After 2 years of 22%-plus increases, top Microsoft execs' comp fell in FY 2013

Compensation awarded to the top five executives at Microsoft, including current CEO Steve Ballmer, fell in fiscal year 2013, the first time in the last four years that it's declined, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). In the proxy statement Microsoft filed with the SEC last month in anticipation of the shareholders meeting slated for tomorrow, the Redmond, Wash. company provided data on the total direct compensation for Ballmer and the four highest-paid executives below him for the years 2009-2013. The total direct compensation -- salary, cash bonuses and stock awards -- in 2013 for the five was $36 million, for an average of $7.2 million each, down 3.7% from the year before. Although Microsoft says it does not directly tie executive compensation to "any specific set of metrics," in the proxy statement the company lauded its calibration of compensation with the firm's performance. "The relationship between total direct compensation and key financial results demonstrates the alignment we have established between pay and business performance," the proxy stated. To illustrate that, Microsoft compared compensation with its operating income. In fiscal year 2013, operating income dropped to 27 billion, or 5.4% lower than the year before. The difference in the year-over-year movement of compensation and operating income in 2013 -- the former down 3.7%, the latter off 5.4% -- was much smaller than in the previous two years, when compensation climbed significantly faster than did operating income. In fiscal years 2011 and 2012, Microsoft's operating income rose 12.7% and 4.9%, respectively. During those same years, however, direct compensation to Ballmer and his four highest-paid underlings jumped 23.1% and 22%. In 2012, direct compensation costs climbed more than four times faster than did operating income. Shareholders do not vote on executive compensation, although they must approve changes in how that compensation is calculated. One of the proposals before stockholders tomorrow will ask them to okay performance criteria used in the company's incentive plan. That plan has been amended to raise the annual maximum amounts for each designated executive from $20 million to no more than 20 million shares for stock options or stock appreciation rights, and 5 million shares for stock awards. Cash awards are also on the change docket, with those to be limited to the value of 5 million shares at the end of a fiscal year. "The limits on cash awards are raised to the same level as for stock awards, to give the [Compensation] Committee greater flexibility in making cash awards in a variety of situations, including new hire awards," Microsoft said in the proxy statement. Microsoft will host its annual shareholders meeting tomorrow in Bellevue Wash., starting at 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET). The company will webcast the event. At Microsoft, top executives' compensation for 2013 was much more in sync with year-over-year movement of operating income than in 2011 and 2012, when the former outpaced the latter by as much as four times. (Data: Microsoft.) Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at  @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com. See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com. Microsoft watch Someone made money off the Surface RT: Former Microsoft asset manager charged with insider trading Microsoft to name new CEO in early 2014 Microsoft's CEO search and the art of non-denial denials Microsoft exec hints at separate Windows release trains for consumers, business EU signs off on Microsoft-Nokia deal U.S. antitrust regulators OK Microsoft-Nokia deal Mum's the word: Microsoft board 'doing really well' at keeping quiet Scroogled swag sells out as some buyers go for the gag Gates talks CEO search, but reveals zip In role reversal, Ballmer stays composed, Gates chokes up, in shareholder meeting More in Microsoft Update download vine videos won't play download win 7 logon background changer download friend adder elite crack download chicken invaders 2 christmas edition full version download delta airlines boeing 777 for fs2004 download the sims 2 for download internet turbo full crack download crviewer dll windows xp download let the love begin mp3 kyla download talking cat game for pc

How Load Balancing Is Playing a Bigger Role in Tech Transitions

Load balancing technology, which took off in 1990s with the rise of the Internet, continues to find behind-the-scenes work in the enterprise - including a supporting role in the current mobile boom. Take the case of Richard Fleischman & Associates, an IT consulting firm that uses load balancing products from Kemp Technologies in its disaster recovery (DR) line of business. RFA's financial services industry clients include hedge funds and broker-dealers, and financial industry regulations require a disaster recovery plan. (New York City customers can cut over to RFA's Purchase, N.Y. disaster recovery center or the company's Boston center.) Stevens Demorcy, senior systems engineer at RFA, says Kemp Technologies provided a solution to a tricky DR issue: Making customers' iPhones, Android and Windows smartphones quickly available in the event of a disaster. In the last few years, many customers had migrated from BlackBerry and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to smartphones that use Microsoft's ActiveSync mobile data synchronization technology. (ActiveSync is a Microsoft Exchange Server feature that lets users access email, calendar and contacts on mobile devices.) During Superstorm Sandy, many clients had to go to DR and wait hours for DNS updates to propagate and reach their devices. Related: Gimme Shelter: Wall Street Braces for Next SuperstormAnalysis: Did Wall Street's Business Continuity Plans Fail During Sandy? In the BlackBerry world, BES handles the back-end communications task of redirecting blackberry devices to the DR site. But that tool no longer exists in the smartphone/ActiveSync environment. As a consequence, it can take up to a day for some smartphones to get an updated DNS record, which redirects the device to a new IP address, Demorcy notes. RFA built its smartphone solution using a combination of Kemp's LoadMaster local load balancers and GEO global load balancers. The GEO appliances are key in this application, since they redirect smartphones when customers go into DR mode. Demorcy says the GEO acts as a DNS server, repointing traffic wherever the server administrator needs it to go. RFA typically places one load balancer and one GEO at the customer's site and the same number at a disaster recovery center, though Demorcy says the particular arrangement may change depending on a client's needs. Load balancing is an "old concept" that "hasn't changed much," Demorcy says, but using the global feature to quickly give people access to their email during an emergency has reinvigorated the technology. "That's the part that makes it worthwhile. The global part is where you benefit the most if you want to do DR." Market Shift Pushes Load Balancing Into Application Delivery Controllers The first flowering of load balancing coincided with the rapid rise of Internet properties, which found a need to distribute workloads from one Web server to another as traffic dramatically expanded. Software and appliance-based load balancers became mainstay tools for business seeking scale and high availability. More recently, however, load balancing to some degree has been morphed into the newer technology category of application delivery controllers (ADCs). Those devices provide load balancing as part of a broader set of features that may include compression, traffic management, network and application protocol optimization and Layer 7 content switching. Secure Sockets Layer offload is generally an ADC function but can also be found in more traditional load balancers. Heman Tailor, director of IT at SCAinteractive, a company that provides interactive promotions such as customer loyalty programs, cites the additional features as a plus. The company currently uses the Coyote Point E450GX appliance. ( Fortinet acquired Coyote Point Systems earlier this year.) The technology manages the Web server cluster in SCAinteractive's network operations center, which the company uses to run its promotions. "Using a load balancer is very typical of running a Web cluster - or any other cluster, for that matter," Tailor says. "There are many solutions out there, but what makes it stand out is features such as hardware compression and SSL offloading, and Layer 7 routing and load balancing." Case Study: Thanks to ADC, Carfax Accelerates Data Delivery to Meet Demand Those features, Taylor says, "reduce the load significantly on our end, along with making the management of the servers behind the clusters much easier." As for future developments, Tailor points to the incorporation of global load balancing as most server farms add second and third sites to boost reliability. Load Balancing's Enduring Qualities Work Well for Failover While load balancers have grown in sophistication as they meld into application delivery controllers, customers continue to cite the old-fashioned virtue of reliability as the important draw. The capability to shift workloads away from oversubscribed servers in a data center or to failover from one server to another remains a core feature. Now Nerd, based in Beaverton, Ore., deployed Barracuda Networks' Load Balancer 440 to support its NerdDeck offering, a white-label remote technical support service. NerdDeck serves as its customers' remote support department, providing a phone and chat service as well as remote access tools. Geoff Turner, Now Nerd CEO, says installing the load balancer paid off within weeks of purchasing it. A server failed overnight, but the load balancer detected the outage and redirected requests to other servers. Now Nerd staffers never noticed the problem until they came in the next morning, checked email and discovered the server alerts. Customers detected no change in service. News: Load Balancing Among Issues in Healthcare.gov Enrollment System Crash "Different people have different purposes for load balancing," Turner says. "Our goal was not offloading SSL. It was to give customers a consistent experience." That said, Turner notes that his company may use some of the newer features such as global load balancing down the road. Embedded Load Balancing Meets Virtualization Challenges Load balancing technology in recent years also has had to contend with virtualization and cloud computing, which complicate the environment in which workloads are distributed. Accordingly, some enterprises have adopted server application virtualization software with embedded load balancing. That was the case for W&W|AFCO Steel, a structural steel fabricator in Oklahoma City. The company runs key applications such as labor scheduling and enterprise resource planning on its SQL Server database platforms, which operate as VMware virtual servers. download frontier airlines interview questions download software diet mp3 full version download unrar extract and recover software download lexmark 7300 printer software download version 1.8 word format rich rtf download microsoft fix it center offline download netop remote control full version download where to rundll32.exe for windows xp download microsoft windows system image manager download luckywire for windows 7

'ZeroAccess' click-fraud botnet disrupted, but not dead yet

Microsoft and law enforcement agencies said Thursday that they disrupted a botnet that defrauded online advertisers of $2.7 million a month but that the malicious network hasn't been completely eliminated. The "ZeroAccess" botnet infected computers with malicious software that interfered with search results in a browser, directing people to websites where cybercriminals profited from bogus clicks on ads, according to a news release. Microsoft, working with A10 Networks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, said they did not expect to completely stop the botnet due to its complexity. As it has done in other botnet interventions, Microsoft filed a civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against eight unnamed "John Doe" defendants. The lawsuit, filed on Nov. 25, alleges that the defendants also used the infected computers to commit identify theft and DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. A notice announcing the lawsuit is written in both English and Russian, indicating the suspected language of some of the accused. Online advertiser spend hit $20.1 billion in the U.S. in the first half of this year, according to the lawsuit. The industry's "size and rapid growth combined with its highly technical and organizational complexity has made online advertising a rich environment for cybercriminals," the suit said. In click-fraud scams, advertisers end up paying for bogus clicks generated by software. The traffic from infected computers is sold by cybercriminals to other people running websites, who benefit by collecting fraudulent advertising revenue. The U.S. federal court allowed Microsoft and investigators to block communication between the botnet and U.S.-based computers and take control of 49 domain names used by the botnet. Europol, working with Latvia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, executed search warrants and seizure orders on various computers related to 18 IP addresses connected with ZeroAccess. As many as 1.9 million computers were infected with the botnet code in October, Microsoft said, citing research from the University of California at San Diego. About 800,000 computers infected with ZeroAccess are active on the Internet on a given day. download file rar patch ita photoshop 7 download plants vs zombies for pc at walmart download the sims 3 patch 1.48.5 download six guns per android download clutch electric worry mp3 download plants vs zombies ipad survival mode download kaspersky antivirus 2011 italiano download skype for samsung chat