Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is having a busy week. Thursday, he told reporters in Belgium that the company might rethink its plan to stop selling Windows XP as of June 30, saying “if customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter.” At a conference in Milan yesterday, Ballmer said that Microsoft could walk away from the Yahoo deal, maintaining that it is the best way to take on Google but insisting that if the proposed acquisition doesn’t go through, Microsoft will move forward alone. The desktop Linux community may feel betrayed by OLPC switching to Windows XP, but executive editor Galen Gruman contends that in reality they betrayed themselves by never developing a credible desktop OS and related application stack during the past decade. OLPC’s open source qualms underscores a larger Linux limit. Customers balk at Dell’s XPS One update because, although Dell says that there’s nothing wrong with the Samsung hard drives themselves, if users don’t install the firmware there’s a risk they will lose access to their data. An Oracle executive touts enterprise mashups at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, saying that in order to succeed they need to be easy to use, have performance on par with the Web experience, and provide relevant content. Related: So, what is an enterprise mashup anyway? And amid recent turmoil over Tibet that includes attempted DDoS attacks against CNN, China worries that hackers will strike during the Olympic Games and an expert says that, even though the Chinese government is taking the issue very seriously, network security is grim. Software Development