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About K-Lite Codec Pack.

[via BetaNews]

Microsoft announced Friday that its $120 million acquisition of Groove Networks had completed, just days after a Delaware court threw out a lawsuit by a former Groove executive to prevent the merger. Michael Matthews sued because he claimed the deal was unfair to the employees of Groove Networks.

As planned, Groove will join the Information Worker unit of Microsoft, which develops Office. “While Groove and Microsoft technologies already work together in very powerful ways, we’ve only just begun to realize opportunities to better address the needs of information workers at a time when the very nature of work itself is changing,” said Groove founder Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft’s Chief Technical Officer.

As you (perhaps?) know, I am working for Helvetia Patria (fast 10 years, wow). Our annual results 2004 were presented today and they are…pretty good ;-) Have a look:

• Gross premium written: 5’105 million CHF (1 euro = 1.5 CHF ~)
• Result after taxation: 159 million CHF (+72%)
• Investments at market value: 25’989 million CHF
• Return On Equity: 12.3 %
• Combined Ratio: 99.2%

One of the best result within Switzerland and Europe in the insurance branch.
Yey :-) Good for us and for our bonus.

The complete results are available here.

[via CICLOPS]

CICLOPS means Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS. Very nice picture of Jupiter.

This true color mosaic of Jupiter was constructed from images taken by the narrow angle camera onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft starting at 5:31 Universal time on December 29, 2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during its flyby of the giant planet. It is the most detailed global color portrait of Jupiter ever produced; the smallest visible features are ~ 60 km (37 miles) across. The mosaic is composed of 27 images: nine images were required to cover the entire planet in a tic-tac-toe pattern, and each of those locations was imaged in red, green, and blue to provide true color. Although Cassini’s camera can see more colors than humans can, Jupiter here looks the way that the human eye would see it.[…]

Everything visible on the planet is a cloud. The parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the white ovals, and the large Great Red Spot persist over many years despite the intense turbulence visible in the atmosphere. The most energetic features are the small, bright clouds to the left of the Great Red Spot and in similar locations in the northern half of the planet. These clouds grow and disappear over a few days and generate lightning. Streaks form as clouds are sheared apart by Jupiter’s intense jet streams that run parallel to the colored bands. The prominent dark band in the northern half of the planet is the location of Jupiter’s fastest jet stream, with eastward winds of 480 km (300 miles) per hour. Jupiter’s diameter is eleven times that of Earth, so the smallest storms on this mosaic are comparable in size to the largest hurricanes on Earth.

As you know, Microsoft acquired Groove last month.

Jeff Clavier posted an interesting follow-up about the deal. Have a look!

As usual, I would like to publish some information about my monthly statistics.

Technical statistics March 2005

– number of hits: 189’424 (daily min.: 3’994, max.: 10’381)
– number of pageviews: 45’678 (daily min.: 1’080, max.: 2’327)
– number of sessions: 24’213 (daily min.: 491, max.: 1’506)
– bytes transferred: 5.92 GB (daily min.: 120 MB, max.: 348 MB)

Requested pages March 2005

– weblog: 81% (thereof atom.xml: 30%, BootstrappersBible.pdf: 1.39%)
– website: 16%
– robots.txt: 3%

Browsers March 2005

The version 6.0 of Internet Explorer represents 93% of the IE’s used to access my pages.

Some countries of my visitors March 2005

33 different countries identified:

Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, Niue, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tuvalu, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States

Traffic development

Accomodations

We stayed at La Banane, which is really a great hotel. Very nice people here, who still know what is "service". We felt at home! On the other side, the hotel was renovated in 2000 and it is amazing. Just 9 bungalows, but … hey, great ones. We were *very very* happy with our choice :-)

Umh, Google seems to launch a new “beta product” for geek, called Google Gulp :-) A FAQ is also accessible, if you *really* want to know more. Hilarous.

Think fruity. Think refreshing.
Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink™ technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex. Plus, it’s low in carbs! And with flavors ranging from Beta Carroty to Glutamate Grape, you’ll never run out of ways to quench your thirst for knowledge.

How to get Gulped?
You can pick up your own supply of this “limited release” product simply by turning in a used Gulp Cap at your local grocery store. How to get a Gulp Cap? Well, if you know someone who’s already been “gulped,” they can give you one. And if you don’t know anyone who can give you one, don’t worry – that just means you aren’t cool. But very, very (very!) soon, you will be.

Google Gulp and Your Privacy
From time to time, in order to improve Google Gulp’s usefulness for our users, Google Gulp will send packets of data related to your usage of this product from a wireless transmitter embedded in the base of your Google Gulp bottle to the GulpPlex™, a heavily guarded, massively parallel server farm whose location is known only to Eric Schmidt, who carries its GPS coordinates on a 64-bit-encrypted smart card locked in a stainless-steel briefcase handcuffed to his right wrist. No personally identifiable information of any kind related to your consumption of Google Gulp or any other current or future Google Foods product will ever be given, sold, bartered, auctioned off, tossed into a late-night poker pot, or otherwise transferred in any way to any untrustworthy third party, ever, we swear.