Category: technology

Google Rethinks Pets At Work

Sleepy Korat

(yes, this is an excuse to put a picture of one of our Korats on my blog)

According to The Inquirer out of the UK, Google is rethinking its ‘pets at work’ program. This was due to a pet python (animal, not language) going feral at the New York office. And the name of the pet is Kaiser. What the? Valleywag had blow-by-blow coverage earlier this week.

I’ve never got the deal with taking your pets to work in the US. OK, I can take goldfish if people get over the fact they seem to die weekly.

Taking your beloved pets to visit the animals you work with just smells like animal cruelty to me.

EMI dropping Digital Rights Management

EMI’s change of heart from Apple press release:

Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.

As an iPod and Zune user, this is a vision of the future: the hardware and location we choose use to listen to music and watch video should not matter. Consumer choice is important. Kudos Apple and EMI for stepping into the light.

Eurovision Season is starting

I don’t understand a word of this, but the central tenants of Geek hardware and reproduction are universal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8PQnKdYh-0

According to Bruce Satchwell, hardware and radio geek from the Gold Coast, this is an example of a weird European hobby called Amateur Radio Direction Finding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Radio_Direction_Finding

I wonder if this hobby started like archery in the 11th through 13th century in England? English archers were revered through Europe due to their prowess. This was developed in villages from a young age. Maybe during the Cold War eastern bloc countries had their young radio geeks make RDF devices to stop the Capitalist west airborne intruders? I wonder.

The Inside Story of Channel 9 and On10.net

From Wired “Gimme a B! Gimme an L! Gimme an… ” (Wired 15.04) . On10.net (or sometimes called Channel 10) is one of the “outputs” of the world-wide team I work for. Bunch of smart and enthusiastic people. Jeff is our quiet uber-boss.

This article describes the history behind Channel 9, and the new open-ness of Microsoft.

It’s interesting to be a part of the small team that’s changing the perception of Microsoft.