Nemhauser said one of the major problems with AJAX development is complexity. "I find it challenging enough to keep up with the technologies I have to keep up with, let alone to have to deal with manual creation of event handlers, messaging, client-side script, etc.," he said, speaking of tasks he would have to perform to do AJAX development from scratch.
"JavaScript is not an object-oriented language. It does not have strong typing; there is no exception handling; and there is no inheritance. One of the biggest problems with the AJAX approach is the amount of time it takes writing and debugging all that code," he said.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced Wednesday that the company will increase funding for a program that provides basic computer training and job skills to people in countries lacking those services.
Microsoft will put US$25.2 million more into its Unlimited Potential computer training program, bringing its investment to $152 million, a total that includes both cash and software. Gates made the announcement before giving a keynote address at the Government Leaders Forum, a two-day conference sponsored by the company in Lisbon.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Wednesday that attempts by governments to censor Web site contents were doomed, because banned information can seep out despite official injunctions.
"The ability to really withhold information no longer exists," Gates told a government forum on the Internet.
Gates said his company must comply with legal requirements in the countries where it operates.
Late last year, Microsoft shut down the site of a popular Chinese blogger at Beijing's request. The blog by Zhao Jing, writing under the pen name An Ti, appraised sensitive topics such as China's relations with Taiwan and media freedoms in China.
After outrage from many of its own employees over its abrupt censoring of a Chinese blogger, Microsoft has formulated a new policy to deal with requests from a government that alleges posted material violates its laws.
The measures were detailed by Microsoft's top lawyer, Brad Smith, at the Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon on Tuesday.
Smith said that Microsoft will only remove blogs when given proper legal notice, and even then, will only block access to that material within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.
The unexpected announcement was immediately praised by Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who said she was "extremely pleased" and the move was of "crucial importance."
The beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 is available to the general public starting today. Microsoft hasn't changed much in this version of the browser since PC World compared the first IE 7 beta to Mozilla's Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 and Opera 9 Preview 1. But version 7 is a different beast entirely than the IE you are probably using today.
This new iteration of the world's dominant browser adds a number of features long since taken for granted by alternative-browser users, such as tabbed browsing, a toolbar-integrated search box, and limited RSS support. Version 7 also has a much more compact and streamlined interface than its predecessor, with a strong emphasis on dedicating as much of the window as possible to the displayed Web site. Also included are a number of security upgrades, like a new antiphishing filter.
Microsoft's tool for helping customers make sense of its complicated product licensing is expected to make its debut outside the U.S. with several new features on Tuesday, according to the software company.
The second phase of the Microsoft Product Licensing Advisor's (MPLA's) rollout will allow customers in Canada and some countries in Europe -- including France, Germany and Spain -- to use the tool, said Sunny Jensen Charlebois, Microsoft's senior product manager of worldwide licensing and pricing.
Microsoft's latest Windows XP operating system contains a flaw that drains the batteries in laptop computers, requiring more frequent recharges.
The problem, uncovered Monday by Web site Tom's Hardware Guide, causes laptop batteries to lose power at a faster rate when devices such as printers, mice and iPod music players are connected. Whereas Microsoft had acknowledged the problem internally and told some customers, it hadn't made the information widely known.
"Battery life is very high on the list of customers' requirements," Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. in Wayland, Mass., said Monday in an interview. "The immediate reaction is, 'What took so long?'"
Antitrust investigators from the European Commission are holding meetings with key Microsoft officials at the company's U.S. headquarters to discuss whether it is complying with the Commission's antitrust ruling of March 2004, a Commission spokesman confirmed Tuesday.
Officials from the Commission team working on Microsoft's case have been in Redmond, Washington, since Monday to hear the company's arguments about why it believes it has complied with the Commission's 2004 ruling. In that ruling the Commission ordered the company to offer a version of Windows without its Media Player and ensure that rival developers could interoperate with its workgroup server software.
Microsoft executive Jan. 30 said the Team Foundation Server component of Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System will ship in March.
The company had been saying that TFS was on track to ship in the first quarter of 2006. And S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, noted in his blog that the technology would in fact ship in March.
"With the forthcoming availability of Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio Team System in March, Microsoft is embracing the extended software development team," Somasegar wrote in his blog. "With the introduction of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, we bring a solution that marries creativity and agility with discipline and visibility."
Microsoft previewed its third annual Government Leaders Forum Monday by indicating it will promote strategies and solutions designed to reduce governmental red tape when the meeting gets underway Wednesday in Portugal.
In its announcement, Microsoft cited its Microsoft Connected Government Framework, which consists largely of training and educational solutions developed for government officials.
"Governments around the world tell us that to interoperate effectively they need a more structured approach to building information technology systems," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, in a statement.