Most software patents suck. They are simply a high level description of something you could create “transfer information from one system to the other by electronic means”. Yeah right! The Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in §101 of the Patent Act. Process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”

This might have a huge impact on all current software patents as well. Even Google’s pagerank patent is at stake. Read the full article at the Patently-O Patent Law Blog.

I’ve posted many rants against DRM already and will continue to rant when needed. In this case Nate Anderson wrote an article which is a convincing statement against DRM. Yahoo! Music, a not very well known online music store, closes shop and will bring down the DRM keyserver as well. So all of the poor sods who bought music through Yahoo! Music will not be able to play their songs anymore. That’s DRM for you. Thanks DRM. Thanks Yahoo!

What have we learned? Don’t put your trust and money in DRM protected goods. It’s like the local car dealer goes out of business and starts taking back all delivered cars from their customers. “Sorry we’re broke. We’ll have to revoke your right to use the car that you bought. Hand over the keys. NOW!”

Today is the ninth annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. So today is an excellent day to mail your system administrator and thank him or her for the lack of storage in your mailbox.  For screwing up the daily backups so only the full backup of last month could be restored losing weeks of valuable work. For blocking useful internet pages. For stripping important attachments from your incoming mail. For revoking permissions on your user account that makes work next to impossible.

This is just the point of system administrator day. In general every encounter a user has with a system administrator is typically in case of problems. The system administrator is associated with problems. So remember every day you don’t have to call on the system administrator he’s doing a good job keeping the infrastructure up and running. Appreciate that.