Gary Chan 2.0

Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!

Yahoo! Issues Statement in Response to Microsoft

Google on Monday said it has a plan to have American consumers from Manhattan to rural North Dakota surfing the Web on handheld gadgets at gigabits-per-second speeds by the 2009 holiday season.

news.com

Today, you can now download Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update. For those of you eager to receive the benefits of Windows Vista SP1 - you can now do so! We’ve seen quite a bit of questions in our comments so we want to communicate as much as possible surrounding Windows Vista SP1 and today’s release to Windows Update as we can.

For those of you happy to wait - sit tight because SP1 will start downloading to PCs automatically beginning in mid-April (Remember, this happens only if you have your Windows Update configured to automatically download updates and SP1 will automatically download but not automatically install). But if you want to get the benefit of a year’s worth of improvements right now, go check Windows Update today…(Hit the Start Menu, All Programs, and select Windows Update).

windowsvistablog.com

Now let’s look at the New York Times. It’s homepage is arranged, like most traditional media brand sites, by what is most important.

Here’s the problem — if you visit the New York Times throughout the day, and no important news has broken, the homepage remains largely unchanged, static, like a print newspaper.

Organizing news by importance as the default makes sense when you’re only delivering the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news publishing is continuous, it’s not the best way to server frequent news consumers.

publishing2.com

…Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook.

googleblog.blogspot.com

Welcome to the Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 Readiness Toolkit, the first place to look when you’re ready to optimize web sites and applications for Internet Explorer 8. Here is a message from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect:

“Welcome to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, the latest test release of the most popular browser!

This release contains some great advances in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout, programming model, performance, reliability, usability and service integration. We are eager to ensure that the transition to Internet Explorer 8 is seamless for you and your audience, and to give you a head start on using many of the new features with your sites and services. We encourage you to test your sites and services, and our platform implementation, and give us feedback!”

Chris Wilson Signature
-Chris Wilson
IE Platform Architect

microsoft.com

Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

That’s a lot of buzzwords.

microsoft.com

Looks like games are coming for the Zune after all! Microsoft just announced XNA Studio developers will be able to use the Zune as a multiplayer wireless mobile gaming platform. Details are sparse at this point, but it looks like it’s going to be second gen Zunes only, since it was specifically mentioned that it’d take advantage of the touchpad controls. We’ll let you know more as we get it.

Update: Microsoft hasn’t made any final decisions as to whether the specific hardware will be necessary, and has hinted that it would be up to the game developers to decide whether to make use of the Zunepad in second-gen models, or make controls work with first-gen Zunes as well. More on that here.

engadget.com

Mozilla Messaging, the new mail focused subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, today announced that it has begun operations.

The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience.

mozillamessaging.com

I had a bunch of people internally ask me why Windows Server shows it’s version as Windows Server 2008 SP1 (for brevity - WS08). I will explain it, but I wanted to use the Writer feature that allows me to insert pictures. Who says anything beyond notepad is a waste of time. Actually, that’s me usually…

blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald