The decision by Chairman Bill Gates to transition away from working full time at Microsoft to assuming a part-time position has ushered in a new era and a new job for CEO Steve Ballmer.

“When Bill announced his role change, I felt like I was entering a new era and had a new job, given the uniqueness of my relationship with Bill over many years,” Ballmer said at Microsoft’s annual financial analyst meeting at its campus here July 27. “I have never had to be the primary champion of innovation within the company. Bill has always played that role. But, over the next two years, I will have to become the primary champion of innovation at Microsoft.”

Source: eWeek

Microsoft is leaving Java in the dust, but the company still has room to grow in the developer arena, a key executive said.

Speaking at the Microsoft FAM (Financial Analyst Meeting) on July 27 in Redmond, Wash., Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior vice president of Server and Tools business, said Microsoft’s .Net platform has outpaced Java, particularly the Java Enterprise Edition, over the past five years to become the development platform of choice for enterprise development.

“Five years ago we had problems with J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition],” Muglia said. However, “We’ve grown from having a quarter of the market to, now, 60 percent,” he said. Microsoft displayed the FAM presentations via Webcast.

“J2EE has run its course,” Muglia said.

Source: eWeek

Microsoft said on Friday that it is recalling an update to its Small Business Server product because of a glitch found late in the manufacturing process.

The software maker said it found a problem with Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 after the product was released to computer makers but before it was made broadly available. Small Business Server is a product that combines the Windows Server operating system with the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server and other software. The R2 release is an update to the version that was finished in 2003.

Source: News.com

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is waging a “reign of terror” against “defenseless people” in its efforts to prosecute people for illegal music downloads. So says Ray Beckerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the law firm of Vandenberg & Feliu in New York. Best known for his Recording Industry vs the People blog, Beckerman made the comment during a conference call yesterday organized by the Defective By Design campaign.

During the call, whose purpose was to raise awareness and to create a defence fund against the RIAA, Beckerman described what he alleges are the typical tactics used by the RIAA in suing individuals in the United States and other countries, and two of the cases that might become landmarks in the struggles against the RIAA’s actions.

According to Beckerman, the RIAA has brought 19,000 cases against private individuals. “You have a multi-billion-dollar cartel suing all sorts of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations,” Beckerman says. His concern is that “due to the adversarial nature of justice, the RIAA will be successful in rewriting copyright law,” particularly if the technological community does not resist.

Source: NewsForge

Personal information on 72 worker’s compensation claimants was stolen from Sentry Insurance and later sold over the Internet, the company said.

The data sold included names and Social Security numbers but not medical records, Sentry said. Data on an additional 112,198 claimants was also stolen but there is no evidence it was sold, the company said.

Sentry said it notified everyone affected and was providing credit monitoring services to help prevent fraud.

Source: AP