Buzz Out Loud Podcast

Well, actually, people are made of black holes. But I couldn't do a Soylent Green reference if I wrote that. We also talk about Natali's Lady Things and the fact that we all wear makeup. Oh, and Sony is broke. And Jammie Thomas is going back to court. So it's not all good news.

EPISODE 974

Sony Records First Full-Year Loss In 14 Years
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-earnings-sony-records-first-full-year-loss-in-14-years/

eBay wins L’Oreal suit
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ebay-wins-french-court-ruling-in-loreal-case

Not-so-shocking: Jammie Thomas, RIAA unable to settle
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/not-so-shocking-jammie-thomas-riaa-unable-to-settle.ars

Pirated music dominated by pop hits
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8049495.stm

Three strikes proposal for print
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/14/three-strikes-propos.html

AirTran Wi-Fi for ALL flights
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-biz-air-tran-wireless-internet-may12,0,5545703.story

Mulligan! Twitter backtracks on unpopular change
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10240163-36.html

YouTube on Google News
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10240709-93.html

Import Contacts
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/import-your-mail-and-contacts-from.html

Street View in Japan must reshoot
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10240459-71.html

Google asks personal health questions
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10240076-2.html

Kindle owners start to lose text-to-speech on purchased books — how do DRM-free Kindle books work?
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/14/kindle-owners-start.html

Kindle for all bloggers
http://gizmodo.com/5253808/amazon-opens-kindle-to-all-bloggers

Illusion Cloak Makes One Object Look Like Another
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/13/2215220

Could all particles be miniblack holes?
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23530/

Holy Moly iPhone app rejected by Apple
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/story?id=7575266&page=1

VOICE MAIL
Kim
A podcast entirely about Twitter

Ton
Why would anyone want to see @replies

E-MAIL
Hi Buzz Crew,

In episode 973 you talked about a credit card that displays a unique code for online purchases. I don't think adding more complexity to a credit card is a good idea. I use a Bank of America credit card with "ShopSafe" for online purchases. When I'm ready to purchase online I simply logon to BOA (Bank of America) and use ShopSafe to generate a one use credit card number. You can set the expiration date and credit limit for the credit card number. The number can only be used by one vendor so it's of no value to anyone if they steal it.

Link to BOA ShopSafe Service info:

http://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/index.cfm?template=learn_about_shopsafe

Love the show,

RJ

Buzz crew,

I’m a few days behind, but I just listened to your bit about an iPhone or iPod Touch being required by a university. Here at the University of Minnesota (go Gophers!), the university will actually lend iPod Touch to students in some classes, particularly media classes. You keep the iPod Touch for the semester and turn it back in when your course is finished. It is a pretty good programme and seems quite fair.

Also, we use Moodle for our online classroom stuff. It’s an okay system, but I think the University likes it because its free and open source!

However, I also agree that requiring students to have some fancy tech gadget is ridiculous.

—–
Ethan Poole

Aloha Buzz crew,

http://www.pcper.com/#NewsID-7154

The first signs of Intel’s Larrabee processor has been spotted in the
wild at the opening ceremony for the Visual Computing Institute at
Saarland University in Germany. Larrabee is Intel’s attempt to break
into the (GP)GPU market, hoping to break Nvidia and AMD’s current
stranglehold. It’s a bit of an odd beast in comparison to the existing
offerings: Instead of creating a completely specialised chip they’re
using a chip that’s largely based on their existing speciality, the x86
CPU; though it means they’re paying AMD nice bits of licensing money per
GPU they crank out thanks to cross-licensing for stuff like the x86-64
support.

The guys at PC Perspective have taken a pretty close look at the picture
and seem to believe it contains 32 cores + 32 vector processing units,
which seems to validate more or less what a few sites were claiming all
the way back in June 2007.

Love the show,
Paul, the brit geek in Hawaii.

Hi Buzz Crew,

I just wanted to take a quick moment to respond to your comments in episode number 973 where you were wondering why cell phone salesmen always have the "inside scoop" on product releases.

Having worked for Verizon Wireless for about a year in college, I can tell you that these inside scoops are completely made up. You see, Tom, you were close when you mentioned that the salesmen are on commission and that should be a driving factor. It IS a driving factor because of how the commission works. The salesmen are paid commission for 3 things - new line, out of contract line, and accessory sales. Notice what is missing there? On contract sales! That's right; the representatives don't make a penny for replacing your broken, on contract phone. Actually, it hurts their numbers as the accessory sales ratio is tied to the number of handsets sold. At Verizon, we needed to sell 3 accessories for every handset that we sold. People who are replacing broken handsets never buy accessories because they already have them. To put it simply, the salesmen don't want to sell an on contract customer a handset because they get NO commission and it hurts their numbers.

Now you see why these salesmen know all of these magical release dates. It's to get the customer to go away and hurt someone else's numbers.

I'm not defending the salesmen as this is a terrible practice, but as long as phones are subsidized, the companies are not going to pay their employees for on contract sales, and the salesmen will keep coming up with dates.

In Japan, our phones are no longer subsidized, and the customer service has gotten so much better since they changed the practice. Also, our monthly bills have gone down (by almost 50%!!). On the flip side, I paid about $650 for my last phone. I don't think the USA is ready for that kind of sticker shock on phones, so I guess you will have to deal with the made up release dates and inflated charges for the time being.

Love the show!

Shawn

Don’t you think that Twitter is a bit pretentious? I mean you have
people that write usually one sentence about their everyday lives that
contains little or no valuable information. With the teenagers that
can’t spell, I’m surprised they don’t use all acronyms. This emphasis
on the self seems to be a theme with these websites (i.e. myspace,
ipod, youtube, justin.tv). Do people really think their lives are that
interesting that they need to be broadcast to the world? This is why I
recommend the book “The Dumbest Generation”. – Matt

Episode 817

Judge declares mistrial in RIAA-Jammie Thomas trial
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/not-for-publica.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10050757-38.html

DoJ agrees: IP enforcement bill is a bad idea
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/09/doj-agrees-ip-enforcement-bill-bad-idea

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080924-doj-to-senate-dont-make-us-be-big-contents-copyright-cops.html

T-Mobile lifts 1GB cap from new Android phone
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/TMobile-Lifts-1GB-Cap-From-New-Android-Phone-97982

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/t-mobile-lifts-bandwidth-cap-for-google-phone/

Move over, Netflix — Roku to open the box
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/09/roku-box-will-b.html

Google founder lobbies FCC to free spectrum
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/googles-larry-p.html

MySpace launches interactive music service with labels, Amazon
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/09/myspace-launche.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7635416.stm

Asus adds 3.75G to latest Eee PC; What the hell is “3.75G”?
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/09/25/asus-adds-375g-to-la.html

Netbooks win top-selling spots on Amazon
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/netbooks-win-to.html

Chinese say they’re building ‘impossible’ space drive
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/09/chinese-buildin.html

Russian town puts giant smiley on Google Maps
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/24/1646205&from=rss

Voice Mail
Anonymous Viagra

E-mail

Sorry, I have to be a whinger and disagree with your conversation from BOL 815. I think e-mail would be perfect, and in the end should replace MMS. If the e-mail client on phones became more streamlined, then it would be difficult to see the difference, and you would have a far wider range of options for sending and receiving (on your phone, computer or other e-mail-enabled device). Call me stoopid, I just don’t get MMS. It seems redundant.

Patrick Hanlan

**********

Hey, Buzz Crew,

In response to the story on episode 816 about using your phone to unlock/start your car: what took so long?! I have been waiting for this for years, not only because it means I might no longer have to carry around keys and a phone, but also because I think the security of this device could be much better than a normal set of keys. You seemed worried about someone getting your phone and then being able to find and steal your car. But what if your phone had a built in fingerprint reader or some other method of authentication (even if it’s just a simple 4-digit PIN as you mentioned), and required you to authenticate yourself before it would unlock your car? Also, many phones already have remote data wipe, so if you lose your phone you can just wipe it and your personal data and your car are safe. Furthermore, if the phone is required to start the engine and keep it running, and if your phone has a GPS device built in, a thief is forced to carry around a real-time tracking device if they want to take your car.

I don’t even know how tightly integrated the phone and key portions of the system can be, and I know there are issues such as the phone’s battery dying, but I think that eventually this technology could be both cool and very secure.

Love the show,

James from Texas/South Korea

**********

Hey JaMoTo (or… whoever happens to be filling in today)

In case you haven’t heard, Nullriver has posted a notice saying that Apple is going to now disallow any tethering apps.
WHAT!? Molly, help me rage a little bit here.
Tethering is officially supported in MANY countries (including up here in Canada!) by the telcos. WHY can Apple not just find out which countries it is allowed in and selectively allow it in those App stores? Ridiculous!
To make matters WORSE--I managed to buy the app while it was still available for $9.99. However, this means Nullriver can’t do any updates for it. What if 2.2 firmware breaks Netshare? Can I get my $10 back?

A big WTF, Apple. You are really starting to make me angry.

Kevin

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1721598&tstart=0
http://www.nullriver.com/

EPISODE 726

Note: We are making a change to our podcast feed system on Monday, May 19. However, you do not need to subscribe to a new feed. One important thing to know: If you have your podcast catcher set to download "all unheard episodes" in a feed, you will probably find a bunch of already heard episodes in your feed on Friday as a result of the changes. To lighten the hit, set your podcast catcher to only download "the latest episode" for the week of May 19-to-23.

Cox, Comcast biggest BitTorrent blockers in the world
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080515-us-isps-biggest-bittorrent-blockers-in-the-world.html
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006967.html

Facebook Disconnects Google Friend Connect
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207800461
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9945308-2.html

RIAA defendant Jammie Thomas may get new trial
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9945643-38.html

Microsoft, OLPC officially team up
http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9945438-56.html

Details for Guitar Hero 4 released
http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/05/15/216205.shtml

Analyst: Amazon.com’s Kindle to generate $750 million by 2010
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9945112-1.html

TiVo extends lifetime subscription offer
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9944974-7.html

jDome offers unique experience to gamers
http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/05/15/ jdome_offers_unique_experience.html

50 Years of DARPA: 5 Good Inventions, 5 Lousy Ones
http://gizmodo.com/391157/ 50-years-of-darpa-5-good-inventions-5-lousy-ones

VOICE MAIL

Shalin
CBS idea.

Drew Phoenix
Battlestar Spoiler

E-MAIL

Semantic web searching

Not to harp on an old subject, I am behind a few days in my listening. Semantic Web searching caught my ear when you mentioned it in episode 722. I am one of those who thought Jeeves could answer my every question.

Last night my wife and I couldn’t figure out the answer to a factual question and didn’t want to hit the computer at the time. This morning I went to Powerset.com and asked it “What artist wrapped an island in pink?” Thinking a perfect semantic search engine would simply give me the answer. Powerset gave me a bunch of results, the musician Pink, the Pink Panther, but nothing about the artist who has wrapped islands and the German governmental buildings in pink fabric.

I went to Google and pasted in the exact same search criteria and the Artist Christo came up as the 2nd result from a New York Times article.

I went to Christo’s Wiki page, since Powerset only index those pages, and sure enough all my terms: island, wrap, pink, artist were on his Wiki page.

As with Jeeves, Powerset is not quite ready for prime time. Let me know the next time to check Semantic searching again.

P.S. Let’s Go Pens!

--PittCaleb

Cut off in traffic? Get their name and address via SMS

Hello,

For a bit over a year now I have been commuting from Lausanne to Geneva, and reading the free papers while listening to BOL on my iPod.

Today I came across a story that I found a little sinister, and thought you might find interesting. Here is the French version (for Molly to practice):

http://www.lematin.ch/fr/actu/suisse/ a-geneve-le-sms-permet-de-traquer-chauffard-et-belle-fille_9-156371

Here is the Google Translate version (which does an OK job):

http://translate.google.com/translate?u= http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lematin.ch%2Ffr%2Factu%2Fsuisse%2Fa-geneve-le-sms- permet-de-traquer-chauffard-et-belle-fille_9-156371& hl=fr&ie=UTF8&sl=fr&tl=en

Basically, you can SMS the local government a license plate number, and they will send you the name and address of the owner. I can’t even begin to list the reasons that I think is a terrible idea (full points though to one of the people that they vox pop’d in the paper version of the article, who suggested you that could get the address of someone driving an expensive car, and then go a burgle their place).

Of course, I am relatively smug since I don’t own a car, and am completely happy surviving on public transport (which is possible here, unlike most other places I have lived).

Cheers,

--Shaun
The Australian lawyer in Geneva

“Nobody solved it?” Not so fast, Leo

Dear BOL gang:

On BOL 725 when you and Leo Laporte were talking about all the outages of Twitter and similar sites, Leo mentioned offhand that scaling to massive usage is “a tough problem and nobody’s really solved it.” I agree that it’s a tough problem–but that’s why you need good engineers. I, for example, wrote the software behind Wikipedia in 2001 when it was having problems with its earlier software even though there were only a few thousand users then. I redesigned the database carefully, and gave serious thought to the trade-offs between performance and utility of every feature, solving the problem–and I was just a volunteer. Since then, other volunteers from the free software community and Wikipedia employees have scaled it up to its present level and built on to the software to the point that there’s hardly any of my code left–and they did all this while it was up and running.

If I may gloat a bit, this is not the first time the free software community has shown that it can outperform highly paid engineers in real-world applications.

--Lee Daniel Crocker

Fun while it lasted

Hey buzz team,

Just wanted to send my condolences in regards to the recent news of the acquisition. Quick question though, when will you be making the switch-over to the boring, dry news that only targets the elderly?

--Shane

Google Street View

Hey TMJ,

I was so excited yesterday when I drove past a Google Street View car on the highway. I made a few funny faces and gestures and thought that now I’d be forever immortalized as the funny guy with the Cardinals hat (Go Cards!). Then I got home and listened to episode 724 and heard that Google will be blurring faces as a measure to ward off privacy concerns.

Also, who knew that KC would be one of the next cities to be on Street View? It’s not like we’re a tech hub like SF or NYC, the previously available cities. Most of my co-workers don’t know the difference between a PC or Mac, or even which OS they are using. They just say that they use “the computer.” But, it’s still pretty cool.

Love the show!

--Dave the Engineer (or maybe Dave B. in KC, it rhymes after all)

Icahn has Yahoo-Microsoft merger?

Greetings!

I’ve always believed resistance is, in fact, futile, so I was compelled to not resist from making what I believe should be a candidate for best “lolhuman” to date, and no-one will appreciate a tech-related ‘lol’ as much as you.

http://www.lanxon.co.uk/index.php/2008/05/15/icahn-has-yahoo-merger/

In related news, maybe Icahn wanted the existing board to reject the Microsoft bid because he appreciated how much the deal would annoy shareholders, thus reducing share prices, thus making his purchase of millions of them less painful, and he’d get his way at the end of the day anyway. Smart dude, in my opinion.

Warmest,
--Nate