Google, as part of their 10 year anniversary, is launching Project 10¹⁰⁰, offering millions of dollars to the best ideas they can find for helping people.

If you have a newly installed IE7 (not company preinstalled), or reverting back from a beta IE8 install. You will have an annoying redirect to this URL (http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx) every time you time open IE, regardless of what your homepage is setup as. First it foes to this page: (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=54834 –) and redirects itself to the runonce.msn.com page.

The page itself is harmless and actually supposed to be help full for a newly installed IE7, so that you can customize your IE setup. But after you choose your settings not that it only doesn’t save the chosen options but also goes back to the same time whenever you open IE. Needless to say, it very annoying. This is how the runonce.msn.com page looks like:

Short Solution: copy & paste this three line in a notepad and save it with .reg (ie IE7.reg) extension and run the reg file after saving it. This should automatically edit the necessary setting needed to fix this problem.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“RunOnceComplete”=dword:00000001
“RunOnceHasShown”=dword:0000001

Long Solution: Run regedit from Start –> Run –> regedit. From there, go toHKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main and you will see the obvious entries that needs to be changed, you can add the above entries manually:

The problem seems to with third party anti-spyware which are doing it’s job by preventing you from editing your registry settings from URL, and doing it’s job very good.

-Ranjan 

Questions by Google

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
3. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
4. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
5. Describe a chicken using a programming language.

Questions by Microsoft

1. You have a bucket of jelly beans. Some are red, some are blue, and some green. With your eyes closed, pick out 2 of a like color. How many do you have to grab to be sure you have 2 of the same?
2. Pairs of primes separated by a single number are called prime pairs. Examples are 17 and 19. Prove that the number between a prime pair is always divisible by 6 (assuming both numbers in the pair are greater than 6). Now prove that there are no ‘prime triples.’
3. Imagine an analog clock set to 12 o’clock. Note that the hour and minute hands overlap. How many times each day do both the hour and minute hands overlap? How would you determine the exact times of the day that this occurs?
4. How much does a 747 weigh?
5. Imagine a disk spinning like a record player turn table. Half of the disk is black and the other is white. Assume you have an unlimited number of color sensors. How many sensors would you have to place around the disk to determine the direction the disk is spinning? Where would they be placed?

And this is how IKEA does it…

Some products you can understand why they are in beta, like Knol, Google Alerts, Custom Search, Google Chrome, etc. However, a lot of products that you wouldn’t really expect are still labeled as beta.

Here are a few notable Google products that are still in beta:

• Gmail
• Google Docs
• Orkut
• Google Finance

More...

Every day we browse sites, infact a lots of them. Sometimes we like to print some content from a site. But often, we find that the web pages contain irritating advertisements and other unwanted content. It not only wastes the printer ink and other resources but leaves unwanted content in the hard copy. Finally, I came across a great, useful, easy and free online service: PrintWhatYouLike.com is a simple point-and-click element removal tool to make printing sites and pages without printer-friendly links much easier, and without any software.

Paste in the URL of a site, and you’ll get a left-hand sidebar that lets you click and and remove pictures, headlines, and other page elements. You can pull out the background image, isolate selected parts of the page, and even resize individual elements, all in the name of reducing ink usage and improving readability.

Better still, you can copy a link to the page you’ve just hacked to bits, giving web site owners with popular pages a free resource for printer-friendly versions.

-Ranjan