Microsoft

Carl Icahn will never give up! How will he when the software giant Microsoft is backing him and the entire shareholders speak his language? Billionaire investor and shareholder Carl Icahn filed a definitive proxy statement today nominating slate of nine directors to replace Yahoo’s current board members including its Chief Executive Officer, Jerry Yang.

On Sunday, Icahn and Microsoft Corp. jointly proposed for a restructuring of Yahoo board and its executive ranks and the sale of the search business to Microsoft. Microsoft can not be more shameless by backing Icahn in getting the deal done at any cost.

Icahn’s slate of directors recommended to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission obviously includes a list favorable to Microsoft and Icahn. The list would obviously speak and act what Icahnsoft orders.

The slate includes Adam Dell, managing general partner, Impact Venture Partners, Mark Cuban an entrepreneur and others. The persistent and adamant Icahn stated, “We believe that now is the time to enter into a significant transaction with Microsoft,” on a letter to Yahoo shareholders. He also stated that his current best-friend Microsoft would purchase all of Yahoo or its search business if the current board is replaced with Icahn’s own personal favorites.

Yesterday Microsoft had is farewell for one of its valued employees. Well, the farewell was not for an employee who was a staff but an employee who changed the face of science and technology! Changed the lives of millions around the world! An employee called Bill Gates. The last day would have been a speech about his legacy by fellow workers and would have ended with some cakes but it was a day marking the end of an era, an era which changed the world for ever.

Bill Gates had spent 33 years of his life building the world’s largest software company. What could he have spoken when asked about his accomplishments all these years? Which ones would he highlight? May be that’s the reason Gates did the impossible and never spoke about it.

Microsoft today released Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008, a hypervisor-based virtualization technology. Microsoft claims that it has distributed nearly 1.5 million copies of Hyper-V beta version which demonstrates customers interest in virtualization.

Virtualization helps companies decrease hardware costs, power consumption costs and the complexity of managing the IT system. Virtualization also increases flexibility for the overall environment and helps maximize value of IT investments.

Microsoft’s Hypervisor Technology, commonly called Hyper-V enables customers consolidate some of their most demanding workloads.

Bill Hilf, General Manager for Platform Strategy and Windows Server Marketing at Microsoft stated, “Customers who buy Windows Server 2008 are not only getting the scalability benefits, the high performance and reliability, and all the great things that Windows Server is known for; as of today they can benefit from integrated virtualization with Hyper-V.”

Customers can now download the final version of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Hilf also added, “There have already been over 1 million evaluations of Hyper-V, and with this release IT organizations everywhere can move it from the lab to production to fully experience the benefits that Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 can bring.” To download Hyper-V, please click on the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V

Hyper-V would also be available as a Windows Update for customers who have already deployed Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft Corp. announced its intention to acquire Mobicomp a Portugal based mobile technology company. MobiComp built one of the first WAP-enabled ticketing systems for cinema-goers in early 2001 and is acclaimed for its innovative mobile data protection and sharing services.

Corporate Vice President, Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, Todd Peters explained that “People expect their phones to deliver the best experiences from PCs and the Web right to their pockets. Investing in the right solutions from companies like MobiComp will extend the capabilities of Windows Mobile and Windows Live to help us provide the most innovative and seamless way to stay connected.”

Formed in 2000, MobiComp is a privately funded Braga, Portugal based company which has its offices in Spain, Lisbon, Dubai, UK and Finland. The company is !SO 9001:2000 certified and received the Award for Services to Innovation from the Portuguese Republic President in 2006.

Carlos Oliveria, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of MobiComp mentioned, “Like Microsoft, we’ve always believed in an open and innovative mobile platform and deep industry partnerships. We are thrilled that our work over the past eight years can now be extended by partnering with Microsoft’s world-class portfolio of mobile services.”

Is there any other name more familiar than Bill Gates? The founder of the world’s largest software company had in him the power and will to change the personal computing industry for ever.

Born in October 28, 1955 William Henry Gates III was born to a rich family with a business, law and political history. Bill Gates father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served as the board of director for First Interstate BancSystem. Bill Gates was a bright and intelligent person from childhood which prompted his parents to enroll him with the Lakeside School.

The Lakeside school had then decided to educate the students with the knowledge of computers. Computers then were too heavy and costly for schools to afford. However, the school raised funds and bought a DEC PDP-10 made by General Electric.

Bill Gates, his friend Paul Allen and other Lakeside Students fell in love with the computers. They were inseparable making the lab their home day and night. Gates and Allen spent their entire day reading articles, books and magazines related to computing and the rest on programming. This lead to problems with the Lakeside faculty and for the school. The school ran out of budget on maintaining these computers and Bill and Allen lost their interest in studies.

However, Computer Center Corporation a Seattle business offered their computer assistance to the school. This would mean more computing time and knowledge for Bill and the young comrades. They now skipped classes, rarely submitted home works and had used all of their school computer time.

Well, the story of these computer freaks or what ever you wish to call, did not end up here. Their minds now led them to hack the school security system and even alter the files which record the number of school computing time used. The nuisance was finally caught and Computer Center Corporation finally banned them from their system for several weeks.

What would these computer addicts do without computers? They formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. Might be they had the adrenaline by birth to change the world forever. They wanted to apply their ideas in the real world and in real time situations to make life better.

What more can be good for these young comrades? The same company who threw them out had now some serious issues. Computer Center Corporation was facing issues as the system had week security and was crashing frequently. This was when they remembered the hackers and their impressive assaults on their computer. They asked Bill, Allan and the other comrades to help fix bugs and find issues with security and reliability. In return, Computer Center Corporation would provide them unlimited computer time. Well, as you would have assumed by now, this was too big a temptation to resist for the addicts. Gates remembering those early years mentions, “It was when we got free time at C-cubed (Computer Center Corporation) that we really got into computers. I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night”

After a few years, Computer Center Corporation had to close due to insufficient funds. After this the Bill, Allen and the group worked for University of Washington and then for Information Sciences Inc. However, work with TRW defense meant not just finding bugs but fixing them. TRW made Bill a serious programmer and made Bill and Allen think of forming their own company.

In 1974, Allen stepped on a magazine while he was on the way to meet his fellow comrade Bill Gates. Little did they realize what he saw would change their life for ever. On the Popular Electronics magazine cover was a photo of Altair 8080 with the headline “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.”

Allen just rushed back to Bill’s dorm with the magazine. They soon found out the maker of Altair, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems). Gates called them up in the next couple of days stating they have developed a BASIC which can be used in Altair. Both Allen and Gates had never seen an Altair and did not even have one line of code written. That was an unadulterated lie.

Who on earth would know that they lied. MITS was eager to have a look at the code and this was the start of some serious homework for Bill, Allen and his well formed lie. But they stuck to what they promised. They had already informed that they would show what they have in a couple of months.

After days and nights of coding forgetting and forfeitting sleep and food, they could now say that the code is now real and not a lie. Bill did most of the coding and Allen worked on stimulating a PDP-10 to work like Altair. As you know, they have never seen one.

Allen now flew to MITS to show their BASIC. They had never tested in an Altair. It should work perfectly or it would be a failure shattering their dreams. Well, Allen entered the program in Altair. Hurray! It worked perfectly the very first time. Well it should, as it was coded by none other than the master, Bill Gates. MITS was impressed and got the rights to their BASIC.

Within few months, Allen convinced Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard and thus Microsoft was born. Isn’t the rest History? Surely, they dreamt what a common man would call “the impossible”.

The British Newspaper The Sunday Times had its annual survey to find out the best IT companies to work with in Britain. Ten companies were chosen out of the top 100 companies in UK.

The eligibility criterion to participate in the survery was that the company should be at least 7 years old and have at least 250 employees.

The top place was acquired by Microsoft with 1,595 ecstatic employees on Microsoft’s three sites in UK. The company also scored a impressive 93 percent for workforce treatment as Microsoft staffs felt proud working with the company as it makes a positive difference to the world.

Microsoft also topped the list for pre-tax profits to charity. A whooping £17.62 billion was spent on charity which is 9.58 percent of total UK profits.

Peoplesoft got its place in the fourth spot in the survey. Peoplesoft is the sixth largest software company in the world having around 257 employees in UK with 93 percent of its employees earning a salary of over £30,000.

The 9th place went to Electronic Arts, a popular computer and video games development company. EA has made some of the worlds most popular interactive games like FIFA, James Bond and Harry Potter.

CISCO attained 14th place and SAP in 17th place. SAP has over 23,000 employees in 50 countries worldwide.

Bill Gates, Chairman of the software giant Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the key decisions regarding companies withdrawal of the $47.5 billion bid for the search engine company Yahoo! Inc would be made by Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft made a bid of $44.6 billion for Yahoo Inc. late February with the plans of having a monopoly in online advertising and internet search. However, Yahoo was not pleased with the offer and requested more. A $47.5 billion was in returned as bid by Microsoft. This again was rejected by Yahoo and finally Microsoft withdrew the bid later on Saturday.

Bill Gates made these remarks after a meeting with the South Korean President, Lee Myung-bak while he was on a short trip to South Korea.

It is reported that MSN Windows Live mail registrations have been hit by spam bots as much as 30% to 35%. This is a serious security issue for Microsoft.

The bot acquires the CAPTCHA on the MSN server, takes it back to the spammers server and is read using spam servers technologies. After successful reading, the text match is sent back to MSN registration form and the registration is done successfully.

Vice President of Security Research, Dan Hubbard stated that this is the first time that we have seen bots like this. He also mentioned that some of the account creation scan is still murky and stated that the team is yet to find out what is happening in the spammers server. He also mentioned that spammers use these addresses for a day and then dispose them. These spamming addresses are quickly shut down by MSN and get listed in spam filtering products.

This huge success rate by spammer bots has started an debate if CAPTCHA is secure. This has lead to rethink CAPTCHA potential. It should also be noted that few months back a Russian programmer stated that he was able to crack Yahoo’s CAPTCHA system 35 percent of the time.

Top Most Firing IT Companies in India

1) IBM — Right now this is the most firing company for IT professionals.
In the last 6 months, this company has fired nearly 20% of their employees
because of BG check and performance issues. This is the most insecure
company from an IT professional’s point of view. They don’t have any
strategic plans at HR policies regarding employee security. No appraisals
(maximum 10%).
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Yahoo CFO, Chris Liddell stated that Microsoft may have to borrow money to finance its deal tagging Yahoo for a proposed $44.6 billion purchase.

Microsoft may use its available savings and its stock to pay the share of $31 which it had offered for Yahoo! Inc. The rest of the amount that Microsoft has to pay would be acquired from the capital markets which would be the first ever in the history of Internet.

Investors are requesting Microsoft to go for a debt for some time. Before the proposed deal, Microsoft’s shares raised to $30.51 a 6 cent increase in the Nasdaq Stock Market trading. However, on Feburary 1st, the day of the deal announcement, the shares had a dip of 6.6 per cent which was the largest fall since April 2006.