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Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy (CUACC) is setting up Thailand's first .NET Excellence Programme with the aim of broadening the skills of local IT professionals. By keeping abreast of the latest advances in technology, it is hoped that the programme - set up in collaboration with Microsoft (Thailand) - will lead to increased proficiency and efficiency in local business management. Assistant Professor Virach Aphimeteetamrong, dean of CUACC, said the faculty placed importance on supporting professors and students in being conversant with and competent in doing business today as well as in the future.

Microsoft programming legend Charles Simonyi is leaving the company after a 21 year stint, the company announced today. Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 when Microsoft had only 40 employees--it has approximately 50,000 today--and guided the company's efforts to move beyond development tools to early software applications such as Multiplan, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel.

A Hungarian native, Simonyi is most famous for creating the so-called "Hungarian" naming convention, still used by developers worldwide to create software source code that is easier to read and maintain. Simonyi says that the name of this convention was just a joke, a take on the phrase, "it's all Greek to me." "Naming conventions are supposed to make the code more readable," he said in a 1986 interview. "The joke is that the program looks so unreadable [when using my naming convention], it might as well have been written in Hungarian. But it's a set of conventions that controls the naming of all quantities in the program. 'Hungarian' is a complete jumble to the uninitiated, and that's the joke."

According to a report in the New York Times today, several directors of AOL Time Warner are seeking the ouster of chairman Steve Case, who previously headed online giant America Online (AOL) when it was a separate company. The enigmatic Case, however, is resisting the challenge, the report says, and it's possible that he has enough support on AOL Time Warner's board to remain in power: Three quarters of the board would need to vote for his ouster in order for the change to be made.

AOL Time Warner shares have fallen over 70 percent since the two companies combined in an historic corporate merger earlier this year. Adding to the company's financial woes are high-profile investigations by the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) and US Department of Justice (DOJ), both of which believe AOL misled Time Warner shareholders by illegally inflating AOL's value.

Former Microsoft researcher Charles Simonyi has started a new company with the goal of creating software development tools. During his 20-year tenure at Microsoft, Simonyi served as director of application development, chief architect and distinguished engineer, and helped to develop the company's Multiplan, Word and Excel applications. He also worked as a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

The new company, Intentional Software, was created with Simonyi's business partner, Gregor Kiczales, a professor at the University of British Columbia. The tools it is creating are meant to help programmers more closely match their designs with the resulting code and to allow maximum reuse of software components.

Bill and Melinda Gates added a girl to their family Saturday. The newest release -- Phoebe Adelle Gates -- arrived at 12:36 a.m. at Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue. She weighed 9 pounds, 13 ounces. "Bill and Melinda are delighted to welcome another child," family spokeswoman Annemarie Hou said. "Mother and daughter are both doing very well." The Microsoft Corp. co-founder, who recently was once again named the United States' richest man, and his wife have two other children: a daughter, 6, and son, 3.

Intel on Monday released its fastest mobile processor yet, a 2.2GHz mobile Pentium 4-M, and 10 other mobile chip upgrades targeted for use in full-size, mini- and sub-notebooks as well as the emerging market for Tablet PCs. The new processors range across Intel's extensive line of mobile offerings, and include low-voltage and ultra-low-voltage Pentium IIIs, designed for use in compact computing devices where energy efficiency and cooler run chips that don't require fans are desired to help extend battery life.

The most powerful chip released Monday by Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., was the 2.2GHz Pentium 4-M, priced at $562, and targeted for use in full-size notebooks designed for use as a desktop replacement. Other processors issued Monday include a 1.33GHz mobile Pentium III-M, priced at $508; a 1.26GHz Pentium III-M, offered at $401; a low-voltage 1GHz Pentium III-M, priced at $316; an ultra-low voltage 866MHz Pentium III-M, for $209; and an ultra-low-voltage 850MHz Pentium III-M, offered at $209.

Microsoft is pushing further into digital rights management with a plan for a DRM server due to go into beta testing later this year. DRM technology enables content creators, such as record companies, to encrypt content and define who can decrypt it and how they can use it. Microsoft is counting on increasing adoption of the technology to help drive demand for many of its current and future products.

The company currently offers a DRM system, Microsoft Windows Media Rights Manager, which is being used by seven music and video subscription services. But its fate, once the DRM server is released, is not clear, as Microsoft sees a broader opportunity for the DRM server solution.

As Microsoft Corp. prepares to unleash new software over the next year, including the Windows .Net Server 2003 family, the next version of its Office productivity suite and three server infrastructure applications, Jim Allchin, group vice president for platforms at the Redmond, Wash., company, sat down with eWeek Senior Editor Peter Galli in San Jose, Calif., to discuss this next round of software releases.

eWeek: What is really exciting for you in Longhorn, particularly around the next-generation technology for the enterprise?
Allchin: There's a bunch of work going on around what I call concrete plumbing, covering things like hot patching-the ability to keep machines running while you patch them-to all the work we're doing on standardized install. On the networking side, we have many ideas around how to create ad hoc groups on the fly. For example, if several laptops are in a room for a meeting, we want the PowerPoint presentations to be able to show up on all of them concurrently, to be able to project those up to the projector wirelessly or to synchronize what they're doing so they can make notes without having to do any setup to get the dynamic bonding in a secure way.

Microsoft today is announcing SQL Server 2000 Windows CE Edition 2.0 and the second beta of the .Net Compact Framework and Visual Studio .Net smart device extensions, both designed to enable developers to create and deploy mobile .Net applications. SQL Server CE 2.0 is the next version of Microsoft's compact database that connects enterprise data management to smart devices.

"Both of these products relate to Microsoft's continuing delivery of a comprehensive mobile platform," said David Rasmussen, lead product manager for the Microsoft .Net development platform. "What's significant about this is now there are 6 million Visual Studio .Net developers that have the capability to become mobile application developers."

Microsoft said the .Net Compact Framework and Visual Studio .Net SDE Beta 2 are Microsoft's developer platform and tools that deliver the benefits of .Net application development, including XML Web services support, to smart mobile devices. "SQL Server CE provides a rich but compact relational database that goes down to the device level," Rasmussen said. "It includes full support for synchronizing back to an enterprise database."

Microsoft has long lusted after your living room. Facing a largely saturated market for PCs, the company sees the convergence of computing and entertainment as an opportunity to reignite its growth. The software maker has achieved some success with the Xbox game console, but the big prize is music, movies, and television.

So far, Microsoft's frontal assault on the TV set hasn't fared well. Its WebTV and Ultimate TV products--which combined Internet access, television, and a crude form of interactive TV boxes--were both busts. Technical difficulties and resistance by cable operators to doing business with Microsoft has kept the software giant out of the set-top box business.