Stuffs For All

I wrote a post in one of my another blogs just few days ago on how about win a free PS3 through referral marketing. Well, here’s another way you can get your hands on a Sony PS3 (worth $399.99) plus a game (worth $59.99) of your choice. Actually, this is an online contest organized by one of my favorite Blog Oh! Blog, also provider of some of the coolest WP themes. All you have is follow these simple instructions:

• Post a review of Blog Oh! Blog on your website or blog including a link to this contest.
• The review should be a minimum of 200 words.
• Make a comment on this contest and mention the link to your post.
• Subscribe to our RSS Feed if you haven’t done so already. (To track this contest)
• Everyone is free to join the contest but a single blogger is allowed only one entry to the contest.

Just this much and you are eligible to win yourself a PS3 console worth $399.99 which has:

• Internal 40GB HDD for storing your games, music, and photos
• Built-in Blu-ray player
• Cell Broadband Engine advanced microprocessor
• SIXAXIS wireless controller (very cool!)
• Screen sizes supported : 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
• Memory : 256MB XDR Main RAM, 256MB GDDR3 VRAM

Also you will be giving an opportunity to choose any PS3 video game worth $59.99 so you can play as soon as your PS3 arrives. You don’t even need to worry about shipping if you win. Let the organizers think how it gets to your doorstep. There’s still time left. The contest will run till 20^th of May 2008 and the winner will be declared on May 21, 2008. So, hurry up and start blogging.

Not that I think it matters to Google much but still it will be very pleased to hear that Microsoft Corp. yesterday announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft has been trying hard very long to acquire Yahoo and in the process it had raised its original offer from $44.6bn to $47.5bn (£24.1bn) - $33 per share. This has all been going on to compete with Google which has been dominating internet marketing for a long time. But yahoo showed no interest whatsoever to any bid less than $53bn, or $37 a share, which was more than Microsoft was willing to pay. It seems like Google will continue to regime the internet advertising for few more decades.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer in Microsoft’s press release.

The text of the letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang.

May 3, 2008

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, Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft Corporation

I also heard that Google threw a big party the other night. Must be very happy. HEHE

I don’t know why people are so scared of virus. It’s nothing but few lines of codes and if you are cautious, you’ll hardly get a virus in your PC. A lot of my friends were bothered by some “Sujin Virus”. The title and homepage of Internet Explore was changed to ‘sujin.com.np’ and in their flash drives also they had a file named Virusremoval.vbs. So, they were pretty much sure that it was a virus trying to spread through the flash drive. I kind of searched over the internet and also sneaked the code in the VBS file (opened it in a notepad). Finally, I could conclude that this virus was a phony which does nothing big except modifying some registry keys. Still, if you’re annoyed by the virus and want it out of your PC you can just download a scanner from http://www.swiftnepal.net and run a scan. If you want to be smart and remove it manually by yourself, then try out these simple steps:

1. From the start menu click ‘Run’ -> type ‘Regedit’ (Registry Editor will open)
2. In the Registry Editor, go to Edit menu and press find
3. In the find dialog box type - virusremoval.vbs and press find next button
4. The search will end at some folder in the registry at the key - “userint”; doubleclick it; you will find many paths separated by commas - eg: c:windows/system32/userinit.exe,c:/windo… and so on. Among those paths you will find “C:\windows\system32\virusremoval.vbs”. Delete the path. Ensure that remaining paths are unaltered so that your genuine scripts are not affected.
5. Press F3 (find next) to see if the same path exists somewhere else in your registry. If found again at some other place remove the path there also.
6. Repeat F3 until you get a message that search has finished.
7. Change your home page to your usual one. You will notice that though your home page has stopped from changing back to ‘sujin.com.np’, still your title bar is showing ‘sujin.com.np’.
8. To change this back to normal, first change your homepage, and again open the ‘Registry Editor’ and press find in edit menu and type ‘sujin.com.np’ without quotes. You will find the key - “Window Title”. Double click the key and type “Windows Internet Explorer” or any other text you would like to have in the title bar. Please note that you have to change the key at two places. Press find next f3 till you receive the message that search has finished to ensure that you have changed at both the places.

Happy hunting Sujin!!!

Are you fade up of looking as same boot screen each time your computer boot? Do you think that it’d be better if nothing came when your computer boots. Well, there is a way to change the boot screen too (the manual process is a little complex but a thiry-party s/w might make it a lot easy) but I’ll be tweaking you through the process of just disappearing it. Here are few steps that you need to follow and walla …you never will be seeing the boot screen unless you want to.

First of all unhide all the hidden files and folders

• Go to your OS is installed drive
• Open the file ‘boot.ini’ with notepad or wordpad
• Search for the line ‘multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect’ and ‘/sos’ to it’s end without any quote
• The new line should look like this ‘multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /sos’
• Save the file and restart

For all the mobile users, this software is a must. SmartMovie is a package of 2 softwares. One is the converter which converts the video clips from your PC to a playable format on your mobile device and other is its supplementary player which obviously allows to playback the converted video onto your mobile device.

3 steps to play your videos on your mobile device, anywhere, anytime:

• Convert any video file on your PC into a phone-friendly video file.
• Upload video into device/memory card.
• Play the video in SmartMovie Player installed on your mobile device.

Minimal requirements:

• PC with Windows XP, 2000, ME or 98.
• DirectX 7 or above.
• Mobile device with one of supported operating systems (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm)

Just for the record and all who might not know, Opera is the only browser that is available for most of the devices from PC, almost every mobile phone, and other networked devices. I was going through Opera’s official site and I was quite happy to know that on April 2, 2008, it released the beta preview of Opera Mini 4.1. The browsing is easier and more fun in compare to its previous versions taking your mobile browsing to a new level of interactivity with both the phone and the Web.

Features:

• Opera Mini 4.1 is up to 50% faster than Opera Mini 4. So, Opera has definitely worked on speed.
• The addition of auto complete feature is time saving and finger saving as well.
• You can also save pages and view later during offline time.
• The new Opera mini now lets you find the content that you want on such a small screen in no time.
• Last but not the least is that with Opera Mini 4.1, download and upload can be handled without any restrictions. The final blow to your phone’s native browser.

1,2,3…10. Out!!! Phone browser loses the new Opera wins.

You can download the beta version at http://www.operamini.com/beta.

You may never want to know this but an extra tip won’t so any harm. There might be times when your parents may tell you that you’ve been playing PC games for a long time and you may have sit just few minutes ago. So, this might help you out to convince your parents that you’ve not been playing for long. The command is simple.

1. Open a command prompt screen (start -> run -> type ‘cmd’ without quotes and enter)
2. In the command prompt, type ‘systeminfo’ and enter

A long list of information will be displayed but the one we are looking for is System Up Time which somewhere down in the middle. There are other information too that you might use.

Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 is the business publishing program that helps you create, design, and publish professional-looking marketing and communication materials like Advertisements, Award Certificates, Banners, Invitation Cards, Calendars and so on. You can create these materials for print, e-mail, and the Web with an intuitive, task-based environment that guides you from initial concept to final delivery in-house without professional design and production expertise.

For e.g. Microsoft Office Publisher makes it easy to produce effective business cards, whether you create your own design or use one of the Publisher designs. You can use color schemes and font schemes to select the colors and fonts that reflect your company’s image. You can further customize your business cards for specific market segments or locales, and you can add names and job titles for new employees as your business grows.
For creating simple web sites, now you need not to know html tags. You can simply build your site within few minutes. Just open a template provided by publisher, modify the contents, add the extra pages required and just publish these pages to web.

Office Publisher 2007 is designed to help businesses create professional-looking publications in-house quickly and easily. Even a beginner can create a publication for print, e-mail, or the Web. You can create your own publications with the professionally designed Publisher templates, customize the templates as needed, and then change from one type of publication to another by clicking a single button.You can save your publications as Portable Document Format (PDF) files and XML Paper Specification (XPS) files and share them as read-only publications. This makes it easy to share your publications with customers, colleagues, or family members who do not have Publisher installed on their computers.
When you save publications as high-quality PDF files or XPS files, you can print them on your own high-quality printer, post them in a viewable, fixed format for visitors to your Web site, or use the Pack and Go Wizard to take the files to a commercial printer in a format that the printer is sure to be able to professionally print.

In this era of inter networking, work groups and digital highways, it becomes more and more important to protect personal sensitive data from malicious or unintended harm.

More and more documents and information are migrated to the computer in the form of files stored in the hard disk.

More and more computers are linked together, exposing those files to dangers of being destroyed, examined, or adulterated intentionally or not by other users (hackers) of the network.

The PC Security for Windows ™ utilities are custom designed to help you protect your system against such intrusions.

The PC Security for Windows ™ offers comprehensive data security protection by performing the following functionality:

• File locking.
• Folder locking.
• Internet locking
• Window locking.
• Shortcut/Program locking.
• System locking (the whole computer) with different timers and Hot Key.
• Explorer Control.
• Restricted System.
• Intruder Detection with Alarm.
• Context Menu support (mouse right click to lock and unlock).
• Flexible and complete password protection.
• Drag and Drop support.

You can try PC Security for Windows ™ with no fear. If you decide not to use it, it has an uninstall feature that removes it completely from your machine!

Hardware/Software Requirements:

Computer: IBM or compatible

Processor: Pentium/compatible or higher

RAM 32MB or higher

Operating System: Windows XP/95/98 or higher, Windows NT 4.0 or higher

To view the software version details, in standby mode, enter *#0000#.

Symbian smartphones always have several disks as C, D, E, … which is just like PC.

Copy text:

To copy letters or words in your phones:

• To select letters or words, press the edit key (the key which looks like a pencil in your mobile phones keypad), and scroll left or right. To select rows, scroll up or down.
• To end the selection, release the scroll key.
• To copy the text, continue to press and hold the edit key, and select Copy.
• To paste the text to another document, press and hold the edit key, and select Paste.

Delete items:

In most applications, to delete items such as files, folders, or applications, scroll to the item that you want to delete, and press <C>. You need not to visit Application Manager to uninstall or remove the application installed earlier in your phone memory or memory card. If you remove an application, you may not be able to open files created with that application.

Use dictionary:

When editing text, to activate predictive text input, press the edit key, and select

Predictive text on.

To write the desired word, press the number keys once for each character. The word suggestion changes after each character.

If the word is correct, press 0 to insert a space and continue with the next word.

If the word is not correct, press * to see the matching words one by one.

If the ? character is shown after the word you have entered, the word is not in the dictionary. To add the word to the dictionary, select Spell, and enter the word.

Record your phone talks:

To record a phone call, open Recorder during the call, and press the scroll key. Obey all local laws governing the recording of phone calls. Both parties of the call hear a tone every 5 seconds during recording.