topicalhuman.com

My mother, who has recently decamped to Seoul, asked me to look at some Toshiba Notebooks she was considering. After googling the part numbers, I realised that the only info was in Korean. I don’t read Korean. I then noticed that there was an option to have Google translate the page into English. I thought is might be useful so I clicked on it. It took close to a minute to complete the translation, and here is the result. Now, it it useful in the sense it was able to provide some basic info, but the translation is an example of Engrish at its finest. Check it out - pretty funny.

Just a brief link to Session Computing - this appears to be a neat resource for Thing Client Computing products.

Yes, its true. Even the boss man says DRM sucks, and that you’re better off buying a CD and ripping it. Of course, this isn’t a major revelation, but it sure is interesting to hear him admit it penalises the honest majority of users.

Hugh is requesting people write and send him their Minifesto’s. And he is getting some really good stuff through. Just to highlight a few of the good ones being submitted, Seth Godin has an Unforgivable Minifesto, there is a really neat Music Minifesto, and an ex-pat Minifesto which I’m going to forward to my Mum.

Some of this is really very clever. But the cleverest work has been done by Hugh. Not to put too fine a point on it, his blog over the last couple of months has been a bit lean on some of the ‘meatier’ content I had come to expect over the last couple of years. No doubt he has been busy as a result of the hard work he has put into gapingvoid over the last couple of years, but to be honest, I don’t care much. I want to read interesting, thought-provoking stuff, and won’t bother checking sites that don’t fill this need.

However, by opening up his personal media outlet to other people with something useful to say he has probably accomplished the following:

• Gained new fans, perhaps even potential partners and allies, among those who have something to say through submitting a Minifesto.
• Retained the interest of a significant portion of his readership (well, at least me!) by having interesting posts, in a more regular basis.
• Attracts new readers, as some of the Minifesto’s are on subjects I’m sure Hugh hasn’t written about before.

A very clever move by Hugh; I’m sure it isn’t a co-incidence.

I’ve been casually following the fallout from the recent Australian legislation regarding copyright, particularly in regard to digital mediums. Cory Doctorow has a brief article on BoingBoing that highlights one aspect of the ridiculous nature of this legislation: Search Engines will need explicit permission to index and cache Australian websites.

For what it’s worth, the Search Engines can consider this my permission to index and cache my humble little website. It makes me think, however, that if this is going to be a real obstacle, is there a tool that can be developed that automatically tells Search Engines that a particular web page is “search-friendly”? Hopefully, this won’t actually be required.

[Update] The SMH reports on a more recent development here.

IE7 has been released after what has appeared to be a fairly rigourous development cycle. I’ll be interested to see how it goes - I might wait until a service pack.

Google has bought YouTube. It will be interesting to see what happens from here.

Mark Cuban has a great article on why he thinks YouTube is going to be in yesterdays news very soon. I love YouTube, as evidenced by my constant linking to it. So I would love to argue the point with him, but what he is saying seems to make sense.

Hopefully the folks at YouTube can pull a rabbit out of their hat so they can keep providing the service they do currently.

[Update] It looks like Mark Cuban is on to something - Universal Music has their eyes on Myspace and YouTube.

I want to check out this extension for Firefox sometime: AdaptiveBlue.

Also, a good article here on the increasing relevance of ’social software’ in business environments.

I’ve touched on rootkits before, specifically the Sony rootkit. I found out today that Sophos has a free anti-rootkit package. They even have a podcast on the subject. I use Sophos, and in a professional capacity I recommend and sell Sophos. I actually really like selling it, because it is really good software in general. So I downloaded the scanner and gave it a run. It seems to work smoothly and fairly quickly.

I actually found out about when Jodie, the lovely Sophos rep, visited us at Centra Networks today. The conversation quickly turned to the Sony rootkit, and I was reminded of a recent comment by Mark Cuban:

and for all you “but i can and do download everything ” types. Good for you. Get up and away from your computer and go see how the rest of the country lives. And when you hit 27, get a real job or move out of your parents house, whichever comes first, tell me if you are still downloading 10 movies and burning them for your friends and creating 10 playlists for Itunes every week like you did in college or when you first graduated. At some point you realize the time you spend downloading and burning to a DVD is worth more than the 10 bucks to go to a movie or 20 bucks or less to buy the movie. When that happens you will have figured out that all that time you spend burning DVDs and trying to manage space on your hard drive wasnt worth it

This sums up for me a big reason why DRM is a waste of time. The people who download illegally are either students who will grow out of it soon enough, or they are perpetual losers. And last time I checked, spending tens of millions of dollars pursuing losers is bad business.

[Update] BoingBoing reports that Texas is suing Sony over the rootkit affair.