Google Adsense

I signed on the Google Adsense program. Blogger.com started allowing Goggle Adsense ads on the web blogs. So why did I sign it?



That's Simple! Just thought of trying it out. So if you want to see me rich, click , click and click on the Google Ads on my blog :-)

Beware - Writing Blogs can take your job Away!

Blogging is becoming a more common phenonemon with millions of bloggers posting messages on a daily basis. Organizations have started adopting this but in some cases it can cause flury within the same organization. Few months back I heard about Microsoft firing an employee for posting some pictures on his blog, which showed Macs ordered by Microsoft. And today yet another case, Friendster fires an employee and the reason again was blog. Here is the link for the friendster gal , who got fired. http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/46_Shitcanned.html



Even though the posts for which she was fired don't look damaging for the company, but writing anything about your corporation, please first check your corporation policy. A big brother might be watching you!



Thanks to rotwodtwo(http://www.mblog.com/rtwodtwo/) for the link.

Olympic Games - Celebrate Humanity

One of the tv commercials for the olympics that touched me.

Heart



If you could have the arms of Hercules,

Legs as swift as the wind;



If you could leap shoulder high above the rim,

Have the kick of a dolphin, the reflexes of a cat;



If you could have all this, you would have the body,

you would have the tools,



But you will not have greatness,

until you understand that the strongest muscle is the heart.



To me that's the soul of the olympic games.

Watch the videos from here.

http://www.olympic.org/uk/passion/humanity/index_uk.asp

Executors in JDK1.5

Brian Geotz has an article at JavaPro for using Executors in JDK1.5 .



JDK1.5 intorduces Executors which can help maintain thread pools and management of task execution. The article is available at this link . http://www.ftponline.com/javapro/2004_08/online/bgoetz_08_04_04/default_pf.aspx

Multimedia Snapshot

As I was writing my previous blog on TIVO getting the nod for distributing digital content over the internet and media companies need to open up, a thought struck my mind.



Blogging has become a world wide phenomenon, with mllions of bloggers blogging every second. Search engines like Technorati are keeping track of each and every blog and enabling to search the live web, getting to know opinions of people as and when they are published.



Can such a thing be reproduced with live multimedia streams ? There are limited number of audio and video blogs that exist, but I think they are not well organised. There are no search engines to search through, there's no proper central interface like Technorati etc. which can pick the live video streams, club them nicely together and publish it as a news channel.



Currently all the audio and video blogs are kept in files , associated with certain text ; one can go and read text and hear audios, but what would be interesting is if one can generate a live 24 hour video channel from multiple splitted up videos contributed by people from all over the world.



Next time, when I hear a breaking news, I can hear not just what media houses present to me but what the local residents themselves experience. I can have something like visual map of the whole world and can zoom in or out and can wish to hear news stories from any big city to any small native town of any corner of the world.



Big news media does the organization and presentation of news very well - but thats a challenge if one can be a blogger, then there might be whole lot of people who become indepedent journalists, have a rating system and with some clever multimedia and semi-automatic analysis and then anyone can have a live multimedia snapshort of the world at any given moment of time.



This is yet far from reality, but as we move into the future - more and more multimedia generated by our peers will start affecting our life.

TIVO Gets the Nod

CNN has the newstory on TIVO finally getting the nod to go ahead with distributing media over the internet. http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/04/technology/tivo.reut/

TiVo Inc., maker of popular digital television recording devices, Wednesday received approval for technology that would permit users to send copies of digital broadcast shows over the Internet.

The Federal Communications Commission voted to certify digital protections on TiVoToGo, which is not yet available but would enable a user to record and send a digital broadcast television show to up to nine other registered people who have a key allowing them to see it.



The approval came despite concerns by the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Football League about the risks of unfettered distribution of copyrighted shows and illegally airing sports games outside of authorized markets. .........

I think this is an important step for closing the gap between rich digital media which is controlled by media companies with the content on internet which is mainly text based. Media companies need to find more ways to distribute content via internet, making it a rich channel and also earn money along the way. In the long run, they would themselves in trouble if they don't open up.

Patents or No Patents

Got an interesting link from Technodirt about Software Patents



Patents Have Become The Nuclear Stockpiling Of The Software Industry

MÃ¥rten Mickos, CEO of mySQL, has written a piece over at Always-On, explaining (accurately) that the software patent game these days is the equivalent of nuclear stockpiling. You build up as many patents as you can, because you know the competition is, too, and you'll need them to fight off any patent battle. It doesn't need to be this way. In fact, it shouldn't be this way, because all it's doing is slowing down innovation and diverting money away from development to lawyers. Mickos uses the database industry as an example. In the days before software patents, plenty of people took the relational database ideas of Edgar Codd (totally random aside: I had a database professor in college who had the bumper sticker: "Codd is God" in honor of Mr. Codd) and built up a thriving industry, including the standardization of SQL, on which the entire industry is based. While he doesn't say it specifically, the clear implication is that in a world of software patents, that situation wouldn't have existed. Letting everyone build their own implementations based on the idea of relational databases and the standards of SQL allowed a thriving, competitive industry to develop. Copyright laws protect the code. However, when we patent ideas, the first person to come up with the "idea" of a relational database could have patented it -- and simply stopped the competition from happening without coughing up license fees to IBM. As we've said before, innovation is more important than invention. By allowing the inventor to patent an entire concept, it kills the ability to innovate, harming the entire economy.

The complete news story is at

http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P5141_0_3_0_C



There is an interesting quote from Bill Gates from this newsstory..

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution...is patent exchanges...and patenting as much as we can...A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."



That quote is very telling. It is from Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, in his "Challenges and Strategy Memo" of May 16, 1991.