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Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good - and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, leaving users unable to access the songs they have purchased. Starting September 30 users will not be able to purchase songs from the Yahoo Music Unlimited Store.

Songs and albums that are purchased through Yahoo Music Unlimited Store are protected by a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that requires a valid license key for playing them on the PC. The company will be taking off this license key servers offline on the same day the store shuts.

Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends customers burn their files to CD and re-rip them onto their computer. (In the process, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, not to mention sound quality.)

Earlier this year, a similar situation arose with MSN Music - although Microsoft has since relented and will keep the DRM authorization servers up and running through 2011.

The reaction of most music fans has been: "’Yahoo had an online music store?’"

If there’s one positive that can be drawn from this, it’s that all four major labels and most indies now sell DRM-free online.

Microsoft has unveiled further details about its upcoming DirectX 11 at the annual GameFest developer conference in Seattle.

A new ’shader’ technology "lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics", according to the software giant.

"Developers will be able to take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor," said Chris Satchell, chief technology officer at Microsoft’s entertainment business division.

DirectX 11 will also offer support for tessellation, giving models a smoother appearance when viewed up close, in addition to multi-threaded resource handling to make the most of multi-processor set-ups.

The new Software Developer Kit will be compatible with existing DirectX 10 hardware, but will require the much-maligned Windows Vista thereby excluding millions of XP users.

Games based on the current DirectX 10 SDK for Windows, including Crysis, Gears of War and BioShock, have been well received and praised for their added realism.

All three were nominated in the Best Game category at last year’s Bafta Video Games Awards.

Microsoft said that DirectX 11 will be launched "later this year".

Source: vnunet.com

Microsoft and Facebook strengthened their existing partnership Thursday with the announcement that Microsoft would be powering the social network’s Web search and sponsored links.

The announcement was made at Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting in Redmond. Sources indicate the search services will be integrated into Facebook without many changes to the overall site design.

Facebook will begin using an API from Microsoft some time in the fall. The move mirrors a similar deal between Google and MySpace made almost two years ago. The search giant paid $900 million for MySpace’s search box and ads.

Google’s deal extends across all Fox Interactive sites, which include Rottentomatoes.com, Gamespy.com, fox.com, americanidol.com, and others. In addition to search, Google also has rights to advertising on these sites.

The actual monetary value of Thursday’s Facebook deal was not disclosed, although Microsoft previously invested $240 million in the site last October. That deal made Microsoft the exclusive third-party provider for advertising on Facebook.