I’m weird, but I enjoy discussing contentious things with people. The best kind of debate is one where both sides put forward a good effort, and chip away at various misconceptions until one of a handful of things happens. Either you can find a solid central point of agreement either by figuring out what the core of what they really want is rather than the outside rhetoric is, or you can come to an understanding that the views are incompatible and agree to keep your own opinions and leave it at that.

Buried deep in one of the bonuses for a second doctor DVD, I found the real reason why so much of the doctor who series is missing from the early days.Over the years, many have blamed BBC’s shortsightedness, or the cost of the early digital tapes for this. They said that the tapes were erased and reused… In the DVD though, they told the real story. The number of copies of the series that could be made wasn’t limited by the cost of the tape, but rather by Actors union contracts.

(Link Dead)Might be weird for me to say so after the fiasco that was Comcast owning our local cable company, but I actually wouldn’t mind them buying Bresnan now. After all, they’re on the forefront of IPv6 native deployment.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/google-planning-to-open-the-vp8-video-codec.ars So, Google’s planning on using Vp8, and mozilla is as well. And they’re going to “Open” it.Which makes the fact that Google is still funding ARM optimization for vorbis/theora interesting.One possibility is that Google won’t entirely open VP8 up. They may open it up for software royalty free, but keep hardware optimizations as something you license from them. On2 already has chips for VP8 decoding and encoding. Or they could license the code that generates VP8 files, while making decoding fully open and free.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/steve-jobs-weighs-on-iphone-os-dev-controversy.arsThey counter the complaints about quality, standards compliance, and added costs when comparing native code to cross platform code. Also showing how many of the apps Apple is holding up as standards are actually using techniques that apple now prohibits.http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.htmlOf course, Android supports scripting languages, including apparently editing and interactively executing code right on the phone.I wonder when I’ll get to have an android phone here at work…

This is from the drudge report, has no permanent links though, so I’ll just copy the whole text. GOOGLE FRANKENSTEIN: MACHINES TO CHOOSE YOUR NEWSMon Apr 12 2010 08:15:34 ETGOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive! News sites should use technology to PREDICT what a user wants to read by what they have already read, Schmidt told the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NEWS EDITORS, where a few humans still remained in the audience.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/microsoft_open_source_gm/Microsoft is trying to clean their image up when it comes to open source…http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/microsoft-offers-much-needed-fix-for-windows-oss-development.arsThey’re even making their own APT/DPKG sort of package management thing for windows to permit real distributions of Gnu and other open source software to be easily installed on windows. A development I welcome…http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/06/microsoft_ooxml_standards_fail/However, they’re still fighting a few turf wars over their Word and other Office application dominance…So, MS… Reformed, or still the iron fist?I’m not entirely convinced that they’re more evil than Google…

Bad month for books and games. Been too busy to do that, so I’ve mostly been multitasking videos in amongst other things.Books7. The Lion of the Farside - Interesting ideas behind this one. Alternate world sitting parallel to depression era america. Farmer marries a strange woman who turns out to be from the other world. People from the other world kidnap her, he follows. Games.2. Last Rebellion - One of the easiest rpg’s I’ve ever played.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/as-much-as-one-percent-of-the-internet-is-now-using-ipv6.ars1% of the internet has IPv6.Yay!Hopefully we’ll be able to get to 10% within a year or two…

Has anyone else had problems with Netflix DVDs dropping out of their queues lately? It’s getting quite annoying. I have 35 dvds that they’ve just entirely stopped carrying. Sometimes entire series have disappear, sometimes the middle dvd in a series… I bought Fate: Stay Night’s last dvd, but I really can’t do this for every series that I encounter missing discs on, especially if my interest in the series is only marginal (Such as the Kiddie Grade series, which has lost no less than 5 out of its 8 discs in recent months.