Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corp, Steven Ballmer was adamant and refused to raise its $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo! Inc. The CEO of Washington-based Microsoft said, “We know what Yahoo is worth to us. We offered a lot of money: $44 billion. It is not a lot of euros anymore. If their board thinks that's fair, great. If not, we'll move forward,"

Ballmer did clarify as to what he meant by ‘moving forward’. He however clarified that Microsoft would not make a bid for Google primarily for regulatory reasons.

Yahoo! has four days before Microsoft's deadline to agree to its offer or face a hostile takeover fight and risk a lower bid. Earlier Yahoo! had rejected Microsoft’s offer and had argued that it's worth more than the $31 a share in cash and stock that the latter offered. Yahoo! management and directors have said Microsoft's cash-and-stock offer "significantly" undervalues their company.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! also announced its first-quarter financial results on April 22nd. These results were closely watched as these could make a statement in themselves and coax Microsoft for a higher bid. Revenue, excluding the amount paid to advertising partners, rose to $1.35 billion. That beat forecasts of $1.32

Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.

Over on the Microsoft Advanced Windows Debugging and Troubleshooting blog, they've been posting a "Puzzler" every Monday and providing the answers the following Friday.

The puzzlers are fun to participate in and it is interesting to read people's responses - everyone has their own ideas and own experiences to draw off of.

With the third puzzler, the blog authors have decided to make the challenge a bit more difficult - the latest puzzler requires one to reverse engineer some assembler.

I've not got much experience with reverse engineering assembler - I can read some assembler and can usually get a very basic idea of what a targeted chunk of code is doing. So it was an interesting challenge for me to attempt to C-ify the assembler they provided. It doesn't appear that the authors are posting the responses until they reveal the answer (makes sense to me!). But I thought I'd post hashes of my response, which I'll also post once the NT Debugging blog authors post

When most companies are working towards making the web more standardized and interoperable, it feels as if Microsoft wants to take users back to the last decade when sites were specifically designed for and only one browser, in this case, Internet Explorer.

I only say this because Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has recently sponsored a climate-change edumacation site called “Carbon Grove” designed exclusively for and only works on Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

To be clear, I actually don’t mind their sponsorship. The Internet Explorer team could very well sponsor this site if they wanted to and I’d be glad to take their money, but it shouldn’t influence who should or should not be able to access the website - adding “artificial incompatibility” - especially when there’s nothing technically preventing it so.

The main feature of the website is a Silverlight application and because Silverlight is supported on at least IE, Firefox and Safari, there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t work otherwise.

If you try to access the website with Firefox and spoof your user-agent to appear as Internet Explorer 7, you are presented with a Silverlight error which

A new version of the Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison Guide is now available. Version 1.08 includes updates to a number or line items, but in particular it includes a lot of fixes in the debugging section and adds a section on 64-bit development features.

Also check out the update for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 @ http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB946581