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Mithras Capital, a private equity fund that owns 1.9 million shares (0.14 percent) of Yahoo! would like to see the slumping Internet giant renew talks with Microsoft and sell itself to the software giant for $22 a share. But get this: That price represents a 74 percent premium over Yahoo!'s current stock price, a higher premium than what Microsoft originally offered for the company back in July. So sit back and enjoy the peals of laughter coming from the Thurrott household this morning because that is the single stupidest thing I've read all week. All week. I've said it before, and I've said it again: Yahoo! is doomed and any company purchasing that train wreck will simply be screwing themselves for years going forward. Don't give in, Microsoft. You may think things are bad now, but they'd be much worse with the weight of Yahoo! hanging over you.

Shedding more light on its Oslo vision for model-based software development, Microsoft this week elaborated on plans to preview Oslo technologies, offering code names and citing the company's DSL concept as a lynchpin of the platform.

Quadrant, meanwhile, provides a way to author models visually. "The way to think about it is M lets you build textual DSLs and Quadrant lets you build visual DSLs," Wahbe said.

Oslo will be featured as part of the Visual Studio product family; the company has not yet announced which version would include Oslo. While Oslo at first glance might appear to be minimizing the role of the developer by raising the level of abstraction, Microsoft believes it is just a natural step in the evolution of software development that does not put developers' jobs at risk, Wahbe said.

At last July's E3, Microsoft first announced its concept of an avatar-based community for online gaming, along with the ability to install games to the hard drive. At the Tokyo Game Show, the experience got a launch date: November 19.

With what's now being called the "Xbox Experience," gamers will be able to create customized avatars (similar to, but more tweakable than Nintendo's Miis) that can host "Live Parties" or engage in one-to-one chats with other users. These avatars will also be fixtures of new massively multi-player social games that are expected to arrive by the holidays like Scene It? Box Office Smash and Lips, a multi-player Karaoke game not unlike Singstar.

Microsoft is co-sponsoring a study to see if people who undergo genetic testing to identify their risk for developing certain diseases actually change their behavior to mitigate that risk.

San Diego-based research lab Scripps Translational Science Institute, the study's main sponsor, will offer genetic scans to up to 10,000 employees, family members and friends of Scripps Health that provide a detailed analysis of their risk for more than 20 health conditions. Scripps Health is a US$2 billion nonprofit community health system also based in San Diego.

The conditions -- including diabetes, obesity, heart attack and some forms of cancer -- are ones that can be changed or prevented by people's lifestyle choices.

Microsoft announced this morning that it will deliver a completely new user interface for the Xbox 360 on November 19, the New Xbox Experience, an update that will result in a "completely new Xbox 360.

"The company also revealed that it will be extending its most popular game franchise with a new release called "Halo 3: Recon" that will ship in late 2009 and extend Halo 3 with new single and multiplayer missions.

"Our industry is defining the future of entertainment," says Microsoft corporate vice president John Schappert. "When the New Xbox Experience launches in just six weeks, we will be inviting the whole world to play. We will also have the games that everyone will want.

Microsoft's Live Labs team has just released a new way to track political discourse on the Web. Called Political Streams, the tool tracks news stories on both blogs and traditional-news sites, and ranks it based on velocity and overall coverage.

What's really neat is that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story, to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days.

Each item can be drilled down into a little further, which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places.

Facebook has begun allowing users to search the Web from within Facebook, using Microsoft's Live search service.The arrangement, first announced in July, offers a revenue opportunity for both companies. But they'll need to convince people to use the search feature, and it's uncertain they will in its current form.

"I'm not sure the experience they offer is optimal," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. Still, the deal is a coup for Microsoft, which has been struggling to boost its search business. It might be the biggest search agreement for Microsoft in terms of potential users, Sterling said.

Microsoft Office Labs released Tuesday its Touchless SDK for developers to experiment with multi-touch technology.

With the SDK, developers can build multi-touch applications that use a color marker and webcam for input. Utilizing the webcam, applications can track the location and size of the color marker to enable multi-touch functionality without touching a surface, according to Microsoft.

The SDK can be used to build games or applications that could, for example, browse through media, said project developer Mike Wasserman. A demonstration of the technology can be viewed here.

Microsoft got in line with several other organizations that are taking steps to get paid for products and services provided to Washington Mutual, the largest bank to fail in U.S. history.

On Tuesday, Microsoft filed a document with the Delaware bankruptcy court handling the WaMu case asking to be sent copies of all proceedings in the case. "Microsoft filed a notice of appearance because we have existing contracts for software licenses and consulting services with Washington Mutual and we want to make sure those contracts are properly administered through the bankruptcy process," said David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, in an e-mailed statement.

SQL Server may be one of the most popular databases today, but Microsoft nevertheless remains a laggard in the business intelligence market. It ranked just fifth among BI vendors last year, according to research firm IDC.

But as Microsoft gets serious about BI, it has an ace that turns out to have been hiding in plain sight all along.

The software maker's ubiquitous spreadsheet Excel is already the most popular front-end program used by business analysts and others who want to analyze and display the results of their BI queries, according to Forrester analyst James Kobielus.