10. Your kids still believe the Googlebot is bringing the Christmas presents.

9. Your reply to “How are you” is “I’m feeling lucky”, combined with a clicking gesture.

8. You shout at the librarian when she takes more than 0.1 seconds to find your book.

7. You just lost a case in court to name your newborn son “Google”.

6. You think of Google as your second-best friend, but lately consider it to get into first position.

5. Your Google shirt is losing color.

4. When people talk to you, you try to optimize their keywords.

3. Your last three Sunday family trips have been to the Googleplex.

2. You are convinced “What’s your PageRank?” is a good pick-up line.

And the number one sign you are addicted to Google:

1. You are completely clueless without a computer.

Source: E-Marketing Blog

What is POP3? It is a protocol that allows retrieval of your emails in almost any email program that you’ve installed on your mobile phone or PC. Here’s all the information you might need when setting this up in your email program:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)  
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25 or 587)  
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

In addition to POP3, Microsoft offers additional technologies that can provide you with an even richer experience of your E-mail. Try viewing your Hotmail using Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Office Outlook via the Outlook Connector, or Windows Live for Windows Mobile phone.

Looking for help with Hotmail? Visit the Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center! The Solution Center has instructions on how to set up your e-mail software to send and receive Windows Live Hotmail messages using POP3. You’ll also find instructions on how to set up Hotmail on the web to give you POP3 access to a non-Windows Live e-mail account. If you have problems using POP3 access, Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center also has links to report a problem with Hotmail.

Source: LiveSide

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007, and employs more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions.

On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects. The two-year transition process is to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities. Effective June 2006, Ray Ozzie has assumed Gates’ previous title as chief software architect and is working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities at Microsoft. Craig Mundie has assumed the new title of chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft and is working closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts.

Born on Oct. 28, 1955, Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.

Gates attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he discovered his interest in software and began programming computers at age 13.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft’s chief executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer – the MITS Altair.

In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates’ foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.

Under Gates’ leadership, Microsoft’s mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $7.1 billion on research and development in the 2007 fiscal year.

In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how computer technology can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries. Business @ the Speed of Thought has received wide critical acclaim, and was listed on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com. Gates’ previous book, The Road Ahead, published in 1995, held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list for seven weeks.

Gates has donated the proceeds of both books to non-profit organizations that support the use of technology in education and skills development.

In addition to his love of computers and software, Gates founded Corbis, which is developing one of the world’s largest resources of visual information – a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. He is also a member of the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which invests in companies engaged in diverse business activities.

Philanthropy is also important to Gates. He and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $28.8 billion (as of January 2005) to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that in the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $3.6 billion to organizations working in global health; more than $2 billion to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $477 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $488 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns.

Gates was married on Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates. They have three children. Gates is an avid reader, and enjoys playing golf and bridge.

Source: Microsoft

So you believe that you are the only one who is getting that error screen? You’re not alone!

Wow! 39,161 Days And 10 Hours to copy a single file on Windows Vista! Microsoft! What exactly have you done to Vista?

Who has server access?

The crux of the problem in prior versions was access to configuration settings. In IIS 6 and prior, only administrators on the server could make configuration changes. Many of these configuration changes were commonly requested by developers working on web applications, especially in shared server environments where developers could not gain administrative access. In IIS 7 the server configuration is based on distributed XML files that contain the settings for not only IIS, but also ASP.Net and other components. Microsoft has done away with the Metabase in favor of a much more open system. In the same way web.config files in ASP.Net applications let developers set policies based on a hierarchy, developers now get the same function in IIS configuration and even leverage the same configuration files from ASP.Net configuration. These files include the machine.config, which handles overall .Net configuration; web.config, which can be set at many levels and mostly has to do with web site configurations; and applicationHost.config, which is where global web server settings for IIS 7 are located. It is with this last file where the real changes have occurred; most of the settings available through the IIS User Interface can be set directly though the applicationHost.config or even delegated to the local web.config via settings in the applicationHost.config.

While this may seem like a small feature, this means that a developer can be granted access to their own web.config file to make changes to the settings within IIS for their particular website. There is no need to allow the developer administrator authority over the entire server just so they can change a couple of configurations settings.

Custom Shared Hosting Systems

This change has major implications for shared hosting services. Traditionally, shared hosting servers have very few settings that can be modified for customers, and many of those settings cannot be modified directly by the customer. With the implementation of IIS 7, developers will be able to change the settings for their website without having to contact their hosting provider to make the change for them.

This can dramatically reduce the time and cost of developing new web applications. As an example, imagine a developer working on a website hosted on a shared hosting server. The code is throwing an error, and the developer feels that it can be corrected by a configuration change in IIS. In systems using IIS 6, the developer will need to contact the hosting company in order to make this change. Once the host makes the change and responds back, the developer can then test the application again. If the configuration change does not correct the error, or if further changes need to be made, the developer will need to contact the hosting company again and wait for the changes to be made.

As a web developer, it is important to look for anything that helps boost productivity. One potential boost would be to have access to the source code that makes up the .NET Framework libraries. Luckily for developers, this has arrived and has made Windows Server 2008 the platform of choice.

Back in October 2007, Scott Guthrie — the Microsoft Program Manager in charge of .Net — announced on his blog that Microsoft would be releasing the source code for many of the libraries in the .Net Framework. Among the libraries released are the base class libraries, the ADO.Net and XML libraries, Windows Forms, and ASP.net (which is of most interest to many developers). This is big news for developers because it helps streamline debugging and troubleshooting. When debugging, developers are much less likely to hit a "black box" in the form of an unreadable library from Microsoft.

The libraries that are being released are also included in Windows Server 2008 and are the most up to date available as of publication. They are even more up to date than the libraries that shipped with Visual Studio 2008.

The release of these libraries can be of great assistance to developers, especially when working on particularly complex projects. When .Net was first released there was no documentation on how to accomplish many tasks that developers knew were possible. This included many of the elements that were included with Visual Studio, like the drop shadow on menus. Before the release of the library source code, developers resorted to looking at the Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) to reverse engineer the proper calls and produce the desired effects. This was a successful — but a horribly draining — process because the MSIL is essentially an assembly language for .Net. If the source code for the .Net Framework had been available back then, developers could have simply browsed the code and found the correct calls and parameters. This would have reduced development time from weeks to days.

In addition to examining the source code to copy desired effects, developers can now debug the libraries from Microsoft. This means that if code is returning a strange error from the Framework (an all too common experience) developers can now examine the libraries themselves and see what the problem is, which will likely save a call to Microsoft Support!

Developers can even read the developer comments that Microsoft has left in the source libraries, which include some of the most helpful information available. There are explanations of why some elements work the way they do, and why some libraries are constructed in particular ways. Compatibility with previous versions is mentioned regularly, which often helps to make sense of changes that otherwise can frustrate developers.

The best information about these changes can be found in Scott Guthrie’s blog at: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu.

A quick search using the keyword "source" reveals several entries with details about how to utilize the source code in development environments. The blog also contains information on updates and new releases.