Apple News: Microsoft Said to Cut Windows Price 70% to Counter Rivals
Microsoft is cutting the price of Windows 8.1 by 70 percent for makers of low-cost computers and tablets as they try to fend off cheaper rivals like Google’s Chromebooks, people familiar with the program said. Manufacturers will be charged $15 to license Windows 8.1 and preinstall it on devices that retail for less than $250, instead of the usual fee of $50, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. The discount will apply to any products that meet the price limit, with no restrictions on the size or type of device, the people said. Stronger competition from Apple and Google cut revenue last quarter at Microsoft’s devices and consumer licensing division, which includes Windows software, as the computer industry posted its biggest annual decline on record. By offering incentives for PC makers to sell cheaper models, Microsoft may be able to increase its share of the growing $80 billion tablet market and stave off Chromebooks, notebooks that run Google’s operating system.
Read full story => Bloomberg

Technology News: Facebook Investor Peter Thiel Calls Technology A “Scapegoat” For Inequality
Early Facebook investor and noted Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel thinks that too many Americans have mistakenly blamed technology for rising inequality. “Technology is an easy scapegoat,” he argued, in a big-think discussion put on by political lobby, FWD.us. In a wide-ranging discussion with MIT professor Andrew McAfee, the two duked it out about technology’s role in social ills. “I think technology has helped,” Thiel said. “You have things like Facebook, like Google–technology has helped to offset some of the brutal effects of globalization”. While globalization has flooded the low-skilled job market with ultra-cheap outsourced labor, technology has relieved the beleaguered middle-class with services in health, education and leisure that were once the exclusive domain of the wealthy, Thiel asserts.
Read full story => TechCrunch

Programming News: Can Haskell power the next Ruby on Rails?
Over the last seven years I’ve primarily been working in Ruby on Rails. I’ve spent time working at startups and large enterprises on some of the most significant Rails apps in production. The consulting company that I lead as CTO, Stack Builders, spends more time writing code in Ruby than in any other language, and we know that our clients are happy with the way that we’re able to meet their needs with the code that we produce. Even so, when we launched the new version of our company’s web site, we decided to do so in Haskell rather than in Ruby. After the launch of the site (which didn’t take much longer than it would have using Ruby), we’re happy with our decision. Furthermore, we’re excited that 2014 is going to be a year where we put a substantial amount of our resources into both open-source and client project development in Haskell.
Read full story => StackBuilders

Photography News: Beginner photography tips: the most common mistakes and how to avoid them
Although you can correct a lot of exposure errors in Photoshop, particularly using raw format files, it’s still better to get the results right in-camera as much as possible. Even when converting raw images, there is a limit to how much highlight detail you can recover if you over-expose your images. While it’s often possible to boost the detail in the shadows of an under-exposed shot, the result will be noisier and lower quality than if you correctly exposed it in the first place. Below we’ve rounded up some of the most common problems photographers have with exposure and provided some quick solutions.
Read full story => DigitalCameraWorld