Archive for February, 2008

Humor: (Dada) Time Waster web sites (2)

link to article
Also in the best tradition of the “dadaist nihilistic movement” from the 1920s, this site neither does anything nor provides any useful information – but in difference to the two others we have introduced in a “previous post” this one also has some kind of political aspect and if it’s just a name.

The web site with the title “B.O. Is Your New Bicycle” provides you with a new teaser line every time you click on the text.

Our favorite so far: “B.O. spent the afternoon setting up your router”…

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Humor: Button Paradox

link to article
The text on the buttons reads:

Red button: The blue button is true
Blue button: The red button is false

Nice idea…sorry already sold out last night

via “Etsy”.

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Microsoft provides free developer tools to students worldwide

link to article
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?

P>link to article
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

link to article
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

link to article
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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