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The Microsoft Office program suite basically runs the world. If you know what you are doing with Office, then you are ready to use computers more and more in your everyday life. Office contains all of the basics for computer use. Word lets you type up just about anything. Powerpoint gives you the ability to create presentations. Excel and Access give you the ability to build databases. These are all important stepping stones. If someone doesn’t know how to do this, then they should look into MS Office training.

This isn’t actually that tough. There are a number of training centers available that will walk you through the basics of Office so that you are ready and able to start using it often. This won’t work for everyone though. It used to be that you were just out of luck if you couldn’t go to a training session. Now you have new options. These take the form of Microsoft Office training videos.

The premise is simple. Most of Microsoft Office will be taught through a do-it-yourself approach anyway. The only way to get good at it is through figuring out the processes for yourself. They’ve now made it easy to just do the work through pre-recorded lectures viewed at your own leisure.

The simple truth about technology is that you will usually understand it best if you do the instruction yourself. It is really hard to just learn how to use a program. You need to do a lot of things by yourself or alongside an instructor. This used to mean expensive training sessions at a specific center, but it is now possible to do it in the comfort of your own home with MS Office training CD plans.

These are really simple in nature. You just put the CD in the computer and then follow the instructions that it gives. The beauty of it is that it can guide you through the real ways that you’d load up the relevant programs and put them into general use. This is a great way to start off and a good way to quickly get a great understanding of the simple things everyone has to learn at some point.

The lessons take a mixture of simulations and Office 2007 training videos. You can just work through the lessons at your leisure and gain your education when it fits your schedule. What more could you want. You can learn about the latest software without a major investment.

The zombie computers used to send spam are coming back to life.

Security vendors say spammers are reconnecting with hacked PCs used for sending spam as evidenced by a rising number of spam messages circulating on the Internet the last few days. Spam levels suddenly dropped two weeks ago after the shutdown of McColo, a rogue ISP (Internet Service Provider) based in San Jose, California, whose connectivity was used to control networks of hundreds of thousands of computers to send spam, known as botnets.

Computers that are part of the Srizbi botnet — which by some estimates sent nearly half of the world’s spam — are apparently becoming active again, according to researchers from FireEye.

“Srizbi has returned from the dead and has begun updating all its bots with a fresh, new binary,” according to a blog post on Tuesday by Atif Mushtaq and Alex Lanstein of FireEye. “The worldwide update began just a few hours ago.”

Srizbi’s computers were controlled by spammers through McColo’s network. When McColo was shut down, those computers tried to call back and get new instructions to send spam. But the botnet operators are clever and created a way to get those machines back if they were stranded.

FireEye researchers essentially did an autopsy on Srizbi’s code. They found that the hackers put in an algorithm that dynamically generates a domain name from which a compromised computer could fetch new instructions.

The hackers could then register that domain name and put instructions there to tell the compromised PC to go to a different command-and-control server — not McColo’s — for new instructions.

Since FireEye figured out how the algorithm worked, the company registered the gibberish domain names, such as “auaopagr.com,” that algorithm generated. When those machines reported for duty, there were no instructions. But FireEye couldn’t keep preempting the spammers forever by buying domain names.

Now the compromised computers are connecting to domain names registered by the spammers and getting updated code, including templates for new spam campaigns. The new command-and-control servers are in Estonia and the domain names are being bought from a registrar in Russia, FireEye said.

Srizbi at one time amounted to more than 450,000 PCs, and it remains to be seen how many of those machines have updated code. But three other botnets that were controlled via McColo — Rustock, Cutwail and Asprox — all appear to also be coming back online.

Dmitry Samosseiko of computer security vendor Sophos wrote on Wednesday that spam levels suddenly surged earlier this week, due in part to the resurgence of the Rustock botnet.

McColo’s connectivity was briefly restored by mistake by TeliaSonora, and the precious few hours online allowed spammers to tell computers infected with Rustock where to go for new instructions.

Antispam vendor MessagLabs, which was recently acquired by Symantec, hasn’t noted a rise in spam associated with Srizbi, said Paul Wood, senior analyst based in their U.K. offices.

Wood said MessageLabs analyzes spam that ends up in the inboxes of its 8 million users and it may be that Srizbi is either not up to speed yet or changed how it targets people.

But MessageLabs has noticed an uptick in spam coming from Rustock, Cutwail and Asprox, which would indicate those botnets are picking up Srizbi’s slack.

“Like any sort of business if your courier goes down or goes on strike, you find an alternative provider,” Wood said.

Still, spam levels are around 40 percent of what they were before McColo went down, Wood said.

Social networking company Facebook recently held acquisition talks with Twitter, the micro-blogging company, the Financial Times said.

The negotiations, put a valuation of as much as $500 million on Twitter, which has become one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched start-ups, the paper said.

The talks, which were first reported by the AllThingsD blog, were confirmed to the paper by two people familiar with the situation.

Facebook offered to pay for the acquisition in stock, the paper said, citing a person close to the situation.

Putting a value on Twitter’s shares proved controversial, according to the paper.

If it used the $15 billion valuation at which Microsoft Corp bought a stake in Facebook last year, it would have valued the Twitter purchase at $500 million, though that investment was seen as a high-water mark for Web 2.0, the paper said.

One person close to the situation suggested to the paper that the $15 billion valuation for Facebook was the top end of a range of values the two companies talked about, implying that a deal might have valued both Facebook and Twitter at a much lower level.

Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, would not comment on the talks, but suggested that the company wanted to remain independent to build on its messaging service, the paper said.

Facebook and Twitter could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters.

Emails have joined fags and runs for coffee as the latest threat to workplace productivity, for a new study has revealed that the popular online communication mode wastes an hour a day.Researchers in Britain have carried out the study and found that office workers actually waste an hour a day sending and receiving emails — the obsession has led to a culture in which many process them without even thinking.

They have based their findings on a survey of 4,000 employees from 150 business houses in Britain.

The poll found that the average worker wastes one hour every day through inefficient use of email; most do not filter or organise their emails correctly; and many of emails sent do not help people do their jobs, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported. And, according to a spokesman for communications consultants Expert Messaging, which commissioned the research, this could be because workers had not been given appropriate training for proper use of emails.As a communications tool that we have all grown up with, but seldom if ever given any formal training on or provided any corporate guidelines for, it’s no wonder that email is a significant sources of stress, miscommunication and inefficiency for companies and individuals,” he said.

Agreed Nigel Shadbolt, a Professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton University: “I think we are still working out what is acceptable and unacceptable email use.

“Some companies have banned their workers from sending carbon copies of emails, and in extreme cases have banned them from sending emails altogether. There’s a problem that with superabundance of information there’s a scarcity of attention.

“Since our attention span is always limited, since there are only a certain number of hours in the day, we do’ve to be more thoughtful about what we send and receive.”