Death, Taxes, & Voting

Considering that less than 50% of Canadians of the age of majority actually vote, why don't we make it mandatory to vote every time an individual files their taxes?

PS: I am intentionally leaving a lot of editorial commentary out of this post.

AMD Open-Sources Video API

This is quite a leap forward for free and open-source software users everywhere.

Nvidia ARMs Themselves for a Shot at the Desktop Market

X86 chip manufacturers should probably be a little bit worried at this point, considering that Microsoft has also decided to do a full windows port to ARM. Of course, Linux has been running beautifully on ARM for almost two decades already.

Don't be fooled, Nvidia's ARM team is not only aiming at the netbook / laptop market - they're setting their crosshairs on the desktop market as well, as indicated by their roadmap.



PS: If you are reading this, and you were present at a certain meeting with me not too long ago where we were talking about buying an ARM architecture license, then I hope you are hearing this message loud and clear. My honest opinion is that you need to act now or suffer tremendously in sales.

Ahem... Picasa?

Dear Google,

Don't you think it's about time to make functional Picasa clients for Linux and Android?

Currently, I am relying on a random 3rd-party app maker to upload video from my Google Nexus S to my Google / Picasa Web account - it's a little discomforting.

Also, video transcoding for Picasa Web albums is really straight forward to do using ffmpeg from the command-line, and it will even do VP8 :) ... but still, I can only upload videos from Picasa using Windows or Mac. If you're worried about software patents, then just use a plug-in architecture with dlopen(). That way, users can supply "their own" versions of popular multimedia encoders / decoders. For closed-source platforms, just write a plug-in that uses the codecs available on that system (e.g. windows, os x).