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High Capacity Broadband is Core to America’s Future
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Posted by Anoop Gupta
Corporate Vice President, Technology Policy & Strategy
Today I had the privilege of participating in a workshop convened by the Federal Communications Commission as part of its effort to develop a National Broadband Plan by early next year. Today’s session focused on how best to supply the greater bandwidth required by emerging applications and devices, which could deliver huge social and economic benefits in nearly every aspect of our lives – in education, healthcare, commerce, energy and government, to name a few.
I want to commend FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and his colleagues for vigorously taking on this incredibly important and urgent challenge. Every 18 months, data storage capacities (driven by Moore's law) are doubling, and devices and applications are quickly evolving to take advantage of the trend. Bandwidth available in homes is rising too, but more slowly. This discrepancy is already creating a bandwidth bottleneck, and the situation will get worse over time.
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Office Team Steps Up Efforts to Protect Customers from Pirated Software
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Posted by Keith Beeman
General Manager, Genuine Software Initiative
As part of Microsoft’s on-going commitment to combat the spread of pirated and counterfeit software, and to protect our customers and partners, the Office team today made two important announcements.
First, we expanded the Office Genuine Advantage Notifications program into 13 more countries, upping the total to 41 countries where the voluntary program offers end users enhanced protection against the risks of using non-genuine copies of Office, such as viruses and malfunctioning code.
In addition, we announced that Office 2010 will offer technology managers new tools, built on our Software Protection Platform (SPP), to better control how volume-licensing keys are activated and used as they roll out Office 2010 in their organizations. The introduction of SPP into Office 2010 will also make it harder for counterfeiters to defraud consumers by selling inferior, bogus copies of Office, as the product will have technical features that make the program harder to pirate.
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Engineering Accessibility into Windows 7
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Posted by Laura Ruby
Director, Accessibility Policy and Standards
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about Government 2.0, accessibility and tools that are available to help developers make information technology more accessible to people with disabilities. As a longtime member of Microsoft’s accessibility community, I’m pleased to share with you another valuable resource – a new book entitled, Engineering Software for Accessibility (Microsoft Press, 2009; 100 pages). The book is available as a free download or as a hard-copy via Barnes & Noble and Amazon. My Microsoft accessibility colleague Jason Grieves, a program manager on the Windows Accessibility Team, and his colleague Masahiko Kaneko co-authored the book, which describes much of the process our engineers used to make Windows 7 the most accessible operating system Microsoft has yet produced.
Read more from the Windows team about the book and the efforts that went into writing it.
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Promoting Innovations to 21st Century Careers
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Posted by Fred Humphries
Managing Director U.S. Government Affairs
At Microsoft, we believe that equipping students and workers with the education and skills they need to compete in the 21st century global economy is critical to U.S. economic and national security. Indeed, despite the economic downturn and high unemployment rates, Microsoft and thousands of our partners continue to struggle to find workers with the knowledge and experience necessary to help our businesses compete and grow.
These skill shortages exist despite significant investments by Microsoft and our like-minded partners to grow the pipeline of science, technology, engineering and math students through programs such as Partners in Learning, which provides curricula and class materials, and DreamSpark, which offers students free software.
But even if we succeed in developing a deep pool of highly skilled IT workers in the U.S., there will still be substantial workforce development needs to keep the U.S. economy evolving and growing long-term. For instance, there has been much talk in Washington, D.C., about the wave of new green jobs and health IT occupations that are likely to emerge over the next decade. Such occupations will also require that job seekers possess a basic platform of skills to prosper in a global economy.
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