Jason Schwanz dot com

Fired for Legally Using P2P

Filed under Technology

P2P, or peer-to-peer, is one of the hot terms of the early 2000’s. I found an article on Slashdot yesterday about a teacher, Jorge Cortell, at a university in Spain. This teacher gave a speech on the legal use of P2P networks, and following his presentation he was promptly fired. You can read his blog post for his side of the story. Here is a quote from his post:

The day before the conference, the Dean (pressured by the Spanish Recording Industry Association “Promusicae” as I found out later, and he recognized himself in a quote to the national newspaper El Pais, and even the Motion Picture Association of America, as another newspaper quotes) tried to stop it by denying permission to use the scheduled venue. So I scheduled a second one, and that was denied again. And a third time. Finally I gave the conference on the university cafeteria, for 5 hours, in front of 150 people.

When the media caught wind of this and contacted the Vice-Dean of Communications he said that Jorge was never a teacher at that university, but Jorge had been teaching there for 5 years! Amazing.

An Example of WIDLM

Filed under Technology

WIDLM? You may be wondering what that stands for. It’s simple…Why I Don’t Like Microsoft. It was easier (and shorter) to type WIDLM than Why I Don’t Like Microsoft. But, here is the aformentioned example.

Today on the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog, Dwight Silverman posts about a recent interview with Micro$oft CEO Steve Ballmer. While the author (not Dwight) states that the content is not verbatim, the jist of it is there. Ballmer is quoted as saying:

We believe RSS is important and will be around for a while but it is not going to change the world. It is a little too simple, that is also the reason everyone’s using it. We are working on more existing powerful stuff, around XML/web services [sic] that will address many issues beyond RSS. RSS will be around, but whatever we are working next will be cooler and more prevelant.

Having said that, there are groups in MS that believe RSS has the potential to change everything and many future technology will be built around RSS, the internal debate goes on.

Silverman rebutts Ballmer’s “simple” claim with “Uh, Steve . . . simple is the point!” Amen!!! Not everything needs to be robust and complex. I think he’s forgotten that simple things change the world, too. Do you remember another simple thing called HTML? That sure has changed the world over the last 10 years.

And what do you mean by “cooler and more prevelant”? If you mean proprietary and full of security flaws, then yes that is probably true. Will it be forced on the world as a built-in “feature” of your monopoly product, Windows, like Internet Explorer and Windows Media?

That’s one of the problems with Microsoft. They take a simple idea that works really well, and they decided that it’s not “good” enough so they make it bloated and cumbersome. It’s like what a former co-worker of mine used to say about the difference between MS developers and open-source developers; Perl/Python programmers use a nutcracker to open a walnut, where MS developers use a sledgehammer.