The European Commission has buried the hatchet with Microsoft after Redmond agreed to offer European consumers the choice of alternative browsers in Windows. In turn, the EC agreed to drop charges filed against Microsoft back in January.

NEW DELHI: It's a capital cost all right! Delhi High Court has asked Microsoft Corporation to shell out Rs 800,000 ($16,000) for choosing to
fight four copyright violation cases in the Indian capital even though they originated in other cities.

The order came after the court found that the alleged violations occurred in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Mumbai.

Not only did the court note that Microsoft had offices in these cities, but it also said the company was using "money power" to "harass" the defendants, who would have to travel to Delhi to fight the cases.

The next version of Internet Explorer will gain speed by off-loading as much as it can way from the browser and onto the machine. IE9 will speed up the browser's overall performance by sending image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor.

The idea to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers is also being looked at by Mozilla, which makes Firefox, and Norwegian developer Opera. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, said that early work on IE9 had already shown significant performance strides.

Microsoft already had its own open source (OSI-approved) licenses, its own open source project hosting site and now it's adding its own non-profit open source foundation. That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation. Officially called the CodePlex Foundation, it's a separate effort from the CodePlex site and is aimed at helping to get more commercial developers involved in open source. Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source, will anyone take them seriously?

It looks like Microsoft has the advantage -- at least for now -- in its David vs. Goliath legal skirmish with Canadian software developer i4i, which recently won a patent infringement suit against the software giant.

Software giant Microsoft Corp. is apologizing for altering a photo on its Web site to change the race of one of the people shown in the picture.

A photo on the Seattle-based company's U.S. Web site shows two men, one Asian and one black, and a white woman seated at a conference room table. But on the Web site of Microsoft's Polish business unit, the black man's head has been replaced with that of a white man. The color of his hand remains unchanged.

The photo editing sparked criticism online. Some bloggers said Poland's ethnic homogeneity may have played a role in changing the photo.

It was revealed in February of this year that Microsoft was to open its own retail stores across the United States. Although there had been speculation about just a move for a good while. The first two Microsoft retail stores are due to open soon in Scottsdale and Mission Viejo. And Microsoft is now hiring employees for those two stores.

Microsoft has released their latest version of Windows Live Movie Maker. The new release has a simplified, more focused feature-set and excludes infrequently used tools. Users can upload videos directly to YouTube and Facebook, burn files straight to DVD, play videos on HDTVs, and save in a wide spectrum of resolutions, including 480i, 720i, 720p and 1080p.