Well, the mighty Bill Gates has finally left the empire of Microsoft that he built, placing it completely in the hands of Steve Balmer. He did a short Farewell interview as well as a farewell speech. Him and Steve Balmer could hardly hold back tears at the parting. Its the way it should be, they founded Microsoft more than 20 years ago and Bill Gates was the key to Microsoft rising its way to its current glory. With the departure of this titan, Microsoft is surely entering a new Era. Will they be able to keep their enormous lead on the computer market without one of their founding fathers?

Whether you loved him or hated him, you cannot deny that he was a brilliant, influential, and great man. He revolutionized personal computer and brought the PC as we know it today to its current form. Even though some people may bitch and scream at Windows about how bad it is, it has provided the market with a standard to improve and advance upon and has provided many business with a solid platform. Bill left Microsoft to dedicate much of his time to the Gates foundation. Now the former leader of one of the biggest corporations in the world will spend his life making society a better place. That is quite a fitting end.

Although talks about a Microsoft buy-out of yahoo for $47 billion completely fell apart when Yahoo partnered with arch-nemesis Google, Microsoft still has a offer for $9 billion to a minority stake in Yahoo and its search. Yahoo does not want to sell saying that selling its search business would cut off all future growth in the market but Mark Nelson wants Microsoft to take its offer to the investors because he think it clearly presents a superior deal in terms of transaction price. Yahoo still faces a battle against large shareholders about why they did not sell to Microsoft for the overpriced $47 billion price tag.

I personally don’t see what is wrong with selling their search for $9 million. Yahoo now has a long-standing deal with Google and will use Google to provide its search results for the foreseeable future. Yahoo’s search technology is light-years behind Google’s so there’s really no reason for them to hang on to it. The $9 billion price tag is a hard one to pass up to as it is a overbid for Yahoo’s search. And just in case you are wondering, no I don’t own any shares of Microsoft or Yahoo.

Beyond the confines of Pluto, there may lurk many worlds with masses as big as 70% that of earth. One, Sedna, has been found already but there may be others that are just as massive, if not bigger. Since most of these objects are in an irregular orbit around the sun, they cannot be considered planets, but instead would be considered planetoids, dwarf planets, or the newly coined term, plutoids. All these objects are part of a system called the Kuiper Belt which orbits the sun at a distance somewhere between 100 AU(100 times the distance from Earth to Sun) to 200AU.

At this distance from the sun, all water would be frozen on the surface but if the planet had a hot core, there could exist liquid oceans miles beneath the surface — a potential for life. Which means that not only are we not alone in the Universe, but we are not even alone in the solar system. I would be extremely excited at the prospect of finding complex aquatic life on what was thought to be frozen and lifeless chunks of rock. Heck, maybe someone evil squid-men from Planet-X might even invade us. Right now data on these objects is sparse so not much is known about them and anything we conjecture would be in the realm of science fiction.

A Colorado-based company has said it wants to build a flying robot Hum-vee which can re-supply troops and also can be used to deliver a weapons payload. I have to admit, this idea sounds appealing — sending supplies across enemy lines and possibly hitting enemy targets without risking pilots’ lives. However, the maximum speed of this robot is around 450MPH and without stealth, I doubt it would survive any enemy AA fire.

However, this robot is still in the conceptual stages of development and will not be ready anytime soon for real-time deployment. Honestly, I can’t really even see how a design like the picture above can fly unless it had enormous secret engines installed somewhere. Its certainly not the most aerodynamic design I’ve seen. I’m excited about this, but I have my doubts.

Today, Yahoo officially gave Microsoft the finger and Partnered with Google as part of an Advertising deal designed to help sales of Yahoo ads. This also happens after Yahoo’s shares fell 10% and some investors were talking about a mutiny because Yahoo had not sold to Microsoft at a premium price on MS’s last offer.

The partnership may last as long as ten years if it gets through the anti-trust cases, which I may guess, Microsoft will be heavily arguing for.

Honestly, Steve Ballmer has to have smoke coming out his ears at this point. Just last month, Microsoft looked like it was going to aquire yahoo so it could compete with Google in the search engine market. Now, the company that it was likely to purchase has partnered with its arch-nemesis. I’m not sure how Microsoft plans to get over this one. There’s no other companies like Yahoo out there that MS could aquire to get on a more even footing with Google. But then again, Microsoft does have an obscene amount of money on its hands.

Yahoo’s partnership doesn’t really make any sense to me either. Its hiring Google to sell its ads. But, as most people know, Yahoo’s ads and Google’s ads directly compete against each other so they’d be eating each others market. Yahoo’s Ad network, YPN, has always been the biggest potential threat to Google, adsense network, it just never completely materialized. But now, Google is going to help it take form? It really doesn’t make much sense to me.

Yahoo using Google as its primary search results is a good thing as it will improve the quality of Yahoo’s service. But I hope that Google does not adopt Yahoo’s directory as part of its search algorithem. It costs $299 to get listed in that directory for a year and the quality of that directory is not better than the other directories out there. If Google weights links from Yahoo more than other places, it will deteriorate the quality of their search.

For webmasters like myself, this joint ad market may be a good then. All of a sudden, the advertiser pool has gotten larger and Google needs adspace to meet inventory demand, which means higher CPM’s for us. In the long run, I hope Google doesn’t swallow Yahoo, this kind of a monopoly isn’t good for anyone.

Yesterday, I wrote about the exciting launch of the new Apple 3G I-phone. Today, after I took a closer look, I have to say, I am quite underwhelmed by it. I was hoping for new features like the cam-corder or at least a 5 mega-pixel camera with the phone. Unfortunately, there isn’t really anything new about this I-phone. Its essentially the same thing as the old I-phone with a plastic instead of metal coating with the 3G chip turned on. The design of the phone looks the same, its about the same size, and nothing looks new. It does get an hour or more so of battery life. But for people that already have an I-phone, there is no reason to buy this new version.

Whats more is the new 3G plan — it seems like a way for AT&T to steal some people’s money. AT&T has yet to blanket the country with the new 3G connection, which allows faster download speeds. But even for people who live the areas that are not covered by 3G, they still have to pay the extra $10 per month for 3G phone plan. They can’t opt to not have 3G. What kind of crap is that? Paying for something you can’t use. I don’t know how apple plans to stay ahead of the race with this “new” phone when Samsung’s new phone has a vid-cam and a 5 mega-pixel camera. Looks like apple is falling behind.