REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft Corp. is scheduled to stop selling its Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers Monday, despite protests from a slice of PC users who don't want to be forced into using XP's successor, Vista.

Once computers loaded with XP have been cleared from the inventory of PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., consumers who can't live without the old operating system on their new machine will have to buy Vista Ultimate or Vista Business and then legally "downgrade" to XP.

Microsoft will still allow smaller mom-and-pop PC builder shops to buy XP for resale through the end of January. A version of XP will also remain available for ultra-low-cost PCs such as the Asus Eee PC.

A group of vocal computer users who rallied around a "Save XP" petition posted on the industry news site InfoWorld had been clamoring for Microsoft to keep selling XP until its next operating system, Windows 7, is available. The software maker has said it expects to release Windows 7 sometime in 2009.

Last week, Microsoft said it would provide full technical support for six-year-old Windows XP through 2009, and limited support through 2014.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

The clouds, or 'Flogos', are made of soap and gases, such as helium, which allow them to fly off and retain their puffy texture.



'They will fly for miles,' said Francisco Guerra, the creator of the machine. 'They are durable so they last a while.'

They can fly up to 48km (30 miles) and go as high as 6km (four miles) but normally the little clouds level out at about 150m (500ft).

The clouds can be made in 60cm (2ft) or 90cm (3ft) sizes but a 1.8m (6ft) generator is in the pipeline.

The proto-clouds have also been cleared by the authorities of being a hazard to aeroplanes.

This is just for the residents of India. Go to this website and join the contest and you could win an AMD powered laptop.

Let the Grandmaster help you with this. It's fun and it's rewarding, quite literally. An AMD-powered laptop awaits the ones who clear this challenge.

A model displays the world's smallest, 7cm cubic, karaoke box for one person. Hi-Kara, manufactured by Takara Tomy Co., weighs 150 grams without battery and comes in two colors - white and pink.



It can be connected with another "Hi-kara" so you can enjoy duet. It has an estimated price of $97 and will be available on market this October 2008.

Oblation Run, protesting students greet UP centennial celebration

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Members of a fraternity at the University of the Philippines held their annual ritual of running naked on campus six months early on Wednesday — by official request — to celebrate the state-run school's centennial anniversary. Hundreds of cheering students lined the main campus avenue, jostling for positions with their digital and cell phone cameras.

The "Oblation Run" — named for the university's iconic symbol of a naked man with outstretched arms that symbolizes his selfless offering of himself to the nation — started in 1977 as a gimmick by the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity to promote the screening of a movie about oppressed plantation workers called "Naked Hero." The film had been banned by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Since then, the fraternity has used the stunt to make political statements, from raising AIDS awareness to demanding the resignation of the Philippine president, said Armand Padilla, a fraternity alumnus and organizer of the centennial run.

He said the university's centennial committee requested the fraternity stage the annual nude demonstration as one of the activities to mark the school's 100th foundation year.

The fraternity mustered 100 members and alumni — the largest number of naked runners ever — for the event, he said.

The naked runners, who wore golden masks and wrapped T-shirts around their heads to hide their identities, offered roses to scores of giggling female students who they took their pictures as they jogged about half a mile (1 kilometer) from the student center to the Oblation statue in front of the university's administration building.

A student, who identified herself only as Bang, praised the runners' grit.

"It is not just a show of bodies, but they even carry the principles on the placards they were holding," she said.

Several runners carried placards saying "Serve the People," a rallying call for students of the university, who are called "Scholars of the People" for the state subsidies to their education.

Here's a video of the said event, only here in my beloved country.

Can drinking coffee help you live longer? Some researchers say it's good for our health, some say it has side effects. Better watch this video:

An email sent to me by SpreadFirefox:

Don’t forget to be part of Firefox’s Download Day!

Mark your calendar, wrap a ribbon around your finger or write a little sticky yellow note. Download Day will start on June 17, 2008.

Anthony Lawson from Wilmington, North Carolina broke the world record for longest continuous karaoke-singing. The previous record is 38 hours and 30 minutes.


Lawson set up the singing challenge with his friend, a DJ. It began with Queen’s “We Are The Champions.” 39 hours and two minutes later, and with the allowance of water and regular bathroom breaks, Lawson officially became the champion of continuous karaoke-singing.

Though not breaking his goal of 40 hours, he is now the Karaoke King.

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc and Microsoft Corp ended talks as the Web pioneer agreed to let archrival Google Inc sell search ads on its site, the companies said on Thursday.

Yahoo said it had agreed to let Google put search ads on its site in what it called an $800 million annual revenue opportunity that would boost cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first 12 months.

Yahoo's ads and Google's would be pitted against each other in an auction style process that could make a deal easier to pass regulatory approval.

Full story: here

That is Wednesday in this country. Just click the Firefox logo on the right side of this blog. Here's the full info:

NEW YORK (AP) — A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.

There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what's already available on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.

Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in "phishing" scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.

The list of suspicious sites come from Google Inc. and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities.

Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off.

Firefox 3 also offers speed and design improvements — the back button is now larger than the forward button, for instance, because people tend to return to a previous page more often, said Mike Schroepfer, the project's vice president of engineering.

Firefox is the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla, an open-source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products.

Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Its supporters are organizing launch parties around the world next week, and Mozilla is trying to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

Microsoft is currently testing Internet Explorer 8, while Opera Software ASA released Opera 9.5 on Thursday.

Source: AP

The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term "plutoid" as a name for dwarf planets like Pluto. The IAU has been responsible for naming planetary bodies and their satellites since the early 1900s.

Here's the official new definition:

"Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit."

In short: small round things beyond Neptune that orbit the sun and have lots of rocky neighbors.

The two known and named plutoids are Pluto and Eris, the IAU stated. The organization expects more plutoids will be found.

Read More: Yahoo News

Check out this monster cooler. This is for those who wants extreme air cooling and those who wants to showcase their rig in those cool transparent case.



The Cooler Master V10 uses a rather unconventional design, features six heatpipes and two 120mm fans, one mounted vertically and the other horizontally. The horizontal fan is located above the memory slots to provide additional memory cooling.

Look how big it is when mounted on a motherboard!

What a busy month for me. Classes just opened yesterday which marks the end of long vacation for students here in my beloved country.

To start with, I'm posting a tip on my blog. Starting today, you will see "TnT" as a prefix to all my title post for Tips n Tricks. It doesn't mean "tawa ng tawa" in my own native language.

Let's get started. This tip will open multiple homepage. Most users use a single homepage which appear when they load their browser. What if you are like me who at the start of the day browse my favorite site which is more than 5? So instead of typing the site's address or clicking the bookmarks one-by-one, why not just set those site as your homepage? Everytime you open Firefox, it will load those site automatically.

Here's how to do it:

First, load Firefox. Then click the Tools menu and select Options. See figure below.

The Options window will appear.

Then on the Home Page text box, just type the list of sites you want to load, separate it with a vertical bar or the (|) pipe character. For example, I want my blog, spreadfirefox and blogger to load, I will just type:

http://pinoypureview.blogspot.com|http://www.spreadfirefox.com|http://www.blogger.com

That's it. Everytime you load Firefox or open a new window, those site will automatically load.

How hot are the high-end video cards today? A humorous video on Youtube shows a GeForce 9800 GX2 Graphics Card was able to fry an egg.


I guess it's hotter than an Athlon XP (link here) because the egg was cooked so quickly.

Just enjoy the show, and maybe next time a bacon will be on their testbed. :)