I hate the tv

So Google talk rolled out an interesting feature a while back, to show your friends which song your playing…You can see it here…

Well they use it to track what people are playing and rank music using it.

It seems pretty cool, so I’m not totally against it, but I bet a lot of people don’t know this is going on. And it’s important to remember that this user information is turned directly into money by companies like google.

I didn’t see them mention this to me when doing the software update. Software license agreements are all hocus pocus….click here and we’ll make the hundreds of pages of nasty legalese go away so you can just use the damn program. At least google’s got some blurb up about how you opt-in and opt-out. They’re pretty cool about that.

Sweeet.

This device looks more and more appealing, but the price of $390 is a bit too high for me, I’m affraid. Maybe I’ll splurge and give it a shot.

Another interesting thing I found in the discussion of this tread is that Tapioca allegedly works with google talk’s VOIP in linux. I’ll give that a try when I get a chance.

Streaming media is dominated by a bunch of software companies whose products I don’t want on my computer. I’m a user of firefox, media player classic, ffdshow, media player connectivity, Real Alternative, and others. I do not use IE or Microsoft WMP because they sucks and probably report my viewing habits to homeland security.

For all those sites which don’t work, its nice to know that there is a way of downloading the media to play locally. You can also store copies of your favorites. Use lawfully, you crazy kids.

As a cynic, I’ve developed a certain disdain for the patent system. Mainly because of companies like the new SCO, which is a company that bought the SCO unix rights and makes a business out of trying to enforce patent infringement claims. Sure, if your stuff gets ripped off, and you defend yourself thats ok. But I find it repulsive when people who don’t do the creating, who’ve just bought the rights, start throwing their weight around saying “That’s our idea and you have to pay for it”. I doubt very much that the code monkeys who wrote the products the new SCO now is protecting feel good about accusing the whole linux community of mass patent infringement.

Similarly disgusting is the music industry, with the example standing out of Michael Jackson outbidding Paul McCartney for the rights to most of the Beatles music.

As an American, especially as an engineer, you get fed this story that you can make it big by inventing something, patenting it and selling it to everyone over the television late at night. In a simplistic view, the patent system seems great and would be the “ticket outa here” of many aspiring home inventors. Practically, though, the situation is much less rosy as Don Lancaster eloquently explains in his article “A Case Against Patents”.

Snip:
“Finally, be realistic. You don’t create things to get filthy
rich. You create things because you like to create things
and have some compelling desire or need to do so. As long
as there are enough nickels to keep going, that is all that
should really matter.”

This page is effectively a diary right now because I have very very few non-robot visitors. For instance, the MSN Robot has visited this page 711 times this month. Thats about 7x the amount of IE users. They’re probably robots too.

It doesn’t bother me, but spam does. I’ve been getting comment spam from assholes trying to sell pills. I installed SpamKarma2, a plugin to WordPress. Installation was painful, but it’s too early for me to judge the product.

From the inq, A guy who wrote an open source program to allow a computer to hook up to a model train has been hit with some nasty letters and some legal threats from a Japanese company who claims he is infringing on their patents. The project on sourceforge has not been shut down, so it looks like the author is not bowing to the pressure.

This issue is going to come up over and over in the near future so we need to be very diligent and ensure that correct precidents are set. The nature of software nowadays is that many people will be concurrently developing just about everything. If it doesn’t exist yet, wait a little while and it will. With this amount of development, patents just stifle innovation. Keeping in mind that patents were meant to encourage innovation by providing a timed monopoly to the pating party in exchange for showing how something is done.

Doing some perl research and found a very nice use of the Finance::Quote module…..this:

They’re 8 foot tall puppets which mimic the movement of the stock market in realtime. They were part of burning man 2000.

So I was writing an email and meant to use the word “committee” in it. Since my spelling talents peaked in about 6th grade and have been declining ever since, I typed “comitee”. No problem…just a right click and then the suggestions pop up.

Is it Chromite? No. Dolomite? Nope. Sodomite(s)???

As a response to this inq article, I wrote this to Nick Farrell

“To Sun,

I think an easy way to get some positive talk with your name attach to it into the heads of gamers would be to donate (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) some servers to games which are not yet MMO, like battlefield2 and battlefield 1942. I still play those a bit and we could use some non-suck 64 player servers.

I know for a fact that one of them opteron servers will do nicely. I’m sure this opportunity exists for other games.

It’s just something to think about being as I, and a surprisingly large amount of us engineers, play online games. I used to know a bunch of AMD people who gamed. I’d assume its the same accross the board with us engi-dorks.

Please and Thank You,
Ihatethetv.com”

I missed this story until Mike Feldman brought it up on his annoying show this week. Apparantly Barb “donated” to katrina victims so they could buy Neils software. From Talking Points:

“Ignite!’s has a unique business model, which works like this. Neil goes around the world finding international statesmen, bigwigs and criminals who want to ‘invest’ in Ignite! as a way to curry favor with the brother in the White House.”

Barb Bush continues to please…she even hates the Simpsons! The enemy of my friend is my enemy.

What is going ON in that family? It’s like a competition who in the Bush family can be the biggest scumbag….