Buzz Out Loud 965: Nobody puts Rafe in a box
On today's show, Molly, Rafe, and Brian Cooley take over for Tom, Natali, and sanity. Between ISP censorship in Minnesota, Faceook phishing attacks, and search on Twitter, it doesn't sound rant-tastic but it really, really is. Enjoy.
Listen now: Download today's podcast
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EPISODE 965 |
Minnesota orders ISPs to blacklist gambling sites
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10231683-38.html
Facebook hit by phishing attacks for a second day
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10230980-83.html
Manipulating the
Palm Pre supply is just wrong
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10230970-17.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a7H6bfrDqVPE&refer=us
Ashok Kumar rains all over Palm’s parade, says Pre will be DOA
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090430/analyst-the-pre-is-doa/
Twitter on-page search goes live
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10231505-2.html
60% of corporations still use IE 6
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10231713-2.html
Acer’s loose lips: Win 7 release October 23?
http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/news/2009/05/01/Acer-Spills-Windows-7-Release-Date/p1
Rumor: Sony to unveil new motion-sensing controller at E3
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/01/rumor-sony-to-unveil-new-motion-sensing-controller-at-e3/
Apple to introduce more affordable Macs, sources say
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/30/apple_to_introduce_more_affordable_macs_sources_say.html
LHC gets magnet repair
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10231747-76.html
VOICEMAIL
JC Penney calling
E-MAIL
Dear Buzz Crew,
Just wanted to let you know about yet another “Comcastic” thing that has happened in the world of TV and internet. Earlier this week my parents were confused when they could only get channels 2-29 on the 3 non-cable box connected TV’s in their house. When my father called the cable company, they told him that he needed to connect digital converters to his TV’s in order to get back all of the channels. No, not the one for the over-the-air digital conversion, a special Comcast branded box that costs $2.99 per month to rent. For now, they are not charging for the first 2 or 3 boxes, but who is to say that this policy won’t change in the future? When I spoke to the retention department about this, they told me that the reason for the change was to make room for more bandwidth for internet and TV and that notices were sent out to customers informing them of the change. My problem is that this notice (which my parents probably tossed thinking it was about the over air conversion) comes pretty convenienetly close to the more well known digital conversion thus confusing me and especially my parents. I also couldn’t find anything about the changes on their website, comcast.com. In fact, all I could find was information about how current customers don’t have to do a thing:
http://www.comcast.com/dtv/default.html?INTCMP=ILCCOMCOMAL20644&fss=digital%20transition
Just thought you should know.
Love the show,
~Adam - the motion capture actor
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Hi,
In episode 964 of Buzz Out Loud you weren’t able to come up with any ideas why someone would want to have something launched automatically when a thumb drive is inserted into a computer running Windows 7. Well, I’m clearly a minority, but as a visually impaired person I sometimes use screen reading software on other computers than my own, e.g. in a public library or at a friend’s house. Then it’s very convenient to just pop in a USB thumb drive and have the screen reader launch and start talking within seconds without me having to do anything. If autorun was disabled, I’d probably have to go to the Start menu, Run, guess the drive letter of the USB drive and enter the path to the executable. Thought I’d just let you know… I guess a confirmation would be OK though, i.e. a message like “Would you like to let this application X run?”. Then I could just blindly (no pun intended) press Y a couple of seconds after the USB drive has been inserted.
Regards,
/David R., Sweden
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BOL Crew,
First time email, long time listener, but i am a little disappointed about the constant at&t bashing the past few episodes. I am an owner of an iphone and live in Florida and have never had any call drops or other network issues anywhere any of the southeast states i have traveled constantly to, the network is actually pretty good here. On the contrary to what you guys have seen in California and New York, the Verizon network here sucks. My personal opinion, If you all have problems with your phones, then complain, do something about it. All cell phone carriers do in fact listen to coverage problems and have teams dedicated to looking at these types of issues. I had a sprint phone a couple of years ago and i began to report a dead zone near my phone on the sprint website, and guess what they did? They fixed it. I think it is wrong to say that the carrier sucks if you are just basing it on a couple of markets, when the whole network has over 73 million customers nationwide. Just like they may have coverage issues in some areas, the other cell phone carriers (sprint,verizon, and tmobile) have the same issues in other markets……
And a small clarification, prior to the merger of Cingular Wireless & At&t Wireless, Tmobile, Cingular and At&t all had a network joint venture in the California and New York/New Jersey Markets called GSM facilities, which allowed each carrier to share network coverage in these areas.
I think a fair and balanced discussion of the level of service from the top 3 carriers is needed.
Love the Show
David
**********
Thank you, thank you, thank you Brian Cooley! I have heard for SO LONG about how Vista sucks the big one (hope that’s still censor-safe), but nobody ever seems to have any REAL reasons why. OK, it gets attacked by malcontents, but, as they are malcontents, they’re likeliest to go after a target which has more malicious tools known and available to attack it, which is basically what Brian said. Again in keeping with Mr. Cooley, I have several machines running MS products (2 w/ Vista & 1 w/ XP), they are networked and communicate just fine with each other. I only seem to need to reboot when an update tells me to. Of course they’re not perfect, but is OSX or Linux? Also, what is this love affair with the OS? Shouldn’t it be like a referee in football or basketball? You should not notice them unless there is an infraction! Really, I’m no shill for MS, but I just don’t understand all the bashing they take.
Love the show,
George Armstrong
Signal Mountain, TN
As host of the Buzz Report video series, Molly provides a fresh and funny perspective on the latest consumer electronic products to hit the market, as well as commentary on the stories and development that she thinks are truly buzz-worthy. She is also co-host of Buzz Out Loud, CNET's "podcast of indeterminate length," which entertains listeners with a funny and skeptical take on the day's technology news. Her other podcast, Gadgettes, is proof that girls can be geeks too.
Tom Merritt appears on
CNET TV, specializing in help and how-to and the ever popular Top 5
lists. He also co-hosts CNET's The Real Deal podcast. 
Jason Howell can
often be found producing Buzz Out Loud from the audio studios at CNET,
updating XML feeds from the comfort of his cubicle, and saying "uh-oh"
from time to time. 
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=mayday&searchmode=none
Mayday is an emergency code word used internationally as a distress signal in voice procedure radio communications. It derives from the French venez m'aider, meaning 'come help me'.
LTS :-)
I'm no fan of IE6 (I use Firefox), but I was amazed to hear you say in Episode 965 that IE6 doesn't support JavaScript, AJAX, or CSS.
IE first supported JavaScript way back in 1996, in IE3. IE3 also supported the first version of CSS 1.0. IE 6 supports CSS 2.1, although not fully. And IE -- with version 5 in 1999 -- was actually the first web browser to implement a foundational elements of AJAX: XMLHTTP, which we now know as XMLHttpRequest.
You're right that IE6 doesn't support tabbed browsing and that it's not as standards-compliant as modern browsers, requiring infuriating hacks and workarounds for web developers. More importantly, it's the most insecure web browser in use today.
However, it's not quite the technological dinosaur that you make it out to be.
Bruce from Peterborough, Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
In regard to the email about the Comcast digital boxes. My household received the same letter from Comcast saying that certain channels would no longer be available if we didn't get one of their "free" converter boxes (this was maybe six months ago). Last month I had to rescan all of channels on my TiVo and I found that those channels that comcast said could only be gotten on their boxes were actually still there, just moved up the band a bit to the 70's, 80's and 90's. The only downside is that those channels aren't in the guide line-up, so if I want to record one of those "unavailable" channels, I have to set it up like the old VCR (channel, date, start time, end time).
I just wish that I could tell the TiVo what all of those channels were so that it could record by show, like a TiVo should, not like a VCR, which is SO 20th century.
Gary (Gigi) Gessner
Washington Crossing, PA.
My one pet peeve about Mr.Laporte is his rule of thumb "Windows for buisness, Macs for home"
Its not that easy when being on a budget I can get a low cost Windows tower for $375 and a Mac starts at $1,0000 or so, the Mini at $600 or a little more. Is the quality excellent on a Mac? Sure. I just can't get over the price barrier. Even a mini is steep for me, so I "have" to put up with a somewhat sketchy Windows machinge because of its either a low cost PC tower or nuthin.
Just cannot wait for CBS to give Natalie the boot from BOL finally.
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by Philomorph
May 4, 2009 9:28 AM PDT
- The reason many big companies are still using IE 6 is that in the Wild West days of web design, every department had that one guy who came up with a great web page that made things so much easier for everyone. Unfortunately, he wasn't that great at web design, so the page is a kludgey mess, and he's moved on anyway.
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(11 Comments)Now the company's poor IT department doesn't have enough manpower to fix the 500 internal web pages that will be broken by IE7, and no one in those departments knows how to fix it for themselves, but everyone uses that page every day, so letting it break is not an option.
Call me a dreamer, but I'm hoping that like Vista, IE 7 will be skipped over and we'll all jump to IE8 and compatibility mode will make everything ok.