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Via Paul Beard’s, free posters (“as in beer”) from Microsoft to help people ‘protect their stuff’.

My favourite one is the one with the ‘Do not pick up virusses’ slogan. Where do I pick up these virusses, you said? Quote:

“Educate your students, faculty, and staff on the simple steps they can take to protect their PCs. ”

Protect your PC: stick a poster on your desktop!

EPIC managed to get access to the agreement between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Microsoft. The agreement allows the institute to gain access to Microsoft sourcecode.

The Microsoft presentation is here and portions of the contract here. Both documents are part of EPIC’s ongoing Paladium resource pages.

The BBC carries an article about the
homeless and the dogs of New York. And the suggestion that ‘walking the dog is a great way to meet people’.

As an avid BBC reader (and fan), I question the choice of the pictures they use sometimes. I don’t doubt the fact that people use their friendly canine companions to seek out other singles but the picture makes the whole story sound a bit surreal.

British humour, I gather.

The BBC’s ‘On this day’ (January 31st of 1953) item got me sidetracked.

“A car ferry has sunk in the Irish Sea in one of the worst gales in living memory claiming the lives of up to 130 passengers and crew.”

The item reminded me of the event that unfolded a day after that disaster: the Dutch flood disaster of February 1953 that killed and drowned 1,853 people. Immediately after the storm, a commission was set up to advise the government how to protect the country from spring tides, which accumulated in the project the Dutch call the ‘Deltawerken‘. However, the completion of the biggest part of the project introduced a couple of other problems, most of them environmental. In my younger days when studying civil engineering, I remember the lively discussions about the disadvantages of using and building these kind of giant dams.

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And ‘something went terribly wrong’. That’s when the action starts in Doom 3, ID’s latest first person shooter that hasn’t been released yet or ‘hasn’t been rated yet’, as the trailer reveals.

But anyways, the trailer reveals a storyline so full of Hollywood – like cliches, that it had me laughing my socks off. Scientists, experiments: something bad, evil, that kind of stuff. The game clearly pushes technology. No doubt about it: But someone should start writing courses ‘How to make a good storyline for a game’. I bet that there’s a market for that too.

While mindlessly browsing I wondered how many DOS commands have been registered as a domain name. A couple of them (with a brief description taken from the help):

More.com (displays output to the screen one at a time), format.com (formats drives), win.com [available] (loads Windows from DOS), Edit.com (Remember? That was just the *QB* editor), diskcopy.com [not worth linking] (copies disks without forcing the users to play diskjockey) and the best of all: command.com.

That blinking cursor looks inviting, doesn’t it?

The Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs has come under fire when they introduced their new slogan for a campaign to raise awareness for the European Union (warning: Dutch language-link).

Europa. Best Belangrijk.

Which translates into English as ‘Europe. Pretty important’. Or ‘Quite important’. Or as in ‘Europe: we should do something about it, but it can wait’

The slogan has plenty of advertisers laughing. The Dutch parliament (Dutch once again) thinks those millions could have been spent on better things. Or watch the ‘quite not so serious’ reminder over at the BBC. What the British news agency thinks of the (additional) Dutch logo that goes with the slogan?

‘Quite nice’

Via the BBC, a report that Spirit’s problems may have been caused because of an accumulation of files on its internal flash memory banks. Says a development manager:

“We were unaware of [the problem] because of the accumulation that happened during cruise and our 18 sols on the surface”

NASA engineers will try to run a health check tomorrow and delete some of the files next Wednesday.