Wolfram Alpha to Make Microsoft’s Bing Cool

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be integrating search results from that cool “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha. Because, you know, Microsoft will just buy anything and everything just to make Google stop existing. Except Google is, like, sooo un-buy-able. Last July, Microsoft bought Yahoo!, sort of, and it’s still doing more integrative stuff, like integrating Twitter and Facebook and whatever else is fancy out there. Soon, Microsoft will become a really successful, huge company! Just like Google!

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Yahoo Finally Bing-ified

Microsoft takes over what Yahoo has for search, supplanting the latter’s search engine with Microsoft’s Bing.

A ten-year deal announced today follows what seems like years of negotiations, company reshuffles, infiltrations of high-powered shareholders and even the replacement of Yahoo’s own CEO. But Yahoo has finally handed over the reins of its search business to Microsoft, which will power search on Yahoo’s sites with its own engine, Bing, and become the world’s second-largest search engine after Google.

In the US, this would mean Microsoft takes 30 per cent of the search engine market to Google’s 65 per cent. In Europe, however, Google’s share is even higher — around 80 per cent of all European Web searches currently go through Google, providing Microsoft with an even greater challenge.

link: “Microsoft to take over Yahoo’s search engine.”

Making A Point About Malaria, Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm To Members Of The Elite

The ever-lovable Bill Gates, who is now retired and spends his days dancing to an iPod, opened a jar full of mosquitoes at an elite technology conference to make a point about malaria being a deadly disease that can fuck up anybody, including the rich and smart and those who call themselves “doctor” and with excessive nose hair.

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Microsoft Parks One Of Its “I’m A PC” Booths Just Outside An Apple Store

Microsoft doesn’t only have fangs, it also has liver. It seems the giant is taking its “I’m A PC!” ad campaign to another level by actually rubbing it where it matters. This is a photo of a new “I’m a PC” recording booth just outside an Apple Store in Bullring, Birmingham, England, where a staff of about three Microsoftees –presumably all zombies — are on hand to enlighten anyone on the awesomeness of Microsoft.

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Apple Embarrasses Microsoft For Having More Cash

While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, the Mac maker now has more cash than Microsoft and earns more than half of its profits and over three fourths its revenues.

For the quarter ending in September, Microsoft released revenues of $15.06 billion, net profits of $4.37 billion, and a reserve of cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments that added up to $20.7 billion.

Apple reported $7.9 billion in revenues and $1.14 billion in net profit, but those numbers don’t include most of its iPhone business, which is hidden away in subscription accounting under GAAP rules. For that reason, Apple also released its real earnings: $11.68 billion in revenue and $2.44 billion in net profits. The company also reported a cash position of $24.5 billion.

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{Image: Bill Gates dances with an iPod}

Mac Ads Directly Chomping On Vista’s Rashy Balls

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Nothing much, really. Just Apple taking a stab at Windows Vista. In some other planet, they’d just call this mud slinging. But actual mud slinging is definitely more fun.

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“Shocking!” “Depressing!” “You’ll shit in your pants!”: The Inside Story Of Xbox 360′s Red Ring Of Death

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In August, 2005, as Microsoft was gearing up production, an engineer raised a hand and said, “Stop. You have to shut down the line.” This wasn’t just a brief moment. The engineer spoke up repeatedly.

That engineer, who asked not to be identified, had deep experience in manufacturing. When production results were really off kilter, stopping a line and tracing a problem back to its roots was the answer. But the higher-ranking engineers, managers and executives chose to risk going forward. There wasn’t a universal backlash from the engineering ranks, according to one engineering source.

Nobody listened to that engineer — who spoke on condition of anonymity — apparently because console launches are always hurried affairs. Yields — the percentage of working products in a given batch of total products produced — generally start low. As the manufacturers conduct statistical analysis and tight controls on every step in assembly, they learn how to drive the yields up.

Still, the picture wasn’t pretty. The defect rate for the machines was an abysmal 68 percent at that point, according to several sources. That meant for every 100 machines that Microsoft’s contract manufacturers, Flextronics and Wistron, made at their factories in China, 68 didn’t work. At the recent dinner, Bach denied that there was a big concern about defects at that point in time.

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Microsoft’s Plan B To Get A Huge Slice Off The Search Market

Bill Gates superman

Microsoft is buying Powerset, developer of what it hopes is a smarter way to search the Web. Powerset uses so-called “semantic Web” technology that brings up results based on an understanding of a word’s meaning and the context of its use. That’s in contrast to the method used by the major search engines, which work primarily by matching words in queries to those on Web pages. Microsoft announced the acquisition July 1 on a blog, saying it shares Powerset’s vision “to take search to the next level by adding understanding on the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.”

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{Mad: The things Bill Gates will do for luv}