I was discussing today about the changes Yahoo! share prices went through during its bid war with Microsoft and there wasn’t much discussion about that in blogosphere. What kept people silent in those moments and what could had happened, had it been discussed at that crucial time!

Here is the graph and from it, even a novice in share market can figure out about the period when bid happened -

(directly taken from Google Finance)

It pays to be at higher place and still getting a bidder from someone a level higher…Yahoo! cashed it very well.

As shown in last keynote from Bill Gates at CES 2008 -

Keynote - Bill Gates’ Last Day - January 6, 2008

Interesting enough…at least for those folks who enjoy those funny Apple advertisements cracking jokes at Microsoft Chairman!

Microsoft and Nokia have teamed up for bringing Windows Live services to Nokia S60 devices which include Nokia N73, N80i, N95, N76 and the N93i. These services include following -

• Windows Live Hotmail
• Messenger
• Contacts
• Space

Good to see that Microsoft is opening up to other platforms.

These services are being rolled out on trial basis which will cost 2 euros a month, later.

New Hotmail allows to send photos and videos taken by camera to be set as attachment with mails. This service will be available in 11 countries initially - Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, U.K., Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (unable to figure out any pattern).

Here are screen-shots from Phil Holden’s writeup on deal who is Director in online services at Microsoft -

If you are also facing same problem as I have been facing while trying to register custom DLL files in Vista as whenever I issued following command -

REGSVR32 C:\xxx.dll?

I have a turn around for that. I received error regarding User Access Control.

Even when you try to run any executable file in Vista, every time it asks you to confirm if you want to run that program or not as if it doesn’t believe that you are the one who tried to open that program.

If you think that you can manage it enough by yourself, you can go for disabling this prompt as I did. For that you will need to go to Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Safety > User Accounts and there click Turn User Account Control on or off. Unselect Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer option and click OK. That’s it. Now try to register your DLLs and you would be able to do that without any hiccups.

Also there is shortcut method to do that from command line -

Disable UAC:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe

ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Enable UAC:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe

ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Reboot your system and you are done.

And if you are getting this error while registering your DLLs -

The module REGSVR32 “C:\Program Files\xxx.dll? failed to load.

Make sure the binary is stored at the specified path or debug it to check for problems with the binary or dependent .DLL files.

The specified module couldn’t be found.

.

(I don’t know why that extra dot in the end - may be UI bug from Vista team!) 

It means you are not giving proper path. Try to correct the path for your DLL and you will be able to register it.

These are the changes that I have come across while playing with Windows Vista - the latest version of Windows from Microsoft. of course, it isn’t the complete list but the one I noticed.

Some of them are good whereas others are annoying to me and I don’t know what made Microsoft to make them!

• The interface is very much glossy and attractive.
• Search functionality is just at its best and I hadn’t expected to be more faster when you are provided with such good organized result display - I don’t think Google Desktop is required anymore for desktop search when gadgets are also included along-with Vista. Microsoft definitely learns a lot from competition and Google leaves things un-patented at places .
• Alt + Enter doesn’t work anymore for the folder selected in left pane of Windows Explorer (it works in same old way for the ones selected in right pane)
• Skip and option to repeat action for all the files as check box is a nice change.
• If you just navigate in Windows Explorer using keyboard, selected folder isn’t opened automatically as and when it is selected with key but when enter / return key is pressed.

So far I am loving exploring this OS as I came across a quote recently and it sounded quite true -

Today or Tomorrow, you have to switch to Windows Vista, then Why Not Now.

Updates:

It also added proper Hindi font support oterwise you might have noticed the misalignment of fonts in different browsers because of ambiguous Unicode support. E.G. My Firefox browser never displayed Hindi Fonts correctly over Windows XP but same version of browser is displaying them rightly over Vista. And now I can easily read/write Hindi in browser - ????? ????!