CoreDownload Blog

Boris Epstein, founder of Sillicon Valley based BINC (a company specialized in head-hunting technical workers) says Yahoo! is in big trouble, because a lot of people leave the company.

Many employees of Yahoo! do not want to work for the merge between Yahoo! and Microsoft, considering that, while Yahoo! is good, Microsoft is evil. Other reasons are the lack of support for open-source from Microsoft and the “not so interesting” technologies of MS.

Other people say bureaucracy has made innovations impossible at Yahoo. The fact that in January Yahoo! announced that it will fire 1000 employees makes people not be sure about their job at Yahoo, so that prefer to search for another job.

More on this topic can be read here.

VeriSign announced that the cost of registering Internet domain names with the .com and .net TLD will be raised.

Currently, registrering a .com domain costs $6.42, and a .net costs $3.85. The new prices, which will be probably introduced on October 1st, will be $6.86 and $4.23. It is expected that this change will be reflected by the prices asked by the domain registrars starting from now, till the end of the year.

Other announcements of this kind are probable this year.

A nice video about the partnership between Indiana University and Vicious Cycle Software. The students will have access to the same professional software package that developers used to create the most popular games on the market. Who wouldn’t want to be a student at Indiana University?

Reuters announces that a leading brokerage claims that the Microsoft giant will raise the offer for Yahoo (current offer is $31 per share).

Analyst Mark Mahaney believes that Microsoft is trying to find alternatives, if the deal for Yahoo is not reached. One of the possibilities would be to offer a share of Microsoft to Time Warner, in exchange for the Time Warner online content, considered of high-value.

Citigroup continues to say that the most probable thing to happen is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.

According to pcpro.co.uk, Mozilla just announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released in June. As you may know, there already is a Beta 4 version available for download here, on Mozilla website. (link is for english version).

Mike Schroepfer said that people can migrate from Firefox 2 without any problems, because the existing Beta version is stable enough. Even more, he said “In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there”.

This update is just in time for Mozilla, because the competition is also evolving. Apple just released Safari version 4.1, and Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer 8.

Google announced the release of a new tool for webmasters: Google AJAX Language API. With only Javascript, it can detect and translate blocks of text within web pages. It uses the Web 2.0 technology, and the supported languages are: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The API supports 29 translation pairs.

For an easy integration, Google offers some examples of using the Language Translation API. Though automated translations are not as good as human translations, it became very often that websites offer their visitors the possibility of reading the content in the other languages. Google said that the new API will be improved in the future, so stay tuned

If you like mysteries and ghost stories, this game is perfect for you.

Since Azada, I was waiting for a good seek and find game. For my surprise, this game exceeded my expectations. It has a unique way of making you find objects. If in other games of this type you have to find a certain object, here you have to find pieces of that object. Each object is broken in 4 pieces. Furthermore, some objects require items that are not on a single board. You might have to move between 2 -3 boards to complete one puzzle.

Playing this game you never get bored. It is so different than other seek and find games, that it captured my attention until the end.

 One more thing, there is no time limit for a puzzle. This way, you never run out of time.

 I can think of only one draqback of Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor: too short.

You can download Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor from CoreDownload.

PC Tools announced an update on the source of malware. Russia goes to first place, with 27.9%, making China to fall on the second place, with 26.5%, and US to fall on the 3rd place, with 10%. Brazil follows, with 6.7%, Ukraine with 5.4%, and UK with 5.3%.

The new “king of malware”, Russia, is also #1 for sending unsolicited emails (spam).

Source: news.com

As a big Starcraft 2 fan I was waiting with eager to see the new zerg units. Of course, I could get an idea from the previous movies Blizzard posted on the official Starcraft 2 site, but it was far from the real ones. What surprised me the most was the new Queen. Far better than the old idea, this one is a “true queen” of the swarm.  Her main role is to protect the base against enemies. She can even turn all building into defensive structures. Pity it can be only one build. To be honest, I was very curios what zerg unit will be equivalent to Protoss MotherShip. I am still waiting for the Terran.

 Anyway, thanks to Starcraft-Source.com, here are the new zerg units:

Roaches: very fast, absorbs a lot of damage.

Overload: old unit, it can create creep, has some new abilities, but it cannot detect invisible units without upgrading to Overseer.

Overseer: primary role detector

Queen: very powerful new unit, land only, has a lot of new abilities

Baneling: morphs from zerling, similar suicidal role as the old infested marine

Nydus Worm: like the old nydus channel, but now it works anywhere on the map.

Infestor: support unit; it can move only while is burrowed, can infest Terran buildings.

Swarm Guardian: like the old Guardian unit from original Starcraft, but it has some new abilities.

Zergling: first combat unit of the Zerg.

Hydralisk: similar to the original one

Mutalisks: similar to the original one, it still has the “bounce” attack

Lurker: similar role as in Starcraft I

Infested Marine: different role than in SC I, it has range attack

Ultralisks: best Zerg tank unit. Looks like is still very powerful

Corruptor: air to air new unit; it does not attack but it infests.

A good resolution movie I found here. I look forward to updates on Blizzard site.

As they promised, Microsoft released the Vista Service Pack 1. Here are the download links: 32-bit version or 64-bit version. We shall see if this will improve the stability of Vista, and if Vista will be adopted by more PC users. Currently, Vista has just a 7.6% market share (February 2008 statistics).