Tekorama

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reasserted during the company's annual shareholder's meeting Wednesday in Bellevue that the company was no longer interested in acquiring Yahoo.

"We are done with all acquisition discussions with Yahoo. I've said that a bunch of times. Somehow some people have gotten confused nonetheless," he said in response to a question.

One person in the hall at Bellevue's Meydenbauer Center then applauded.

View Full Article: Seattle PI's Microsoft Blog

Apple is in talks with three of the "big four" record labels about offering music tracks through iTunes that would be made available in MP3 AAC format without copy protection measures, a move that could further distance the digital download service from its rivals.

View Full Article: AppleInsider

It's a feature which could be ubiquitous in more data centers if it could just get out of the labs: the ability to move running virtual machines between platforms with next-to-zero downtime. Now, it's being done cross-platform.

View Full Article: BetaNews

Google's beloved web-based email client has always been ripe for third-party design customization (we've always been partial to the Gmail Redesigned skin in Better Gmail, for example), but now Gmail is officially riding the interface customization train by offering 30-some new themes to spice up your inbox. Keep reading for a screenshot tour of the cool new offerings...

View Full Article: Lifehacker

The Office Labs web site, which consists of software experiments related to Microsoft Office that will probably never ship and aren't even considered to be in alpha or beta status, was launched back in April. Since then, the site has released a couple of prototypes, and the latest one went live this week...

View Full Article: Ars Technica

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer, has posted today on the IEBlog about what’s next for IE8. Dean and his team have been busy analyzing all the data sent in since the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (which is a huge amount data). Based on feedback received on the transition from the IE7 Beta to final release – the IE Team wants to be clear about the plan for IE8. Dean highlights what’s next for IE8...

View Full Article: Windows Experience Blog

Matt Hester has just posted up a blog about performance and stability improvements in Windows Search 4.0 – 84% improvement of desktop search in Vista sound good to you?

You can learn more about Windows Search at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/default.mspx...

View Full Article: MSDN Blogs

Zune, Microsoft Corp.’s digital music and entertainment service, today announced landmark agreements with major and independent music labels to bring significant new value to the subscription music model. The Zune Pass subscription service currently gives consumers on-demand access to millions of tracks for $14.99 per month. Starting today subscribers will also get to select 10 tracks per month to keep and add them to their permanent collection (an estimated $10 value).

View Full Article: Microsoft PressPass

Steven Sinofsky: This post is about disk space and the disk space “consumed” by Windows 7. Disk space is the sort of thing where everyone wants to use less, but the cost of using a bit more relative to the benefits has generally been a posiitve tradeoff. Things have changed recently with the availability of solid-state drives in capacities significantly smaller than the trend in spinning drives. Traditionally most all software, including Windows, would not hesitate to consume a 100MB on a specific (justified) need when looking at a 60GB (or 1,500GB ) drive; with desirable machines shipping with 16GB of solid-state storage, we are looking carefully at the disk space used by Windows—both at setup time and also as a PC “ages”. We also had a specific session at WinHEC on solid-state drives that might be interesting to folks. This post is authored by Michael Beck, a program manager in the core OS deployment feature team.

View Full Article: Engineering Windows 7 Blog

Months before it bowed to pressure from Intel Corp. and relaxed the requirements for its "Vista Capable" marketing program, Microsoft Corp. published an article on its TechNet Web site recommending that users avoid Intel's 915 graphics chipset if they planned on upgrading to Windows Vista, internal e-mails at Microsoft show.

View Full Article: Computerworld