Yahoo, Microsoft make search pact official (FAQ)

What's your take of this merger? Let us know....




How did we get here?
Slowly. Microsoft and Yahoo have been talking about various combinations of acquisitions, partnerships, and alliances since 2008, before finally settling on the current deal after their disastrous acquisition talks led to Yahoo's hiring of CEO Carol Bartz. The deal was held up pending regulatory review, since just about any time that two companies in a three-company market propose joining forces, regulators will want to examine the potential aftermath.

What will change on Yahoo's site?
The changes could be very difficult to notice. Microsoft is now providing the back-end technology that generates search results and search ads based on query keywords. But Yahoo will control how those results are presented, meaning it can add all sorts of structured content like statistics for baseball players or movie times at local theaters to search queries.


What will change for Microsoft?
Microsoft will have to give up control of its major search advertisers to Yahoo's sales force in exchange for increasing its market share. Microsoft will also get to pick and choose from among Yahoo's assortment of back-end search technology developed over the years, and a certain number of Yahoo employees will now work for Microsoft.

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The CoOlDiGgY Olympics Daily Rundown

*EVAN LYSACEK WINS GOLD

*Mancuso wins third medal




*Lindsey crashes, loses chance at 2nd gold. Still hot


*Double the fun as USA's Hannah Teter (silver) and Kelly Clark (bronze) take medals in halfpipe

*USA still on top of Medal Count

CoOlDiGgY celebrates Black History Month: Alicia Keys

All that and a music genius, too

Google Gets US Approval to Buy and Sell Energy

Here's "Google Oil's" likely logo...




Google has received federal approval to buy and sell energy on the open market, giving it more options for the way it powers its data centers and opening the door to a potential move into the energy-trading business.

Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved its application Thursday, granting Google "market-based rate authorization," or the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis.

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Andrea Friedman, actress from "Family Guy" sets the record straight

In an e-mail message sent on Thursday to The New York Times, Ms. Friedman wrote:

I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line “I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska” was very funny. I think the word is “sarcasm.”

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life.

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RELATED: More from Andrea

States face serious pension woes: $1 trillion short

Retirement is overrated anyway


At the core of state budget problems in the US is something that goes beyond the recent recession: poorly managed pension systems for public employees.

That’s the conclusion of an in-depth analysis released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States in Washington. The unfunded liabilities exceed $1 trillion and could force difficult choices upon many states, the nonprofit research group said.

The problem is not a new one, but it has grown worse in the past year. And, on a day when President Obama called for a new commission to propose fixes to the federal budget, it’s a reminder that Congress doesn’t have a monopoly on the idea of making promises without figuring out how to pay for them.

“To a significant degree, the $1 trillion gap reflects states’ own policy choices and lack of discipline,” the Pew Center report concludes.

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Malware crashed systems during Windows security updates

We have long ago left Microsoft because we got the blue screen so much we thought it was our screensaver




Windows systems that crashed during the latest Microsoft security update last week did so because they were infected with a rootkit program that made changes to the operating system kernel, Microsoft said late on Wednesday.

"The restarts are the result of modifications the Alureon rootkit makes to Windows Kernel binaries, which places these systems in an unstable state," Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote in a blog post. "In every investigated incident, we have not found quality issues with security update MS10-015."

The patch addresses a vulnerability in the 32-bit Windows kernel that could allow elevation of privilege that was disclosed last month.

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Photoshop turns 20 Years-old

Photoshop, making Olsen twins pictures like this possible. We thank you




Hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time you had to take your pictures carefully and develop them with even greater care; a lost memory then was truly lost.

But all that started to change 20 years ago on Friday, when the first version of Photoshop was released, and began to usher in the age of digital photograph editing that we depend on more than ever today. Now we can't just imagine a world without Photoshop, we can't imagine the English language without it. How many software packages become verbs?

The Photoshop story began in 1987, when Thomas Knoll programmed a pixel imaging program he called Display. It didn't do much; primarily, it displayed grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. But it also provided a creative foundation for what would soon become one of the most important apps in the world. Knoll and his brother, John, built on Display's functionality by giving it processing capabilities. Adobe licensed the software in 1988, renamed it Photoshop, and shipped the first version on February 19, 1990.

Since then, Photoshop has become a phenomenon, its capabilities becoming synonymous with graphic design the world over. Many of the features that even casual users take for granted now weren't in the earliest incarnations: layers, without which any large-scale task would seem impossible today, weren't introduced until version 3.0; the healing brush, which essentially made wrinkles, pimples, and moles a thing of the past, bowed in version 7.0. Adobe estimates that there are more than 10 million users of Photoshop worldwide.

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