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Software patents kinda suck

Today in the car I had a funny thought, justed wanted to share it with the world 🙂

I was listening to an old javaposse podcast, they were talking about creative’s patent and how they were going after apple with thei r Ipod.
Now okay, I know software pantents can be good in some situations, but it’s really getting out of hand in the US.
I was thinking about how pantents would effect other sectors.

Just imagine it, patents in soccer or basketball or any other sport. I would just destroy it. You wanted to fool you opponent with a trick and you just happend to use a trick somebody had pattented, you were into a lot of trouble. Every game would be analysed and all the good players would have to give up all of their money because the used a lot of tricks they had seen on tv when they were a child.

Okay, I know I’m being stupid and silly, but hey just look at what everybody’s doing with the patents at the moment. Its really getting out of hand if you ask me. I really wonder how all of this is going to end.

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audio vs video

A couple a days ago I was talking to freax about doing a vidcast. why, well it sounded great but also because I want to give something back to the community. I had the idea of doing a podcast about programming, not the things you see on most of the show but actually going rather deep into it.
Some of the ideas about subjects I head were ie doing a podcast on hibernate, so not just telling you what it is but showing you in an IDE an example and building a real world example I would be using on my own website/intranet.
Another Idea was to build an application using a Service Oriented Architecture. And then show some of the benefits that came from doing it this way.
I wanted freax to join and tell his stories about using design patterns in C. Showing some of the neat tricks he used in his day to day work.

While I was explaining this to him, he told me someone had asked him to write a book about design patterns in C. Now a book sounds great, and looks good on your CV, but then I told him, imagine Robert Love had not written his book on kernel programming, but made an iptv show on it. Okay it would have taken several hours but you can do so much more with visual things and movement than static content.

Today I read werners blog, he had a nice comparison chart in there of how much you learn from several mediums. Now in this chart audio/video are the same, but for me that’s certainly not true. My mind more easily stores visual information than audio information.

I’m still thinking about doing such an iptv show, but haven’t got the details figured out yet. I think the release time would be every month or so. But If I start this I want to have a schedule planned out for at least 10 episodes. I’m still thinking about good subjects. Java,Mono and C are already in there, but what precise subject I haven’t figured out yet.