Kevin Whitman's Blog

Category: My Opinion (page 1 of 2)

Spotify and Skype are like twins separated at birth

Spotify and Skype are the two hottest european startups it seems. Skype does internet phone service and Spotify is an all you can eat social music service. I use both of these products everyday. They also seem to have a lot in common:

  1. European
  2. P2P technology
  3. They both start with an S.
  4. Microsoft is in both of their friend networks. Skype is owned by MS. Spotify is friends with Facebook who has Microsoft as a friend.
  5. Popular among us geeks
  6. Integrated with Facebook.
  7. Social

Gets you thinking, right? Just some random information.  They seem so similar but different businesses.  http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-stats-and-how-spotify-works/ is a really great write-up on Spotify P2P tech. Spotify is like an “Modern Napster” but this time the music industry is happy with it. Skype and Spotify are using peer to peer for awesome, legal and legit uses. I think they both are great examples of legit P2P use.

I recommend using both of these products if you aren’t already. Hope you enjoyed this random post.

Thoughts on online dating

I am interested in Online dating somewhat. I have joined dating sites like eHarmony and Zoosk, both sites i deleted my account on. I have a few problems with websites just for dating. They want money, but they also don’t have banner ads so someone has to to pay the bills. So they have to make money, but I’m not sure if its something worth paying for. eHarmony didn’t show profile pictures without paying, Zoosk did show pictures for free. Both of them require you to pay money to communicate. Another thing I don’t like about both Zoosk and eHarmony is that you can only list if you’re interested in “Men” or “Woman”. You can’t list “Men and Woman”. Seems like they both are leaving out bisexual people.

So I think sites that are designed for just only dating aren’t that great. I think it would be better to meet someone over Twitter or chat rooms. Maybe even on Facebook as in maybe they have a mutual friends. So I think its possible to find your prefect match online for free. I think I would rather find someone online and then do online video chats to get to know them and feel more comfortable. Then do offline dating.

I really want to move to San Francisco and build a company also. So I’m not in to dating really right now, but sometimes I will feel lonely and wish I was dating. I think I would date someone who’s in to technology, Moderate politically, healthily, nice and cute. Also religion of them won’t matter really to me as I’m not a religious person but maybe they could help change that.

I also think a kid or a few would be okay, but it’s not something I want to do right now. I see children as getting in my way. I want to build something and do financially well.  Maybe adopt or have kids when I’m 30 or 40.

So far theses are my thoughts on online dating and just dating in general.

Thoughts on religion

When I was younger and uneducated I believed in god because my mom did and she called her self a christian but we never went to church. Back then I thought going to church would be cool but my step dad was like church is just about money and crap. I thought he was crazy, but he said believing in god is all that matters no church needed. Plus you shall not kill or steal. I would pray sometimes at night before but I never really made it in to a habit. Most of the times I would ask god for a new toy. I thought of him like some magical creature. None of the toys I asked for magically showed up when I woke up. I put god and santa in the same category. I kind of started disbelieving in him but other people told me I was doing it wrong, you don’t ask him for stuff. Plus family told me he’s real because he’s the only reason this earth and I exists. Continue reading

Dead and Dying Formats

The Apple iMac was one of the first computers to not include a floppy drive, and it used a CD drive. Current Macs you buy today has a CD/DVD SuperDrive, except the Air. No Macs has Blu-Ray. I think CD, DVD and Blu-ray are dead as the internet will replace them.

A iPad can’t watch a Blu-ray, nor can it run Flash or Java in the browser. So I think it shows both formats are dead. A iPad can’t have a disk drive, due to space limits. It can’t have Flash or Java due to poor performance and not being open. Most people will agree Flash isn’t open, but your like “Isn’t Java open”? I thought it was also, till I read this. People, Companies and the media don’t really care that the iPad can’t play disks, but they do seem to care about the Flash issue. You have lots of ways to get good content on to your iPad, buy them on iTunes. Watch lots of free and high quality content on YouTube like Smosh or DamonFizzy. Subscribe to a free Podcast on iTunes like Hak5 or Diggnation.

Flash isn’t open because i have to buy expensive authoring tools from Adobe, for example Flash Professional is 699 bucks! With HTML5, I can write my code in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac, which is free with your operating system. I can download or buy authoring tools. I can get Notepad++, a really nice code editor which supports several programming languages I use, and its free! I can even buy HTML5 tools from Adobe if I wanted to, they sell Dreamweaver. Other tools exist to help me write HTML5 apps. Like jQuery, CSSEdit or others. Continue reading

A social protocol

Adria tweeted “Google+, Twitter, Facebook are like ice cream. Everyone has a story about why their favorite flavor makes them smile.” at 4:14 PM eastern time. That got me thinking. I like Twitter and one of my Cousins likes Facebook. She won’t use Twitter but i share more on Twitter. Same thing with Google+, I like it more than Facebook and I’m using it now also. I think this is a problem.

I think we need an open social networking protocol, but i doubt this will happen anytime soon. When eating ice cream, me and Adria could be sitting next to each other. The flavor she or I picked doesn’t matter we can still sit and chat while we eat. Same with email. I like Gmail. Someone else might love Yahoo or even their free email from Road Runner. Email is an open protocol. Continue reading

Looking at the social web

2003-2006

The year is 2003-2006, MySpace is where you could just find about everyone your age. Everyone I knew in School had a MySpace, I had a MySpace. Teachers, Law Enforcement and adults would bad mouth and speak out against the website making it seem worser then it really was by saying it was unsafe. Maybe it was unsafe back then due to some hacks, but other than that talking to a random dude at a bus stop is kinda unsafe also, it’s a risk you can take, you could meet a creepy serial killer or some nice guy because you never really know till you try to talk to someone and get to know them. I remember one of my teachers got this crazy woman who seemed Anti-Tech to come in and give a slide show. She showed how she would hack in to MySpace and show all this set private information. At the end, where people would ask questions, people asked how she hacked it and she said she wasn’t going to tell because she knew we kids would do it.

I kinda think looking back now, she wasn’t really hacking as you would think. I looked up information on it before and all the so called “hacks” don’t work anymore. The way they would work is you would take the persons MySpace user id, not the username, but the number like say 10290292298(random number i just typed) and use that id with different urls because it didn’t check privacy in some areas. Also teachers and other adults would say privacy settings didn’t matter. I never understood why, maybe because of the hacks that got fixed. I always did and i do today trust privacy settings when they are set right and implemented by the social networking site correctly.

So back then All of us young people liked it. Teachers hated MySpace. I once taught people in my class in English back in middle school how to use proxies. About a few days later, after different teachers noticed people were on MySpace when it was blocked, our principle went to the class rooms in the eighth grade one morning to talk to us about it. He told us if any of us got caught from now on we would lose our computer privileges for the rest of the year. He said he would also report our MySpace name to MySpace so they would delete our account. I’m not sure if MySpace would really delete an account just because a principle told them to, i really doubt it. I think he was saying it just to scare us. Not all of us was under 13. But i don’t think the principle or any teachers really found out who showed people how to use proxies. Continue reading

The Motion Picture Industry makes me mad

I rent movies from Block Buster but now I’m pissed off big time. first of all some disks won’t allow you to skip your shitty ads. Now i noticed something new. On the movie Repo Man I wanted to watch the Unions Commercials and deleted scenes under bonus Features but i got a black screen with white text with a message that said

“This disk is intended for rental purposes and only includes the feature film.

Own it on Blu-Ray™ or DVD to view theses bonus features and complete your movie watching experience.”

Now I’m not sure if this is only Universal Pictures or the whole industry. But from what i seen so far, The Motion Picture Industry likes to act as a whole and is like a cult. Like most people I won’t want to watch a movie over and over unless it’s really great like Avatar or The Social network(I am going to buy it on DVD in Jan when its said to come out). I like to rent my movies on DVD because I can watch it in the comfort on the couch in my own living room, movie theater seats aren’t that comfy.

I also like to check bonus features. I don’t believe iTunes, Blockbuster online or Netflix Rentals online allow that, but if they do correct me. I know for sure Time Warner Cable On demand rentals don’t have bonus features. So I like to have a physical disk for bonus features. So if you not going to give me any bonus features on rentals, well I guess I won’t be renting any more movies and boycott big movie studios all together, unless it’s a really good movie people talk about.

There is a lot of free legal content like Revision3, YouTube, Web Originals on Clicker and more. Remember big movie studios, you aren’t the only ones who can produce great content. AppleAdobe and more makes tools for us to produce content.  I am a pissed off customer of yours. So I hope you take this feedback and clean up your act. As time goes by and equipment becomes better and cheaper, you will start to see even better content made by small studios. So consider this your one and only warning that you need to clean up your act.  The Music Industry has learned they had to clean up their act and they did. Its your turn now movie Industry.

Are Search Engines just as bad as the Gnutella network that LimeWire used?

Well recently you may have seen in the news that the Limewire pear to pear operations has been shut down and if you visit the Limewire website you will see a notice stating why.

LimeWire Legal Notice

LimeWire Legal Notice

So LimeWire p2p got shutdown because they allowed people to download illegal content. Not all content on the network was illegal but most people abused it. Some people will make a version of Linux or do podcasts and use the Network to send them out without having to host it using bandwidth transfer and disk space on their own web server/hosting plan. This is the same with torrents. So the Torrent and LimeWire technology can be used for good but it sadly abused.  LimeWire is a client that connects to the Gnutella network. There are still clients out there that can connect to the Gnutella network not made by LimeWire.  The way P2p file sending works is someone will add a file to the network and with their client open, the file is accessible. Each client acts as a node on the network. Clients can search Gnutella index or the torrent trackers index. A client will then start downloading from all the nodes with that file on the network. So basically Gnutella or Torrent Tracker stores information that contains where the file is located. The file itself isn’t on the trackers server. LimeWire use the Gnutella network by default or you could give it a torrent file from some other tracker/network. This is my understanding on this technology and please correct me if I am wrong.

So lets put this in context. Your web browser of choice is a client.  Google is the network Index. Some other server hosts the file. Continue reading

Pizza Delivery in the future

About a week ago Google Announces they have played around with a self driving car. So this is my vision of how you would order pizza using this technology.

The Car i vision. Crappy picture i drew in paint.

 

We all know pizza sucks unless its Delivery. So the ordering process would be.

1. Call or visit the web like you would today. You would have to give your phone number also.

2. The pizza place makes your order and loads your order.

3. They send the car off to your location you told them when ordering.

4. The car goes to your location and you pay then get your order.

5. The car goes back to pizza shop.

So when after your order is done being made, on the computer that they put your order in via phone or you via web they pick a car, So say Car Id 7  is available. The computer loads the order information, The list of your order and price. They open the handle on the slot and put the pizza in and close it. It then locks it. They then back away and after it detects no one is close to it, it then starts driving to the house or place of business of the customer.

Then when the car gets to your location the car will then alert the pizza company computer system the car is at your location, how long it drove and triggers a phone call. It then keeps calling every 1 minutes up to 10 times and then leaves if you don’t pick up. Then once you pick up, it then adds 10 minutes to the timer. Once 10 min is up, it calls you and if you pick up it adds 10 more else if leaves. Once you get to it. The car will say your name (Jane Doe in this case and the price.) You pay it via credit card or put money in similar to how you would with a soda vending machine. You open the handle and take your order out. It also prints a receipt or maybe they could put it on the box. Once you close the door on the pizza vendor built-in to the side of the car, The car drives back to the pizza place after it detects if safe to do so. Also these cars would not have to be full size. Could be built-in to a smaller 2 door car.

Then maybe they can come up with a way to make pizza by robots and load them on the car. Then maybe we can have 24/7/365¼ Pizza ordering!

Thoughts on College

Well as I am writing this, I am still in High School, I do go to an online charter school so I do have more free time than most high school students. Got about 2 years left. Almost 18.  So thinking about college isn’t far off. Well my Family wants me to go to college. They want me to be a doctor or lawyer. My grandpa helps funds my servers and he kind of doesn’t understand this web stuff, he thinks its something I’ll grow out of it. Right now I been work on my Start up NewHills.com that isn’t open yet.  I really hope it becomes something big but I kind of doubt it. So if I go to college I’ll have something to fail back on but I have not decided yet. Continue reading

Olderposts

Copyright © 2010 - 2024 Kevin Whitman's Blog

Back To Top ↑