commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

This one slipped under my radar somehow: Microsoft have changed the default rendering behaviour of Internet Explorer 8. Previously, the plan was that IE8 would behave as IE7, unless the developer added a special <meta> tag. Now, the default is to use the (slightly more standards compliant) IE8 renderer by default, but give the developer the option to use IE7-style rendering (again, but means of a <meta> tag). PPK sums it up nicely:

Microsoft has decided to put the interests of web standards above the interests of the Intranets of its corporate clients.

I advise you to read the previous paragraph again. Even two years ago I had never expected to be able to write such a statement.

The Yahoo board have rejected last month’s unsolicited purchase bid by Microsoft. Phew!

Microsoft buys stake in Facebook. Oh well, was sorta going off Facebook anyway.

From BBC News on tomorrows PS3 launch: Neil Thompson, head of Xbox in the UK … said it did not matter which high definition DVD video system wins the format war.
“Whatever format wins it is highly likely we will offer a solution,” he said.

Check out IE7.com - subtle!

AJAX-y Timeline of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Acquisitions - very nice interface. Hopefully the author will keep this updated, it makes keeping track of things very simple.

See this MSDN article for a Microsoft solution to the Linux “problem”. Not sure why I find this funny - I think it’s the fact that Linux is dealt with so matter-of-factly, as though Linux were something that an unwitting user had accidently infected their machine with, like some kind of malware…

Arstechnica recommends that Vista be delayed again in order to improve the quality of the final product. I think people will sympathise with this. Sounds awfully familiar, too.

At a Microsoft Demo for the speech recognition features of Vista, things went very wrong, with “mom” being mistaken for “aunt”, and then the effort to fix the problem just making things worse.