The annoying hardware problem du jour is a Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D motherboard that refuses to recognize memory (or so it seems) I've tried three different sets of DDR2 RAM sticks and all I get is a flashing light on the chipset fan and a steady beep-beep-beep. It's a nice motherboard. I hope I don't have to scrap it.

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The washington post reports today that Microsoft has made a buyout offer for yahoo. That would certainly be a seismic change in the internet. It would also probably open Microsoft up to fresh new antitrust charges. My fear is that with software companies such as yahoo that most of the value is in the personnel and in the culture.

I suspect that many of the engineers at yahoo deliberately chose to work there rather than at google or microsoft and that a merger is going to cause some of them to jump ship. There would also be the inevitable grace period when executives at microsoft and yahoo are trying to figure out which parts of the merged organization to keep and which to discard and the low morale and uncertainty that accompanies wondering if you'll still have your job tomorrow.

So the question is, if the merger does go through, will Microsoft be able to keep yahoo's momentum going?