiders for a few minutes in 2014. It was also a startup with serious money under its belt: a valuation of more than $100 million at its peak.

But all that cash couldn't keep the train a-chuggin': After struggling to deal with complaints of bullying and baseless rumormongering (gee, who woulda thunk on an anonymous message-sharing app?) -- and simultaneously facing a troubling trend of declining use -- the company shut down and returned its money to investors after a mere 16 months on the market.

Secret went through several evolutions along the way, shifting its design and philosophy to try to address complaints and keep everyone happy. In the end, its co-founder, David Byttow, said the startup was no longer the entity he had set out to build.

"Secret does not represent the vision I had when starting the company," he wrote, "so I believe [shutting down is] the right decision for myself, our investors, and our team."

A loss of original vision was also blamed for the collapse of ProtoExchange, an outsourcing marketplace for hardware engineering, as well as for the downfall of Digital Royalty, a social media strategy startup that underwent "sizable shifts" in the months leading up to its shutdown.

"Some of these shifts were in our control and some were not," its founder, Amy Jo, eulogized. "In order to honor our core values, which have been the epicenter of our culture, we have decided to hang up our crown."

Pour one out for our crownless homies.

Failure sign No. 3: You aren't ready for success
Some startups have stellar ideas but lack the resources or know-how to execute them. And -- you guessed it -- that dangerously spicy combination doesn't exactly create a foundation for long-term success.

Ask Martin Erlić, whose startup UDesign went from promising new concept to kaput old company in the span of a single year.

The idea sounds solid: UDesign was an app that'd make it simple to create your own pattern and use it on a custom piece of clothing. Neato, right? But instead of hiring experienced programmers, Erlić and his partners in crime decided to "wing it" and do the dirty work themselves.

"What ended up happening was that we spent everything we could have spent on polishing the product ... on marketing instead," he explains. "We thought we could trick people now and make up for it later. Wrong."

Flash without function -- an age-old tale. It's one Attila Szigeti, founder of startup flop ratemyspeech.co, also knows well.

"We only had a crude prototype but no amazing product, and we couldn’t attract [a] considerable number of users," he recalls.

Some startups don't even get that far. Jeremy Bell's former company, Wattage, was supposed to make it easy for anyone to come up with an idea for an electronic device -- dragging and dropping components like buttons, sensors, speakers, and displays into an online creation tool -- then have the gadget manufactured and delivered in a matter of days.

Yet again, it was a cool concept without the legs to hold it up.

"When I looked at the various prototypes we’d created, the quality simply wasn’t there yet," Bell admits. "We were heavily using laser cutting as our means of fabrication, and while it allowed us to produce something close to our vision, it wasn’t good enough. What we really needed was a hybrid of laser cutting and 3D printing, but unfortunately, 3D printing is still far too slow and expensive to be realistic."

As it turns out, not being realistic is a pretty big hurdle to overcome.

Failure sign No. 4: You've built your business on a legal landmine
Play with fire, and you're bound to get burned. It may sound obvious, but man -- an awful lot of startups have disintegrated in heat-generated meltdowns.

The most prominent examples revolve around rights-related woes. Take Grooveshark, a music discovery startup that managed to last an impressive 10 years before its legal oversights caught up with it.

"Despite [having the] best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes," the company conceded in an unsigned shutdown memo. "We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service. That was wrong."

Grooveshark's settlement agreement with record companies forced it not only to shut down the service and wipe all the company's servers clean, but also to turn over everything it owned -- the website itself along with all apps, patents, and copyrights -- to the rights-owners it had wronged.

Things weren't quite so dire for Exfm, another music discovery service. But while the company didn't get clobbered in the same way as Grooveshark, legal issues definitely played a key role in its decision to go dark.

"The technical challenges are compounded by the litigious nature of the music industry, which means every time we have any meaningful growth, it’s coupled with the immediate attention of the record labels in the form of takedowns and legal emails," the company's founders stated in an email to subscribers.

Once-trendy "social streaming" startup Turntable.fm suffered a similar fate -- and even noted that it should have paid closer attention to the troubles its predecessors had faced.

"Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups," founder Billy Chasen says. "It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue and a hard industry to work with. We spent more than a quarter of our cash on lawyers, royalties, and services related to supporting music."

Failure sign No. 5: Your product depends on someone else's service
Call it the "single point of failure" fragility: If your business relies on someone else's service to exist, you're pretty much asking for trouble.

We've seen sob stories from several startups that hitched their wagons to Twitter only to have the virtual rugs pulled out from under them with little to no warning. The most recent high-profile example is Twitpic: The once-vital image sharing service clashed with Twitter's growing ambitions and found itself immersed in a battle it couldn't win. According to the company's bye-bye missive:

Twitter contacted our legal [department] demanding that we abandon our trademark application or risk losing access to their API. This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008 and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009.

Other founders found themselves facing an about-face with Facebook, like Lookery -- a marketing company whose currency revolved around social network data.

"We exposed ourselves to a huge single point of failure," co-founder Scott Rafer muses. "Predictably and reasonably, Facebook acted in their own interest rather than ours."

Rafer says his startup "could have and should have" used its resources to establish some level of independence instead of investing further in Facebook's platform -- a similar sentiment to the one expressed by PostRocket, a company that set out to help customers reach more fans in Zuckerberg's virtual backyard.

"We should and could have done much better in bringing you a reliable product that expanded as quickly as the landscape of Facebook marketing changed," co-founder Tim Chae confesses. While informing customers of his company's demise, Chae actually suggested they turn to Facebook's then-new analytics service as an alternative, saying the product "blows any other service out the water" -- a perfect summary of the danger associated with trying to fill a hole in an existing service.

Even if a startup doesn't get shut out entirely, trying to keep up with a fickle step-parent's evolving requirements can take significant resources -- which is especially challenging when funding is limited. Social media marketing firm Argyle Social cited that factor in its failure, as did song sharing service This Is My Jam.

The single point of failure can even come from a detail as seemingly innocuous as search: A startup called Tutorspree put all its consumer-attracting eggs in the basket of search engine optimization -- and when the tides one day turned, it found itself lost at sea without a life preserver in sight.

"We were single channel-dependent, and that channel shifted on us radically and suddenly," co-founder Aaron Harris explains. "There is a chance that a single channel can grow a company very quickly to a very large size, but the risks involved in that single channel are large and grow in tandem with the company."

You don't have to be a scrappy startup to sense the danger in that arrangement.

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Comparing Google’s Eddystone beacon technology to Apple’s iBeacon

Google’s recent Eddystone announcement adds another heavyweight to the indoor location-based services market. With beacon location support from the two largest mobile ecosystem providers, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons have become the de facto standard for indoor micro-location applications. Let’s investigate some of the nuances of the Eddystone format compared to Apple’s iBeacon and highlight key items that organizations should consider while deploying a nascent solution.

The main driver for beacons is the search for a suitable indoor positioning technology for mobile devices, enabling real-time navigation and location awareness for mobile apps. Through the iPhone era, we have tested the limits of the established handset technologies: GPS, inertial navigation, cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi (Basic Service Set Identifier -- BSSID) scanning. We know their capabilities, both individually and as a group. Indoors, Wi-Fi technology can provide adequate location presence but for use cases requiring real-time, precise location updates, another solution is needed.

Then along came Apple’s iBeacon, the first standardized implementation of a BLE beacon. Sensing an iBeacon on a mobile device is in many ways similar to sensing a Wi-Fi access point; we use signal strength and the signal-distance characteristics to calculate location. However, the substantive differences in approach relates to packaging and implementation. BLE beacons are portable, fully cordless and inexpensive. As a result, a BLE beacon solution designed for location is significantly cheaper and less complex to install compared to an equivalent Wi-Fi based solution.

Additionally, beacons present a huge real-time accuracy advantage, since location is calculated by the app monitoring beacons that continuously transmit, instead of a Wi-Fi infrastructure waiting for a handset to awaken from variable power-save windows.

Because of these inherent advantages, iBeacons have quickly gained traction for indoor positioning. Not to be outdone, Google recently entered the Beacon arena with Eddystone, which claims to extend capabilities supported in Apple’s widely adopted iBeacon protocol.

With Eddystone, Google was looking for a better way to push notifications to clients without the need for an app, as well as the ability to manage beacon deployments. To achieve this, Eddystone is designed to support multiple new data packet types, including Eddystone-UID, Eddystone-URL, and Eddystone-TLM.

Eddystone-UID is similar to iBeacon in that it identifies a beacon and allows an app on a device to trigger a desired action. Eddystone-UID is somewhat different from iBeacon in that it is 16 bytes long (iBeacon is 20) and is split into two parts (iBeacon is 3).

Eddystone-URL sends a compressed URL to the mobile device, relying on Android 5.0 or higher to process push events instead of a dedicated app. On iOS devices, users must install the Chrome browser and enable notifications, so an app is still required. As of now, Android users have to open the notification center to check for nearby Eddystone-URL beacons, making it more of a Pull rather than Push notification. Unsolicited, push-based notifications can present phishing risks, although Google mitigates the risk by brokering all transactions, retrieving site titles and description meta tags and embedding them in the notification. This ensures that users know what site they are about to visit before clicking through a notification link.

While Eddystone-URL may seem interesting, its cross-platform caveats and recent privacy concerns around potential implementations, as highlighted in Google’s Here project, will limit its appeal.

The third data packet type is Eddystone-TLM. Short for telemetry, TLM sends health and statistics data such as battery voltage, beacons temperature, uptime, and number of packets sent to the applications developer. This is a one-way, best-effort communication and could help venues monitor their beacon deployments. Presumably, an Android client must be in direct proximity to the beacon for Eddystone-TLM to update the cloud with health telemetry. While it does not allow you to update or modify the data being sent by the beacon remotely, it is a step in the right direction.

Google’s first crack at Eddystone tells us that more BLE innovations will likely be coming. For early adopters looking to reap the massive benefits from micro location-based services, a BLE beacon infrastructure that can be centrally monitored and managed with firmware updates is an absolute necessity. Most significant is Google’s acknowledgement that indoor location positioning based on BLE technology is no longer a fad and is here to stay. With some prominent BLE beacon deployments in existence, Google can no longer have Apple solely control the future of this space.

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W10Privacy is a smarter Windows 10 telemetry blocker

If you’ve tried more than your share of Windows 10 telemetry blockers recently, then we know just how you feel, but wait -- W10Privacy is more interesting than most. No, really.

There’s a lengthy list of tweaks you can apply, for instance -- approaching 100 -- all neatly organized across several tabs: Privacy, Telemetry, Network, Services and more.

While the competition often leaves you uncertain what a particular option will do, W10Privacy has some very clear descriptions : "Do not let apps use my camera", "Do not let apps access my name, picture and other account into", and so on.

If that’s not enough, hovering the mouse over that action displays a tooltip with more information.

W10Privacy gives you quite fine control over some areas. There’s not just a vague "block telemetry" option: instead you can choose to "block IP addresses of known Microsoft telemetry servers" through either a firewall rule or your HOSTS file, in both full-strength and lightweight versions.

Each action is color-coded, too, as either green (safe to set), amber (check carefully) or red (don’t do this unless you’re really sure), reducing the chance that you’ll cause some major problems.

There are some useful bonus features, too, including the ability to uninstall most of the standard Windows apps.

The program does have various issues. There’s no way to disable/ enable a group of settings at once; there’s no "Cancel" option if you hit "Set changed settings" by mistake; the interface and general implementation need a lot of work.

Still, there’s nothing here that can’t be fixed, and W10Privacy’s explanations of what each tweak does are well worth having. It’s also small, portable and entirely free, so if you’re interested, just grab a copy and give it a try.

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Hitch your IT career to a rising star with DevOps certification

Hitch your IT career to a rising star with DevOps certification

Savvy IT industry watchers have probably been noticing something called “DevOps” come gliding into view for a while now, striking regular pings on the scope of anyone scanning for either hot trends or spiking salaries. Even proponents of DevOps, however, sometimes struggle to define it in layman’s terms, a challenge that anyone who has ever tried to explain development methods like Agile or Scrum to someone outside of IT will understand. Beneath the jargon, however, there’s an important development model that is quickly gaining in popularity. If you’re involved in IT, then this is something that’s probably worth taking the time to understand.

What is DevOps?
DevOps is a compound of “development” and “operations.” It’s a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration, integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other information technology professionals. DevOps is often shown graphically as three overlapping circles consisting of Development, Quality Assurance, and Information Technology Operations, with DevOps being the area of overlap that ties all three circles together.

DevOps is so much more, however, than the intersection of three circles. It’s often the intersection of five or ten circles — it just depends on the company that the DevOps is supporting. DevOps spans the entire delivery pipeline. This includes improved deployment frequency, which can lead to faster time to market, lower failure rate of new releases, shortened lead time between fixes, and faster mean time to recovery in the event of a new release crashing or otherwise disabling the current system. Simple processes become increasingly programmable and dynamic when using a DevOps approach, which aims to maximize the predictability, efficiency, security, and maintainability of operational processes. Automation often supports this objective.

DevOps integration targets product delivery, quality testing, feature development, and maintenance releases in order to improve reliability and security and provide faster development and deployment cycles. Many of the ideas (and people) involved in DevOps come from the enterprise systems management and agile software development movements.

DevOps aids in software application release management for an organization by standardizing development environments. Events can be more easily tracked as well as resolving documented process control and granular reporting issues. Companies with release/deployment automation problems usually have existing automation but want to more flexibly manage and drive this automation without needing to enter everything manually at the command-line.

Ideally, this automation can be invoked by non-operations employees in specific non-production environments. The DevOps approach grants developers more control of the environment, giving infrastructure more application-centric understanding.

The adoption of DevOps is being driven by factors such as:
● Use of agile and other development processes and methodologies
● Demand for an increased rate of production releases from application and business unit stakeholders
● Wide availability of virtualized and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers
● Increased usage of data center automation and configuration management tools
● Increased focus on test automation and continuous integration methods

According to David Geer, 42 percent of IT pros surveyed had adopted or planned to adopt DevOps development approaches (Information Week, 2014 DevOps Survey). That number ballooned to 66 percent of U.S. companies using DevOps approaches by the time of a Rackspace survey only 10 months later. With DevOps clearly taking over the coder’s realm, most programmers will eventually have to yield to and master this mindset.

What does DevOps mean for a programmer’s profession?
There's a lot of interest in DevOps in the IT world right now.DevOps introduces developers to operational requirements and the tools and methods necessary to ensure that the code they create is immediately functional, of high quality, and fit for the production environment. With solid training in these tools and methods, developers should find their talents highly sellable in a career world that is increasingly favorable to DevOps practitioners.

Adam Gordon, CTO of New Horizon Computer Learning Centers of south Florida, sats that important developer skills for DevOps environments include automating configuration management (infrastructure lifecycle management) using vendor-neutral tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, and Docker. These tools integrate with a host of popular platforms and software including Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services, CFEngine, Cisco, Eucalyptus, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, Jelastic, Jenkins, Linux (various distributions), Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, OpenSVC, Rackspace, Rightscale, Salt, SoftLayer, Vagrant, VMware, and a rapidly expanding number of examples.

Some of the most popular vendor-specific DevOps platforms include those from Microsoft and VMware, says Gordon. Microsoft’s DevOps-related products include System Center with its System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). These Microsoft developer tools enable functions such as automated configuration management, monitoring, and custom management pack development. VMware tools such as vCloud Air (vCloud Hybrid Service) bridge the VMware development platform to tools such as Puppet and Chef, according to Gordon, while the vRealize cloud management platform automates infrastructure and application delivery, monitoring, analytics, and management.

Finally, Red Hat Linux developers will find that learning to deploy this distribution can be useful for work in Red Hat-related DevOps environments.

Does everyone love DevOps?
No, not everyone. Take Jeff Knupp, for instance. In an April 2014 blog, Knupp claims that DevOps is “killing the developer.” Allow me to quote directly from Mr. Knupp’s post:

“There are two recent trends I really hate: DevOps and the notion of the ‘full-stack’ developer. The DevOps movement is so popular that I may as well say I hate the x86 architecture or monolithic kernels. But it’s true: I can’t stand it. The underlying cause of my pain? This fact: not every company is a start-up, though it appears that every company must act as though they were.

“DevOps is meant to denote a close collaboration and cross-pollination between what were previously purely development roles, purely operations roles, and purely QA roles. Because software needs to be released at an ever-increasing rate, the old ‘waterfall’ develop-test-release cycle is seen as broken. Developers must also take responsibility for the quality of the testing and release environments.

“The increasing scope of responsibility of the ‘developer’ (whether or not that term is even appropriate anymore is debatable) has given rise to a chimera-like job candidate: the ‘full-stack’ developer. Such a developer is capable of doing the job of developer, QA team member, operations analyst, sysadmin, and DBA. Before you accuse me of hyperbole, go back and read that list again. Is there any role in the list whose duties you wouldn’t expect a ‘full-stack’ developer to be well versed in?

“Where did these concepts come from? Start-ups, of course (and the Agile methodology). Start-ups are a peculiar beast and need to function in a very lean way to survive their first few years. I don’t deny this. Unfortunately, we’ve taken the multiple technical roles that engineers at start-ups were forced to play due to lack of resources into a set of minimum qualifications for the role of ‘developer.’ ”

“Imagine you’re at a start-up with a development team of seven. You’re one year into development of a web application that Xs all the Ys, and things are going well, though it’s always a frantic scramble to keep everything going. If there’s a particularly nasty issue that seems to require deep database knowledge, you don’t have the liberty of saying, ‘That’s not my specialty,’ and handing it off to a DBA team to investigate. Due to constrained resources, you’re forced to take on the role of DBA and fix the issue yourself.

“Now expand that scenario across all the roles listed earlier. At any one time, a developer at a start-up may be acting as a developer, QA tester, deployment/operations analyst, sysadmin, or DBA. That’s just the nature of the business, and some people thrive in that type of environment. Somewhere along the way, however, we tricked ourselves into thinking that because, at any one time, a start-up developer had to take on different roles, he or she should actually be all those things at once.

“If such people even exist, ‘full-stack’ developers still wouldn’t be used as they should. Rather than temporarily taking on a single role for a short period of time, then transitioning into the next role, they are meant to be performing all the roles, all the time. Most good developers can almost pull this off.”

Certifications in DevOps
The DevOps certification realm is taking root quickly. One organization that is out in front of the pack, however, is Amazon Web Services. If you want to make a strong move into DevOps, then consider any of the following credentials.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

Description
The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam validates technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include the ability to:

● Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
● Understand, implement, and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
● Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
● Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
● Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Prerequisites
Required Prerequisite: status as AWS Certified Developer – Associate or AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate

Eligibility
● Two or more years’ experience in provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments
● Experience in developing code in at least one high-level programming language
● Experience in automation and testing via scripting/programming
● Understanding of agile and other development processes and methodologies

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
170 minutes to complete the exam
Exam available in English
Exam registration fee is $300

DevOps is a hot trend in software development right now.AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
Description

The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam validates technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:

● Deploying, managing, and operating scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS
● Migrating an existing on-premises application to AWS
● Implementing and controlling the flow of data to and from AWS
● Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements
● Identifying appropriate use of AWS operational best practices
● Estimating AWS usage costs and identifying operational cost control mechanisms

Prerequisites

No prerequisites; recommend taking System Operations on AWS
Eligibility

● One or more years of hands-on experience in operating AWS-based applications
● Experience in provisioning, operating, and maintaining systems running on AWS
● Ability to identify and gather requirements to define a solution to be built and operated on AWS
● Capabilities to provide AWS operations and deployment guidance and best practices throughout the lifecycle of a project

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
80 minutes to complete the exam
Available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $20
Exam Registration fee is $150

AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Description

The AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam validates technical expertise in developing and maintaining applications on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:

● Picking the right AWS services for the application
● Leveraging AWS SDKs to interact with AWS services from your application
● Writing code that optimizes performance of AWS services used by your application
● Code-level application security (IAM roles, credentials, encryption, etc.)

Prerequisites
No prerequisites; recommend taking Developing on AWS
Eligibility
● One or more years of hands-on experience in designing and maintaining an AWS-based application
● In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language
● Understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic architecture best practices
● Proficiency in designing, developing, and deploying cloud-based solutions using AWS
● Experience with developing and maintaining applications written for Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Simple Workflow Service, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Cloud Formation.

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
80 minutes to complete the exam
Available in English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $20
Exam Registration fee is $150

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Description
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam validates advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Example concepts you should understand for this exam include:

● Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS
● Selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements
● Migrating complex, multi-tier applications on AWS
● Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS
● Implementing cost control strategies

Prerequisites
Status as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Eligibility
● Achieved AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
● Two or more years’ hands-on experience in designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS
● Abilities to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment, and provisioning applications on AWS
● Capabilities to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects, or the enterprise

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
170 minutes to complete the exam
Exam available in English and Japanese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $40
Exam Registration fee is $300

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Description

Intended for individuals with experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:
● Designing and deploying scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS
● Lift and shift of an existing on-premises application to AWS
● Ingress and egress of data to and from AWS
● Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on data, compute, database, or security requirements
● Identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural best practices
● Estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control mechanisms

Prerequisites
None, but it is recommended that candidates take the Architecting on AWS and AWS Certification Exam Readiness Workshop
Eligibility
● One or more years of hands-on experience in designing available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS
● In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language
● Ability to identify and define requirements for an AWS-based application
● Experience with deploying hybrid systems with on-premises and AWS components
● Capability to provide best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
80 minutes to complete the exam
Available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $20
Exam Registration fee is $150

There's a lot of interest in DevOps in the IT world right now.AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
Description

The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam validates technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include the ability to:
● Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
● Understand, implement, and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
● Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
● Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
● Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Prerequisites
AWS Certified Developer – Associate
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
Eligibility
● Two or more years’ experience in provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments
● Experience in developing code in at least one high-level programming language
● Experience in automation and testing via scripting/programming
● Understanding of agile and other development processes and methodologies

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
170 minutes to complete the exam
Exam available in English
Exam registration fee is $300

Click here to view complete Q&A of 70-697 exam

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft 70-697 Training at certkingdom.com

Cybersecurity 101: Protect your home or personal network

Intrusion detection systems. Network firewalls. Behavioral analysis. Encryption. The toolkit of the modern information security professional is full of complex, advanced technical controls designed to protect enterprise networks against increasingly sophisticated attacks. How should home users protect themselves — without investing thousands of dollars in specialized security equipment — against cybercriminals who want to steal sensitive personal information?

Fortunately, there are simple and inexpensive steps that every home user can take to build a robust, layered defense that will protect them against most of the malicious threats that jeopardize the security of their systems and personal information. Let’s take a look at five simple ways that you can keep your network secure without breaking the bank. Think of these recommendations as being a Cybersecurity 101 course for the average home computer user.

Use a Firewall
Businesses spend thousands of dollars on sophisticated firewalls designed to keep malicious threats out of their protected networks. Firewalls sit at the border between a private network and the Internet, enforcing rules that regulate the traffic allowed to cross that border. Enterprise-grade firewalls are expensive and require extensive configuration to precisely define the types of traffic that should be allowed to enter the network unsolicited. For example, a business firewall would typically allow connections from the Internet to the company’s web server.

Fortunately, home users don’t need a sophisticated firewall because they don’t have sophisticated networking needs. Unless you’re running public web servers in your home, your firewall policy should be very simple: Don’t allow any unsolicited connections to your network. You probably already have a firewall built-in to the Internet router provided by your service provider. Even better, it’s probably already configured to enforce this simple “deny everything” firewall policy.

Take the time to understand what type of router is sitting at the border of your home network. Find the instruction manual for that model router and use it to verify that the firewall function is enabled and blocking all unsolicited connection requests. This will go a long way toward keeping the bad guys out of your network.

Install and Update Antivirus Software
Antivirus software is still one of the tried-and-true ways to protect your network against malicious threats. Signature-based software runs on your systems, scanning them constantly for any signs of malicious software. When antivirus software detects a threat, it acts to immediately neutralize it by removing the software entirely or, if that’s not possible, quarantining it in a safe location until you can take further action to clean your system.

You can’t just simply install antivirus software and walk away, however. The manufacturers of antivirus software release new updates on a daily basis to combat recently discovered strains of malicious software. If you haven’t updated your software in a few years, it’s next to useless as a defense against modern threats. Take a few minutes to verify that all of the systems on your network have current antivirus software and that they’re configured to receive daily signature updates from the vendor.

Keep Computers Patched
Whether you’re running Windows or Macintosh systems, you need to apply security updates on a regular basis to keep your systems secure. Microsoft and Apple release patches whenever they become aware of a security vulnerability in their operating systems. If you don’t apply those patches, attackers will likely discover your vulnerability and exploit it to gain access to your network and data.

Fortunately, it’s easy to keep your computers patched. Both Mac OS X and Windows provide automatic updating mechanisms that check every day for new security patches and automatically apply them to your systems. You just need to ensure that this functionality is turned on and your computer will take care of all of the work.

Encrypt Wireless Networks
Your wireless network is the easiest path for an attacker to gain access to the systems in your home. You should use strong WPA2 encryption to protect your network and configure it with a strong password known only to authorized network users. If you have no encryption, or use the outdated WEP encryption standard, it’s equivalent to leaving your front door unlocked and open, waiting for intruders to wander by and steal your belongings.

Configuring wireless encryption is usually very easy. Check the manual for your wireless access point. You’ll probably just need to select WPA2 encryption from a drop-down menu and then enter a strong passphrase used to access the network. Once it’s up and running, reconfigure all of your devices to use the new encrypted network and the contents of your communications will be safe from prying eyes.

Encrypt Sensitive Files
You don't have to be a genius to protect your home network.One oft-forgotten risk is the physical theft of computing devices. If an intruder steals a computer out of your home or a thief grabs your bag on the subway, you may lose physical possession of the computer. It’s one thing to lose a couple thousand dollars because of the device theft, but it’s far worse to lose your tax returns, credit card statements and other sensitive information that might be stored on the device.

You can protect yourself against the loss of sensitive information by encrypting the contents of your computer. Even if the computer falls into the wrong hands, the thief won’t be able to access your encrypted personal information without knowing your password. Both Windows and Mac systems offer free built-in encryption technology that you can easily enable. FileVault on Macs and BitLocker on Windows provide an easy way to protect the contents of your hard drive from prying eyes. Just make sure that you know your own password so that you don’t lock yourself out from access to your personal files!

Conclusion
Securing a home network is far simpler than securing the complex corporate networks that offer public services, but it still requires effort. Take the time to assess your network by verifying that your firewall is active, installing antivirus software, applying security patches, using WPA2 on your wireless network and encrypting your sensitive files. The few hours you might spend securing your network today may prove themselves worth the effort when they successfully protect you from hackers down the road!

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Exam 77-418 Word 2013

Exam 77-418 Word 2013

Published: February 28, 2013
Languages: English
Audiences: Information workers
Technology: Microsoft Office 2013 suites
Credit toward certification: MOS

Skills measured
This exam measures your ability to accomplish the technical tasks listed below. The percentages indicate the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam. The higher the percentage, the more questions you are likely to see on that content area on the exam. View video tutorials about the variety of question types on Microsoft exams.

Please note that the questions may test on, but will not be limited to, the topics described in the bulleted text.

Do you have feedback about the relevance of the skills measured on this exam? Please send Microsoft your comments. All feedback will be reviewed and incorporated as appropriate while still maintaining the validity and reliability of the certification process. Note that Microsoft will not respond directly to your feedback. We appreciate your input in ensuring the quality of the Microsoft
Certification program.

If you have concerns about specific questions on this exam, please submit an exam challenge.


Create and manage documents
Create a document
Creating new blank documents, creating new documents using templates, importing files, opening non-native files directly in Word, opening a PDF in Word for editing
Navigate through a document
Searching for text within document, inserting hyperlinks, creating bookmarks, using Go To
Format a document
Modifying page setup, changing document themes, changing document style sets, inserting simple headers and footers, inserting watermarks, inserting page numbers
Customize options and views for documents
Changing document views, using zoom, customizing the quick access toolbar, customizing the ribbon, splitting the window, adding values to document properties, using show/hide, recording simple macros, assigning shortcut keys, managing macro security
Configure documents to print or save
Configuring documents to print, saving documents in alternate file formats, printing document sections, saving files to remote locations, protecting documents with passwords, setting print scaling, maintaining backward compatibility

Preparation resources
Basic tasks in Word 2013
Create your first Word 2013 document (training)
Move around in a document using the navigation pane

Format text, paragraphs, and sections
Insert text and paragraphs
Appending text to documents, finding and replacing text, copying and pasting text, inserting text via AutoCorrect, removing blank paragraphs, inserting built-in fields, inserting special characters
Format text and paragraphs
Changing font attributes, using find and replace to format text, using format painter, setting paragraph spacing, setting line spacing, clearing existing formatting, setting indentation, highlighting text selections, adding styles to text, changing text to WordArt, modifying existing style attributes
Order and group text and paragraphs
Preventing paragraph orphans, inserting breaks to create sections, creating multiple columns within sections, adding titles to sections, forcing page breaks

Preparation resources
Insert fields
Copy formatting using the format painter
Add a page break

Create tables and lists
Create a table
Converting text to tables, converting tables to text, defining table dimensions, setting AutoFit options, using quick tables, establishing titles
Modify a table
Applying styles to tables, modifying fonts within tables, sorting table data, configuring cell margins, using formulas, modifying table dimensions, merging cells
Create and modify a list
Adding numbering or bullets, creating custom bullets, modifying list indentation, modifying line spacing, increasing and decreasing list levels, modifying numbering

Preparation resources
Insert a table
Convert text to a table or a table to text
Change bullet style

Apply references
Create endnotes, footnotes, and citations
Inserting endnotes, managing footnote locations, configuring endnote formats, modifying footnote numbering, inserting citation placeholders, inserting citations, inserting bibliography, changing citation styles
Create captions
Inserting endnotes, managing footnote locations, configuring endnote formats, modifying footnote numbering, inserting citation placeholders, inserting citations, inserting bibliography, changing citation styles

Preparation resources
Add footnotes and endnotes
Create a bibliography

Insert and format objects
Insert and format building blocks
Inserting quick parts, inserting textboxes, utilizing building locks organizer, customizing building blocks
Insert and format shapes and SmartArt
Inserting simple shapes, inserting SmartArt, modifying SmartArt properties (color, size, shape), wrapping text around shapes, positioning shapes
Insert and format images
Inserting images, applying artistic effects, applying picture effects, modifying image properties (color, size, shape), adding uick styles to images, wrapping text around images, positioning images

Preparation resources
Quick parts
Change the color of a shape, shape border, or entire SmartArt graphic
Move pictures or clip art

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