Buzz Out Loud Podcast

Rafe Needleman and I get in a fight over Windows 7's loose activation policy. Brian Tong suggests we hug it out. Rafe and I seem to prefer stabbing it out. We also take Flickr to task for censoring images and wonder why the Internet addiction center is so expensive.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Windows 7 runs free without activation for 120 days with simple command
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/21/windows-7-runs-free-without-activation-for-120-days-with-simple/

Yahoo deletes anti-Obama image from Flickr
http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-deletes-anti-obama-image-from-flickr-2009-8

Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/08/20/twitter-to-roll-out-commercial-accounts-this-year-co-founder-stone-says/

Facebook launches a Twitter app
http://mashable.com/2009/08/20/facebook-twitter-app/

WordPress gets own URL shortener
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10314587-250.html
Vb.ly – “sex positive url shortener”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10313617-250.html

Coalition to challenge Google Books settlement
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10314586-93.html

Microsoft retail stores are hiring
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-retail-stores-are-hiring.ars

First American Internet Addiction Treatment Center
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/20/1833202/First-American-Internet-Addiction-Treatment-Center

ACP, one of the oldest open source apps
http://slashdot.org/story/09/08/21/1121202/ACP-One-of-the-Oldest-Open-Source-Apps

DARPA 3D reasoning engine to identify urban threats
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10314619-42.html

Vote for Buzz Out Loud at SXSW 2010
http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-10311505-10.html

Voice mail
Anonymous on how easy it is to install a program in Linux

Patrick in New Hampshire does a word count

E-mail
Hey Buzz Crew!

I was thinking (dangerous, I know), the other day you guys were
talking about URL-Shortening on twitter and how you can’t just allow
links to go on forever because then people would go around that by
putting all the stuff they need in to an http://blahblahblah

So what if…

You had endless links but the actual link text you see is just
“link” ?! Crazy right? That way all links become 4 characters! Yes
yes, there’ll be security issues, but it won’t be worse than bit.ly
already is I suppose

For you html gurus out there, I guess it would look something like:

Here’s the tweet, and here’s the link and the rest of the tweet

TADA, problem solved. No more apocalypse from url shorteners dying XD.
not from twitter at least

Cheers,
Qiming

(Pronounced Ki-Ming)

Love the show

**********

All the URL shortening talk and twitter’s 140 character limit nonsense
got me thinking: Do you think the wireless carriers will ever
officially ditch the 160 limit on SMS, or do they make too much on
suckers like me with VZW Blackberries that don’t use EMS and make you
send multiple messages if you exceed 160 characters?

Wishfully thinking,

Luke the Pastor

**********

Hey Buzz Crew i just wanted to throw my hat into the ring about the
slim. Only the older PS3 Models feature Backwards compatibility. The
current models (80gm, 160gb) DO NOT feature the ability to play PS2
Games. Only the launch Models (60gb and 20gb) have the ability.

~Paul

Episode 871

Chrome breaks outta beta
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10120965-2.html

Nintendo Wii outsells Xbox 360 more than two-to-one
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/peripherals/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212500018&subSection=All+Stories

Sony’s PS3 A sinking ship: Sales plummet (SNE)
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/sonys-ps3-a-sinking-ship-sales-plummet-sne

Acer Aspire One goes official on AT&T’s 3G network
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/acer-aspire-one-goes-official-on-atandts-3g-network/
http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/12/acers-99-netboo.html

Android susceptible to apps that turn on roaming
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F12%2F149242
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/g1_roaming/

Cellphone jammer crammed into key fob, ends texting / talking while driving (thanks, Greg and Michael and Jordan et al)
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/12/cellphone-jammer-crammed-into-key-fob-ends-texting-talking-wh/

FCC Commissioner blames World of Warcraft addiction for huge college dropout rate
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/fcc-blames-college-dropout-rate-on-world-of-warcraft-addiction

Five PC power myths debunked
http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2008/12/pc_power_manage_1.html

NFL launches “Game Rewind”, every game on-demand in HD with no commercials
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/12/nfl-launches-game-rewind-every-game-ondemand-in-hd-with-no-commercials.html

Russian hopes to cash in on
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7778767.stm

Puppy Cam: Viewed 15 million times, for 773 years
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/puppy-cam-viewed-15-million-times-for-773-years

E-mail
Hello Buzz crew,

Since you talk about it SO MUCH, yesterday I finally signed up for Twitter . And looking for CNET celebrities to follow, I went to see who does Rafe Needleman follow. Guess who. Yahoo’s top search term for 2008. That’s right, Rafe Needleman follows Britney Spears on Twitter. I just can’t imagine Rafe listening to "Baby One More Time," so, may I ask why?

Love the show.

Regards,
Bernardo

**********

Have you all been following the USPS outages? I am 2 episodes behind (been to cold and rainy to walk my dog), so apologize if you've mentioned.

http://www.usps.com/homearea/onlinesysteminterruptions.htm

Seems it is affecting small business, too:

http://cbs3.com/local/Loca.l.Business.2.884808.html

LTS,

/John in Fairfax

AAAAAND its fixed.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10121982-38.html

**********

Hey JaMoTo / buzz crew +1,

I think the whole ‘In The Wild’ bingo game is great, and I’m just
waiting for someone to run up and snap a picture of me, being that I
bring my Kindle everywhere and I am a ‘Kindle in the wild’.

Anyhow, after yesterday’s show where Molly mentioned a Retro Edition
of BOL Bingo would be fun, I decided she shouldn’t be denied and I
made one up and attached it below. I’ve also uploaded it to my Flickr
account so it can be shared with the citizens of Buzz Town. It can be
found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/98865482@N00/3102895508/
I hope you enjoy it. Love the show!

-Aaron the Delorean driver (and Kindle in the wild)
New York

**********

Hi guys!

In the last show, Molly made a comment about how the ustream
video-page “isn’t an RSS-feed”. Well, now it is! I used Yahoo! Pipes
to create an RSS-feed of your live video shows. I wrote it up in the
forums, at:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-10152_102-0.html?forumID=97&threadID=320004&messageID=2926270&tag=forums06;forum-threads

Hope you like it!

–Oskar

**********

Ahoy Buzz Brigade,
Regarding episode 870 on LTE, y’all made a few missteps about the facts.

First off, the commonly held misconception is that LTE has anything to do with GSM. This is similar to the misconception that WCDMA, more commonly known as the tech behind UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA and HSPA+, has anything to do with GSM. While the tech that preceded GSM for AT&T, TDMA, was the technical precursor to the speaker-buzzing wonder iPhone fans know and love, HSPA (the 3G in the iPhone 3G, etc.) is only GSM’s successor because that was the preferred upgrade path of most GSM carriers. LTE is OFDM-based (as is 802.11g WiFi and…gasp…WiMAX in higher-speed modulations), and is thus another completely different underlying technology with no built-in backward compatibility to either GSM or HSPA. However, the majority of GSM carriers across the world, plus many CDMA carriers (Verizon being one of them) have chosen LTE as their upgrade path. It’s like saying that Mac OS X is a technical upgrade to OS 9…while the same company is going with the precedent as the successor, OS X is based on BSD/Unix while OS 9 is based on some witch’s brew Apple cooked up eons ago.

To be clear, I’m not bashing LTE, though WiMAX is out in the field now whereas LTE has so far not ventured out of lab doors. But to say either technology is the technical successor to either GSM/HSPA or CDMA (which has a direct 3G upgrade, EvDO) would be flawed. Though the same standards board responsible for GSM and WCDMA also dreamed up LTE (3GPP)…

Second and finally, though tests confirm that LTE, at similar range to WiMAX it seems, can provide link speeds comparable to WiFi, you won’t see speeds like those in the wild for quite awhile. The reason is mostly that of backhaul. To provide 100 Mbps to a subscriber, LTE not only needs a liberal swatch of spectrum (something only ClearWire, the WiMax guys, has), but it needs a tower connected to some serious backhaul. To give you an idea of how serious this backhaul would need to be, think about your local cable company’s node, that serves a few hundred people. If your cable operator is Comcast and you just got a speed upgrade, they can offer a total of 114 Mbps over an entire node on the downstream, and 30 Mbps on the upstream. This would be enough for a single LTE customer to get full-speed access. Then again, AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS have the infrastructure for LTE at the node level, but you’re still looking at more bandwidth than anybody is pushing over copper or cable right now. Of course, if Verizon rolls it out in FiOS areas (WiFiOS anyone?) it’ll work on the backhaul side, but…

…you have the problem of femtocells. Anyone using a femtocell for LTE has their internet connection as the bottleneck for service. You can’t get 100 Mbps over a 6 Mbit cable connection. Of course, if Verizon allowed femtocells to hook directly into customers’ FiOS installs, independent of the 10-50 mbps download and 2-20 mbps upload limits on users’ accounts, that’d work. But that’s about the only solution if they want to actually get the speeds they’re boasting about.

Hope this clears things up and love the show!

Ian (the Colorado college student, iansltx on Twitter)

We've got a host of Black Friday news today, like Apple retail stores matching online promotions; Sony still refuses to lower the price on the PS3, but they will let you get a PlayStation credit card and a $150 discount (along with whopping interest rates, of course, so pay that sucker off right away, mmkay?); and Nintendo has a couple of new DS Lite bundles on offer instead of the DSi. At least one of them comes in ICE BLUE.
Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 861

Apple retail stores will match reseller prices
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10107987-37.html

Use the new PlayStation Visa, get $150 off purchase of PS3
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/11/25/use-the-new-playstation-visa-get-150-off-purchase-of-ps3/

Nintendo hunkers down for Black Friday
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/9294-nintendo-hunkers-down-for-black-friday/

Sling opens up its Hulu competitor to the public
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/25/sling-opens-up-its-hulu-competitor-to-the-public/

U.K. agency bans ‘really fast’ iPhone ad
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10108679-37.html

Digital sales surpass CDs at Atlantic
http://news.cnet.com/Digital-sales-surpass-CDs-at-Atlantic/2100-1027_3-6248057.html

Gmail ‘vulnerability’ turns out to be phishing scam
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10108529-83.html

Google admits breaking App Store rules
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10108348-37.html

Microsoft ranked fifth worst spam service ISP
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10108283-83.html

90 percent of gaming-addiction patients not addicted
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7746471.stm

VOICE MAIL
Dave from New Jersey: BlackBerry Friday

Anon: PeekYou

E-MAIL
Leave it to the Swedes:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/

Keith

**********

Hey JaMoTo+1,

This is Kumar from Hong Kong. I’m just writing in about Episode 859 where you mentioned that Felicia Day’s show The Guild was paid show. In fact, the first season of The Guild is available for free on YouTube, and the first episode of the second season was just released, and is now available at MSN Video (and Xbox Live/Zune Whatever-it’s-called, obviously). You can get all the links at watchtheguild.com.

Also, someone asked why it wasn’t available as a podcast. While it isn’t officially a podcast, there is a website (www.rsshandler.com) that converts YouTube channels to video podcast feeds. Pretty nifty, huh? It’s come in handy for me many times (I use it for Season 1 of the Guild, the official Monty Python channel, the official PotterCast channel, and more).

Cheers,
Kumar

P.S.: Is there a way to send you guys voicemail through Skype or something of the sort? Or how about sending an mp3 through email? The US telephone number isn’t of much use down here in Hong Kong.

**********

Hey Buzzers,

I vote for the immediate establishment of the Association for Creation of Reliable Obfuscated Naming for Your Meaningless Subcommittee aka ACRONYMS

I wonder if I can get hold of the acronyms.gov? I'll let you know how that goes

Dave the Software Engineer
Ireland

**********

The government department charged with creating names like “SAFER”, “PATRIOT”, “CANSPAM”, etc. is the “American Central Research Office
(for) Names Yielding Mnemonics.”

Simon

**********

Dear Buzz Crew, or JaMoTo as the case may be : )

I’m writing you concerning the verdict in the Amero Case. I’m the Technology Coordinator / IT Admin for the Clarendon Public School District in Clarendon, AR. I am absolutely disgusted and in shock that this case was even brought to court in the first place. The ones who should be paying fines, and more appropriately being tossed out on their collective asses, are the police computer “expert” and the school tech guy. They lied in court and proceeded to make several errors and mistakes when talking about internet technology. Stories like this make me want to be like the old South Western Bell Telephone: Reach out and “touch” someone. And by touch, I mean slap the holy crap out of. I feel really bad for this poor woman. I know her health is not good, but I’d find me a good lawyer who understands the tech and sue the living pants off of the idiot cop, the tech guy, and the district.

I have had a few cases where I’ve found porn on systems and porn on the browser cache, but they have all been linked to spyware that has infested the machine. The source is usually from software such as “free” screensavers that the teachers bring from home via thumb drives and install on their teacher computer. I also see a lot from botched installs of Limewire, Frostwire, Aires, Bear Share, etc. They can install all the major file sharing apps they want. My school side firewall and the DIS side filtering system won’t let them work. Simple, but effective.

I manage a Novell (Suse Enterprise Linux w/ Novell Open Enterprise Server) network and right at 300 computer systems. We have a hardware firewall at each campus, a site license with Grisoft for our AV, Firefox w/ Adblock as the default browser, and we are behind the AR Department of Information Systems 8E6 filtering system. I use several free tools to manage malware infections when they happen.

My point is this. Even with the very good protection that the state’s filter system, our firewall, and AVG provide for us, I still get porn pop-up and malware issues that happen. I do not care how much hardware and software protection you throw at it, if you have a large network, you will have issues. Period. End of Story. Add kids on computers to the mix and your risk goes way up. If you want to have and impervious system, I have a very simple solution. Unplug the network cable. Until you are ready for that day, at least hire some people with more than a brain stem to run your network.

I cannot guarantee that as of right now every machine on my network is updated with the latest patches and AV updates. But I can guarantee that none of our systems are more than two months behind. It boggles my mind to think of the problems that the Kelly Middle School faces now if the same idiots still run the network.

Sincerely,

Brent Cannon

**********

I’m a teacher.

Not only should Julie Amero go after the IT department in her former district. I think the whole commuity needs get up in arms about the huge waste of money persecuting this poor woman. They need to impeach/fire the DA, the head of the police department that arrested her. The cops and DA’s office should have laughed in the district officials faces - and if the district pushed it they should have been arrested for filing false charges.

I’m am disturbed by the fact she didn’t know how to turn off the monitor. I teach technology to students K - 5 all of them know how to turn off the monitor. SOP for hitting an inappropriate website is turn off monitor, tell an adult, the adult gets you out of the site and checks what you were doing just before. If the student was acting within the rules - a note goes home to the parents explaining that a site was accidentally accessed and has been turned into IT to be blocked. If the student acted outside the rules - well they don’t report the bad site unless they get caught (My classroom is set up so I can see all the screens easily). Those I find by checking histories on the computers.

In the last 4 years, I have had 2 or 3 kids a year accidentally access inappropriate sites usually while doing research on cancer, the Civil Rights Movement or the Civil War.

Love the show,
Kimberly a Texas Teacher