Earlier this evening Bill Gates gave his final Microsoft keynote at the 2008 CES show in Las Vegas. Throughout the keynote he made many references to what he will do with his free time once he retires from day to day operations at Microsoft. It turns out Bill has big plans in addition to his foundation after all. The cameos were top notch.

I would have never thought of this. Bed Jump is a site were people can share pictures of themselves jumping on hotel beds. The photos are usually in mid-air and some are quite funny. I think I got to the fourth page before I made myself stop.

I needed to generate an MD5 hash the other day, so I tried to find the best offering for Vista x64. I found Hash Tab which just might be the coolest thing ever (as the author claims). When you right-click a file and select it's properties, it creates a new tab that shows the files various file hashes including CRC32, HAVAL, MD5, RIPEMD-128, RIPEMD-256, RIPEMD-320, SHA-1, SHA-512, Tiger, and Whirlpool. It works perfectly on my Vista x64 box and I would recommend it to all.

Updated review here >>> VMware vs. VirtualBox Part 2

VMmare and VirtualBox are both virtual machine software suites for x86 and x64 computers. They allow you to run a "virtual" or guest operating system (OS) inside your main (host) OS. For example you could run Debian Linux as your main OS while running a complete version of Vista in a separate window on your desktop. Additionally, the guest system can comprise of different hardware. You could create three virtual hard drives and two optical drives on your virtual computer. Currently, the top three offerings in the virtual machine market are VMware, Virtual PC, and VirtualBox. I used to use Virtual PC, but felt it went downhill fast after Microsoft acquired the technology in 2003. At that point, I switched to VMware 5 and haven't looked back until today.

Vista4Experts allows savvy Vista users to quickly disable some annoying features. 

MyFoxDC reports from Germantown, MD. A little girl thought she was getting an iPod for Christmas but ended up getting a rude surprise. She got the box but when she opened it up, she found a surprising switch: the iPod had been replaced with a bizarre note.

Jay Ellis, the girls father, returned the ipod to the Germantown, Md. Wal-Mart store where he purchased it. The store manger told him that another customer returned an iPod with a similar issue.

UltraEdit is the best text editor that I know of. It provides the ability to integrate with Windows Explorer under Advanced / Configuration / File Associations; but even the latest version 13.20a doesn't add itself to Vista x64's Windows Explorer.

Earlier this year, the entire country of Estonia was hit with a paralyzing attack on its Internet infrastructure that shut down the websites of government ministries, news organizations and major banks. These botnets seem to be making more headlines.

The first dating service to use lab-based genetic profiling launched online last week. Scientific Match promises to pair up people who will be physically attracted to each other because their DNA is different.

Well-matched couples will like each others’ natural scents, have more fun in bed, and bear healthier children than those who are genetically similar, the company claims.

The service, available only in the Boston area, charges $1,995 for a year-long subscription.

"I strongly believe this will dominate the future of dating services," said founder Eric Holzle, a mechanical engineer.

Members swab their cheeks and send in saliva samples. A lab spends two weeks analyzing the immune system genes, and then the company matches individuals with genetic profiles that are unalike.

"We look at six specific genetic reference points on DNA, and none of those six can match to make a match," Holzle explained.

He was inspired by a well-known sweaty T-shirt study of a dozen years ago, in which biologists found that women liked the smell of dirty shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to themselves.

Uniblue ProcessLibrary.com, might aid you in identifying an unknown Windows process. They offer a searchable index of common processes, identifying them by the manufacturer, purpose, and security risk level. They also offer ProcessScanner and ProcessQuickLink.

ProcessScanner will compose a report on all the processes running on your system. It maintains a copy of the report on their website and gives you the URL so you can forward the output to someone else.

If you prefer to stick with good old Task Manager, their ProcessQuickLink will add an icon to each process reported in Task Manager. This simplifies looking up unknown processes, as it adds an icon to each process reported in Task Manager. Clicking the icon brings up the corresponding ProcessLibrary page.

I like the library but found it valuable only for reassurance that a suspicious-looking process is actually benign. When infecting a system with spyware, the process scanner could not identify the process. I like the process library and the two free utilities they offer, but scattered among the library and various utilities you'll find penty of links to launch the SpyEraser spyware scanner, which is a dud.