NVIDIA today announced that it will return $1 billion this fiscal year to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and dividend payments, including $100 million in stock being repurchased this quarter.

SurfRight, the company that develops HitmanPro, agreed to provide us 10 licenses for their program to organize a giveaway for our readers. The rules are simple, as with previous giveaways all you have to do is sign-up via a widget: … Continue reading →

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Paris, April 9th 2013

Dalibo is proud to announce the release of Ora2Pg 11.1. This major release adds support to multiprocessing so that you can now export data in parallel mode. Importing data from an Oracle database is now ten times faster. With this new feature, Ora2Pg performances are closer to the ones you'd get with any ETL.

Since 2001, Ora2Pg is the best solution to migrate data from Oracle to PostgreSQL and is used by thousands of companies around the world to switch from the most expensive proprietary RDBMS to the most advanced Open Source RDBMS!

Ora2pg 11.1 also brings important improvements :

• You can now generate XML transformation files for Kettle (see http://kettle.pentaho.com/).
• Faster scan of Oracle databases containing huge number of objects.
• Faster partition data export with direct import to tables partition.
• Bug fixes on RAW or LONG RAW data export.
• PL/SQL to PL/PGSQL code rewrite.

Gilles Darold, the project leader and main developer of Ora2Pg, explains: "The development of ora2pg is really fast because more and more companies are moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL. This new version brings speed improvements to migrate multi-terabyte databases faster. For most users, lowering the migration time is critical because it means less downtime during the switch from Oracle to PostgreSQL."

These performance enhancements were developed by Dalibo in collaboration with Photobox, Europe's largest online photo processing service and Bouygues Telecom, a major mobile network operator and ISP in France.

Dalibo would like to thank the developers who submitted patches and the users who reported bugs and feature requests, especially : Dominique Fourdrinoy, Ludovic Penet, Thomas Ogrisegg, Alex Delianis, Pierre-Marie Petit and mrojasaquino. Ora2Pg is an open project. Any contribution to build a better tool is welcomed. You just have to send your ideas, features requests, or patches using the GitHub tools at https://github.com/darold/ora2pg.

Useful Links:

• Website: http://ora2pg.darold.net/
• Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ora2pg/
• Development: https://github.com/darold/ora2pg
• Changelog: https://github.com/darold/ora2pg/blob/master/changelog

About Ora2Pg :

Ora2Pg is an easy and reliable tool to migrate data from Oracle to PostgreSQL. It is developed since 2001 by Gilles Darold, also author of pgBadger, a PostgreSQL performance tool. Ora2Pg can export most of the Oracle objects (table, view, tablespace, sequence, indexes, trigger, grant, function, procedure, package, partition, data, blob and external table).

Ora2Pg works on any platform and is available under the GPL v3 licence.

Docs, Download & Support at http://ora2pg.darold.net/

About DALIBO :

DALIBO is the leading PostgreSQL company in France, providing support, trainings and consulting to its customers since 2005. The company contributes to the PostgreSQL community in various ways, including : code, articles, translations, free conferences and workshops

Check out DALIBO's open source projects at http://dalibo.github.com

April 7, 2013 – BOAO, Hainan, China – The Hainan government and Microsoft China today announced comprehensive collaboration to enable Hainan in its ambition to become the “Hawaii of China,” transform Hainan into an international tourism destination and a powerhouse of software development. In the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed today, both parties agreed to form a long-term partnership, cooperate strategically on incubating the application of informatization, nurturing the software industry, developing the next generation of IT, cultivating talent, and protecting intellectual property rights. Guests from Hainan government and Microsoft present at the signing ceremony included Luo Baoming, secretary of the Hainan Provincial Committee, Sun Xinyang, secretary-general of Hainan province, Li Guoliang, vice governor of Hainan Province, and Orlando Ayala, corporate vice president, chairman of Emerging Markets, Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president, chairman and CEO of Microsoft Greater China Region, Ya-Qin Zhang, corporate vice president, chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group, and Sandy Gupta, CTO of Microsoft China.

Luo Baoming, secretary of the Hainan Provincial Committee, said, “Hainan is committed to becoming a world-class international tourism island characterized by sustainable and efficient, low-carbon local industries and the information technology is the critical foundation for realizing this. By partnering with world-leading IT companies like Microsoft, Hainan can leverage innovative technologies to upgrade and enhance industries including tourism, real estate, transportation, maritime and agriculture, and accelerate Hainan’s transformation into an international tourism island. The MOU reflects both sides’ vision and commitment to Hainan’s bright, sustainable future.”

Orlando Ayala, corporate vice president, chairman of Emerging Markets, extended his congratulations on the partnership, adding, “Information technology and intelligent applications are playing an increasingly important role in developing more sustainable industries, including the tourism industry. This is vitally important because Asia Pacific is quickly becoming the world’s most popular region for tourists, and China is expected to become the leading tourism destination over the next decade. Microsoft has always been committed to helping industries transform through technological innovation and we look forward to working closely with the Hainan government to enhance the competitiveness of Hainan’s tourism industry and accelerate their transformation into a sustainable international tourism island.”

Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president, chairman and CEO of Microsoft Greater China Region, said, “Microsoft is honored to be in this strategic partnership with the Hainan government. Over the last 20 years, Microsoft has invested throughout the country as a part of its long-term commitment to partnering in developing an innovative, competitive and talented China. With comprehensive strengths in devices and services, from client to cloud, Microsoft China has the capabilities and is committed to supporting the Hainan government in promoting local industries, driving economic transformation and creating a model of eco-friendly international tourism.”

As the only tropical island in China, Hainan is the weathervane of China’s tourism industry. The construction of Hainan as an “international tourism island” was elevated in status to one of national strategy as it is seen as playing an essential role in China’s overall development. Under the MOU, Microsoft and the Hainan government will work together to improve Hainan’s competitiveness in information technology and help develop information-based industries, which will facilitate the smooth, rapid upgrade of the local industrial sector and support intelligent tourism industry growth.

Microsoft demonstrated tailor-made, forward-looking tourism solutions at the Bo’ao Forum, including innovative service experiences such as no-contact, motion sensing and multi-touch technology; the integration of the Hainan International Tourism Island portal and Bing Travel; a “space-time tunnel” and much more.

Technology innovation has become a driving force for the sustainable development of cities. With Microsoft’s extensive experience in software service outsourcing and cloud services, as well as the strengths of its products, technology and global resources, the company hopes to enable the nation’s governments and enterprises to improve their core competitiveness through informatization, to accelerate economic transformation and build better, flexible more connected cities.

REDMOND, Wash. — April 10, 2013 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the power and automation technology company ABB will deploy Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer to its employees worldwide.

With about 145,000 employees in 100 countries, ABB is transitioning from multiple IT collaboration and messaging solutions to Office 365 to provide a single platform for productivity, communication, collaboration and enterprise social in the cloud.

“Office 365 and Yammer will enable us to transform communication and collaboration among our employees, surfacing the best and most innovative ideas across the organization,” said Andy Tidd, chief information officer at ABB Group.

Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner emphasizes: “Strong internal communications are the lifeblood of a company’s success, and ABB’s decision as a global technology leader to deploy Office 365 and Yammer will help it realize its vision for empowering employees with new ways of working via enterprise social and the cloud. When you remove barriers to productivity and innovation and enable employees to collaborate and communicate even more freely and seamlessly across organizational and geographical boundaries, incredible things happen.”

Office 365 integrates a number of typical functionalities that employees use in their daily work. The mail service works seamlessly with the online meeting and videoconferencing service. Office 365 simplifies online meetings, and in large organizations such as ABB that can typically reduce travel costs by 15 to 20 percent.

ABB is rapidly embracing enterprise social networking solutions, implementing Yammer as its companywide platform to increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the organization. ABB also plans to take full advantage of the planned integration between Office 365 and Yammer.

About ABB

ABB (http://www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 145,000 people. The company invests more than $1.3 billion annually in research and development. In November 2012, ABB announced it had developed the first hybrid breaker for high-voltage direct current, enabling a new generation of super transmission grids. (http://new.abb.com/about/hvdc-grid).

About Yammer

Yammer (www.yammer.com) is a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network used by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide — including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — to foster team collaboration, empower employees, drive business agility and promote organizational connectedness. Yammer’s freemium business model lets customers see the value of Yammer before upgrading to the premium offering. Founded in 2008, Yammer is now part of the Microsoft Office Division.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.