Australian IT reports that Rick McCallum is at it again.

STAR Wars producer Rick McCallum told a Melbourne audience that the fight against P2P swapping of films was as important as the war on terrorism.

Wow… if VCR was just the Boston Strangler, imagine what Ossama can do for the movie industry…

Piracy is bad. Fine. Point taken. But smell the coffee: in the 80’s, people now could watch movies at home and you didn’t figure out a way to make a buck out of it until the courts told you to stop whining and to deal with it. And you’re better off with it now.

Now people can watch movies without even going out to the videostore. No inventory to maintain, bandwitdh is cheap, pirating movies is even more a pain in the butt than copying VHS tapes ever was, people won’t bother (except for bragging rights) if they have an alternative. No need for it to have foolproof security, just simple and convenient.

Oh, and back to terror-stuff: I happened to catch an old Rambo on TV the other night. Funny how the Afghan freedom fighters were the good guys then when they were blowing up the russians. And how many movies were made exploiting that theme. I’m not even going into the Disney-taking-Stevenson’s-Pirates-to-the-big-screen deal. Are pirates the good or the bad guys now? Does it depends who gets the loot?

Great news for CD manufacturers and collectors of AOL promo CDs! The perishable DVD media is born. This had been vaporware for a while. Beyond the environmental issues, I wonder if this won’t do wonders for spread of DVD copying know-how.

Basically the DVD will most likely contain a short extract, not the whooping 4.7 GB from a full DVD and there wil be every incentive to rip the content to your hard drive asap since the disc will become opaque and unreadable in a few hours after being taken out of it’s airtight packaging.

Now, DVD with audio tracks can be interesting even if it is almost absent from the market place (I won’t even get into the DVD-Audio mess). So the media itself is promising and can be made into valuable products, as Fleecy showed me. So maybe this will be a good thing in the end. But can CD and DVDs be recycled?

[via /.]

I assume most people have heard of Googlism by now. It’s a site that uses Google to get a list of things said about a given topic. It works fairly well for the easily amused although a meaningful use was not immediately obvious to me.

Then Fizzz suggested using « Slashdot » as a search term. Here are a few gems:

slashdot is a plot by microsoft to destroy the productivity of linux users
slashdot is filled with repitition that is very compressible
slashdot is to linux what osama bin laden is to islam
slashdot is to net culture what 125th street in harlem is to clothing companies that want to latch onto hip
slashdot is a website where open discussions thrive about things that are really important to the inner nerd in you
slashdot is made up of programmers who suffer from the delusion they are computer scientists

Some people (Hi Pseudo!) know how much I love receiving web cards. I mean, I love the attention and all, but I always suspected that those things were responsible for putting some of my addresses on some spammers lists. I was called a paranoid freak more than once, but it seems I am finally proven right by this TechTV article!

Merci Cla

Ça a pris plus d’un an, mais Vidéotron y est arrivé!

Illico ENP

Enfin un PVR qui a l’air pas trop poche au Québec. Son Dolby Digital, sortie vidéo HDTV et la capacité d’enregistrer deux émissions simultanément sont incluses (tout en permettant d’en regarder une troisième live).

Y a même des sorties 1394 derrière!

650$….

CNet: Trust or Treachery? I can’t help but feel that we’re winning.

The masses don’t necessarily trust the companies developing « trusted computing » technology.

On TCPA and Palladium and a funny quote:

« If (Microsoft and Intel) are out to screw the world, I think Congress will stop them »
David Farber, telecom law professor

[via Hack the Planet]

« [the] best batteries get 70w/kg. Not enough. Fuel cells aren’t going to happen this decade. Chocolate cookie is 1000w/kg; propane is 8750w/kg »
–Dean Kamen talking about life and the Segway

[via Aaron Swartz]

We already know that Qualcomm says that CDMA won.

Now the Register comments on that reality gap in a article aptly named « Qualcomm monoculture is ‘killing Ameciran wireless« .

I was talking about IP telephony restrictions the other day. Little did I realize that the XBox Live has built-in voice chat capability for games. That might end up being put to some creative use.

[via JOHO]

Another halloween memo (and the mandatory /. and news.com coverage.) and an article stating the obvious about TCO: shop before you buy into any sales pitch because your mileage may vary.

Time to change the color scheme.

[via Carnet CFD]

I had a conversation during lunch the other day with a couple coders and they were saying they couldn’t wait for a cell-phone-PDA-pager-camera combo that was Bluetooth-WiFi-GPRS-3G-Infrared enabled, you know, a no compromise, everything goes in thing. Oh, and it needs to be small too and have a long long battery life….

This ZDNet article says that they can dream on. Will not happen. Market not going there. I’m not sure I agree.
Continuer la lecture →

Bridging the digital divide. A leitmotiv. Well apparently, even inside the US, people are not interested anymore.

Now it’s the New Scientist that, despite BMG’s announcement and Macrovision’s plans, Audio CD protection is not best of ideas:

Copy Protection On CDs Is ‘Worthless’

[via Slashdot]

John Udell has an interesting post today. I can’t really summarize this, except to say that it’s really interesting and it’s the kind of neat trick what pulls the Internet forward.

Oh, and it makes me want to talk about books available on Amazon! I don’t know if anyone at Amazon or at weblog.com ever envisioned something like that when they put their API together. I doubt it. I think it just shows that creativity can’t be planned and that giving toys away to people will lead to wonderfully unexpected results.

Read on…
Continuer la lecture →