Slowly dying

Gone are the days of Street Dancing battle on streets. Everything going hi-tech these days And so did the Street Dancing.

ACDC (Adam/Chu Dance Crew) and M&M (Miley and Mandy) Cru  are on the street (Online street Youtube.com) fighting for the title of largest online dance battle in the world history. So far it’s going good.

Check’em out on 10th June – They are ready to kill each other

Here is the First challenge from ACDC

M&M’s Response to the above

Following Microsoft withdrawal of Y! acquisition plan and signs of not reversing the decision, Billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy contest to Oust Yahoo!'s board, stating that Y! Directors acted irrationally and lost the faith of Investors and Microsoft.

Below is the Letter sent by Mr. Icahn to Y! Chairman Roy Bostock

May 15, 2008

Dear Mr. Bostock:

It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet.

During the past week, a number of shareholders have asked me to lead a proxy fight to attempt to remove the current board and to establish a new board which would attempt to negotiate a successful merger with Microsoft, something that in my opinion the current board has completely botched. I believe that a combination between Microsoft and Yahoo is by far the most sensible path for both companies. I have therefore taken the following actions: (1) during the last 10 days, I have purchased approximately 59 million shares and share-equivalents of Yahoo; (2) I have formed a 10-person slate which will stand for election against the current board; and (3) I have sought antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission to acquire up to approximately $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. The biographies of the members of our slate are attached to this letter. A more formal notification is being delivered today to Yahoo under separate cover.

While it is my understanding that you do not intend to enter into any transaction that would impede a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, I am concerned that in several recent press releases you stated that you intend to pursue certain "strategic alternatives." I therefore hope and trust that if there is any question that these "strategic alternatives" might in any way impede a future Microsoft merger you will at the very least allow shareholders to opine on them before embarking on such a transaction.

I sincerely hope you heed the wishes of your shareholders and move expeditiously to negotiate a merger with Microsoft, thereby making a proxy fight unnecessary.

Sincerely yours,
CARL C. ICAHN

Reference:
Icahn Moves to Oust Yahoo Board (Wall street Journal)
Icahn Letter to Yahoo Board

Here is the Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s letter sent to the Y! exec

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

· First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

· Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

· In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

· This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

· It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Reference: Ballmer to Yang: Dear Jerry, Drop Dead | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx

Couldn't resist myself from writing this post after watching this movie, based on one of the most terrible and heinous crime ever committed.

A young girl Sylvia Marie Likens tortured and murdered by Gertrude Baniszewski, her children and young people from their neighborhood in 1966.

Articles:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835635,00.html
http://www2.indystar.com/library/factfiles/crime/history/likens_sylvia/sylvia.html
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0802948/

The Girl Next Door (2007) is another movie based on the same plot.

After the great success of hugely popular Zeast - Sutta song, here is one more explicit song, which is becoming extremely popular in the underground crowd. And the song is Honey Singh - Badshah.

Beware - Content is very mature and should be avoided by girls and kids.

Some of you might have already heard it but for others here it is

(Posted From - Windows Live Writer)

Finally IE 8 renders the above image correctly. On my browser IE 7 it still sucks.

So what the fuss is all about? Acid2 is a web test (though not a standard) which tells how browsers renders some specific features of web standard. Web Standards Project, publisher of the test, is an Web Standard Advocacy group. For a web developer, supporting ACID 2 means a better cross browser compatibility. They don't have to write different set of style and HTML code for different browser. It certainly make their life happier.

IE was one of the worst performing browser as per the ACID test but not any more.

As per the Blog post from IE Blog 

"With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7’s CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded."

With earlier releases of IE, it used to break some of the the existing web sites. For example my blogger theme just didn't work with IE7. It was pretty much fucked up and I had to revert to some other theme. Hopefully I will not have to suffer any more.

Well DONE MSFT and IE team.

http://scobleizer.com/2006/12/26/microsoft-sending-free-computers-to-bloggers/

Microsoft AMD and Acer are giving free laptop to the blogger for the review of their new operating system....

I dont know what the heck is wrong with the people crying about their promotion of their products... I seen lots of blogs speaking against this campaign. Wht the heck is wrong if they give away their products. Same bloggers would have been writing the appraisal for Googol or Appl, had they done the same thing....

Come on ppl grow up..... Its up to the ppl who are receiving the laptops if they get influnced by the gift sent out by the big companies... If they do they arent ethical blogger but who gives a shit...

Gimme a free laptop too.. I like tht acer ferrari Amd x64 Dual Core with Vista Ultimate

I wish they could give me one

collage.jpg (JPEG Image, 800x640 pixels)

Pics taken on the way to the Satna for attending the marriage of Ashish....

Check out the following link for the pics

• http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/talksandy/AshishSMarriage
  
• http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/flying.death/AshishSMarriage
  
• http://flickr.com/photos/flyingdeath/tags/ashishmarriage/
  

technorati tags:ASHISHMARRIAGE

Blogged with Flock

Ray Noorda died last month. A legend in the software business, Noorda came on board with Novell in 1983 and turned the company into a powerhouse in corporate networks. His arch-nemesis, of course, was Microsoft which he tried to crush with his own Office suite. But as we know, Bill Gates prevailed.

Yet in the tech world, enemies can easily become allies. That was the case last week, when Microsoft agreed to partner with Novell on its Linux software.

read more at : http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15588445/

[Quote= Copied from Wall Street journal]

Just as Microsoft Corp. is about to roll out the latest version of its cash-cow Office applications, Google Inc. is beefing up efforts that could win away some of the customers Microsoft is targeting.

Google's latest move, expected to be announced today, is a plan to bundle its existing word-processing and spreadsheet offerings -- online applications that people can use through their Web browsers -- under the name Google Docs & Spreadsheets and more tightly weave them together. The services, which are available free, offer more-limited functions than Microsoft's word processor and spreadsheet programs, which people use the old-fashioned way on their personal computers.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters last week that Microsoft's hold on customers who aren't "professional users" of its core Office product "may be vulnerable." The Web search giant is targeting average consumer users and organizations such as universities as it continues to expand email, calendar, spreadsheet and word-processing services that overlap with Microsoft offerings.

Google's push comes as Microsoft puts the finishing touches on Office 2007, the latest version of its ubiquitous set of business programs, due by the end of the year. The programs, taken together, are Microsoft's largest generator of revenue and profit after its Windows operating system. They are also deeply entrenched in the world's large and small businesses around the world.

Free equivalents of Office have existed for years and failed to crack Microsoft's market share, But over the past two years, a growing number of Internet companies, including Google, have started to make concerted efforts to pick away at the business, which accounted for $11.8 billion in revenue for Microsoft in the year ended June 30.

Working in favor of these Internet interlopers is a continuing shift by businesses and consumers to software used over the Internet. For decades most computing tasks were handled with software that was installed on computers. Microsoft defined that era with its Windows operating system and its Office suite of applications.

In recent years, though, as high-speed broadband Internet connections have spread to homes and offices, an increasing number of computer users have begun experimenting with software applications hosted over the Web. With just a Web browser, they can use software over the Internet that's free or available by subscription.

Kyle McNabb, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., says that Google's moves are less about grabbing market share today than about changing behavior and getting consumers accustomed to free online software that they now buy from Microsoft. "Google is helping set the expectations that you don't have to go buy these things," he says. "This is going to have an impact over five to 10 years."

Microsoft Vice President Antoine Leblond says that Microsoft doesn't have plans to roll out an online version of Office. Instead, he says, the company is building online services designed to work with Office, a strategy that would tap the benefits of online programs without cannibalizing Office. "The future of software is going to be the combination of client applications [like Office] and [online] services," Mr. Leblond says. "It's not going to be one or the other -- the black or white approach."

Mr. Schmidt said last week that Google was "not in the business of building Office," which he said was well suited for "professional users." But the comments by Mr. Schmidt, who has long played down any competition with Microsoft, make much clearer Google's likely core target market: users at home, in educational settings, and at small- and medium-size businesses. It could also include professional users who rely on Google for personal applications. Mr. Schmidt said Google's calendar application is better than Microsoft's for family members sharing their schedules, primarily because it is free and allows such sharing to take place easily online.

Google has rolled out a range of free online services. Some of them carry advertisements, and it hopes others will entice people to use its ad-supported services more. In contrast, Microsoft licenses Office to businesses and sells it to consumers for about $400.

Microsoft plays down the potential threat to Office from Google, arguing that online software can't have the same full features that computer users demand. It can also be slow, and many businesses are loath to entrust core business functions and data to outside companies.

Microsoft's Mr. Leblond says that Google will also find it increasingly difficult to add new features to its programs, in part because the programs rely on browser software for many of their functions. So for instance, printing is much more limited than printing from an Office program, he says. "The technology they are using has some inherent limits," he says. "They are going to hit up against these limits."

But Google says it isn't trying to match all the features of traditional productivity software. "We believe that 90% of users don't necessarily need 90% of the functions that are in there," says Jonathan Rochelle, a product manager for Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

With the Google products, a user can save any documents on Google's servers, accessing them from anywhere that can connect to the Internet. Other key differences with Microsoft: Besides being free, Google services make it easier for users to share files and work on them simultaneously, Google executives say. One important similarity: The Google services can generally save and open files in Microsoft-compatible formats.

"We're building a different way of dealing with complex, powerful information that is online all the time, on every device, and fully shared," explained Mr. Schmidt.

Google is now trying to drive a shift toward this sort of consumer usage. The Mountain View, Calif., company earlier this year bought Writely, a Web-based word-processing service, and rolled out its own spreadsheet product. In August it began offering Google Apps for Your Domain, a package that allows organizations to tap email, calendar, instant-messaging and Web-page creation services that run on Google's computers. Google executives had said that word-processing and spreadsheets were "good candidates" to be added to that offering, which is geared toward organizations and small businesses.

Google's Gmail email service had 9.7 million U.S. visitors in September, and its Calendar service had 896,000, according to comScore Networks Inc. The research firm didn't have usage statistics for Google's word-processing or spreadsheet services.

Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, thinks that Microsoft will need to respond more directly to Google's moves. He predicts -- despite Microsoft's denials -- that the company will offer a lower-end version of Office over the next year that's aimed at consumers and small businesses.

"I think that they are leaving the door wide open for Google to deliver a broader solution on their online platform," Mr. Sherlund says. Microsoft needs "to be serious about trying to shut that door on Google."

[/Quote]

reference :

• http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116052883714688829.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
• http://docs.google.com

Google’s online community web site Orkut has run into trouble for “spreading hatred against the country”.

The Aurangabad bench of the Bombay high court, comprising Justice AP Deshpande and Justice RM Borde, issued notice to Google last week following a public interest litigation initiated by 22-year-old advocate Yugant R Marlapalle.

In his petition, Marlapalle, who is also an Orkut member, took exception to a community called ‘We hate India’, owned by someone who identifies himself as Miroslav Stankovic. The community features a picture of the Tricolour being burnt.

“My prayer is to direct Google to remove communities that spread hatred against India, the national flag, and all deities in the country,” Marlapalle told DNA. “My objection is to the offending communities, not Orkut.”

He has cited the provisions of section 75 of the Information Technology Act, which empowers authorities to file charges for offences or contravention committed outside India by any person irrespective of nationality.

A Google India spokeswoman told DNA that US courts have jurisdiction over Orkut. Besides, the web site has terms of service that mandate users to abide by rules prohibiting impersonation as well as vulgar and offensive comments or images. She was unable to say, however, if Google had received the court notice.

Orkut has been misused in India before. Last month, the Kolkata police caught spurned lovers who posted fake obscene profiles of girls they dated on the community site.

Only recently, Google was forced to hand over data of specific users to Brazilian authorities, following allegations that Orkut was being used for illegal activities, including child pornography.

Google has earlier raised eyebrows in India with its highly detailed maps of sensitive locations, available freely online.
Cyber law experts say the case only highlights the fact that India lacks laws to deal with hate speech.

In this case, one would have to invoke section 65 of the IT Act, terming Google a network service provider and making it liable for all third party issues.

[Courtsey: Wall Street Journal]

With its $1.65 billion agreement to acquire YouTube Inc., Google Inc. may be able to broaden its online-advertising business and boost its video offerings to meet the rapidly changing viewing habits of consumers.

The all-stock purchase announced yesterday of closely held YouTube, a 19-month-old, San Bruno, Calif., startup with 67 employees, highlights users' growing consumption of video online and the booming sales of Web advertising. The hefty price tag also reflects the interest of other media and technology companies in acquiring YouTube as a way to jump-start their online-video efforts.  

The deal -- the largest in Google's eight-year history -- marries Google's massive collection of computers, data lines and systems for serving up online ads from hundreds of thousands of advertisers with YouTube's leading position in playing videos for users on the Web. It could transform Google, of Mountain View, Calif., into a bigger power broker for the distribution of video online, following the mixed track record of its own online-video efforts. YouTube has said that consumers view videos through its service, ranging from homemade videos to movie clips, more than 100 million times daily.

"This is going to allow us to continue to develop features for our community and our partners, allow us to sharpen our focus," said YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley in an interview. "We'll be able to leverage the technology and resources of Google to supercharge our efforts in those areas."

The acquisition could also boost Google's ambitions to significantly broaden its ad-brokering activities beyond simple text ads on Web pages to larger amounts of video advertising online. The Web-search company places ads, often targeted by specific keywords such as "Chicago hotel," on its own and partner sites using an automated online system and has said it intends to also broker ads in radio, print media and television.

"We believe the combination of Google and YouTube will create this very new and interesting global media platform for users, content providers and advertisers all around the world," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt during a conference call announcing the deal.

Yahoo Inc., News Corp. and Microsoft Corp. were among the other companies that expressed interest in acquiring YouTube, say people familiar with the matter. YouTube had earlier passed on a lower offer from Google and held acquisition discussions with Yahoo, which tendered an offer in recent weeks, say people familiar with the matter. Yahoo's offer, valid for 24-hours, expired amid its concerns about copyright- and revenue-related issues though talks continued after the expiration, one of the people says.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company "evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago" but decided to build its own service, a test version of which opened recently.

Meanwhile, Google significantly increased its offer and deal talks between the two gathered intensity late Tuesday, when Google's Mr. Drummond and YouTube Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu drafted a term sheet, a person familiar with the matter says. In parallel, the two companies worked to complete content and ad-revenue-sharing partnerships with the major music companies and CBS Corp. that were announced yesterday morning.

News Corp. sniffed around YouTube as recently as last week, but never made a firm offer because the start-up said it was not for sale, say people familiar with the matter. On Friday, when the news of the Google negotiations surfaced, News Corp. sent a letter to YouTube asking for an opportunity to participate in the sale process, according to the familiar people. YouTube didn't respond, these people said. Behind the scenes, Google's deal to purchase YouTube is threatening to create a rift between Google and News Corp., which jointly made headlines in August with an ad-brokering deal under which Google guaranteed revenue of $900 million over three and a half years to News Corp. for its MySpace social-networking service and other sites.

read full story at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116039852999986783.html

Google Video as you know lets you download the video to your system.

So the file downloaded(*.gvb) is not the video file but the URl locator to the actual media file which Google Player (VLC) use to download the actual *.gvi ( actually avi ) file.

This file you can play on any system any media player provided that they have required codec. But google wont let the Windows Media Player play this file (healthy competition huh)

So they changed the fourcc code of the avi sorry gvi to some junk so that WMP wont play it but as other player have their own parser for reading the header of the media file they just ignore that code and not worry about it......................................

Google knows it of course so they became evil and dint let Windows users with WMP see their vids. Is it fair to say Google is no evil any more

Read the original story at

• http://techoncrack.blogspot.com/2006/08/everything-about-google-video.html
• http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/09/20/playing-google-videos-in-windows-media-player/
  

Michigan has retaken the top spot this year. But the winner's circle also includes two newcomers.

Reference : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115860376846766495...

Download the complete ranking from WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/MB_06_Scoreboard.pdf

[Quoted from Wall Street Journal]

The lead in The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive ranking of America's top National business schools seesawed again this year, with the University of Michigan reclaiming the No. 1 spot from Dartmouth College.

Michigan and Dartmouth are clearly the schools to beat, with Dartmouth having achieved a first-place finish in three of the Journal's six annual rankings and Michigan now having scored two wins. (The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School is the only school that has succeeded in besting Dartmouth and Michigan.)

Our other two rankings produced some surprises, as two less prominent newcomers placed first in the Regional and International categories. Arizona's Thunderbird moves up from No. 4 last year in the ranking of regional U.S. schools, while ESADE in Barcelona, Spain, leads a group of European, North American and Central American schools in the International ranking.

Michigan owes its first-place showing in part to its emphasis on practical experience in its M.B.A. program. Recruiters say they prize Michigan graduates because they can connect theory with practice. As for Thunderbird and ESADE, they share an international focus and even happen to be partners through a dual-degree program of study at both schools.

A commitment to ethics and corporate social responsibility also distinguishes all three of the top-ranked schools -- from Michigan's student projects in developing countries to ESADE's "Christian humanism" tradition of management education to the oath of ethical conduct signed by Thunderbird graduates.

Looking Beyond Academics

The three rankings measure how appealing business schools are to the corporate recruiters who hire their M.B.A. graduates. What differentiates each ranking is the type of recruiters the schools attract. But the ratings of all 85 schools across the three rankings are based on how recruiters evaluated them on the same 21 attributes, as well as the recruiter's intention to return and hire a school's graduates over the next two years. In addition, the rankings include a "mass appeal" factor, which is the number of recruiters that the National and Regional schools attract. For the International ranking, the mass-appeal measure was changed this year so that schools can qualify for it only if they attract recruiters who place a large number of their graduates in jobs outside the U.S.

Harris Interactive conducted the online survey of 4,125 recruiters (up from 3,267 respondents in 2005) from Dec. 13, 2005, to March 16, 2006 -- with respondents rating only schools where they said they had recent recruiting experience. To qualify for any of the three rankings, a school had to receive at least 20 recruiter ratings.

The rankings aren't necessarily a reflection of the schools with the most celebrated academic reputations. Although the 21 attributes include the curriculum and faculty, academic quality isn't the primary concern of most survey respondents. Instead, they care most about the M.B.A. students' interpersonal and communication skills, teamwork orientation, personal ethics and integrity, analytical and problem-solving abilities, and work ethic.

That helps explain why some of the most renowned schools, such as Harvard and Stanford, don't rank as highly in the survey as their academic stature might suggest. While recognizing the brainpower of their students and faculty, recruiters complain that they often find graduates of some of the most prestigious institutions more arrogant and less collegial than the M.B.A.s they meet at other schools. Some of the large, elite schools also don't seem to enjoy as many close, personal relationships with recruiters as smaller M.B.A. programs do, and their career-service offices tend to receive lower scores for customer service.

Overall, the survey respondents appeared happier with the schools this year, giving generally higher ratings on the 21 attributes and indicating that they plan to continue recruiting at the same schools. More than half of the recruiters said they believe the quality of M.B.A. graduates is the same or better today compared with past years.

[/Quoted]

Read the full story at : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115860376846766495.html

It seems so dreadful to stay a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's

dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in

company, to lie ill gazing for weeks into an empty room from the corner where one's bed

is, always having to say good night at the front door, never to run up a stairway beside

one's wife, to have only side doors in one's room leading into other people's living rooms,

having to carry one's supper home in one's hand, having to admire other people's children

and not even being allowed to go on saying: "I have none myself," modeling oneself in

appearance and behavior on one or two bachelors remembered from one's youth.

That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with

a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand. 

Franz Kafka

So http://www.live.com has a math engine working behind the scene. Give it a BODMAS equation and you have the answer.

Give it a try...

type 25 * 5 + 45 / 78 - x + 9.2 = 56.7769231 on ur favorite search engine...

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=25+*+5+%2B+4... and find out the answer

where as google gives you no result.

So LIVE is more intelligent and smarter than google. Isn't it? ;)

Microsoft launched a new service called SoapBox to compete with video uploading service like youtube and Google Video.

So be ready with your cameras to shoot the video and upload it to the SoapBox

Cyclists who wear protective helmets are more likely to be knocked down by passing vehicles, new research from Bath University suggests.

The study found drivers tend to pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than those who are bare-headed.

Dr Ian Walker was struck by a bus and a lorry during the experiment. He was wearing a helmet both times.

But the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said tests have shown helmets protect against injuries.

To carry out the research, Dr Walker used a bike fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to find drivers were twice as likely to get close to the bicycle, at an average of 8.5cm, when he wore a helmet.

The experiment, which recorded 2,500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol, was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Dr Walker, a traffic psychologist from the University's Department of Psychology, said: "This study shows that when drivers overtake a cyclist, the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist's appearance.

This study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely

Dr Ian Walker

"By leaving the cyclist less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgements.

"We know helmets are useful in low-speed falls, and so definitely good for children, but whether they offer any real protection to somebody struck by a car is very controversial.

"Either way, this study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely in the first place," he added.

Dr Walker thinks the reason drivers give less room to cyclists wearing helmets is because they see them as "Lycra-clad street warriors" and believe they are more predictable than those without.

He suggests different types of road users need to understand each other.

"Most adult cyclists know what it is like to drive a car, but relatively few motorists ride bicycles in traffic, and so don't know the issues cyclists face.

"There should definitely be more information on the needs of other road users when people learn to drive and practical experience would be even better."

Wig wearing

To test another theory, Dr Walker donned a long wig to see whether there was any difference in passing distance when drivers thought they were overtaking what appeared to be a female cyclist.

While wearing the wig, drivers gave him an average of 14cm more space when passing.

In future research, Dr Walker hopes to discover whether this was because female riders are seen as less predictable than male riders or because women are not seen riding bicycles as often as men on the UK's roads.

However, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents insisted: "We wouldn't recommend that people stop wearing helmets because of this research. Helmets have been shown to reduce the likelihood of head and brain injuries in a crash.

"[The research] highlights a gain in vulnerability of cyclists on our roads and drivers of all types need to take more care when around them."

The owner of one the US's largest Internet software piracy Web sites www.iiBackups.net was sentenced yesterday to more than seven years in prison.

Story (Reference) : http://www.courttv.com/news/2006/0911/piracy_ap.html
http://deadlydevil.blogspot.com/2006/09/pirate-in-...

Nathan Peterson, 27, of Los Angeles, sold products copyrighted by companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. at a huge discount on his site, iBackups.net, prosecutors said. The site began operating in 2003 and was shut down by the FBI in February 2005.

In addition to Friday's 87-month sentence, U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III ordered Peterson to pay restitution of more than $5.4 million and to forfeit the proceeds of his scheme, which included homes, cars and a boat.

Peterson pleaded guilty in December in Alexandria to two counts of copyright infringement.

Justice Department and industry officials called the case one of the largest involving Internet software piracy ever prosecuted.

Last month, Ellis sentenced a Florida man to six years in prison for selling illegal copies of computer programs on another site, BuysUSA.com.

On Saturday,19th August we all at MS IDC were Rocking over the beats of Euphoria. We celebrated 8th anniversary of Microsoft India Development Center. Organized @ International convention center, Hitex, Hyderabad it was a spacial occasion for all of us to celebrate as the IDC has been expanded to the the 1K brilliant engineers.

Party Pics will be posted in the coming days...