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Archive for February, 2008
Microsoft provides free developer tools to students worldwide
If you’re a student of an university around the world Microsoft today is giving you a late Christmas present.
From today on Microsoft allows students worldwide to download developer tools including VS Professional 2008 and 2005, a copy of MS Server 2003, VirtualPC, SQL Server 2005 Dev. Edition, Expression Studio plus additional development tools free of charge.
All you have to do is to use your MS Live account (or a newly created one) to log into the site and provide the country and name of your university. The verification of your student status will then be done within about a minute via a web service ( we learned this from someone who has done it with an UK university, might take longer with others). The license key allows you to use the software for student projects and research. Teaching staff and commercial use is excluded…
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Opinion: Obamania or Change You Can’t Believe In?
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There is an interesting opinion piece at Spiegel Online - the web site of Germany’s leading political weekly magazine - on Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.
It compares Barack Obama’s campaign to the Dot-Net boom of the 1990s when for companies key economic indicators like profit, sales and numbers of employees, or experience and realism of the management team were replaced by momentum of the rising stock price.
Interesting read and for those who know the realities of dealing with Multi-Billion organizations or of international diplomacy some quite intriguing comparisons…
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Internet: Wikileaks.org ordered offline by US court
The BBC today has an article online about Wikileaks.org, a website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents.
The “BBC reports” that “…following a California court ruling, the site been taken offline in the US…” Well seemingly that’s not completely true. You won’t get access to the site via wikileaks.org but that’s because the DNS server entries have been deleted.
But hey - there are other ways. You can access the site’s content at other servers on the Internet (see image below). We suggest searching for the web site’s name and DNS and you might find it yourself. Popular bookmarking sites might also turn out helpful.
While you can question the motives why people upload documents to this site or even question the content of some of them, Wikileaks.org definitely had a rough ride the last days.
Within days they endured a fire in their server room, massive DDoS attacks and censorship threats…
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Guerrilla Advertising: Obey in Toronto
A series of strange ads have been popping up in Toronto, Canada during the last days advertising for a product called “Obey” and linked to a group calling itself “WhyBecauseISaidSo”
The punch line on one of the ads reads as following:
My son had ideas of his own.
Obay put a stop to that.
The idea behind it - while this is definitely a teaser campaign - is thrilling and scary at the same time. How many people are actually already using drugs to sedate their children and to make them more compliant? And this at times when governments in western countries are passing laws to create a new form of political correctness or citizenship…
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Time: Cold War Calculators
Those who still remember slide rules from the time before pocket calculators or learned flying a plane before GPS devices became so common will love this site. Others who remember the atrocities of the cold war might have a different approach to these relics from a time we all hoped that it would have long passed…
But whatever approach or understanding for that time you might have the web site “Cold War Calculators” - a site dedicate to radiac calculators slides - might show you some new “instruments” seemingly necessary during this dark period…
We didn’t know there were that many kinds of different calculators for these strange purposes - radiation dosage calculators, bomb damage effect computers, nuclear effects estimators, causality slide rules, weapons effects rules and calculators, fallout predictors, burst calculators…
Anyway - bang you’re gone…
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Quote of the day: Quotes with horses
We were surprise how many quotes or proverbs with horses exist. Below our quick list of the most interesting ones:
“I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.” Abraham Lincoln - 16th US President (1861-65)
“Speak the truth but ride a fast horse.” West Texas saying
“The one who [...]
Humor: Design Police
These tags might come useful not just with bad design. Think corporate documents, bad ads…
With “Design Police’s visual Enforcement kit” you can bring that crap to justice. Download the PDF templates from their web site and use as you see fit….
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Video: Glisse
Outstanding stop motion video by artist “Nicolas Lelièvre”. He created this movie with dancer Jean-Baptiste André. The music is by “Mils”…
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Animation: Zoudov
Great animation with a Cold War spy story plot set out at an USSR rocket launch station.
Also available as Quicktime from the “Zoudov” web site…
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Image: What’s inside my laptop
If you ever wondered what’s under the hood of your laptop but were afraid to open it yourself then “BusinessWeek” has a set of great images that shows you how the plumbing is done inside your machine.
The article “Building the perfect laptop” provides insides on Lenovo’s new superslim ThinkPad X300 and the story behind it. Also some comparisons to Apple’s MacBook Air (for more of this have a look at the “table published” by Engadget today)…
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