I’ve given this a bit of thought. Hackers are roughly the “Starving Artist” equivelent of the IT world.

Although not always starving. “Art” and inovation in the world of computers tends to pay off even if you’re not driven to make money off it. I think that’s a bit of a difference in the medium rather than a difference of the individual.

Hackers tend to be driven to do interesting, innovative stuff rather than doing it principly for gain.. which is similar to artists that create work because they feal it needs to be done, rather than for any financial reasons. Everything else about the piece is secondary to it’s production.

Pushing the envelope, seeing what you can do, it’s a similar theme in both worlds. There’s even some crossover with 3D artists and mathematicians that do graphical design. I know that might sound a bit weird, but think of the skill set necessary to hack on X.org. Very cross-genre stuff.

It looks like Time Warner might be taking the plunge. With google instead of their heated rival, Microsoft.

A 5% stake in AOL for $1 Billion US seems a little high.. last I knew AOL had a declining user base and was bleeding some obnoxious number of customers each month. While a captive user base seems pretty attractive, it gets less so when all those users are quickly fleeing.

Apparently the US governement should be able to spy on citizens indefinately. At least according to Bush. And it was irresponsible to not renew all of the “Patriot Act”.. because apparently patriotism has to do with easier access to what should be confidential data. Who knew?

Commodore is making a comeback after being purchased by a Dutch media company. They’re launching new products in the home entertainment space, including a WinCE media player. Remember, it’s not crap, it’s Commodore.

Choice quote from the article

“Never before has a brand come out of hibernation and truly reinvented itself to position competitively in an ever-evolving digital media marketplace,” van Wijhe said.

What? He’s never heard of Apple? Now, I know they’ve heard of Apple over in Holland.. I’ve got Dutch friends that own iPods, so he can’t use ignorance as an excuse.

US immigrations is having a little computer trouble. Apparently they’ve been hobbled by aging systems going down and can’t update or upgrade everything for want of compatibility.

So apparently you can have a web server with 99.999% uptime but can’t have a immigration computer system that doesn’t crash for a half our occasionaly. Looks like overpaying and over extending really pay off.

Want to aid in tireing out the RIAA/MPAA internet content spidering machine? Then grab a copy of DirIndexFaker referred to in that P2Pnet story. It seems that it’s maker has rewored the DMCA bot-killer into something workable.

You don’t have to create any files for it, as it creates and sends them on the fly when requested. Not sure what kind of footprint it has, but the maintainer thinks it’s pretty light-weight.

So if you’re looking to show the MPAA that you really don’t want them generating traffic to your site to further their war on.. well.. everyone else then check it out.

1up talks to J. Allard of Microsoft and Kaz Hirai of Sony about their next generation consoles and where their companies are going. It’s almost as if they forget forget what Microsoft is when they’re talking about MS as if it’s the “new underdog” of the gaming world.

Anyway, there’s some good information outside of the obvious ploys to one-up the competition.

J. Allard saying

From the broadest point of view, one thing that bums me out about the videogame industry is that we’ve developed these camps or factions when we’re all gamers.

is priceless. When someone else is the top dog, why can’t we all just get along? Microsoft is all about the “we” and “us” untill there’s no “competition”. Then it’s all about the “how much can you bleed” the “us”.

FCC Cheif Martin is all for taxing VOIP services. Nevermind that they have the potential to carry phone service to rural areas for far less than it costs to run individual data lines *and* phonelines out to each subscriber.

That assumption is made on the basis that whatever technology works best for bridging the last leg of the IP packets journey will be used. So there’s no need to have a phoneline, per-say, but you would simply use whatever wired or wireless technology is feasible.

My problem with things like the massive telephone subsidizing fund is that it encourages graft, corruption, and market fixing. There’s absolutely no incentive to make low-cost workable solutions while everyone is forced to pay for the broken system.

Looks like some Aussie’s are still ripping up the countryside due to “racial tensions”.

I don’t get why they’re terming it a problem with “youths”. The drunk looking fellow in the picture looks older than the police trying to arrest him.

It looks like Sony-BMG might be thinking of ditching it’s role as a software company after all. They’re taking the issue “very seriously”, it’s reported.

Now, half the states in the union sueing them might have prompted a bit of heart-to-heart on how important corrupting unsuspecting users PC’s really is. Do they derive financial gain from it? Not really. Does it stop people from copying music they purchase to (gasp) listen to on the go? No.

Sorry Sony, you might have to stick to selling people one copy of albums for the foreseeable future instead of doubling prices and charging for the music in every conceivable format individually.

Wait, wait! I know what you’re thinking. That maybe I’ve lost my mind. Or started taking advertising dollars directly from Microsoft Games or whatever the division is called.

I can assure you that neither happens to be the case. Rather, part of a recent Gartner report on things IT executives should do for the new year caught my attention. Just not in the way it was intended, I think.

The mentioning of purchasing an XBox (or other console) to help understand disruptive technologies and prepare for the new year might not be totally off base. Not necessarily because it’s disruptive. It’s not, really. Consoles have been around for 35 years or so now and the premise hasn’t changed. Even the game plots remain largely unchanged, merely sporting (arguably) better execution in more recent releases.

No, what we should consider about consoles in relation to IT management is their ease of use. Only the absolutely necessary features are supported. You can always upgrade or expand them at a later point.. the underlying mechanisms are somewhat flexible. But the interface presented to the end user provides what they need, and only what they need, to get their “work” done.

Corporate and business systems should strive to be similar. Not the administrators system or the PC running design suites that vary frequently, but the person using a word processor, web browser, and calendering app. All to often unnecessary features clutter desktops and give rise to usage issues (or distract the user).

Not every desktop of course. Some corporations or large outfits have a fairly streamlined experience. But I’m betting there’s quite a few of you businesses that could benefit from a clutter free desktop being presented to in-house users. It’s certainly something to think about going into the new year.

Intel appears to think the laptop being powered by it’s rival AMD’s CPUs is a really bad idea. But not on any persuasive technical argument, no.

Intel’s Craig Barrett feels it’s because the laptop doesn’t address local needs.. ya’ know.. because there’s a huge difference in what a laptop can do based on market.

It doesn’t sound like he put a lot of thought in that one.. the laptop in question is powered by a crank and was designed by the boys & girls at MIT for poor rural environments. Although it won’t be playing Quake 4 fon small rural farms. So maybe he’s right.

Family tech support around the holiday’s always a pain. Enjoy! Penny Arcade! - One Day In The Future

I don’t think you can make stuff like this up. According to the AP wire there’s at least one drunken mob roaming Australia attacking Arabic looking people. ‘Round these parts people are usually racially violent when they think they’re being trodden on, not when they want to trod on others.

That’s usually a bit more subtle these days. Or institutionalized. At any rate, this one was due to two lifeguards (possibly?) being attacked by youths of (maybe) Lebanese descent. This all seems a bit sketchy to get a mob together and terrorize random people. On second thought lets just try to avoid mobs altogether, even the Aussies.

Sony just can’t keep themselves from trojaning your computer, it seems. ZDNet’s reporting on yet another flaw with the Sony rootkit-enabled DRM software.

I’m really starting to question what business Sony BMG is in these days. Are they a software house or a music shop? After all those horrible DRM packages that have been chewing through machines out on the ‘net I’m really starting to think they might want to .. ya know .. stick to selling music.

I’ve heard it’s what they do, after all.

Our jails apparently aren’t full enough yet in the USA. Music publishers (not, ya know.. Congress or anything) wants jail time for people that make music lyrics available online.

Remember, every time you write down the lyrics of a song it deprives some poor, starving lyric publishing company that all those readers would have purchased from. Any conceivable way of making a buck should be ingrained in law with a stiff jail sentence, apparently.

Releasing products every 24 months just wasn’t making enough money, so it looks like Microsoft is going to a 18 month release cycle. Apparently something that sounds like a SpikeTV program (Extreem Programming) is going to make this possible.

Not to belay the obvious, but if they can’t cut out a decent program in 24 months, how can they expect to in 18? Insanity.

Digitizing the print world’s always a huge headache. It looks like Google’s coming to realize this as they attempt to make the print world searchable.

One of the problems I see with complaints on Google is that they tend to gloss over a very pertinent point. While they bitch and moan about the current publications being “ripped off” they fail to mention the real reason they’re so up in arms about Google’s print service.

In a word, it will make printed works which are no longer clearly copyrighted and works that no one lays claim to digital. There will never be another dime made on these work and it may well fall out of human knowledge without this.

But someone, somewhere has to own the copyright by US law. And what the publishers are arguing is that because of that, this work should never see the light of day unless the copyright holders are tracked down and payed.. not that that’s technically possible.

Merck looks to be running into a little more trouble with the vioxx lawyers. There’s a case going to a Dallas federal jury on Tuesday. A widow is suing over the death of her husband claiming it was from Vioxx as he was otherwise healthy.

The backstory is that the tests might have omitted a few heart attacks from their results. Apparently the researchers didn’t include them initially and this didn’t come out until after the deadline for including research.

So, pretty nasty all around. Class action suites appear to be in the wings if this one is successful.

Looks like Apple may want to scrap that whole “computer” idea altogether and go with the real money maker. iPods. Demand for their laptop line has apparently slowed a bit even as the ubiquitous iPod continues on it’s path to glory.

Now, I’ve never really understood the need to overpay for a DRM encumbered MP3 player. People seem to really dig them though.