An anonymous reader writes "In a letter sent today, Microsoft writes to Yahoo's board of directors to tell them that they would like to 'negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies.' Their message is a combination of friend and foe: 'If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders.'"

Microsoft's efforts to get businesses to adopt Vista may come to a screeching halt now that Bill Gates has announced "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version", referring to Windows 7, the next expected version of the company's flagship desktop operating system.With a new version available soon, many organizations may decide to wait and see if they can avoid the pain of a Vista rollout altogether.

An anonymous reader writes "Lawrence Roberts, co-founder of ARPANET and inventor of packet switching, today published an article in which he claims to solve the congestion control problem on the Internet. Roberts says, contrary to popular belief, the problem with congestion is the networks, not Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Rather than overhaul TCP, he says, we need to deploy flow management, and selectively discard no more than one packet per TCP cycle. Flow management is the only alternative to peering into everyone's network, he says, and it's the only way to fairly distribute Internet capacity."

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week Nick White, Product Manager for Windows Vista and blogger at WindowsVistaBlog, announced that he was leaving Microsoft. Geek.com previously interviewed Nick about what SP1 for Vista was all about, so they sat down with him yesterday to get the details behind his departure, his proudest moments at Microsoft, a few regrettable moments, and more."

os2man lets us know that OpenSSH version 5.0 has been released. The mirrors are linked from the top page. "OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell) is a set of computer programs providing encrypted communication sessions over a computer network using the ssh protocol. It was created as an open source alternative to the proprietary Secure Shell software suite offered by SSH Communications Security. OpenSSH is available for almost any Operating System."