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What's a Mac doing with Windows on it?

...A whole lot more than it's ever done before.

It's been done, Windows XP can now be installed onto a Macintosh.

Those of you who remember that awful Apple advert slamming PC users as "dull" will remember the line "What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's ever done in a PC".... At least we've got a good catchy counter now.

What's a Mac doing with Windows on it? A whole lot more than it's ever done before.

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Google doing evil?

Check this blog entry out.

Apparantly me having that MSN Search box on this blog is supposedly violating their Blogspot TOS. The MSN Search bar I put in there is "obstructing Googles services from operating efficiently and effectively"

He's been asked to take down the search box, but for the moment it is still up. Imagine if Microsoft pulled this sort of stunt, there would be hell to pay.

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Subscribe to Wester

How come Wester isn't blogging? How come Wester has three blogs?

One here and one on his MySpace and one on his MSN Space.

How about some updates Wester, I never see you on MSN, you're on the forums less and less, what's going on dude! I'm trying to subscribe to you but I'm just getting empty feeds.

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Played with Live.com lately?

If you've not seen Live.com for a while I suggest you check it out again.

It's really developing well - I'm sure Founder will love it as it's huge on AJAX. &#59;)

If they can get the performance up a bit more they may replace Google as my homepage. I just can't say no to having all my RSS feeds sat there.

Live.com

If they can really get the average Joe to use the feeds and other gadgets on this site I could well see it going down a storm. Glad this is now the default homepage for Windows Vista instead of that MSN crap - although that has gotten slightly better and the beta is a lot better, but it's still filled with junk nobody cares about. Live.com gives you your own content from where you want and that's why it's better.

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The captcha is back

When I woke up this morning I was greeted by over one thousand e-mails. It was the blog e-mailing me due to new comments being posted. Most of them were spam.

These spammers were seriously dumb, some of the comments didn't even have a link in at all, some only had a link to Google in. Hmmm may be this is a new Google spam wave? Nah I think not, these were just really dumb spammers who enjoy wasting my time. Hopefully the mess has now been cleaned up.

I've put the captcha back on all the comment forms now, as annoying as they are I just can't deal with another thousand e-mails in my inbox again.

And one more thing, hey Founder you stole my skin I spent hours working on that!

Leave a comment »

Marxists are right (again)

Marxists have always argued that human beings are naturally co-operative and will help each other automatically "out-of-the-box" if you will. We argued this because logically that is the only way we could of survived, we evolved our natural helpful and co-operativeness because they were a huge advantage over other species, there was also much evidence on early communist societies to bolster the argument.

We argue that class society puts a clamp on this natural behaviour due to bourgeois culture transmitted from the ruling classes over history, me me me money money money. People react to the world they live in - but take someone young enough and society won't yet have time to warp his or her mind.

Recent studies have now shown that altruism 'in-built' in humans.

Dr Warneken and colleague Professor Michael Tomasello wanted to see whether very young children who had not yet learned social skills were willing to help strangers.

The experimenters performed simple tasks like dropping a clothes peg out of reach while hanging clothes on a line, or mis-stacking a pile of books.

Nearly all of the group of 24 18-month-olds helped by picking up the peg or the book, usually in the first 10 seconds of the experiment.

They only did this if they believed the researcher needed the object to complete the task - if it was thrown on the ground deliberately, they didn't pick it up.

What is also interesting to note is the research was also conducted with our closest living relative chimpanzees, it showed similar results - although they were not as able to understand as complex things as the human babies - like things falling into boxes with flaps.

Scientists have long debated what leads people to "act out of the goodness of their hearts" by helping non-relatives regardless of any benefits for themselves.

Human society depends on people being able to collaborate with others - donating to charity, paying taxes and so on - and many scientists have argued that altruism is a uniquely human function, hard-wired into our brains.

The latest study suggests it is a strong human trait, perhaps present more than six million years ago in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

"This is the first experiment showing altruistic helping towards goals in any non-human primate," said Felix Warneken, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

"It's been claimed chimpanzees act mainly for their own ends; but in our experiment, there was no reward and they still helped."

What's also interesting - and why I've also tagged this with the politics flag is many in the right-wing press especially in the United States utterly ignored the tests carried out on human babies - while others more to the left like the BBC gave more attention to the bulk of the experiment - to humans.

Marxists were right all along - now it's official (again).

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