The Technophilez

A man upset with the Hungarian government's decision to sign a software and training deal with Microsoft tried to pelt the company's chief executive with eggs during a presentation Monday at a Budapest university.

The man, wearing a shirt with the words "Microsoft Equals Corruption" scrawled on the back, tossed three eggs at Steve Ballmer, who nimbly ducked behind a lectern. The protester isn't likely to win a major league pitching contract: He missed Ballmer on all three attempts, despite standing less than 50 feet from the Microsoft chief.

Ballmer was in Hungary on Monday to promote a program called Titan, under which Microsoft will train IT professionals in the country. The program also includes Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and several other vendors.

More than 10,000 Hungarian programmers and other IT professionals are expected to participate in Titan, which is slated to run through 2012. Hungary, along with a number of other Eastern European countries, is seeing significant growth in IT jobs outsourced from the Web.

Microsoft said Saturday that it was abandoning its blockbuster bid to acquire Yahoo after it raised its offer by $5 billion but Yahoo rejected it as still too low.

The about-face followed a meeting on Saturday morning in Seattle between Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and Yahoo’s chief and co-founder, Jerry Yang, according to a person familiar with the talks.

At the meeting, which also included Yahoo’s other founder, David Filo, and a Microsoft president who oversees its online unit, Kevin Johnson, Mr. Ballmer increased Microsoft’s offer to $33 a share, or a total of about $47.5 billion, from $29.40 a share. Mr. Yang told Mr. Ballmer that Yahoo would not accept an offer below $37 a share, this person said.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo has not moved toward accepting our offer,” Mr. Ballmer said in a statement. “After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal.”

A person close to Yahoo said the price was not the only stumbling block. The person said Yahoo was also concerned that the deal could be blocked by regulators and wanted a higher offer, in part, as a hedge against that risk.

Microsoft’s decision to walk away casts a cloud of uncertainty over Yahoo and its shareholders. The breakdown in the talks is likely to send Yahoo’s shares plunging, and Mr. Yang and his team will have to decide how to placate investors.

The company has been exploring alternatives to a marriage with Microsoft, including a partnership in search advertising with its arch rival, Google, which could lift Yahoo’s profit and perhaps its stock price. Yahoo has also discussed possible mergers with the AOL unit of Time Warner and the MySpace unit of the News Corporation. The MySpace talks have not been active of late.

But both remaining options pose challenges. A Google partnership would be likely to attract scrutiny from regulators because of Google’s dominance over online search and advertising, while AOL and Yahoo have many overlapping businesses and technologies, making a merger difficult.

In a statement issued late Saturday, Mr. Yang said, “With the distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history.”

Developers have questioned the commitment to openness in Microsoft's Live Mesh service, which is designed to bridge the offline and online worlds.

The company's new service, that will synch all of a user's devices and applications to produce a seamless framework, was unveiled at Web 2.0.

Microsoft has said the service will use open standards and be rolled out to Windows machines, Macs and mobiles.

But developers at the conference said they needed more detail about openness.

Web 2.0 is one of the leading web development conferences

"As long as they innovate and it is an open platform that is compatible with other devices and other companies like Apple then I think it's great. I think they realise this and that they have to add value to people or they won't be able to keep up the strength of their brand."

Sam Pullara from Yahoo was not impressed by what he saw in the 15-minute demonstration, and he said that did not have anything to do with Microsoft's bid to buy the company he works for.

"I am a Mac man and frankly I have completely given up on Windows. To me it looks a lot like dotMac for the Apple and I think it will be a lot harder to execute well because Windows machines are just so different from one another." 

Microsoft's Live Mesh general manager Amit Mital told BBC News that the firm was committed to openness and said there was a need for developers to get on board.

"We hope people will look at the platform and the capabilities and think about new imaginative ways of building applications that will benefit our customers."

At an earlier demonstration of the product to an audience of developers, he said: "Today we live in the world of the web and the web is at the centre of everything we do.

" It is how we connect with the people we care about, access the data that matters to us and also accesses many of the applications we use on a daily basis. And the way we connect with the web is via a number of devices."

Live Mesh is being privately tested by a core group of about several thousand with a public test expected later in the year. Over the next couple of days those attending Web 2.0 will be able to give Live Mesh a run for its money.

Windows Vista customers can now receive the first service pack for the operating system via the Microsoft Automatic Update service, Microsoft said Wednesday.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will download automatically to PCs that have the automatic update feature of the OS turned on, the company said. Previously, Vista was available to customers via Windows Update, but people had to specifically download it.

Not all customers will receive SP1 immediately via Automatic Update, however. The company is distributing it in phases to "ensure a seamless download experience," Microsoft said. A timeline for when all customers would receive Vista SP1 via Automatic Update was not immediately available.

SP1 is a rollout of software updates that fix bugs and glitches in Vista and is seen as a milestone that will inspire many customers -- especially those in the business market -- to adopt the OS. In fact, in a recent report, "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista," Forrester Research said more business customers plan to upgrade to Vista now that SP1 is available. This comes as no surprise, considering companies often wait for the first service pack after a major Windows release to update corporate desktops.

However, even SP1 will not guarantee that enterprises and business customers currently running XP or an earlier version of Windows will upgrade, as some have said they would skip the OS altogether. The same Forrester report said as much, although the research firm is recommending that companies don't skip Vista because they would not be well-positioned for future versions of Windows if they do.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will continue to allow Windows XP Home edition to be sold for a class of computers it calls "ultra-low-cost PCs." It's a category that covers machines with slower processors, smaller screens, and in many cases flash memory for storage, rather than a traditional hard drive.
Microsoft will give PC makers the option of using Windows XP or Vista on ULCPC devices, said Michael Dix, general manager of Windows client marketing.
Still, the minimal hardware used in ULCPC systems might make Vista ill-suited to such a task. The decision to discontinue Windows XP might have driven even more device makers into the hands of Linux, hence the extension.

Overall, big-name computer makers are still scheduled to have to stop selling Windows XP for all other uses by the end of June. Mainstream technical support will continue to be available for Windows XP through April 2009, and more limited support will continue through April 2014