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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s annual developer conference in Seattle on May 21, 2024.

Max Cherney | Reuters

Microsoft said Thursday that it’s starting the process of releasing a broad update to its Windows 11 operating system for PCs.

Today, Windows accounts for just 9% of Microsoft’s $245 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue, acquisitions of public companies Activision Blizzard and Nuance Communications. But revenue from Windows is highly profitable, and the widespread use of Windows on computers has helped Microsoft attract clients to its Azure cloud. So the product enhancements keep coming, before support for the popular Windows 10 ends in October 2025.

Following its introduction in 2021, Windows 11 is still quickly growing in popularity. The number of active devices was up 50% year over year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s earnings call in July.

The Windows 11 2024 Update, also known as version 24H2, is meant to boost basic PC functions, such as downloading files over Wi-Fi, compressing documents and managing energy use.

Microsoft provides new file compression options out of the box in version 24H2 of Windows 11.

Jordan Novet | CNBC

Here are some of the other new capabilities coming to PCs that can run Windows 11 in version 24H2:

More energy consumption controls. You’ll have an option to reduce the power draw of your PC while it’s plugged in, even if it doesn’t have a battery.

Supercharged hearing aids. If you have hearing aids that support Bluetooth LE Audio, you’ll be able to connect them to your computer and directly stream audio and adjust volume levels and balance.

Faster internet. There’s a new kind of router that adheres to the Wi-Fi 7 standard, and these devices can send data at a higher throughput than Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. Your PC should now be able to make the most of these routers at home or at the office, so you can download files more rapidly and have more devices running at high speed.

Simpler Wi-Fi sharing. In the Settings app, you’ll be able to bring up a QR code showing information for logging on to your Wi-Fi network, so you can quickly get other devices connected.

Rich backgrounds. If your device or display supports high dynamic range, or HDR, signals, then you can select an image file that uses the .JXR file extension and make it your desktop background. The result will make for higher contrast between light and dark parts of an image.

Control mobile files. If you connect your phone to your PC over Bluetooth, you’ll be able to turn on a control in the Settings app that will show files on your phone in a folder inside the File Explorer app. It’s a wireless alternative to connecting your phone to your PC with a USB cable.

Smaller clock. You can make the time take up less space in the System tray. To do this, open the Settings app, select Time & language. Under “Show time and date in the System tray,” you’ll find a new option that says, “Show abbreviated time and date.”

Compression choices. You won’t have to download a program from the web if you want to bundle up your files in the 7-Zip or .tar format. Select a group of files in File Explorer, right-click, hover over “Compress to…” and then select from the ZIP, 7z or TAR options. Or you can pick “Additional options,” which brings up a box where you can increase or decrease the compression level and choose a compression method.

How to get the new features

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Microsoft announces new HR executive, company veteran Amy Coleman

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Microsoft announces new HR executive, company veteran Amy Coleman

Microsoft’s Amy Coleman (L) and Kathleen Hogan (R).

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft said Wednesday that company veteran Amy Coleman will become its new executive vice president and chief people officer, succeeding Kathleen Hogan, who has held the position for the past decade.

Hogan will remain an executive vice president but move to a newly established Office of Strategy and Transformation, which is an expansion of the office of the CEO. She will join Microsoft’s group of top executives, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.

Coleman is stepping into a major role, given that Microsoft is among the largest employers in the U.S., with 228,000 total employees as of June 2024. She has worked at the company for more than 25 years over two stints, having first joined as a compensation manager in 1996.

Hogan will remain on the senior leadership team.

“Amy has led HR for our corporate functions across the company for the past six years, following various HR roles partnering across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development spanning 25 years,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.

“In that time, she has been a trusted advisor to both Kathleen and to me as she orchestrated many cross-company workstreams as we evolved our culture, improved our employee engagement model, established our employee relations team, and drove enterprise crisis response for our people,” he wrote.

Hogan arrived at Microsoft in 2003 after being a development manager at Oracle and a partner at McKinsey. Under Hogan, some of Microsoft’s human resources practices evolved. She has emphasized the importance of employees having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, drawing on concepts from psychologist Carol Dweck.

“We came up with some big symbolic changes to show that we really were serious about driving culture change, from changing the performance-review system to changing our all-hands company meeting, to our monthly Q&A with the employees,” Hogan said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider.

Hogan pushed for managers to evaluate the inclusivity of employees and oversaw changes in the handling of internal sexual harassment cases.

Coleman had been Microsoft’s corporate vice president for human resources and corporate functions for the past four years. In that role, she was responsible for 200 HR workers and led the development of Microsoft’s hybrid work approach, as well as the HR aspect of the company’s Covid response, according to her LinkedIn profile.

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Google, Apple hit with EU antitrust actions under cloud of Trump tariff threats

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Google, Apple hit with EU antitrust actions under cloud of Trump tariff threats

A man holds an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max ahead of the launch of sales of the new iPhone 16 series smartphones in a store in Moscow, Russia September 20, 2024. 

Evgenia Novozhenina | Reuters

European Union regulators are taking steps to rein in Google and Apple on antitrust charges, even as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to hit the bloc with tariffs for alleged “overseas extortion” of America’s tech giants.

This breaking news story is being updated.

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XRP surges after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says SEC is dropping its lawsuit against the company

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XRP surges after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says SEC is dropping its lawsuit against the company

A visual representation of the digital cryptocurrency, XRP.

S3studio | Getty Images

XRP surged after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the Securities and Exchange Commission is no longer pursuing its appeal in the case against the payments company.

The price of XRP was last higher by nearly 14% at $2.57.

“It’s been almost four years and about three months since the SEC originally sued us, certainly a painful journey in lots of ways,” Garlinghouse said at the Digital Assets Summit in New York Wednesday morning. “I really deeply believed that we were going to be on the right side of the law and on the right side of history.”

“The system just feels broken. That we had to fight this fight for the industry and you had an SEC attacking the industry, particularly the Ripple case,” he continued. “There were no victims, there was no investor loss. They were just not acting in good faith.”

In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple for breaching U.S. securities laws by selling XRP without first registering it with the agency. The company scored a partial victory in 2023 when SEC. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the decision, which was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. Still, while XRP at that point was not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, it was considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.

The development comes as the SEC moves quickly to reverse much of the damage in the crypto industry left by the previous administration. Last month the agency ended its enforcement case against Coinbase; closed its investigations into Robinhood’s crypto unit, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys with no enforcement action; scaled back its crypto enforcement unit; and clarified that meme coins are not securities.

This week, the newly formed SEC crypto task force will kick off a roundtable series focused on defining the security status of digital assets.

XRP was created by the founders of Ripple in 2012. It is the native token of the open source XRP Ledger, which Ripple uses in its cross-border payments business – about 95% of which takes place outside the U.S. Ripple is the largest holder of XRP coins.

The coin was the biggest beneficiary of the post-election Trump trade. It’s up more than 400% since then and up 22% this year.

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