Microsoft looked within to find a replacement for its outgoing search chief Chris Payne, while reorganizing its search department and bringing its ad platform group under the direction of the division.

"Aligning Search and our Ad Platform efforts under a single R&D leader is essential as we drive advances in our search, commerce, and payments infrastructure, and evaluate change-the-playing-field opportunities," the company said in a statement.

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Thursday morning, executives from the parent companies of NBC and Fox announced they have reached agreement on a deal to create a single Web site for the distribution of what they're calling "premium content," implying that non-advertising supplemented programs may carry a streaming fee. NBC Universal and News Corp. will form a joint entity with its own management team, supplied by NBCU during a transitional period before permanent managers are selected.

There are several surprises in this deal, the first of which is that the Fox Interactive Media division of News Corp. does not appear to be a direct part of the partnership. Instead, to stave off attempts by individuals who may try to "share" clips of Fox or NBC content on their own initiative, the new company - as yet unnamed - has already struck redistribution agreements with MySpace, placing FIM in a subsidiary role, along with AOL, Yahoo, and MSN.

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An employee of a political campaign consulting firm in Washington, D.C., whose clients include presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D - IL), has confessed to having created the heavily-circulated remix video of the classic 1983 Macintosh introduction ad produced and directed by Ridley Scott, which was altered to substitute Sen. Hillary Clinton (D - NY) in place of Big Brother, and Obama's campaign logo in...a strategic location on the classic hammer thrower's outfit.

Phil de Vellis, the former campaign communications director for newly minted Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and an employee of consulting firm Blue State Digital - which works exclusively with Democratic candidates - confessed to being YouTube user "ParkRidge47" (a reference to Sen. Clinton's birth place and year). In keeping with his employer's policy against doing any work for candidates on the side, de Vellis was terminated today.

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Earlier this month, US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff extended the proposed deadlines for states to comply with the new Real ID regulations, which would require uniform ID card codes among states, and connectivity to a national database. At the time, he estimated states may incur up to $14 billion in expenses over the next ten years to comply with his department's directives.

So on Monday, the National Governors' Association petitioned the House Budget Committee to set aside an initial $1 billion from federal revenues, to handle the states' up-front costs.

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Microsoft is investigating claims made on several Internet forums that hackers are breaking into customer's Xbox Live accounts and using their accounts to purchase premium content and steal personal information, the company confirmed in a statement to the press on Wednesday. Saying "security is a top priority," it will look into any report of hacking it receives.

Gamers had been complaining that the Redmond company has not taken their complaints of break-ins seriously, either telling them to complain to their credit card companies or claiming they could not do anything about the problem. It is currently unclear as to how hackers are gaining access to the accounts, however some are speculating users are being tricked into giving enough of their personal information to facilitate a break-in.

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What is fast becoming one of the computing industry's most diverse consortiums of competitors will meet tomorrow at IBM's offices in New York, for the first time with Microsoft as a contributing member. The OpenAjax Alliance is seeking to develop a standard specification for Asynchronous JavaScript, which can now also count Google among its ranks, after having co-founded the Alliance but having held out on its decision to officially join...for reasons some speculate may have had to do with Microsoft.

For all intents and purposes, Google and Microsoft are AJAX, with Google having led the way in promoting the concept of JavaScript code that isn't bound to browser-based events. The freely distributed Google Web Toolkit (GWT) provided most Web developers' first introduction to document object models that could be amended on the fly. Microsoft came along not long afterward with its betas of "Atlas," which have since been pulled in under the ASP.NET umbrella.

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EarthLink has begun a beta test of a phone that will use its municipal Wi-Fi network as well as a consumer's home network to both place and receive calls. The first tests will occur on the company's network in Anaheim.

Accton Technology has been selected to manufacture the phones, which will be made available to select beta testers in the city. Those in the region could sign up for the beta by calling 1-800-352-7650, the company said.

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In Dell Computer's revolutionary direct sales model, which altered the evolution of American business, component parts for building customer orders were purchased at or near the time of the order, reducing to near-zero inventory on hand and accelerating the company's rise to profitability. Google is already pretty profitable in its own business, but today it confirmed rumors that it will experiment with an approach to advertising sales that Michael Dell might appreciate: a cost-per-action model where the advertiser pays when the sale is made.

While similar systems have been tried by Internet advertisers before, they've been on a far smaller scale. Google's upcoming AdSense beta will give selected participants in the US the option of determining the value of a user's action - such as paying for a download or signing up for a newsletter - triggered by an ad supplied through the Google AdSense network.

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Microsoft's hit video game Gears of War is likely to become a movie after New Line Cinema acquired the movie rights to the title this week. The company said that the movie would be based on the title's plot, though made in a way that both fans of the game as well as the average moviegoer could enjoy. The idea came after a New Line executive played the game, the company says.

Lead game designer Cliff Bleszinki collaborated with screenwriter Stuart Beattie to produce the script. Gears of War is set on the fictional planet Sera, and the players is tasked with protecting the planet's inhabitants from creatures known as Locust Horde, which come from the center of the planet.

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Attempting to appease lawmakers still uneasy over the planned merger between XM and Sirius, CEO-designate Mel Karmazin said the company is considering offering a la carte programming options post-merger.

The comments were made both in regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as during Karmazin's testimony in front of the Senate Antitrust Committee on Tuesday.

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Apple said Wednesday that it had begun shipments of its Apple TV product, aimed at solidifying its hold on the digital entertainment industry, and expanding its presence into the living room. The device was originally scheduled for release last month, but the company said development had taken longer than expected and pushed the release back in late February.

The device acts as a link between iTunes on the computer and a user's big-screen television by using a preexisting Wi-Fi network. For faster transfer, the device would use 802.11n technology. It includes a 40GB hard drive to store the information locally to the device, negating the need to download it before each viewing.

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Facing increasing criticism over its decision to make the European edition of the PlayStation 3 less backwards compatible than its US counterpart, Sony on Tuesday announced which games would work with the console.

Earlier models launched in both US and Japan include a chip which allowed most PS2 games to be played on the console. However, in the interest of cost-cutting, the company replaced the chip with software for emulation.

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With the US Congress having approved a plan just eight days ago to provide households with as many as two coupons, each good toward $40 off the purchase of a converter set-top box enabling existing television sets to receive digital programming over the airwaves after February 17, 2009, LG - expected to be a major producer of STBs - predicted that its models would end up selling for $60 apiece.

The comment came from John Taylor, LG's vice president of US government relations, in a public statement that was cited this morning by Reuters.

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The man who for all practical purposes invented the modern concept of the interpreted programming language, and who gave us the first principles upon which the software industry was formed, died over the weekend at age 82. John W. Backus led the Applied Science Division of IBM's Programming Research Group, which in 1954 set about to develop a more sensible language that the IBM 704 could translate into its own machine language.

FORTRAN was not the first programming language; indeed, there were symbolic constructs prior to FORTRAN whose purpose was to represent machine instructions with more tangible, teachable concepts. Backus himself had developed one such precursor: the so-called "Speedcoding System" for the IBM 701, whose project was launched and completed in 1953.

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Technology news site Unstrung.com says that a $2 billion sale of Palm could be in its final stages, with three bidders interested in the company, one of which being cell phone maker Nokia.

Rumors of a sale have persisted for much of the last week, as the once dominant PDA maker has faltered in the face of competition from Microsoft and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry. While Nokia seems to lead the bidding, it is said that management would prefer a private equity buyer.

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