Normally these Hitler parody videos are amusing, but this one has one of the better explinations about why SOPA and PROTECTIP are both things that we should be concerned about.
Now, I have no gripe with people trying to protect their intellectual property, working for a software company I get pissed when people pirate the software that I’m making my living off of. However the way this bill is written is extremely heavy handed and could be used to go after a lot of things that are at the moment considered fair use. Now not being in the US means my opinion means less than a sack of crap to US lawmakers but I’m glad to see that a lot of the people in the US are actually paying attention to what’s going on.
Instead of having laws written that would essentially allow large corporations to dictate what goes on the internet perhaps the large corporations should be tracking down the people who make the materials available for download and going after them. Or perhaps looking at a way of rebuilding their business model to provide customers with access to the entertainment they want for a reasonable price. I’m not a CEO of a major record company, but I’m reasonably sure that an on-line store of this type of stuff can and has been done and be successfully. Just not by any of the major music labels as far as I’m aware.
Every so often I get into a reflective mood, and one of the things that i’ve been reflecting on lately is why some good technologies fail.
I’m old enough to remember when VCR’s first hit the market. For those that where not around at that time there where two competing formats, VHS and Beta. From a technical standpoint Beta had a better picture quality at one point Sony was not willing to make some changes to the format to extend the recording time as it would have degraded picture quality. VHS on the other hand could record a full four hour football game without problem, and by the end of the VCR era was able to record over ten hours on a tape. In the end Sony lost out on the format war back in the VHS era because they did not listen to the customers. Customers who where more concerned with being able to tape a entire football game or movie on a single tape rather than the overall quality of the of the recording.
The second time at bat with the Bluray vs. HD DVD fight Sony learned their lesson and didn’t loose their second chance at the brass ring.
There’s a number of other things that spring to mind, both smartphones and PDA’s are one that I’ve been thinking about recently. Apple entered the digital assistant market with the Newton line of products back in the day, those products didn’t get to a point where they hit a critical mass and Apple dropped out of that market for quite some time. Tablet computers have been around for a long time but aside from niche applications they didn’t catch on. PDA’s started to get popular once the BlackBerry showed up, but Apple really drove the nail home with the iPhone and then with the iPad. Heck people that didn’t even know what a tablet was immediately flocked to pick up a iPad upon release.
Hell, even your keyboard is a example of this – most of us use a QWERTY keyboard, a layout designed to slow typists down so that they would not jam mechanical keyboards. Obviously that’s not so much of a concern now with mechanical keyboards being replaced with computers. However you don’t see people using Dvorak keyboards often now do you?
So, after getting kicked from the VAG, and then promptly kicked from the Law Courts you now go and take up residence in Grandview Park.
Really?
I have been watching your GA live streams fairly frequently and the amount of back and forth that you get engaged in is astounding. And quite honestly you have a unique ability to completely ignore the people who are actually making sense during your GA sessions. Tonight you have a member of the native community who gives a extremely strong argument about moving from Grandview and into Stanley Park to ensure that you aren’t pissing off another chunk of the 99% that you claim to represent. Tonight you are at a point where you are backed into a corner facing possible police action to evict you from Grandview Park and you can’t even come to a consensus as to if you should be doing anything to address this, never mind what that action should be.
And now you have what looks to be a number of your members talking abouttaking a break from the protest.
Really? Are you Serious?
I keep hearing comparisons between OccupyVancouver and the revolutions in Egypt and other Arab nations and I don’t see it. People in Egypt are facing being shot and killed when they protest for their rights. The people in the US are getting beaten, pepper sprayed, tear gassed, and arrested while exercising their right to protest. You run away at the threat of being arrested by the police. If this protest movement, whatever it actually stands for, was something that you really believed in you would not be backing down constantly, you would show some spine and stand up for what you believe in.
Homelessness and drug addiction are huge problems. They deserve a serious discussion and the people affected deserve help and serious discussion on the issues. They deserve better than a protest movement that stands in solidarity until it’s too cold, too wet, or the police show up.
Well I got my hands on an androit tablet to fiddle around with, and I’m of mixed minds on it.
My first reaction was one of almost immediate negativity. I found the interface clunky, non intuitive, and most of the apps didnt really impress me at all. After working with it for an afternoon I had enough and wound up handing it back. However I figgured that my immediate ditching of the hardware was probably a little premature, so i picked it up again to pay with for a bit. And that’s where i’m torn. After mucking about with it for a lenghth of time I think that ive got it configured in a way that I fell works. The problem is that the learning curve on the android tablet is a bit steeper than I found with the iPad, however that may simply may have somethig to do with having used an iPhone for many years.
I still don’t know that I would spend my own money on a tablet at this point, especially since the good ones all seem to cost almost as much as a laptop anyhow. I will however continue to take advantage of the gear if it’s sitting around at work.
So I have been trying to put down some thoughts on Occupy Vancouver for several weeks now, and like any complicated topic putting things down on paper (so to speak) has proven difficult.
On one hand I support what the occupy movement represents, and even though the Vancouver occupation has focused more on the issues of housing, addiction, and some of the first nations issues I still see those of issues worthy of discussion.
What I can’t support is the actions of some of the individual’s who have attached themselves to the Occupy Vancouver movement. Between attacking persons taking photos at the site, biting VPD Officers, and attacking firemen those persons are seriously damaging the credibility of their movement. That’s before I even consider that the group as a whole cannot seem to address organize themselves in a manner that addresses the life safety issues in the camp. I think that would be something of a priority given the recent death and overdose at the site.
Adding to this there is apparently now a splinter group of Occupiers calling themselves Occupy Vancouver 2.0 who have split from the main occupation as they feel that the current movement has lost its focus on the original intent of the occupy movement. While I do see where they are coming from I don’t see this doing anything other than further fragmenting the message – whatever it actually is.
While I agree that all the messages that are being brought to light are all worthy of discussion, I don’t believe that the occupation on its own is going to do much more than annoy the general public in Vancouver at this point. It may be time for the Occupiers to do a bit of a sanity check, after all when you claim to speak for 99% of the population it’s probably a bad idea to piss off the general public as a whole.
Well it was bound to happen sooner or later, I’m mucking about with an iPad right now. I didn’t go out and buy one, this one came from work,and it’s only on loan from our QA team while they don’t have need of it in testing our products on it.
This is the first time that I have had my hands on one for more than a few minuets when sitting killing time in a store. And while it’s growing on me a bit I still don’t think that I would have much use for one personally outside of work.
If the darn things didn’t cost as much as a home computer did I MIGHT be more willing to spring the cash loose, but as it stands the only ones that really fall into the price point where I would be willing to experiment with them are the much cheaper android based tablets like the Kindle Fire or the kobo Vox. Again, I haven’t had enough fondle time with them to know if they would do the job.
The one thing that Apple does have over the other vendors is the whole AppStore ecosystem, if you can stand being in the walled garden it’s not a bad way to go. Lord knows that my wife goes off the handle if I suggest anything other than a iPhone to replace her currently aged iPhone 3.
Well Google finally decided to allow Google+ to tie into Google Apps accounts, so I’ve finally been able to get a look at the new service that they have launched.
Now you should understand that I am of two minds with social networking. Part of my head understands that social networks such as Facebook, Google+, and even this blog, are a great platform for self promotion and getting my opinions out in the world. The other size of me kind of backs away from the public aspects of self promotion because:
I value my privacy.
I don’t see why people even care about my day to day routine.
From a privacy standpoint I’m simply looking to limit the personal information that people can find online quickly. Lord knows that there’s enough of it already without me posting it all over the place. As for the content of what I would be posting most of the time during the week my world is a routine. Between going to work and the kids there’s not a lot of things that happen during the week that are new and exciting. Even when something dramatic or bad does occur I’m generally more involved with dealing with the problem or stopping the drama to be bothered posting anything about it online for people to comment on.
Heck the only reason that this blog exists was because I wanted to see if I could set this up, It’s continued existence is more due to my apathy to taking it down than any specific desire to keep the thing online.
Now that i’m poking around on Google+ the only feature that I actually think makes sense is the circles that they have put in place. On Facebook if I wanted to share something work related I would wind up spamming a large number of people with the work stuff that really wouldn’t care. The other side of the coin is that I won’t accept friend requests from customers or coworkers because there’s aspects of my personal life that I’m not wanting to mix with work. The circles in Google+ would let me segment out portions of my social activities to only groups of people that would find it appropriate, so my very strongly anti firearms cousin won’t have to put up with me posting target shooting results.
I’ll be interested in seeing what Facebook does around the concept of Circles, whatever they do decide to do I’m sure that huge numbers of people will start screaming about how they are changing ‘thier’ Facebook.
No, this post is not about finding the right laptop to compute with, it’s about a much simpler tool than that. A notebook for taking notes in, you know the old pen and paper style. I’ve got a fondness for fountain pens and they don’t always work well on all types of paper that you sit down to write with, some bleed more than others, and some are so bad that you can see what’s written on the other side of the page as plain as day.
For the past year or so I’ve been using Moleskin notebooks for taking notes at work and they have worked quite well for me, however I’ve heard a number of reports that the paper that is used in the newer ones isn’t the same as the ones that I have been using, that and their disappearance from many of the store shelves over the last year has me hunting for a replacement. I have found a Piccadilly notebook at a local clearance place that I plan to try out once the current notebook runs out. It’s about four times thicker than the one’s that I have been using, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem given that the ones that I was using are not much thicker than the ones used by elementary school students.
I’ve been using Mozy Home, an on-line backup provider for a number of years to keep an offsite backup of my personal data. A little while back they basically discontinued the service that I was using and introduced a set of tiered plans that changed how much the service was going to cost me.
Before the changes the service was so cheap that it was a no-brainer of a decision to make, for 50$ US per year I get unlimited backup online? With the new changes however the backups are now capped at 50 GB.
Hmm. Currently I’m backing up 450GB of data. Fair enough I can see that costs increase and storage is something that has to be actually paid for, and I’m hardly a casual user. Checking their pricing however the plans charge another 2$ per month for every 20GB of additional data. This puts the cost of the service up over the 300$ / year mark. Even picking the higher end plans that give you 120GB included in the package still puts the total cost up over the 300$ mark.
Once my locked in subscription to Mozy expires I will look into the alternatives, right now there’s others out there that still have an unlimited plan.
Social networking makes me laugh a little bit, especially the people on Facebook. As pretty much everybody and their dog knows every time that Facebook makes any changes to their site it kicks off a whole suite of people complaining about the changes and demanding they be reversed. I can understand that people don’t like change but the sense of entitlement that some of the people complaining about the changes has just floors me.
One comment was from a friend of mine stating that they wanted Facebook to “Stop messing with his stuff”.
I can understand that type of sentiment if you are having a change pushed down your throat for a service that you are paying for (I’m looking at you Mozy, but you are a subject for another rant) you could be justified in getting a little worked up. If however it’s a free service that you are not obligated to use then your options for complaint are reduced somewhat from what I can see.
Personally I like my private live to stay a bit private, and since I don’t trust Facebook’s privacy statement worth a damm there is very little that I actually post there for public consumption. My other concern is that I do like to have control in some way as to where my information is saved. At least with this site I can pretend to have some level of control over the information that I post, at least before Google sucks it up and indexes the hell out of it.
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