The end of the internet
I’m not being dramatic the internet will be dead in 5 years if the telcoms are allowed to create this kind of structure. For a decade now the WWW has thrived on the backbone of the internet. This has been possible because of the end to end structure of the internet which allows individuals to publish and small companies to thrive. This proposal by At&t would kill the internet as we know it. By regulating the content that can travel over their infrastructure the telco would be in control of the internet. This is unacceptable. Call your congress person and demand that the internet remain free.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
The End of the Internet
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005Thunderbird Testing Day
Monday, December 12th, 2005If you are looking for a replacement to your current crappy (IE Outlook) Email client and want to help out with the development of a great piece of open source software check this out:Mozilla Quality: Thunderbird Community Testing Day planned for Tuesday, Dec 13
Basically you can be an instant beta tester for the day and help to get Thunderbird up to release status. So get of your butt tomorrow and help out!
Gmail Filesystem
Monday, December 12th, 2005I found this awsome piece of software today… you can use your Google mail box (which has something like a 2gig limit) to store data just like a standard mounted file system… very cool. I’m already using it to mail myself backups, and now I will just have an easier time of it.
America’s most prolific inventor
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005Search for the most prolific inventors is a patent struggle: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
This popped up on slashdot tonight. What a great story! This is the problem with the modern patent and the Intellectual Property Struggle. There is no control over the process. One guy has 1000 flowerpot patents, and others have hundreds or thousands of closely related electronics patents. It is no longer possible to patent the light bulb because that is to broad so instead companies have to specifically patent every detail in every new design. On the other side of the coin there are broad software patents held for things so general as to be ridiculous like this one which is owned by Microsoft and registered in Europe. It covers “Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements” in other words if you create a video game you are supposed to pay Microsoft their due for inventing “scoring” I’m assuming that you don’t need to pay them if you just play pool, or enter a Gymnastics Competition, but maybe, like Al Gore, they will claim they invented those too.
iPod TV with NBC
Tuesday, December 6th, 2005Apple turns on iPod TV with NBC deal - vnunet.com
Apple announced today that it has partnered with NBC to offer some very cool programming. Now you can download Late Night with Connan O’Brian the next day to watch on your way to work. Itunes will also be providing a bunch of old shows including Night Rider. This seems to me like a great place to take this service, though I’m not sure if a drive down memory lane with Kit and Michel is worth the asking price or $1.99 an episode. Apple and NBC should consider some sort of differential pricing for these old favorites, or else allow you to purchase every episode for a lower price and then download them one at a time. Still I’m going to stick to my TV for watching TV, then again I listen to most of my music on my TV too, so maybe I’m just not in the target market.
Silverstone Lascala 17
Sunday, December 4th, 2005I’ve finally decided on a case for the mythtv. Right now I have the whole thing in a huge tower which is flipped on its side, but the cooling is not that good and it looks awful. Instead I’ve decided to buy the Silverstone Lascalla 17… now I just need to find a good price.
In other news when I rebuild the case I’m probably going to do a full install with Slackware 10.2 and mythtv .18.2 from source (unless of course .19 is out)which I will make sure that I post. I have a couple of PVR-250s and a PVR-250, so I will make sure to include the IVTV stuff.
Mozilla Updates Firefox
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005PCWorld.com - Mozilla Updates Firefox on Schedule
Listen… if you haven’t got Firefox yet you really need to get it. This browser is so far above and beyond IE that there is really no contest. This is your chance to break away from the Microsoft machine without sacrificing a singe thing. Get Firefox Today
PC World top 100
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005Firefox, Wikipedia, OSX and many more… Stop by the news stand and see what other great applications made the PC World op 100 list. Looking at the top 50 it is preety clear that apple’s focus on usability and design has paid big dividends as well as projects developed in the open source “Bazaar”.
