DerekReynoldsDotCom

David Breyer and I have been for awhile talking about consolidating our daily tech postings to our personal blogs to create a better tech centric website. So today we bring you www.yellinglizard.com.

This blog (www.derekreynolds.com) will continue to serve just my personal blogging.

The Supreme Court today has handed movie studios and record labels a sweeping victory against file swapping, ruling that peer-to-peer companies such as Grokster could be held responsible for the copyright piracy on their networks. In a unanimous decision issued Monday, the nine justices said companies that build businesses with the active intent of encouraging copyright infringement should be held liable for their customers’ illegal actions.

Does this mean the end to P2P? I think not… There are plenty of new encrypted and private peer-to-peer file sharing applications spawning monthly. Rodi, an anonymous Torrent application and several other p2p apps will succeed in Grokster’s demise..

What is so funny about this situation is just as the MPAA takes down 1 p2p app, 5 others spawn, some even offshore or opensource, immune to the MPPA and RIAA ridicule.

I feel quite bitter now having just recently booked our hotel room at the MGM Grand.

Yup, I’m not kidding. They even have different categories. I think it’s great. PodCasts or something similar to PodCasting is the future of news or talk radio and it’s about time someone recognize these talented individuals.

Visit and vote on your favorite PodCast Here

David Breyer was asking me the other day about the new Unreal Engine 3. For those who don’t know, Epic Games, developers of the Unreal series, gave a demonstration of their Unreal 3 game engine at the past E3 convention in LA earlier this year. The new updated engine will be used in their new game Unreal 2007 due out probably late 2009….

A guy on IRC had posted some amazing looking screenshots that looked, well.. Unreal! Searching through my history, I managed to find them:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
E3 trailer

Oh, and if you have the skillz, Epic is now hiring.

I was telling Steve Doss about how cool Battlefield 2 is and how he should run out today and get it. His response was a link to this “gun toting bot” and a question “is THIS in your game????”

Read all about it here

David Breyer pointed me to a very cool and addicting web (search) site that is sure to take off quickly. After doing a bit of research it appears YubNub is billed as a “Social command line for the web” created as the result of a “program like hell for 24 hours” project. In fact, it came out of one guy’s attempt to win a contest around the new Ruby on Rails framework.

The idea of search as the command line for the web is well established, this takes the idea one step (or more) further, letting you set up commands in the search line itself. You can use the search line as a single point of reference for searching just about any web resource, and you can add your own:

I was tired of setting up the same Firefox keywords on each of the 5 computers that I use. By putting my keywords into YubNub, I can hit “am mark twain” for an Amazon search, or “gmap vancouver” for a Google Maps search, no matter which computer I’m on.

But on a bigger scale, YubNub is the realization of a very big idea: the URL command line of the web OS.

Web applications were once considered slow and unreliable, compared to their desktop counterparts. But these days, people are increasingly choosing web applications over desktop applications. Amazingly, GMail is found to be faster than desktop email programs. The snappy Google Maps interface feels as responsive as a desktop application. The web is morphing into the desktop, and today we are witness to the command line making its appearance in this new world, as YubNub, the (social) command-line for the web.

The beauty of YubNub is that anyone can help to extend it. If there is an existing web service with a submit form, they can add it pretty easily (like I did with the Amazon example above). But even more interesting is the adding of complex data-processing services (like validating an RSS feed, or converting webpages to audio using text-to-speech).

More..

TWIT episode 9 was delayed because of scheduling issues between Leo and Call For Help up in Canada. So this week they give us 2 (last weeks and this weeks) episodes for your listening pleasure.

A peer at work, Shane noted that a great fast torrent-free download site for TWIT is www.ourmedia.com

Direct Downloads:
TWIT Ep 9
TWIT Ep 10

Sprint and Sirius announced a deal to allow Vision customers to listen to Sirius on their handsets using the Vision network.

Does this mean we’ll be able to listen to Howard Stern on our cellys?

Sprint Corporation announced a new partnership with Sirius Satellite radio
Inc. that will offer some of its customers the possibility of receiving satellite radio over their cell phones.

The deal, which is the first one to have been struck between a wireless corporation and a sattelite radio company, is set to expand Sprint’s wireless entertainment package.

More..

Avalanche, Microsoft’s new codename for their Bittorrent like file sharing engine is in the works of being released here shortly. Cloning many of the features that BitTorrent already possesses Microsoft officials are touting in a research paper that both praises and criticizes BitTorrent: “Despite their enormous potential and popularity, existing end-system co-operative schemes such as BitTorrent, may suffer from a number of inefficiencies.” The coding system used by Avalanche, which is based on network coding, is 20 percent more efficient with downloading, according to the research paper… *Cough* BS *Cough*.

Read more about it here

Just got word from David Breyer registration for CES 2006 is now open.

I received this email yesterday and promptly registered. This will be my fourth CES conference. I plan to blog everyday from the conference, and maybe, just maybe, do a podcast each day. Of course I will have my camera at the ready. You can see some of last years photos in the gallery. (Note: I recently switched to flickr and don’t have everything loaded yet.)

Last year I had to watch Bill Gate’s speech from a satellite room, hopefully this year I will get in line early enough to be in the real thing. Although I hear they gave most of the seats to press people. But hey, I should be considered press too right?