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When Microsoft couldn't get Windows Vista to work properly, users made the backward upgrade popular by switching back to the more stable and faster Windows XP. In its latest not-so-deft move, the software giant alienated many of the corporate IT managers it depends on by leaving them out of the loop when the time came to release Vista Service Pack 1...

Microsoft is dangling a US$44.6 billion hostile bid in front of Yahoo investors in what is widely pegged as a move to thwart Google from overtaking it as the biggest and most powerful tech company in the world. The proposed price would be a healthy premium over Yahoo's stock price before the bid was announced, and the news itself was enough to send shares of the struggling Internet giant sharply higher. The irony of Microsoft saving the world from a monopolistic monolith was not lost on many tech observers, and the blogs were abuzz for days after the announcement with critics weighing in on every possible angle of the story. It probably won't be lost on the governments of the world either -- and their scrutiny is widely expected as the proposal develops. Yahoo is keeping its hand close to the vest, although CEO Jerry Yang sent out an e-mail to the entire staff basically saying that the company was looking at other options. Top advisers have been brought in, Yang said, and all avenues are being explored. Maybe the exclamation point in its logo means Yahoo won't go quietly...

It's a tactic that professional party promoters have used for years: Tell everyone that all the big-name celebrities are going to be at your party, even if they haven't promised anything. Work up the hype, get people excited, and pretty soon it won't matter that they never committed, because they'd be crazy not to come. Sometimes that works, but when it doesn't, it tends to make you look like a real jackass. Qtrax put that strategy to the test, and it fell flat on its face. Qtrax is an ad-supported music-download service that lets users get a lot of songs for free. It announced that all the major record labels had signed on as partners: EMI, Universal, Warner and Sony BMG. Problem is, those record companies denied that any actual deals had been reached -- some said they were in talks but nothing had been nailed down. This doesn't necessarily mean Qtrax is dead in the water, but jumping the gun can't possibly go over well at the negotiating table...

Now, we all know that college students aren't necessarily the best-behaved people on the planet, but to hear the movie studios tell it, college students are the enemy that must be destroyed. Much of that belief might have been based on a study the Motion Picture Association of America commissioned in 2006, which found that college students were responsible for more than 40 percent of all illegal movie downloads. The studios were so incensed that they sent their lobbyists to Washington to insert language into a higher-education bill that would force universities to take measures to prevent piracy in order to receive federal funds. Now, it turns out that college students really only account for just about 15 percent of the piracy going on. The wrong number, the MPAA says, was the result of a "math error." However, the studios are sticking to their guns, preparing lawsuits and maintaining that college students are the most egregious movie-pirating riffraff. Hopefully, the MPAA was able to get its money back for the botched study. Maybe it will come in handy to pay the legal bills...

Easing into the role of full-time philanthropist, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates delivered his final keynote address at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, giving the audience an earful of predictions for the next decade. High-definition video will become ubiquitous, devices will become more interconnected, and keyboards will drift off to oblivion. The growing use of touch screens signals the beginning of that trend, according to Gates...

Open source software providerOpenLogic last week announced the results of a survey focusing on the most recent draft of the GPLv3 (General Public License) ...

Sun Microsystems on Monday announced the immediate availability of the GlassFish V2 Beta. Sun also unveiled its new Web Developer Pack as well as the creation of a Java Specification Request 311 ...

Novell on Tuesday announced that it has completed testing its Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 with SAP's NetWeaver and MySAP business suite applications ...

Open-Xchange on Monday unveiled the opening of its Open-Xchange Community project and the availability of source code and development documentation for its latest AJAX-based e-mail and groupware technology ...

PSA Peugeot Citroen and open source software giant Novell have signed a multiyear contract that will deploy the Linux operating system on thousands of company computers that already run Windows ...

Sun Microsystems is gunning for Red Hat, with new support pricing in conjunction with an update of its Solaris 10 operating system, the company announced Tuesday ...

Adobe Systems on Wednesday released Flash Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems ...

Marking the fifth anniversary of its release, Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie Studios celebrated the birthday of the Xbox video game "Halo" by releasing the beta version of its latest sequel, "Halo 3." The Xbox Live public pre-release precedes the game's final version, which is scheduled for availability in spring 2007 ...

Appro, a Milipitas, Calif.-based provider of enterprise servers, storage and workstations, has announced its completion of the first of four super computer Linux clusters for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) ...

The Fedora Project, a community-supported open source collaboration sponsored by Red Hat, has released Fedora Core 6, the latest version of its Linux-based operating system ...

Sun Microsystems and theInternet Systems Consortium, a nonprofit corporation that providesinfrastructure for the global Domain Name System, announced Wednesday that the ISC chose the free andopen source Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun Fire x64 server as an F-root server, one of the 13 root DNS servers that form the backbone of the Internet ...

Pentaho, the maker of an open source business intelligence (BI) suite, last week launched a new release of its Pentaho Dashboards application that provides live and dynamic integration with Google Maps ...

JBoss Monday released Hibernate 3.2, the latest update to the company's Java object/relational mapping software. Hibernate packages now support the most popular development frameworks, and can be used with JDK 5.0 (Java Developer Kit) annotations, the Java Persistence API, or full Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB 3.0) ...

Baynote, a maker of content guidance software for Web-based businesses, on Monday unveiled Baynote.org, a community-based Web site designed to encourage the adoption of business-ready open source search ...

Samsung Electronics announced Tuesday that it has developed a mobile phone equipped with a camera featuring the world's highest resolution for any camera phone. The South Korean electronics firm said the camera will initially be sold in its home market ...