Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has famously called high schools "obsolete" and warned about their effect on U.S. competitiveness. Now, his company has a chance to prove that it can help fix the woes of public education.
After three years of planning, the Microsoft-designed "School of the Future" opened its doors Thursday, a gleaming white modern facility looking out of place amid rows of ramshackle homes in a working-class West Philadelphia neighborhood.
The school is being touted as unlike any in the world, with not only a high-tech building -- students have digital lockers and teachers use interactive "smart boards" -- but also a learning process modeled on Microsoft's management techniques.
We may never know exactly what happened, but Microsoft VP Brian Valentine has abruptly left Microsoft after being reassigned to an undisclosed job outside of the Windows Division. My guess is that Valentine was either uninterested in his new job or, more probably, that Microsoft didn't really have a new job for him at all and Windows boss Steven Sinofsky was simply ousting Valentine as part of his restructuring of the Windows business. Valentine, curiously, has already found a new job at nearby Seattle-area e-tailer Amazon.com. While I'm sure selling books will be just as exciting as shipping software, I'll be curious to see how long Valentine, a large personality himself, will last in the cult of Bezos. My guess is we're not looking at a best seller here.
After taking on the responsibility of leading Microsoft's efforts to secure its much-awaited Vista operating system, Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of the Redmond, Wash., company's Security Technology Unit, is in town at the Security Standard Conference to evangelize to the firm's progress in those efforts.
While critics continue to say that Microsoft's next-generation operating system will likely carry as many vulnerabilities as its predecessors and some of the software giant's partners in the security applications markets have called the firm out for some of the new features present in preview versions of Vista, Fathi maintains that the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative is moving forward, and that the new OS will be the most secure Windows product the company has ever produced.
Microsoft's Expression Web design tool is one step closer to the market, along with a new beta and a shorter name.
The product formerly known as Microsoft Expression Web Designer is now Expression Web and has entered its first public beta after several months in the Community Technology Preview program.
Expression Web is Microsoft's first serious entry into the Web design and publishing market. It had a Web designer in the form of FrontPage, but FrontPage was never meant for heavy-duty Web page development and has fallen significantly behind in keeping up with the advance of new Web technologies.
Windows Vista may not ship in the European Union at the same time that it is released in the United States as a result of possible issues with European competition law, Microsoft acknowledged on Sept. 7.
The problem from Microsoft's perspective is that the EU has been slow in letting the software giant know exactly what it needs in order for Windows Vista to ship in Europe.
"We are doing everything we can to deliver Windows Vista to our European customers on time. Our top priority is to ensure that the product is fully compliant with European law," Microsoft spokesperson, Guy Esnouf, told eWEEK.
For all its juking and jiving, Massachusetts will, of course, stick with Microsoft Office and eschew the free OpenOffice.org office suite it had threatened Microsoft with. However, the state said that it will use the open-source OpenDocument data format in lieu of Microsoft's proprietary data formats. It can do so because Microsoft will soon ship an OpenDocument plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets the suite read and write to OpenDocument files. In tech terms, this is a win-win: Microsoft gets the revenue from selling Office to Massachusetts, and Massachusetts can claim a moral victory by using an open-source document format. Frankly, the whole thing was ridiculous. And if Massachusetts was really concerned about doing the right thing, it would simply utilize Microsoft's Open XML formats, which work natively in Office 2007.
Cisco Systems and Microsoft will announce progress on a 2-year-old effort to link their separate technologies for network
client health screening, commonly known as "network access control," according to sources familiar with the companies' plans.
The companies will use The Security Standard conference in Boston to unveil application program interfaces in Microsoft's
upcoming Vista operating system that will allow Cisco NAC-compliant switches and routers to evaluate the security posture
of Vista systems.
Microsoft Wednesday began offering Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 to users who had downloaded the Beta 2 of the next-generation operating system in June.
"The final major pre-release of Windows Vista -- Release Candidate 1 -- is now available for priority access by Customer Preview Program participants only," Microsoft said on the CPP Web site Wednesday.
"If you registered for this program in June, please look for a recent e-mail message from Microsoft with information regarding RC1," the site stated.
Microsoft has announced the release of IronPython 1.0, its implementation of the Python dynamic programming language on the .Net platform.
The Redmond, Wash., software giant released IronPython 1.0 on the company's CodePlex community source Web site on Sept. 5. Company officials said IronPython 1.0 represents a significant milestone for Microsoft's CLR by demonstrating performance and capability of a dynamic language on the .Net Framework.
In addition, IronPython offers all the benefits of integration with the .Net Framework, including language and tools interoperability, along with Python's developer productivity benefits. Plus, IronPython 1.0 enables developers to leverage improvements in the .NET Framework 2.0, such as generics and dynamic methods, the company said.
A Microsoft executive who led Windows Vista's development is leaving for Amazon.com, with the clock ticking down to the scheduled release of the delayed operating system.
A series of executives have left Microsoft over the past year, but Valentine's position and long tenure make him particularly noteworthy. Among other things, he was publicly praised by the company as an effective leader in the final stages of Windows 2000 development.
He was most recently senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division, a central group responsible for Windows engineering. He has been a leader in a variety of areas, even in extracurricular activities -- learning how to ice skate so he could play goalie for the Windows hockey team.