So, you didn't like Microsoft, did you? Well, how about News Corp.? In an attempt to rejuvenate Yahoo and fend off Microsoft's advances, Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate is reportedly in talks to purchase Yahoo. Although claiming that his company is "not interested in buying Yahoo," the Merc reports: The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp., reported Wednesday that its parent company is considering taking a stake in Yahoo that could exceed......

It looks like Sunnyvale-based Yahoo plans on rejecting the $44.6 billion rose Microsoft offered it earlier this month. A move that would have merged the two tech giants won't happen, it seems, and we were so sure this relationship would've worked out swimmingly. Sniff. But all is not lost. According the Gate: Yahoo's board, which met Friday, has determined that the $31 per share offer Microsoft made is inadequate. The Wall Street Journal reported......

This Sunday is that football championship tournament known as the Super Bowl. And with it comes its array of advertising amusement. (Please, pray for no Burger King commercials. "People freaked" is the single worst ad campaign in this history of ever.) [SFGate]Hillary Clinton is in town; Sen. Ed Kennedy counterattacked with a stop in Berkeley as part of his Obama tour. [CBS5]The bay has temporarily turned into Marin's toilet. [Marin Independent Journal]Bad behavior on......

In an attempt to slow Google's fierce roll, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo Inc. for a cool $44.6 billion today. Gulp. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that his company has "great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market." Although Yahoo would like to remain independent, recent layoffs and......

-- Girl fight! [KGO] -- Barney's -- like its irritating X-Mas holiday window display this year -- is full of green, self-righteous crap. [Curbed SF] -- Mark Zuckerberg might be the next Bill Gates, but he's not nearly as dreamy as early Microsoft-era Bill Gates. Then again, who is? [ValleyWag] -- Star of India fire kills two. [SFoodie] -- Roundtable Q&A with Lust, Caution (Se, jie) director Ang Lee and star Wei Tang. [Pixel......

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos threw down some serious shade today. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," he cried, shaming two senior Yahoo officials. Why? Because the Sunnyvale company named names, handing over private information about Chinese journalist Shi Tao's online pro-democracy action to country officials. (Or, as the New York Times so eloquently put it, their "complicity with an oppressive communist regime." Oh snap.) This landed......

-- Sixth Street did not explode. [Chron] -- Neither did Hayward. [CBS5] -- Friday's party for Barry, Bonds/Newsom connection. [GNS] -- Pigeon crap on bridges falling down, falling down, falling down... [Chron] -- Microsoft going after Yahoo? [EWEEK] -- On-air chats with Jessica Aguirre, who already knows how much you want to fuck her with your monster cock, gentlemen, so go easy on her. [Chron] -- Alleged San Mateo blue square to stand trial.......

Oh Björk! You quixotic Icelandic vixen, you. You dancer on the tongue-tip of the art vanguard. You lucky multi-million-dollar musician. Unlike mere mortals who don't have the clout or funds to access such items, the modern music diva gets her very own reacTable with which to "wow audiences" while on tour this summer, according to Wired.com. SFist Leanne saw it in action herself, at Shoreline, back in May....

Hey, remember our friends at local Internet innovator, Digg? We talked in brief with the founder, Mr. Kevin Rose, a little while back. Well, according to a press release issued by Microsoft Corp., the two companies have signed a three-year deal to collaborate on advertising that will be relevant to Digg's users....

In case you haven't heard, tonight, at precisely 12:01, THE VERY FINAL HARRY POTTER BOOK WILL BE RELEASED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!! And by final, we mean final. The end. Finito. And with it, all the answers to all those pressing questions will be answered: will Harry die? Is Snape good or evil? Will Ron and Hermione finally get it on? And by the way, we just discovered Hermione is in Microsoft Word’s spell check. That’s crazy. ...

If you're a subway rider, you've probably already noticed that Muni's running on manual today. Their signaling system -- the one that run on OS/2 -- is, as always, experiencing problems. They're waving the trains through the tunnel by hand. And the delays aren't too awful -- as it turns out, having no system at all isn't all that much worse than using Alcatel's dreadful ATCS. But here's where we slap our foreheads: Muni's posting......

Good thing we were too slow to post the news yesterday that Microsoft was thinking about buying Yahoo -- because when we woke up today, we found out that the deal is now supposedly off again. As of yesterday, people were abuzz that Microsoft had reopened merger talks with Yahoo over the past few months in the wake of the Google-DoubleClick purchase and the news that Google is now the number one website on the......

Here's todays news...

Here's todays headlines....

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,......

Here's some good news for all you iPod owners (which would probably be all of you), Apple is finally close to an agreement with the Beatles to sell Beatles tunes on iTunes. And yes, that would indeed rock....

On Tuesday, the American -ists will be celebrating democracy and hitting the polls, letting politicians know what they really think. It just made us wonder: if it were up to the -ist-a-verse, what would we be voting for?...

Since we have to lead with anything Journey here at SFist, check out the YouTube clip of the ad for Atari's "Journey Escape" we found on Kotaku. Avoiding (pixelated representations of) crazed fans and manipulative music industry types never looked so fun! Buy it now! If espionage is more your game, then the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans at HP should be up your alley. Even reporters were entangled in the web of lives spun to discredit......

The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly......

With SFist Rita's report yesterday about Apple settling with Creative, Apple fanboys can console themselves with the news that Microsoft is also getting dinged for even more money in a patent infringment suit. Meanwhile, retail workers who downloaded the development version of Apple's new OS, Leopard, are getting canned left and right (scroll down). But BusinessWeek thinks good iPod news is on the way, while Wired News explores the back alleys of Chennai in search......

Our little Craigslist is growing up! Craigslist went from around 200 to roughly 300 sites this last week with the addition of 97 new and exciting Craigslist locations. While a cynic might view this expansion as a way to get a foothold in other places before competition from Google and Microsoft comes stopping in, we think that it has more to do with people clamoring for these locations. Of all the new cities out......

Two big names announced this week that they're stepping down at Microsoft -- first, the most human face of the company, Robert Scoble, followed shortly by founder and icon Bill Gates. While we seriously doubt the two moves were related in any way, both moves could substantially impact the company's future. If for the worse, then big trouble at Microsoft could mean a big boon to Silicon Valley. Of course Microsoft is not an empire......

Dum-dum-da-DUM, dum-dum-DA-dum..... -- that's right! SF's own J.Lo, Kimberly Guilfoyle avant Newsom, has announced that she's getting married in Barbados on Memorial Day, in three weeks! Who's the lucky mayor TV personality? Eric Villency, who hosts the TV show iDesign, a decorating show on the Fine Living network. Okay, Sofia Milos is kind of a C-list celebrity, but no doubt that CSI: Miami outranks cable channel 182. We've been looking around for their wedding registries......

The fallout from Apple's Boot Camp continues, and we in the labs are struggling to keep up. For the record, we've now got our shiny new MacBook Pro dual-booting into OS X and Windows XP, and the process worked without a hitch. Once we bought another copy of XP, that is — they're really not kidding when they say you can't grab just any old installation disc. As soon as it was all up......

Sometimes we get burnt out on politics. Sometimes, in order to watch TV, we actually turn on the TV. Sometimes, mainly when Google on our cell phones allows us to lose a baseball trivia bet more quickly than we ever thought possible, we get a little bitter about the vast resources of information on the web. In those quiet, still moments we gravitate towards blog posts that are about nothing more than introspection and personal growth. Antics so Blonde obsesses over her tax return, while Geese gets all in aflutter about the giant hole of suck that is MySpace. Amy LeBlanc gets all blissed out at her boyfriend's birthday celebration, the same as XT. Jennifer at Mental Hijinks lovingly documents her field trip to Pixar, with some more pix over at Kimi's post. Brimful reminds us of why we were English majors and swooned over poetry with her own beautiful post and Joel writes a piece that examines the politics and emotional growth behind receiving the Advocate in a plain white plastic wrapper and makes it cut to the quick. And sometimes, we just want to be left alone.

Then, somehow, despite the rain, we're done with introspection. We want to read totally inaccurate, absolutely false writing and believe it totally. We want fiction. Yes, it's marketing, but we don't care. If it's good, it's good.

Finally, after our cleanse, we're ready to face the world again. Ready to accept Microsoft into our lives, ready to go hiking or talk politics. We're ready for literature, rain and the apocalypse. We're ready and reading for you. SFist Jacob, contributing. "Morning Clouds on Bay Bridge" by Thomas Hawk. ...

Tech news you should be interested in this week: Microsoft announced on Tuesday that its Vista operating system won't be released until January of next year (link from CNet news.com). Office 2007 is also delayed to come out in tandem with the new OS. PC manufacturer Dell bought gamer-targeted manufacturer Alienware (link from Ars Technica). Alienware will continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, and at least at the moment, Dell continues to sell......

This week Microsoft and Intel finally revealed the Origami, their "Ultra-Mobile PC" platform. Reaction from most of the blogs and news sites has been one of disappointment — there were a lot of teasers and speculation on what the device would end up being, but it turns out it's just a tablet PC that's smaller than a laptop but bigger than a PDA. Microsoft's goals for the platform are to be able to run......

DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi's tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city. LAist documented graf artist Banksy's most recent visit to LA in one two three posts. They also found the best possible use......

There are so many good reply-all stories: the person in the office who accidentally distributes their snide response to an office-wide email; the fun-loving fake email sent to #ALL PERSONNEL from the computer of the guy who left Microsoft Outlook open while he went to lunch; the computer-unsavvy boss who sends everyone his late-night dinner order ("a California roll, the spider roll, and three slices of sashimi tuna from the belly -- but no wasabi and extra ginger"), to the embittered guffaws of the unhappy underlings with whom he works (who are eating stale Combos from the overpriced office vending machine). Add one more anecdote to the list: the admissions director at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law shamefacedly admitted that when he was training a new staff member on the computer system today, he accidentally sent out an email invitation to an early-admitted student celebration party to everyone who had applied to the law school this year. Ha! Can someone please please please forward us a copy of the de rigeuer apology email that'll be sent out afterwards? Trying to look on the bright side, the admissions director said that the email in fact only went out to about half of the applicant pool (3500 out of 7000), because the large distribution list crashed the Boalt server. You know, they should totally just move the reply-all button further away from forward and regular-reply on the standard mail button bar setup! ...

Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google — the companies that internet wags are now calling "The Gang of Four" — were subjected to a verbal smack-down on Wednesday in a hearing about those companies' involvement with known Communists. CNet News.com has a transcript of the hearing, in which California Representative Tom Lantos grills a representative from each company, repeatedly asking "are you ashamed." Fitting in with the internet theme of the proceedings, Lantos invoked Godwin's......