When Zotob infects a computer, it attempts to deliver a malicious file, which is named differently depending on the variant that has infected the computer. If your computer has been infected, this file will be present and your registry will show changes. Use any of the following methods to check for infection. (If you find the file, you do not need to check the registry, and vice versa.)

Learn More about the Malicious File

So many times I get the question about putting a large disk in a windows box that is not seen as the proper size. Whether it is windows 2000 or XP we can point you to the proper page at MS but after that you are on your own. If you are terrified by regkey edits call someone who can do this for you.

XP   http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

Sterling Energy Systems announced an agreement with Southern California Edison on Thursday to build a solar power facility capable of generating 500 megawatts of power. It will be installed over 4,500 acres in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles.

The system calls for the installation of the company's 37-foot-high dishes which reflect sun into a tube of a Sterling engine where hydrogen is kept. The heat from the sun is focused on hydrogen, which expands and creates enough pressure to turn a piston and crank shaft.

Sterling Energy Systems is testing another installation with Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. The Deal.com reports more on the people and business model behind the Phoenix-based start-up.

More commonly used solar installations use photovoltaic cells to convert the sun's energy to electricity.

Meanwhile, FedEx turned the switch on a large solar installation in Oakland, California last week. According to an article in RenewableEnergyAccess.com, the FedEx-owned installation will 904 kilowatts of electricity and be the largest corporate-owned solar installation in California.

Apple executives insisted that Mac OS X would only run on x86 chips used in Apple-developed hardware. Intel PCs distributed to Apple developers with the x86 version of Mac OS X used a security chip to prevent developers from copying Mac OS to other Intel PCs, according to several reports this week from Mac enthusiast sites.

However, several enterprising hackers have figured out ways to bypass the security chip and run the developer's version of MacOS for x86 on any x86-based PC, according to a posting on the Web page of The OSx86 Project. Posters on that site, as well as other sites within the Mac community, claim to have used the instructions to run Mac OS X on their Intel or AMD PCs, with some posting pictures and videos of x86 PCs booting Mac OS X.

The process requires a copy of Mac OS X version 4 (Tiger), VMware's virtualization software, the PearPC emulator that can run operating systems written for PowerPC on any architecture, Apple's Darwin 8.0.1 software, an x86 processor that supports SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2), and two files created by an independent developer that can be downloaded using the BitTorrent file-sharing system.

As of Friday afternoon, detailed instructions were available in a wiki created by The OSx86 Project. Another site had posted instructions for installing Mac OS X without using VMware's software.

Simply the most different cooler design seen to date. "More Details" from Tom's   More details "Digital Daily"

A structure like that is already a good radiator which can be successfully used for passive cooling of a low power-consumption processor (e.g. I used Athlon 64 266x4 (Winchester core) with the Cool'n'Quiet enabled, at Vcore = ~1.0V). Very few users would dare for an experiment like that, so most are more interested in the nominal operation mode of StarIce cooler.

Officials at Sunbelt Software, a Clearwater, Fla.-based vendor of antispyware tools, said the company stumbled upon a massive ID theft ring that is using a well-known spyware program to break into and systematically steal confidential information from an unknown number of computers worldwide.

The operation was discovered yesterday during research Sunbelt was doing on a spyware program belonging to a particularly dangerous class of browser hijacking tools called CoolWebSearch (CWS), according to Sunbelt's president, Alex Eckelberry.

CWS programs are extremely hard to detect and remove, and are used to redirect users to Web sites that use spyware tools to collect a variety of information from infected computers.

The CWS variant being researched by Sunbelt turned infected systems into spam zombies and uploaded a wide variety of personal information to a remote server apparently located in the U.S. That server holds a "treasure trove of information" for ID thieves, Eckelberry said.

Sunbelt's research showed that the information being uploaded to the remote server included chat sessions, user names, passwords and bank information, he said. The bank information included details on one company bank account with more than $350,000 in deposits and another belonging to a small California company with over $11,000 in readily accessible cash, he said.

Full Article here |  Removing and detecting

101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005

101 Samples, in both Visual Basic and C#, featuring many of the new features available with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. For more samples using Visual Studio 2003 .NET, see this download.

Download all 101 Samples: C# Version   |   VB Version

These samples have been written and tested with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005

MS Page Here

While Spammers might anger you and frustrate, with the daily barrage of endless garbage. We seriously doubt that murder is the right answer to the problem. In Russia though, it appears to be the answer. The image was the product of a contest urging Russians to kill the spammer in question.

Russia’s most (in)famous spammer, Vardan Kushnir, 35, was dead in his apartment in downtown Moscow on Monday, July 25. Someone repeatedly smashed his head with a heavy object, authorities say, and then ransacked his entire apartment. The authorities have obviously got no clue as to who that someone might have been.

And, as a matter of fact, they don’t seem to really care: every day between 10 and 20 people meet a violent death in Russia’s capital, and a significant part of those crimes remains unsolved (Russia’s Interior Ministry reports 1,935 unsolved murders, 73,000 burglaries and 11,400 robberies between January and May in this year alone). There is no reason for Moscow’s law enforcement officials to give Kushnir’s case any special treatment, so they most probably won’t. But the Moscow-based media is awash with comments and speculations, expounding one simple, albeit largely irrational, theory: someone (ranging from God almighty to an irate IT office worker) finally punished Vardan Kushnir for his seemingly unstoppable spamming activities.

Full Article

Frustrated with all the tag differences with XHTML and do not want to trace all the differences. This little app costs nothing and will help you quickly find the errors.

Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

Get it here

Easy Outlook Express Repair is a utility for restoring damaged folders in Outlook Express. If Outlook Express cannot find your messages in its folders, you can use Easy Outlook Express Repair to get your messages back as well as to recover the damaged Outlook Express folders.
     If Outlook Express data files (dbx files) are somehow damaged and you cannot use Outlook Express to view the messages stored in its folders, Easy Outlook Express Repair will help you to extract messages from the damaged folders and save them to the disk. The saved messages can be viewed in Outlook Express and/or imported to any other mail client. Using the program does not require any special skills. You will recover your lost messages just in 2 steps.

More Details

Apple Computer Inc.'s neglect of the humble mouse is over. It now offers a model that's nimble.

Apple introduced on Tuesday its first computer mouse with multiple buttons, including four sensors and a tiny scroll ball. Although a departure from the company's traditional mouse, the "Mighty Mouse" looks very similar to the single-button model Apple has long produced.

The most obvious difference is the relatively tiny scroll ball at the mouse's head, which can move cursors diagonally as well as up and down across display screens and can be pressed to "click" functions.

Find out More

  Mozilla Foundation has set up a commercial subsidiary to cash in on the Firefox browser.

The open-source group on Wednesday announced a major reorganization that includes the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit subsidiary to ride the Firefox gravy train.

Mozilla Corp., which will operate out of the Foundation's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, has been set up as a wholly owned commercial subsidiary to generate revenues to support development, testing, and productization of the various Mozilla open-source technologies.

"The broad adoption of Mozilla Firefox has created significant economic value both in Firefox itself and in a commercial ecosystem that is developing around Firefox," Mozilla said in a statement.

Mitchell Baker, who has served for the past two years as "chief lizard wrangler" at the Mozilla Foundation, will assume the title of president of Mozilla Corp. All 36 employees at the Foundation will immediately move over to the Corporation.

Brendan Eich, a co-founder and longtime technical leader of the Mozilla project, is now the chief technical officer of the new corporation, while the board of directors will remain the same except for the addition of Reid Hoffman, chief executive of social networking service LinkedIn Corp.

"[The] purpose is not to generate a return on investment in the financial sense. It is not an investment vehicle or an IPO candidate. It is completely owned by the Mozilla Foundation," Baker said in a blog entry detailing the reasons for the reorganization.

The CodeHound Visual Studio .NET Add-In is designed to make life easier for developers who use Visual Studio .NET. With this free tool, you can search hundreds of Web sites and millions of newsgroup posts without leaving the VS.NET IDE!
 
Our VS.NET Add-In automatically detects which language you're using, whether it's Visual Basic .NET or C#, and directs you to the appropriate search engine. Simply highlight a word or phrase in your code, right click, and select Search CodeHound. Your default Web browser will launch with your search results instantly!

 Download our new Visual Studio .NET Add-In!

As you convert your ASP.NET 1.x applications to the new ASP.NET 2.0 framework, you may encounter issues related to the changes introduced by the 2.0 framework. In this article, we will look at both the conversion process and some of the common issues you may encounter during a conversion.

What Is ASP.NET 2.0?

ASP.NET 2.0 is a major update of the ASP.NET 1.x framework. Not only does ASP.NET 2.0 introduce many new features, it also fundamentally changes the way that an ASP.NET application is designed, compiled, and deployed. Although your ASP.NET 1.1 applications will run on ASP.NET 2.0 without recompiling, you will find that upgrading to use the new ASP.NET 2.0 features both simplifies your development and gives you more options for compiling and deploying your code. If you aren't familiar with ASP.NET 2.0, or the benefits of upgrading, please read Migrating from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0.

With specific regard to upgrading an application, you will need to be aware of operational issues that affect how an application is compiled and deployed. You will also need to be aware of how new coding features affect your conversion and also give you opportunities to improve your application.

Don't have the money for MS Office?  Want a free alternative?

OpenOffice.org is both a multi-platform and multi-lingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. To help build the community, join us. We have downloaded and tested both v1.1.4 and v1.9+beta both worked nicely. The 1.9 version is a build up to v2.0 and it is a great free alternative. Works on any PC platform and MAC.

Download

• The stable version (1.1.4)
• The beta version (1.9+)
• Order a CD-ROM