Heard about this one on GeekNewsCentral yesterday (Episode 113). Marks Sysinternals Blog has an article called Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far. You have to read it to believe it.
Category Archives: Technology
Debian based GNU/Solaris
Aside
What’s this? Debian based GNU/Solaris???
DRM Crippled CD: A bizarre tale in 4 parts
Aside
This article on The Big Picture tells a bizarre story about DRM crippled CDs. This actually hits home for me as over the weekend I found that the new G3 – Live In Tokyo CD (Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and John Petrucci) came out and is also DRM protected. iTunes only has the partial album – no Petrucci. Disappointing. This story is a pretty interesting read and shows how rediculous this copy protection thing is and how petty one company can be.
Flickr Architecture
Aside
Ever wonder what Flickr’s architecture looks like? Niall Kennedy has a post about it that refers to a Powerpoint presentation on Flickr’s site and states some brief statistics. The presentation is pretty interesting. It’s amazing what you can do with MySQL and a little (okay, a lot of) PHP …
Oracle to release “free” low end database
Aside
I found this article on ZDNET talking about how Oracle will be releasing a free version of Oracle 10g to try and head off Open Source databases like MySQL.
USATODAY.com – Tech people appear hyped about their industry again
Aside
Kevin Maney posts a review of the Web 2.0 conference held in San Franciso earlier this month.
The Story of the Most Popular Guy on MySpace
Aside
A guy named Samy documents his experience after hacking MySpace to become more popular. Pretty amusing read. It seems he learned his lesson and will be more honest moving forward.
Riya – Real Competition for Flickr?
Aside
Nalla sent me a link to TechCrunch » First Screen Shots of Riya, an article about a new photo service with built in photo recognition. This looks pretty cool, aside from the stated 4 hour upload time per gigabyte of data.
VMWare Offers Free Player
Aside
VMWare, Inc. offers a free virtual machine player according to this article. Download the new free player at the player download page.
Google Reader
I’ve been using the Google Reader for the last few days since I’ve been away from my home machine, where I usually use FeedDemon for all of my RSS aggregating needs. I have to say, I’m digging it. One nice thing about having Google software to manage this kind of stuff is that they are confident enough to give you the ability to export your feed data to external feed readers if you aren’t happy with it.
Joel Spolsky wrote an article back in 2000 about removing barriers to entry in order to get your product accepted in the market. One of these barriers is allowing the user the option to go back if they feel they have made a mistake. Google has removed this barrier to entry for us, allowing us to go back to what we are comfortable with if we want to.
I’m not sure I’m going to go back. I really like what Google has done with their aggregator. Check it out and see if you don’t feel the same way.