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The last time Microsoft was featured in an episode of “Family Guy,” it was the butt of Zune joke. Peter Griffin’s father-in-law asked Bill Gates to help him program his Zune and then taunted the Microsoft chairman, noting that he owns an iPod “like the rest of the world.” This time it’s going to be different. That’s because Microsoft is paying to make it so. The company has teamed up with Fox to sponsor a “Family Guy” special built around Windows 7.

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Sometimes life’s irony smacks you in the face. Sometimes BoomTown smacks you with it instead.

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Kai-Fu Lee’s uneventful departure from Google to start a Beijing incubator really belies the spectacle that attended the beginning of his tenure at the search giant. Lee’s train-hopping from Microsoft to Google back in 2005 touched off a five-month pitched battle marked by all manner of inanities and expletive-laden outbursts.

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“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got. The satisfaction for the device was superhigh.” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said that of the Zune in October 2007. Boy was he ever wrong. MarketWatch reports that revenue at Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit, which manages the Zune and Xbox 360, fell 42 percent to about $211 million in its most recent quarter.

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Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is finally having his say on Google’s wonderfully overblown Chrome OS announcement.

His take: It’s just another Linux distro.

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In January, Wikipedia claimed nearly 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to research outfit Hitwise. MSN Encarta received 1.27 percent. Little wonder, then, that Microsoft is discontinuing it. The company announced Monday it would stop selling Encarta software by June and would shut down the encyclopedia’s MSN Web sites on Oct. 31.

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The souring economy is closing the divide between the rich and the obscenely rich. Forbes just published its annual list of billionaires and it has 332 fewer names this year than it did last year. Among those who’ve suffered grotesque losses: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett.

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What spreads faster than economic gloom and doom, and is more infectious than professional anxiety? That phenomenon known as “25 Things.” Just in time for Facebook’s fifth birthday, the record-breaking waste of time may have reached critical mass this week. Elsewhere this week…

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QOTD

Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

– Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unleashes a swarm of mosquitoes on his audience during a talk about malaria eradication at the TED conference today.

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QOTD

The financial market and economic conditions that have developed this past year are truly unprecedented. I hope two years from now when I write this letter I can look at this section as a reflection of something that was short-term and that has passed, but I think the effects of the crisis will last beyond that….If you take a longer timeframe, such as five to ten years, I am very optimistic that these problems will be behind us. A key reason for this is that innovation in every field–from software and materials science to genetics and energy generation–is moving forward at a pace that can bring real progress in solving big problems. These innovations will help improve the world and reinvigorate the world economy.”

– Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says the economic recession service pack is still a ways off.

The Web never stops publishing, but a tech blog definitely slows down on a market holiday. To wit: A (Long) Weekend Update, and best wishes on Martin Luther King, Jr. day.

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