Buzz Out Loud 643: Silicon Valley drink-off
Steve Jobs says Robbie Bach must be drunk if he thinks the Zune is a worthy competitor to iPod. Oh, snap, it's drinking contest time!
Molly Wood Former Executive Editor
Molly Wood was an executive editor at CNET, author of the Molly Rants blog, and host of the tech show, Always On. When she's not enraging fanboys of all stripes, she can be found offering tech opinions on CBS and elsewhere, and offering opinions on everything else to anyone who will listen.
5 min read
Steve Jobs says Robbie Bach must be drunk if he thinks the Zune is a worthy competitor to iPod. You know what we say? Old Mad Dog should put his shot glass where his mouth is, thereby enabling us to launch a new hit show on CNET TV: Silicon Valley drink-off. Come on, Steve! It'll be great! In other news, iPhone hacking takes a violent turn.
--Molly
Listen now: Download today's podcast
--Molly
Listen now: Download today's podcast
 | EPISODE 643 |
TODAY'S LINKS:
TODAY'S VOICE MAIL:
Hiram from Brazil
Metered bandwidth is not so great here.
Metered bandwidth is not so great here.
William from Las Vegas
iPod Touch keeps bugging me to pay money.
iPod Touch keeps bugging me to pay money.
William from Las Vegas
Whoops. My mistake. I was on drugs (Sudafed).
Whoops. My mistake. I was on drugs (Sudafed).
Weird guy
What's up with Christina Del Ponte?
What's up with Christina Del Ponte?
TODAY'S E-MAIL:
Love the Linux chaser to balance Apple stories
My elderly aunt, who understands little else from the podcast (or the rest of life these days), loves it too. She perks up every time she hears the jingle. Though I'm pretty sure it's because she thinks it's a liquor ad since she starts yammering on about booze-filled reminiscences.
But it makes her happy ! And I think a Linux story--it's the perfect antidote to all that crApple.
Great show, love Molly's rants, Tom's libertarian angle, and Jason's (niiice) voice. :-)
Thx,
Solunas
My elderly aunt, who understands little else from the podcast (or the rest of life these days), loves it too. She perks up every time she hears the jingle. Though I'm pretty sure it's because she thinks it's a liquor ad since she starts yammering on about booze-filled reminiscences.
But it makes her happy ! And I think a Linux story--it's the perfect antidote to all that crApple.
Great show, love Molly's rants, Tom's libertarian angle, and Jason's (niiice) voice. :-)
Thx,
Solunas
Bandwidth limits
Buzz crew,
I have been listening to your podcast for awhile now and wanted to comment on the metered bandwidth issue. I live in Lawrence, Kansas, (home of the KU Jayhawks), and our Internet provider has had limits on bandwidth for as long as I have their service. I paid $28 additional dollars last month in overages for using 14 addition GB of bandwidth on top of the allowed 10. Usually I do not exceed this amount, but with my increasing list of podcast subscriptions and now iTunes movie rentals, I might have to upgrade to the Gold package which allows 40GB and has faster service.
I believe the package pricing is not too unreasonable, especially since the lowest package is only $15/month with 1GB of bandwidth. Someone who is a light Internet user would benefit from broadband at a low price.
I have included a link to my provider.
Thanks and great show.
Phil
P.S. Natali, I miss watching Textra, but I wish you the best in New York.
Buzz crew,
I have been listening to your podcast for awhile now and wanted to comment on the metered bandwidth issue. I live in Lawrence, Kansas, (home of the KU Jayhawks), and our Internet provider has had limits on bandwidth for as long as I have their service. I paid $28 additional dollars last month in overages for using 14 addition GB of bandwidth on top of the allowed 10. Usually I do not exceed this amount, but with my increasing list of podcast subscriptions and now iTunes movie rentals, I might have to upgrade to the Gold package which allows 40GB and has faster service.
I believe the package pricing is not too unreasonable, especially since the lowest package is only $15/month with 1GB of bandwidth. Someone who is a light Internet user would benefit from broadband at a low price.
I have included a link to my provider.
Thanks and great show.
Phil
P.S. Natali, I miss watching Textra, but I wish you the best in New York.
Useage based broadband
Hi Tom, Molly, and Jason!
I'm a long-time listener and love the show but I completely disagree on your views of Usage-Based Broadband from Time Warner. How could anyone possible want this? In the age of HD video streaming/downloading and interactive content I certainly don't want to worry about "going over my gigabytes." For goodness sake, people already have to deal with that with their cell phone minutes. What's stopping the companies from charging usage-based cable TV? It makes just as much sense! Now people will have to be more aware to turn off their Internet when they're not using it. This is not the same thing as "turn off the faucet" or "turn off the lights." I shouldn't have to turn off my Internet so I don't use excess bandwidth. Are we back in the dial-up era again? I keep track of my bandwidth usage and each month I use about 100-200GB of bandwidth each month. This includes gaming, video streaming, downloading, etc. I don't want ISPs to throttle traffic but I would rather them do that the switch to usage-based plans!
Thanks guys! Love the show!
-Martin
Hi Tom, Molly, and Jason!
I'm a long-time listener and love the show but I completely disagree on your views of Usage-Based Broadband from Time Warner. How could anyone possible want this? In the age of HD video streaming/downloading and interactive content I certainly don't want to worry about "going over my gigabytes." For goodness sake, people already have to deal with that with their cell phone minutes. What's stopping the companies from charging usage-based cable TV? It makes just as much sense! Now people will have to be more aware to turn off their Internet when they're not using it. This is not the same thing as "turn off the faucet" or "turn off the lights." I shouldn't have to turn off my Internet so I don't use excess bandwidth. Are we back in the dial-up era again? I keep track of my bandwidth usage and each month I use about 100-200GB of bandwidth each month. This includes gaming, video streaming, downloading, etc. I don't want ISPs to throttle traffic but I would rather them do that the switch to usage-based plans!
Thanks guys! Love the show!
-Martin
Packet-sniffing watermarks
Tom, Molly, and Jason,
You recently talked about watermarking video/audio files and ISP scanning for the watermarks. You said you didn't see a problem with ISPs doing this. I would have a problem with ISP's scanning for watermarks since I backup my files to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) my ISP would try to block me backing up these files to the cloud. Fortunately my backups are sent encrypted so they wouldn't be able to read the watermarks. Any file-sharing software would only need to transfer files using SSL to prevent ISP's from reading the watermarks.
Love the show,
RJ
Tom, Molly, and Jason,
You recently talked about watermarking video/audio files and ISP scanning for the watermarks. You said you didn't see a problem with ISPs doing this. I would have a problem with ISP's scanning for watermarks since I backup my files to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) my ISP would try to block me backing up these files to the cloud. Fortunately my backups are sent encrypted so they wouldn't be able to read the watermarks. Any file-sharing software would only need to transfer files using SSL to prevent ISP's from reading the watermarks.
Love the show,
RJ
MacBook Air OS reinstall solution
Hello, this is Sean from Pittsburgh and I just wanted to say three things...
Hope that clears those issues up, love the show!
Thanks,
Sean
Hello, this is Sean from Pittsburgh and I just wanted to say three things...
- I was thrilled when you mentioned Sidney Crosby on the show a few weeks ago, he is great.
- Regarding the reinstall of OS X on your MacBook Air, that will never crash...during the keynote, Steve specifically mentioned that the remote disc feature will indeed work if you need to reinstall the OS or upgrade to 10.6.
- The Apple TV was also using a subscription revenue model that iPhone is using, hence the free update...I remember reading that somewhere last year at least.
Hope that clears those issues up, love the show!
Thanks,
Sean
Digital copies included on movie DVDs?
Hey, guys.
During Steve Jobs' keynote, a rep from 20th Century Fox said that a digital file copy would be included on the Family Guy Blue Harvest DVD. I assume one could download this copy to his or her hard drive and watch it as many times as they wanted. This is a great idea, but considering services such as Netflix, wouldn't movie studios be inadvertantly distributing these digital copies to many people who didn't buy the DVD? And what would stop people from sharing these digital copies via bittorrent? I can't imagine there'd be DRM on it, or there would be no point in offering it on their DVDs to begin with.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Michael Tolosa
Hey, guys.
During Steve Jobs' keynote, a rep from 20th Century Fox said that a digital file copy would be included on the Family Guy Blue Harvest DVD. I assume one could download this copy to his or her hard drive and watch it as many times as they wanted. This is a great idea, but considering services such as Netflix, wouldn't movie studios be inadvertantly distributing these digital copies to many people who didn't buy the DVD? And what would stop people from sharing these digital copies via bittorrent? I can't imagine there'd be DRM on it, or there would be no point in offering it on their DVDs to begin with.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Michael Tolosa