Technology in your hands.

On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.

Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft’s history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft’s DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained.

“They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending,” said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees.

Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered along the way, and certainly isn’t perfect today…

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You may not have noticed, but technology has passed a significant, if little-recognised, milestone. The news emerged only this week, but late last month a supercomputer built for the United States Government performed what is known as a petaflop, or one quadrillion calculations per second.

Few of us know what a quadrillion looks like (in Europe it’s known as a billiard), so, if you’re curious, here’s one you can study in private: 1,000,000,000,000,000. Big, isn’t it?

Mathematicians have calculated that a quadrillion-high stack of five-cent coins would reach Saturn, but that’s probably not much easier to visualise. Or spend…

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Microsoft’s abandoned takeover bid for Yahoo appears to have culminated with a disheartening thud for those two companies but amounted to yet another coup for online search leader Google.

What began in January as Microsoft’s most audacious attack yet on Google instead paved the way for the Internet’s most powerful company to gain even more clout through a deal that gives Google access to a large chunk of Yahoo’s advertising space.

By submitting to a partnership that endorses Google’s search advertising technology as a better choice than its own, Yahoo is giving online marketers even more incentive to spend most of their money with its biggest rival, according to industry analysts.

It looks like such a sweet deal for Google that the U.S. Justice Department and lawmakers are expected to take a hard look at the arrangement to make sure it doesn’t give Google too much control over the Internet’s search advertising market.

Google currently has about 75 percent of the U.S. search advertising market followed by Yahoo at 9 percent, according to the research firm eMarketer…

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