Microsoft,Yahoo! Change Search Landscape
Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers
For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.
The key terms of the agreement are as follows:
- The term of the agreement is 10 years;
- Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
- Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
- Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
- Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
- Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
- Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
- Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.
- Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
- Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.
- At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.
The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.
For more Information.visit their official new site Choise Value Innovation
Restore a firefox profile backup
The first thing you need in this tutorial is a firefox add on called FEBE
(Firefox Environment Backup Extension)
There was a post about this addon and you can find it here
There is no problem in making a backup for the whole profile. the problem was in restoring it. i tried to restore it but there were some troubles that i could finally find a solution for them. i had to create a new profile to restore that backup to it and here are the steps to create one
- Close all running firefox instances.
- start?run? firefox -p , you should see something like that
- create a new profile. i don’t think there will be any troubles with this step
- start firefox after choosing the first profile (it is the one that have FEBE installed)
- When firefox starts go to tools ?FEBE?Restore?Restore profile
- Browse your pre backed up profile and then choose the new profile you created , by default (if you didn’t change it , it is called Default user. continue with it and close firefox
- Now again go to Start ? run ? firefox -p
- Choose the profile you created a min ago and start firefox
- Enjoy using your profile again
- say your opinion about this post
SpaceSniffer – Find What Takes Your Disk Space
When you buy a new pc, everything is fine and there is ample space in your C drive and all other drives. Give some time and a lot of disk use and you will have warnings and slow disk access speeds due to the reason that the disks are getting full and the space is clogged up.
So finally one good day you want to clean the unnecessary stuff or burn/transfer them to secondary storage devices such as optical drives or portable hard drives. So how do you find out what takes the lost space? Well this is where SpaceSniffer comes to the picture. It’s a small portable application which scans the whole disk and shows the disk layout in a tree type visualization. Its quite hard to really visualize every folder that takes up the space of the disk, but this software has done a great job in generating a visual output of how each and every folder takes the space (see screenshot below). Also you can click on the green star to include or exclude the remaining free space on the map. This software is small and very easy to use, and is bundled with a amazing list of features and most of all its FREE.
Mozilla ready to work on Firefox 3.7: New Features, New Design
Firefox 3.5 was released several weeks ago adding lots of new features(and bugs) to it. It hasn’t been a month after the 3.5 release and Mozilla is already getting ready for Firefox 3.5’s successor, Firefox 3.7. The first mockup images of version 3.7 was added to the Mozilla wiki 1 day ago and these images show a totally revamped user interface as several features. Now as these are images of the initial stages so we cannot be sure what will end up in the final version. Good news is that Mozilla will be gathering user feedback on the design as they used to do with their earlier versions.
Here are some screenshots of the mockup 3.7, and descriptions of the features stated in the wiki
- Embracing Glass: Toolbar and Tabs using Glass. Buttons translucent and slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar. Raised 3D lookachieve tactile "feel".
- Page Button: Connect the Page button to the left side of the tab area. Directly connected to the Page.
- Tools/Bookmark Bar: Connecting the Tools button to the side of the Window to emphasize the fact that it is used for customizing and changing the UI. Adding a button next to that to toggle the Bookmarks Bar which is turned off by default.
Home page never changed
Alot of applications change the home page of the browser when they are installed.i can mention that some change the home page to ask.com or yahoo.com….
It is so annoying that you have to restore the home page again everytime one of these programs change it. now i don’t have to restore it anymore cuz it won’t be changed anymore 
i found this way that will make the home page never changed
Firefox About Commands List
Firefox has a lof of configaration options using “about:” clause but we generally don’t use it, So here is a list of commands to pass your time 
about:
Just type the above clause and you will see general info about Firefox.
about:mozilla
Pretty scary, try it for yourselves.
about:blank
This as we all know it, shows a blank page.
about:config
This shows the main Firefox configuration.
about:cache
This shows the cache info & stats, and allows you to browse your cache files.
about:credits
This shows all the people who contributed towards Firefox development.
about:plugins
This shows info about all the plugins installed on Firefox.
about:buildconfig
This shows info about the particular Firefox build, that is if you wanna know.
about:robots
This is the funniest, check this out.
—Edit (thanks to blacknoise)—
about:sessionrestore
This is useful for manually restoring your sessions.
about:certerror
This is the window which is displayed to the user when there is a certificate mismatch occurs (if you see this screen, then thats probably a good idea to get out of that site asap).
about:privatebrowsing
This is useful to start private browsing mode.
resource:
Shows the directory structure of the Firefox installation.
This is all that I know, if you know any, I will be happy to add them to this list, please let me know in your comments below
Personas For Firefox – Dress Up Your Browser
You do not wear the same clothes everyday, why should your favorite browser? Personas for Firefox brings in the ultimate personalization feeling to Firefox. Forget themes, personal is a whole new world of personalization and fun.
Personas are basically header and footer images for Firefox 3.5.x and you can select a persona and let you browser wear it as long as you like. These personas are loaded when the browser goes online. And there is a huge gallery of personas to choose from.
Simply Install the Firefox Personas Extensions and you are set to go, Well what if you do not like the Personas you see? No worries the brilliant Mozilla team has that covered too, if you are good in Photoshop or any other graphic designing suite, then you can create your own Persona for your browser, how cool is that, and if you like to share it with friends, you can upload your custom Persona to the gallery. Enough talking, its better you try your own Persona for your browser.
Get Firefox Personas Extension
Note: These Personas will ONLY work with the Personas Extension.
Critical security flaw found in Firefox 3.5
*******************UPDATE*******************
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.1. Go to www.getfirefox.com or update your current version
********************************************
Mozilla confirmed a critical security vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution. This vulnerability was found by MilwOrm. According to Mozilla a security patch will be released soon. The exploit is related to Firefox TraceMonkey JavaScript optimizer. Until there is an update for Firefox this issue can be fixed by disabling the optimizer.
To do this type in about:config in the locationbar and type in
javascript.options.jit.content and set its property to false. (you can do this by double clicking it)
Note: The above setting disables the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and will reduce performance of Firefox 3.5
Windows 7:Enable the Built-in Administrator Account
Windows 7 comes with a built-in administrator account, this was also the same in Vista. The advantage of the administrator account is that it has full access and permission on the computer. This account is named Administrator and disabled by default.
Here’s how you enable it
1. Open a command prompt with admin privileges (also knows as an elevated command prompt)
2. Type net user administrator /active:yes to enable the account.
You can change it to net user administrator /active:no to disable the account.
You can also enable the Administrator account using the Local Users and Groups Manager (lusrmgr.msc)
VLC media player 1.0.0
![fullscreen_1[1]](http://dotnetwizard.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/fullscreen_11.jpg "fullscreen_1[1]")
VLC Player 1.0.0 is out of beta. This final version fixes lots of bugs and adds some new features and high definition codecs making it the best player that can play videos without requiring 3rd party codecs.
The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestrial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-platform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavors, all BSD flavors, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux. VideoLAN is free software, and is released under the GNU General Public License. It started as a student project at the French École Centrale Paris but is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries.
