Now, Starcraft 2 requires a pretty good graphics card, so if I want to stay on OS X, I’m going to have to go with at least a MacBook Pro 15″ — i.e. a 13.200 DKK computer ($2350 / €1770). Now, that’s a hell of a lot of money. Alternatively, if I choose not to care about OS X and just try to get value for my money, I can get an MSI FX600 with equal or better specs for 6.000 DKK ($1050 / €800).

A quick comparison of some key specs. (Specs and prices from http://edbpriser.dk)

Granted, GDDR3 RAM is a lot better than just DDR3 (the G makes all the difference), but it’s not 4 times better.

On top of that, I’ve lost absolutely all respect I had for Apple when I bought my MacBook back in 2007. The upcoming Mac App Store and shit like that is just downright retarded. Meanwhile Microsoft has actually been doing pretty much the same as they’ve always been doing, but compared to Steve Jobs’ insane world domination plot, Steve Ballmer is actually starting to look like the sane one of the two. And Windows 7 is getting rave reviews, so why not give that a try, now that OS X is going “Trumpets!”

Now I’m just left thinking, why would anyone (today) spend money on a Mac, when you can get the same specs in non-Apple computer for less than half the price? The MSI obviously doesn’t look as slick as a unibody MacBook, but it looks alright — I mean, it’s not downright ugly if you peel off all the stickers, and the day I pay 7.000 DKK ($1250 / €940) for just the design, is the day when someone ought to shoot me in the fucking head.

Fortunately the users of Slashdot had pretty much the same questions as I did. Mainly “What’s the name of the app? (We want to know, so we can avoid it.)” and “How does it sneak in past Android’s warning system?”

Well, it turns out that the name of the app is not something that figures anywhere — neither in the Kaspersky announcement or in the more specific ReadWriteWeb article. According to the latter the app is not even in the Android Market, and — funniest of all — the trojan only works if you’re on a Russian carrier! So basically, here’s what you have to accidentally do to install this “trojan”:

1. Figure out the name, because Kaspersky seems to not want to tell us.
2. Find the downloadable .apk package somewhere on the web and download it.
3. Configure your phone to allow installation of non-market/untrusted apps.
4. Install the app and ignore the part of the installation process, where the phone actually warns you that this app requires access to services that cost you money. Which is even further specified as: Send SMS messages. Granted, it doesn’t specify if the app will actually make use of it, but it should seem odd to anyone why a media player would need to send out text messages.
5. Move to Russia. (Unless you already live there, in which case you can happily skip this last step.)

So let us draw a parallel to the actual story that spawned the use of the term “trojan” in this modern context. You know, just to put things in perspective. (Bah! Who am I kidding, I just love a ridiculous analogy.)

The Greeks built this huge wooden horse and loaded up 30 men in it because after 10 years of siege of Troy they still couldn’t pwn those Trojan n00bs. Then they put this huge wooden horse somewhere in the woods outside of Troy, but not anywhere obvious because that would be too easy, and the Trojans wouldn’t find it until a couple of years later when some Trojan emo kid and his emo girl friend were hiding in the woods crying and writing poems. Now the Trojans were all pumped up because of this loot and started hauling it back to Troy and someone noticed a sign on the horse saying, “There are some Greek soldiers inside this horse. Maybe they have weapons. And maybe they intend to use them. But who knows? GL HF!” “Fuck it!”, the Trojans said and brought the horse back to town only to get completely Zergling rushed by the Greek soldiers inside who were apparently still in great shape after 2 years inside a wooden horse with only very little to eat and even less to drink and no internets at all! So they killed a brazillion Trojans and then they had pancakes to celebrate and was all like *om-nom-nom-nom-nom*. And they never told anyone — ever! — how they’d passed time waiting for 2 years inside a huge-ass wooden horse.

Now, in this version I would say that the whole Trojan Horse ploy worked, not because of Greek ingenuity and cunning, but because of incredible retardedness on the part of the Trojans. And it does make the Trojan Horse seem like way less of a trojan, doesn’t it? Same thing goes for this “First Android Trojan” — not so sneaky after all, when you have to actually give it permissions to perform it’s trojan-y goodness.

There’s an angle on this story that’s really interesting, because Kaspersky Lab not only announced that they’d found this alleged trojan, they also announced that they’ll be rolling out some security software for the Android platform in early 2011, and what better way to spark interest than to find some obscure proof-of-concept trojan that’s not even active in the wild and hype it as if it’s actually a real threat?

I really, REALLY wish that news agencies and newspapers would do just a little research before posting such sensational stuff, because we’re definitely not going to see a follow-up that clarifies the matter.

Måske musikbranchen skulle overveje at udgive mindre – men bedre – musik?

They list the steps for a Windows performance boost as follows:

• Update drivers
• Update firmware
• Give Windows less to think about (involving messing with the registry, disabling unnecessary graphic effects, removing unused fonts etc.)
• Overwhelmed by icons? (Involving messing around with msconfig.)
• Malware removal
• Defrag the hard drive

Now consider that updating drivers — and especially firmware — requires very specific knowledge of your hardware, while rummaging around in the registry and msconfig requires a good deal of knowledge about how software works and in some cases knowledge about — or ability to guess — how software vendors may choose to name their executables and the paths at which they might put the executables. Malware removal may have become easier over the years, but to a lot of users the terminology and processes involved seem intimidating, which ultimately stops them from doing it properly; or at all. And finally, defragmentation? Are you fucking kidding me?

Now Linux (let’s just take any Debian based distro for these examples.)

• Updating drivers is handled like all other updates, i.e. unless you’ve specifically disabled the automatic check for updates, you’ll be prompted to install fresh drivers pretty much as soon as they’re available. No manual searching required (unless you have some poorly supported hardware that doesn’t have drivers in any of the available repositories).
• Updating firmware can be a bitch, since most firmware updaters are Win only. On the other hand, I’ve never had to update my firmware from Linux on neither my MacBook nor my ThinkPad, so personally I regard this as a non-issue, but your mileage may vary.
• Cleaning up the registry… What registry?
• Managing applications that auto-start? System > Preferences > Startup Applications — easy and not as potentially dangerous as msconfig!
• Disabling unnecessary visual effects? System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects.
• Malware removal. Not really necessary (for the time being), but under all circumstances no harder than on Windows.
• Defragmentation. No!

So to sum up, all you actively need to do to keep a Debian based Linux box speedy is basically to decide which applications and services you want to start up as you log in. That’s it! (If you’re really picky about getting the most out of your battery, you may want to turn off visual effects while running on battery power; or all together.)

Now I’m left wondering why so many people think that running Linux is for geeks only. To me it seems like running a Windows machine (and keeping it running) requires a good deal of knowledge about your computer’s hardware, it is insanely time-consuming and in general a pain in the ass. (I wouldn’t know for sure since I haven’t done it for several years, but I still help plenty of people with their Windows related problems.) No matter what OS people run, they always tend to have a backup geek they can turn to when things get too complicated — that goes for OS X, Windows and Linux, so why not start relying a little more on your personal Linux geek?

Steve Jobs: “Home sharing: we‘re going to let you copy songs, TV shows, etc. with up to 5 computers in your house.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, thanks a lot. Are you really going to let me do that? Gee, Steve! I don’t know what to say. I can play my DVDs on pretty much any device with a DVD drive without being limited to 5. I can even let friends borrow them without being worried that I won’t be able to see them myself when I buy a new DVD player because it would just happen to be the 6th device to play back that particular DVD. And don’t get me started on my vinyl collection.^[1]

I’m not sure I want an OS riddled with antifeatures, where I’m at the mercy of what Steve Jobs and Co. will let me do with my data.

^[1]: Irony would have it that in this recent press event, Apple announced the iTunes LP, which is basically nothing like a vinyl, but more like the many failed attempts at releasing extra material in a data track on a regular CD album. So get ready for craploads of cheesy DVD-like animated menus and metric tonnes of completely useless and indifferent bonus material.

Now, talk about jumping to conclusions — not to mention the wildy exagerated title! I’m willing to bet that MS won’t ship Windows 7 without any means of installing IE8 (e.g. via something like curl or wget — or simly via FTP). I’m pretty sure there’ll be big fat icon in some prominent location saying “Install Internet Explorer”. Besides, it’s not really that hard (for anyone) to open Explorer and type in: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org and navigate to the Firefox EXE and double-click — especially if Mozilla would make a shortcut. (Hint hint!) Alternatively, if MS wants to be really cool, they could offer installation of either of the major browsers when installing Windows 7. I.e. something like: “Thanks for installing Windows 7, which browser(s) would you like to install? IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome?” Or they could even go as far as saying “Would you prefer MS defaults or non-MS defaults?” Where MS defaults would be IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player etc., and non-MS would be e.g. Firefox + Thunderbird + VLC, Opera + VLC or something completely different. MS already had something like this in XP SP2, where you could select standard setups (either MS or non-MS), which would then affect settings such as the default browser, mail client, media player and IM client. Pretty un-MS-ish and ironically my all-time favorite feature in Windows.

This is typical of Politiken’s  IT section. They always pretend to be seeing stuff from the end-user’s, while apparently being even more clueless than the average (l)user. Or maybe they have ulterior motives. Maybe they don’t like the EU putting up a fight against the MS monopoly and messing with their precious Windows. Either way it’s “journalism” like this, that makes the least technically inclined users stick to Windows XP, 98 or whatever untill someone or something forces them to upgrade.

In this case it’s Microsoft’s (deliberately?) half-assed implementation of ODF rendering my previous predictions of doom and destruction more than just a little inaccurate. I guess my praise was a bit premature. I should have known better.

So in this post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world it is now possible to actually use OpenOffice.org and send your ODF document to a Word user and expect them to be able to open it! While this is somewhat unexpected coming from Microsoft, it’s really a huge benefit to all word processor users of the world and a nice move from the people in Redmond. Of course, they’re not just doing it to be nice — there are certainly financial aspects to it — but still it shows that they are “getting it” even though it’s taken them some time.

Now, let’s sit back and watch how long it takes for Apple to implement native ODF support in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. My guess is that it’ll be a while. Actually, I’m getting more and more tired of being held hostage by Apple’s ideas of what I want — and am allowed — to use my computer/OS for, while Microsoft seems to be heading in a more sensible and  Open direction. Of course, first and foremost I’m a Linux-user, but with Windows 7 getting rave reviews and these nice additions in Office 2007 SP2 (not that I do, or ever will, use Microsoft Office or any other office suite for that matter) I might just give Microsoft another chance after ditching Windows back in 2001. Kudos to the Redmond crew for going with what the users want instead of what they want the users to have.

So will KEEP actually be written from scratch? Or will they simply bundle whatever Open Source software they find into one neat package? The project description doesn’t say anything about it. The first is stupid, because a lot of the Open Source emulators available are of high quality, are quite portable, have been developed for many years now and are still maintained. Some shiny new software is likely to be less stable and compatible, and the project description doesn’t give any promise of the software being maintained in the future. The latter is simply too expensive. €4.02 million for bundling some Open Source software?

Also, while preserving the games is all well and good, there’s more to preserving video game history than just preserving the software. Playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii with the Wiimote is NOT the same as playing it with the good old, unhandy NES controller (even though the Wiimote is quite unhandy for that purpose).

Yesterday my professor told me that he couldn’t actually provide us with access to various papers on the subject of the course he’s currently teaching, because certain publishers have hired students to spy on the teachers at the university and report back on any copyright infringements they notice. Usually the teacher would upload a PDF of the relevant article on our intranet, thus allowing students to download (and print), but now we’ll have to obtain these papers by other means, which may be any of the following:

• try to get hold of some obscure copy of some obscure journal containing the article in question
• pray that the publisher has made it available (either for free or relatively cheap) on the web
• get in contact with someone who owns the relevant issue of the relevant journal containing the relevant article and hope they’ll let us xerox it (and still infringe on the copyright, but this time without the professor’s help)

… and that’s only the articles.

A lot of the texts we use in linguistics come from various collections, where a number of people contribute to the work published in book form. Now, we have some good libraries here, but they rarely have more than a single copy of a book (well, maybe some older editions), which means that if every student had to read an article from a particular book, they’d actually have to either borrow the book or read the article at the library. Think about it… 24 students all wanting to read the same article (which they’re not allowed to xerox) in the same book, of which the library only has one copy.

One could, of course, buy all the journals, collections, etc… But that would be so ridiculously expensive that studying something like linguistics would cost a fortune. Handing in a decent paper based on good research would quickly run into the thousands of euros. And we’re expected to write 2 or 3 of those papers each semester…

Now I’m thinking Science Bay (or maybe Science Nova) — a marriage between Pirate Bay and Discogs containing nothing but torrents of scientific articles neatly categorized, with detailed meta data, and searchable in every imaginable way. It would even be possible to provide BibTeX entries for every article, and even provide one huge, downloadable BibTeX database for the entire content of Science Bay. When uploading a torrent, one would be able to either fill out all the relevant meta data form fields for the article in question, or simply paste a BibTeX entry containing all the relevant/required meta data. It wouldn’t just be a solution to a problem, it’d be awesome! Searching for and actually finding relevant articles couldn’t be much easier! I’m not talking about sharing entire books or even just chapters of books. Just scientific articles from journals, collections, and what have you.

Only problem is, where would one get such a project hosted? We’ve all heard about the legal trouble Pirate Bay has faced through the times and I certainly can’t afford to hire a lawyer to fend off pissed off pubilshers. While I could probably easily do the code for the project, I don’t have access to decent servers, bandwidth, Hungary, legal advise, etc…

But isn’t this how science is really supposed to work? Everyone sharing what they find and contributing to a greater cause. I know some scientists like to live like rock stars (I’m looking at you, Hawking! :-p), but that’s no excuse for their publishers behaving like retarded record labels.