Darren Straight's Blog

Happy Birthday Bill Gates, wish you all the best now that your 50!

This weekend saw Mr Bill Gates turn the magic age of 50, half a century. It has been quite a year for Bill and birthdays, with his own Microsoft turning 30 this year. While people have their mixed views on Gates, its safe to say one thing about him, without him Neowin wouldn’t be around today. So here is a quick look back at Bill Gates, and a quick Happy Birthday to him.

William H Gates was born on Oct 28th 1955, in Seattle. He attended the private lakeside school where he discovered his interest in computers and programming at the age of just 13. Selling his first project for the mere sum of $4,000 he went on to University at Harvard, where he later left, to devote his time to Microsoft. Since then Microsoft have amassed a large fortune, and have strived to become world leaders in every market they enter. When Bill isn’t buying rare pieces of artwork, he is signing cheques to charity, $750million last year going towards vaccines in Africa.

So what’s next for Bill? After all, at 50 its not likely that he is about to retire, chances are that he will continue to be at the forefront of Microsoft’s next OS, Windows Vista, and after that, who knows, the sky’s the limit. So happy birthday Bill, here’s to many more happy years.

Source

I’ve once again been invited to another global community site were each user has their own hompage where the can share with trusted people their photos and storys, so why not sign up now and give it a go!

iAlmond is the official name of this website, which means ¡°Towards the World¡± in Esperanto.

At iAlmond, each member updates photos and journals on his or her personal homepage (called iHome) and enjoys them with friends & family.

iAlmond symbolizes a global community where trusted people share their values and exhibit their uniqueness.

Sign up now!

Steve Bennet from the Messenger Support team as now given out his 5 MSN Messenger Wave 8.0 Invitations to 5 lucky people, unfortunately one of them wasn’t me, but there’s bound to me more chances on the way so I wont give up, congratulations to those of you who did win, if you are one of them reading my Blog Article I would love to hear your personal opinion on it without revealing too much, thanks.

Well done to everyone who got the question right. The invitations have winged-their-way to the 5 winners who answered correctly and the fastest. Enjoy the Beta testing program; and to those who didnt win hard luck. Better luck next time.

__________

Oh, and congratulations to the 1,000 contacts who have won themselves a Creative Zen Micro for doing nothing. More competitions soon though, so keep coming back for more.

Steve

Steve Bennet’s Msn Space

I found this posted over at Digg.com and found it to be quite interesting, there’s not much else I can say about it so go and check it out

Digg Post
Link to Page
Another interesting web clock idea

Wooow this is great, watch how 10,000 balls bounce down a hilly San Francisco street and by the way no it’s not computer generated, it’s actually real!

Link to advert.

Yep that’s right Blog comment spam attacks, I cam in from work yesterday and found that I had 50 new Blog comments to moderate, this is a huge amount of comments to moderate considering I normally only get a couple a day, anyway I marked them all as spam as I noticed that all the comments were linking to various casino and sex sites that I didn’t want in my comments, the ip’s were all different and so were the names and emails so I’m guessing that they were using a spam bot, here’s an example of one of the comments:

Author : Charles Baumann

Your site is exactly the kind of sites which make the net surfing so fun. It’s impossible to experience one’s death: http://www.aphids.com/cgi-bin/quotes.pl?act=ShowListingsForSub , we elected them , By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail

Anyway I thought that would be the end of it but it wasn’t I arrived home today to find that I had 20 more to mark as spam so I thought to my self ok something has to been done and that’s what I have done, I done a quick search on the internet and found some pages about how to deal with blog comment spam and what plugins were best, I have chosen Akismet a WordPress Plugin that apparently is one of the best had handle spam like this so I guess I will have to wait and see what happens in the next following days.

Here are some of the sites I found:

Akismet Website
Plugins/Spam Tools
Combating Comment Spam

Well this isn’t new news but I wanted to bring this topic up again as I never did get a reply from prima which makes me very angry has a lot of people worldwide really wanted this guide and they ruined it for them!

Here’s some interesting links you may want to check out!

Prima Game Thread
My HL2World.com Post
Don’t Cancel Mod Makers Guide peticion
A recent HL2world.com post about it the guide!

I have just been invited by a friend to test a new social networking site out called Multiply, just looking at it now, its not that bad but I’ll have too look around more to get the full feeling of what it has.

What it is
Multiply is a web site that makes it easy to share photos, blogs, videos, music, and other kinds of digital content with your friends and family.

How it works
Just add your contacts and they’ll add their contacts, and so on. Multiply keeps track of who knows whom in your social network, and this allows us to automatically notify these people when you add new stuff to your home page.

Why it’s better
Each time you add something, we create a thread on your own personal message board and give access to the people you choose. With Multiply you get a built-in audience of people ready to give you feedback and turn your content into lively discussions. You’ve never been able to simultaneously communicate with everyone in your life in this way — and Multiply makes it easy!

What you get

• Your own web site – to post a blog, photos, video, music, reviews of movies and restaurants, classified listings and more.
• Unlimited storage space for your digital content
• A personal URL on its own domain – http://YOURNAME.multiply.com
• 10 free digital prints! (for a limited time)
• All free with sign-up!

Truly a great piece of software, I recommend you test it out to see the results for yourself.

Thank you for participating in the Data Protection Manager beta program! The final version of Data Protection Manager is now available! The evaluation version can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/dpm/evaluation/trial.mspx

As the latest member of the Windows Server System family, Microsoft® System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is a server software application that is designed from the ground up to optimize disk-based backup and recovery. Backing up data to disk provides the fastest way to recover data lost to user error or software and hardware corruption. With Data Protection Manager, recovering information is as simple as browsing a share and copying directly from the Data Protection Manager to the production server.

Data Protection Manager provides several unique capabilities:

Rapid & Reliable Recovery- DPM enables IT administrators and end users to recover data in minutes instead of hours it takes to recover from tapes.
Efficient & Near Continuous Protection- DPM utilizes efficient byte level replication to deliver faster back up and less potential data loss.
Operational Simplicity- DPM lowers the total cost of your data protection environment by improving the efficiency of your operations.

Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast has been Released, this is what I have been waiting ages for and it’s finally here, but there’s just one problem, I’m still upset over Valve and why I haven’t got any reply from “webmaster@steampowered.com” has to why my ISP IP is banned from the Steam Forums, I sent an email last night to Gabe Newell has you can see from my last blog post so hopefully he will read the email soon and the problem will be resolved, I’m sure there’s a logical explanation to why they didn’t get my emails maybe I should be a little harsh on them considering all what they have done so far for the half-Life Community, hey I’ll tell you what as Valve have gone to a lot of hard work to make The Lost Coast available, I’m going to download and play it, this will be the first time I’ve played anything Valve related in 2 months so I hope it’s worth it.

Valve I hope you reply to my email soon, thanks!

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is now available for play for all Half-Life 2 owners.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, a single-player level custom-created to showcase High-Dynamic Range lighting (HDR) in the Source engine, is available now to all owners of HL2. As a technology showcase, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast’s system requirements are very high. During installation, Steam will prompt you if your system does not meet the recommended configuration. We hope you enjoy it.

HL2world.com post