http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j3mzqth1SjhbQvSffPO8HLVg3pIA

Sun Microsystems Inc. will begin building servers with Windows preinstalled.

The agreement announced Wednesday is the latest twist in a truce the companies, once bitter rivals, hammered out in 2004, when Sun pocketed $1.95 billion in a settlement payout from Microsoft over antitrust and patent allegations, and both companies vowed to make their products work better together.

Sun will begin incorporating Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 software into its so-called x64 servers, which are corporate computers that run on 64-bit microprocessors from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Servers are the computers in corporate data centers that process large amounts of data such as Internet traffic or financial calculations.

The companies said in a joint statement that Sun’s machines with Windows pre-installed will be available within 90 days.

Although Sun customers have been able to run Microsoft’s operating system on Sun servers for several years, Sun would not install it in the factory. That left customers who wanted Windows in the lurch unless they wanted to install in on their own or already had licensing contracts with Microsoft, in which case Sun would install it.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, stands to gain from the agreement because of Sun’s reach in the server world. Sun is the world’s No. 3 server seller with 13 percent of the worldwide market, behind IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co., according to the latest data from market researcher IDC.

The agreement includes a nod from Sun and Microsoft to the momentum surrounding so-called virtualization technology, which allows computers to run more than one operating system, saving hardware and electricity costs while boosting the performance of giant, energy-sapping machines.

Sun and Microsoft vowed to make sure their respective operating systems worked well with one another’s virtualization technologies, a commitment that could help both companies prosper from the trend toward data center consolidation and urgent efforts by technology managers to reduce energy costs.

The further embrace of Microsoft highlights Sun’s attempts to shed its image as that of a quarrelsome startup that in the late 1990s was eager to pick public fights with big rivals. Instead, Sun is becoming a more restrained and inclusive company willing to forge alliances, including the announcement last month of a partnership with longtime rival IBM Corp. that will allow Sun’s Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers.

It’s a crucial element of Sun’s turnaround strategy, and a formula that Sun management said is necessary to ensure the company’s long-term financial success.

Two things to note in this posting, Google is hosting the content from the news source. The other is Virtualization of Solaris on Windows and vice versa. This is great. Anyone who has tried running any form of linux or unix in Windows Virtual Server or Virtual PC knows that it is far from ideal.

I had made a page consisting of 3 frames to display the time in 3 countries on one page.

http://mnathani.com/time/

This was really easy to do, using google’s time search operator. This feature has now been removed without word from Google as to why or if it will be coming back.

Google recently introduced this really cool Lookup Function which allows you to enter in data without having to look it up yourself. A simple example could be the birth date of a famous person which would be easy to find online, but you could do it automatically within the spreadsheet. Really useful when you have a list of people you want to compile data on.

Google does restrict this function to being used 1000 times per spreadsheet. Rightly so in my opinion to reduce load on their servers.

An example query to get the birth date of president Bush:

=googlelookup(”George W Bush”,”date of birth”)

Define:segway

Google reader is great. Dont get me wrong, but the number of feeds I have is expanding daily and the archives maintained in the history make it very easy to lose a certain item just when I need to find it. Google : search is part of your core business, so why has it been left out from google reader? Search has reached a certain point that it is being taken for granted.

It is easier to type something into a search engine, the search fuction built into an operating system, if you use gmail for email, you use that anytime you want to find that appointment, phone number, detail, or whatever useful information you knew you had but didnt know where. But that DID NOT matter. Instant search provides the answer within seconds, regardless how old the information is that you are looking for.

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Microsoft it seems is very keen on purchasing Yahoo. If this does happen, the search engine war becomes less competetive as only Google and Microsoft will remain. Will taking Yahoo over improve the overall image of Microsoft? Will the Yahoo division benefit from the resources at Microsoft? Will people flock to Google, with their increasing number of services and free products?

It somehow reminds me of several AT &T mergers which ate up many other companies to leave a huge monopolistic single corporation. Will Yahoo lose its coolness factor by being associated with Flickr? Will services such as del.icio.us survive? Or will they get rebranded with Microsoft Internet Bookmarks or something like that. Will Flickr still remain free and unlimited for pro users? Will the subscription rate increase? Will people start using the combined Search engine? Will Yahoo still maintain its full portal style webpage or move to more like google.com or live.com’s style of simple search bar with a few buttons here and there.

What kind of benefits can we expect from this purchase? Will some cool and new web applications come out of this? Can this be good for the industry to give google some real competition?

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Today I was trying some advanced google queries to see if the recent changes to this blog had made their way into the google search results. Some of the queries involved advanced search operators, as described in this url. Simple stuff really, a few inurl: mixed with a few keywords, coupled with 100 results (the maximum available from google at a time). Lo and behold, I was presented with the following error message:

Google

Error

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

Granted, the queries I was performing were probably pretty rare, and perhaps a tiny bit more cpu intensive on their servers, compared to regular queries. But I never expected to be given a download link for an antivirus. I am running Firefox, have current anti virus and regularly scan my system for viruses. Not to mention that the few queries I was doing were manual and not some bot doing repetitive queries. I am curious if anyone else has come across such error messages from Google.

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Ever want to know what website was on a certain ip address or websites (in the case of shared hosting)?

The following search operator is very useful as it returns websites running on the same ip address.

This is definately one feature provided my Microsoft Live Search that Google does not provide.

It is simply ip:123.32.123.123 where 123.32.123.123 is the ip where you want to find other websites being hosted.

Here is a query (ip:4.79.226.104) run on the ip address for www.howstuffworks.com, you can see over 1000 other sites on the same ip address.

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