3 ways to embed Power BI

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3 Ways to Embed Power BI

By Jessica Cook as written on powerbi.microsoft.com
Want to share your Power BI reports and dashboards as part of a website or application? This week, Guy in a Cube looks at three ways to embed Power BI, including publish to web, using the REST APIs, and the new Power BI Embedded service within Microsoft Azure.

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Delta flights grounded as power outage takes down computers

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Delta flights grounded as power outage takes down computers

By Darrell Etherington as written on techcrunch.com
People flying Delta may have woken up this morning to find out they aren’t flying at all – a massive networked service outage resulting from a power failure in Atlanta, the airline’s home base, has delayed all of today’s current flights and is causing widespread cancellations.
Delta confirms that the outage began at around 2:30 AM ET, and affected its computer systems across the globe. Flights that were currently in the air at that time will continue to operate as normal, the airline said in a statement, but systems might be showing upcoming flights as incorrectly still on time.
Regarding any potential resolution, Delta has only said that it’s “working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible,” but has no timeline for a fix. It’s also now offering a waiver for anyone with travel booked on Delta between August 8 and August 12, suggesting it anticipates travel over the next few days to be impacted as well.
The power outage in Atlanta has affected flight status displays, the carrier’s website, and both mobile and on-the-ground airport software tools, according to Bloomberg. The media outlet also points out that it’s the second-largest disruption at a U.S. airline this month, following Southwest’s recent computer failure that led to the cancellation of over 1,000 flights.
Delta had around 3,300 flights booked for today, sot he affected group is potentially much larger. But what these incidents highlight most of all is that commercial airline tech still lags a lot of other industries, and can be brought low with incidents that would hardly bruise dedicated cloud service companies like Google and Amazon.
The failure here is on both the flight side, and the information side, meaning it’s difficult even to properly make affected customers aware they’ll be delayed, and it’s a strong argument in a series of recent computer-related airline flubs that modernization in the industry’s systems is long overdue.

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Managed Solution Becomes a Microsoft Authorized Education Partner

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Managed Solution Becomes a Microsoft Authorized Education Partner

Managed Solution earns distinction through commitment to academic customers.

Managed Solution, today announced it has become a Microsoft Authorized Education Partner (AEP), demonstrating its ability to meet Microsoft academic customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment. To earn a Microsoft AEP authorization, partners must complete a test to prove their level of academic licensing and market expertise.
The AEP program is designed to train participating resellers on Microsoft’s Academic licensing, authorize them to purchase and resell Microsoft Academic licenses, and demonstrate to potential customers that they are approved and knowledgeable academic partners.
Managed Solution is a long standing and fast growing full-service IT solutions firm that solves business technology challenges that are holding back the profitability potential of companies and deliver, maintain and forecast the technologies they'll need to stay competitive in their market place.
“By becoming AEPs, partners show themselves to be committed and trained in providing discounted Microsoft academic products to the education market,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of Education for Microsoft Corp.’s Worldwide Public Sector. “This authorization, along with our other education partner initiatives, gives our partners recognition of their areas of expertise and our academic customers the confidence that they are buying from academic IT specialists.”
The Microsoft AEP Program is designed to authorize and equip organizations that deliver academic products and services through the Microsoft platform with the training, resources and support they need to provide their customers with superior experiences and outcomes.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers businesses by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place.
Managed Solution was founded in 2002 and was quickly recognized as one of San Diego’s 40 fastest growing companies and the 27th fastest growing IT company in Southern California. With corporate headquarters in San Diego, Managed Solution provides IT services nationwide and was recently recognized as one of the top 10 National Cloud Service Providers.

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Why Pokémon Go captured our imagination — and huge market share

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Why Pokémon Go captured our imagination — and huge market share

By Llraz Margalit as written on techcrunch.com
When a franchise that essentially died more than a decade ago comes back to life with such fervor, we need to ask ourselves how and why that happened. And if you’re able to stop playing Pokémon Go long enough to read this article, you’ll find the phenomenon is deeply rooted in evolutionary psychology.
Matthew Lynley recently explained the brilliant ploys used by the creators of Pokémon Go to promote engagement, retention and virality. As a web psychologist, I am naturally inclined to dive deep into the aspects of human behavior that make us prone to embrace the game.
From an evolutionary standpoint, our brains operate much better in a natural environment that’s rooted deeply in our mind, compared to a setting based in virtual reality. Our behavior is governed by two parallel processes: The conscious process that revolves around our immediate tasks (in this case, winning Pokémon Go) and the unconscious process that is responsible for ensuring that there are no threats or sudden changes in our environment.
When playing virtual reality games, the unconscious computation in our brains is forced to work much harder, because it’s not familiar with this strange virtual reality environment. In contrast, playing Pokémon Go involves our actual environment, with which our mind is far more familiar; thus, playing within that setting delivers a comforting feeling of cognitive fluency — a mental shortcut that signals familiarity in a treacherous world.
The idea behind cognitive fluency might seem obvious — people prefer things that are easy to think about. The experience of the real world is psychologically easier to process than that of the VR world of other games. Fluency guides our thinking in situations where we have no idea that it’s at work, and it affects us in any situation where we need to process information.

Pokémon Go scratches some basic psychological itches.

This sense of familiarity has a strong influence over what types of things people find attractive and enjoyable. Playing games in a familiar setting is much more enjoyable, and familiarity has played a strong role in human survival. In prehistoric times, if something (or someone) was familiar, it meant that you had already interacted with it, so it was probably not going to kill you.
Pokémon Go scratches some basic psychological itches. First, the game itself is simple to understand and easy to play, for children and adults alike. Each time a level advances, the challenge is revived and thus the crave is renewed and the desire to continue receiving those fresh doses of gratification causes us to continue playing.
One of the rewarding building blocks of the game is the unexpected gratification of finding the monsters as we walk. We don’t know when to expect them; they can appear at any time or place. Our attraction to this kind of action is attributed to a neurotransmitter called dopamine, a chemical found in our brain.
Scientists initially associated dopamine with feelings of enjoyment (a high level of dopamine being visible during activities such as eating chocolate, having sex and hearing favorite music), but research in the past decade has indicated that dopamine has additional functions besides activating gratification and pleasure. This molecule helps us in detecting changes in the environment.
The system centers around expectations. We can expect high levels of dopamine when we encounter unexpected rewards (three or four times as excited, as measured by the strength of the dopaminergic firing). In other words, the reward is more pleasurable the more surprising it is.
When we receive unexpected cash on a randomized basis, it forces us more strongly into obsessively repeating our action than cash on a predictable basis would. This tendency was best illustrated by B.F. Skinner, a pioneer of behavioral psychology, in the 1950s. When his lab rats received an unexpected reward from pushing a pedal, they would continue pushing it even after the reward stopped arriving. This element of surprise helps explain why people just can’t get enough of Pokémon Go.
Additional bursts of pleasure also come from the nostalgia this game evokes. Being outside chasing monsters activates old and enjoyable memories, providing us with a priceless opportunity to relive a piece of our childhood again, and bring our childhood experiences to life. It activates memories from a simpler time in which we were out in the streets playing social games like tag or hide-and-seek.

Pokémon Go players feel as if they are taking part in an actual activity with other people.

Those games we used to play involved human partners, or at least involved manipulating real objects in real space (like throwing a ball). Pokémon Go players feel as if they are taking part in an actual activity with other people, rather than a remote observer behind a screen. Throwing the ball at a Pokémon brings up exciting memories that were closed in a box that belongs to the past. These memories have a positive influence on our well-being as we get a secret key to a magical period.
In addition, playing Pokémon Go can fulfill an everlasting fantasy. Walking through the streets fighting monsters that pop up unexpectedly out of nowhere can easily drive our imagination to assume the masterful role of superhero, or warrior, fulfilling a fantasy and giving our senses and emotions an other-worldly experience. Such games boost adrenaline levels, and they awaken strong feelings of power — as well as frustration, gratification and enjoyment.
A central part of the gratification Pokémon Go players experience is akin to the old-fashioned games we used to play, where people would go outside and interact more socially. Many studies have illustrated the mood-boosting effect of physical activity, and social ties are equally important for mental health. Some research suggests that even shallow conversation with strangers boosts well-being.
However, Dr. David Sack recently cautioned in Psychology Today about the fine line between behavior and addiction, questioning whether Pokémon Go will drive up the percentages of internet addiction or pathological gaming.
He quotes a DSM-5 fact sheet studying gamers: “When these individuals are engrossed in Internet games, certain pathways in their brains are triggered in the same direct and intense way that a drug addict’s brain is affected by a particular substance. The gaming prompts a neurological response that influences feelings of pleasure and reward, and the result, in the extreme, is manifested as addictive behavior.”
“Such compulsive play pushes aside other interests and responsibilities, threatening relationships, academics, jobs and more,” Dr. Sack writes. “Although this research focused on traditional online gamers, it’s no stretch to expect the same to apply to Pokémon Go players.”
To conclude, there is a thin line between having fun with a game and becoming addicted to it. The problem is that this line starts creating changes in our brain, generating new connections — before we even realize we are addicted.

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Microsoft brings together IT management and security for the hybrid cloud

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Microsoft brings together IT management and security for the hybrid cloud

As written on blogs.technet.microsoft.com
As organizations adopt hybrid cloud models for IT, the challenges for operations management continue to increase. Among those challenges is the difficulty of securing these complex environments, which include resources on-premises as well as in hosted clouds, Azure or AWS. At the same time, the cost of breaches continues to rise – the average cost of a data breach to a single company is $3.5M. To help meet these challenges, today we are announcing the general availability of new and improved security features for Microsoft Operations Management Suite, a set of cloud-based services designed to help customers protect, detect and respond to security issues across hybrid cloud environments.
Operations Management Suite (OMS) is management for the cloud, from the cloud. Delivering analytics, automation, configuration, security, backup, and site recovery, OMS gives you the ability to increase visibility and control from the on-premises datacenter to the cloud. The advantages of cloud-based management include the ability to innovate faster, scale to meet expanding requirements, and get up and running without long deployment cycles. Using cloud-based security tools also ensures that you are always working from the latest information on threats. Security and management go hand in hand, because the same data that indicates a potential performance or health issue, might also indicate a security breach. By bringing security and management together in a single cloud-based offering, OMS provides the tools you need to address threats and remediate issues without the added complexity of point solutions.
Last week we announced the general availability of Azure Security Center, a set of tools to help customers gain visibility into the security state of their Azure resources, take control of cloud security policies, and both detect and respond to active attacks. With OMS Security we bring the security analytics that are built into Azure Security Center to hybrid cloud environments, giving you the capabilities you need to handle today’s evolving security threats. OMS Security leverages the same intelligence and detection that we use in Azure and is based on the security knowledge that we gain from running a hyper-scale cloud.
With OMS Security, you can quickly assess the security posture of your hybrid cloud environment and detect active security threats. OMS Security will continuously monitor the environment for security vulnerabilities such as missing critical security updates, antimalware, and recommended security configuration baselines. To detect active security threats and attacks, the service leverages powerful event analysis paired with threat intelligence derived from Microsoft’s own cloud experience. You can centralize management for protecting systems, as well as creating alerts, implementing automatic security updates across systems, and applying security policies. A simple approach to search and queries across all data sources lets you streamline the security audit process with easy access to comprehensive and actionable security log data. With these new capabilities, IT administrators can avoid being blindsided by a breach and alert the security team if they see indicators of compromise. Security response teams can then use the same simple search capabilities to rapidly get a view across operations and security data to help stop the threat.
The new Security service includes a broad range of tools to help you get deeper visibility across multiple aspects of the security landscape. Highlights include advanced threat detection and the Threat Intelligence dashboard, which lets you visualize attacks using the same data we use in Azure. For customers using Advanced Threat Analytics in Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), you can now view that information in OMS, giving you a single view of security for IT operations. The new Security Configuration Baseline Assessment identifies vulnerable OS configurations that could be exploited by an attacker. To see OMS Security in action, and get a deeper view on how these features can work for you, take a look at Operations Management Suite Security in this episode of Microsoft Mechanics.
To make it easier to get access to these solutions, we announced earlier this month that you can purchase OMS via a new subscription model. Existing System Center customers can get OMS as an add-on, extending the value of existing on-premises investments.

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