You sometimes know the news isn’t all good about a company’s earnings when it casts a bright spotlight on its revenues; a company can make a lot of money without necessarily earning it. Google is the antithesis of such a company, earning an astonishing one-third of its revenues while still sharing nearly a billion dollars with its traffic generation partners.

Google closed out its fiscal year 2006 having reaped just over $3.2 billion in revenues for the final quarter, a gain of two thirds over the fourth quarter of 2005. Of that $3.2 billion, just over $1 billion of that is net earnings, an 86% annual gain – meaning Google is even more efficient now than it was last year.

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Dell CEO Kevin Rollins, who on Monday stood on stage in New York City to accept a commemorative Windows Vista plaque from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, resigned abruptly on Wednesday, and will be replaced by the computer maker's former CEO Michael Dell.

Rollins joined Dell in 1996 and was appointed CEO in July 2004. During his tenure, however, Dell was unable to retain its status as the leading PC manufacturer due to increased pressure from Hewlett-Packard. The company also warned Tuesday that its fiscal fourth quarter revenues would miss analyst expectations.

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A Turing award-winning scientist who leads Microsoft Research's eScience Group, and whose seemingly spontaneous innovations have touched nearly every aspect of technology, including financial databases, astronomy, and geography in a career that spans four decades, remains missing at sea since having signaled home from his sailboat last Sunday night.

US Coast Guard search vessels and aircraft have thus far been unable to locate any trace of the 40-foot craft belonging to Jim Gray, age 63, who set out alone for the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco on a personal mission to scatter his mother's ashes.

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Flaws within the Windows Mobile operating system could cause phones to crash, security firm Trend Micro said in a pair of advisories. One deals with Internet Explorer, while the other involves the Pictures & Videos application.

In each case, devices running these programs and opening either a specially crafted Web page or JPEG image file could be susceptible to a denial-of-service attack. Microsoft has been alerted to the issue, and the firm will not release details of the flaw.

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A feature dating back to the Internet's HTML 3.0 era is causing problems for Internet Explorer 7, forcing Microsoft to issue an update for Windows Vista just one day after its public launch. Web sites using frames causes IE7's phishing filter to evaluate the page multiple times simultaneously, leading to high CPU usage.

Microsoft encourages anyone experiencing this issue, which might not be obvious except to knowledgeable computer users, to download the update. A patch for IE7 on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will arrive during February's Patch Tuesday next week, although a direct download is available now from the Knowledge Base article.

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Yahoo this week began launching sites under its "Brand Universe" concept, aimed at creating online destinations for fans of specific entertainment properties, the first of which would be the Nintendo Wii console.

Almost none of the content on these sites would be original, rather they would borrow from Yahoo's various properties. For example, on the Wii site, the front page features content from Yahoo! Video Games, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Answers, along with a message board and buyers guide.

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The Justice Department has acquiesced to Congressional demands to provide more details on the controversial spying program, with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales agreeing to hand over secret documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Calls for the release of the information came from both sides of the aisle, with Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), now the committee chair, and Arlen Specter (R-PA) leading the calls for its release.

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Even with the operating system released to the public, Microsoft cannot seem to catch a break with Windows Vista. The latest complaints come from game developers, who say the OS' parental controls are so strict they're disrupting gameplay.

The charge comes from WildTangent, an online gaming network. It says that security restrictions in Vista actually breaks hundreds of games across RealArcade, Yahoo Games, AOL Games, and even on its own site. The reasons? One is that there's no ESRB rating.

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Although Windows Vista officially launched for businesses back in November, Microsoft waited until today to release the final version of its Application Compatibility Toolkit for the new operating system. The software is designed to diagnose any potential problems that may arise from upgrading.

ACT version 5.0 can be deployed on current Windows 2000 and XP machines to take an inventory of applications and see whether or not they are compatible with Windows Vista. A built-in Standard User Analyzer checks to see if the new security settings in Vista will affect applications, namely those running as an administrator.

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The lady who in September 2005 called Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's claim in a BusinessWeek article that his company would eventually "win the Web" "deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers and to put it into Microsoft parlance, customers," now finds herself working for him.

Molly Holzschlag, the former group lead of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and still contributing expert to the W3C, announced on her new MSDN-hosted blog this morning that she has joined Microsoft on a contractual basis, to provide expertise to the Internet Explorer group on matters of interoperability.

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Just three weeks after Skype development chief Eric Lagier said a Skype version for cell phones was a no-go, the company has signed an agreement with HelloSoft to license its VoIP software to enhance its Windows Mobile client.

Lagier's comments may sound contradictory considering the company already provides software for mobile phones with versions for either Microsoft's PocketPC or Windows Mobile operating systems, however he was likely referring to a general version that would be compatible with a larger section of cellular handset manufacturers.

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To celebrate the second birthday of the Google Mini search appliance for small businesses, Google has upgraded the device with a number of new features to make it more flexible while remaining affordable at $1,995 for the base model. Existing customers can simply upgrade their hardware to take advantage of the improvements.

Google has endeavored to make the Mini more useful for both public Web sites and Intranets, linking it with a number of enterprise applications such as Salesforce, SAP and Oracle, in addition to integrating Google webmaster tools, Analytics, and a new administration interface. Document-level security has also been added to search results, enabling the application to index protected content and make sure users can only see links they can access.

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Microsoft has made the decision to use the Word HTML rendering engines for both the reading and composing of messages within Outlook 2007, a decision that has been criticized by those who use HTML e-mail frequently.

The change means that many e-mails who may have displayed perfectly within Outlook in previous versions may look seriously jumbled in the latest incarnation. There's a simple reason for this: Word supports far less HTML standards.

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An unusually high number of reports of intermittent playback freezes during Blu-ray movies and some games have been posted to Sony's PlayStation 3 forum, as well as to the AVS Forum and other sources, after PS3 owners upgraded to version 1.5 of the system firmware.

Tests run by these users since having noticed the bugs appear to eliminate Blu-ray discs themselves as the cause of these freezes, most of which are said to be momentary and not terminal. Time codes displayed at the time of freezes are dispersed, indicating that the discs are not defective.

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On the very same day that Intel announced to the world it had developed the critical formula for the material that will replace silicon dioxide as the dielectric gate in transistors for metal oxide semiconductors, its biggest arch-rival in the research and development field, IBM, announced the very same thing.

The still secret material, for years considered the "Holy Grail of semiconductor science," will enable transistors to scale down to the seemingly impossible levels Intel requires to feed the monster that is Moore's Law.

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