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I've never been invited to Bill Gates' home. But I'm told by someone who has that outside his personal library hangs Lost on the Grand Banks [1898], one of the masterworks of the American artist Winslow Homer. Gates paid $36 million for the painting in 1998, when he quietly bought it in a private transaction that saw what is believed to be the highest price ever paid for an American painting. The Room of Flowers by Childe Hassam, for which Gates recently paid $20 million, hangs inside the library. In the hallway, visible from the library, is Polo Crowd [1910], one of the greatest works by George Bellows. It was sold for $27.5 million at a Sotheby's auction in December, 1999, to an anonymous buyer now known to have been Gates.

The software giant on Tuesday chose Madrona Venture Group to take part in a program to persuade start-up companies to participate in its software-as-a-service initiative. Under the terms of the agreement, companies that are funded by Madrona will receive discounts on hardware, software and product support services; joint marketing opportunities; and technology consulting, among other benefits. The Microsoft Investor Connection Program is designed for companies building products and services that Microsoft believes will help promote .Net. The program offers venture capital firms a way to partner with Microsoft by providing access to .Net and XML Web Service-related technology, services and products for the companies in their portfolios.

A possible flaw in Intel's motherboard for Microsoft's Xbox may delay the manufacturing date for the much anticipated game console by up to four weeks, according to analysts. Several sources across the Xbox manufacturing supply chain confirmed the manufacturing delay, according to Eric Ross and David Readerman, both analysts at investment banking firm Thomas Weisel Partners. The production delay, however, is unlikely to affect the device's Nov. 8 launch date because of the option of cranking up the current slack production schedule, the analysts wrote in a report Tuesday morning.

How's the year been for SQL Server?
SQL Server has had a truly tremendous year. We've nailed down 35 per cent year-on-year growth. We've broken the $1 billion sales mark. And we aren't leaving it there. We've got Oracle firmly in our sights. We are catching them with ease right now, last year we outdid them on NT whilst they remained flat. Our database business is one of the best places you could wish to be right now.

If you look at Oracle, it's a one product company. Oracle is in serious trouble. It's revenues are down, its applications aren't any good and its database revenues fell 5 per cent. And we are stealing market share from them very easily. Oracle is getting hit from all angles. IBM is hammering from it from one side and we are hammering it from the other. They're trying, there's no doubt about that, but Oracle is a company in trouble.

Security goes from bad to worse. A new attack that can compromise the encryption cipher used on wireless networks has many users and security experts questioning the future of a technology that has long been touted as the future of enterprise computing. The latest blow to the already shaky security reputation of WLANs (wireless LANs) is the worst one yet. The attack, devised by three well-known cryptographers and re-created success fully by a team of AT&T Labs researchers, enables an eavesdropper to capture a small amount of network traffic and recover a user's secret key in less than an hour.

Greg Sullivan, lead product manager for Windows XP, discusses the latest Kodak/XP. C|Net Radio

Good news everybody AOL is loosing head count, YES! Poor AOL not only will it loose "several hundred" of employees, but probably many of them are AOL subscribers. Excellent!

AOL was not able to comment on the layoffs, since at the moment AOL had laid off all media relation personal. hahaha!

The cuts could total up to "several hundred" employees, the source said, and will occur this month. The source would not say which divisions within the Dulles, Va.-based AOL unit will be affected. AOL employs about 16,000 people. This is not the first time AOL has laid off employees this year. In January, 725 employees were laid off as part of overall cost-cutting measures after AOL and Time Warner completed their merger. In total, AOL Time Warner laid off 2,400 employees during that round, or 3 percent of the company.

When I started using personal computers, I was amazed and inspired by what they could do - and by what they might be able to do in the future. But what's even more amazing is that, even now, we are a long way from exhausting the PC's potential. Today, I'm as excited as I've ever been about the PC - we're at the start of a wave of digital innovation that will create plenty of new, exciting ways for computers to enrich our lives.

Some of these great innovations are available right now, and some are just a few years away. In the coming decade, the PC will continue to become more powerful, less expensive and even more essential - probably the most important tool people use to work, play and stay in touch. And I'm confident that we won't run out of new things to do with the PC any time soon. If the past 20 years have been impressive, the next 20 will be astounding.

Bill Gates, the chairman and co-founder of Microsoft Corp., is investing $100 million in Mario Gabelli's fund business, it said on Monday. Gabelli Asset Management Inc., which is based in Rye, New York, and oversees about $26 billion in assets, said it agreed to sell $100 million of convertible notes to Gates' private investment firm, Cascade Investment LLC. The private sale will, upon conversion, give Cascade a 6 percent ownership stake in Gabelli common stock.

International Business Machines (IBM), Microsoft, and most of the PC industry celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Personal Computer (PC) Sunday, looking back on one of the key milestones of the 20th century. The original IBM PC--code-named "Chess"--came about as a skunkworks project in one of the company's Florida office parks after IBM declined to simply purchase Atari outright for its Atari 800 computer. IBM wasn't the first company to use the term "personal computer"--that honor falls to HP with its 911A calculator, released in 1968. But by the time the IBM edition hit in August 1981, it had plenty of competition.