Gadgetopia: "Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have gotten together and actually agreed on extensions to the REP — the Robots Exclusion Protocol, otherwise known as your robots.txt file."

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BusinessWeek: There's been no shortage of opinions on the failed takeover as bloggers offer plenty of advice for CEOs Yang and Ballmer—plus a few laughs.

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Opinion: Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?

There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.

XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.

So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.

InfoWorld: Apple's .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way.

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ComputerWorld: Industry analysts and a professional developer examine the state of Microsoft's 'Flash killer' multimedia development technology as it enters its second year and discuss what it will take for it to succeed.

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The Web 2.0 Journal posted a nice glossary from Ben Armstrong on Hyper-V teminology used by Micorosoft. If you ever wanted to know the difference between an emulated device and a synthetic device, this is the post to read.

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InternetNews:  This year at the National Association of Broadcasters, Microsoft is celebrating a year of progress since Silverlight's debut.  Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform streaming media technology (think Adobe Flash).  Microsoft is announcing updates to developers' tools that tie it to the company's popular Sharepoint collaboration server, and plans to blow its own horn to call attention to the technology's growing momentum.

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Last Tuesday evening, I upgraded my Windows Vista desktop to Service Pack 1. If you regularly visit my blog, you know that I'm a long-time user of both Windows and Linux. You also know, that I've been deeply disappointed in Windows Vista.

The install of Vista SP1 went smoothly and I haven't discovered any of the driver issues other Windows users are having. This shouldn't be a surprise since I did have good luck running my box on the SP1 RC1 Refresh. Performance has been slightly improved since the original version of Vista. More importantly, I don't have to reboot my PC once a day just so I can get my LAN connectivity back. In short, Vista users will want to upgrade to SP1, but I still recommend those happy with their Windows XP, Linux, or Mac desktops to stay exactly right where they are.