Archive for the 'General' Category

Home sick at moon?

After travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometers,Neil Armstrong stepped down onto moon marking the biggest milestone in human history.But strangely, after the first step, they din’t take much steps.The landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football field.Check out the below pic for the traverse map of the crew on moon surface.

traverse map of the crew on moon surface

Source: NASA history division website.

Orkut IS BANNED you fool The administrators didnt write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!

Many people are facing a common problem, where Orkut.com, Youtube.com and Firefox are blocked in their systems and they get following error with a scary laugh:

Orkut IS BANNED, orkut is banned you fool The administrators didnt write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!

So here is the procedure to solve this problem.

It happens bcoz of “Heap41a / win32.USBworm” which spreads through USB pen drives and removable storage devices. I’ll tell you manual method to remove the virus:

Follow these instructions:

1. Open “Task Manager” and goto “Processes” tab.

2. Look for services with name “svchost.exe“.

3. You’ll get approx. 2 services with the name “svchost.exe” which has your Windows username. End Task them.

4. Now open “regedit” from RUN and goto following keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer\Run

If you find a key named “Winlogon” having value  “heap41a\svchost.exe” , delete it.

5. Now goto following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL

Here change the key value of “CheckedValue” to 1

6. Now enable “Show Hidden Files/Folders” option in “Tools -> Folder Options” in My Computer.

7. Right-click on Start button and select “Open“. Now open “Programs” folder, here you’ll see a folder “Startup“. Open it and if you get a hidden file there, delete it. If its not there, then close it.

8. At last open “My Computer” and open C: drive.You’ll see a folder “heap41a” in C: drive. Delete it.

Thats it. After doing all this, restart your system and you’ll get rid of the virus.

End of Nazi Germany

Blowing up swastika

Above is a clip of US army blows up the swastika atop the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg which marked the end of Nazism and reign of Adolf Hitler, the Führer (Leader) of the Nazi party.

But I have been thinking and something doesn’t add up. Why did Hitler go through all that trouble to exterminate the Jewish people?No he was not lunatic.Then I don’t understand why go through such a huge operation to round up and destroy 6 million Jews in such a shortspan of time. No single reason seems to explain….

A new Dot-Com Bubble ?

The dot-com bubble was a landslide event for software developers. You receive termination letter in your inbox or may be gazing at the calendar ,waiting for the call letters ,which never ever came. You simply cannot work in the field without having something miraculous or you are doomed.

The “dot-com bubble” was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw their value increase rapidly from growth in the new Internet sector and related fields. The period was marked by the founding (and in many cases, spectacular failure) of a group of new Internet-based companies commonly referred to as dot-coms. A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an exuberant environment in which many of these businesses dismissed standard business models, focusing on increasing market share at the expense of the bottom line. The bursting of the dot-com bubble marked the beginning of a relatively mild yet rather lengthy early 2000s recession in the developed world.

 nasdaq-graph

Seven years later, are we heading for another dot-com bubble ?
 You might argue that the new bubble has been in effect since mid-2006, but the direction is absolute now. The job market for software developers is every bit boomed up as it was in 1999. Skyrocketing salaries resulting in beginners entering the software development field with giant dollar signs in their eyes. The signs are all around and I suggest better get prepared .I was too young for the first bubble , but I think this one gona be bigger!

Update:- Here Comes Another Bubble - The Richter Scales

*Click here if video not available in youtube!

Robots.txt

Every one love it when Google crawlers index our site within minutes you publish new posts. But often there are cases in which you dont want to index some part of your web site. Reasons can be like,if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see. Or may be, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you’d rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty.

Robots.txt is a text file you put on your site to tell search robots which all pages you would like them not to visit. Let me make it clear, it’s no way a firewall or a kind of password protection but rather a request from ourside. Its up to the search engine to decide whether to accept it or not. May be like a “Please, do not enter” note on an unlocked door, you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter.
But if ever you plan to implement this, do make it a point to place robot.txt in the main directory because they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look in the main directory (http://XYZ.com/robots.txt) and if they don’t find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt. So, if you don’t put robots.txt in the right place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

When Hard Drive cheats on you

I bet this happened with every one of you. You buy a brand new 100GB hard disk and happly after installation checks system manager to painfully realize that its shows 93GB in total. You get confused! Did the vendor cheated me?? or is it for some funky system usage they have reserved up my precious 7 GB?

You are not alone! The fact we finds out the hard way is that there are two ways to define a gigabyte!

When you buy a “100 Gigabyte” hard drive, the vendor defines it using the decimal powers of ten definition of the “Giga” prefix.

100 * 109 bytes = 100,000,000,000 = 100 Gigabytes

But the operating system determines the size of the drive using the computer’s binary powers of two definition of the “Giga” prefix:

93 *  230  bytes = 99,857,989,632 = 93 Gigabytes

If you’re wondering where 7 Gigabytes of your 100 Gigabyte drive just disappeared to, you have the answers. It’s an old trick by hard drive makers– they intentionally use the official SI definitions of the Giga prefix so they can inflate the sizes of their hard drives, at least on paper. This was always an annoyance, but now it’s much more difficult to ignore, as it results in large discrepancies with today’s enormous hard drives. When your Terabyte hard drive is not a Terabyte? Its 931 GB.

200 most successful websites - a MindMap

MindMap

Click the above pic to view the 200 most successful websites on the web this year, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective in a single mindmap. Quite comprehensive and innovate method for data representation!

Old Doordarshan Advertisements

You from India? Then this is going to be nostalgic. Following is a collection of old advertisements which used to come in our one and only national channel [im talking about late 80’s man!] Doordarshan. 

Talk about the latest pulsar 220cc leading the cc race for Bajaj….but not long before there was a time when good old Bajaj Chetek was the king…Do you remember the then Bajaj ad?…the one which gave an national integrity message….check it out below; for sure will pull up a smile on your  face…

 

And our very old Cadbury’s dairy milk ad…comes on guys now don’t say you forgot this cutie’s skirt….

This was a real horror…..you have spent lot of time forwarding this ad in your cassette player……..it’s the never ending Vicco turmeric ad….   This is very special for me. As a kid I loved this animated cartoon singing and playing around .The Public interest animated ad  Ek Anek ‘.  

And here is the all time famous national integration ad ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara‘. It’s a class apart still now.

UPDATE:-

Giant Robot :)

Mile sur mera tumhara

A search engine marketers life

Here in the below video Robert Scoble talks to Jeff Figueiredo, one of the senior search engine marketers at PointIt. Search-Engine-Marketers??? Yup, they are the one who buys millions of keywords from search engine giants Google-MSN-Yahoo for their billion dollar clients. Haven’t you noticed the Google ads coming up along with your Google search results? Who buys these search keywords for their company ads? Check out this new breed of advertisers chasing the keywords you type in your search boxes and the billions they hook up. Hear from him why Microsoft and yahoo struggle in competition with Google at search advertising arena. And he sum up saying….“There’s more dollars in play and Google is getting more of those dollars.”……sounds cooooooooooooooool.

Inside the Googleplex

A short 5 min video inside Google’s Mountainview office. Inspiring as always; this is a good watch. 

 

Small DAM virus outbreak

You think people are conscious enough to delete spam mails; at least not dump enough to open one and execute a suspicious attachment inside a spam. Check out the following video on F-Secure’s WorldMap Live showing an outbreak early this year, of malware named Small.DAM(a Trojan which comes as attachments in spam emails) which loads a malicious service named “wincom32″  in turn creating backdoors for other malicious activities

This shows how many people are still ready to click on suspicious attachments in emails!

Bill Gates no longer the “world’s richest man”

After 13 years of dominance Bill Gates is no longer the world’s richest man, having been surpassed by Mexican telecommunications giant Carlos Slim, according to an estimate by a Mexican financial publication. Bill Gates who’s estimated currently at $59.2 billion, has been surpassed by Slim as his telecommunication company, American Movil, whose shares recently surged in price by 27%, boosting his net worth to $67.8 billion.But is he good enough to give Bill Gates a tough run in this billion$ race? I don’t think so….shares bloom then fades. 

Infosys acquiring Capgemini!

The latest news to hit Indian IT industry today morning was that of Infosys bidding for Europe’s largest IT services giant, Capgemini.While both sides denies these facts, the European stock market is having a harvest with Capgemini shares value rises 4.6% to a two week high of 53.78 euros. Whether this whole thing is another hoax or not, the trust European investors shows on this Indian IT giant is worth noting and can be summarized by the statement from a Dresdner Kleinwort analyst- “Infosys is big enough and none of the large Indian players has made a large acquisition in Europe” and he is definitely optimistic about Infosys doing something big like this.  

If such a merger were to happen, the combined strength of the two companies in terms of turnover would stand at around $14 billion, still some way behind global leaders IBM, EDS and Accenture but definitely will end up as the undisputed king of Indian service industry. The fact that consulting business for Infosys is still on the investment mode and they have shown interest in inorganic growth, will this be yet another India Inc rising clout into the global market?

Microsoft founders - Then & Now!

Hope all are familiar with this below pic. The Microsoft group photo back in 1978,December. The first 11 who kicked off all this fire. Of course you recognize Bill gates in this photo, but just for a thought; what happened to others? Where are they? What they doing now? Are they still with Microsoft?

Microsoft Group photo 

Waiting for answers? Read on. 

Top Row


Steve Wood Programmer. Left Microsoft in 1980. Married to Marla Wood. Now runs a telecommunications company. EW $15 million.
Bob Wallace Production manager-designer. Left Microsoft in 1983. Was a psychedelic-drug advocate. Died in 2002. EW $5 million.
Jim Lane Project manager. Left Microsoft in 1985. Now owns his own software company. EW $20 million.
 
Middle Row


Bob O’Rear Chief mathematician. Left Microsoft in 1993. Now a cattle rancher. EW $100 million.
Bob Greenberg Programmer. Left Microsoft in 1981. Helped develop Cabbage Patch dolls for Coleco. Now makes software for golf courses. EW $20 million.
Marc McDonald Programmer. Microsoft’s first employee. Left Microsoft in 1984 because it was “too big”, then rejoined the company when they bought Design Intelligence, the company he was working for. Has the honor of wearing badge number 00001. EW $1 million.
Gordon Letwin Programmer. Left Microsoft in 1993. Now an environmental philanthropist. EW $20 million.
 
Bottom Row


Bill Gates Co-founder. Still Microsoft chairman and chief architect. Now the richest person in the world. EW $50 billion.
Andrea Lewis Technical writer. Left Microsoft in 1983. Now a freelance journalist. EW $2 million.
Marla Wood Bookkeeper. Married to Steve Wood. Left Microsoft in 1980, then sued the company for sex descrimination. Now a self-described “professional volunteer”. EW $15 million.
Paul Allen Co-founder. Left Microsoft in 1983 but remains a senior strategy advisor to the company. Now sports team owner, space enthusiast, and philanthropist. EW $21 billion.

The BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) thesis

Check this extract from wikipedia.org on BRIC thesis :-

BRIC or BRICs are terms used to refer to the combination of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.General consensus is that the term was first prominently used in a thesis of the Goldman Sachs investment bank. The main point of this 2003 paper was to argue that the economies of the BRICs are rapidly developing and by the year 2050 will eclipse most of the current richest countries of the world.

Goldman Sachs argues that the economic potential of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)is such that they may become among the four most dominant economies by the year 2050. The thesis was proposed by Jim O’Neill, global economist at Goldman Sachs. These countries are forecast to encompass over forty percent of the world’s population and hold a combined GDP [PPP] of 14.951 trillion dollars. On almost every scale, they would be the largest entity on the global stage

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