Best software - buy shareware online

Microsoft and the National Science Foundation announced on February 4 that they are teaming to provide NSF-selected researchers with free cloud computing resources built around Microsoft’s Windows Azure public-cloud operating system.

Under the terms of the new program, the NSF chooses individual researchers and research groups who will get free access to Microsoft’s cloud-computing resources for three years. The NSF is charged with awarding and managing the projects. More details for those interested in applying are available on the NSF’s Web site.

Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft has not just one or two, but now 12 sessions dedicated to Windows Phone app and game and development on the agenda for its Mix 10 conference in mid-March, the company announced on February 4.

Microsoft still isn’t providing any specifics about what the content will be for those sessions (I’m guessing that will come some time after the Mobile World Conference in mid-February in Barcelona). But there are now 12 placeholders on the Mix site for those sessions.

Microsoft today said it will deliver a record-tying 13 security updates on Tuesday to patch more than two dozen vulnerabilities in Windows and Office.

The company will ship a total of 13 updates next week, five of them pegged "critical," the highest threat ranking in its four-step scoring system. The 13 updates will tie the record from October 2009, when Microsoft issued the same number of bulletins, but fixed a total of 34 vulnerabilities. According to Jerry Bryant, a senior manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), next week's updates will patch 26 flaws.

Former Softies are weighing in publicly about Microsoft’s culture of innovation — or lack thereof — in the past couple of days. What they aren’t doing is offering any real suggestions about how Microsoft can make a company of 90,000 or so employees more agile, less insular and more innovative.

Don Dodge, who was cut in the last round of Microsoft layoffs, only to resurface days later at Google as an evangelist, is extolling the virtues of Macs this week. Dick Brass, who retired from Microsoft in 2004 and was instrumental in the Tablet PC launch, is airing his grievances about what went wrong back in 2000 in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Bill Hill, the leader of the ClearType team at Microsoft who left Microsoft last summer, has a post on his personal blog that also criticizes Microsoft’s development and commercialization processes.