Main Dish:

- Paul sent me this link to Mecora. What's fascinating about it is that it turns every connected hard drive into an internet radio station. The model is pretty straightforward, instead of downloading music illegally, you listen to someone's legal copy legally. Don't know how this would work for portable music devices, where a lot of downloaded music ends up residing.

- last year I linked to an EETimes piece about next gen 64 bit Power architecture chip from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The point of my original comment was that the game systems are driving hardware innovation, given that the Cell processor was initially headed for Sony's PS3 game console. There is a better analysis of the chip that just came out, but one of my favorite pubs is taking issue with it for some good reasons. I think this is something we'll see with more regularity as multi-core processors hit the market, the analysis of these chips really needs to break from the past... e.g. the comparison of 'local memories' in a multicore environment vs. L1 cache in a monolithic processor.

- delays in implementing the EU's software patent rules... blame the Polish. I'm not so sure that implementing the U.S. style system for patenting software is a good idea for anyone... here's more detailed info on the delay.

- I think I'm gonna gak.

- So Google comes out with TV search and everyone gushes about how cool it is... even though Google can deliver copyrighted material in the form of scripted content... which is pretty much all of the actual programming. Blinkx has a similar service and because I root for the up-and-comers, I vote for them. I rate this a 4 on the excitement scale.

- Good finally launches a mobile email product for the enterprise

- here's why I wouldn't be such a fan of RSS feeds for wiki changes: it's be like getting those daily digest emails from yahoo groups... too much clutter. I wouldn't mind having wiki search results delivered as RSS feeds. Actually, now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind have changes to a specific wiki page RSS'ed to me... I think Socialtext can do that... Ross?

- Om points out a reason why Google's bid to acquire dark fiber is not related to VoIP.

Comments

[Marc g]

Blame the Polish all you want, but should such important decisions about patent law be made on a thumbs up/down vote in a meeting of agriculture ministers? C'mon, that's smeels so bad my nose is burning all the way over here. Not the first time it happened either. They tried this either the week before or after Christmas in a special session of the same ministry. Reporting was of course very thin. I'll dig up the links I found to that one if you like.

I think US style software patents have serious flaws, it doesn't mean that software patents are fundamentally a bad idea. In order to find a good way to do it open debate is required. Tactics like this won't get you there.

[jeff]

Hey Marc,
I'm on your side! Software patents are a good concept, but the system that the U.S. has evolved to for implementing this specific form of IP protection is flawed. As I insinuated, the Europeans should be very careful about going down this road.

At any rate, another delay is not good either. The market is expecting the EU to deliver guidance on this, they should double down and do the debate necessary to get it done. I think this also exposes a weakness in the EU system... getting 26 separate nations to agree on a single strategy.