James Sapara’s Personal Blog

We’re at coffee tonight and we’re talking about the craziness that is patents. It occurs to us that many of the patents are just the same old technology, but on a cellphone or wireless network of some sort. This is obviously silly for many reasons, mostly that putting something on wireless these days is trivial… and that cellphones are essentially computers. So it stands to reason, if companies in the US can get away with filling this sort of patents… and defending them. Well, obviously there is money to be made by just… making patents up with various applicable technologies. So I present to you, our first prior art claim to… the motion gesture interface to cellphones.
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I’ve been in the market for a new camera bag ever since I bought a 300mm telephoto lens. My plain old 35mm camera bag just didn’t cut it anymore. I wanted to take my camera with me, and be able to swap to a different lens if the need arose. Considering my 35mm camera bag from Lowepro has lasted the better part of 12 years or so… I figured they would be a good brand to continue using. At the recommendation of a friend who is a far more experience camera buff than me, I decided to go with a single strap, over the shoulder bag. This makes for easy pickup and reduces some of that back pain from carrying a load of equipment on one shoulder.
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Right, much time has passed since my last post. Here’s a summery of the exciting stuff that’s happened since… well… since I can remember it.
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Literally out of no where this morning I was thinking about mowing lawns. Some may already know my particularly odd stance on this subject, but the more I thought about it; the more I needed to say something about it. I use a push reel mower. You can find them almost everywhere you can find gas mower. Let jump into why I use one of these “old school” mowers.
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While short, this article (Id’s Kevin Cloud Says Piracy is Killing PC Gaming)points out an unfortunate problem. Video games for the PC are easy to pirate. Reducing the incentive for people to buy them. Which is leading game developers to make video games for console systems instead of PC’s. I’m not particularly bothered by this trend, since I don’t play alot of video games these days (WoW for the most part…). What bothers me is the idea that a subscription game is the solution. As it’s implemented now in games like World of Warcraft. I pay for game in a box, then I subscribe.

I think there’s a good chance that if it was free to download and all you had to do was subscribe it would be fantastic. A publisher could make a game available by free for a week (depends on the size and theme of the game) people would try before they buy. If they wanted to continue to play they would have to subscribe to the game. For a single player game it would have to either be a small amount of money a month (say $2 or $3), or a full fee at the star for access all the time. SteamPowered actually attempts to do this, but requiring full payment up front. For ANY online game like WoW, it only makes sense to distribute the game for free, give a week free play to get them hooked and then sucker them in with subscriptions. I would of been playing WoW the week it came out instead of waiting 8 months to start.

Anyways, it seems to me that the economy today is all about instant profit, not sustainable income. At some point the markets expendable income will become close to 100% allocated. Would you rather them buy you boxed game once, or pay you a sum each month. I think the answer is obvious. Not to mention I think alot of consumers would think less about paying $12 to try a game for a month, than shell out $70 to find out a game sucks. In the market of games, if you make a good game you shouldn’t have to worry about the number of subscribers you’ll get.

I’m on my way back from the mall today replaying the “OK GO” video in my head. It’s not particularly great for any reason, just slightly entrancing to see 4 odd looking men dance like that. I was nearly ready to purchase their album on itunes/amazon whatever, until I noticed they used “Capitol” records. Unfortunately that an organization ruled under the iron fist of the RIAA; who, just happens to be one of my least favorite organizations (Right below United States Government (no offence guys, but damn there’s some silly policy going on there (yes I know Canada has silly policies as well)) and above MPAA). Back on topic…

I used to just not like the RIAA… holding the little man down and all that. Today it just came to me (may of been obvious to others…) that the reason I shouldn’t support the RIAA it’s because it has taken the power from the artists. Every starting band seems to have problems with money. They don’t get paid much apparently, which is understandable. Here’s my problem: I’ve never heard of a record company exec being broke. Or that the people who run the RIAA are underpaid, or anyone else involved in that process. It seems that the priority for distributing the money leaves the artist last in this whole scheme they have. What I think some artists don’t realize (or are scared to test) is that without them, “the artist”, these people would have no jobs. The artist is effectively employing all these people, but not so willingly paying themselves poorly.

The solution is cut the the middle man organizations out. Back to basics for production, marketing and distribution. All these things cost money, and possibly in some cases more than what an established organization would cost. The difference is it would promote competition in that industry to provide the services artists need to be successful. No longer would the artist be paying for some RIAA chump (aka Cary Sherman) to make money off suing children, dead people or old people for downloading music. Not that I support that practice, but I feel the market has been driven to that by the business model the RIAA forces on us.

Anyways, all I want to do is buy an album and know that the artist is getting fairly compensated before everyone else does, because without the artists there is not music. With no music there would be no RIAA… just think about that Chad…

Basically it reads the mbox file and uploads it to the imap server. Simple and useful for systems where there are not alot of users and you just happen to know their passwords.

Download

I have recently had the need to backup my contacts from my cellphone. I installed the software that came with my phone, but for some reason it would not work with the toshiba bluetooth adaptor in my dell. So I went looking for something that would. Turns out someone had this problem already and made an application that actually works. Imagine that… MyPhoneExplorer.

Well I’ve been bitching about how Surpass keeps taking away ssh and never updates anything, so I finially moved from those commies. I found a cool hosting company that gives you a virtual dedicated server. You kinda pay on a subscription/used resources system. You can read all aboot them here: OpenHosting, if you sign up please use this link. You save the setup fee of $15 and I get $15 after you spend $60. Deals for both of us!

For those who know my geek side well; You could describe me as the laided back security guy. I recoginze the importance of computer security, but I don’t go overboard for the most part (or insist on needless procedures/protocol when you leave your machine in an unlocked home). At any rate, I’ve always felt bad that my passwords for the net are not as secure as they should be. While the important stuff is easily over 18 bytes long, I have this urge to give all the sites I visit some decently long and complex passwords. This is where Mandylion comes in.

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