In a prior post I came out in swinging defense of what I thought was Kevin’s courageous attempt to save Digg and Alexis’s misguided criticisms.

As it turns out, Digg V4 has decided to focus on ‘large publishers’ (like Alexis had thought they would) rather than ‘small publishers’ (whichh I thought they were).

So, given that I quickly (and loudly) appealed to Alexis to be cautious with his critique, I feel it is appropriate to (just as loudly) apologize and admit that I was wrong, and am now disappointed in Digg and Kevin.

I stand corrected Alexis, you were right.

Please note that I am not apologizing just because the community revolted – communities always revolt when change happens, but they often get used to it – but I am acknowledging that Alexis correctly saw what the true changes at Digg were, as I did not.

I absolutely love this business card design….might be a bit too geeky for some though.

Seen @ Zee.Me’s Blog.

A typical shopping mall parking lot starts off empty, and drivers navigate to the best parking spot of their choosing. If they get there early, they get the spot right in front of the door.

If they don’t, they get the spot all the way at the back and have to walk for miles.

If they are lucky enough to be driving past a sweet spot that someone is coming out of, they got lucky – and can seize it.

Left uninhibited, most parking lots will function fine. The average driver is capable enough to navigate through the parking lot and use it efficiently without any external guidance.

However, every now and then there is that douchebag that parks in two spaces in a completely jammed parking lot.

There is that annoying driver that decided to mess around and ends up bumping someone else, and causes a traffic jam.

There is that very heavy traffic day, where many drivers are agitated and need to get somewhere quickly – which causes everybody to get where they are going slowly.

In those situations, you need a traffic cop (i.e. regulator).

However, if you had many traffic cops directing traffic into and out of every parking space, traffic would slow to a crawl most of the time – because you know those moments when he tells you to go right, but you thought he said left and you have to now reverse and go back right, but then he had told you to just continue going left and there is that few seconds of uncertainty on both parts about what to do…those moments would be multiplied many times by the number of drivers and traffic cops.

So while free market capitalism has ushered in significant advancements in medicine, technology, standard of living, etc., every now and then it needs a traffic cop.

For those douchebag drivers…not you, of course.

P.S. Image courtesy of Alex92287 on Flickr. 

 

 

I recently had a need for video compression software. I was working on a side project, that involved compressing video and releasing it online.

I tried many different pieces of freeware and they all came up short. They were either too complicated, or didn’t quite do a good job. I settled on Sorenson Squeeze 6. I have had experience with one of the earlier versions and remember it being pretty nice to use and the results were pretty good (i.e. relatively small size for high quality video). 

So I checked them out, being that it is a small project I was not on the market for anything TOO expensive. $800? No way. I continued searching for a free/cheaper alternative but with all the demos I downloaded, they always came up short. I decided to bite the bullet and get it.

Got it, worked beautifully. It’s an awesome product…really. It’s very intuitive, very powerful and has MANY settings. I used it for IdeaTin and decided that I should really get around to resizing all my home videos. Yes, all 700GB of them. Every single HD tape that I rip is about 30GB. I definitely don’t need ‘HD’ quality, but I never got around to figuring out how to reduce the size of my library. Now that I have Squeeze 6, I can finally tackle it in a sane way. To Sorenson’s credit, I emailed them telling them about my project and that the $800 price is too steep (also that I found Squeeze 6 at another online store for $200 cheaper). They refunded me $200 off the purchase price, no questions asked. I was pleasantly surprised.

I have a Windows 7 machine, 1 iMac + 1 Macbook Pro. The idea was that given the size of the library, I would have it running on all three machines at the same time to reduce the total amount of time spent re-encoding the library. Got it installed on the MBP and Windows 7 machine fine, no problems.

Tried to install on the iMac, no can do. Contact customer support, they say 1 Serial Number, 1 machine. Ok, I get such a policy in business environments (mid-size to large companies anyway).  I get it for Operating Systems, where it is the core of the system. The very foundation of the computer.

But for a home/small business, where people realistically own multiple machines, and for an application designed to do ‘heavy-lifting’ (where having multiple machines running at the same time will reduce the load) this policy should be re-evaluated. I get that there might be technical challenges with detecting who is telling the truth and who is trying to scam you, but I would be willing to bet that these types of policies turn off more legitimate users than deter pirates. If I were to pirate any software, I can install it on as many machines as I like. If it doesn’t work, I don’t have to use it and have no buyer’s remorse. If I buy software and it doesn’t do what I want, or there are restrictions (especially for the more expensive variety), having buyer’s remorse is the software company’s worst enemy.

In this case, Sorenson might be better served at least waving it for those that have a legitimate reason – what is the marginal cost of issuing one more serial number to someone that owns a small business or is using your software at home and has bought your software? Nothing. You don’t have to contact the customer, they will contact you. You don’t have to ship any new CDs or any new documentation. A simple email would suffice.

An alternative route that Sorenson could take is, build an ‘add-on’ application that comes with the software (free) for this particular use case. If you want to restrict me to just using it one or two machines, fine. But have an ‘applet’ that allows me to install a small app on additional computers that allow me to just do a single function (run batch encoding while the main machines are also running – or some variation thereof).

For all software makers out there, it might be beneficial in the short-term interest of the company to restrict the use of your software in ways YOU deem it appropriate to be used, but you simply risk diluting your brand equity in the long term. Imagine you buy a BMW and they tell you where you can drive it or who you can lend your car to.

Oh, and Sorenson, I know that when I bought your software I ‘agreed’ to these terms in the EULA. No need to throw it in my face when I am inquiring about them with your customer support. Your EULA should be protection against fringe cases, an escape of last resort. Not the first line of defense.

Hi Marc,

Per your user agreement, you are only allowed one activation per license. If you would like more information on purchasing a license for multiple users, contact [email protected].

Thank you,

Here is to wishing that software companies will wise up and start allowing customers to do what they want with their software, once they take your money.

 

 

Say it ain’t so? As far as I know, I was never told that Blizzard would be using my bandwidth to serve other clients. I hope I didn’t miss it in the long EULA I skimmed over and agreed to.

As you can see in the image above, I am downloading Starcraft 2 Beta from a number of ‘peers’. I have a unique Peer ID (blacked out for privacy purposes), and each of my peers have the same. The leftmost column is the IP address for all the clients I am connected to, and the rightmost column is their Peer ID.

What is also curious is my download speed is only twice my upload speed. Sometimes it is even equal. It seems to me that Blizzard does this to keep as many peers as active as possible. There is no option to throttle my upspeed, or downspeed for that matter.

I love Blizzard and all, but these ‘sneaky’, old media, tactics are not befitting such a forward thinking company as Blizzard.

Perhaps this could have been buried in the EULA, and if that is the case, without any other notification, I feel….kind of…taken advantage of.

Edit: Just re-read the EULA and saw point #3 which discusses this issue:

3. Distribution of the Game. Blizzard may choose to distribute the Game through the use of the “Blizzard Downloader” utility which utilizes the ‘upload’ capability of your computer to distribute the Game to other participants of the Beta Test. In such an event, you agree that Blizzard may distribute the Game by using your home computer to ‘upload’ all or part of the Game to other participants of the Beta Test.

Another particularly heinous section of their EULA is Ominously titled ‘Consent to Monitor’.

8. Consent to Moniter. WHEN RUNNING, THE GAME MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER’S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH THE GAME. AN “UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS” AS USED HEREIN SHALL BE DEFINED AS ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY “ADDON,” “MOD,” “HACK,” “TRAINER,” OR “CHEAT,” THAT IN BLIZZARD’S SOLE DETERMINATION: (i) ENABLES OR FACILITATES CHEATING OF ANY TYPE; (ii) ALLOWS USERS TO MODIFY OR HACK THE GAME INTERFACE, ENVIRONMENT, AND/OR EXPERIENCE IN ANY WAY NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED BY BLIZZARD; OR (iii) INTERCEPTS, “MINES,” OR OTHERWISE COLLECTS INFORMATION FROM OR THROUGH THE GAME. IN THE EVENT THAT THE GAME DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, THE GAME MAY (a) COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR ACCOUNT NAME, DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED, AND THE TIME AND DATE THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM WAS DETECTED; AND/OR (b)  EXERCISE ANY OR ALL OF ITS RIGHTS UNDER THIS AGREEMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE TO THE USER.

Although Kenny Rogers gave us ’The Gambler’ (YouTube) where he teaches us about when to ‘hold em, or fold em’ (the hand of life, ostensibly). Tony Hsieh, of Zappos fame, has given us another wonderful poker metaphor. Know when to change tables.

Very interesting interview of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet by Charlie Rose. I know it’s a bit long, but they discuss their latest challenge to the wealthiest Americans. Watch it here.

Google just announced that they have rolled out a new indexing system for their search engine, called Caffeine. Here are some interesting quotes:

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)

What’s even more intriguing is the amount of data they process:

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

I can’t even fathom that amount of data. To read the official Google announcement, check it out here.

Fubiz.net has a wonderful post of various murals of the upcoming World Cup 2010. Here are some that I love: [caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”434” caption=”Lionel Messi - Argentina World Cup 2010”] [/caption]

Many people misunderstand the true meaning behind ‘fail early, fail fast’. The most ‘high-profile’ of which is Jason Fried and our friends at 37Signals.

Fail early, fail fast isn’t encouraging you to fail. It’s encouraging you to act/move/start.

Read the phrase again, with emphasis: fail early, fail fast.

The idea behind the saying is, just do something. It’s easy to get trapped in a ‘secure’ situation. Whether that is a ‘stable/cushy’ job, or using a product that is OK. It’s this inertia that kills innovation. It’s fear of the unknown or fear of the failure that also dis-incentivizes people from striking out and making that killer product they have always envisioned, or recorded that song they have written, or sold that painting they have stashed away in their basement.

People get accustomed to procrastinating and delaying that they don’t attempt to do what they say they want to do.

The phrase ‘fail early, fail fast’ is attempting to take the sting out of the fear of failing - by using the terms ‘early’ & ‘fast’. Makes it sound ‘quick’ and ‘painless’. Ever been to a doctor to get an injection?

‘It will feel like a mosquito bite’ is what I am always told.

It’s kinda like that - especially since creating a new product is so hard, the last thing a creator needs is the fear of failure hanging over their heads (although, to be fair that fear can be a good motivator).

I am not advocating failure, but anything that removes one more psychological barrier for inventors can only be good for society.

So, go ahead and fail as quickly as you can. Pick yourself up, and try again.

Editor’s Note: Please note that I am not encouraging people to strike out in an attempt to fail. Simply to not be afraid of failing - if that wasn’t clear enough in the post.