Ramez was the MS rep on the call about the PowerSet acquisition.

MS acquired PowerSet to add natural language capability to the Live Search engine. The guess is that this was a $100M deal. Which shows there is still room for innovation in the search realm - it's good to see MS taking a stab at innovating in search.

Bill retired from Microsoft today. Nice video here looking back on his life from childhood to today.

Quoted: Watch videos that look back to the story of Bill Gates from his early years, to founding Microsoft and what lies ahead for him and the company he started.

Yahoo issues one of the most condescending statements I've ever heard!

Quoted: “Your Current Board of Directors Has the Knowledge, Experience and Commitment to Best Represent Your Interests and Maximize Stockholder Value.”

A discussion thread about the lack of SSL on AppEngine, and some ways to work around that.

I got into (an interesting) discussion of a proposal to store encrypted data only on the server with no private server key - and how secure that may be.

(Roy, this reminds me of your project last year - I'm sure you've thought about all these same issues).

A scathing analysis of all the anti-shareholder actions Jerry Yang has taken in the last few months. I think Joe Nocera is right on here - when your company goes public, you can no longer treat it as your private plaything. Neither can it be run for the benefit of the employees....it's the owners of the company, the shareholders, who's interests must be paramount.

Arrogantly, Mr. Yang appears to ignore this fact, and is now being sued by large shareholders, pension funds, and Carl Icahn.

How can he NOT be forced to step down (much less cost Yahoo many tens of millions in defending against these suits)?

Quoted: Since Yahoo went public in 1996, the company has had new owners — its shareholders — but it is unclear whether Jerry Yang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, knows this.

Look for a fax cover sheet template on Office Online.

I can't believe how badly MS has screwed this one up. There are so many design problems with this site - not the least of which they allow users to vote, and display the number of downloads, BUT there is no way to sort the results by most popular votes or downloads! Am I just not seeing it or is the feature completely missing.

How does that happen?

Searching the Google Patent database, it appears that this was the first patent FILED (March 1985) and ISSUED (May 1986) to Microsoft.

Among the inventors - Steve Ballmer!

The patent covers the packaging Microsoft used in some of their earlier products - a clam-shell acrylic box that would hinge open to become a stand for the manual that was shipped with the software.

I still have some of these in my basement.

Full set of design applications for building Silverlight (and WPF?) apps. I'm not at all clear what the different apps are. Darrell has helped me decode the names:

Web - Dreamweaver (replaces FrontPage?)
Blend - Flash (XAML editor for Silverlight/WPF)
Design - Illustrator
Media - Asset catalog
Encoder - Replaces Windows Media Encoder?

Live Mesh demo