I do not like television as we know it and there is nothing new about it. I simply can not understand why thousands of people gather at the same time to watch a certain episode of a certain soap. But then I heard about Joost. I will not go in to details what it is and how it works because that is pretty well described on Joost website.

As I checked their site and couple beta reviews I was more than happy to see that there are no pre-scheduled program. Instead people are able to pick what they want and whenever they want. And because the content is delivered per request it seems to provide more possibilities paid content. There are plenty of big names providing content and advertisements.

While looking at something like Joost it is very easy to see how old fashioned and plain stupid digital television project is in Finland. Analog broadcasts will be shut down mostly during this year and citizen were urged to buy buggy set top boxes for their television. There were great promises of better content and interactivity. It feels somewhat wasted effort as its lifetime will be short. As broadband connections are widely available and people are already used to utilize it for Skype, chat and various content, it will not be a big step to start using it for same needs as television.

National and regional content will be driving factor for its spreading in Europe. People do not really mind where their favorite soap is coming as long as it is available. But lack of forced scheduled program will cause a change in their minds. People will be free to schedule their days and shops will not be deserted during Bold and the Beautiful - as it used to be in Finland when its popularity peaked.

Lack of schedule can also be a problem as people are not used to make such individual decisions. They will watch all the available episodes in a row, they will be totally dead on the next day at work and they do not know what to do on the next day. There will be demand for video jockeys who plan playlists for such people. Hmm, such a profession...

Recently I had some installation problems and it turned out be because of compatibility issues of some

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19

(or 2.2.5) and SUSE Linux 10.1. Same installer worked on SUSE 9.0. After some tests and googling I found out a reason. It seems that 10.1 does not contain certain older libraries (glibc) which 9.0 used to have and therefore it fails.

I came up with couple ways to fix:

Modify installation script and remove those conflicting lines.

If the installer happens to be in binary form, it might still possible to do search and replace. Copy original installer to installer.old and

cat installer.old |

 sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > installer 

Install right version of glibc and hope it did not conflict.

Change shell to something else than bash as in it export is built-in command and cannot be replaced. For example zsh allows it. Disable original built-in export, create wrapper for export command which handles LD_ASSUME_KERNEL and forwards rest.

It has not bothered me that much but after seeing some blogs with more descriptive URLs than itemid=134 I began to search way to add such feature to this blog. I found right plugin in not time and it was really easy to install. What NP_FancierURL2 does is that it creates search engine optimized URLs for Nucleus items.

When a blog starts to get more attention it is good idea to have some protection against comment spam. I found nice plugin for that from Nucleus plugin list and after changing default questions it seems to be good enough. Anyways, it will be interesting to see how much more visits this URL change brings.

Today while I checked some finnish discussion forums related to IT I found some poor soul trying to get people to join this scheme. It is based on an old idea that user should get paid when seeing adds. This time it contains my favorite element - pyramid marketing. It will be interesting to see whether they manage to release their viewbar before they fade in the history.

Few links:
What Everyone Ought to Know About Agloco

AllAdvantage Is Back

One difference between Finland and Hungarian is that sometimes almost everybody work on Saturday. In Hungary May 1st is a bank holiday as well as in Finland. But the day before that is a holiday in Hungary as people work today to compensate it and then they can have a long weekend. In Finland holidays and such compensations are much more stiffer as far as I remember.

Establish a new company is demanding and even stressful task to do. However, to add some extra spice to this one could make it from abroad. Paradigm Quest is one example of such and they describe their process on their blog. So far it is still on planning stage but it looks pretty good as they are doing necessary research before actions.

I decided to play a little bit with some online tax calculators (bérkalkulátor). If you are planning to work in Hungary you might want to search for such and try it out. But beware - it will make you sad.

I calculated some numbers and I plotted them on a graph. On the first one you can see gross income (X-axis) with net income (Y-axis). The currency used is HUF. It does not look that bad if you do not pay attention to values.



But for the second one I calculated tax percent (Y-axis) for same gross incomes (X-axis) as on the previous graph. Now this makes me sad. Even though I come from Finland which has progressive taxation and plenty of social services to feed with tax money, this graph is not nice to view. As you can see, progression hits very hard and 200 000 HUF gross salary is not a reason for a celebration here.



So, what would highly educated hungarian with some language skills do? He works in a company and earns 250 000 - 350 000 HUF. After some time he gets a 10% raise on his salary. Sounds nice but actually it just covers inflation (7-8%) and also government happily slices almost half of it away. He gets pissed off because he does not see any point to progress on his career. But because he is smart and educated he does not go on the streets to burn cars and to do such nonsense. Instead of that he packs and relocates to another EU country with more sensible taxation.

Today Apple and EMI Music announced that Apple's iTunes store will start selling songs without digital rights management (DRM). This means in practice that you are free to copy those songs on any device you happen to have and burn unlimited CDs for your own use. Something like this was expected as Steve Jobs wrote his public letter about DRM some time ago but still it came as a surprise.

DRM has been dead idea for all its existence. As human needs to see and hear digital content like movies and songs in analog format (light&sound waves) there is no way to prevent copying. Quality of the copy can be slightly worse but it did not prevent people copying VHS movies. And making a copy of DRM protected content is just a matter of time there is no real need to harass ordinary customer.

Apple and EMI Music were not first ones to announce such idea. There are already several online music stores operating with similar basis. However, this announcement is the first one from major players and it is worth of noticing that Apple has some foothold on movie industry, too. Unless Apple and EMI Music fail miserably with this idea, which is unlikely, there will be other companies following them.

It is hard to find real losers with this trend. Consumers are winning and those music producers and distributors implementing this are winning. However, companies developing and applying annoying DRM features are losing and I do not feel sorry.

EMI Music's press release