Google Inc. said it has sold its stake in Chinese rival Baidu.com. Google registered to sell all of the 749,625 shares of Beijing-based Baidu.com Inc. it owns, according to a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filer of such a document is permitted to sell the shares within 90 days after the registration. Google bought about 2.6 percent of Baidu

Yahoo has announced that it is set to allow users to embed, in its instant messaging service, programs that help them collaborate on activities ranging from calendar scheduling to watching videos or even trading commodities. The company said it was introducing a handier way for tens of millions of users of Yahoo Messenger to share a variety of web services, media or software created by independent software developers, or by Yahoo itself

Apparently Xbox chief Peter Moore thought that Xbox Live Arcade was for old ladies and little girls. "I didn't expect Live Arcade to be for gamers, I thought maybe for their girlfriends, mums and sisters -- but it's for everybody," Moore told UK videogame mag Edge It turns out Microsoft is actively accepting submissions for the next Arcade hit. According to Moore game publishers weren't optimistic about Xbox Live Arcade

IBM Corp. opened its first development center in Russia on Tuesday, pledging investments of $40 million over three years to tap Russia's computing talent. The center will focus on mainframe technology development and will quintuple its current staff of 40 specialists by 2008, IBM officials said

The latest version of a Microsoft operating system is coming soon, although exactly when is still up for grabs. If you think back to the start of the Millennium and the release of Windows XP, you will remember things like product activation, a new interface to get familiar with, networking changes and a slow migration of people away from Windows 2000. I still have one of my computers running under Windows 2000 but I was forced to upgrade the others to run some of the newer software

The latest version of a Microsoft operating system is coming soon, although exactly when is still up for grabs. If you think back to the start of the Millennium and the release of Windows XP, you will remember things like product activation, a new interface to get familiar with, networking changes and a slow migration of people away from Windows 2000. I still have one of my computers running under Windows 2000 but I was forced to upgrade the others to run some of the newer software

Hewlett-Packard has no plans to preload versions of the upcoming Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 on its PCs, but HP aims to support the operating and sees opportunities for it, an HP spokeswoman said. Plans call for HP to certify SLED 10 for select desktops - including the nx6310, nx6320, nc6320, nc2400, nx6315 and nx6325 models - before the year's end, the spokeswoman said in response to questions from CRN

The GNU-HALO project team, which had been working on a new FreeBSD operating system distribution for several months but ultimately decided to switch over to a Linux core, finally released its first edition, GNU-HALO Alpha 0.1 Linux live CD, on June 19, a team spokesman said. The fledgling distro uses a 2.6.16 kernel and the KDE 3.5.3 desktop environement, the release announcement said. The initial build is based on SLAX Standard Edition v 5.1

Opera Software released the final version of Opera 9, its newest browser, June 20. Opera 9 includes support for widgets, a new security toolbar, customizable search engines, and native support for the BitTorrent file-distribution system. New features in Opera 9, according to Oslo-based Opera, include: Widgets -- small web applications (multimedia, newsfeeds, games, etc.) that make the desktop experience more fun, the project said

An overwhelming majority of Microsoft employees use rival Google to search the Internet, bloggers and a Web metrics company claimed Tuesday. Andrew Hitchcock, a 19-year-old student at the University of Washington, got the ball rolling by posting Google Analytics statistics on visitors to his Web site. Of the users originating from Microsoft's domain who reached Hitchcock's site via a search engine, 80 percent came through Google