After more than a year and a half of testy courtship, Yahoo and Microsoft inked a ten-year deal last July that would see Microsoft taking over searches on Yahoo’s high-traffic Internet sites. But anyone who’s used Yahoo’s search in the last few months knows that the deal hasn’t really materialized yet: executing a Web search on Yahoo still shows Yahoo’s search engine, not Microsoft’s new (and highly publicized) Bing.
According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo and Microsoft are still trying to work out all the details of their long-term partnership. “Given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized,” Yahoo wrote in the filing. “The parties are working diligently on finalizing the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible.”
Although there’s no indication the Yahoo-Microsoft tie-up is in jeopardy, both companies indicate the deal-making is taking longer than either of them anticipated, and hope to have everything worked out by early 2010. However, merely working out an agreement amongst themselves is only the first step in moving ahead with the partnership: once a search deal is worked out, it still has to be approved by both U.S. and European antitrust authorities.
Microsoft and Yahoo initially estimated it might take as much as two years before all aspects of the partnership were online and operational, even after a deal was completed.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.