There are times when we get too close to a topic. We familiarize ourselves with every aspect and nuance, but fail to recognize not everyone else has done the same. Whether you consider this myopia, navel-gazing, or human nature, the effect is the same. I recognized this during the recent webcast when someone asked the question – “What’s the difference between a security advisory and a security bulletin?” The answer was simple to me, as I’ve been doing this for years, but the question was valid and it reminded me that not every person on the planet knows all of the ins and outs of Update Tuesday.

Today we released eleven security bulletins addressing 24 CVE’s. Five bulletins have a maximum severity rating of Critical while the other six have a maximum severity rating of Important. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately for your environment.

All four models of Surfaces - The ARM-based Surface RT (now known as plain-old Surface) and Surface 2, as well as the Intel-based Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2 - are getting a variety of patches and fixes.

Evaluating the legacy of any CEO, especially one as storied and controversial as Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, is a challenge. That's why I'm glad I had a chance to take it on. In late November 2013, I went to Redmond and interviewed Ballmer and a number of other current and former Microsoft leaders about Ballmer's last 13 years as CEO.

On the eve of his exit as chief executive officer of Microsoft, after more then a decade on the job, it is more evident than ever that Steve Ballmer's image does not always reflect reality. As anyone who has ever seen him speak at a conference (or portrayed on television, as he was in cartoon form on the animated series South Park this year) knows, Ballmer is a larger-than-life kind of guy. His public persona is brash, bombastic and, at times, bordering on boorish. To most people, he is known more for his manner than his management. But look closely, and you'll notice that the real Steve Ballmer is responsible for making a handful of largely unsung strategic decisions during his tenure as CEO of Microsoft (MSFT) that will continue to affect the company and industry long after a new leader takes the helm of the Redmond, Wash.-based company.

Through the HP Vertica Analysis technology platform and other HP technologies, the company was able to create Earth Insight – an early warning detection system that supports conservation efforts in tropical rainforests worldwide. Additionally, HP engineers developed a dashboard to provide analysis on the platform called the WPI (Wildlife Picture Index Analytics System). The system, connected via cameras, waits for animals to walk in front of the camera and then a photo is taken. The photos are the key – animals in the photos are analyzed and tracked over time, showing which animal populations are increasing and decreasing. In addition to the photos, climate metrics are also being measured, such as temperature, humidity, precipitation, etc. So far, they have collected over 1.4 million photos and three million data points, which comprise over 3 terabytes of data.

ActiveWin.com is at the HP Discover conference this week in Barcelona, Spain. Be sure to follow ActiveWin.com's coverage of the event on Twitter @ActiveWin throughout the week. We will have access to a variety of HP Executives, see some of the latest technologies, and more.

Sanket Akerkar, Vice President, Developer and Platform Evangelism group (DPE), works closely with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) as they develop the latest applications that help improve the way people and companies do business. Today, Sanket offers a look at some of the latest names helping deliver these solutions that maximize the Windows 8.1 experience. - Erwin Visser

They say you don't move forward by standing still. In a frenzied grasp for relevance in the mobile age, Microsoft spent 2013 shaking things up at a cellular level. Beyond major new releases for the Xbox, Windows, and Office brands this year, Microsoft spent billions to gobble up Nokia, revamped itself from head to toe as a device and services company, and said a bittersweet sayonara to its longtime chieftain—and those are just the major headlines.

Steve Ballmer is chief executive officer of Microsoft. He's been in the job for some time, but he recently announced that he's stepping down. The fact that Ballmer's departure was announced without the simultaneous announcement of a successor is a good indication he was pushed out the door by the board of directors. And these photos taken Sunday around noon at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City in Arlington, Va., show why.

For months, the speculation has been that Ford’s CEO is the leading candidate to replace Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, with an announcement due possibly by the end of this month. But that plan seemed to be quashed last week after board member Edsel Ford II said Mulally was staying through the automaker until the end of 2014. “Ford’s directors haven’t pressed Mulally, 68, to make a public statement to clarify that he plans to stay with the automaker because he’s made his intentions clear to the company’s board, Edsel Ford told Bloomberg News.”

Household names including Apple and Google have formally called for changes to U.S. surveillance practices and policy, arguing that current operations undermine the freedom of people. Eight companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and LinkedIn have formed an alliance called the Reform Government Surveillance group. Although usually fierce competitors, the group have come together in agreement over the U.S. government's spying programs - brought to light by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden - and have formally requested "wide-scale changes" to the regime.

Every Patch Tuesday Microsoft releases non-security updates as well. The description of the updates to be released tomorrow, Tuesday, December 10, 2013, are already up. As usual, the descriptions are vague and say far less about each update than do the descriptions of Microsoft's security updates. Until then, there's nothing much to glean from the descriptions.

Everything is better with Peggle! Catch Peggle fever now on Xbox One. Master over 120 new levels and trials in the sequel to one of the most addictive puzzle action games of all time. Unleash amazing magic powers as you learn from Peggle Master Bjorn, and 4 all-new masters like the dark and mysterious Luna, while you shoot balls at colorful, challenging boards of pegs to reach Extreme Fever. But there's more! Unlocked costumes allow you to dress up the various masters for laughs. Four-player Peg Party mode lets you deploy your Peggle skills to the utmost against friends and family. Game DVR lets you save and share replays of your most astonishing shots, while Kinect support gives you the chance to aim and shoot with only your hands and voice. Truly, Peggle 2 is a game for our age, and indeed all ages!

It has been estimated that PS4 sold 66 per cent more units than Xbox One in the US in November. Michael Pachter has said in his most recent investor note that he believes PS4 sold 1.25m consoles in the region throughout the month and that Xbox One sold 750k. Note that PS4 was released in the US on November 15th, giving it a week more on the market than Xbox One which launched on November 22nd. If correct, that 66 per cent margin mirrors what was seen in the UK during the console’s respective first weeks – Xbox One sold 150k units while PS4 managed 250k, a 66 per cent difference.

It looks like an improvement. And as long as you aren’t actually using it, it is. The Xbox 360’s sprawling, multi-layered, ad-splattered interface, crammed as best as the engineers could manage into hardware that was never designed to support it, has been replaced by an elegant three-pane view. Home shows recent activity, Pins shows user-created shortcuts, Store holds everything you might want to buy. Advertising, though present, is less obtrusive. Three blocks on the main screen are apparently targeted based on user activity, and even if they aren’t then it’s hardly the obstruction that it used to be. Not having a social feed in the main interface, like PS4, is a missed opportunity, although to Microsoft’s credit it takes only a single button press to launch the quick-loading, Facebook-like activity feed. It’s when you try and do anything from here that problems arise.

Microsoft researchers have designed a smart bra that can detect stress. The prototype contains removable sensors that monitor heart and skin activity to provide an indication of mood levels. The aim was to find out if wearable technology could help prevent stress-related over-eating. Mood data was provided to the wearer via a smartphone app in order to highlight when "emotional eating" was likely to occur.

Microsoft has pledged to improve the Xbox One party system after various users spoke out to say the party invitation process and chat features have left much to be desired. Writing on Reddit, Microsoft director of Xbox Live programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb said the team in Redmond is aware of this feedback and is working on solutions. "I had a meeting today about much of this and I can say that things will get better," Hryb said. "I can't offer a timeline of a list of what will be addressed first, but we are aware of the issue and things will get better."

The Chinese government has urged Microsoft to extend support for Windows XP in order to boost Beijing’s anti-piracy efforts and head off a potentially huge security threat. Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of China’s National Copyright Administration, met Microsoft and other software companies in a bid to put some pressure on, according to Techweb. He apparently claimed that ending support for Windows XP would create serious security risks for many machines in the PRC, with opportunistic cyber criminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the software once security updates end on April 8th 2014.

According to a report at GameSpot sister site ZDnet, Microsoft is planning to release its next wave of operating systems-codenamed Threshold-in spring 2015. Sources confirmed to reporter Mary J. Foley that Microsoft executive vice president Terry Myerson used the name "Threshold" in an internal email recently. If plans hold, Threshold will feature updates to Microsoft's three main operating systems platforms-Xbox One, Windows, and Windows Phone-allowing them to share common elements more easily than in the past. A single app store for all three platforms is also in the pipeline, the report claims.

On Tuesday, Microsoft updated its Lync collaboration software for Windows 8.1, a relatively minor update that still makes one wonder why Lync and Microsoft's Skype aren't a single product. Upgrading to Lync for Windows 8.1 is easy enough: on your Windows 8.1-powered PC, Lync will upgrade itself over the next 24 hours. The upgrade adds a bit of functionality, including the ability to take control of a shared screen in a Lync meeting.

Microsoft Corp. sold $8 billion of bonds in dollars and euros, a record offering from the world’s largest software maker that followed Johnson & Johnson by issuing AAA rated corporate securities this week. Microsoft borrowed $3.25 billion with five-, 10- and 30-year notes in the U.S. currency, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Redmond, Washington-based company also issued 3.5 billion euros ($4.8 billion) of bonds split between eight- and 15-year portions.

Microsoft plans to fork out $230m to add a fourth mega datahall to its Dublin bit-barn campus. The expansion was announced on Tuesday and will add a further 20 people to the 80 on-site staff, as well as create temporary employment for 380 building-related jobs. The expansion will add around 169,000 square feet of IT space to the facility. This is a significant addition, and represents tens of thousands of additional servers. Microsoft is adding to the data center to support continued growth in services such as Xbox Live, Bing, Office 365, and Windows Azure, among others.

Google already runs much of the digital lives of consumers through email, Internet searches and YouTube videos. Now it wants the corporations, too. The search giant has for years been evasive about its plans for a so-called public cloud of computers and data storage that is rented to individuals and businesses. On Tuesday, however, it will announce pricing, features and performance guarantees aimed at companies ranging from startups to multinationals.

New Aesthetic artist James George has been making art out of code for a few years now, and has often employed Microsoft tech in his process. Last year he paired a Kinect with a DSLR to capture people's movements for his piece Depth Editor Debug. He followed that up last winter by using a Kinect-DSLR hybrid to develop the experimental film Clouds. Microsoft must have noticed — George was invited to spend three months as the first-ever artist-in-residence at Microsoft Research's Studio 99, where he's had the company's digital toolkit at his disposal to create new works of art.

Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Microsoft ramped up its FUD machine and launched the next phase of its infamous anti-Google Scroogled campaign last week. This time, the company is targeting Chromebooks, Google's cheap ChromeOS-based, web-centric laptops. Why is Microsoft worried about Chromebooks? Because it can see the writing on the wall. For many mainstream users, the operating system they use is slowly becoming irrelevant, and even though Chromebooks are not right for everyone, they are slowly becoming a real alternative in the low-end laptop market.

If you’re only half-paying attention to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sales, you might have the sense that both consoles are tied. Sony issued a press statement a few weeks ago claiming it sold around one million systems in 24 hours. A week later, Microsoft did the same, claiming it, too, had sold about a million systems in a day. There was one crucial, underreported difference: The PS4 launched in just two markets (the U.S. and Canada), while the Xbox One launched in 13; that, said Motley Fool’s Demitrios Kalogeropoulos, is kind of a big deal. Garnish with news that Sony’s PlayStation 4 both outsold Microsoft’s Xbox One in the U.K. last week (by more than double) and simultaneously broke every games console sales record on the country’s books, and everything looks to be coming up roses for Sony.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has given its approval to Microsoft's pending acquisition of Nokia's mobile devices and services business. The transaction got the DOJ nod on November 29, according to the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition notification on December 2. "We look forward to the date when our partners at Nokia will become members of the Microsoft family, and are pleased that the Department of Justice has cleared the deal unconditionally," said a Microsoft spokesperson in a prepared statement. Last month, Nokia shareholders gave their approval to the deal during an extraordinary general meeting in Helsinki. Indian authorities gave their approval to the Microsoft-Nokia deal earlier this fall.

Microsoft is starting to roll out a new volume-licensing plan that unifies its myriad existing business licensing agreements into a single new type of contract. Currently, Microsoft offers a variety of volume-licensing plans for small, mid-size and enterprise customers. Those plans include everything from Select Plus, to Enterprise Agreements, to the Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement (MOSA) and the recently announced Server and Cloud Enrollment Plan.

When I blogged recently about Microsoft's plans on the operating-systems front following Windows 8.1, I mentioned a couple of "spring 2015" releases. threshold It turns out the Microsoft codename for that wave of deliverables is "Threshold." A couple of my contacts have confirmed that Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson recently mentioned the Threshold codename in an internal email about plans for his unified operating-system engineering group. If all goes according to early plans, Threshold will include updates to all three OS platforms (Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone) that will advance them in a way to share even more common elements.

Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop may not be the next Microsoft CEO with Redmond giant’s board favoring Ford CEO Alan Mulally and its own Satya Nadella as the most likely candidates to supersede Steve Ballmer. Elop hasn’t been completely discounted as candidate, with Bloomberg sources saying the situation could change and some other people could also be considered for the role. It’s worth reminding that before leaving Microsoft for Nokia, Elop was the president of the company’s business division. And the mobile-related experience he gained at Nokia gotta count for something in the years to come.

With 2013 rapidly coming to a close, investors are starting to look ahead to next year, assessing stocks in their portfolios. Of all the components in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Microsoft stands out. Next year will be critical for Microsoft, as the Windows-maker moves forward in its ongoing transformation. Over the last decade, Microsoft has lagged its primary competitors Apple and Google in shareholder-value creation, as the company's growth has remained sluggish.

Think how often a new CEO comes in to fix a mess at a company with limited resources and a flailing business. Microsoft is flabby and slow to move but surely it is not bereft of cash. Maybe that is what happens when you coin money for having once created a monopoly. You lose your sense of urgency because you have all the time in the world to get to your goal. You are hardly fighting to stay alive. So instead of leading the way, you are behind the technology curve which always moves at an accelerating pace.

Microsoft looks ready to kill off Windows RT, its version of Windows devised for chips based on ARM's architecture, judging by remarks by senior executive Julie Larson-Green. Larson-Green, who is executive vice-president of Devices and Studios at Microsoft, said that the aim of Windows RT was "our first go at creating that more closed, turnkey experience [that Apple has on the iPad]…" but that Microsoft now has three mobile operating systems: "We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We're not going to have three."

Microsoft has responded to reports that owners of its new Xbox One console are experiencing problems with the disc drive by offering a free download. Some users have said the drive makes very loud noises when they try to insert a disc and in some cases is not reading discs at all. Microsoft said only a very small number of users are affected. The Xbox One was launched on Friday and sold more than one million units in the first 24 hours. In a statement Microsoft said that those customers who had reported problems and were waiting for a replacement console would be provided "with a free digital download of one of the launch titles published by Microsoft studios."

Users of Microsoft's Xbox One console caught swearing in video clips are having their accounts suspended. Files containing "excessive profanity" will be taken down and their owners will have access to some features on Xbox Live removed. Microsoft said all files uploaded to its Upload Studio were monitored for violations of its code of conduct. The review process was to help maintain a clean, safe and fun environment for all users, the company said.