Buzz Out Loud 816: The fog of charm

I bet you think this podcast is about you. Don't you? Don't you!? On today's show, we learn how easy it is to spot a narcissist on Facebook (stay away!), terrible ideas that will criminalize professional eBay sellers and kill eBay even faster than it's killing itself, and how video games might be the only thing that can survive a recession.

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EPISODE 816

Bill would give retailers power to halt online auctions
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080924-bill-would-give-retailers-power-to-halt-online-auctions.html

Users fail to spot fake pop-ups
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7633402.stm

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080923-study-confirms-users-are-idiots.html

T-Mobile soft capping 3G data at 1GB per month
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/23/t-mobile-soft-capping-3g-data-at-1gb-per-month/

Other G1 flaws
http://gizmodo.com/5053747/android-and-t+mobile-g1s-five-most-obnoxious-flaws

Games are recession-proof earners?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/games-are-recessionp.html

China to run out of IPv4 addresses in 830 days
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/09/24/1254235.shtml

Narcissists easy to spot on Facebook--if you know how
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080923-narcissists-easy-to-spot-on-facebookif-you-know-how.html

Google gets political with quotation tool
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10049591-36.html

Two ways to get Comcast to increase the data cap
http://gigaom.com/2008/09/24/two-ways-to-get-comcast-to-ditch-the-data-cap/

LHC shut down until early spring
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10049188-76.html

Phone that works as car key
http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/2008/001415.html

VOICE MAIL
Daniel: a phone is a phone

E-MAIL
After listening to Molly and Brian rant on about the SanDisk microSD thing, I started to think about the issues you all raised:

The cards are too small to see album art or album titles
The cards are easy to loose

And also the email that a listener sent in about storing his entire music collection in a Velvetta box when the LHC forces us all underground.

So I started to think...

Wouldn't it be cool if you had a case for all of your microSD albums (so it could hold a whole bunch of them), so you wouldn't lose them. And wouldn't it be cool if this case had a color screen on it, so you could cycle through all of your cards and see the album covers? And wouldn't it be cool if this case could also play the songs on your microSD albums?

Oh yeah, isn't that an iPOD? Store all of your albums in flash memory, be able to see album covers, and listen to your music.

LTS,

Jamie

Hi JaMoTo

Regarding Gregory’s comments (BOL #815) about MP3-CDs, it would seem the BBC have experimented with the format, although not with music. The soundtracks for ‘deleted’ Doctor Who episodes have been released on MP3-CD — for example you can get almost 5 hours worth of classic ‘Troughton’ on one disc (see below). Given that many CD players seem to recognise the format (at least here in Europe) I wonder why it isn’t used more widely? Possibly the licensing costs for a year’s worth of music would be a nightmare?!

Still, works great as an audio book format.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Abominable-Snowman-Audio/dp/0563494182/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1222267428&sr=8-2

LtS,
Simon

(PS. It just occurred to me: why is the snowman “abominable”? I mean what did he ever do to deserve such a title? He just keeps to himself, and never bothers anyone. Clearly he’s been the subject of some kind of slander. Should we start a campaign to clear his name?
I blame Bigfoot! Grrr!! )

Hey Buzzites,

i just heard the discussion about possibly selling MP3 cd’s and how the quality wouldn’t be as good as normal cd audio.

Even though i’m not one of the people that really notices the difference between lossless and high bit rate MP3’s, I agree with Brian C in that i’d rather have the full quality audio than not. But I couldn’t help but think your missing one real option.

Surely you could around get the same amount of lossless audio on a dvd as you could get compressed audio on a cd.

John B off of England.

I laughed when I read “funnerer”. It is a PERFECT way to ridicule Apple’s “Oh, we’re so smart that we can bend grammar rules and it makes us cooler because everyone knows that we are so smart).

It’s only derivative because Chunky chocolate bar pushed that it’s “thickerer” back in the 70’s.
Dana

Exchange on the android is going to take a while. Android may be open, but Exchange is not. Someone (T-Mobile, Google) will have to make a deal with Microsoft to get the specifications of Exchange, and implement it in a /Close sourced/ application. Alternatively, someone can reverse engineer the Exchange protocol, and implement it. There are actually already reverse engineered versions of the protocol out there, but none of them are complete. Enterprises would never release an application like this, so it would probably be a small 2-man shop, and no enterprise would accept an app from such a small shop.
Sargun

While the idea of another physical media for music might seem dumb in the US.. other countries, such as Canada where I live, don’t have access to a wide array of un-DRM online music stores (Amazon.ca sucks!). Canada and other countries probably have more restrictive distribution rules around media, or the online companies just might not have bothered yet (ahem.. Amazon?). So this might be a way to get digital music to those markets, rather than us being force to get it by other.. less legal means. Dumb yes. Completly pointless… maybe not.

LTS

Jamie