Brad on Marriage to Jen: I Was Pretending It Was Something That It Wasn't (BLOG)

Brad Pitt is a satisfied man. Or at least that's what he tells Sunday's Parade Magazine in promotion of his latest film, "Moneyball." In a very candid interview, Brad shares why he wasn't happy in his marriage with Jennifer Aniston and how much he loves Angie. Plus, he addresses those pesky wedding rumors.

On why he's happy now:
"I put much more emphasis on being a satisfied man. I'm satisfied with making true choices and finding the woman I love, Angie, and building a family that I love so much. A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss. … That's the trade-off. But I'll take it all."

On why he ended his marriage to Jennifer Aniston:
"It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn't living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to actress Jennifer Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn't."

On his decision to start a family with Angelina Jolie
"One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom. She is such a great mom. Oh, man, I'm so happy to have her."

On those pesky wedding rumors
"How many stories have you read that aren't true, stories about me and Angie being married or fighting or splitting up? And when we don't split up, there's a whole new round that we've made up and we're back together again! We'll get married when everyone can. We're not splitting up. And we don't have a seventh child yet."

On how much he enjoys fatherhood:
"I was surprised at how automatic it is, how much of it is instinctual. And now I have a great confidence and trust in those instincts. I mean, one sound at night and you're awake and up because they may need you. Or when they start to have a tantrum, you know to divert them from spinning out by helping them focus on something. It just

goes on and on. I tell them, 'You can make a mess, but you've got to clean it up.'



wonderwall

Microsoft Talks Evolution of Windows Server 8 (BLOG)

The excitement that Microsoft's Server 8 team generated over the upcoming release of the latest iteration of its OS was infectious. Yet, the man leading the Server 8 effort resonates nothing less than calm, cool confidence.

Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Cloud Division, is responsible for managing all elements of Windows Azure and the Windows Server platform. On the first day of the Windows Server 8 Reviewers' Workshop—a three-day event where about 35 tech journalists were to be formally introduced to Server 8, I got the chance to speak with Laing before he kicked off the event as the keynote speaker.



PCMag: Can you discuss the planning process with Windows Server 8?
Laing: We've taken a lot from Azure, about running a cloud server—[and] how we think about Windows Server and how we planned it. Servers are typically in the market for five to eight years; Server 2003, 2008 is still out there. So when you do a new release you ar looking at five to eight years. This is the developer preview and the reason for doing a release at this point is to work with the software community and the hardware community—to make sure they are ready when we finally ship. We're not encouraging IT pros at this time to deploy it. They might do some evaluations. We have TAP (Technology Adoption Program) partners; they do deployments. But we want to ensure we have the right device drivers, we have the right infrastructure tools, like backup agents, anti-virus.

PCMag: Is this one of the biggest changes to Windows Server since perhaps NT to 2000?
Laing: We've done a lot of work to focus on giving Server Manager a new tool. Server Manager, we think, is fairly evolutionary. Many of the tools are still available underneath. We want people to be able to manage many machines from one. Our goal was to make it a natural evolution for people. I think that it's probably the broadest [of changes]. We've added more features than our several last releases. It's a big release of Windows Server. And it's in every area—file system storage, clustering, virtualization, remote access…

PCMag: What will the upgrade path to Server 8 be? Will it run on the same hardware as 2008 R2?
Laing: Typically we find that most customers upgrade when they buy new hardware. Our goal is to be able to run on existing hardware. So we will support the same hardware Server 2008 R2 runs on. From 2008 to 2008 R2 we worked to keep the specs the same.

PCMag: Can you discuss the Server 8 development, goals, and new capabilities?
Laing: We surveyed 26,000 customers. We did a lot of work based on what we were hearing from customers. We spent $10 million on surveys. Customers know there's a journey to the cloud. No one knows whether it's two years or five. Some people want to build a cloud, some people want to connect to the cloud. Even if you are a small business, backing up your server is an attractive thing. Or, you may be a service provider wanting to build a cloud and offering it as a service. It's about the ability to give people a high availability environment at a lower price point and software to automate many of the management tasks, and let people offer continuous services.

Another area is claims-based access. It's possible to classify files automatically based on their content or either what directory they are in. So if a file has "Microsoft confidential" in it, that could be tagged and only full-time employees would be given access. We call it claims based access. Another pillar is around the development environment. People want to be able to build applications for a single server, for public and private clouds.

PCMag: How long until we see a completely cloud-based datacenter as the norm?
Laing: New technologies typically don't completely replace existing technologies. They usually create new opportunities. IBM still sells mainframes, which were started in the 1960s. There's been this evolution. Cloud allows you to do things you couldn't do before and reach more people. We expect many standardized workloads will be available online, Office 365 is an example. There are particular cases where what you do does not differentiate your company. You're probably not more successful as a company running your own email. I think it will happen workload by workload and dependent on what your industry is.