Microsoft and open source: True love or casual fling?

Microsoft is declaring itself open, at least when it comes to .Net software development technologies. But that's about as far as the openness goes, at least for the time being.
Already having open-sourced its WinJS JavaScript and Roslyn compiler projects last week, a Microsoft official stressed intentions for .Net projects to be open source going forward. "We are really leaning in on the idea of being more open and embracing open source with the work we do in .Net," said Jay Schmelzer, director of program management in the Microsoft developer tools group. Any new project created around the .Net ecosystem is "by default going to be an open source project," he said at the Build conference in San Francisco. "That is the intended starting point for all these things going forward."
Microsoft, of course, has been famous for dominating the software industry for years with its closed Windows operating system and other non-open source products like the SQL Server database and SharePoint collaboration platform. Might Microsoft extend its open source embrace to these areas? Perhaps not anytime soon.
"Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comment on that," Schmelzer said when asked about any open source plans for those products. "Those teams I think are all evaluating their strategies related to open source." Overall, the company recognizes open source as a key trend in the industry, he said.
Last year, an official in Microsoft's Open Technologies group was unaware of any intentions to make Microsoft's bread-and-butter Windows operating system open source.  It would be momentous if Microsoft ever embarked on such an endeavor, opening up Windows a manner similar to the rival Linux OS.
For now, Microsoft's .Net intentions are admirable efforts at making the company more open. In addition to the Roslyn and WinJS moves, Microsoft this week formed its .Net Foundation, with the intention of extending .Net in the open source realm. The company already has tools vendor Xamarin on board and will look to add other partners.
This story, "Microsoft and open source: True love or casual fling?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow

Watch TV on your Laptop

The big TV news this week is about hardware, with Amazon launching its Fire TV to rival Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. For a while, speculation was hot and heavy that Amazon would launch its own pay-TV service, but that hasn't happened... yet. That's what the real TV wars likely will be fought over, though -- how content reaches consumers.

The Supreme Court later this month will hear arguments on both sides of cord-cutter startup Aereo's business plan. Aereo lets users stream or record live television programming. Broadcasters are fighting tooth and nail to stop it. The company will live or die on the Supreme Court decision, according to its chief backer Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp.
You've probably heard the term "cord-cutting," but if you're unfamiliar with it, it refers to the abandonment of a traditional cable- or satellite-TV subscription in the home, replacing it with online, Internet pipe-fed media.
Cord-cutting generally has cost advantages at the consumer level, not least because your media can be consumed a la carte. You don't need to buy the cable provider's filler programming that you're never going to look at.

6 Ways to Speed Up Your Site

The load time of websites is one of the most important factors affecting its usability; most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below you will find the summary of the “Speed Up Your Site” series. Those are simple yet effective ways to make sure that your website is running fast. You can click on each point to read the article with comments from the readers.

1. Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.
2. Image Formats: apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.
3. Optimize Your CSS: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.

4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

10 Benefits of Having a Blog

Blogging is originated from the words Web Log and it is described as an online journal use for sharing idea or daily activities in chronological order. But in today’s world of blogging, the word blog has been transformed to different meaning. Now, blog can be referred to as website, it can be use to share idea, tips, tutorials, gossip, news, downloads and lots more…

Today, thousands of blogs are been created daily and over 150million blogs has been created. Even though blogging has hit it big, but most people don’t get what makes blogging powerful, helpful and beneficial.

To put an end to this, I have compiled this great post on 10 Benefits of Having a Blog. If you haven’t created your blog, you can hire me to get your professional blog created in less than a week.

The 10 Benefits of Having Blog

1. Become a Better Writer

One of the fastest ways to become a better a writer is to write pages day after day and that’s exactly what an active blogger does. An active blogger spend his or her time writing fresh post on his or her blog and doing that he or she gets him or her writing skill improved.

How to Create Your First Blog Using Blogger

You’re ready to become a blogger by writing your very first blog post, an entry, for your new blog. Fortunately, the mechanics of writing a blog post aren’t much different from writing an e-mail.

Most posts are quite short and are written directly and conversationally, but you can make them as long as you want. Every blog takes on a personality and life of its own.

If you’ve used a Web-based e-mail service like Gmail, Hotmail, or MSN, blog software feels very familiar. Creating the post is simply a matter of filling in the appropriate fields in a form, formatting text, and then sending it off to its destination — in this case, to your blog, rather than a friend’s inbox.

1

Go to the Blogger publishing screen.

If you just finished signing up for your blog, click the Start Posting link to start a blog post; the publishing screen appears. If you’re coming back to Blogger, log in. Blogger takes you to the Dashboard — a kind of control panel showing you the blogs you have set up — giving you access to tools like posting, help resources, or even creating another blog. Click the New Post link on the Dashboard to get to the Publishing screen.

How To Make Money Using Fiverr.com

I started this before but the so-called moderators
deleted it for no reason. Well, since im dedicated to help people,
i wont let that stop me.

Here it is again

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How To Open A Fiverr Account The Smart Way

Now, most Fiverr expect will simply tell you
that in order to open a Fiverr account, all you
have to do is visit www.Fiverr.com, click
here & there and BAM! You have an account.
Well, I stand to tell you that THEY WRONG!
It goes a long way beyond that.