It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 - 1986)

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
- Paul Erdos (1913-1996)
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it."
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

"The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'."

"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."
- George Washington Carver (1864-1943)

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
- Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
- Steven Wright

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."
- Frank Zappa

"It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts."
- G. B. Burgin

"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."
- Jimi Hendrix

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
- Will Durant

"I have often regretted my speech, never my silence."
- Xenocrates (396-314 B.C.)

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
- Seymour Cray (1925-1996), father of supercomputing

Experience is a hard teacher, because she gives test first, the lesson afterwards

Everything is hard before it is easy
-Goethe

Every 10 seconds, somewhere on this earth, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
I hate the country, all those animals walking around un-cooked.
I'd give a thousand dollars to be one of them there millionaires!
I'm gonna survive or die trying.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

‘‘There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to achieve it.''
-NAPOLEON HILL

MS News
Yesterday MS revealed that a new game development platform dubbed XNA will be delivered by MS
XNA will use DirectX will continue to be the "baseline environment"

"The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is thinking that having problems is a problem."
-Theodore Rubin

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out."-- Vaclav Havel

Tried out the Microsoft Plus! Dancers
Amazing quality and great set of characters

An interesting presentation on BizTalk from MS

BizTalk 2004 launched yesterday
My new best friend BizTalks... new avatar availble now

If you know how.. you will always have a job.
If you know why.. you will always be a boss.

Gates on security
"There are a lot of different challenges out there," Gates noted.
"We've got to have the right tools. We've got to have the right
processes. The people who attack these systems are getting more and
more sophisticated. For every time we take a type of attack and
eliminate that as an opportunity, they move up to a whole new level.
And that's not an unending process. We can make it dramatically more
difficult, but we have to keep that in mind: This is a
measure-countermeasure type environment."

MS deal with ebay
MS signs deal with ebay by which Office components such as Excel and Front page can connect to ebay site and get lattest bidding etc

http://www.developer.ebay.com/devprogram

Means to an end ... web begging

Was telling a firend about RSS the other day, and got stomped by a couple of questions really ....
but fact remins that RSS isnt going to get all that popular w/o a business model attached to it and how the business folks can attach a dollar value to it ....rss is going to be in developerland for time to come

Good MS blog here

Cyber Sabotage in the cold war era
Read about a CIA sponsored sabotage and how it hit a cyberia oil facility here

Microsoft WMV 9
The DVD Forum has approved the popular Microsoft Windows Media
Video (WMV) 9 format as a mandatory technology for any device seeking
the high-definition DVD (HD-DVD) logo. In other words, to use the
logo, next-generation DVD players and other DVD-playback devices must
support WMV.

Came across some useful undocumented sproc
1)sp_MSforeachtable - it iterates through all the tables of the current DB

Eg.
sp_MSForEachTable 'exec sp_spaceused "?"' -- To get the spaces used by individual sprocs
EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="print '?' DBCC DBREINDEX ('?')" -- To reindex all the tables in the DB

2) And use sp_MSforeachdb to iterated through all the DBs

3) sp_MSdrop_object to drop any object by providing its id/ name etc

Fortune names Accenture “most admired” computer & data services company

Also check out fortune listing and articles here

Active Directory turns 4, just a couple of days back
Though it hasnt raised to Bill Gates promise of adoption, its done a good job

All about MS clustering services
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/columns/tips/w2kclust.asp

Whidbey Wows !!
Check out the concept of ObjectSpaces tehnology in Widbey here

what does your career and calculus have in common ?
C = G + LT ?
fine out here
Or on the fact that why learining should be a process and not an event

Avanade
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarchives.asp?ArticleID=14776

The top 10 rules of performance here

:)
Two atoms are sitting in a bar.
atom 1(in a whisper): "I think I've lost an electron"
atom 2: "Are you sure"
atom 1: "I'm positive"

MS
In response to the predatory behavior of MS, MS states that its just "constitutes permissible competitive activity" ;)

MS dos 6.0 was the first OS whose source code was stolen and distributed online way back in 2000

SQL server xml features tutorials
http://www.topxml.com/sql/default.asp

Good SQL resource site portal
http://vyaskn.tripod.com

Interesting lines :

There are the faint of heart .. and then there are the relentless !

If you were dirt upon a road, in sultry summer weather,
I'd be a cloud and rain on you, and we'd make mud together.

If God is watching us, the least we can do is be entertaining.

If the enemy is in range--- so are you

Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot

The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are
so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell

Spectators never win

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

creativity
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/mwfong/Sidewalk_Flats/
also http://www.csl.sri.com/users/mwfong/Humor/Meanings/

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

SQL server
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/anniversary/timeline.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/anniversary/tenfirsts.asp

SQL server fun facts
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/anniversary/funfacts.asp

Flash on SQL server
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/2000/demo/autorun/window.htm

Microsoft Museum
http://www.microsoft.com/museum
http://www.microsoft.com/museum/musStudent.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/museum/publictrivia.doc

Good (short) turorials on SQL xml capabilities
like XSLT and XML HTTP here

SQL server
About SQL XML
http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/sqlsolutions/sqlreldata/default.aspx#xml

SQL server
automatically generating sprocs
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/msdnmag/issues/03/04/StoredProcedures/toc.asp

Microsoft
Ending days of speculation, entertainment giant The Walt Disney
Company announced a multiyear agreement with Microsoft to license
Microsoft Windows Media technologies, including the Digital Rights
Management (DRM) component that can be used to protect the delivery of
digital content. Windows Media technologies are increasingly gaining
favor with Hollywood, as content creators seek to find secure ways to
expand into new digital markets and Internet content delivery. Disney
is the second major Hollywood player to embrace the technology in
recent days; Time Warner licensed it last fall. But the combination of
Disney and Microsoft represents a melding of two of the most respected
brands in America and reestablishes Windows Media as the de facto
standard for digital-media delivery.

Ctrl+Alt+Del Inventor Retires on 30/jan/2004
The engineer who invented the Ctrl+Alt+Del keystroke combination is
retiring today from IBM, leaving behind his legacy as an inexorable
part of the PC experience. David Bradley developed the key combination
while working on prototypes of IBM's first PC. He needed a way to
quickly reboot the buggy machine because a hard reset--which involved
flicking off the power switch and waiting a few moments before
retoggling it--took too much time. "The intention was to be cryptic,"
he said. "It was a key combination that was the moral equivalent of
turning the power off and back on again, so it was not an action to be
taken lightly. It wasn't something you wanted to happen accidentally."
Today, many people use the keystroke combination on a regular basis
and not always because the machine has become unresponsive. Microsoft
adopted the keystroke combination for use in Windows; today's Windows
versions use the combination to let people log on to the system and to
bring up a diagnostic screen. "I might have invented Ctrl+Alt+Del but,
as I like to say, Bill Gates made it famous," Bradley joked.

IE Commands 94.8 Percent of Web Usage
In news that should surprise no one, Microsoft Internet Explorer
(IE) dominates the Web with 94.8 percent of all Web usage worldwide,
according to market researchers at OneStat.com. Broken down into
specific versions, IE 6.0 is number one with 68.1 percent of the
market, followed by IE 5.5 (13.8 percent), IE 5.0 (11.8), Mozilla
(1.8), Opera Software's Opera 7.0 (0.8), IE 4.0 (0.7), and Apple's
Safari (.48). Humorous note of the week: MacCentral's coverage of this
event was titled, "Safari global usage nearly doubled."

Microsoft is working to
replace it with yet another C-like programming language. Dubbed Xen
(previously X#), the new language melds C# with XML and Microsoft SQL
Server support

Microsoft
Microsoft surpassed the $10 billion mark for the first time in its
history. And here's a sobering thought: Microsoft is now averaging
sales of $100 million a day, every day, and the company has almost $53
billion in cash or liquid assets--$1 billion more than when the
quarter began

Something to ponder :
Expertise can be surprisingly difficult to find, even in companies that have spent millions of dollars to attract and retain it. Traditional methods, such as document repositories and static directories, are inadequate because expertise, unlike other assets, depends on the context—making it difficult to describe and classify.

Patterns and Practices by audience
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/practices/audiences.asp

Some great insults :)

* He is an intellectual virgin, he has never had an idea in his life.
* You are living proof that stupid people should not breed.
* Doe's your head hurt when you are that stupid?
* You remind me of opium, a slow working dope.
* Did you study to be that expertly stupid or does it come naturally?
* How can I keep an idiot in suspense? I'll tell you later.
* He had a pimple on his ass which turned out to be a brain tumor
* The sealthing technology used to hide your brain from all attacks of reason is impressive. Are NASA designing advanced retards now?
* When you speak, you do so in a way that makes slugs and other invertebrates look like Nobel prize winners.
* Just when I think, "Surely, this person has obtained and encapsulates the limits of human stupidity", you go and push the boundary even further.
* if you were twice as smart as you are now, you'd be chronically stupid.

"Recipe for success: Study while others are sleeping, work while others are loafing, prepare while others are playing, and dream while others are wishing." -William A. Ward

Grid computing
SETI@home project, which analyzes radio waves to search for
intelligent extraterrestrial life. SETI@home's global network of 3
million computers averaged about 14 trillion floating point operations
per second (FLOPS) and generated more than 500,000 years of processing
time in a year and a half

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."
-Aldous Huxley

You will find it when ur ready to seek

we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are

Without a picture of your highest self, you can't live into that self. Fake it till you make it

The very best of Dilbert
1.Life is a waste of time; time is a waste of life, so get wasted all of the time and have the time of your life.
2.If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.
3.Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
4.Eat one live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.
5.If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done.
6.I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow is not looking good either.
7.Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
8.Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days the statue.
9.Needing someone is like needing a parachute. If he isn't there the first time, chances are you won't be needing him again.
10,I don't have an attitude problem, you have a perception problem.
11.You are slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter
12.Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
13.A pat on the back is only a few centimetres from a kick in the butt.
14.Don't be irreplaceable - if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
15.If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
16.To err is human, to forgive is not our policy.
17.Following the rules will not get the job done. Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules
18.Only the mediocre are at their best all the time
19.There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
20.When everything is coming your way......you're in the wrong lane.

Cute animal pics
www.speedysigns.com/decals/ CARTOONS_Animals.asp

www.french.about.com

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debuging Monday's code." - Dan Salomon

"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." - Edwards' Law

"1. Out of clutter, find simplicity. 2. From discord, find harmony. 3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." -- Albert Einstein, three rules of work

"Theory and Practice are the same... in Theory" - Unknown (but taken from Scott Daniels of OGI)

"A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams

"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity." - W.A. Wulf

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns."
- Donald Rumsfeld
(got totally lost when i read that )

"The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all."
-- Edward de Bono

"Leadership requires great courage. It is tough to leave the gravitational pull of the crowd around us. It is tough to take the road less traveled when everyone urges you to be like everyone else. It is tough to create your life on your own terms when others are telling you how your life should be created. But nothing will fill your heart with a greater sense of regret than laying on your deathbed knowing that you did not live your life and do your dreams."
Robin Sharma

Browser war story, but with more hostoric details
http://news.com.com/2009-1032-995681.html?tag=toc

MICROSOFT
Today, Microsoft continues to dominate the PC software industry, holding more than $52 billion in cash and short-term investments despite the stagnation in high-tech spending. This, analysts say, points to the Redmond, Wash., giant's ultimate success--the preservation of its leadership status and a formidable war chest to fend off any threat to the Windows empire, whether it be Web browsers, Java, Linux or any other technology

.NET - Java done right

"Programming is the manipulation of complex abstractions"

MSDN
Who says MSDN is for geeks only ... find how to read the balance sheet of a company here

Hack
Jon Johansen the hacker who made DeCSS for DVD has released a hack to bypass Apples iTunes DRM (Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format)

Debian Linux site was also hacked... but nothing hit the papers .. even the statment the CEO made stinks !!

DirectX
Links to DX and MDX
http://www.dotnetforums.net/t75901.html

DirectX tutorials
http://staff.develop.com/candera/weblog2/articleview.aspx/DirectX

http://www.kuhnstall.de/tutorials.html

MyMSEvents.com
Good site for PDC and Technet related stuff

PDC 2003
Collection of all the PDC 2003 documents
Awesome collection of ppts and discussions

Some interesting facts of COBOL
* 75% of all business data is processed in COBOL. - Gartner Group
* There are between 180 billion and 200 billion lines of COBOL code in use worldwide. - Gartner Group
* 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) through 2005 will be in COBOL. - Gartner Group
* CICS transaction volume (such as COBOL-based ATM transactions) grew from 20 billion per day in 1998 to 30 billion per day in 2002. - The Cobol Report
* There are over 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America in 2002. Over the next four years there will be a 13% decrease in their number due to retirement and death. - Gartner Group
* The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers who know the Internet. - GIGA Group

MS
Here Comes Virtual PC 2004; There Goes Linux Support
Next week, Microsoft will finalize the code for Microsoft Virtual
PC 2004, the most recent version of the virtual machine (VM)
technology the company purchased from Connectix earlier this year.
I've been a Virtual PC customer for years, and although I was happy to
see Microsoft select what I feel is the superior VM technology, I'm
now distressed to see how the company is changing the program.
Previously, Virtual PC was an excellent platform for testing
alternative OSs such as Linux. But Microsoft has killed support for
Linux and other non-Microsoft systems, although the company curiously
still supports OS/2. The reason? Microsoft is positioning Virtual PC
as a way to run legacy Windows NT and Windows 9x applications in VM
environments on modern Windows versions

Linux vs MS
Germany Installs 11,000 New PCs. Windows PCs. Running Office 2003.
We've been hearing a lot about Germany installing Linux PCs this
year--even though most of them will run Windows applications inside a
VMWare VM environment--but this week, Microsoft revealed that it
continues to grab the lion's share of software installations in a
country that the mainstream press would have you believe is "going
Linux." Microsoft will install Office 2003 on 110,000 PCs in North
Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the largest and most populated state in
Germany. NRW said that it chose Office 2003 largely for its XML
capabilities.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Carnegie
Mellon University, all the complaints about Microsoft having security
problems are bunk. In fact, a report from the two organizations
specifically calls for all the finger-pointing to stop because all
technology is inherently vulnerable, and simply blaming Microsoft for
everything obscures a bigger problem: Microsoft doesn't own or control
the Internet infrastructure, which is extremely vulnerable to attack.
Furthermore, the report says, more than 90 percent of all
Microsoft-related attacks--including the two most infamous recent
attacks, MSBlaster and SoBig.F--involved vulnerabilities that the
company had already fixed.

Red Hat CEO: Use Windows--It's Better
You just can't make up this stuff. Matthew Szulik, CEO of Linux
maker Red Hat Linux, said this week that Windows is a better choice on
the desktop than--yes--Linux. "I would say that for the consumer
marketplace, Windows probably continues to be the right product line,"
Szulik said

CyberInsecurity
The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) released document
http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf

MS patterns site
Been searching for this ... better blogg it for later reference
http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/type/Architectures/default.asp

"Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?"
-Shakespeare

Good article about Obfuscation
http://www.preemptive.com/dotfuscator/DotfuscatorFAQ.html

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."
-Stephen Hawking

"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."
-Stephen Hawking

"Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful."
-Joshua J. Marine

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly."
-Langston Hughes

"Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was."
-Richard L. Evans

"Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by."
-John Sales

"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me."
-Dudley Field Malone

"When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'"
-Sydney Harris

"Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life."
-Andrew Brown

"The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
-Robert Frost

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison (1934 - )

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Bill Watterson (1958 - ), cartoonist, "Calvin and Hobbes"

IT
Computer-services firms such as IBM and Accenture are expected to post improved earnings for the latest quarter, amid signs of stabilization in the technology-consulting market

Cyber crime
Hackers stole the source code of the highly anticipated computer game "Half-Life 2" and circulated it on the Internet. It is one of the highest profile cases of cybercrime yet to hit the $10 billion videogame industry

Dell
Dell to enter home entertainment and home electronic segment.
dell is opening a music download portal.

CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly
The lead author of the controversial report about Microsoft
security risks, "CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly," found himself
sans job yesterday when his employer, @stake, discovered he promoted
his company credentials when he wrote and publicized the report.
According to @stake, Daniel Greer, the company's former chief
technology officer (CTO), "is no longer associated" with the company;
@stake also noted that "the values and opinions of the report are not
in line with [@stake's] views." Conspiracy theorists will ignore the
fact that both Microsoft and @stake said the software giant had
nothing to do with Greer's firing, but bigger concerns are at stake
than just one man's job. Because Microsoft's largest competitors
sponsored the report, how valuable or accurate the report can
therefore be is unclear. Sponsoring a report that touts the
competitive advantages of your own product is one thing, but pushing
competitors' opinions on governments that are in a position to
dramatically alter the competitive landscape is another thing
entirely. In the meantime, the accusations are going to fly.

"The more opinions you have, the less you see."
-Wim Wenders

ATM + Windows
According to a study that Celent Communications published last
week, most ATMs in the United States will be running a Windows OS by
2005, a scary proposition for anyone who's seen the Blue Screen of
Death or other crashes while doing such innocuous things as copying a
file or printing. But, hey, I'm sure Windows is up to the task of
accurately dispensing money and properly debiting my checking account.
Apparently, the banking industry is finally getting ready to dump the
aging and rarely updated IBM OS/2, which is the most common ATM OS
these days, and move to Windows, which is more compatible with the
networks that banks now use

Cold reading
http://skepdic.com/coldread.html
http://www.andypryke.com/pub/ColdReading

Linux Security
Linux still suffers from far more security bugs and other vulnerabilities than Windows does. Researchers at mi2g Intelligence Unit, which has been tracking and verifying computer-based vulnerabilities since 1995, say that in August 67 percent of all successful and verifiable attacks against servers targeted Linux, compared with just 23.2 percent that targeted Windows--and August was the month during which SoBig.F and MSBlaster hit. Furthermore, 12,892 e-business sites running Linux were
successfully breached during that month, compared with just 4626 sites running Windows. Windows vulnerabilities get more press because more people run Windows on the desktop, so any Windows-based worms or viruses will generally affect a far larger group of individuals. But anyone who thinks that jumping to Linux is a cure-all should think again.

SUN
Bill Joy leaves Sun today

Microsoft Promotes WMV as Industry Standard
Microsoft announced yesterday that it will offer its Windows Media
Video (WMV) 9 video-compression technologies as an industry standard
to provide third parties with its superior video format at a lower
cost. The company says that yesterday it presented WMV 9, which
launched in January, to the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers (SMPTE), an international standards body, for review. If
adopted as a standard, WMV 9 would be more accessible to third parties
because its specifications would be open.

Linux
The governments of China, Japan, and South Korea are banding
together to create an open-source OS (likely to be based on Linux)

The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsoft.html

Microsoft Signs OS Deal with Motorola
Microsoft has reportedly signed an important deal with Motorola to
supply the cell-phone maker with a version of Windows Mobile OS for
smart cell phones. Motorola, the world's second-largest cell-phone
maker, only recently--and not coincidentally--sold its stake in
Symbian, Microsoft's largest competitor in the smart cell-phone
market. Motorola had previously said it would look to Linux for its
future designs

TSQL
sp_passsword -> Changes password for a specific login name.
e.g. EXEC sp_password ‘oldpass’, ‘newpass’, ‘username’
sp_tables -> Shows all the tables in the current database.
e.g. EXEC sp_tables
xp_cmdshell -> Runs arbitary command on the machine with administrator privileges. (most imp)
xp_msver -> Shows the MS SQL server version including the all info about the OS.
e.g. master..xp_msver
xp_regdeletekey -> Deletes a registry key.
xp_regdeletevalue ->Delets a registry value
xp_regread -> Reads a registry value
xp_regwrite -> Writes a registry key.
xp_terminate_process -> Stops a process

Good site
Great hack-resource site http://neworder.box.sk/
Good sql server security site http://sqlsecurity.com/

Quake II
Quake II source code is now available for Managed C++ using Visual Studio .NET 2003, with speeds comparable to the orginal one which was mostly written in C. The .NET version even adds new features like a "Quake radar" .. transparancy etc.
check out http://www.vertigosoftware.com/quake2.htm

.NET
Windows Automotive, the hot s/w for automobilies
now enlist clients like BMW and Toyota